The novels of Philip K. Dick are enduring cultural texts that, over twenty years after his death, continue to be widely read and discussed by science fiction fans and cultural critics alike. Part of what makes Dick such an interesting writer is his preoccupation with the nature of reality in what some describe as a postmodern age. He enters the political and philosophical debate surrounding postmodernity by dramatizing the effects of the historical transition to an increasingly dissociative and dereferentialized universe. His novels inhabit the dynamic space between different historico-social structures, exploring postmodern modes of existence, tracing changes in the production and consumption of signs and problematizing emergent codes of meaning and reality. This thesis will argue that Dick attempts to fill the gap between restrictive industrial capitalism and expansive consumer capitalism by presenting a critique of the social control exercised by the prevailing social order over perception and desire in both modes. Dick performs this critique by questioning the effect of these constructions of reality at every turn, remaining ambivalent about outcomes, but following a consistent methodology that involves constructing narratives that are incomplete, shifting, uncertain, frightening, and often contradictory. These shifts in narrative reality may be the result of any number of nominal causes, from hallucinogenic drugs and psychotic episodes to more typical science fiction (SF) fare, such as alien beings and time travel devices. Reality may crumble around those characters desperate to maintain it, or characters may deconstruct reality themselves. The loss of stable reality may be utterly pessimistic or playfully humorous. The only constant in Dick’s work is the presence of an uncertain and problematic reality, which reflects contemporary changes in social domination.
Traditionally, social power determines what is real, and those who wield that power have a stake in obdurately maintaining the contingencies that perpetuate their hold on power, casting these contingencies as eternal truths, inescapably real. New forms of social control exercised by ‘consumer capitalists’ rather than industrial capitalists, however, subvert what the prevailing order had previously defined as rigidly real, working instead to generate and maintain the utterly unreal, collapsing brutal forms of social control and carefully eliciting the amorphous and subjective desire that takes its place. The reality in Dick’s novels is essentially ephemeral and insubstantial, reflecting a postmodern subjectivity no longer so obviously beholden to the representative forms of power: the primal leader, the Patriarch, the vicious Father. The long-standing structure of power changes itself so radically that contemporary subjects are left between residual social regulations and dereferentialized desire, torn between lingering restriction and an amplified desire for consumer products or cultural experiences that always seem to trail away, out of reach but never out of sight. This change results when labor-intensive, industrial capitalism transforms itself into post-industrial, consumer capitalism, and is paralleled by transformations in the regulation of desire. Rather than restricting desire, the prevailing order expands desire as a necessary element of consumerism. The conflict between desire and regulation is transformed by an economic system that comes to emphasize the former at the expense of the latter. In contrast to older social forms such as industrial capitalism, which enforced rigid social regulations and repressed desire, newer social modes of production and consumption require heightened desire. The modern subject transgresses historically buried social regulations by pursuing expansive desires paradoxically advanced by capitalists and derived from the social significations of desirability. What was once an ‘unbearable idea’ of transgression, in which desire was restricted and shunted off into ever-dissolving realms of that-is-not-really-how-I-feel, has become a newly acceptable idea, in which formerly-real regulations crumble, disappear, self-destruct, or bury themselves to the neck, underneath the flow of expansive desire. But the dissolution of ‘real’ restriction is paralleled by desire that hovers like a slow-motion cloud of blood-spatter slyly filmed and slickly produced. Consumer products are replaced by mere representation, after which desire is able to wrap itself around only the image — the fleeting and substanceless image. As contemporary capitalism de-realizes regulation, de-realized desire is produced, and is, in fact, the primary product of consumer capitalism; the signification of pleasure overwhelms any chance for pleasure itself. The frenzied activity of desire takes place within a form of capitalism that operates on the principle of what Deleuze and Guattari call deterritorialization. They argue that capitalism is “the only social machine that is constructed on the basis of decoded flows” of desire, but that this desire exists “under the social conditions that define its limit and the possibility of its own dissolution” (139-140). Rather than enacting repression, the large-scale capitalist social machine propagates itself through “the deliberate creation of lack as a function of market economy” (28), counter-intuitively flipping the terms, so that there is a subjective version of the repressive order and a prevailing order full of desire, within which the capitalist subject is encouraged to participate in a distorted and de-realized type of desire.
