The Desperate Recreation of Place

Above: Portrait of PKD by "Objective"

I have discovered what I believe to be a genuine insight into PKD's work in Frederic Jameson's essay "History and Salvation in Philip K Dick." It's not something he spends a lot of time on, and he provides scant examples, but he's onto something, writing:

"Yet something more than the standard psychology (or psychopathology) of the collector seems at stake here: for objects would seem to set in place what Kenneth Burke might have called the category of the 'scene' as such: places lovingly devised and composed for a human activity which has disappeared, as living hosts disappear in course of the generational process, leaving their empty shells and housing behind them. Collecting in this sense then suggests a desperate repetition, which, by reconstructing the scene, struggles to restore the human acts and interpersonal events it once housed. But such an analysis immediately clarifies our earlier thematic material as well, for the [Perky Pat] layout is just such a scene, and fusion with Mercer in some sense replaces the novelty of fresh action and eventfulness with a kind of eternal return of the televisual image. In this particular semic cluster, then, a historically marked object-world joins hands with the phenomenon of 1950s media to make up the space and category of empty scene as such; and this is something like a pure form, which can be inflected in either a negative or a positive way, and accommodate either malign or redemptive content" (372).

There are tons of examples of this: Wash-35, Perky Pat layouts, Christ, the whole town of Millgate in The Cosmic Puppets. I'm rereading Ubik and just the weird way they bring the half-lifers in this weird routine/ritual seems to fit. List some more in comments please.

One interesting thing about this motif is that it mirrors the act of creating fiction. An author toils in isolation in hopes of connecting with some other person. Fiction uses language, inanimate words on the page, to affect change and spur action in our larger reality. The construction of wholly artificial worlds in hopes of sparking something real in a reader seems roughly akin to these Potemkin-villages that exist to evoke authenticity among the people that commune with them.

But likewise, the motif suggests a rough allegory in our late capitalist existence, in which nostalgia and kitsch are used to conjure feelings of patriotism, loyalty, and a perverse desire for stuff. Our nostalgia is exploited for profit, and as a result, the objects of our nostalgia are tainted. Seems like so much of Dick's work revolves around again making sacred what we made profane through sale and commodification .

A Thought About A Dream Within A Dream

I'm up to my eyeballs in essays to grade, and yeah, there's that PKD Weekly Roundup I want to write. But today I'd like to riff on an idea that occurred to me while watching Cronenberg's eXistenZ (now on Netflix instant watch). The movie uses the Dickian notion of the "dream within a dream" (a phrase coined by Poe, so exactly how Dickian the notion really is can be debated). Anyhoo, in the movie the main characters awaken into a number of wholly new realities, and we as the audience learn that the previous, seemingly stable realities were in fact some sort of illusion. Dick's use of this motif generates quite a list:
Time Out of Joint
Maze of Death
Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Ubik
Feel free to name some more in the comments section.

Likewise, Hollywood has become enamored with this motif and films that use this style hard reverse are in no shortage:
Dark City
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Thirteenth Floor
The Matrix
Inception
The list goes on....

One way to think about this motif's popularity is to relate it to the way our own reality is basically a bubble. I mean go someplace else, someplace totally different, go far enough away so that the beliefs and worldview you hold become alien to the people around you. If you encounter a group of people who see the world in a fundamentally different way from you, you'll soon realize how subjective everything is. You'll see the way people travel within their presuppositions like a fish in water that's invisible to them. And you'll see that you do it too. It can be a powerful experience. Think about Barney Mayerson and how the alien-ness of Mars re-calibrates his priorities and allows him to regain some semblance of human dignity and humility.

