Media, Drugs, and Schizophrenia in the Works of Philip K. Dick Author(S): Anthony Enns Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol

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Media, Drugs, and Schizophrenia in the Works of Philip K. Dick Author(s): Anthony Enns Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 1, Technoculture and Science Fiction (Mar., 2006), pp. 68-88 Published by: SF-TH Inc Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241409 Accessed: 12/12/2010 18:23

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http://www.jstor.org 68 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)

Anthony Enns

Media, Drugs, and Schizophrenia in the Works of Philip K. Dick

Philip K. Dick's novels and short stories seem ideally suited to postmodern technoculture theories. Following Fredric Jameson's famous argument that postmodernismrepresents the cultural logic of late capitalism, critics such as Carl Freedmanand Scott Durhamhave persuasively arguedthat the prevalence of paranoia and schizophrenia in Dick's works illustrates the impact of capitalismon the humansubject. For Freedman, Dick's novels depict paranoia as a naturalresponse to the processes of commodification: "If we are economically constitutedas capitalistsand workerswho must buy and sell human labor that is commodified into labor-power, then we are physically constitutedas paranoid subjects who must seek to interpretthe signification of the objects-commodities-which define us and which, in a quasi-livingmanner, mystify the way that they and we are defined" (18). Freedmanfollows Marx in defming commodityfetishism as a force that instills life into inanimate objects by endowing them with the vitality of human relations;the paranoiathat this process generatesbecomes a necessarycondition of postmodernity.Durham adds thatcapitalism also commodifieshuman beings by threateningthe boundariesbetween the self and the environment,and Dick's works frequentlystage this postmodern"death of the subject"through the theme of schizophrenia. More recent critics, such as N. Katherine Hayles and Jill Galvan, have extendedthis approachby incorporatingelements of contemporarycyberculture and posthumaniststudies. Hayles suggests that paranoid schizophrenics and androidsbecome interchangeablein Dick's works because they are both figures of hybridity that "are associated with unstable boundaries between self and world" (160). At the same time that the humans in Dick's narrativesare often dehumanizedby schizophrenia, Hayles points out that the androids are also frequentlyhumanized; "the androidserves as an ambiguousterm that simultaneously incorporates the liberal subject into the machine and challenges its construction in the flesh" (170). Jill Galvin similarly concludes that Dick's works "question the traditional self-other dyad, which affirms a persistent humanmastery over the mechanicallandscape"; Dick "envisions a community of theposthuman, in which humanand machinecommiserate and comaterialize, vitally shapingone another'sexistence" (414; emphasisin original). By linking technology with the collapse of the liberal humanist tradition, Dick's fiction invites critical readingsthat strongly support postmodern technoculture theories. In order to make these theories fit, however, critics tend to privilege Dick's novels from the 1960s over his late "theological" writings, which are often given only cursory attention. Hayles concludes her analysis of cybernetic MEDIA, DRUGS, AND SCHIZOPHRENIAIN P.K. DICK 69 systems in Dick's work by mentioningthat Dick's last three novels "are among the best of his fiction" (189), and his Exegesis-a lengthy theological tract that he wrote near the end of his life-represents "[h]is most ambitious attemptat system creation" (189); yet she adds that "his fiction of the mid-sixties tends toward a different kind of affirmation, one that I find more appealing"(190). Hayles focuses on Dick's mid-sixtiesnovels becausethey illustrate"humans who are at their best when they show tolerance and affection for the creatures, biological and mechanical, with whom they sharethe planet"(191), while in his late writings Dick seems to be trappedwithin his own solipsistic, hallucinatory world. Durham similarly mentions that VALIS(1981) representsperhaps the ultimatedepiction of the late-capitalist"death of the subject," yet he adds that this novel can no longer be considereda work of fiction because "thedissolving subject's experience, once conveyed only within the alienatingframe of SF, can no longer tear itself away from the world" (184). In other words, Dick's theological novels suggest that the unstableboundaries between the self and the environment depicted in his