Interplanetary Literature: 2011 Acla Presidential Address

2011 ACLA PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS
HAUN SAUSSY
Interplanetary Literature
THE comparative THEME

comparative literature."
literature." OF OUR
You might haveCONFERENCE Youwithout
suspected me, not might have this suspected year has me, been not "World without literature, justifica-
justifica-
tion, of misunderstanding "comparative" to mean "competitive," when you saw
in the bulletin that the title of my paper was to be "Interplanetary Literature."
After all, when Goethe, René Wellek, and Hugo Meltzl de Lomnitz, not to mention
our contemporaries Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, David Damrosch, Franco Moretti,
Christopher Prendergast, Pascale Casanova, John Pizer, and David Palumbo-Liu
(among others), have pointed out the futility of framing literary studies in a
national, or even a comparative-national, arena and urged us to think about lit-
erature in a global circuit of communications, the only way left to go is out and
up, toward an investigation of multiple worlds or planets. And yet you might be
thinking that a title like this betokens not the extension of a method, but of a mad-
ness; or perhaps you were reassured by noticing that the date of this lecture is,
after all, April Fool's day. But here I am, still promising to talk to you about inter-
planetary literature.
Faced with that rebuke to your hypothesis, you might now reach for a back-up
explanation, such as that I was going to take for my subject the numerous works
of science fiction and satire written over the last five hundred or so years in
which the Earthling protagonists encounter denizens of other planets and make
friends with them (or not) . Within the bounds of those works, one might say, an
interplanetary culture, literature, or consciousness is founded, or at least imag-
ined. That would make sense, though it's not what I'm going to talk about. I
wouldn't do that because it would be a bait-and-switch: announcing Interplane-
tary Literature and finally coming up with nothing less provincial than the lit-
erature of Earthlings about imaginary other worlds. But what else could I have
offered, speaking in disciplinary terms? It would be rational enough to expect
such a substitution, since my job title, like most of yours, locates me not in the
department of Astronomy, but in a department of literature and language. And
even though such a version of the interplanetary would be, honestly speaking, a
I would like to thank Rima Joseph, Olga Solovieva, Eric Hayot, Alexander Beecroft, and the Symbol-
isme seminar at Yale for many conversations.
Comparative Literature 63:4

DOI 10.1215/00104124-1444495 © 2011 by University of Oregon
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2011 ACLA PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS / 439
cheat and a disappointment, it would instructively replicate the disappointment

we have all felt when, setting out with the aspiration of discovering universal or
necessary truths about literature or society, we learned that at most we found out
what was going on in the neighboring village - the dogs and roosters of which
were audible, and the windmills visible, from our own. I would be reminding you
of the bounded and relative character of knowledge, the slippage by which we
fall back from the desire to know things in their complete otherness to the often
rather predictable ideas we have about them.
None of that is actually my theme today. I will be talking about a moment -
an epoch, if you believe me - in the history of media, the moment inaugurated
by the French poet and inventor Charles Cros when, in 1869, he published an
opuscule entitled "A Study of the Means of Communicating with Other Planets"
("Etude sur les moyens de communication avec les planètes," Œuvres complètes
463-77). It was published as a little brochure, copies of which the author sent to
the Academy of Sciences and the newspapers. Nobody took it seriously at the time,
perhaps because Cros already had a reputation as a jokester and cabaret comic.
(When Arthur Rimbaud had succeeded in alienating Verlaine's in-laws, he went to
stay with the Cros brothers [Teyssèdre 120-21].) It's not easy to say what kind of
writing the study on interplanetary communication is - whether it's literature or
not in our present sense of the word. On the one hand, it is not a work of the
imagination as we usually understand that term - you'll find in it no narrative, no
characters, unless you include the drily impersonal narrator, and very little figura-
tive language - but, on the other hand, it relies on the imagination to fill in and
justify its scientific or technological proposal, a proposal that was never realized.
