Richard Doyle
mobius@psu.edu
We are creatures in a game with our affinities and aversions predetermined for us -- not by blind chance but by a patient, foresighted engramming system that we dimly see … We must trust these tropisms, and anyhow we have no choice -- not until the tropisms lift. And under certain circumstances they can and do. And at that point, much is clear that previously was occluded from us, intentionally. (Dick, The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, 214)
(i) Know your dealer…
Sometime in February or March of 1974, the writer Philip K. Dick eagerly moved toward the door of his Marin County apartment. He no doubt walked quickly through his front room to open it, for he had been anxiously waiting in great anticipation of the arrival. The doorbell --had it worked? His pain was such that he could respond only to "his own vital, demanding, terrible, urgent needs" (Dick A Scanner Darkly, 7), so the door’s promise transfixed Dick into an insectoid, machinic consciousness composed of nothing but waiting: I hope it shall arrive soon.
Oral surgery had transformed Phil’s mouth into a transducer of pain; it was an orifice no longer of taste or speech but of a metric and unavoidable agony. The continual anticipation of the relief the Darvon would bring was leavened only with the apparent eternity of his own subjective time, a time jolted by the ceaseless interrogation of the pain. He had, perhaps, discovered an immortality between moments, but it was a dystopic salvation -- the more one suffers, the longer life seems to last. He had entered, Dick would write, "an orthogonal time," a time not unlike that inhabited by his Scanner Darkly character, Charles Freck.
Freck, despondent over the conditions of his friends, resolves to kill himself. For Freck, at first, this poses anything but a challenge -- it seems nothing could be easier than actively submitting to death:
There was no problem, in the circles where he hung out , in putting an end to yourself; you just bought into a large quantity of reds and took them with some cheap wine, late at night, with the phone off the hook so no one would interrupt you (Dick, A Scanner Darkly, 186)Offing yourself in Freck’s world calls for a telephonic, as well as pharmaceutical disconnection. What must come off the hook is more than the heart or brain. In despair over the state of his friendships, seeking an exit from the network of pain, Freck finds himself increasing his entanglements with his community (scoring the reds) as well as the future. With this newly discovered luxury of a planned death, Freck begins to deliberate on the recipe for his exit, the staging of himself as a scientific spectacle for the to-come:
The planning part had to do with the artifacts found on you by later archeologists. So they’d know from which stratum you came. And also could piece together where your head had been at the time you did it (A Scanner Darkily 186).Freck’s elaborately choreographed death stages a conjunction of a pharmaceutical delivery and a communication with the future, a potent recipe of drugs and discourse that just possibly installs a mediated afterlife. Carefully cutting connections to the world with the help of pharmaceuticals does not create a finally autonomous (or even necessarily dead) organism, but instead links it differentially to a future, a message that essentially reads: Later, archeologists!
Dick’s anxious vector toward the door is no less of a pharmaceutical and rhetorical chimera, one that induced a suspension of normal time and the induction of disruptive blends of before and after. The drugs, one might say, affected Dick well before he took them. For it was the communication with the opened door that most altered him, a communication from "the other side" that anticipated the drugs but did not yet include them. Rather than experiencing his own pain, he communicated with and about the pain of another.
Quite the opposite was true of Freck: After taking the reds, Freck had a terrible truth revealed to him, a revelation of his own unique and yet thoroughly common experience: deceit:
... he had been burned. The capsules were not barbiturates, as represented. They were some kind of kinky psychedelics, of a type he had never dropped before, probably a mixture and new on the market. Instead of quietly suffocating, Charles Freck began to hallucinate ... (A Scanner Darkly, 187)This hallucinated revelation of the ripoff plunged Freck into an interdimensional hell, a panoptic zone of continual reproach populated by compound-eyed alien lecturers:
You have been elevated to the transcendent realm. Your sins will be read to you ceaselessly, in shifts, throughout eternity. The list will never end (A Scanner Darkly, 188)Here immortality offers less of a discrete message -- "Where Charles Freck’s Head Was At When He Did It!" -- than a hilarious sentencing to repetition.
