A Literotopia for Alterscience

A Literotopia for Alterscience: Exoscience and the Interspecies Alliance

Artur Matuck, University of São Paulo, Brazil, 2022

1. The Alterscience Project

The concept of Alterscience presents a new interdisciplinary paradigm that acknowledges human and non-human beings in their complexity and plurality. Alterscience promotes a constructive critique of biosciences’ theoretical, axiological, and epistemological foundations, seeking to understand what materialist theories cannot elucidate or are unwilling to accept.

Alterscience designates a confluence of philosophical, biological, aesthetic, spiritual, moral, and legislative perspectives interlacing emerging theories such as ecology, feminism, decolonialism, and anti-speciesism.

Altercience imparts a project of research, theory, pedagogy, and experience in universities and culture, aiming at continuous reflections, sociopolitical engagements, ecological commitments, and consequential pedagogical practices. A possible ‘alterbioscience’ institutes a paradigmatic revision, intending to interweave logic, philosophy, and spiritual traditions, aiming at potential modes of intelligence and rationality.

This critical proposition for research and action esteems life, animals, rivers, trees, planets, the sun, and the cosmos as emergent citizens of a new form of knowledge that could encompass insurgent thoughts, ancestral wisdom, contemporary forms of subjectivity and diversity, as well as the realms of the digivirtual and the humanotronic.

Alterscience acknowledges that living beings, whether human or non-human, are sacred and, therefore, must have inalienable rights. This vision inevitably confronts the foundations of the dominant bioscience, historically governed by positivism, determinism, technological rationalism, animal reification, and, consequently, animal experimentation.

However, it is auspicious that a newly established field of study has already emerged: the human-animal sciences. This field aims to review the histories, theories, legislation, principles, and assumptions that connect us to other living beings.

The interfaces between media and digital technologies, science, and wisdom, physical and supra-physical realities, ancestral and contemporary knowledge, human, planetary, and cosmological existences, distinct modes of alter-cognition, cyberceptions, and natural, preternatural, and artificial dimensions convene and trigger unprecedented emergencies, unheard-of possibilities of human rehabilitation, and consciousness enhancement.

The overall proposal stimulates a broad reflection on Sciences, Alterciences, Biosciences, and Exoscienes, spurring the creation of projects mirroring a broad cultural change in direction to a new human spirituality, compassion, and solidarity for humans and animal beings, for the planetary biomas and consciousness.

A renewed bioscience will search for (1) a renewed understanding of animals and human-animal relations; (2) alternative scientific objectivity and new forms of knowledge legitimation; (3) other modalities and methods of knowing and experimenting; (4) non-proprietary processes of information dissemination, application, and transformation; (5) to acknowledge other living beings as subjects of knowledge; and (6) to reach and expand the beneficiaries of science.

The theme’s complexity requires a proposition that connects science, art, literature, sociopolitics, and the humanities, embracing critical thoughts, different perspectives, dissonant judgments converging to sustainable knowledge, enhanced pedagogical practices, and a deep reverence for life and diversity.

2. An Alterscience propelled by writing and fiction

The concept of Alterscience derived from my literary and artistic production from the early 1980s. Living near the coast, in San Diego, California, an impulsive flow of esoteric, fantastic, and imaginative textual creation took place, seeking attunement with the psyche, with the dynamics of the unconscious and revelations. At the same time, I decided to construct discourses and artworks to challenge scientific experimentation on animals involving domination and cruelty.

An ongoing fascination with Alpha Centauri, the double and closest star to the Sun, led to a narrative entitled “Ataris Vort at the Planet Megga.” The hero, Ataris, crosses powerful barriers to confront the forces oppressing men, animals, and machines in the imaginary society at Megga, where humans and animals are physically and mentally restrained.

The narrative suggests that humans must expand their consciousness beyond the solar system to inhabit this duostellar system imaginatively. This expansion would lead them to experience their inner polarity and consequently enable them for regeneration/evolution.

Ataris Vort summarizes the awakening to an interdimensional reality: “I have known the dual sun system. I have experienced my inner polarity” (Matuck, 2021). The correlation between a cosmic event and a personal insight, the analogy between the macro and microcosmos, is at the core of the meaning of this poetic political project.

In elaborating the message from Alpha Centauri, the text was spontaneously constructed in a multiplicity of languages. English, Latin, Sanskrit, and Tupi-Guarani were interlaced with neologisms and divided into two voices, thus entitled Dual Sun Reverberation. “Ataris Vort at the Planet Megga” was presented in San Diego in 1981 as a performance and as a video narrative, eliciting a variety of reactions.

In July 1981, I returned from San Diego to São Paulo, Brazil. Shortly after that, I was invited to participate in the São Paulo International Biennial, which was held from October to December 1983. For months, I worked on translating the performance “Ataris Vort in the Planet Megga,” originally written in English.

Since that period, my text acquired an interlinguistic dimension. The initiatory message sent from Alpha Centauri, received by Ataris Vort, translated from English into Portuguese, was recreated with the insertion of Esperanto.

Poetic texts, performances, and videos combined the verve of aesthetic imagery with sustained socio-political principles. At the Biennial, the narrative “Ataris Vort in the Planet Megga” was presented many times. We staged antagonistic forces that fought over fundamental issues, such as the domination of men over animals, which extended to men and androids.

All of a sudden, I had an insight. I felt that by denouncing and staging such dense energies related to torture, suffering, and slavery, I was also somehow bringing them to life. Thus, I imagined and performed a “Final Ceremony” dedicated to the Tulpas, spirits which, according to Tibetan Buddhism, are called upon when fictional characters are created. The final scene of the performance was designed as a ceremony for imagining a luminous path to guide the Tulpas back to emptiness.