(Remembering the Formalist tradition in criticism, so often concerned to differ-
entiate literary language from practical language, we might hold that its failure to
achieve practical realization is what makes it a literary text; but to identify literari-
ness with failure seems an unpromising direction.) More to my purpose, Cros's
little pamphlet is about an innovation in communication that could change the
status of all human devices for the transmission and storage of meaning, includ-
ing literature. So I leave its status open for the moment.
The question Cros wants to answer is: are there beings of an intellectual level
comparable to our own, such that we might enter into communication with them,
on the planets Mars and Venus? How would we find out? He proposes sending
them a signal and watching for their reply. In the current state of technology, he
says in 1869, the only means of signaling available is a ray of light, though it may
turn out that some form of magnetism or gravitation can later be harnessed for
the purpose. (Points must be awarded for accuracy of prediction. Electromagnetic
waves, of which one application is radio transmission, would be discovered only in
1886 by Heinrich Hertz; those who today listen for hints of intelligence in the skies
do so through radio antennas.) Since a light will be used as the signal, we will have
to ensure that it is intense and focused enough to carry across the millions of kilo-
meters separating the Earth from its nearest planetary neighbors. Cros proposes
building a huge electric lamp, the beams of which will be focused by a vast para-
bolic mirror. In order to give it the best chances of being noticed from afar, he
suggests that it be constructed near one of the poles.
The engineering issues don't detain Cros for long. Let us imagine, he says, that
the human race has carried out the project: "The inhabitants of Mars or Venus, if
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE / 440
they have telescopes or lenses to survey the stars, can now perceive, at the dark
edge of the terrestrial disk, a luminous point. This is the signal addressed to them
by humans" (468). And now the semiological questions take over, for what is to
direct the Martians or Venusians to consider this signal a cultural and communi-
cative phenomenon rather than a merely physical one? "They may at first think,"
says Cros, "that the luminous spot is an erupting volcano or some other unex-
plained optical effect - in a word, a natural phenomenon manifesting no other
will than the unfathomable will of the universe." If the light were simply left on, it
would become a point of interest in the cosmos, but by no means a cultural fact, a
sign of intention, a way of saying hello. And to be honest about it, up to this point
there is nothing to correct that judgment on the part of the notional Martians.
The propensity of Earthlings to build electric lamps visible from millions of kilo-
meters away is, so far, just another fact of Earth natural history, like the propensity
of iron to turn red through oxidation. How do we transmit an intention - not just
a particular intention, but the intention to intend - across the distances that sepa-
rate us from those conjectural beings? "It matters, therefore, that the signal should
not have the character [of an astronomical detail] , but should undergo changes
such that its intentional origin and its aim will not remain in doubt." It's not just a
matter of miles, of course, but of something I hesitate to call cultural difference,
since we don't even know if we would have enough in common with those beings
to speak of culture or difference. When dealing with other humans, or even cer-
tain animals, in the absence of a common language, I think I know how to ask for
attention, to open a communication, to point to items in our shared perceptual
sphere; but the slate on which Cros is designing this new method of communi-
cation is intimidatingly blank. What might it mean, in this unprecedented situa-
tion, to mean?
Cros is determined to move the electric signal out of the realm of interesting
natural phenomena and to perform the first communicative act in the new medium
he is inventing. The light that can be turned on can be turned off. But that is still
not good enough. "Lights that appear and disappear following a simple periodic-
ity would not exclude the idea of an astronomical phenomenon, inasmuch as these
often have an intermittent and regularly rhythmic character. Alternations pro-
duced by chance would probably only confirm the explanation resting on the idea
of a volcano in variable states of eruption" (468) . Neither regularity nor irregular-
ity will bring our signal out of the background of other natural events; the task is
to make the difference that is available to us, the difference between off and on,
something more than itself - to create a code, which is, at the same time, to create
a set of things to which a code can refer.1 (With no shared sensory background
that can be assumed other than the channel of the signal itself, the language of
our communication cannot be a nomenclature; there is nothing to inventory.)