A thousand years later he was still lying there on his bed with the Ayn Rand book and the letter to Exxon on his chest, listening to them read his sins to him (A Scanner Darkly, 188)Time, for Charles Freck, is indeed out of joint, but he occupies less the spectral dimension than an alien one. Here Freck is the recipient, and not broadcaster, of the eternal message, a message which marks itself as "false," neither alive nor dead, and beyond living. It is a revelation of deceit -- the dealer had taken him -- even as it broadcasts its message within a psychedelic proscenium. This kind of revelation -- a truthful declaration of error -- itself involves a parallel operation of sorts: Freck must both realize the falsehood of his experience and live through it. It is in this sense that Freck’s dosing requires the invention of a multiplicity, the one capable of living in multiple times simultaneously, a sequential narrative that is nonetheless out of joint.
(ii) Out of joint
Dick’s contact with the transcendent, by contrast, is one where sequential time not only bends under the force of the multiple, it dissolves in a flash of massive surprise as Phil suffers contact with what he called "eternity." VALIS broadcasts a parallel signal, one that operates according to different logics of multiplicity: swarm algorithms that suddenly distribute an emergent reality, rather than narratives unfolding an itinerary. Whereas narrative allows for, perhaps even demands, the possibility of a character traversing sequential (and mostly linear) time, what Dick calls his experience of absolute reality -- a reality that teaches us that we are indeed in some sense chimeric machines -- demands the creative "breakdown" that operates without a center:
For absolute reality to reveal itself, our categories of space-time experiences, our basic matrix through which we encounter the universe, must break down and then utterly collapse (The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, 218).One response to such a collapse provokes repetition, as when one dune gives way suddenly and overtakes yet another which cascades toward an arroyo and its cacti, this sequence of DNA coding for proteins blocking another until there is a complex of interacting sequences that are expressed and form unpredictable proteins which end up harboring a configuration of carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, forming 3,4,5-trimethoxy-ß-phenethylamine which eventually ends up provoking a time discontinuity in Dick’s writing of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said, a novel about, among other things, the effects of being on mescaline when no one can remember that you are a celebrity ... Hence the much more soothing effect and nearly narratable effect of a simple reversal of time in Dick’s musings from "Man, Android and Machine" -- rhetorical operations where temporal order is merely and precisely backward, repetitions on the other side of the mirror, replications subject to less ricochet.
These repetitions, though, can form origamis of time which continue their folding until becoming orthogonal. Of Paul’s discussion of our seeing "as if by the reflection on the bottom of a polished metal pan," Dick offers us an exegesis whose itinerary takes in the entire recipe for his thinking of orthogonal time. "Paul was saying that we may well see the universe backward." In other words, Dick glosses Paul’s invocation of "a glass, darkly" as speaking not to a primordial deceit, but to an extraordinary likeness haunted only by reversal and magnitude. Here the "veil spinning of Cali" becomes less a contradiction to the real than a particular rendering of it: backwards and dim.
It is one thing, of course, to name the rhetorical operation and its apparent manipulation of time -- hysteron proteron -- and quite another matter to ask after its conditions of possibility. How can language -- for it is in language, despite all his debts to visuality, that Dick locates the distortion -- alter the perception and experience of time?
The extraordinary thrust of this thought just simply cannot be taken in, even if we intellectually grasp it. ‘To see the Universe backward?’ What would that mean? Well, let me give you one possibility: that we experience time backward; or, more precisely, that our ... time experience, is orthogonal to the flow of time itself -- at right angles"(The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, 215).While Dick’s precise geometry of this orthogonal operation is a non sequitur -- why, precisely, would right angles form within a flow? why not whirlpools? -- his example and explanation of it are definitive for an inquiry into Dick’s conceptual differentiation at work in and on "Man, Android, and Machine." For, as Dick asks, what would it mean "to see the Universe backward?"
Clearly, given Dick’s immediate gambit of response, this is no rhetorical question in the usual sense. Instead, it seeks not just what, but how "To see the universe backward?" means. Dick’s citational demeanor here asks, quite literally how the fragment ‘To see the Universe backward?" works to produce a "grasp" in the absence of its ability to be incorporated, "taken in."