earlier novels have infected the author's own personal life, ratifying "the subject's intensive death" while simultaneously proclaiming "the destruction of a genre" (184). Subsequent critics, such as ChristopherPalmer, arguethat Dick's theologicalnovels representa clear break from postmodernism,because they introducea level of "ethicalseriousness" that contradictsthe "postmodernistsense of the textuality of meaning" (339). By transgressing the realm of art, rejecting the use of irony, and collapsing the critical distancethat was presentin his previouswork, Dick's late writings seem to resist any applicationof the postmodemtechnoculture theories thathis earlier works support. Using the work of contemporaryGerman media theorists FriedrichKittler and Wolfgang Hagen, however, this essay will argue that the inherent connectionsbetween media technologies and altered states of consciousness in Dick's novels and short stories actuallyrepresent a direct continuitybetween his early work and his late theological writings. By conceiving of consciousness as thoroughlyextended into and penetratedby the electric media environment,for example, Dick frequently represents media technologies as "discourse networks," or technologicalsystems of inscriptionthat establish "theframework within which somethinglike 'meaning,' indeed, somethinglike 'man,' becomes possible" (Wellbery xii). Kittler identifies the processes of consciousness with the operationof new media technologies: "Freud'sprinciple thatconsciousness and memory are mutually exclusive formulates" the "media logic" of the phonograph, an instrumentthat also served as a model for brain mapping (Gramophone 89). Dick's works similarly address the conflation of media technologiesand psychic statesby incorporatingmaterial from Wilder Penfield's researchin cortical stimulationof the brain. Kittleralso argues that "[m]adness is cinematographic"(159), because film "uncoversunconscious processes of the centralnervous system" (161). Dick similarlycombines the time-basedtheories of schizophrenia developed by existential psychotherapists, such as Ludwig Binswangerand Eugene Minkowskiwith the "time axis manipulation"enabled by film in order to describe unconscious processes as cinematographiceffects. 70 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)

Wolfgang Hagen argues that media technologies are linked to schizophrenic hallucinations and trance states, as they illustrate "a linguistic structure articulated by the unconscious" (113; my translation). Dick's late writings similarlyrepresent the experienceof the electric mediaenvironment as a process of patternrecognition or noise filtering, and they even outline a quasi-mystical theory of the collective unconscious as a productof informationtechnologies. Consciousness becomes, in John Johnston's words, "a secondary effect, the result of a machinic interplay between a perceptual apparatus, a recording device, and a symbolic system" (215), and this notion of consciousness as a medial interfaceoffers new andpotentially fruitful ways of readingthe boundary problems in Dick's fiction. The Psychic Apparatus: Media Technologies and Brain Mapping. Much of the existing scholarship on Dick's representationof media technologies has focused on their role in state surveillance. In her reading of Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, for example, Galvan argues that "technology often acts in Dick's novel as the long arm of the government, furtively breachingthe bounds between public and private" and "dramatically rupturingthe humancollective" (418). The totalitarianuses of technology are illustratedin many of Dick's mid-1960s novels, most notablyThe Simulacra and The PenultimateTruth (both 1964), yet Galvanadds that "the fault lies not with a totalitarianessence in the media itself" but rather with "the authoritarian forces who bring the image to life" (422). She thus concludes that Dick would "disagreewith Baudrillard,as with MarshallMcLuhan before him: the medium is not the message; it simply provides a venue-in itself neutral-for the affirmation of political power" (422; emphasis in original). Scott Bukatman similarly suggests that although "Dick may evidence a profound suspicion of technology ... [i]t is less technology per se than the mythifyinguses to which it is directed by the forces of an instrumentalreason that serve as the targets of Dick's satire" (53). This argument is supported by a speech of 1972 ("The Android and the Human")in which Dick says that: [S]tate tyranny ... utilizes technology as its instrument.... Like all machines, these universaltransmitters, recording devices, heat-patterndiscriminators, don't in themselves care who they're used by or