Charles Cros is competing with a volcano, or with the interpretation of his acts as
those of a volcano; what can he do that a volcano can't do?
Like Descartes and like Leibniz, reaching for the primitive and self-evident reg-
ister of concepts out of which a world may perhaps be built, Cros decides that the
1 On the properties thought to differentiate a signifying system from natural occurrences, see
Greimas, and compare Stephen Dedalus's question: "Can excrement or a child or a louse be a work
of art? If not, why not?" (Joyce 214).
first idea to be exchanged with the extraterrestrials is that of numeration . "The first
signals," he says, "must be such that they have a living character, in some sense, and
that they express the law of numbers that will be used in later signals" (469). I was
brought up short by the word "living" in Cros's description: it seemed an illegiti-
mate idea to import at this stage, a flagrant case of loading the deck, for we have
no way of knowing whether our idea of "life" corresponds to anything in the exis-
tence of the Venusians and Martians; it is the same as the problem of intention,
and in fact "living" could be taken as a loose synonym of "intentional" (as opposed
to mechanical, natural, physical, and all the other properties of a volcano that we
are not to reproduce). More charitably, perhaps Cros is using the word "living" in
a minimal sense that will be made explicit in what follows, as if to say: we will call
"living" a code in which the signs of the code express the law of their own significa-
tion, of their assignment to other bits of code that are to be known as their mean-
ings. Thus the word "living," that apparently illegitimate signifier, would crown
with success the ambition of establishing a code that enables joint attention and
shared reference. But since we have nothing to hand yet but alternations of light
and dark, so-called self-generating "life" must emerge from the demonstrations
that set up the code. As in the Turing test, whether or not there is "life" in these
signals will be up to the beholder. "Life" is proleptic, following an act of address.
The code to be used must involve a small number of elementary signs, com-
bined into regular and exhaustive patterns to make a far greater number of com-
plex signs. Cros settles on a three-unit elementary code: one flash, two flashes,
three flashes. (Actually there are four units, since the absence of a flash is signifi-
cant too; but the zero degree of signification, like the advantages of binary, fails to
capture Cros's attention.2) This yields a number system with base three: FLASH
will signify one, FLASH-FLASH will signify two, FLASH-FLASH-FLASH will sig-
nify three; FLASH (pause) FLASH stands for four, FLASH (pause) FLASH-
FLASH will signify five, and so on. In Arabic notation: 1, 2, 3, have the same mean-
ings as usual, but the next numeral in the base-three system, which looks like our
number 11, will mean the number four; the number five will take the form of our
number 12, and so on. In the initial transmissions meant to establish the code,
Cros proposes to follow each number in its base-3 expression with the correspond-
ing natural, or base-1, expression. Thus the base-3 numeral that looks like our 22,
our FLASH-FLASH (pause) FLASH-FLASH, will be followed by its natural equiv-
alent, a series of eight uninterrupted flashes. The code, then, divides into "nom-
bres représentatifs" and "nombres représentés," the numbers signified and the
numbers that signify them; and, with this, the relation between expression and
content, or between form and meaning, comes to inhabit the nascent code, mak-
ing it possible to present it to a wholly other observer as "meaning" something.
The referent of one series of flashes is another series of flashes. An adequately
astute observer situated several thousand kilometers away should be able to work
out, given enough repetitions of the basic vocabulary units, how the base-3 num-
bers and natural numbers correlate. It is then - with the splitting of the code into
2 "L'exemple des premiers signaux donnés ci-dessus est construit d'après une numération à trois
éléments. Je n'ai pas voulu insinuer par là que ce système fût le préférable. Peut-être la numération
à deux éléments est-elle plus avantageuse" (470). As for the zero-sign, Cros sees it only in the form
of the "entirely conventional" sign 0 in the decimal notation and rejects it as being too difficult to
convey (469).
two and the institution of a reference-relation between the two sub-codes - that
an observer becomes a reader, able to say that this means that; thereupon we
become the emitters of a signal, after having been, as far as anyone knew, just a set
of mysterious light-emitting natural causes. That's life, in the sense in which Cros
tries to make "living" a property of code.
