(1) Reference Abducted or, Saucerian Section

On any ordinary day - to the extent that there are such things - I see an awful lot of aliens. Most of them are Grays, with olivine eyes that take up most of egg shaped faces. Come to think of it, most of them are nothing but face, eyes adorning backpacks, skateboards, bumper stickers, tattoos. And none of them move. Not even a little. They are, strictly speaking, liquid, conforming to the space of their containers, miming the rhythm of their vehicles. When I am not looking, they seem to replicate. I mean, how else did so many of them suddenly appear? There are even several of them on my computer as I write this. "Perhaps he is collaborating in the writing of this right now."

Unless you have been in a coma since 1947 - and, perhaps, even if you have - you have seen them too. Don’t pretend. I know, it’s a bit embarrassing. I can’t remember the first time I saw one, if there was a first time. It’s as if they have always been there, and I simply have no memory of them. Do they, like any fit object of a paranoid narrative, remove evidence of their past existence, wipe our memories clean even as we gaze upon them? Why can’t I remember the first time I saw an alien?

Or maybe, in some sense, they were unrepresentable. Maybe it is only now that these uncanny guests are literally able to appear, to become stickers, film images, patches, T shirts. Perhaps, even, there is something about the present that forces them to appear, to flush them out of the sky and onto the icon. Do we have any witnesses to this event, this becoming icon of the alien, the alien's abduction by the image? What would prevent a witnessing of such a becoming?

We are called on to produce than one witness, and in this segment we will be listening to multiple testimonies to this entrance of the alien into our networks of representation. For before it becomes iterable enough to appear, literally, anywhere, the citational image of the alien was networked with a series of singular bodies, bodies that were probed, abducted, instructed, forced to speak. Some of these bodies lived in and off the discourse we call, out of habit, science fiction. Others found themselves on a couch, hypnotised, or speaking out of the pages of a popular book. But all, as witnesses, testify to the sampled quality  of abduction.

By sampling, of course, I am referencing the heterogeneous chains of sound and/or image that have composed hip hop  and new music performance for nearly a quarter century. Sampling - the grafting of one sequence of sound or image onto another - relies in its conceptualization and its practice on an understanding of sound and image as information, information whose major effect is found its ability to be networked, connected up to new contexts and moments. By this I do not mean that music, video or text that samples seeks to "inform" in the CNN sense of the term, although that may also be true. Rather, the emergence of the practice of sampling is associated with the capacity to manipulate sound and images as sequences, a citationality amplified by their digital medium. So for example, when DJ Spooky operates through the syntheses of disjunctive sound - a track from a stereo album used to test high fidelity equipment that enunciates the words "stereophonic sound" is blended and refrained through percussion, horns, jet engines, and various styles of noise - he treats the entire audio universe as an immense informatic pallette.

      For musical sampling is merely one example of the deterritorializing effects of informatics. Moving sounds from one site to another, the high resolution tweaking of an image sample made possible by "morphing" technologies differentially repeats transformations in practices of the life sciences. With the emergence of a digital molecular biology organized around the manipulation of traits or alleles as information, the "organism" or even "life" no longer serves as a delimitable object of biological inquiry. Instead - as with DJ Spooky’s audio universe - molecular biology operates on an immense recombinant informatic interface. The new citationality of molecular biology enables novel styles of connection and exposure to other traits, other species and other machines. The contours of the human body are being virtually reorganized, as the alleged "essence" of the body, DNA, becomes mobile, a moveable and thus re-moveable script of oneself that is constantly available to an alleged "outside" that we cannot master.
    Pitches are given to venture capitalists, IPO's are floated, living systems begin to co-evolve with the stock market.  As a result, unprecedented life forms arrive. It is of course crucial that such life forms arrive first as nearly transparent commodities available for universal exchange, dissipative structures literally becoming machines for the production of selective wealth.  Beyond "speaking" as commodities or transforming  our ecology into an allegedly dead zone of "things", such novel life forms occasion new forms of deterritorialization that are quite literally ecstatic, an allopoesis that overtakes the self progation of autopoetic systems. We are, as evolutionary psychologist Merlin Donald might put it, out of our heads, newly distributed beings whose cognitive and evolutionary insides are becoming outsourced across a network. Donald wrote of the effect that allegedly external "storage" device writing had on the emergence of thought and interiority, but he only hints at the forms of consciousness cultivated by a much more amplified and differential infoscape composed by this  most recent encounter between capital and evolution.