against.... Before the absolutepower of the absolute state of tomorrow can achieve its victory it may find such things as: When the police show up at your door to arrestyou for thinkingunapproved thoughts, a scanning sensor that you've bought and built into your door discriminatesthe intrudersfrom customaryfriends and alerts you to your peril. (196-197) Although Dick never explicitly advocated the kind of media interactivity promoted by Bertolt Brecht and RaymondWilliams, he nevertheless believed that media technologies could potentiallybe manipulatedand redirectedagainst totalitarian regimes, an argument that more closely resembles William S. Burroughs'famous "ElectronicRevolution" (see Burroughs174-203). Yet the notion of technology as an instrumentaltool seems to contradictthe mainpoint of Dick's speech, which is thatour technologies "arebecoming alive, MEDIA, DRUGS, AND SCHIZOPHRENIAIN P.K. DICK 71 or at least quasi-alive, and in ways specifically and fundamentallyanalogous to ourselves" (183). Dick's criticism of state surveillance would appear to be equally motivatedby an understandingof technology itself as a force that raises fundamentalquestions about the very natureof being. Dick also suggests that "we-the so-called humans-are becoming, and may to a great extent always have been, inanimatein the sense that we are led, directedby built-intropisms" (187; emphasis in original). Dick's conviction that humans may be more like machines was partly inspiredby Wilder Penfield's experimentsin the electrical stimulationof the cortex. AnthonyWolk points out that Dick was familiarwith several of Penfield's publications from 1959, such as Speech and Brain Mechanisms (with Lamar Roberts) and "The InterpretiveCortex," as specific references to these works appearin several of his novels (109). Penfield began experimentingon patientswho had sufferedepileptic seizures in orderto identify the parts of the brain that should be excised, yet he was surprisedto discover that electrical stimulation often triggered "psychical states" in the form of memories, dreams, and hallucinations.He describes a 16-year-oldwoman who complained of seizures that were ushered in by hearing a song, a lullaby her mother had often sung to her.... At operationwhen the posterior portion of the superiorconvolution of the right temporallobe was stimulatedshe gave a little exclamation. Then after the electrode had been withdrawn she said, "I had a dream. I wasn't here." After talking with her for a little while the electrode was reappliedat the same point without her knowledge. She broke off suddenlyand said, "I hear people coming in." Then she added "I hear music now, a funny little piece." The electrode was kept in place and she became more talkative, saying thatthe music she was hearingwas somethingshe had heardon the radio. It was the same song her mother had sung. After an intervalthe same point was stimulated,again without warning her. She said, "anotherdream. People coming in-." In this case we had succeeded in electrical reproductionof the hallucination drawn from her past experience which had, for years, introduced her epileptic seizures. (ExcitableCortex 21-22) Penfield had discovered that unconscious memories were stored in specific locations in the brain, and that they could be recalled when these spots were electrically stimulated. Penfield frequentlyacknowledged the similaritiesbetween brains and media technologies, and he comparedthe interpretivecortex to a "wire recorder, or a stripof cinematographicfilm with soundtrack"("Interpretive Cortex" 1719; see also Penfield and Roberts 53). This was further emphasized by the fact that many of his patients recalled scenes from movies or recordedmusic. Penfield describes anotherwoman who heard an orchestra playing an air while the electrode was held in place. The music stopped when the electrode was removed. It came again when the electrode was reapplied. On request she hummedthe tune, while the electrode was held in place, accompanyingthe orchestra.It was a popularsong. Over and over again, restimulationat the same spot producedthe same song. The music seemed always to begin at the same place and to progress at the normally expected tempo. All efforts to mislead her failed. She believed thata gramaphone 72 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)