The electric light is set up; the code is established; again and again the opera-
tors send out into the ether the flashes that indicate a sequence of numbers by
way of suggestion that rational beings inhabit this globe and have taken command
of the signifying apparatus. Cros refers to this procedure as "the call," l'appel. Like
any call, it anticipates a receiver, but unlike most calls, it can make only the most
stringently minimal hypotheses about the identity and character of that receiver.
This is an uncomfortable and unsatisfactory state of mind. Cros imagines that,
having set up this elaborate signaling mechanism and sent out a few thousand
flashes, humanity will grow tired and bored and conclude that the whole experi-
ment was a failure. But no, he insists, the lack of response can never be taken as
proving that the signaling apparatus failed to contact intelligent beings over
there. Imagine, he says, that intelligent aliens had directed similar signals toward
the Earth in the days before Galileo. Although humans certainly had the intel-
lectual equipment to recognize and decode signals from afar, they did not yet have
the telescopes and observatories necessary to perceive such signals as these; and
from Galileo's time to 1869, humanity had still not developed an apparatus capa-
ble of sending a signal in return. In responding to his imagined critics in this way,
Cros fills out the portrait of his unknown extraterrestrial hearers, the beings to
whom the unprecedented "call" is addressed. The recipients of the call resemble
us. What other kind of being could they resemble? "If today a similar call were
addressed to the earth, before answering it, it would be necessary to overcome the
ignorance, skepticism and ill-will of most men before proceeding to the delicate,
difficult and expensive construction of transmission devices. Thus a great deal of
time would be lost, and they would be close to giving up on us, over there" (470).
"They would be close to giving up on us" - "l'on désespérerait sans doute de nous,
là-bas": Cros seems to have an intimate knowledge of these extraterrestrials, what
they want, what they are waiting for, how long they are prepared to wait, "là-bas,"
over there, for us.
But maybe the worst is not yet certain. Cros relaunches the imaginative enter-
prise: "Observers, armed with the most powerful instruments, keep the interro-
gated planet steadily in their sights. And now on the dark segment of its sphere, a
little point of light appears. It's the response! This bright spot, by its alternations
echoing those of the terrestrial signal, seems to say: 'We have seen you; we have
understood you'" (471). Here it would be good to come down from the interplan-
etary frame of mind and focus on the particularities of that intraterrestrial com-
munication we call translating, for the English version of the paragraph I have just
read leaves out a detail of significance in the French. Or to be more exact, in the
written French of the text. The reply reads: "nous vous avons vu," masculine singu-
lar. Not vus, "we have seen you" in the plural, which would be the expected way of
putting it, but "you" in the singular - almost "we have seen your face," as if all
humanity, or all electrical engineers, constituted a single subject. Is that subject
perhaps identical with Charles Cros, also a masculine singular, the only human
individual who has so far allowed himself to be interpellated by the extraterres-

trial sages? Or is it something yet more new and strange? In this detail of his
French I see Cross sincere attempt to speak Martian, for the extraterrestrials have
no way of knowing that human beings are a disparate population of millions of
individuals speaking different languages, saluting different flags, having different
opinions about the advisability of knocking on the doors of other planets. As far as
they know, we are like the Man in the Moon, one big self, emitting one big signal.
As, for practical purposes, we would be.
