To Remember Stanislaw Lem (Critical Essay‪)‬

Stanislaw Lem, Polish fiction writer, critic, and polymath, died in March 2006, in his 85th year. This major writer needs remembering and critical honoring. One may easily find an overview of his principal works on his homepage www.lem.pl/, in the many obituaries, and in my own 1995 encyclopedia article, so I shall here focus on a juxtaposition of his weakness and strength as I see them now. CONTRA: I'm taking as my first text here Lem's Summa Technologiae, written (astoundingly) around 1960 and published in Polish a few years later. This is a most sweeping, at the time certainly unequalled, sketch of the technological possibilities of future decades and possibly centuries, which includes rich and well-informed speculations about cosmic civilizations, "thinking machines" (intellectronics in Lem's terminology), the construction of artificial worlds much more perfect than today's virtual space (phantomatics), and many other aspects of "technological evolution." I read it first in the Russian edition of the 1970s and then checked it with the original Polish and the German translation of 1981 based on the third Polish edition; and I have fought in vain for a quarter of a century in the U.S. to have it translated--nobody wanted to risk money to translate 600 pages of a difficult text in an unknown language by an outsider. But while I assume as given that we could even today learn much from it, I shall totally neglect its most rich themes and apercus in order to concentrate on a key presupposition which defines and limits this work: this is a book about projected grandiose plans which does not spend a single word on who would be its bearers. It is a book without an agential subject. More precisely, the subject is allegorical: it is a very anemic and abstract actant of humanity (Condorcet would have been proud of it, and in fact Lem once declared the 18th Century is his favorite one, though he was rather thinking of Hume and Bishop Berkeley). Its tacit premise is that future humanity will be not only united but also lacking all the antagonisms between and within the systems existing in the 20th Century: both what Lem called capitalism in crisis and degenerate socialism (in the 1950s Lem had thought that socialism was the first system with a scientific approach to human society). Another total non-dit, as befits agnostic scientism, was religion (or indeed any articulate horizon for values), though fascination by some aspects of Catholicism (theology and ritual, I'd say) can be found in Lem's fiction. Any access to the grandiose possibilities envisaged in Summa presupposes the absence of problems such as wars, hunger, poverty, avoidable illnesses (i.e., their great majority), interest conflicts between opposed social groups or classes, oppression by huge economico-political apparati such as a bureaucracy, and similar systems. The implied bearer of Lem's intellectronics, phantomatics, cosmic architectures (rebuilding of solar systems), etc. could only be a technoscientistic competitor to Marx's classless society, in which the communist slogan "from each according to his possibilities, to each according to her necessities" (Critique of the Gotha Program) has prevailed. But there is no hint of a link between the readers of 1960-1980 and that future. Thus far had Stalinism emasculated even a first-class thinker such as Lem.