There is a familiar, if logically impossible, retroactivity at play here: like the chicken who claims she came "before" the egg, the sentence collapses its ecological scene of emergence. The same goes for the egg who would claim ex nihilo status -- don’t try telling it to the hen ... Here language, in contact with the machinic if not logical consistency of sexual reproduction, turns life into a serial -- first one thing, then another.
So too does a backward vision of the universe involve a logically impossible but apparently graspable retroactivity: one would have to see the universe before it came into existence; one would have to understand a sentence without processing it or taking it in; one would understand this sentence before reading it. Here time is not out of joint, merely reversed.
At times Dick remembers this recognition of reversal, calling it by its Platonic name of anamnesis? (230). And yet a more persistent troping favors the arrival of negentropy:
When I say that they and we are waiting for spring to come, I am not merely using a metaphor. Spring means thermal return, the abolition of entropy ... It is spring that restores that life, restores it fully and in some cases, as with our species, the new life is a metamorphosis; the period of slumbering is a period of gestation together with our fellows that will culminate in an entirely different form of life than we have ever known before ( 218).Abolishing entropy, a new form of life arrives through Homo Sap: humans are caught up in a developmental/evolutionary transformation which will "culminate" catastrophically on a threshold, the threshold of human life. Suddenly and irreversibly, the spring would effect a catastrophe: the end of human life, its becoming other.
(iii) Constantly Fibonacci , or come out as a machine
Dick would later also describe the catastrophicopening of his door as a sudden opening onto information: according to Dick, the information was of such a quantity that it transformed or "metamorphized" him into a qualitatively different state of being. "I have been transformed, but not in any way that I have ever heard of." (Dick, ed. Sutin, In Pursuit of Valis, 6) Upon catching a glimpse of a gold fish about the delivery woman’s neck, Dick inhabited a flash of pink light, light which suddenly delivered an enormous message to the 44-year-old writer. "Nailed" with information, Dick reported that he suddenly and inexplicably knew that his son Christopher needed immediate medical attention. Phil would later credit the information with saving his son’s life, as an operation corrected a life-threatening hernia. At least one other symptom can also be linked to the informatic outburst: A graphomania that induced thousands of pages, including at least five novels, four that arguably make up a "trilogy" on the VALIS experience.
Dick’s contact with what he would call VALIS -- the Vast Active Living Intelligent System -- is a crucial event framing any exposure -- accidental or otherwise -- to any one of his numerous writings that have contributed to and even provoked the emergence of virtual life forms at the end of the 20th century. For it is in VALIS and its exegesis -- several essays, novels and more than eight thousand pages of hand-written, unnumbered manuscript misleadingly titled Exegesis -- that Dick worked on and through the convergence of machinic and biological systems, a convergence perhaps both less discussed and more seductive than the epistemological panics allegedly provoked by the computational evacuation of the "signifier."
Of course, throughout more than 36 novels and hundreds of short stories, Dick frequently inquired into the difference that transformations of communication might bring: In Ubik reality undergoes a perturbation when the dead speak out of their cryonic suspension and telepaths make private communication impossible God haunts a space colonist’s dome with message bearing Muzac in Divine Invasion and, in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, an alien deity poses as a hallucinogenic extraterrestrial lichen that "translates" those who eat it into an eternity of repetition, an eternal return of the same ...