(2)From Citings to Sightings: Close Encounters of the Informatic Kind

        Abduction discourse exemplifies the character of such an informatic landscape in which new practices of citationality - such as the sampling of DNA - emerge. From its very origin, the "problem" of extraterrestrials has been conceptualized as a problem of information. An early (1953) report from the Robertson panel, charged with an evaluation of the UFO problem, concluded that the threat of the Unidentified Flying Object is of an informatic kind:

Parlous times...result in a threat to the orderly function of the protective organs of the Body Politic. We cite as examples the clogging of channels of communication by irrelevant reports, the danger of being led by continued false alarms to ignore real indications of hostile action, and the cultivation of a morbid national psychology in which skillful hostile propaganada could induce hysterical behavior and harmful distrust of duly constituted authority.

That is, it was the very replication and propagation of the rumors and reports of UFO sitings and contact that disturbed the panel, and not the objects of the reports and rumors themselves. Excessive discussion of UFO’s could, in and of itself, consititute a very real danger, endangering the organs of the Body politic, clogging them like a rhetorical virus. The very contact of Americans with these stories risked the cultivation of a psyche that would be even more exposed and susceptible to a hysterical rejection of authority, a psyche perhaps less nourishing for a National Security virus that was so effectively propagating.  In short, UFO reports, from the perspective of the US government, were a rhetorical contagion  threatening the effective production of narratives about itself,  a "duly constituted authority."  Such distrust  - the belief that their own government's authority was to be disrusted, with the secret truth veiled from the public - apparently provokes belief in, rather than skepticism of propaganda. The Robertson panel clearly found propaganda to be more contagious, and more "out there", than truth.

Thus the early management of the UFO phenomenon in the United States focused at least as much on the establishment of reporting protocols as on the  investigation of siting events. Allen Hynek, a respected astronomer who worked with several of the early investigations into UFO phenomena, recognized  that the ecology of the UFO included its status as a rhetorical practice: "UFO’s exist, for most of us, as reports. .." From very early on, the task of the meager US UFO investigation efforts was to separate the UFO "signal" from its "noise", a task which Hynek would later charge was essentially the denial of the possibility of signal. Indeed, the very code names of early investigative commitees - Project Sign mysteriously became Project Grudge - suggested a semio-textual understanding of the alien. Faced with the possibility of a Body politic clogged with a surplus of information, investigative teams  sought to put the country on a rhetorical diet,.

        Yet it was the very informatic economy associated with  UFO's - a blip on a radar screen, a government report, a "message for mankind" - that would thwart such an effort. For any desire to stifle the news of the UFO will itself make news - witness the recent proliferation of  Roswell theories in the face of the US Government's attempt to "come clean." Traditional understandings of the UFO and abduction phenomenon have understood the alien presence as a crowd phenomenon, one in which the mass of reports essentially acts as an aggregate, a totality in which one report  spawns another which spawns another, proliferating into a mob not unlike the ones that overtook certain sections of New Jersey after Welles' War of the Worlds hoax. In this understanding of the appearance of the alien, the "observer" or reporter is primarily interested in determining what the "alien" is - hence the reports which threaten to clog the organs of the body politic, the univocal "messages" that they and the aliens bear. In this context, to manage the proliferation of UFO information, one must simply cut it off - in the place of a mass or crowd of sitings and reports, we will have an aggregate of silence.  Such a diagnosis, troubled as it is by a "clogging", is consistent with a rhetorical economy of incorporation that characterized the surplus of alien reports to be fundamentally objects of containment

But perhaps such an understanding forgets the very essence of the alien presence - its characteristic ability to proliferate and mutate, disturbing the various taxonomical categories that we bring to bear on "them." As one psychologist and UFO investigator with a particularly teleological bent put it, perhaps we "are meant to be be baffled." While I would challenge the teleological and anthropomorphic attachment of "meaning" to the UFO phenemonon, it is difficult to argue with the claim  that "aliens" and "UFOs" appear to be inherently cryptic - no hermeneutic of disclosure has proved capable of providing sufficient revelation for the growing population of observors, abductees and debunkers. The discourse mushrooms - with bestsellers, magazines, usenet news groups, television dramas and blockbuster films - even as the indeterminacy of the alien phenomenon persists. Many groups claim to know what these phenomena are, but none are sufficiently persuasive to have the final word, so we there will still be yet another episode of the X Files, yet another confession of abduction, yet another debunking.

