Solaris (1961) Stanislaw Lem
The typical reading of Solaris (and Stanislaw Lem’s work in general) is one of extreme pessimism towards the limits of both science fiction and space exploration. The idea is that humankind is too consumed by narcissism to ever be able to make contact with the alien other. Any alien that we may encounter—as in the sentient ocean planet of Solaris—observed empirically with all the dominating power of our sciences, becomes a mere mirror, reflecting back to us our most vulnerable selves; the interaction that we appear to have with this immense and solitary being, is, in reality, only a confrontation with the ghosts of our own repressed trauma. We react by bombing it.
From the historical context this reading appears sound. Lem, having grown up in the ghettos of Lvov and having survived the holocaust, is allowed a certain extreme pessimism towards the human endeavor; space exploration is but a futile dream in the face of mechanized genocide. In this regard we may be thankful that he wrote any books at all, for, as Adorno claims, the only adequate response to the holocaust is a scream.
And yet there is another reading that can be made of Solaris that pushes the limits of science-fiction while perhaps delimiting the hard pessimism. This would be the reading from the standpoint of radical immanence. Radical immanence will claim that the so called “outer space” may as well not exist, and that the significance of any science fiction worth the name must necessarily be bound to the limits of the planet. The Alien other can only ever be representative of those alien others that we have already encountered here on planet earth (the octopus, the sequoia, the house-cat) and that yet still remain fundamentally strange. From this standpoint then, we may read, for example, the xenomorph of the Alien series, as built of composite parts of creepy insectoid otherness, mashed up with the defamiliarizing aesthetics of raw network technology. In this way the lethal alien is hidden in the naked technology of the mining ship Nostromo; the alien monster is synecdoche for the extractive killing power of technocapital itself.
W/r/t Solaris, the sentient ocean planet is of course our own ocean planet. Tarkovsky seems to make this reading self-evident with the sentimental ending of his adaptation; the major flaw being the overly religious exultation of fathers; the sea of course is not and can never be a dad and the movie fails because of this whingy theological bias. Lem’s Solaris is more inconclusive and more profound because of it. What remains is sheer ignorance. We cannot know this ocean, and yet it is where we came from. It is the most alien thing on this planet and it is also our origin and home. That the salinity of the sea matches the salinity of our blood and tears is a dim echo, a fractal refrain of this our great gray mother. Darken its waters, cloud its surface with our trash and oil, bomb it, burn it and yet nothing we can do can erase this past, or suppress this rage; huge, implacable, bigger than dreams. What Solaris divines, and what we as a species are not yet ready to admit, is that we are the ghostly emissaries of a distant traumatic past sent from out of the sea’s consciousness. The ocean of planet earth is sentient: it finds its sentience in us.
But really the universal and unknowable alien ocean from out of which we have been sent is our own mother’s womb.