[sic] was being turnedon in the operatingroom on each occasion. ("Interpretive Cortex" 1720) The brainfunctioned as a gramophonerecord, replayingthe same piece of music whenever the electrode stimulatedthe same spot. Furtherexperiments revealed that this phenomenonwas quite common, and subjects repeatedlyclaimed that the music they heardresembled gramophone recordings or songs heardover the radio. In a 1963 study, Penfield and Perot concluded: "We were surprisedat the numberof times electrical stimulationhas caused the patient to hear music.... Sometimes it was an orchestra, at other times voices singing, or a piano playing or a choir. Several times it was said to be a radio theme song" (673-75). They also noted several cases in which electrical stimulation activated visual hallucinationsthat recalled images seen in films. One twelve-year-oldboy, for example, "would see a robber, or a man with a gun, moving towardhim," and this man was apparently"someone he had seen in the movies" (615). Dick cites these experimentsin the opening chapterof Do AndroidsDream of Electric Sheep? where a "merrylittle surge of electricity" from his "Penfield mood organ" ensures that Rick Deckard wakes up at the right time and in the right frame of mind (351). The central issue of the novel is highlighted when Rick's wife Iran criticizes the device as "unhealthy"and associates it with "mentalillness" because it produces an "absenceof appropriateaffect" (352). Louis Rosen, the narrator of Dick's 1972 novel We Can Build You, also discusses cortical stimulationexperiments, as a similarmood organhas madehis own electronic organ company obsolete: What had undone us was the extensive brain-mappingof the mid 1960s and the depth-electrodetechniques of Penfield and Jacobson and Olds, especially their discoveries about the mid-brain. The hypothalamusis where the emotions lie, and in developing and marketing our electronic organ we had not taken the hypothalamusinto account. The Rosen factory never got in on the transmission of selective-frequencyshort range shock, which stimulatesvery specific cells of the mid-brain, and we certainly failed from the start to see how easy-and important-it would be to turn the circuit switches into a keyboardof eighty- eight black and whites. (6) In both of these novels, therefore, Dick extends Penfield's descriptionof the brain as a device for storing acoustic information by imagining an electrical soundtechnology capable of activatingpsychical states. Rosen's electronicorgan ultimately fails because he is unable to predict this link between acoustic frequencies and neural impulses, and at the beginning of the novel he still maintainsthat the two phenomenaare separate: "I've dabbled at the keys of a HammersmithMood Organ, and I enjoy it. But there's nothing creative about it. True, you can hit on new configurationsof brain stimulation,and hence produceentirely new emotions in your head which would never otherwise show up there.... But that's not music. That's escape. Who wants it?" (6-7) This statementclearly echoes Iran's criticism of the "Penfieldmood organ" in Do AndroidsDream of Electric Sheep?, yet Rosen's distinctionbetween music MEDIA, DRUGS, AND SCHIZOPHRENIAIN P.K. DICK 73

and cortical stimulation becomes more problematic when his psychiatrist prescribes a drug that also stimulatesa particularsection of the brain: "Hubrizine stimulates the anterior portion of the spetal region of the brain. Stimulation in that area, Mr. Rosen, will bring about greater alertness, plus cheerfulness and a belief that events will work out all right on their own. It comparesto this setting on the HammersmithMood Organ.."... I read the setting critically. By God, when translatedinto notes it was close to the opening of the BeethovenSixteenth Quartet. What a vindicationfor enthusiastsof the Beethoven Third Period, I said to myself. Just looked at, the stop-settingnumbers made me feel better. (52) Rosen even asks his psychiatristif he has "a drug whose setting in terms of the Mood Organcorresponds to portionsof the ChoralMovement of the Beethoven Ninth" (53). Acoustic signals, cortical stimulation, and pharmaceuticalsthus ultimatelybecome equivalentmeans of accessing stored memories. The media logic of the consciousness/memorydivide is also illustratedin Dick's 1968 short story "The Electric Ant," in which Garson Poole discovers he is a robot and begins to experiment with his internal circuitry. Although Penfield's experiments are not explicitly referred to in this story, the same terminologyis employed when Poole describeshis "reality-supplyconstruct" as a tape deck that transmits "sense stimuli" to his "centralneurological system" (229). By editing this "realitytape, " Poole experiences a series of hallucinations that resemble those reportedby Penfield's patients: In the center of the room appeared a flock of green and black ducks. They quackedexcitedly, rose from the floor, flutteredagainst the ceiling in a dithering mass of feathers and wings and frantic in their vast urge, their instinct, to get away.... Now something else appeared.A