Stanislaw Lem - Summa Technologiae

Electronic Mediations

Katherine Hayles, Mark Poster, and Samuel Weber, Series Editors

40 Summa Technologiae

Stanisaw Lem

39 Digital Memory and the Archive

Wolfgang Ernst

38 How to Do Things with Videogames

Ian Bogost

37 Noise Channels: Glitch and Error in Digital Culture

Peter Krapp

36 Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture

Patrick Crogan

35 Digital Art and Meaning: Reading Kinetic Poetry, Text Machines, Mapping Art, and Interactive Installations

Roberto Simanowski

34 Vilm Flusser: An Introduction

Anke Finger, Rainer Guldin, and Gustavo Bernardo

33 Does Writing Have a Future?

Vilm Flusser

32 Into the Universe of Technical Images

Vilm Flusser

31 Hypertext and the Female Imaginary

Jaishree K. Odin

30 Screens: Viewing Media Installation Art

Kate Mondloch

29 Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter

28 Tactical Media

Rita Raley

27 Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political

Philip Armstrong

26 Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds

Timothy Murray

25 Ex-foliations: Reading Machines and the Upgrade Path

Terry Harpold

24 Digitize This Book! The Politics of New Media, or Why We Need Open Access Now

Gary Hall

23 Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet

Lisa Nakamura

22 Small Tech: The Culture of Digital Tools

Byron Hawk, David M. Rieder, and Ollie Oviedo, Editors

21 The Exploit: A Theory of Networks

Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker

20 Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow

Victoria Vesna, Editor

19 Cyberspaces of Everyday Life

Mark Nunes

18 Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture

Alexander R. Galloway

17 Avatars of Story

Marie-Laure Ryan

16 Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi

Timothy C. Campbell

15 Electronic Monuments

Gregory L. Ulmer

14 Lara Croft: Cyber Heroine

Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky

13 The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory

Thomas Foster

12 Dj Vu: Aberrations of Cultural Memory

Peter Krapp

11 Biomedia

Eugene Thacker

10 Avatar Bodies: A Tantra for Posthumanism

Ann Weinstone

9 Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society

Steven Shaviro

8 Cognitive Fictions

Joseph Tabbi

7 Cybering Democracy: Public Space and the Internet

Diana Saco

6 Writings

Vilm Flusser

5 Bodies in Technology

Don Ihde

4 Cyberculture

Pierre Lvy

3 Whats the Matter with the Internet?

Mark Poster

2 High Techn: Art and Technology from the Machine Aesthetic to the Posthuman

R. L. Rutsky

1 Digital Sensations: Space, Identity, and Embodiment in Virtual Reality

Ken Hillis

Summa Technologiae

Stanisaw Lem

Translated by Joanna Zylinska

University of Minnesota Press

Minneapolis

London

Originally published in Polish in 1964 as Summa technologiae by Wydawnictwo Literackie. Copyright 2000 Wydawnictwo Literackie, Krakw. Copyright 2010 Barbara Lem and Tomasz Lem. http://www.lem.pl.

English translation and Translators Introduction copyright 2013 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Contents

Joanna Zylinska

Translators Introduction

Evolution May Be Greater than the Sum of Its Parts, but Its Not All that Great: On Lems Summa Technologiae

Joanna Zylinksa

Is the human a typical phenomenon in the Universe or an exceptional one? Is there a limit to the expansion of a civilization? Would plagiarizing Nature count as fraud? Is consciousness a necessary component of human agency? Should we rather trust our thoughts or our perceptions? Do we control the development of technology, or is technology controlling us? Should we make machines moral? What do human societies and colonies of bacteria have in common? What can we learn from insects? For answers to all these questions and more, Stanisaw Lems Summa Technologiae is undoubtedly the place to go.

Lem (19212006) is best known to English-speaking readers as the author of the novel Solaris (1961), the film versions of which were directed by Andrei Tarkovsky (Grand Prix at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival) and Steven Soderbergh (2002). However, science fiction aficionados all over the world have been reading Lems original and often surprising novelstranslated into over forty languagesfor years. Be that as it may, the Polish writers attitude to science fiction was not unproblematic. Witness his spat with the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America association, which was incensed by Lems unabashed critique of the majority of the works within the genre as unimaginative, predictable, and focused on a rather narrow idea of the future. Lems own novels take a rather different approach. Drawing on scientific research, they are deeply philosophical speculations about technology, time, evolution, and the nature (and culture) of humankind. What makes Lems writings particularly distinct is his ironic writing style, which is full of puns, jokes, and clever asides. Yet, on another level, his gripping stories about space travel, alien life, and human enhancement are also complex philosophical parables about human and nonhuman life in its past, present, and future forms.

The philosophical ambition of Lems fiction is carried through to what is probably his most accomplished and mature work: a treatise on futurology, technology, and science called Summa Technologiae (1964). With a title that is a pastiche of Thomas Aquinass Summa Theologiae, Lem erects a secular edifice of knowledge aimed at rivaling that of his scholastic predecessor. His Summa sets out to investigate the premises and assumptions behind the scientific concepts of the day and, in particular, the idea of technology that underpins them. As Lem writes in the books opening pages: I shall focus here on various aspects of our civilization that can be guessed and deduced from the premises known to us today, no matter how improbable their actualization. What lies at the foundation of our hypothetical constructions are technologies, i.e., means of bringing about certain collectively determined goals that have been conditioned by the state of our knowledge and our social aptitude and also those goals that no one has identified at the outset.

Despite having been written nearly fifty years ago, Summa has lost none of its intellectual vigor or critical significance. Some specific scientific debates may have advanced or been corrected since Lem published Summa in 1964, yet it is actually surprising to see how many things he did get right, or even managed to predictfrom the limitations of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program through to artificial intelligence, bionics, the theory of search engines (Lems ariadnology), virtual reality (which he terms phantomatics), and nanotechnology. However, it is in the multiple layers of its philosophical argument that the ongoing importance of his book lies. Biophysicist Peter Butko, who published an explicatory essay on Summa in 2006, describes the book as an all-encompassing philosophical discourse on evolution: not only evolution of science and technology... but also evolution of life, humanity, consciousness, culture, and civilization.