I will suggest here - and it is my hope that you are suggestible - that in this cryptic context, alien phenomena are better understood as proliferating packs than incorporating crowds, drawing these concepts from Deleuze and Guattari's sampling of Elias Canetti's enormous and marvelous book, Crowds and Power. For Deleuze and Guattari's Canneti, the (closed) crowd is a mass or aggregate that achieves one voice; its borders are secure enough that one most definitely knows who is "in" the crowd" and who is "out" of it. Paranoia - that usual suspect trotted out to explain cold war UFO flaps - is the all incorporating subject formation associated with the crowd - it is sure that all of these "events" add up to something, even if this something be, in the eyes of the national security agencies charged with the management of the UFO problem, nothing itself. By contrast, pack phenomena are characterized by their continual variation -as with a pair of dice, variation is built into the operation. In a pack, this continual variation - its proliferation, its transience, its subsequently shifting morphology - renders the borders of the phenomenon persistently uncertain. Rather than incorporating everything on its' itinerary with the repetitious mantra of "inside/outside, inside/outside", alien phenomena replicate in exuberance, nomadically distributing themselves across diverse and even divergent ecologies.

      It is this continual "surprise" value associated with the pack that seems to best map alien events. For as entities that are understood as information - Hynek even calculated what he called the "strangeness rating" of each report, a rating roughly commensurate with Claude Shannon's quantitative description of information - alien phenomena continually surprise observers. One abductee, sampling perhaps from the conventions of Penthouse forum, put it this way: "I never thought it would happen to me..." In this framework, the alien events would be understood as cryptic - indeed, as "alien" - not because we "lack" some bit of information, but because as pack phenomena, alien events are characterized by their status as multiplicities more closey associated with swarm behavior than the understanding of any individual subject. As with the slightest twitch of a starling's wing, the multiplicities called "aliens" propagate the smallest difference into extraordinary events. Alien events, like a cloud of starlings, arrive.
      Alien arrivals, so I would argue, must be understood within the economy of the sample because they are
(1) constituted by a citationality that allows them to be iterated within the context of a global hyperspace (I’ve seen this on TV!)
and a corporeality composed of information ( They’re taking samples of my DNA and selling them to biotech companies!) and

(2) because their consistency across all previously instantiated reporting protocols resides only in their variation, like a refrain composed of hetergenous chunks of sound, an orderly noise continually altered by each successive sample. The crafting of samples demands, above all else, variation, a discontinuity physicist and digital cosmologist Edward describes as the "grainy"  or discrete quality of an informatic universe such as our own. Fredkin paradoxically describes such a flickering universe where every (literal) bit of space/time is binary, one or zero, on or off, as finite.  Crucial to such a unverse is that every bit of space/time is "about" to be something else: the future. "Every part of space is computing its future as fast possible, while information pours in from every direction. The result is the same as caused by the apparent randomness of quantum mechanical processes."
 

This nearly structural fluctuation and uncertainty, of course, generates more and more information associated with alien phenomena, information which seeks to put one final piece in the puzzle and achieve revelation. Many contemporary abduction accounts - the localization of the blurry tangle of a Unidentified Flying Object and a human subject - narrate and invent the body that would bear such a pack-like excess. Former Van Halen lead singer Sammy Hagar, contacted in 1968 within a dream by an alien presence, recently told the story this way:

"I woke up and caught the whole thing going down. Either there was information being programmed into me, or information was being taken out of me to see where my head was at."

This uncertainty regarding the very borders of one’s body - not to mention of a dream - is symptomatic of the informatic ecology of the sample. An ecology of continual exposure, the deterritorializing effects of such information transfer erode the very agency of the subject - as sampler or samplee,  Hagar’s "confession" emerges out of the space of their convergence, the one who can only say either/or.