But the idea that got me more excited was how these hard reverses reconstruct what Heidegger called our 'thrown-ness.' Check this:

"Heidegger proclaimed that we are ‘thrown’ into the world and that our Being-in-the-world is a ‘thrownness’ [Geworfenheit]. To Heidegger this concept is a primordial banality which had long been overlooked by metaphysical conjecture. Humans beings are thrown with neither prior knowledge nor individual option into a world that was there before and will remain there after they are gone (Steiner 1978). Heidegger wrote;

“This characteristic of Dasein’s Being – this ‘that it is’ – is veiled in its ‘whence’ and ‘whither’, yet disclosed in itself all the more unveiledly; we call it the ‘thrownness’ of this entity into its ‘there’; indeed, it is thrown in such a way that, as Being-in-the-world, it is the ‘there’. The expression ‘thrownness’ is meant to suggest the facticity of its being delivered over.”

No biology of parentage can answer the question of whence we came into Being. Neither do we know toward what end our existence has been projected, apart from our position in relation to death. Yet for Heidegger, it is this twofold mystery that makes the ‘thrown’ state of human life the more absolute and tangible. Human kind is ‘delivered over’ to a total, all-encompassing ‘thereness’ and Dasein must occupy this presentness and take it up into its own existence. Heidegger wished to emphasize the unmistakable ‘thereness’ of the world into which we are thrown (Steiner 1978)"

So when these characters are thrown into utterly new realities, they replay for us, in abrupt drama, our own sense of alienation we all feel because we can't really know our ultimate origins. Why are we here? Who made us? What is our purpose? We can't ever really answer these questions.

The revealing of a new level of reality is both stabilizing and destabilizing for us. The possibility that we could be hoodwinked into thinking this is the real world undermines lots of traditional philosophy and it even creeps some people out. On the other hand, once reality is shown to be an illusion and the character remains relatively unchanged, that speaks to the strength of the individual, and the personality's independence from the world around it.

But let's not forget that in every one of these hard reverse narratives the artificial reality has been produced for profit or other material gain. This speaks to the way our own surroundings are a capitalist tapestry of advertisements and hard-sold lifestyles. We are surrounded by an illusion otherwise known as 'The American Dream.' But any reality that dream once had is dissolving and so our experience under late capitalism is but a dream within a dream.

Quote of the Day

I copied this behemoth into blogger yesterday. When I hit 'publish' it was gone. So, here it is again...

"In such moments, Dick's work transcends the opposition between the subjective and the objective, and thereby confronts the dilemma which in one way or another characterizes all literature of any consequence: the intolerable and yet unavoidable choice between a literature of the self and a language of some impersonal exteriority, between the subjectivism of private languages and case histories and that nostalgia for the objective that leads outside the realm of the individual or existential experiences into some reassuringly stable place of common sense and statistics. Dick's force lies in the effort to retain possession and use of apparently contradictory, mutually exclusive subjective and objective explanation systems all at once. The casual attribution, then, of the hallucinatory experiences to drugs, to schizophrenia or to the half-life, is not so much a concession to the demands of the older kind of reading or explanation as it is a refusal of that first, now archaic solution of symbolism and modernism: the sheer fantasy and dream narrative. To attribute his nightmares to drugs, schizophrenia, or half-life is thus a way of affirming their reality and rescuing their intolerable experiences from being defused as an unthreatening surrealism; a way of preserving the resistance and the density of the subjective moment, of emphasizing the commitment of his work to this very alternation itself as its basic content. And this discontinuity is at one with our fragmented existence under capitalism; it dramatizes our simultaneous presence in separate compartments of private and public worlds, our twin condemnation to both history and psychology in scandalous concurrence." - Frederic Jameson, Archaeologies of the Future (350-351)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you can read the quote in context here.

VALBS Transmission

I've been thinking a lot about how this blog can best contribute to the serious study of PKD, which is very much the wild west of academia. I think we (ok, I) need to dig into more of the scholarly analysis of Dick's work, and try to find the articles and essays that can deepen our readings. There's a lot of academic kipple out there, and it just keeps on multiplying, driving out the none-kipple, making it harder to find the good stuff. Looking back, I have giant gaps in my masters thesis about Dick, simply because I didn't know about several important essays. Whether this is a testament to the obscurity of the secondary materials or my researching skills, I'm seeing a lot of these gaps in the new studies of PKD hitting the market.

