Friday, August 12, 2022

Science Fiction, Technology, Technoscience, Innovation: Some Quotations

Percy Bysshe Shelley, preface to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818):

[...] the novelty of the situations which it develops, and however impossible as a physical fact, affords a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield [...]

Félix Bodin, preface to Novel of the Future (1834):

Si jamais quelqu’un réussit à faire le roman, l’épopée de l’avenir, il aura puisé à une vaste source de merveilleux et d’un merveilleux tout vraisemblable, s’il se peut dire, qui enorgueillira la raison au lieu de la choquer ou de la ravaler comme l’ont fait toutes les machines à merveilleux épique, qu’il a été convenu de mettre en jeu jusqu’à présent. En offrant la perfectibilité sous la forme pittoresque, narrative et dramatique, il aura trouvé un moyen de saisir, de remuer les imaginations, et de hâter les progrès de l’humanité, bien autrement puissant que les meilleurs exposés de systèmes, fussent-ils présentés avec la plus haute éloquence. 
If ever anyone succeeds in creating the novel, the epic of the future, he will have tapped a vast source of the marvelous, and of a marvelous entirely in accord with verisimilitude [...] which will dignify reason instead of shocking or deprecating it as all the marvelous epic machinery conventionally employed up to now has done. In suggesting perfectibility through a narrative and dramatic picturesque form, he will have found a method of seizing, of moving the imagination, and of hastening the progress of humanity in a manner very much more effective than the best expositions of systems presented with even the highest eloquence.

Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852):

The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot take its poetry from the past but only from the future. 

Joseph Brodsky:

By its fullness, the future is propaganda.

Walter Benjamin, "On Scheebart" (written 1940-ish; in Selected Writings 1938-1940, trans. Edmund Jephcott):

Scheerbart's great discovery was that the stars could be used to plead the cause of creation before an audience of humans. He had already used the voices of animals to plead this cause. The fact that a poet is enlisting heavenly bodies to speak on behalf of creation bears witness to a very powerful emotion.

Herbert Marcuse, 'Karl Popper and the Problem of Historical Laws' (1972):

Moreover, ideas and efforts which once were 'Utopian' have been playing an increasingly decisive part in the conquest of nature and society, and there is awareness of the tremendous forces which may be released and utilized through the encouragement of 'Utopian' thought. In the Soviet Union, science fiction writers are being taken to task for lagging behind science in their dreams and phantasies and they are told to 'get their imagination off the ground' (New York Times, 9 July 1958). Political interest in maintaining the status quo rather than logical or scientific impossibility today makes real possibilities appear as Utopian. 

Don Ihde, Existential Technics (1983):

Only now interpretation of a text across past temporal distance cannot remain the only direction for contemporary hermeneutics. It must also turn to the 'possible worlds' of the future. Such an exploration in a radical sense, of the imaginative hopes and possibilities of humankind -- and particularly those becoming horizontal in technological society -- is called for as a prospect for hermeneutics. I am calling for not only interpretation across the past, but across the future, in which one concrete and necessary task is the 'science fiction' of a possible hermeneutic. In short, the projective hermeneutics is one which looks at 'texts' across possible futures, the futures made available in technological culture.

Sheila Jasanoff, Science and Public Reason:

To facilitate the commercialization of biotechnology, the United States, and the European Community and several of its member states, adopted laws and regulations to control not only laboratory research with genetically engineered organisms but also their purposeful release into the environment. [...] Risks that once were considered speculative and wholly unmanageable [...]  came to be regarded as amenable to rational assessment in accordance with sound scientific principles. Apocalyptic visions and the rhetoric of science fi ction yielded to the weightier discourse of expert advice and bureaucratic practice. The research community coalesced to persuade the public that the risks of biotechnology could be assessed in a reasonable way and that earlier fears of ecological disaster were mostly unfounded.  

Sheila Jasanoff, 'Future Imperfect, Science, Technology and the Imaginations of Modernity':

Technological innovation often follows on the heels of science fiction, lagging authorial imagination by decades or longer.