But perhaps it is in his less noted experiments with biological difference that Dick’s most productive contributions to cyberculture might emerge. Researchers as diverse as psychologist Merlin Donald, Lynn Margulis, researcher John Lilly, and novelist William S. Burroughs have argued that the nonlinear growth of complex infospheres might effect an evolutionary transformation as extraordinary as the invention of linear time and sequential thought in humans. Dick’s "Man, Android and Machine" takes such a description to augur not a shift in human "consciousness," but a sudden and irreversible mutation of the allegedly individuated Homo Sap into a being "in-toxicated" and entangled by the machine: an ecstatic multiplicity both of time and identity provoked by the overwhelming increase in informational traffic. Indeed, in "Man, Android and Machine," Dick takes multiplicity to already be a biological phenomenon. In 1976, after reading of Joseph Bogen’s research on the hemispheric brain, he writes:
Bogen’s article contains concepts so fascinating as to cause me to wonder why we never realized that our "unconscious" is not an unconscious at all, but another consciousness, with which have a tenuous relationship" (The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, 220).This "tenuous relationship" that for Dick composes reality does not traffic primarily in communication, the transfer of a message to a (perhaps distant, perhaps interior) receiver. Nor does it operate through logical or biological negation, as does Dick’s 1968 character Deckard, an android bounty hunter who develops an eye for one of his targets. In the 1976 "Man, Android and Machine," this unpredictable interaction -- named, at first, as a relationship between consciousnesses -- is instead a cause for wonder, a fascinated experience of complicity, a transaction not of understanding but of joint inhabitation, a zone of hospitality where the sudden arrival of an alien difference is welcomed. In this instance, of course, Dick is relaying a particular kind of relationship with an absent presence: reading. But this hospitality operates not so much through language and its allegedly referential function, but instead emerges only through affective practices hardly subject to the control of consciousness:
What are names? This is the god of in-toxification, taking in the sacred mushroom (c.f. John Allegro) or wine, or finding a joke so terribly funny that you lose all reason laughing and crying, as when you see one of the silent slapstick comedies (232).Here language functions as talismanic solicitations of Pan: less descriptions of than prescriptions for the hallucinating, jaw-breaking, side-splitting multitude (Maffesoli 1992). And that prescription is, in part, treated as a sensory interruption or jamming: Slapsticks are precisely and literally special effects used to alter the sonic landscape, an ecology only of implication in the silent film. One cannot "hear" said slapsticks, but instead must allow oneself to be affected by them, a complicity both of deceit ("there are no slapsticks") and wonder ("I can’t stop laughing at the absent slapsticks"). Laughter becomes an ecstatic practice, a guide to action after the "loss" of reason, that time when we forgot that slapsticks exist as physical objects.
Laughter, of course, is a register of human agency about which it is difficult to speak seriously. Neither active nor passive, it instead marks a profound complicity with a context or a community, an "other consciousness," a being beside oneself . (Rotman) It is in this ecstatic offer or solicitation that Dick’s texts resoundingly respond to the challenge of inhabiting biotechnological and machinic ecologies. For crucial to Dick’s itinerary is his gradual realization and even ethical affirmation that he is indeed a machine -- a machine whose greatest virtue is its capacity for breaking down.
How to build an overmind that doesn’t fall apart two days later
Dick’s treatment of biological difference in "Man, Android and Machine" responds to diverse flows of information that traverse both biological and machinic systems. Diverging from a molecular biology of the 1950s and 60s that repeatedly treated information as the general equivalent of biological systems and their allegedly dialectical others, machines, Dick posited at least two different styles of information processing entities, entities which operated differentially on and with information: what I will call, for the sake of mapping Dick’s response to the problem, autopoetic machines of representation and allopoetic machines of transformation. Autopoetic machines -- like Dick’s early understanding of reality-versus-illusion -- function primarily as closed machines of repetition. Sturdily constituting themselves out of their difference from an ecology, autopoesis operates through those machines which, for Dick, grow out of an incapacity for difference -- the difference of chaos:
In any case the universe that we experience ... is experiencing the typical dysfunctions that take place at the end of a cycle. You may say, if you prefer, ‘Reality is collapsing; it’s all turning to chaos,’ or, with me, you may wish to say ‘I feel the dream, the dokos, lifting; I feel Maya dissolving: I am waking up, He is waking up: I am the Dreamer: We are all the Dreamer.’ One thinks here of Arthur Clarke’s Overmind (219).
The divergence here is not, one comes to realize, a preference anyone gets to choose. Just as the difference VALIS made to Dick was hardly deliberated upon or anticipated, these two responses are less actions of an individual organism or machine than they are different actualizations of the same information. For Dick, information is Absolute Reality, an ecological fact no more avoidable than the pink light that he flashed through after spying the fish-shaped gold necklace beyond the door, a sign of the early Christians that produced so much anguish, humor and writing.
