Stanislaw Lem: Memoirs Found in a Bathtub – The Collapse of Knowledge

by Steven Craig  Hickman

The more complex a civilization, the more vital to its existence is the maintenance of the flow of Information; hence the more vulnerable it becomes to any disturbance in that flow.

– Stanislaw Lem, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub

​Stanislaw Lem had that unique ability to combine humor and science, philosophy and pessimism in the right proportions: a recipe for collapse and disaster. His books are the type you’d bring along on a long voyage to Orion. Along with Shakespeare and the King James Bible his are the works I return to over and over again to keep the madness at bay. Shakespeare because I never cease to be amazed by his command of language and that unique ability to portray characters more alive than most people I meet in life. The King James Bible to remind me why I became an atheist, along with the fact that it too is one of those treasures of linguistic power and rhetoric that teaches you the power of narrative and its ability to shape a culture. Lem because he conveys the sense of what a cosmic pessimist is: the creature who combines the fatalist and the comic stance against the idiocy of the world.

In the Memoirs Found in a Bathtub we discover that unique thing, the demise of our own civilization written from the future, a future that is both impossible and real. Knowledge is our environment. Information is our bread and butter. We exist in iPhone, iPad, the Internet of things, InfoSphere: bubbles of artificial madness and delight. We are connected in an onlife world 24/7 to a realm of information that never ceases. But what if in the blink of an eye all this vanished? What if the information flow stopped, utterly. What would happen? What would you do if you were disconnected from the world of information? In this short work he imagines the time of our time when the world of information ceased, when knowledge itself collapsed, when libraries dissolved before our very eyes:

It must have been a cruel blow indeed to the pride of Late Neogene man, who saw himself already reaching the stars. The papyralysis nightmare pervaded all walks of life. Panic hit the cities; people, deprived of their Identity, lost their reason; the supply of goods broke down; there were Incidents of violence; technology, research and development, schools— all crumbled Into nonexistence; power plants could not be repaired for lack of blueprints. The lights went out, and the ensuing darkness was illumined only by the glow of bonfires.1

T​he “papyralysis nightmare” to which he refers is the disappearance of books due to a biochemical attack in which paper was the victim. Of course Lem wrote this before the massive influx of the desktop computer age, when only the great behemoths of IBM and other mainframe systems were making there way into governments, military, and many academies. Other such works such as John Barth’s Giles Goat Boy will parade this pre-computer age of mainframes, but not quite as uniquely as will Lem. No Lem had that ability to make us laugh at the truth, to parody the things we cherish without knowing we cherish them. His studies are microparodies of our civilization. He could take the most innocuous subject and turn it into the key to civilizations downward course into oblivion.
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As he describes it the world of the sciences and academy, think-tanks and knowledge-bearers were victims of their own specialisms. Because of this after the collapse, the great amnesia of knowledge set in, the world became primitive again while only a few specialists held the key to our advance sciences, philosophies, cultural memory, etc. Within a generation they knew this would all be lost. What to do? Think about it: if our libraries, our computers, all our informational storage systems vanished from the earth what would we do? Primitive societies were built on mnemonic techniques of ritual enactments and mimetic narratives that conveyed the cultural memory from generation to generation. In fact this truly is what culture is: a memory system that acts as a communication device to convey information about the social-body through time. But how would an expert be able to describe his knowledge to people who could not understand the “meaning” of that knowledge?

Niklas Luhmann in his systems theory of communication would describe social systems as “systems of communication”:

​Being the social system that comprises all  communication, today’s society is a world society. A system is defined by a boundary between itself and its environment, dividing it from an infinitely complex, or chaotic, exterior. The interior of the system is thus a zone of reduced complexity: Communication within a system operates by selecting only a limited amount of all information available outside. This process is also called “reduction of complexity”. The criterion according to which information is selected and processed is meaning. Both social systems and psychical or personal systems operate by processing meaning.

​So Luhmann would develop the notion that in the medium of meaning, there is no “nature” and no “essence.” And there are no boundaries that cannot be crossed (for otherwise they would have no meaning as boundaries, as indications of something else). Instead, there are only horizons that move along with every movement. And meaning can only be defined self-referentially in recursive connections that refer to other things, and always to the unmarked state of the world, thus passing into instability. Identities materialize by the repetition of operations. At the same time, they are the structure by which repetition recognizes itself as repetition. In short, meaning is “autopoietically” constituted by systems that can only recognize their own boundaries in the process of constituting meaning by providing themselves with inward and outward referents, their own distinction of self- and other-reference. Each observing operation draws a distinction and is distinguished by performing the distinguishing.2
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This view of the unmarked state of the world combined with the notion that meaning is the fruit of repetition, operation, and distinction as a process of autopoietic or self-referential feedback inserting itself into the repletion by way of an operation or the marking of a distinction produces meaning. Luhmann also believed that each system has a distinctive identity that is constantly reproduced in its communication and depends on what is considered meaningful and what is not. If a system fails to maintain that identity, it ceases to exist as a system and dissolves back into the environment it emerged from.