Sheila Jasanoff, 'Imagined and Invented Worlds':

Imaginaries, as we have argued throughout this volume, occupy a hybrid zone between the mental and the material, between individual free will and group habitus (Bourdieu 1990), between the fertility of ideas and the fixity of things. Most importantly, however, sociotechnical imaginaries can become integrated into the discourses and practices of governance, and thereby structure the life worlds of larger groups, including entire nations and even transnational communities.

[...]

Science fiction, I suggested in the introduction, is a repository of sociotechnical imaginaries, visions that integrate futures of growing knowledge and technological mastery with normative assessments of what such futures could and should mean for present-day societies. Utopic or dystopic, these fictions underscore the self-evident truth that technologically enabled futures are also value-laden futures. Science fiction stories express fears and yearnings that are rooted in current discontents, either signaling possible escape routes or painting in morbid colors the horrific consequences of heedlessness in the present. They thus offer a deeper look into-possibly even predictions of-what harms societies are most desperate to avoid and what good they may achieve through foresight and imagination [...]

Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time III (2010):

We have been considering adoption as a process of protean interiorization by which I can affectively adopt/interiorize a cat, a child, a father, or in a moral sense a maxim, religiously a belief, technically a tool, socially a lifestyle, politically an idea of a We, epistemologically the understanding of a rule-adopting/interiorizing here means exteriorizing: my emotional affect, my moral behavior, my religious practices, my technical gestures, my way of life, my convictions, my actions, the carrying out of a rule as the concept synthesizing a diversity. 

Becoming is not future, I might say with regard to the question of adoption, which is also necessarily fabulation. This means that adoption is not adaptation, since it is invention. An adoption without invention is the failure and the enticement that engenders deception and malaise, as reactions compensating for a flawed action. 

The fact of becoming is today essentially a technological fact. In the human domain, becoming always has something to do with the technical fact that preceded genetic origins of humankind, and that is in fact as old as the cosmos. If it is true that becoming consists of a group of changing states linked by cause/effect relationships, there can hardly be any doubt that the totality of these sensory changes defined as "beings we are ourselves" is today largely and manifestly determined by changing technological states. If the to-come is not the future, there is no future without the to-come, but there is a to-come without future. 

The to-come without future is called the mechanical; the confusion of to-come and future is called the mechanism

The to-come, which is today in its broadest tendencies the fact of technology, is subsumed to technoscience as an activity conceiving, in an ever-narrowing relationship with marketing, the evolution of technology-while submitting to the systematic dimensions of technology as they emerge from a technical system as it becomes mnemotechnical. 

This to-come is what today is not being thought, not only because technics, as the dynamic process of individuation, is still largely ignored (despite the work from which Technics and Time, I and 2 tries to draw lessons), but because technoscience itself is not it, even while it is an instance of the effective implementation of retentional criteria. 

This un-thought is not un-identified in the sense in which something forgotten is not thought: it is largely thought and felt to be unthinkable, and this is why as such it forms the very core of the anguish of malaise, closing perspectives to knowledge while enclosing them within the agitated know-how of a badly thought technology. The opposition between technology and subjectivity still today inhabits the banal framework in which anguish and malaise are expressed in the form of increasingly invasive and anguished chatter. It can only be thought beyond, passing by Husserl and Heidegger in their difficult relationship to Kant, while coming slowly back to us through Nietzsche. In "subjectivity," we must come to understand-beyond representation as conceived since Descartes and beyond the banal, poor opposition to objectivity that must be transcended-the will to which we hold beyond this subjectivity. 

Bernard Stiegler, Technics and Time III:

Technics has not found its role in the metaphysical cinema: it does not exist, as such, in any rigorous sense; it is nothing more than a correlative of theoretical philosophy. [...] But today it has become inconceivable not to take actions with quite revolutionary consequences (in the sense of the "Copernican Revolution") as a result of the fact that science, formerly the domain of pure theoretical reason, now having become technoscience, calls out daily for "practical" outcomes (in the Kantian-that is, moral-sense): its porosity between theory and practice is perpetually mcreasmg. 