Dick is a variable and reversible writer whose work cannot be adequately addressed by the critical tools of a single theorist. Therefore, the arguments developed in this thesis are drawn from the work of several important thinkers, whose names and ideas will be quickly broached here in order to lay the groundwork for what is to come. The following discussion, quickly sketched in a concentrated form, hardly exhausts the concepts of these theorists, but it will hopefully provide a way of looking at the work of Philip K. Dick — and be exemplified in the course of later, more detailed, discussions. As suggested, Dick is an important writer because he captures contemporary American society as it makes a fairly radical change in socioeconomic form. One of the results of this change is the tendency to ‘de-realize’ reality. The term ‘de-realize’ appears often in this thesis and provides a good opportunity to discuss the two distinct modes of social domination that I will attempt to intertwine. The first is restrictive reality. Marx’s notion of commodification, of both the product and the laborer, is a good example of restrictive de-realization (which I call ‘restrictive reality’ because it is reality as defined by restrictive social modes). Commodification obscures the use-value of the object produced and the humanity of the laborer, thereby de-emphasizing the real relations that went into the act of producing the product, or ‘de-realizing’ the real. Another example of restrictive reality is Freud’s notion of the Oedipus complex, which represses desire into the production of children via the ‘proper’ family unit. Desire is repressed by the Father, thereby de-emphasizing the real possibilities of desire, or ‘de-realizing’ the real.
However, both Marx and Freud understood the reverse of their restrictive realities. In fact, contained within restriction is the necessary second mode of social domination: expansive reality. In Marx, the reason for the restrictive reality of industrial labor is to divorce commodities from any sense of their use-value so that commodities become expensive, from the sale of which the owners of the means of production become wealthy (i.e. produce Capital). Labor is restrictive so that the value of commodities may be expansive. Guy Debord and Jean Baudrillard each point out the ways in which the modern consumer system inflates the signs of happiness and advances a ‘society of the spectacle’ that deals in expansive reality. Expansion, therefore, is not liberation from restriction, but its natural extension, the development of an expansive social necessity that contradicts restriction. This calls to mind Herbert Marcuse’s concept of the performance principle, which describes the worker who is repressed by labor beyond what is needed to survive because ‘needs’ have themselves been expanded — which increases restrictive labor.
In Freud, the reason for the restrictive reality of Oedipalized desire is to institutionalize guilt so that existing modes of social organization (‘civilization’) may persist. Guilt is divorced from any sense of necessity so that it can be heightened, from the attribution of which the patriarchal owners of Oedipus become powerful. Freud writes that “the sense of guilt produced by civilization is not perceived as such either, and remains to a large extent unconscious” (Civilization 99). Deleuze and Guattari suggest that the modern consumer system ‘deterritorializes,’ or releases and expands, desire, creating an expansive reality. This desire is then ‘reterritorialized’ in subjective constructions based on the myth of Oedipus. That is, deterritorialized desire is not liberation from Oedipal restriction, but its natural extension, the development of expanded Oedipal desires that contradict restriction.
Each of the above contradictions is a case of what will be called the ‘unbearable idea,’ a phrase used to refer to simultaneous social demands for restriction and expansion that ultimately trap the subject in a paradox and sustain the dominance of the prevailing social order. The central goal of this thesis, as mentioned earlier, is to explore how Dick inhabits the space between restrictive reality and expansive reality, charting the psychological journeys his characters make through these types of de-realizations. I will use Raymond Williams’s terms ‘residual’ and ‘emergent’ at times to refer to the restrictive reality of industrial capitalism and the expansive reality of consumer capitalism, since this progression (restrictive to expansive) seems to adequately trace historical changes in the modes of production and consumption.
It must be stated that Dick was not a rigorously systematic thinker, but rather a radically original fiction writer who subverted his own constructions as often as those of society and social power, capturing the spirit of postmodernity at the same time he offers a critique of it. It would be misguided to describe Dick’s fiction as being part of a coherent, unyielding, unified, and parsimonious theory, for his novels refuse to offer a singular result: inconsistency, irrationality, and unreality are, paradoxically, the order of the day. Contemporary society moves methodically into new expansive modes, while the structures of older restrictive forms are increasingly covered over. Dick pays particular attention to the dehumanization, or ‘androidization,’ inherent in this process. The way modern Western society organizes reality leads to a diffusion of humanity and a troubling change in subjectivity, marked by the proliferating unreal objects of late capitalism. Dick, as a persistently psychological writer, focuses his attention on how people develop ways of reacting to and within postmodern and hyper-real culture, attempting to extricate a sense of humanity from within this struggle. What he finds lodged within the fog of the de-realized universe is human flesh, surrounding a human heart still somehow connected to others in a web of human relations. Empathy and karma (or meaningful actions that, paradoxically, have acausal effects) emerge from the Dickian narrative as what remains after the terrifying loss of the restrictive real and the empty exaggeration of misguided desire for simulation.