So one can understand why Lem in his comic novel is investigating just this: What happens in a society (system of communication) when it’s very systems of memory and repetition falter, break down, and collapse. Does society return to some zero point of environment? Do we become savages again? Or does something else happen? And, if so, what? Lem will describe his hypothetical society as doing this:

​Desperate measures were employed. Certain branches of the amusement industry (such as feelms) mobilized their entire production to record incoming information on the positions of spaceships and satellites, for collisions were multiplying rapidly. Circuit diagrams were printed, from memory, on fabrics. All available plastic writing materials were distributed among the schools. Physics professors personally had to tend atomic piles. Emergency teams of scientists flitted from one point of the globe to another. But these were merely tiny particles of order, atoms of organization that quickly dissolved in an ocean of spreading chaos. Shaken as it was by endless upheavals, engaged In a constant struggle against the tide of superstition, illiteracy and ignorance, the stagnant culture of the Chaotic should be fudged not by what It lost of the heritage of centuries, but by what it was able to salvage, against all odds. (ibid., KL 73-79)

​What he hints at is that it isn’t the world of “lost” information that was the problem, but rather what they were able to salvage of the remaining knowledge that became the issue. What he’s describing is the judgment of humans on what is worth saving of our heritage:

​Because the supply of new writing materials failed to meet even the most urgent needs, anything that did not directly serve to save the bare framework of society had to be jettisoned. The humanities suffered the worst. Knowledge was disseminated orally, through lectures; the audiences became the educators of the next generation. This was one of those astonishing primitivisms of Chaotic civilization that rescued Earth from total disaster, though losses In the areas of history, historiography, paleology and paleoesthetics were quite Irreparable. Only the smallest fragment of a rich literary legacy was preserved. Millions of volumes of chronicles, priceless relics of the Middle and Late Neogene, turned to dust forever. (ibie., KL 82-87)

​This notion of a bare knowledge, of salvaging only the minimal information needed to support this remaining civilization through its darkest period, this alone makes you ask: What would we do? What do we consider the bare minimum needed to rebuild our civilization? Have our leaders, academics, philosophers, literary or sociological thinkers even begun to recon with the collapse of civilization in these terms? If as many presume our vast global civilization could over the next few hundred years be vulnerable to various global disaster scenarios, have they thought of what is the bare minimum of knowledge needed to rebuild our scocius if such a collapse of civilization were to happen? And, if so, what does that tell us about ourselves?
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I began reading Peter Sloterdijk’s Spherological trilogy recently which he wrote due to this need for a knowledge arc as he termed it or a space-station. His sense of the use of the metaphor of the space-station as a total or spherical environment as the coupling of man and his environment was to bring the truth that the earth is this artificial space now. When one thinks of an astronaut in space enclosed or encapsulated by his artificial environment every aspect of his existence is dependent on this environment maintaining its integrity. So that if it is not repaired and maintained then the astronaut herself is at risk. It’s this sense of the earth as this total artificial environment that concerns Sloterdijk, the sense that we in our time treat the earth as something else than this total system that encloses us in its environment, and that we are totally dependent on its resources, mechanisms, systems for our survival; and, yet, we seem incapable of realizing just that, and instead allow this artificial system to break down and become corrupted, polluted, and decayed not realizing that as it lose integrity so will we. We have politicized the system that maintains our integrity at the expense of the system itself. We treat the earth as Other, as Gais or Goddess; as Resource – a dead substance to be manipulated, extracted, used as we see fit for our benefit; as Theme Park – a wilderness or wild zone where humans can enjoy something termed Nature as if it were a Zoo to be maintained… all these various approached to a world that we objectify as simply Other. Yet, it is not. We and it form a coupled pact. We are enclosed within it, a part of it, and it is our survival suit against the massive radiation and emptiness of space.

Lem’s novel describes a world that has forgotten this truth.

​The reader will see for himself that the daring suppositions of Histognostor Wid-Wiss were for the most part quite accurate. The “Notes” portray the fate of a community locked beneath the earth, a community that refused to allow the infiltration of any news of real events, pretending it constituted the Brain, the Headquarters of an empire that extended even to the most remote galaxies. In time the pretense became belief, the belief a certainty. The reader will witness how the fanatical servants of Kap-Eh-Taahl created the myth of the Antibuilding, how they spent their lives in mutual surveillance, in tests of loyalty and devotion to the Mission, even when the last figment of that Mission’s reality had become an impossibility and nothing remained but to sink ever deeper into the pit of collective madness. (ibid., KL 179-184)

​What he portrays here is a society that was so enclosed in its own systems of self-referentiality, so closed off from the Outside of thought, the real… that it began to enter that paranoiac state of total information implosion when even our ability to trust the outer form of each other’s existence becomes itself the trivial pursuit of an anti-life repeating the anti-realist gestures of a game in which information is feeding only on its own emptiness: the pit of collective madness. Are we entering this stage? Have we forgotten that our artificial environments were once connected to a life-support system that existed independent of our systems of signification? That reality is not information in a bubble, that knowledge once connected to something beyond us? As we fold ourselves into oblivion we should remember Lem’s diagnosis:

​Perhaps, too, this is not a madness of men, but of an organization, an organization that grew too much and one day met a remote offshoot of itself, and began to swallow it up, and swallowed and swallowed, reaching back to itself, back to its own center, and now it loops around and around in an endless swallowing … In which case, there need be no other Building, except as a pretense to hide its autophagia… (ibid.)

​Are we feeding on our own social body like cannibals lost in a cosmic nightmare? Sociologists have always tried to take the chaos of the world and either discover or construct an order from its fragile idiocy. Lem like those strange travelers among the labyrinths of dusty libraries delivers to us a world that is not so much in search of order, but is rather seeking to unravel its impending sense of oblivion, of a mindless chaos whose madness is the horizon of our own minds. This reversal of the sociological paradigm brings with it a sense of new degradations: the power of chaos creates its own order through ceaseless and unmitigated repetitions of a strange autophagia… Freud would put a name to this beast from the abyss: the Death-drive…

​1. Lem, Stanislaw (2012-07-18). Memoirs Found in a Bathtub (Kindle Locations 56-59). Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Kindle Edition.
2. Luhmann, Niklas (2013-01-09). A Systems Theory of Religion (Cultural Memory in the Present) (Kindle Locations 1659-1666). Stanford University Press. Kindle Edition.

taken from:

socialecologie