It nonetheless remains entirely unthought

Is it possible, then, to ignore the fact that technoscience is also the means by which science becomes science fiction, i.e., becomes a cinema, a science bursting with images, models, and simulations that have become real-we might call them chimaeras--ontological lures that must also be perceived through doxa as teratological and diabolical realities? This question of the devil, of chimaeras, and of science fiction is all the more pressing in that it is also the question-and its desired response-of the industrialization of tertiary retentions in the culture industry's production of symbols.

John Locke:

For should the Soul of a Prince, carrying with it the consciousness of the Prince’s past Life, enter and inform the Body of a Cobler, as soon as deserted by his own Soul, every one sees, he would be the same Person with the Prince, accountable only for the Prince’s Actions: But who would say it was the same Man?

Avital Ronell, The Test Drive:

If Nietzsche had discovered something like the essence of a future science, it may well be the case that exposed itself to him in the way great discoveries are made, namely, when thought 'catches it in flight without really knowing what it has caught' [...] In other words, Nietzsche continually offers a model for cognition that cannot simply account for itself or maintain its results within the assumed certitudes of a controlled system of knowledge.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun:

Cyberspace as disembodied representation rehearses themes of Oriental exoticism and Western penetration. [...] Cyberspace opens up, flowers for him -- a "fluid neon origami trick."

Langdon Winner:

But the failure of technocracy in one definition -- the definition suggested by the theory of elites -- does not mean that the power and position of technically trained persons in political life ceases to be a problem. That there is apparently little solidarity or common purpose among such persons does not in itself speak to the issues raised above about participation, representation, or limited government . It merely denies one possibly way that technology and political power might be connected. The elite conception of technocracy is, it seems to me, a good example of a case in which "a picture held us captive." [...] The idea here is that of a cohesive group based on the knowledge it holds rising to power and authority. in science fiction and political theory both, there is a tendency to dramatize the upward thrust, hence the titles "new brahmins," "new mandarins," "new priesthood," and "new utopians." And if one sees society in terms of strata or class levels, the strongest being on "top" and the weakest at the "bottom," then one begins to expect that those who hold new social power will move "upward" and like mountain climbers at the top of Everest be somehow visible up there [...]

John W. Campbell, 'Non-Escape Literature,' editorial in Astounding (Feb 1959):

It happens that science fiction's core is just about the only non-escape literature available to the general public today [...]

E.M., 'Preface' to The Man in the Moone (1638):

To the Ingenious Reader. Thou hast here an essay of Fancy, where Invention is shewed with Judgment. It was not the Author’s intention (I presume) to discourse thee into a beliefe of each particular circumstance. Tis fit thou allow him a liberty of conceite where thou takest to thy selfe a liberty of judgment. In substance thou hast here a new discovery of a new world, which perchance may finde little better entertainment in thy opinion, than that of Columbus at first, in the esteeme of all men. Yet his then but poore espiall of America, betray’d unto knowledge soe much as hath since encreast into a vast plantation. And the then unknowne, to be now of as large extent as all other the knowne world. That there should be Antipodes was once thought as great a Paradox as now that the Moon should bee habitable. But the knowledge of this may seeme more properly reserv’d for this our discovering age: In which our Galilaeusses, can by advantage of their spectacles gaze the Sunne into spots, & descry mountaines in the Moon. But this, and more in the ensuing discourse I leave to thy candid censure, & the faithful relation of the little eye-witnesse, our great discoverer.

Avita Ronell & Anne Dufourmantelle, Fighting Theory

Science, in brief, enfolds at once the scientific method, natural philosophy, and the work of poetry. It invents an ever-surprising relation to the world. Sometimes literature itself finds a new stylistic figure for which science then goes on to get a patent.