But perhaps contemporary subjectivity - I’m abducted, therefore I am - is cultivated less out of any certainty concerning one’s own"agency" or the boundaries of one’s body, and more out of the continual becoming that the exteriority of information makes available. Perhaps, in the context of an informatic ecology, we need not mourn the panic that emerges from a crashed disk. Such crashes effectively introduce a fluctuation or what Deleuze and Guattari have characterized as  rhythm into the linear space of binary, serial computation, providing counter-measures to what William S. Burroughs has diagnosed as that other alien virus: language, or, at least, language captured or even abducted by the idiom of the either/ or, the Word.

In what follows I will pursue several moments or samples of abduction, samples which will attempt to graft abduction onto an encounter with the capacities of informatic bodies, the bodies we find ourselves living with. Perhaps these bodies - whose boundaries, I have tried to argue elswhere, are multiple, massively parallel, at onceinsideandoutside  - emerge in association with alien events for good reason: aliens are themselves multiplicities, they come in packs and not individuals. To sample the excessively prolific science fiction author Issac Asimov , "There is no such thing as a single UFO siting."

(4) Close Encounters of the Nth Kind

Listening to it one night - he had not been able to sleep for a long time - he heard the radio saying hideous words, sentences which it could not be saying.

True, Phillip K. Dick took alot of drugs. That much we know. Author of over 36 novels - mostly science fiction, but some that are sole members of a class consisting of themselves, such as Valis - Dick was a skilled high speed typist and a brilliant, sardonic and hilarious weaver of narrative. According to published accounts of his own journals - an eight thousand page, unnumbered journal entitled "Exegesis" - he fell into somebody else’s novel:

"I think I read all this in the novel THE ROBE x years ago. Jeez, I’ve fallen into someone else’s novel!"

Such a falling, over course, sounds familiar enough to viewers of claymation hero "GUMBY", who could "jump into any book with his pony pal Pokey too...", but Dick’s experience was something other than a leap into the adventurous world of textuality. Indeed, for Dick, the exposure to what he would later dub "Valis" - the Vast, Active Living Intelligent System that spoke the "hideous words" and sentences oozing from the radio - forced nothing less
than an encounter with the informatic character of the universe.

This "encounter" was itself multiple. Dick wrote at least 4 novels that are implicated in what he would call "the events of 2-3-74", a mysterious laser-like pink light, a "firing of information" at his head that took place in February and March of 1974 after his exposure to a glyph of a fish worn around the neck of a pharmacist delivery woman at Dick's apartment door. Each treatment of the event swerved in its own peculiar fashion from a "representation" or "decoding"
of the information that may or may not have been fired at Dick’s brain. The novels and the Exegesis -itself formed out of pages which constitute non
sequiturs of each other, as there is no rigorous sequence to be had - form less an unraveling of Dick’s mysterious encounter than its repetition, a proliferation without origin. Valis, for example, copies elements of the Exegesis’s treatment of 2-3-74 into its narrative, a narrative in which Horselover Fat’s story is told by a science fiction writer named Phil. Fat, of course, is "Dick" in German, and Valis’s narrative operates less as the "expression" of Dick’s story than of its grafting into a fictional universe that in some sense differs from itself. So, for example, Phil tells us that Valis informed Fat of his son Christopher’s health:

He knew, specificially, that his five year old son had an undiagnosed birth defect and he knew what the birth defect consisted of, down to the anatomical details. Down, in fact, to the medical specifics to relate to the doctor...His brain had trapped all the information the beam of light had nailed him with, but how could he account for it?

This would of course suggest to the reader that this text describes the event endured by Dick: Dick, too, we learn in the Exegesis, interviews and other novels of the Valis trilogy, knew the precise characteristics of a previously undiagnosed birth defect after the burst of information. It probably, Dick claimed, saved his son’s life. This reading is encouraged by Dick’s citing of his own Exegesis -what Phil the narrator characterizes as a "journal" but
what Fat calls his "exegesis" - into the text of Valis, a text that testifies to the informatic character of the universe:

Thoughts of the Brain are experienced by us as arrangements and rearrangements - change - in a physical universe, but in fact it is really information and nformation processing that we substantialize.