Nonetheless, there is a difference here that one can "wish" for. One can wish to "say," for example, that the veil of Maya written of by Dick is not a mask occulting a reality, but is instead an attribute of an ecology. Chaos and time dysfunctions are, in this view, less the loss of a (sequential, self-identical, stable) order than the symptom of a Heraclitean transformation, allopoesis. Whereas autopoesis locates self-organization as a marker of the organism’s virtue, its specific difference from the machine, allopoesis names that other plane on which the realization of the living proceeds: metamorphosis, evolution, the capacity for difference. In short, dysfunctions of narrative time and failures of reference -- attributes of "postmodernity" which are supposedly assays of an ontological and even ecological loss -- are instead so many stigmata of a reality that won’t go away, a constant as persistent, if not as orderly, as those of Fibonacci.
We might say that for the Dick of "Man, Android and Machine," the "postmodern" proliferation of simulacra was less a problem of certainty and knowledge than it was an experiment in overcoming the categories of "reality-versus-illusion." Dick remarks that
We humans, the warm-faced and tender, with thoughtful eyes -- we are perhaps the true machines. And those objective constructs, the natural objects around us, and especially the electronic hardware we build, the transmitters and microwave relay stations, the satellites, they may be cloaks for authentic living reality in as much as they may participate more fully and in a way obscured to us in the ultimate Mind. Perhaps we see not only a distorting veil, but backward. (The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick 227--228).In what sense can Dick describe Homo sapiens’ "thoughtful eyes" as evidence for the machinic character of humans? Within "Man, Android and Machine," it is the effect of a butterfly wing that must be responded to. For it is as adornment or artifice that the "thoughtful eyes" -- like those of the panda on so many tourists -- work in an ecological context:
"the harmless moth adorns itself artfully to terrorize others with ocelli. This is a defensive measure, and if it works, the predator returns to his lair grumbling ‘I saw the most frightening creature in the sky -- wild grimaces and flappings, stingers and poisons’ (213).Here "adornment" effects not only an aesthetic response but flight itself, leaving rumor in its wake -- tales of terrifying chimera echo through the lair, a remarkable action at a distance. Nonetheless ocelli -- eyespots on the wings of butterflies and moths -- exemplify the work of fiction in an ecology of predators. Rather than crises of representation, such markings produce movement and flight; they are an aspect of the Umwelt of organisms, as much an element of their locomotion and fitness as wings themselves -- they are techniques of flight that require no movement; movement is provoked in the other. Dick writes that his only mistake in understanding these fictive effects was that he had taken the mask for reality:
I had supposed that only bad people wore frightening masks, but you can see now that I fell for the magic of the mask, its illusion. I bought the deception and fled. I wish now to apologize for preaching that deception to you as something genuine (213).This apology, however, must itself be viewed with suspicion: It is written by an author who has so thoroughly dislocated notions of ‘authenticity" and "reality" that he finds himself overtaken by his own novels: "This brings me to my frightening premise: I seem to be living in my own novels more and more" (Dick, ed. Sutin, In Pursuit of Valis, 2). Here Dick tells the story of his error, even as he carries it out - "now" he both apologizes for and preaches about a deception as something genuine. Indeed, in some sense he apologizes before he preaches about such genuine deception in the context of "Man, Android and Machine."
Everything is equally alive, equally free, equally sentient, because everything is not alive or half alive or dead, but rather lived through (The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick, 228).Here Dick locates life only in a distribution: Life dwells not in the interior folds of what he calls the "brittle organism," but across the networked and sometimes hallucinated ecology of the noosphere:
We are overlapping fields, all of us, animals included, plants included. This is the ecosphere and we are all in it. But what we don’t realize is that billions of discrete and entirely ego-oriented left-hemisphere brains have far less to say about the ultimate disposition of the world than does the collective noospheric" (223).(iv) Chimera
Perhaps "Man, Android and Machine" should be understood as a description Dick offered for his polymorphous experience of Valis. For as his calendar description of the VALIS event suggests -- he called it "2-3-74," which refers not to the third day of February or the second of March, but to an event distributed over a two month period of 1974 -- Phil did his best to associate VALIS with multiple channels taking in the electronic and the vital. Deities, artificial intelligences, nucleic acids, synapses, and government agencies were all partially implicated in both the arrival of the massive burst of information and Phil’s response to it. Indeed in portions of the Exegesis (In Pursuit of Valis, 7) Phil went so far as to suggest that he had become another person, the late Bishop Jim Pike. What are we, as readers, to make of this declaration? For has not Dick confirmed the existence and function of Maya, that distorting veil of difference?