Avita Ronell & Anne Dufourmantelle, Fighting Theory

William Gibson, who writes cyber-punk novels, invented virtual reality. It's now a tool of warfare in addition to its other qualities and uses, but this invention first appeared in science fiction. Although this may seem bizarre and very 'American' to the French, we have to recognize that science fiction has been the site of considerable inventions; the fiction, literature, cinema,, and poetry of the scientific method are imagined before our eyes, as in the film classics The Matrix or Total Recall, where mutants appear and stake out their territories. Science, for the most part, now goes it alone, often subordinated to the destructive needs of war, of institutionalized hostilities. Nietzsche reminds us that science was connected, in the beginning, to astrologers, sorcerers, and music, and so science, when it still belonged to the realm of the imaginary, made promises, and it promised too much. In astrology there is an excess of promise, a hypercomprehension that always surpasses the knowledge base from which it stems.

Avita Ronell & Anne Dufourmantelle, Fighting Theory

When science was not yet working for corporations, governments, states, it knew how to inflate the rhetoric of promise, and this was very important for our Dasein, according to Nietzsche -- he doesn't yet say Dasein, but he's almost there. 

Hannah Arendt, 'The Archimedean Point':

Moreover, the enormous technological consequences which finally gave testimony to the immense power increase of men in the modern age were predicted by no one, neither by the scientists themselves -- who even today, I am told -- still have an inclination to look down upon engineers as mere plumbers -- nor by the historians. (The only predictions came from people like Jules Verne, that is, the predecessors of science fiction.) But, if anyone else should have predicted them, or should have foreseen them, is it not likely that he would have concluded that the increase in human power would be accompanied by an increase in the stature and the pride of man? This, however, has not been the case.

Paul Virilio:

As we knew already, speed is the old age of the World.

The Mountain Goats:

New dreams for the Rat Queen!

The Mountain Goats: 

I hope I cut myself shaving tomorrow [...]

Yuk Hui, Recursivity and Contingency:

[...] in the spirit of eschatology one may ask: Is this completion of humanity a revelation or a catastrophic becoming? We are asking this question, as most of the sci-fi movies do, since we are living in an epoch of technological uncertainty and instability. Cybernetics, the accomplishment of metaphysics, is the force unifying 'humanity' through globalization and neocolonization. In other words, we can use the vocabulary of Gestalt fpsychology in claiming that technology becomes the ground instead of the figure. The noosphere becomes the most dominating sphere on earth, overriding the biosphere. [...] Any future philosophy that ignores the question of system is fundamentally deficient.

Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility (1985):

[...] there mere knowledge of possibilities, though certainly insufficient for cogent prediction, is fully adequate for the purposes of a heuristic casuistry that is to help in the spotting of ethical principles [...] [In a thought experiment, the perceived possibility] can now take the place of the actual occasion; and reflection on the possible, fully unfolded in the imagination, gives access to new moral truth. But this truth belongs to the sphere of ideas, that is, it is just as much a matter of philosophical knowledge as is the truth of that grounding first principle we have yet to supply. Accordingly, its certainty is not dependent upon the degree of certainty of the factual, scientific projections which provided paradigmatic material for it. Whatever the ultimate accreditation for this kind of truth -- be it the self-evidence of reason, an a priori of faith, or a metaphysical decision of the will -- its pronouncements are apodictic, whereas those of the hypothetical thought experiments can at best be probabilistic. This is enough where they are meant to serve not as proofs but as illustrations. What is here contemplated, therefore, is a casuistry of the imagination which, unlike the customary casuistries of law and morality that serve the trying out of principles already known, assists in the tracking and discovering of principles still unknown. The serious side of science fiction lies precisely in its performing such well-informed thought experiments, whose vivid imaginary results may assume the heuristic function here proposed. 

