Green Planets (43 page)

FIGURE 2
Tyger! Tyger! Burning Bright!

Thus there arise true aliens, strange strangers, products of reason's reach into life as such—the beings revealed by evolution are non-chimps, nonhumans, non-insects, non-species, the joke of Darwin's title
The Origin of Species
being that this is a book that argues that
there are no species and they have no origin
.
¹⁶
The very attempt to exit Earth ends the world, not by allowing us to float free in space, but by gluing us every more tightly to the viscous gravitational pull of the aesthetic dimension, which is now discovered to emanate from all things, not only from things humans want to hang in art galleries, a dimension that Plato was quite accurate to describe as an evil realm of demonic magnetism.
¹⁷
The “death of god” and the long march of eliminative materialism go hand in hand with the rebirth of evil and of radically transcendental realms, realms that are now found to inhabit plastic bottles, pellets of Plutonium 239, and tree frogs, but which can be located nowhere in ontically given, phenomenal space. The crack in the real discovered by Kant multiplies everywhere, like crazy paving. The disenchantment of the world gives rise to the reenchantment of the world! But
not as a benevolent world, not as a
world
at all—but rather as the threatening proximity of aliens, aliens wherever we tread, flashing their compelling webs of illusion, a non-total crowd of leering clowns. This is the non-world that ecological awareness glimpses, not in spite of nihilism but through it, underneath it. The void is the meontic nothing of a pair of cat's eyes (
Figure 12.2
).
¹⁸

This is the dark ecological truth that
Avatar
tries to peel away from the ostensible “message,” but which it simply can't help but reveal in every luminescent tendril of color, every glowing resonance, the very filmstock that seems to gaze at us with night eyes:

 

Tyger Tyger, burning bright

In the forests of the night;

What immortal hand or eye,

Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
¹⁹

 

Notes

1
.
Avatar
, directed by James Cameron (2009; Los Angeles: Twentieth Century Fox, 2010), DVD.

2
. Ursula Heise,
Sense of Place and Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global
(New York: Colombia University Press, 1982).

3
. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,
Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
, trans. A. V. Miller, analysis and foreword by J. N. Findlay (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 9.

4
. Immanuel Kant,
Critique of Judgment: Including the First Introduction
, trans. Werner Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 103–17.

5
. William Shakespeare,
Hamlet
, ed. Philip Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 2.2.243 (141).

6
. Judea Pearl,
Causality: Models, Reasoning, and Inference
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 78–85.

7
. Wendy Chun, “Crisis, Crisis, Crisis, or Sovereignty and Networks,”
Theory, Culture and Society
28, no. 6 (2011): 91–112 (106–7).

8
. Quentin Meillassoux,
After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency
, trans. Ray Brassier (New York: Continuum, 2009), 112–28.

9
. Edmund Husserl,
Logical Investigations
, trans. J. N. Findlay, ed. Dermot Moran (London: Routledge, 2006), 1:275–76.

10
. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari,
Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia
, trans. R. Hurley, M. Seem, and H. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983).

11
. See Graham Priest,
In Contradiction: A Study of the Transconsistent
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), passim: the most notable recent quarantine officers have been Tarski, Russell, and Frege.

12
. Martin Heidegger,
Being and Time
, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996), 131–34, 171–72, and esp. Section 40 (172–78).

13
. See Jacques Derrida, “Economimesis,”
Diacritics
11, no. 2 (Summer 1981): 2–25.

14
. Melanie Klein,
Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946–1963
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1975), 61–64.

15
. Immanuel Kant, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” in
Kant: Political Writings
, ed. H. S. Reiss (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 54–60.

16
. A full explication of the
strange stranger
can be found in Timothy Morton,
The Ecological Thought
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 14–15, 17–19, 38–50. See also Jacques Derrida, “Hospitality,” trans. Barry Stocker with Forbes Matlock,
Angelaki
5, no. 3 (December 2000): 3–18.

17
. Plato,
Ion
, trans. Benjamin Jowett, available at
http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/ion.html
(accessed May 27, 2012).

18
. I am of course referencing Jacques Derrida,
The Animal That Therefore I Am
, ed. Marie-Louise Mallet, trans. David Wills (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 3–11.

19
. William Blake, “The Tyger,” in
The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake
, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Doubleday, 1965; rev. 1988).

13

Churning Up the Depths

Nonhuman Ecologies of Metaphor in
Solaris
and “Oceanic”

MELODY JUE

The first time I watched the
BBC
's
Blue Planet
documentary series, I was fascinated by deep-sea footage of a dark, calm pool of water whose surface was carpeted by a bed of mussels. How could there be a second surface of water—underwater? David Attenborough's voice patiently explained that this was in fact a deepwater brine lake: “During the Jurassic period, the water here was shallow and became cut off from the ocean. The area soon dried out, leaving a thick layer of salt and other minerals up to 8 km thick. When the ocean water returned after the region rifted apart, the super-saline layer at the bottom of the Gulf became an underwater lake. Now brine, which is continually released from a rift in the ocean floor, feeds the lake.”
¹
Seeing this underwater lake, I began to rethink my spatial intuition. The ocean, for us, is commonly conceptualized as a Cartesian volume that can be gridded and measured, with a surface only at the top.
²
This dominant metaphorical sense of “depth” as the below and “surface” on top is based on the normal position of a human observer. By surprising us with a counterexample of a unique “surface”
within
the depths,
Blue Planet
reveals both the pervasiveness of our land-based perspective of surface and depth and how it colors the terrestrial metaphors we live by. We expect a surface on top and depth underneath in both reality and in figurative language, but there may be other possible senses of these terms.
³
The underwater lake example suggests a stigmatism, or misalignment of the figurative and the literal figures, which produces a kind of cognitive estrangement similar to what we experience in science fiction about oceans and aquatic beings.