park bench with an elderly, tattered man seated on it, readinga torn, bent newspaper.He looked up, dimly made out Poole, smiled briefly at him with badly made dentures, and then returnedto his folded-backnewspaper. (237) Poole becomes obsessed with the idea of maximizinghis sensory stimuli: "Think of the possibilities, if our brains could handle twenty images at once; think of the amountof knowledge which could be stored during a given period" (233). He also describes the process of storing visual informationin media-technologi- cal terms by comparingthis experience to the act of watching all the television channelsat once: "Whatwould it have looked like ... if this TV set projectedall channels onto the cathode ray screen at the same time? Could we have distinguished anything, in the mixture?" (233; emphasis in original). This comparison clearly illustrates consciousness as a medial interface, and by allowing Poole to introduce new data into his circuitry, the story effectively dramatizes Rosen's claim that experiments in cortical stimulation could potentiallycreate "new configurations." The problem these technologies present is not that they transformhumans into machines but ratherthat memory itself becomes a closed circuit in which consciousness is trapped.This is vividly depicted in Dick's 1980 short story "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon," in which a breakdown in Victor Kemmings's 74 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006) cryonic suspension system leaves him partially awake during a ten-year spaceflightand the ship's computeris forced to feed him sensory stimulationin the form of his own memories in order to prevent his mind from deteriorating. The computer's ability to access Kemmings's "buried memories" (361) replicates Penfield's experimentsin cortical stimulation,and this is made even more explicit when the computerattempts to "intensifythe signal" and "ampup the charge" (363). When it inadvertentlyreactivates "underlying anxieties" and "subliminalinsecurities" lying "dormant"in Kemmings'unconscious, however, brain mapping no longer preserves his sanity but begins to threaten it (363). After repeatingthe same scenarios countless times, in which anxieties from his childhood continue to resurface, Kemmingsnotes that "I have spent more time in my own unconscious mind than any other human in history," a process he describes as "[w]orse than early twentieth-centurypsychoanalysis" (371). The computeralso describes Kemmings's growing insanity as an "entropicfactor" (365) that results in the gradual collapse of his virtual environment:buildings decay, possessions disintegrate, and he suffers from a steadily growing "weariness... a weighing-downsensation" (369). This closed circuit eventually results in psychosis, as Kemmings continues to live within the solipsistic universe of his own recycled memories after the ship has completedits journey. "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" thus illustratesconsciousness and memory as an interfacebetween a perceptualapparatus and a recordingdevice, andit describes schizophreniaas a problem of time and entropy. Time Axis Manipulation: Temporal Distortions of Consciousness. The relationshipamong schizophrenia,media technologies, and time is a recurring theme in Dick's fiction, and it is often discussed in terms of entropy. In Dick's 1982 novel 7he Transmigration of Timothy Archer, for example, Dick incorporatesClaude E. Shannonand WarrenWeaver's concept of "information entropy" into Angel Archer's descriptionof Bill Lundborg'sschizophrenia: Bill ... had no future. Someone with hebephreniahas dealt himself out of the game of process, growth and time; he simply recycles his own nutty thoughts forever, enjoying them even though, like transmitted information, they degenerate. They become, finally, noise. And the signal that is intellect fades out. Bill would know this, having planned at one time to become a computer programmer;he would be familiar with Shannon's informationtheories. (239- 240) Like Kemmings, therefore, Bill is trappedwithin a closed circuit, constantly recycling his own internal thoughts, which are gradually decaying like "transmittedinformation." Yet the notionthat endless repetitionproduces signal decay actually contradicts Shannon and Weaver's definition of "information entropy": The quantitywhich uniquely meets the naturalrequirements that one sets up for "information"turns out to be exactly that which is known in thermodynamicsas entropy. It is expressed in terms of the various probabilitiesinvolved-those of getting to certain stages in the process of forming messages, and the probabilities that, when in those stages, certain symbols be chosen next.... In the physical MEDIA, DRUGS, AND SCHIZOPHRENIAIN P.K. DICK 75