I said earlier that I wasn't comfortable with calling this a literary text. It has its
literary or at least rhetorical moments, but in many ways it won't be made to fit into
the rubric of our current definitions of literature. I thought about lying to you and
presenting it as a lost Kafka story: wouldn't that legitimate it, if we could insert it
into the genealogy of "The Burrow" or "Investigations of a Dog?" But literary his-
tory, except for the variant practiced on the planet Tlön, won't let me do that: it
will insist that Charles Cros, the Parnassian poet of Le Coffret de santal and Le Collier
de griffes , author of such famous cabaret monologues as "Le hareng saur" and
"L'homme aux pieds retournés" ("The Salt Herring" and "The Man Whose Feet
Were On Backwards"), the founder of the drinking club Les Zutistes, wrote this
text. He also devised a system for color photography, invented the first phono-
graph, and tried to reproduce the functions of the brain with clockwork, while
teaching in a school for deaf-mutes and preparing to die of alcohol poisoning at
age forty-five. If we put this system for communicating with our neighbor planets
alongside the comic monologues on dried herrings and Paris bus stops, it enters
one kind of literature, and not wholly to its credit; but if we put it alongside the
work on automatic telegraph systems, sound recording, and chemistry, it ceases to
speak to literature, at least as we usually understand it. I hope to have convinced
you, by what I've already said, that that would be a loss.
I put this text, rather, into the history of media, a move that will have conse-
quences for our interpretation of it and for the way we think about media. Many
of us in comparative literature have cast a friendly or concupiscent eye on media
studies. Among the advantages of media theory is the fact that it is high in mate-
riality. Media address the object-character of works of art and intelligence. Great
Expectations as a literary work is one thing; as a media object it becomes other, a
proliferating series of handfuls of paper, reels of celluloid, impulses on retinas
and hard drives; under the sun of media we see it in its conditions of possibility
and its ongoing adaptations.
Another advantage of media theory for the literary analyst is that every media
object is conceived of as part of a circuit. The film star cannot be separated from
the channels of communication that make celebrity possible, nor can the film star's
fangroup. The reader of an epistolary novel participates in a different medium
and is a different sort of subject from the reader of a third-person past-tense nar-
rative or the hearer of an epic. Media theory takes seriously the idea that we are
constituted by an address, that our relations to the things we receive as media are
not static but interactional and always involve a number of agents, processes, and
objects.
But let me climb to the upper deck of media theory in order to call your atten-
tion to a few of its tacit assumptions that we might want to controvert. Again among
its advantages, the history of media is made up of discontinuous jumps, not per-
manent or essential qualities. In its telling of history, from time to time a technol-
ogy is invented, rapidly adopted, and from that moment forward shapes human
consciousness and ways of relating. Backward glances are permitted as, in Mac-
Luhan's formulation, the old media become the content of the new medium (19;
for an extension to electronic media see Bolter and Grusin) . But the structure of
the historical field of media studies is epochal: we find ourselves living, it may be,
in the age of orality, or of writing, printing, the telegraph, electric light, the pho-
nograph, the cinema, the radio, television, the internet, and so forth, each epoch
opened by a discovery that could not be erased from consciousness once pro-
claimed. And, despite the slowness of practical spread and installation, each of
these media inventions was global in its ambition from the beginning. A medium
establishes a relation between humans and the world, a contagious and expand-
ing relation. The Chinese creation of printing comes down to us through devo-
tional images impressed on paper in the Central Asian merchant towns that
were China's outlet to the rest of the world; within a few years of Edison's patent-
ing of the phonograph, wax records were being made of Zuñi songs and Pacific
Northwest stories; and you don't need me to tell you how fast country codes were
established for every scrap of earthly territory in the mapping of political nations
onto Internet dot-dominions.
What is wrong with this pattern of history, for all its discontinuous and non-
essentialistic virtues, is that it seems doomed to follow the self-description of the
winners. A successful technology overtakes its predecessors and rivals; it defines
the age; it is totalitarian, if I may use such a troublesome word; it knows no limits
until it is superseded by the next great invention. How could we imagine twenty-
first-century culture without the Internet? The most we can do is reconstruct
possible Victorian internets, antique forms of globalization, anticipations of the
way we live today. Contingency, it seems, is squeezed out by the linear advance
of the fittest. Against this dynamic - largely, I think, unconscious or taken for
granted in the telling of the history of media - I want to make room for the unsuc-
cessful initiatives, the losers, the innovations that changed the world but only
"in theory." All kinds of reasons impel me to want to base the history we tell on
something other than success.