This chapter discusses how the cognitively estranged environments of
SF
challenge our terrestrial senses of surface and depth. As case studies, I focus on two texts: Polish writer Stanislaw Lem's seminal 1961 novel
Solaris
and Greg
Egan's novella “Oceanic.”
Solaris
imagines a sentient ocean and its responses to scientific investigation, while “Oceanic” imagines smaller-scale ocean microbes whose chemical excretions produce religious feeling. In both texts, oceans disrupt human practices of symptomatic reading and valuation of depth. Gender and sexuality also play key roles, for in both texts a feminized “nature” no longer accommodates the kind of scientific penetration that would accompany a deep reading. Instead the feminine—as a character, and the element of water—disorients male protagonists in both texts, such that they rethink their relation to transcendental or “deep” knowledge and epistemological limits. In the following analysis, I hope to churn up the “clean” model of surface versus depth through science fictional estrangements, using
Solaris
as a diagnosis of habitual figurations of depth, and “Oceanic” as the story that imagines how the mutual relations of human and nonhuman suggest alternative relations to depth and interpretive practices. Rather than considering depth as a single definable concept, both stories introduce other possibilities through the participation of nonhumans to suggest an ecological and participatory sense of figurative meaning.

SOLARIS

Stanislaw Lem's
Solaris
(1961) dramatizes scientific attempts to penetrate and understand the ocean-planet Solaris according to the classic model of surface/depth, provoking a crisis that is jointly scientific, masculine, colonial, and terrestrial. The novel begins with psychologist Kris Kelvin, an expert on “Solaris studies,” moving from a transport ship to the space station above Solaris in a kind of embryonic pod. The space station, hovering from an Archimedean standpoint above the planet, would seem to offer the scientists an ideally objective location from which to study Solaris. Yet Solaris has long been suspected of sentience on a planet-wide scale: it may be altering its own orbit in space, and it routinely throws up radiant, geometrically complex structures from its surface. In one early description, Kelvin calls the Solaris ocean “a monstrous entity endowed with reason, a protoplasmic ocean-brain enveloping the entire planet and idling its time away in extravagant theoretical cogitation about the nature of the universe. Our instruments had intercepted minute random fragments of a prodigious and everlasting monologue unfolding in the depths of this colossal brain, which was inevitably beyond our understanding.”
⁴
Here, Kelvin draws an analogy between psychological and oceanic “depths,” reading the ocean planet as both a geological and psychological text where visible currents
and large three-dimensional surface structures might be seen as evidence of “thinking”—a sort of distributed cognition throughout the planetary body. Yet the legibility of the planet-as-text proves elusive, for the planet-ocean Solaris enacts an insistent
détournement
against scientific legibility, psychoanalysis, and symptomatic reading, deflecting human attempts to understand the Solaris ocean as either a physical environment or a colossal brain. Solaris modifies the instruments scientists submerge into its ocean, producing “a profusion of signals—fragmentary indications of some outlandish activity, which in fact defeated all attempts at analysis.”
⁵
Lem's fantastic ocean resists both physical and epistemic human penetration, an impervious mirror surface with depths that remain cognitively out of reach to whatever extent they even exist at all. Fredric Jameson calls this Lem's “Unknowability Thesis,” in which Solaris “resists scientific inquiry with all the serene tenacity of the godhead itself.”
⁶

Yet what we miss if we see only the resistance of Solaris is the depth reading
that it practices
on Kris Kelvin and the other scientists from the very beginning of the novel. The clearest example of this involves the arrival of unexpected visitors on the space station. After scientists bombard the ocean's surface with X-rays during one test, the ocean begins to read the brain waves of the human scientists while they sleep, producing physical “phantoms”—also described as “simulacra” or “phi-creatures”—which are intimately tied to each individual's unconscious. Kris Kelvin's uncanny visitor is Rheya, a simulacrum of his deceased wife on Earth who had committed suicide. Although she looks and speaks like the Rheya from Earth, the hyper-real Rheya has no calluses on her feet, perfect skin, and also possesses superhuman strength. “Born” amnesiac, she does not know she is a copy, her own memory based on what Kelvin remembers of Earth's Rheya.
⁷
While on Solaris, every scientist gets such a visitor, projected from the depths of each scientist's own repressed memories. We could say that Solaris gives the scientists access to a different register of depth—their
own
psychological depths—by turning the mirror on them. Is this not a classic example of symptomatic reading? In their critique of a hermeneutics of suspicion, Best and Marcus define symptomatic reading as “a mode of interpretation that assumes that a text's truest meaning lies in what it does not say, describes textual surfaces as superfluous, and seeks to unmask hidden meanings. For symptomatic readers, texts possess meanings that are veiled, latent, all but absent if it were not for their irrepressible and recurring symptoms.”
⁸
The questions here are: What is Rheya's ontological status? Does she embody a kind of depth “reading” that Solaris performs on Kelvin? Is she a memory, an individual, an extension of the Solaris ocean, or an interpretation of Kelvin's unconscious?