sciences, the entropy associated with a situation is a measure of the degree of randomness,or of "shuffledness"if you will, in the situation;and the tendency of physical systems to become less and less organized, to become more and more perfectly shuffled, is so basic that ... it is primarilythis tendency which gives time its arrow-which would reveal to us, for example, whether a movie of the physical world is being run forwardor backward. (12) A closed loop, in which the same signals are replayed over and over again, would thus represent the opposite of entropy, as random elements would be eliminatedand no new informationwould enter the circuit. Even Angel's claim that Bill "hadno future," as he had "dealthimself out of the game of ... time," seems to contradict Shannon and Weaver's notion of entropy as the very direction of time itself. Rather than suggesting that Dick misunderstoodor misappliedthe concept of entropyin communicationsystems to schizophrenicstates, I would arguethat Dick effectively formulated his own theory of schizophrenia as a medial condition by combining Shannon and Weaver's model with elements of existential psychotherapy. Dick was particularlydrawn to the existentialists because they attemptedto understandhow their patients saw the world. In an interview in 1974, for example, Dick praised the Swiss psychologist Ludwig Binswangerfor employingthis methodin his case studyof a patientnamed Ellen West: [Binswanger]tried to figure out where her head was.... I don't think in any book I've ever written, or any book I've ever read, thatthere was thatmuch difference of a point of view.... By the time he had discerned how she saw the world, it was as totally different a universe from ours as if she was on anotherplanet in another solar system. (qtd in Rickman205) In his introductionto Existence, a collection of essays on existentialpsychother- apy, Rollo May explains that what set the existentialistschool apartfrom other psychological approaches was their focus on incorporating philosophical understandingsof the concept of being. According to this view, the boundaries between the individualand the environmentwere blurredand the notion of the individual as having a fixed, stable identity was rejected. A human being is constantlychanging, is constantlyin a process of becoming, and thereforetime and entropyare crucial for understandingthe patient's overall world-view. May notes, for example, that "the most profound human experiences, such as anxiety, depression, andjoy, occur more in the dimensionof time thanin space" (65), and he cites one of Eugene Minkowski's case studies, in which a schizophrenicpatient "could not relate to time and ... each day was a separate island with no past and no future, the patientremaining unable to feel any hope or sense of continuitywith the morrow" (66). Binswanger's study builds on this idea by describing entropy not as an inevitableproduct of forward-movingtime, but ratheras the result of stasis and the inabilityto move into the future. Binswangernotes, for example, that Ellen West's schizophreniawas the result of a desire to "stoptime" (299), which was vividly illustrated in her hallucinatory "tomb-world": "The condensing, 76 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006) consolidating,straightening of the shadow(developing into the vegetativerotting and inescapable encirclement until it becomes the wall of the tomb), is an expression of the growing dominance of the past over this existence, of the supremacyof the already-beenin the whereaboutsof hell and the inescapable movementback-to-it" (305). Like Kemmings,therefore, Ellen West was trapped in an ever-presentpast, which resultedin mentaldeterioration that she perceived as the entropic decay of her environment. Such narrativesas "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" and The Transmigrationof TimothyArcher integrate Penfield's work on cortical stimulationwith Binswanger'sconcept of the "tomb-world"in order to articulate a new version of informationtheory, in which noise and entropy are the result of stasis and repetitionrather than change and transition. The concept of a "tomb-world"appears in many of Dick's works, such as his 1964 novel Martian Time-Slip,where the connectionsbetween schizophrenia, media technologies, and time are even more pronounced.In this novel, the psychiatristDr. Milton Glaub details a theory of autism (which he considers an early form of schizophrenia)that adds a media-technologicalspin to the time- distortiontheories describedby Binswangerand Minkowski: There is a new theory about autism ... from Bergholzlei, in