But let me return to Cros's proposal. A flash of light answers from a distant orb.
The hello, the contact, or the phatic gesture having been reciprocated, now comes
"a moment of pride and joy for human beings. The eternal isolation of the spheres
is broken. There will be no more limit to that avid curiosity that already ran back
and forth across the earth as uneasily as a tiger in its too-small cage" (471). But the
flickering light we see on the surface of the other planet tells us nothing about
those others who have answered us, only that they exist and have understood
our code. We must begin to talk about something with those Others: "Since all
we know how to transmit is numbers, we will make ourselves understood through
numbers. Under this limitation, there is only one method to follow. We will have
to translate a well-chosen set of two-dimensional figures into numerical series,
using a simple geometric procedure, and transmit, in sequence, the terms of these
series" (471). At this point Cros is thinking in the same terms as his contemporary
Etienne-Jules Marey, one of the predecessors of the cinema, who was just then
using a complex of mathematical and material tools derived from ballistics, medi-
cine and hydraulics to capture the different movements of living creatures: the
pulse of the blood in the veins, the flight of birds, the movements of the tongue
and larynx, the pumping of hands and feet in a runner or high-jumper. "Mathe-
maticians," says Cros, "know of several graphic procedures whereby a flat or solid
figure can be fragmentarily represented by a series of numbers; and reciprocally,
they are able to translate a series of numbers into a figure constructed out of
points." Cros indicates, in what he calls a "familiar comparison," a way of render-
ing a monochrome two-dimensional image as a series of numbers. Take the
sequence 19, 3, 7, 1, 1, 4, 25, but interpret it in this way: on a thread first put 19
white beads, then three black beads, then seven white beads, then one black bead,
then one white bead, and so on. The next sequence of numbers to be telegraphed
gives instructions for forming the next row of black and white beads. Eventually,
the rows lined up will form a two-dimensional surface on which is depicted what-
ever image one desires to transmit. (An analogous procedure for sending pictures
by telegraph, one pixel at a time, was developed only in 1899.) Cros notes that
"analogous notation procedures for rendering designs as number series are used
in various industries, including weaving and embroidery" (472). That is, Cros has
made the link between the Jacquard loom, the first programmable information-
bearing tool, and the telegraph; he has put together two of the components of the
networked digital computer as we know it today (see Ifrah, Swade). Cros adds to
this observation that "there is, in [Jacquard weaving] , a whole science that, as so
often happens, was practiced before it was theorized. From it will emerge a new
and important branch of mathematics, and eventually a new classification of these
primordial sciences [i.e., the sciences of information and data storage]. The study
of rhythms will take its place alongside that of figures ." The study of figures inevi-
tably points back to the geometric impulse that ruled Descartes' version of mod-
ern reason and autonomy, the pursuit of certainty through derivations from self-
evident starting premises, in emulation of Euclid's Elements - the unchallenged
model of rationality for centuries in Europe. (A model challenged, though in
work known only to a few specialists at the time, by Lobachevsky's hyperbolic
geometry.) Cros proposes putting the formerly authoritative spatial figures of
geometry through a linear time-funnel, whereby they are analyzed into dots
transmitted one at a time, off and on and on and off, and those dot sequences clas-
sified as "rhythms." The need to turn our knowledge into digital form will cause
us to see and analyze it differently: as rhythms, existing in time, rather than as
figures, existing in space. "These resources seem to offer an interplanetary lan-
guage as precise and as rapid as its supreme importance demands" (473).
