The Future Past. Retrotopia in the Narratives of an Artificial Intelligence by Stanisław Lem and Łukasz Zawada

In Retrotopia, Zygmunt Bauman derives the title phenomenon from the double negation of Thomas More’s utopia and uses it to describe the returns of the imaginary past, whose resurrected potentials make it possible to return to forgotten ideas. This paper examines the relationship between futuristic technology projections and the retrotopian shift taking place in liquid modernity. To this end, the author’s research focuses on the literary narratives of the artificial intelligence in Stanisław Lem’s Golem XIV (1981) and Łukasz Zawada’s Fragmenty dziennika SI (2018). The languages, medium, and stories of the non-human Other illustrate the mechanisms of the modern prophetic fantasies through repetition act and mediating them in the lost/un-dead past. Simultaneously, the (retro)futuristic voices of the superintelligent computers reveal the difficulties of these narratives – trying to slow down Sci-tech progress and embed the past into the future technologies.

In Retrotopia, Zygmunt Bauman derives the title phenomenon from the double negation of Thomas More’s utopia and uses it to describe the returns of the imaginary past, whose resurrected potentials make it possible to return to forgotten ideas. This paper examines the relationship between futuristic technology projections and the retrotopian shift taking place in liquid modernity. To this end, the author’s research focuses on the literary narratives of the artificial intelligence in Stanisław Lem’s Golem XIV (1981) and Łukasz Zawada’s Fragmenty dziennika SI (2018). The languages, medium, and stories of the non-human Other illustrate the mechanisms of the modern prophetic fantasies through repetition act and mediating them in the lost/un-dead past. Simultaneously, the (retro)futuristic voices of the superintelligent computers reveal the difficulties of these narratives – trying to slow down Sci-tech progress and embed the past into the future technologies.