Change, differentiation, is articulated here as operations of information, operations such as citing one text into another, a process of sampling which itself allows for the articulation of an event’s difference from itself. Just as Dick deploys the alter ego "Horselover Fat" marking the
diffference between author and autobiographical character - that is, a difference between Dick and himself - the sampling of a simulacrum of the exegesis dramatizes the variation that is the core of the exegetical practice. If exegesis is that textual, interpretative practice devoted to disclosing the truth of scripture, then Dick’s operation of exegetical citation discloses the truth of 2-3-74’s continual variation. The only way for Dick/Fat to testify to the pink
light was to constantly change his story.

The exegesis, then, is "grainy", continual differing from itself as it is made of variation. Such proliferation, though, paradoxically encourages a cosmology of  epistemological finitude. True, such a digital, informatic universe would seem to be a deterministic one - even Fredkin argues that such a universe is finite to the extent that it is a "closed" system, leading him to postulate the possibility of simulating moments "before" the big bang , a logic of reversibility that disables any understanding of the universe as an incorporating"inflationary" or "PAC MAN" cosmos whose inside continually engorges itself until collapsing in on itself.  But "The deterministic nature of finite digital processes is different in that it is unknowable determinism." Fredkin ties this  to  Turing's enthscheidung problem, which hamstrungs us concerning the binary  prediction of any particular program's instantiation. To halt  or not to halt? There is a "celebrated proof that, in general, there are no analytical shortcuts that can tell the future state of some general
computation any quicker than doing the computation step by step..."  That is, computation is epistemologically finite - its ability to predict is limited by the speed of available computation.  As Fredkin puts it in a footnote, "In general, physics is computing the future as fast as it can."

Indeed,  mathematician Brian Rotman has pointed out extensively in his work "Ad Infinitum" and "mathematics as sign", computers, indeed all ecologies of counting, biological and machinic, are subject to the  non linear finitude of repetition - the fact that counting gets harder and harder as numbers increase, turning the number "line" into a threshold subject to more than epistemological, even ethical, catastropes and clustering.

  Thus rather than attempting to understand the "meaning" of his informatic abduction, Dick’s rhetorical practice of exegesis focused on a continual encounter with the experience of the informatic universe that Valis is a metonym for. More crucial than the content of the information fired into his brain was the enounter with the possibility that Dick lived in a universe where such an informatic abduction was thinkable, where Fredkin's universe of informaiton operates all the way down to the twisted strands of DNA. Such a universe is one of total exposure - the opening of a door leads to a burst of information, information which itself emerges only from "elsewhere", without origin. In Dick’s formulation in the Exegesis, such information is not "ominpresent" but "multipresent", always, possibly, about to erupt, to appear around the next corner. Irreseversible event:

Could it be that in 3-74 Christ interfered with the genetic coding that had programmed me to die at that time?...My gene-pool (DNA) memory fired - opened up: I know that.

This continual exposure is not - as in the familiar paranoid formulation - peculiar to Dick in his cosmology; the encounter with Valis provoked Dick to claim that the universe is itself a continually variable informatic field: "We appear to be memory coils (DNA carriers capable of experience) in a computerlike thinking system...." Dick ,his characters and his readers - to the extent that these can be rigorously distinguished from each other - dwell in an informational universe for whom there is no cutting to the chase, no ethical or ontological principle capable of knowledgeably preparing them  for a fundamentally differential identity, future.

While this emphasis on the machinic, informatic character of Dick’s universe may appear to be a symptom of a writing practice that included Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and a drug routine consisting of handfuls of amphetimines washed down with milkshakes, we have recourse to another archive that suggests Dick’s understanding of the continual exposure fostered by the increasing prevalence of ecologies of information was enmeshed with an
equally material set of events. In addition to being fascinated with the role of taping technologies in the ouster of Richard Nixon - an event Dick claimed retroactively to have foretold in his 1970 Flow My Tears,, The Policeman Said - Dick was the object of a mysterious informatic abduction in November of 1971. His Marin county home was broken into, and his fireproof archive of files and work was ramsacked and exploded. Local law enforcement was less than energetic in their investigation of the crime, and over the years Dick continually speculated about the identities of the perps that stole and sampled his archive. Indeed, at one point the list of suspects actually included himself. In a 1972 letter found amongst his Exegesis papers, Dick writes:

Dick’s encounter with Valis, then, was less about the interpretation or ingestion of a message than the execution of an algorithm, an algorithm of varying commands to
differ, to sample or be sampled. In Dick’s phrasing, only an entity that "would be itself and not itself continually" would be adequate to the experience of Valis: "I almost became a sincere tool of a conspiracy consisting of myself." Such continual variation would for Dick, in principle, extend not only to the self which "bore" the event but also to the event itself, whose retrospective veracity could never be separated from its profound difference from the present. Valis uttered impossible sentences whose very effects provoked the inability to differentiate between the real and the unreal, thus recoiling on the status of Valis’s statements themselves.

