is communication (science) fiction?

Music: The Caretaker: Patience (After Sebald) (2011)

For those who know me outside of RoseChron, at first blush this titular question is a rhetorical one: understood as communion or a real connection between two symbol-using critters, communication is indeed a fiction (cf. John Durham Peter's Speaking Into the Air). Since I read it in grad school, I've always found Richard Rorty's explanation of communication as a kind of coordinated dance, or an attuning of behavior or a squaring of "squeaks" and "barks," rather persuasive. Communication might be better expressed as a coordination of behaviors via symbolic means (which would imply, obviously, that left-handed Tantra is not intercourse after all---ha ha ha). Yes, I think communication is a fiction from the standpoint of popular parlance. But if you get inside the question to ask, semantics aside, if understanding---not as abstract, but as a kind of open-sourcing of the Other---is possible, the question gets pretty interesting, and I recognize this is why all that dialectic-bashing is so appealing today for so many (with nods to Gilles). I tentatively qualify "fiction" with "science" here to point to that "interesting" aspect of the query, and my current reading of Stanislaw Lem's novel, His Master's Voice, has really got me thinking this weeked about the question and, by extension, the foundational promise of my chosen field and profession.

Lem's curious (and emotionally difficult) novel crystalizes a theme I've been encountering repeatedly in my recent attempt to survey and digest the most celebrated science fiction of the twentieth century: can we communicate with aliens? Of course, if anything, sci-fi is a philosophy of futurity, so this quixotic theme is really about whether humans should trouble with communicating with each other. Lem fascinates me because he is among the first authors I've read who is explicitly negative on this question; I've not finished His Master's Voice yet but, so far, the moral is something like, "humans cannot communicate with aliens because they cannot communicate with one another."

The novel is darkly comedic, which is to say, it is deathly serious. It concerns a renowned professor of mathematics, Peter Hogarth, and his involvement with a secret, Pentagon project to decode an assumed neutrino blast (read: radio-like transmission) from extraterrestrials. Like just about every zombie story, the real plot here is not the transmission, but the imbecility of humans grappling with a constitutive outside. Lem skillfully paints, through a first person narrative by Hogarth, how impossible it is for humans to communicate with one another because of the power of projection: the narrator is so self-absorbed (and self-loathing) that anything approaching an openness to the "outside" seems impossible. So far the book reminds me of Sartre's Nausea, however, the melancholy is traded-in for a kind of abject cynicism. The novel is fascinating and difficult to put down, even though Hogarth is so unpleasant. I don't know how the thing will end (so don't spoil it for me), but the hilarious account of how the "message" or "letter from the stars" was received---basically as the consequence of a kind of EVP get-rich-quick spectacle in popular culture---brings to mind, immediately, Konsantin Raudive's serious, well-intentioned 1971 study, Breakthrough: An Amazing Experiment in Electronic Communication With the Dead.

The fascination I have with Lem's work follows on my reading of Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End, 2001, and 2010, all of which concern the ability of humans to communicate with intelligences beyond their capacity to comprehend them. Like Lem, Clarke is something of a pessimist, but he also has a profound hope in the possibility of transcendence (while an avowed anti-religionist, religious themes flower all over the place in his books). The irony here is that, at least in a formal or compositional frame, Lem seems fixed on comedy, while Clarke is resolutely tragic. Clarke finds hope in failure; Lem finds comedy in hope.

Reading Clarke and Lem reminded me of my first encounter of the "Pioneer Plaques," which went out in the early seventies on Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11, now billions of miles in space somewhere. The golden plaques indicate hydrogen, our solar system, human beings and their limbs (apparently we are white), and so forth:

You visual rhetoric mavens will quickly discern why these images were controversial (and I don't mean the fact some folks got pissy the bipeds were nekkid!). The plaques represent the views of Carl Sagan about communicating with extra-terrestrials, who was instrumental in their design (his wife, apparently, rendered the drawing). Perhaps even more intriguing was the creation of the Voyager Golden Records, which were launched in 1977. They are inscribed with sounds from earth and say a lot of something about our prior faith in analogics. Sagan thought, even though the likelihood these messages would reach aliens was low, they nevertheless represented the "hope" central to human being.

Wondering aloud: how has the character of that hope changed because of the apotheosis of the digital?

The longer I think about rhetoric, persuasion, and (the possibility of) communication, the more I am torn between Clarke and Lem's visions. For me, the most inspiring component of science fiction is that people turn outward, exploring together. That attitude toward the unknown is constantly threatened by the temptation to turn inward---to explore the innerspace of another human being as if to discern her inner mystery. Clarke is good with the exploration part, but Lem is much better at showing how too easily that becomes an interrogation of the Other, with terrible and comic consequences.

I'm also thinking about this question, "is communication (science) fiction?" because it looks increasingly probable I'll be teaching a course by this or a similar title for the honors college in 2013 (advanced undergraduates in a seminar-like setting). Which is to say, I guess, that the course is about "love" by another name.