Ella Parker, Compact #1, March 1963:

After much thought I decided to come out into the open and approach the Housing Manager, what an imposing title that is. I went into some detail about what I’d been told by one of his men, and please, is it true? I really piled on the agony. I found it an absorbing hobby, which I do, but I neglected to tell him of the life of ease I oould enjoy if he really did forbid me to continue publishing, he wrote back, asking what kind of equipment I had; he assumed I used the usual type home printing apparatus, and, please, could he have a copy of my magazine to show at a council meeting when they discussed my case? I did some soul searching, I can tell you. I toyed with the idea of letting him assume what he liked, in case he should disapprove of what I was actually using and with-hold his permission, but, clear thinking won the day. If I lied, and later there were complaints about the noise, they could, and would be justified, in chucking us out of the flat. I didn’t want this to happen, as those of you who have visited the old. Pen will understand. I told him the truth, that I have an electric Gestetner, I also sent him a copy of ORION #28. I heard nothing more for months.

Bishop John Wilkins: 

And here, one that had a strong fancy, were better able to set forth the great benefit and pleasure to be had by such a journey. And that whether you consider the strangeness of the persons, language, arts, policy, religion of those inhabitants, together with the new traffique that might be brought thence. In briefe, doe but consider the pleasure and profit, of those later discoveries in America, and wee must needs conclude this to be inconceiveably beyond it. 

David Russen:

But the Title that the Translator gives it (when he calls it a Comical History) seems to be too full of Levity, and unbecoming that Gravity which a Treatise of so serious matter doth require. For though it be interlaced with much Matter of Mirth, Wit and Invention, of things even doubtful, or meerly feigned, and so in some sense may be ranked with Sir Thomas Moor’s Utopia, Don Quixot’s Romantick Whymseys, or Poor Robin’s Description of Lubbardland; yet it is throughout carried on with that strength of Argument, force of Reason, and solidity of Judgment in the Demonstration of things probable, that it may not be unbecoming the Gravity of Cato, the Seriousness of Seneca, or the Strictness of the most rigid Peripatetick or Cartesian; and instead of Comical, may deserve the Epithete of the most Rational History of the Government of the Moon.

Sheila Jasanoff, 'Future Imperfect, Science, Technology and the Imaginations of Modernity':

Belying the label "science fiction," however, works in this genre are also fabulations of social worlds, both utopic and dystopic. Shelley's lab-generated monster turns murderous because he is excluded from society by his abnormal birth and hence is denied the blessings of companionship and social life enjoyed by his creator. Jules Verne's Nemo, a dispossessed Indian prince driven by hatred of the British colonialists who exploited his land and destroyed his family, seeks freedom and scientific enlightenment in the ocean depths. Biopower runs amok in Aldous Huxley's imagined world, overwhelming human dignity and autonomy in the name of collective needs under authoritarian rule. Equally concerned with the interplay of social and material innovation, but reversing the emotional gears, Edward Bellamy's look backward from an imagined 2000 offers, first, an optimistic account of a new social order and only secondarily a foray into technological unknowns. And as a dystopic counterpoint, George Orwell's (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four presents a world of totalitarian thought control overseen by a technologically advanced, all-seeing, all-knowing, 24/7 surveillance state-whose real-life counterpart Edward Snowden, the whistleblowing, twenty-first-century American contractor, famously revealed in the US National Security Agency. Oddly, though, many nonfictional accounts of how technology develops still treat the material apart from the social, as if the design of tools and machines, cars and computers, pharmaceutical drugs and nuclear weapons were not in constant interplay with the social arrangements that inspire and sustain their production.

Sheila Jasanoff, 'Future Imperfect, Science, Technology and the Imaginations of Modernity':

Bringing social thickness and complexity back into the appreciation of technological systems has been a central aim of the field of science and technology studies (STS). Historians and social analysts of technology have worked in tandem to remind us that there can be no machines without humans to make them and powerful institutions to decide which technologies are worth our investment (Winner 1986). This literature resists the temptation to construe technology as deterministic. STS scholars tend to bristle at the evolutionary economist's language of strict path dependence (David 1985; Arthur 1994). STS accounts recognize that history matters, as indeed it must, but reject the notion of rigid lock-ins in favor of a more open sense of agency and contingency in society's charting of technological possibilities. Many aspects of the presenting face of technological systems are socially constructed (Bijker et al. 1987). The stamp of conscious or unconscious human choice and user preference marks the design of objects, their weighting of risks and benefits, and the behaviors they encourage, exclude, or seek to regulate (Calion 1987; Jasanoff 2006). Less frequently encountered in the STS literature, however, are conceptual frameworks that situate technologies within the integrated material, moral, and social landscapes that science fiction offers up in such abundance. To be sure, the normative dimensions of science and technology do not fall wholly outside the scope of STS analysis. STS scholarship acknowledges that science and technology do not unidirectionally shape our values and norms. Rather, and symmetrically, our sense of how we ought to organize and govern ourselves profoundly influences what we make of nature, society, and the "real world."