What follows is an email interview I conducted with Italian PKD scholar Umberto Rossi who has assembled the most complete electronic bibliography of PKD-related material, VALBS, Vast Active Living Bibliographic System:

Q: When did you start VALBS?

A: Uhm... well... good question. Let me tell you that I started from two
existing bibliographies, one prepared by Andrew M. Butler, the other
by Salvatore Proietti... both notorious dickheads. I merged them and
put them on the web. I guess it was 1999 or 2000, something like
that.

Q: What's there?

A: Everything they and I could find which deals with Philip K. Dick. It's
a secondary bibliography. You have monograph, collections, articles,
reviews, etc. And webpages, provided they belong to something like
an online journal/magazine.

Q: How do you locate new articles and essays for the bibliography?

A: Three sources, fundamentally: the MLA online bibliography for
articles, Amazon.com for books, and the emails of those who visit my
webpage and ask me "Hey, why isn't my book/article/essay in
VALBS?"

Q: What are some of your favorite academic papers on Dick?

A: Disch's on Solar Lottery; Andy Butler on Lies, Inc.; Frasca on
Transmigration; Jameson's essay on History and Salvation; but
surely I'm forgetting some other short essay.

Q: Who are some of your favorite Dick scholars, or scholars of science
fiction?

A: Those I have already mentioned. I might add Kim Stanley Robinson.
I'd also like to add two more Italians, Antonio Caronia and Domenico
Gallo, whose La macchina della paranoia (The Paranoia Machine) is
an excellent introduction--unfortunately published by a very small
press, and written in a language that not even Italian understand
properly any more...

Q: Who should use VALBS?

A: Students. I have read several PhD dissertations recently, and I am
amazed by the important books and articles they regularly omit in
their bibliographies. I suspect that those young scholars have been
tutored by university professors who weren't knowledgeable with
Dick, and couldn't support them the way they deserved to be...

Personally I do not believe in bibliographies on paper anymore. I'm
not one of those digital fundamentalists who believe that the web and
Kindle or some other toy will replace books. But I do believe that the
days of reference books are limited. Look at the success of the
Wikipedia. I have worked as a translator, and I can tell you that no
pro translator who hasn't been struck by Alzheimer uses printed
dictionaries today. They all use dictionaries on CD-ROMs. So what's
the use of a paper bibliography today? None. Unless it's the
bibliography of a monograph, that is, part of a larger book. But if
your purpose is collecting all the secondary texts on Dick, go digital.
Put it on the web!

Q: What role do you imagine VALBS playing in the Dickhead community?

A: Reference. It should be THE secondary bibliography. A way to know
what's available, what's been written, even in languages different
from English. A way to know who's studying Dick now and who's
studied him. I dare say it might turn in a sort of collective memory of
PKD scholarship, be it academic or independent.

Thanks Umberto!

My first project is going to be to read Frederic Jameson's book Archaeologies of the Future, which is very dense and, as they say in the Hawaiian Islands, 'hybolical,' meaning overly verbose in its prose, but Jameson is a respected critic outside of science fiction and his interest in Dick is incredibly important in terms of serious study. Plus, it's clear from the following quote that he's onto something:

"Dick's work transcends the opposition between the subjective and the objective, and thereby confronts the dilemma which in one way or another characterizes all modern literature of any consequence: the intolerable and yet unavoidable choice between a literature of the self and a language of some impersonal exteriority, between the subjectivism of private languages and case histories, or some nostalgia for the objective that leads outside the realm of individual or existential experience into some reassuringly stable place of common sense and statistics. Dick's force lies in the effort to retain possession and use of both apparently contradictory, mutually exclusive subjective and objective explanation systems all at once" (350).

That quote would have taken my master's thesis to the next level, but I didn't know Jameson had written on PKD, neither did my advisers.

Part of the problem with studying this stuff is that it can be really hard to find. I have a bunch of PKD-related files that I'd like to post somewhere so that I could link to them in various discussions. If a Dick-head knowledgeable about these things could chime in about potential file sharing sites I could use to make .pdfs and mp3s available that would be much appreciated.