With this language and this system of conventions in place, "it will be neces-
sary to construct a series of figures representing the totality of human knowledge"
(474). The Encyclopedia of all human knowledge - a project that, as Cros is well
aware, has been attempted before - will be undertaken in a previously unimagi-
nable spirit, for it will be a matter of explaining everything to an interlocutor
who is supposed to have both infinite receptivity (not to mention patience) and an
equally bottomless ignorance about the things we know. "Every scientist, every
man on earth will give his opinion, and from over there we may receive some idea
well above any that I could at present emit." The figurative tables of human
knowledge "will each be designated by a number," recalling the supposedly self-
explanatory rational languages of Dalgarno, Wilkins, and Leibniz. Their labels
will set them "so far as possible in a scientific order, starting from simple notions
and going on to ever more complex ideas" - a kind of alphabet of concepts that
would have pleased Leibniz or Locke, but that would have seemed childish and
out-of-date to any philosopher who had caught up to Kant. Or perhaps Kant will
turn out to have been a dead-end, a byway taken in the history of thought before
the purpose of thinking had been reconfigured by its being set in a communica-
tive circuit with the extraplanetary other. Already Cros is thinking about a new
language for inventorying and manipulating concepts, a language that emerges
from the communicative situation, rather than preceding it. "The expression of
a piece of human knowledge, once its representative figure has been transmit-
ted, will be the number that designates this figure." "Furthermore, this order
will result from the need of being understood." "Nous vous avons compris," said
the aliens; but what they understood us as being, what they understood us as
knowing, is what we, effectively, will be, for the project of human knowledge now
has a new finality, that of being shipped off to the appreciative minds of Mars
or Venus.
Having invented, in short order, the visual telegraph, the scanner, the Google
Books universal digitalization project, and the video chat ("Un drame interastral,"
Œuvres complètes 324-29), Cros closes with a wish that, as we know, was not granted:
"I will be happy if I do not find myself blocked, as has often happened before,
by the naysaying ignorance of everything that is not a faithful reproduction of
what has gone before" (475) .
I mentioned as one of the good points of media studies the fact that its objects
are never isolated, but exhibit their work and perform their being through par-
ticipation in circuits. The telegraph does what it does for human consciousness
because people sit at both ends: that is what makes its rapidity of communication
meaningful and gives it the power to influence markets, to give one side the advan-
tage in a war, to scuttle diplomatic initiatives, and to prepare the discovery of rela-
tivity (see Galison). People are at both ends, and they communicate otherwise
than by the telegraph alone: they communicate through markets, nations, rail-
ways, fictions, and so on. In this light Charles Cros's invention of interplanetary
communication is a poor shadow of a triumphant media event. We are not quite
living in the era of interplanetary literature, though; if we were, it might give a
point and direction to much of the shuffling and stockpiling of human knowledge
that we observe around us. Still, Cros's little proposal does perform, even if only
rhetorically, the major task of a new media invention. It redefines human con-
sciousness, although most of us were and remain unaware of what it did. It made
the human the singular subject of a new communication - a thus far one-way and
imaginary communication taking place in a new epoch in which we are not as
we were, either empirically or theoretically, but become the subjects who partici-
pate in a game of mutual recognition with some very Other Others. Charles Cros's
invention failed, in the sense that he was never able to persuade the French gov-
ernment or any significant astronomers to take him seriously; it failed, or at least it
did not succeed, in the further sense that we are still waiting for confirmation that
there are intelligent beings in other planets or galaxies. Or it may be that we are
still waiting for confirmation that his project failed. In that respect it recalls the
projects of - why not? - world and comparative literature. Not sure from what
quarter to expect the answering flash, we keep our lanterns lit.
University of Chicago
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Interplanetary Literature: 2011 Acla Presidential Address

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2011 ACLA PRESIDENTIAL ADDRESS

THE comparative THEME

Comparative Literature 63:4

cheat and a disappointment, it would instructively replicate the disappointment

individual who has so far allowed himself to be interpellated by the extraterres-

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