“We thank and revere the Tulpas that materialized. We release and evanesce their momentarily created energies. We turn them evanescent by the integrity of our will, voice, and light. We wish their departure could be realized without the experience of panic when they returned to the ocean of light. We aspire that their momentary presences created by the power of our minds can operate a blue luminous effect in the dimension we inhabit. To the Tulpas, mirrored spirits of our mind, a momentous return along the path of light.“ (Matuck, 2021)

As I reread the narrative while writing this memoir, I was struck by the interweaving of poetry, testimonial writing, science fiction, and politics. Its conjuring power evokes a glimpsed and recreated evolutionary future.

The sounding words, especially neologisms, are convergent with interlinguistic processes, reminiscent of Brazilian writer Guimarães Rosa and James Joyce’s experimental narratives. This multilingual writing practice, which I had acknowledged in my literary production, gradually induced me to a philosophical reflection.

3. Literatopia, a Philolinguistian Proposition

First, multi- or inter-linguistic propositions require the writer to acknowledge the expressive limitations of their native language. The writer’s new awareness of their monolingualism would naturally be followed by a period of experimentation, in which the text becomes an expanded field with added expressions, words, phrases, or even paragraphs from other natural or even artificial languages.

When observed in a contemporary context, interlanguages reflect a continuous process of breaking down geopolitical boundaries through the digital interconnections that form cyberspace through the constant flows of words, texts, images, and sounds that connect individuals from all regions of the planet.

Multilingualism manifests itself, especially in net communities involving citizens of different nationalities. Thus, it could become an essential expressive tool for the transversal experience of the contemporary subject, who is increasingly nomadic and confronted with unfamiliar cultures, codes, and languages to which he must quickly respond. This persona faces multilingual and interlingual discourses in places he lives or visits through languages he knows and is propelled by circumstances to provide meanings, preliminary decodings, and understandings of every expression heard or seen.

Interlinguistics are also prevalent in interdimensional experiences that emerge in human consciousness when the human mind and psyche intercept parallel realities. Poets, mystics, visionaries, or even mental patients have resorted to foreign or juxtaposed languages to express their visions or sensations better.

Considering that, in these situations, the revealed reality escapes common sense. It is brought to light in a subtle, imprecise, or elusive way the translation process, the impetus to transform the experience into a palpable discourse, often reliant on an assortment of codes in diverse and unexpected languages or media.

Interlinguistics can represent or become an emerging symbol for a cultural reconciliation process between opposites that contend in the theater of contemporary politics, gloomily exhibiting plenty of weaponry, terror, and war. The interaction, dialogue, or concurrence of several languages in a single text indicates a possible dynamic of the reintegration of opposites. It is conducive to a literotopia in which incommensurable energies, like two languages that at first tacitly exclude each other, can finally coexist in the same space of texts, words, or regions and cultures.

This literotopia or semiotopia would indicate that seemingly incommensurate sign systems can be brought into a typical arena to recreate meaning for poetry, performance, text, and eventually for thought, culture, politics, and even for science, bioscience, thus for Alterscience.

Alterscience would be interlinguistic, intercultural, interdisciplinary, intermedial, and intermodal. It would assimilate diverse semiosystems and their interrelations, expressing itself through different [inter] disciplines, media, or discourse genres. Furthermore, it would endow itself with instruments able to capture still unknown realities that are not easily translatable into codes that humans currently recognize.

A possible way to glimpse this proposition would be through a description, in an inspired poetic language, of how a visionary process of knowledge is constituted:

“Alterconceptigo! An Alterconsciousness, a possible prescient form of approaching complex realities, even those distant from our minds, reverberates against our principles and stabilities and challenges our boundaries in time and space. It enhances the potential of the intuitive mind and imparts new evolutionary possibilities. These are alchemical processes, permeating the light of spirit, touching the constructive momentum, which allows knowledge to flow from the intangible universe of dream and imagination into the sensitive universe of the human spirit.” (Matuck, 2021)

4. An Alterscientific Alliance between Human and Animal Beings

This research project aims to produce a relevant response to the possibilities of an Interspecies Alliance involving a reconfiguration of scientific, cultural, technological, and spiritual connections between human and non-human beings inhabiting the planet.

The project will involve:

1. Theoretical, Historical, Scientific, and Philosophical research
2. Cognitive, perceptual, emotional, and spiritual connections between humans and animals
3. Human-animal communication experiential and alterscientiphic practices
4. Public dissemination of Alterscience research and projects

The response will inevitably involve detailed research into the Philosophy of Life Sciences; Environmental, Ecological, Animal, and Cosmological theories and institutions; Anthropology of Ancient, Historical, and Contemporary Human Practices towards Animals; Philosophy of Science and Technology; Interspecies Communication;  Ethical, Philosophical and Religious doctrines;  Diversity of customs, cultures, and legislations involving Humans and Non-humans.

Furthermore, the author, collaborators, and research associates will also be involved in personal activities involving proximity to animal bodies and communities to reckon with the perceptional, performative, ritualistic, and physical aspects of human-animal interconnections. Those endeavors will trigger a series of interconnected discourses in scientific, aesthetic, journalistic, artivist, and performative formats.

The intertwined discourse production would be aligned with and converge into a sustained dissemination campaign designed to reach the most relevant public and audiences to provoke a pertinent impact in institutions, academies, scientific centers, universities, and public opinion.

Those distinct phases will be integrated into a dynamic of interconnections that is not necessarily a chronological sequence but most likely a dynamic of interconnections favoring the involvement of multiple layers in a feedback system of enhancement and improvement.

Bibliography [selected]

MATUCK, Artur. Um Manifesto pela Re-Informação. Revista de Comunicação e Linguagens, Lisboa, Portugal, 2012.

________. Ataris Vort no Planeta Megga. Editora Escuta, São Paulo, 2014.