" In one of my novels... certain anomalies occur which prove to the characters that their environment is not real. Those same anomalies are now happening to me. By my own logic in the novel I must conclude that my (own) perhaps even collective environment is only a pseudo-environment...as in the novel I can’t figure it out. It makes no sense."

Any narrative of Valis - a testimony to what Valis was - paradoxically entails a memory not of the past but of the present: "I claim to remember a different, very different, present life." This other present speaks to a second register on which the experience of abduction fosters something other than a message or understanding of a Truth - rather than a meaning that is decoded or interpreted, the experience of the alien provokes transformative effects, becomings that fredkin might dub the future:

I have been transformed, but not in any way I ever heard of. I..drive differently, much faster, reaching for an airvent on the dashboard that is not there. Evidently I am used to another car entirely. And when I gave my phone number the last two times I gave it wrong - another number. And to me the weirdest thing of all: at night phone numbers swim up into my mind that I never heard of before. I’m afraid to call them; I don’t know why. Perhaps in some other part of Orange County someone else is giving my phone number as his, drinking wine for the first time in his life and listening to Rock; I don’t know. I can’t figure it out. If so, I have his money...

In some sense, then, differentiation extends to more than the "interpretation" of the Valis event - it extends to the transformation of Dick himself. For Dick, the universe has ceased to be an outside that he somehow lives "in" - instead, the "memory coils" called Philip K Dick are in continual contact with the very surface of the universe, information that is continually transforming him. " I feel I have been a lot of different people." PKD composes a mobius
body, a corporeality both "in" his novels and just plain out of it, an interior subject called a "writer" who is nevertheless continually exposed to the strange hacks of Valis, who may or may not exist. Indeed, as in the example of Sammy Hagar with which we began, Dick’s subjectivity and his practice as a writer emerges precisely out of the irrelevance and impossibility of distinguishing an inside from an outside.

Gilles Deleuze, in his 1968 book Coldness and Cruelty, argues that Sade and Masoch are among the great clinicians of medicine - they each isolated the affects and orientations that cultivate their eponymous syndromes. Masoch, for example, excelled in the differentiation of masochism from an alleged "love of pain", focusing instead on the masochist’s penchant for waiting and anticipation. In short, Masoch shows the masochist to be cultivating a capacity for the future, a future of "a new man" who has removed the image of the father and made possible a Nietzschean overcoming of the human.

Although Deleuze’s claim concerning Masoch’s singularity is open to question, I would nonetheless like to apply his understanding of the clinical contribution of literature to PKD’s treatment of abduction. For while the psychological, historical and best selling authors of abduction discourse tend to emphasize or at least engage the "truth" of abduction scenarios, Dick isolates what is perhaps most singular in abduction narratives: their capacity to
proliferate and induce transformation in diverse ecologies, to instill what Deleuze and Guattari have characterized as "becomings."

Rather than mimetic stagings or performances whose goal is representation or completion, becomings are continuously variable events organized around aspects or "particles" of an object or an event. So for example, writing of the Wolfman, Deleuze and Guattari note that this becoming has nothing to do with belief or representation:" .I feel myself becoming a wolf...on the edge of the pack. . .It is not a question of representation: don't think for a minute that it has to do with believing oneself a wolf, representing oneself as a wolf.."

Nor does becoming-wolf entail the ingestion by or of the wolf: "All the better to eat you with", sez the alien" It is this characteristic of being on the border, both inside and outside, a mobius space- a space of impossible consumption - that characterizes becomings. These continual transformations operate not only at the level of a subject " I feel myself becoming a wolf", but of multiple subjects - a couple of authors, a pack, a polis. In constant motion, the pack, the alien, is always somewhere in particular, but it has N centers. You can locate the center or"leader" of a distributed pack when you find what which never ceases to differeniate - that which differs from tself, which will, of course, always be elsewhere, later.