This thesis will read Martian Time-Slip, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as attempts by Dick to expose and criticize the idea that deterritorialized desire and wanton subjectivity are all that remain of human energy after it has been captured in the glow of the television set, indelibly marked by unhinged, dereferentialized contemporary significations. His novels attempt to show how humanity is as endangered by the expansion of desire as it is by the restriction of desire and, while it may seem that he often works at cross-purposes, that is only because his notion of humanism rebels against both restriction and expansion. Humans face a new struggle in confronting a postmodernism that seems liberating but is ultimately empty. It is difficult to assert that Dick does anything consistently in his fiction other than problematize reality, for he does not engage in this problematization for the same purpose or with the same methods in all of his work. For the critic approaching Dick’s work, the greatest challenge is to reconcile the variable and contradictory ways that he subverts reality. The previous sentence reveals this problem in practice, because sometimes Dick ‘subverts’ a status quo reality and sometimes he presents a reality that subverts itself in order to reterritorialize the subject in new modes of domination. While Dick is often caught up in the difficulties of contemporary uncertainty, delving into the details of our ongoing malaise, he insists that something human remains. It is somewhat problematic to use the term ‘humanism,’ since this term is caught up in enduring restrictive modes, indicating a sort of regression to previous forms of social organization. However, Dick’s humanism seems to emerge from this contemporary struggle, rather than reclaim an earlier subject position. Dick, whose historical moment was balanced on the cusp of the expansively de-realized world, enters the game too late to make normative judgments based on an ‘eternal’ human subjectivity, and his return to humanism is rather an advance to a humanism indelibly marked by the deterritorialization of desire.
Before briefly outlining the overall organization, I should state what this thesis will not do. No attempt will be made to fit these three novels — stylistically, chronologically, or thematically — into Dick’s oeuvre. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Novels of Philip K. Dick already accomplishes that task masterfully. No attempt will be made to position these three novels within the SF genre of which they are a part, nor the literary history of postmodern novel, of which they are also a part. Neither will this thesis attempt to make links between these three novels and Dick’s fascinating and troubling biography. Instead, these novels will be treated as cultural texts produced at a certain time and in a certain sociopolitical milieu, making available a set of readings that also derives many of its critical viewpoints from the same era (e.g. Baudrillard, Debord, Lukács, Marcuse, etc).
This thesis will begin with a brief background of some of the critical work on Dick and a discussion of his stated theories of reality and perception (although it will be admitted that he deviates, sometimes significantly, from these theories in his fiction). This will be followed by a brief reading of two Dick short stories from the 1950s, leading to an enumeration and discussion of some of Dick’s narrative strategies, such as un-becoming, anti-epiphany, and reversibility. The implications of these techniques will lead to the positive aspects of humanism — such as connectivity, empathy, and karma — that survive problematized reality. Finally, a closer evaluation of three novels by Dick will expose these concepts in practice. The three novels in this study present the rise of postmodern subjectivity. Martian Time-Slip presents a world based on restrictive labor and then surveys possible responses to that world, including the complete dissolution of the social by means of over-emphasizing the self. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch introduces modes of mediation in which deterritorialized desire fills circumscribed spaces, the de-realized worlds of Perky Pat and Chew-Z. Self and world cannot interact because the self pursues an utterly de-realized world of heightened and directed desire. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? tells the story of a man who struggles within the unbearable idea, driven by deterritorialized desire and commercialization to prosecute the deadly needs of the prevailing order as a bounty hunter, while simultaneously feeling a socially-induced empathy for his prey. These novels develop narratives that explore the possible reactions to the de-realized social strategies employed by the prevailing social order that ensure indeterminacy and fractured human subjectivity.
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A masters thesis on Philip K. Dick