Sheila Jasanoff, 'Restoring reason: Causal narratives and political culture'

The tragic open-endedness of the Bhopal case so many years later speaks to features of public knowledge making in India that we will return to later in this chapter. For now, let us flag chiefly the lack of anything approaching a defi nitive epistemological resolution: a time and place when all the major participants came together to agree on a common understanding of what had actually happened and what should be done on the basis of that shared knowledge. In the absence of such a moment of truth, multiple narratives of responsibility and blame continue to fl ourish in Bhopal, on the look-out for new external audiences or events to legitimate them. Yet this very lack of resolution can be seen as a form of learning – not the kind that necessarily leads to regulatory change or institutional reform, though both did happen in the disaster’s wake (Jasanoff 1994), but rather the kind that, through its very incompleteness, reveals the impossibility of taming a cataclysmic event through necessarily imperfect managerial solutions. The open-endedness of learning at Bhopal offers in this sense its own redemption, by negating the possibility of forgetfulness.

[...]

Learning from disaster emerges out of these stories as a complex, ambiguous process – conditioned by culture, yet not easily forced into univocal, totalizing, national narratives. It is in the raggedness of accounting for tragic experience that the possibility of cultural reinvention ultimately resides.

Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature:

In the environmental arena, both fact and fiction lent credence to worries about human error and lack of foresight.

Sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature:

If Frankenstein played on primal fears of supplanting divine order with man’s imperfect understanding, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World broached themes more suited to the midcentury’s secular, totalitarian experiments. This was a world of graded, standardized, and denatured human beings, manufactured like the orcs in J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasies to meet the needs of an all-powerful state. Turned into instruments of others’ interest, people were deprived of uniqueness, autonomy, and free will. Yet the eugenic ideas that found nightmarish expression in Huxley’s novel were enthusiastically embraced by Western progressives and intellectuals in the early twentieth century. Just five years before the publication of Brave New World, Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, a giant of American jurisprudence, wrote in Buck v. Bell: “It is better for all the world if, instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes. Three generations of imbeciles are enough.” [...] Eugenic theories motivated the U.S. Immigration Restriction Act of 1924, which discriminated against Jews and people of southern Mediterranean origin. Not until the excesses of Nazi eugenics, culminating in the Holocaust, were these ideas substantially discredited as a basis for policy. [...] Indeed, in socialist Sweden, a forty-year program of forced sterilization based on eugenic principles ended only in 1976. Meanwhile, seemingly untouched by the Nazi experience, U.S. biomedical researchers’ desire for knowledge ran ahead of ethical concerns for the protection of human subjects right into the 1960s.

Paul Feyerabend, Putnam on Incommensurability:

English does not cease to be English when new words are introduced or old words given a new sense. Every philologist, anthropologist, sociologist who presents an archaic (primitive, exotic, etc.) world view, every popular science writer who wants to explain unusual scientific ideas in ordinary English, every surrealist, dadaist, teller of fairy tales, ghost stories, science fiction novels, every translator of the poetry of different ages and nations knows how first to construct, out of English words, an English sounding model of the pattern of usage he needs and then to adopt the pattern and to 'speak' it. [...] I should add that incommensurability is a difficulty for philosophers, not for scientists. Philosophers insist on stability of meaning throughout an argument while scientists, being aware that 'speaking a language or explaining a situation means both following rules and changing them' [...] are experts in the art of arguing across lines some philosophers regard as insuperable boundaries of discourse. 

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