While one can only speculate, fruitlessly, on the authenticity of Dick’s claim to have been living with and by a ghost, we can nonetheless note the peculiar efficacy of the distribution of Dick’s personality across space and time. Of his alliance with the dead Bishop Pike, Phil writes:
Someone was and is working with me on all business matters, making my attitude tough and shrewd and suspicious. I am hard-boiled and I never regret !my decisive actions. I can say No whenever I want to. Jim was that way -- no sentimentality. He was the shrewdest Bishop I ever knew.Maybe he is collaborating in the writing of this right now (Dick 1991, 7).
Paradoxically, it is only by being taken in by a "shrewd" specter that Phil can be decisive. Discipline here emerges not from the strength of a will, but from a new-found capacity for invasion. It is precisely Phil’s sensitivity to and welcoming of this thoroughly alien difference, a being neither alive, dead nor sentimental, that allows Dick to become a more thoroughly regulated, even autopoetic, individual. Phil’s capacity for breakdown even yields a new-found regime of health and grooming, those hallmarks of the properly autonomous self whose borders are well defined:
I now drink beer every day and never any wine. I chugalug the beer. The reason I drink it is that Jim knows the wine is bad for me -- the acidity, the sediment. He had me trim my beard, too. For that I had to go and buy special barber scissors. I didn’t know there even was such a thing (Dick 1991, 5).
Clearly, Dick’s newly responsive multiplicity required exacting mixtures of discipline and humor. His musing that Pike may have helped write the Exegesis typifies both the experience of constant surveillance Dick had after VALIS and the comic sense of timing he brought even to his handwritten "The Dialectic: God Against Satan, & God's Final Victory Foretold and Shown: An Exegesis, Apologia Pro Mea Vita" the complete journal he wrote in night after night until his death in 1982. Rather than simply overwhelmed by the memory (and/or experience) of a thoroughly enigmatic presence beyond the door, a presence at once human, android and machine, Dick consistently experienced even the terror of VALIS as a profound gift which could only fitfully be made to refer. Indeed, In "Man, Android and Machine" Dick comes to affirm the work even of Maya, whose distortion, like that of our moth, works by creating interconnections rather than occlusions:
What we must realize is that this deception ... is not an end in itself, as if the universe is somehow perverse and likes to foil us per se; what we must accept, once we realize that a veil (called by the Greeks dokos) lies between us and reality, is that this veil serves a benign purpose (214). Fiction, too, has a purpose, a benign one. Rather than cruel or seductive trickery, this deliberate distortion, the veil and tale spinning of Cali, enables an emergent reality -- the arrival of the future, a future of revelation where masks are seen for what they are:
What we will do, many of us, is throw off the mere masks that we have worn -- masks that were intended to be taken for reality. Masks that have successfully fooled everyone, as is their purpose (218).Absolute reality can only arrive, Dick suggests, via a capacity for hallucination, the ability to be taken in. "Really, I suppose that the clear line between hallucination and reality has itself become a kind of hallucination" (231). This is not to invoke, with the late ethnobotanist and Dick interpreter Terrence McKenna, the notion of a "true" hallucination. Instead, Dick’s ocelli, in their hallucinogenic provocations, enable the breakdown of our space/time matrices of linear time, an allopoetic breakdown that, for Dick, more fully prepares us for the actuality of a dislocating alliance. Dick ends "Man, Android and Machine" with a final, declarative description of our multiplicity, a kind of non sequitur whose message arrives all at once, creating a chimera even of the reader: no longer haunted by ghosts, we dwell multiply with extraterrestrial loves and intelligences in that earthly hospitality known as friendship.
We have friends and they are ETI, and it is as He told us, a bright and morning star, the star of love. (232)