Zepke Stephen: Head in the Stars. Essays on Science Fiction

truth requires a critique – let us thus define our own task – the value
of truth must for once be experimentally called into question.’ (1974
#344)
76 Once more Klossowski elaborates the meaning of this necessity
for Nietzsche’s prescient vision of the future: ‘for everything that
may want to preserve itself at a certain degree, whether a society or
an individual, the will to power appears essentially as a principle of
disequilibrium. And insofar as knowledge accompanies power and
increases in proportion to acquired power, knowledge (and thus
culture as well) must in turn disrupt the equilibrium of a determined
state, however, says Nietzsche, knowledge will never be anything
more than an instrument of conservation – for there will always be a
discordance between the excess of (the will to) power and the feeling
of security that knowledge procures.” (1997 103)
77 Michelson argues: ‘A weightless world is one in which the basic
co-ordinates of horizontality and verticality are suspended. Through
that suspension the framework of our sensed and operational reality
is dissolved. The consequent challenge presented to the spectator
in the instantaneously perceived suspension and frustration of
expectations, forces readjustment. The challenge is met almost instantaneously,
and consciousness of our own physical necessity is
regenerated. We snap to attention, in a new, immediate sense of our
earth-bound state, in repossession of those coordinates, only to be
suspended, again, toward other occasions and forms of recognition.
These constitute the “subplot” of the Odyssey, plotting its action in
us.’ (1969 60)
78 Kubrick, we know, was worried that the imminent launch of the
Apollo mission to the moon would occur before his film’s release,
making its dramatic presentation of weightlessness redundant,
eclipsed by the real as it were.
79 This ‘physicality as the ground of consciousness’ is precisely the
Nietzschean assumption of the will to power. Although Michelson’s
comments approach Nietzsche’s at this point, she never really moves
beyond the phenomenological assumptions she is working with.
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