It is this encounter with the informatic and therefore variable uni-verse that marks Dick's relation to "Valis", an engagement whose defining characteristic is its continual difference - Valis always has the status of N, unknown. Indeed, knowledge, in the usual sense - what was it? - is hardly material in Dick's relation to Valis. Rather than knowing what Valis "means" or what it "was", Dick engaged the incessantly experimental and profoundly ethical question -What should I do?

        Astronomer Allen Hynek coined the by now familiar taxonomy of the alien - close encounters of the first, second, and third kinds. Since his death, a fourth category has been added- the encounter of the 4th kind, abduction. Dick's experiences merit yet another strata of the ecounter with the alien, one which perhaps disrupts taxonomy altogether, as it engages with an encounter of the Nth kind - the encounter with alien thought, the thought of an alien as itself a consequence  of the informatic character of the universe.  Perhaps, even, Dick's encounter with Valis teaches us that in the alien encounter one precisely comes into contact with thought, not a narcissitic "discovery" of our selves in the cosmos, or even an understanding of the finitude of our knowledges, but the incessant, asignifying exteriority of thinking, the sampling and being sampled that thought entails.  "To think", sampling Deleuze narrating Foucault, "To think is to fold, to double the outside with a coextensive inside." Thinking is always in contact with an outside, a distant other who is bent into subjection, but not without haunting interiority with its proximity to a monstrous alterity. To arrest the arrival of the alien with the question of ontology - "Ok, What is it?" or epistemology - "Prove it!" - is to enter into the game of lack, an infinite game in which neither the negative case - the alien does not exist - nor the positive - "Finally, Conclusive Proof that Christopher Walken is from Proxima System!
Film at 11" - takes us anywhere.

But the emphasis on the episetemological and ontological character of the abduction event does more than mire conversation in an stagnant differend, an agon that "fails" at resolution. It overlooks the very possibility of any event whatsoever, the cultivation of exteriority that is, among other practices, reading.   Psychologist John Mack characterizes the effects of abductee testimony  in terms of development and evolution, but  stripped of its teleology, we might also link such speech acts to "involution" and "deterritorialization," operations of folding and the emergence of heretofore "alien" connectivities:

Stated differently, the information gained in the sessions is not simply a remembered "item", lifted out of the experiencer's consciousness like a stone from a kidney.  It may represent a developed  or evolved perception, enriched by the connection that the experiencer and the investigator have made.

For it is in a matrix of hospitality, an exposure to an other, Fredkin's unavoidable, finite, "running"  of abduction events - the encounter of an nth kind, the informatic permeability of thought - that abduction itself gets abducted, taken for a ride, carried away. Getting into the wrong hands, abduction becomes something other than its genealogy would suggest - a technology of identity which emerges out of an encounter with the unthinkable, a shattering of thought which disables the reproduction of any interiorized identity. Taken for surprise, abduction enters the house of being and squats, deterritorializing the household with its unheimlich effects.

Ironically, abduction discourse tends to overlook the very vehicles of abduction, the materiality and subesequent rhetoricity of the web sites, books, films, government documents, hypnosis sessions and case studies concerning abduction. On one hand, this overlooking of the work that the reading and viewing of abduction carries out for the alleged "consumers" of abduction narratives is far from containing any surpise for us: the very overlooking of
corporeality fostered by the rhetorical ecology of the informatic body forms a discursive fractal with the elision of abduction discourse’s strange rhetoricity: its mode of delivery, its complex of affects, its delays and amnesias. The abduction event is itself, like its discursive cousin, DNA, conflated with its writing: swallowed by the Word. . .

On another tentacle, however, this forgetting bundled with the informatic body, this interrupting of the flesh, marks precisely the dislocation and variation at the heart of these informatic bodies. Informatic bodies are composed of precisely surprise. The becoming-information of the body, rather than miming an alleged disembodiement of informatics from the "flesh eating 90's", provokes a double take, and all the problematics of doubling, on the topologies of human subjectivity. Amnesia, for example, opens human experience to the charge that it can’t remember itself, that it is forgetting itself in its becoming-inhuman. This forgetting becomes, then, a responsibility, a demand for testimony to the past. It also becomes a new capacity, a response-ability, the capacity to welcome an other who has surprised us.