4/ What role does uncertainty play in human interaction/ communication?

Bauman, Zygmund.(1995) Life in fragments. Essays in Postmodern Morality. (Blackwell – Oxford & Cambridge USA):
page 82: “Identity is a critical projection of what is demanded and/or sought upon ‘what is, with an added proviso that it is up to the ‘what is’ to rise, by its own effort, to the ‘sought/demanded’; or, more exactly still, identity is an oblique assertion of the inadequacy or incompleteness of the ‘what is’. Identity entered modern mind and practice dressed from the start as an individual task. It was up to the individual to find an escape from uncertainty.”
page 83: “’We are pilgrims through time’ was under the pen of St.Augustine not an exhortation, but a statement of fact. We are pilgrims whatever we do, and there is little that we can do about it even if we wished. Earthly life is but a brief overture to the eternality of the soul. Ultimately, it is not where we are destined to be – and only that part of ours that is destined to be elsewhere is worth of concern and care.
Only a few would wish, and have the ability, to compose that brief earthly overture themselves, in tune with the music of the heavenly spheres – to make their fate into a consciously embraced destiny. These few would need to escape the distractions of the town. The desert is the habitat they must choose.”
page 105: “In human life, fear is no news. Humanity knew it from its inception; few would find a place close to the top in any imaginable shortlist of humanity’s most conspicuous characteristics. Each era of history had its own fears which set it apart from other epochs; or rather, each gave the fears known to all epochs names of its own creation. These names were concealed interpretations; they informed of where the roots of feared threats lay, what one could do to keep the threats away, or why one could do nothing to ward them off. After all, another of humanity’s most conspicuous traits is that cognitive and conative faculties intertwine so closely that only people called philosophers, well trained in the art of separation, can take them apart and imagine one without the other. The threats themselves seem to have been always, stubbornly, the same. Sigmund Freud classified them once for all time:
“We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations with other men.” – [Sigmund Freud, civilization and its Discontents, trans. Joan Riviere (London: Hogarth Press, 1973), p.14.]”
page 106: “The constant principle of all strategies that had been deployed through history to make life with fear liveable was that of shifting the attention from things one can do nothing about, to things one can thinker with; and to make the thinkering energy – and time-consuming enough to leave little room (better still none at all) for the worry about things no thinkering could change. A pocketful of small coins with which to buy little graces allowed the putting off of the moment of confrontation with existential insolvency. Each era minted its own coins, as each era made different graces worth seeking or imperative to seek.”

Page 106: “Fears of Panopticon – Certainty and transparency are often presented as the ‘project’ of modernity. Under closer scrutiny, though, they look more like unanticipated products of crisis-management than preconceived tenets. Modernity itself looks more like an enforced adjustment to a novel and unforeseen condition, that a contrived ‘project’. Modernity emerged as involuntary, no-choice response to the collapse of the ancient regime – a type of order which did not, need not think of itself as an ‘order’, let alone as a ‘project’. It can be narrated as a story of long and inconclusive escape from the great terror which that collapse brought its wake. The name of the terror was uncertainty, lack of understanding, not knowing how to go on.” – (author’s own (highlits?) … )
—> “The Panopticon is a type of building designed by English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham in 1785. The concept of the design is to allow an observer to observe (-opticon) all (pan-) prisoners without the prisoners being able to tell whether they are being watched, thereby conveying what one architect has called the “sentiment of an invisible omniscience.” – from: Lang, Silke Berit. “The Impact of Video Systems on Architecture”, dissertion, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, 2004″ – [from: prison accessed on 20.10.2009]

Baudrillard, Jean; Guillaume, Marc. (2008 ed.) Radical alterity. Trans. By Ames Hodges. (Cambridge, Mass and London: MIT Presss)
Page 112: — making a reference to Sartre’s Being and nothingness: “—Intelligence of the world, the self and the Other is an open, borderless intelligence. Here the Other is understood to be partially irreducible to the self, eternally incomprehensible (Segalen), both radically different and similar, or supposed to be. The Other is the source of the incomprehention that, instead of blocking thought, keeps it moving indefinitely, eliminating any hope of absolute knowledge. This intelligence of the Other should be understood as it is in the expression “intelligence with the enemy”. It is a limitless intelligence because it always leaves something behind: incomprehension.” – Marc Guillaume

Omniscience (or Omniscient Point-of-View in writing) is the capacity to know everything infinitely, or at least everything that can be known
about a character including thoughts, feelings, life and the universe, etc. In monotheism, this ability is typically attributed to God. The God of the Bible is often referred to as “The Great I Am,” among other similar names, which also incorporates His omnipresence and omnipotence. This concept is included in the Qur’an, where God is called “Al-‘aleem” on multiple occasions. This is the infinite form of the verb “alema” which means to know. In Hinduism, God is referred to as sarv-gyaata (omniscient), sarv-samarth (omnipotent) and sarv-vyapt (omnipresent) gyaata (knowing).
From: /ɒmˈnɪsiəns/)

“…everything we know about Solaris has come to resemble a mountain of disointed, incoherent facts that strain credulity”

We get to imagine the experience of the astronaut, realize the addition of doubt and question what we can give an account of with certainty – after Berton’s testimony, when a scientist concludes that Berton’s statements “appear to be the result of a hallucinatory compley brought on by the planet’s atmosphere, as well as symptoms of depression exacerbated by (the) inflammation of the associative zone of the cerebral cortex. This report is in almost no way corresponding with Reality.”

There is a strong political inuendo, along with the mentioning of the ‘interrogation’ of Berton.

“Orbital and Nuclear – The nuclear is the apotheosis of simulation. Yet the balance of terror is nothing more than the spectacular slope of a system of deterrance at the heart of the media, of the inconsequential violence that reigns throughout the world, of the aleatory contrivance of every choice which is made for us. The slightest details of our behaviour are ruled by neutralised, indifferent, equivalent signs, by zero-sum signs like those which regulate “game strategy” (but the genuine equation is elsewhere, and the unknown is precisely that variable of simulation which makes the atomic arsenal itself a hyperreal form, a simulacrum which dominates us all and reduces all “groundlevel” events to mere ephemereal scenarios, transforming the only life left to us into survival, into a wager without takers – not even into a death policy: but into a policy devaluated in advance.)” Beaudrillard, Jean. (1983) Simulations.trans. by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. (Semiotext[e]: Columbia University) p. 58
“The nuclear system is both the culminating point of available energy and the maximisation of systems controlling all energy. Lockdown and control grow as fast as (and undoubtely even faster than) liberating potentialities. This was already the aporia of modern revolutions. It is still the absolute paradox of the nuclear system. Energies freeze by their own fire power, they deter themselves. One can’t really see what project, what power, what strategy, what subject could possibly be behind this enclosure, this vast saturation of a system by its own hereafter neutralized, unusable, unintelligible, non-explosive forces – except the possibility of an explosion towards the centre, or an implosion where all these energies are abolished in a catastrophic process (in the literal sense, that is to say in the sense of a reversion of a whole cycle towards a minimal point, of a reversion of energies towards minimal threshold.)” Beaudrillard, Jean. (1983) Simulations.trans. by Paul Foss, Paul Patton and Philip Beitchman. (Semiotext[e]: Columbia University) p. 74