Switzerland.... It assumes a derangementin the sense of time in the autistic individual, so that the environmentaround him is so acceleratedthat he cannot cope with it, in fact, he is unableto perceive it properly, precisely as we would be if we faced a speeded- up television program, so that objects whizzed by so fast as to be invisible, and sound was a gobbledegook.... Now, this new theory would place the autistic child in a closed chamber, where he faced a screen on which filmed sequences were projected slow down.... Both sound and video slowed, at last so slow that you and I would not be able to perceive motion or comprehendthe sounds as human speech. (41) Dick outlined a similar theory in his 1965 essay "Schizophreniaand The Book of Changes": "Whatdistinguishes schizophrenic existence from that which the rest of us like to imagine we enjoy is the element of time. The schizophrenicis having it all now, whether he wants it or not; the whole can of film has descended on him, whereas we watch it progress frame by frame" (176). Dick adds that this distortedperception of time is essentially the same as Ellen West's "tomb-world,"as "the schizophrenicis engulfed in an endless now" (176). In otherwords, schizophreniaoccurs when the perceptualapparatus fails to process information in real time, and the ability of film to manipulatethe speed and directionof time-which Kittlerrefers to as "time-axis-manipulation"("Media and Drugs" 164)-allows schizophrenicsto compensatefor this deficiency. By combining Binswanger and Minkowski's theories of temporalperception with the notion that film reproducespsychological and perceptualfunctions, Dick's description of schizophrenia reveals the media logic underlying existential psychotherapy, and it once again illustrates consciousness as an interface between a perceptualapparatus and a recordingdevice. Later in the novel, Jack Bohlen similarly describes new sound technologies designed to communicatewith autistic children: MEDIA, DRUGS, AND SCHIZOPHRENIAIN P.K. DICK 77

We take a tape recording, done at fifteen inches per second, and run it off for Manfred at three and three-fourthsinches per second. A single word, such as "tree." And at the same time we flash up a picture of a tree and the word beneath it, a still.... Then what Manfred says is recorded at three and three- fourths inches per second, and for our listening we speed it up and replay at fifteen. (115) The acoustic hallucinationsdescribed by Daniel Paul Schreberin his 1903 book Memoirs of My Nervous Illness were similarly slowed down: "The degree of slowing down can hardly be imagined by anyone who has not personally experiencedthese speech manifestationsas I have. A 'but of course' spoken like 'b-u-u-u-to-o-o-f c-ou-ou-ou-r-s-e' ... lasts perhaps30 to 60 seconds each time before it completely comes out" (163; my translation).This delay representsthe same time-axis manipulationperformed by the tape recorder,which leads Mark Roberts to suggest that Schreber's hallucinations illustrate the connections between sound technologies and schizophrenichearing: "The voices ... are not really voices in the sense of human speech at all, but are, rather, the tonal equivalents of spoken words; or, one might suggest, analogous to the way prerecorded sounds are experienced by the listener-not human, but the mechanical tonal equivalent of human speech" (34). Hagen adds that these sounds not only represent"a language structurearticulated by the unconscious" (113; my translation), but they also resemble the language of electric media technologies, as "the medial effect of electricity is that first signifier (arbitrary and transmissible in Saussure's sense) that does not act already eo ipso in language(in the sum of geographicallyand temporally distributed 'langues') but rather in 'langage"' (112; my translation). In other words, the linguistic structureof the noise generatedin acoustic hallucinationsmirrors the temporal distortionsthat sound technologies introduceinto speech. In his discussion of the drug "Oneirine"in Thomas Pynchon's 1973 novel Gravity's Rainbow, Kittler points out that drugs and media technologies essentially produce the same delirious effects by enabling "time-modulation" ("Media and Drugs" 168). Drugs also enable time-axis-manipulationin Dick's novels, and this ability to modify the perception of time often makes them therapeuticallyuseful. In his 1966 novel Now WaitFor Last Year, for example, the time-traveldrug JJ-180 serves the same function as the media technologies in Martian Time-Slip.The very title of the novel emphasizesthe schizophrenic state of temporal stasis, which is explained when Gino Molinari discusses Eric Sweetscent's aversionto the future: "[Y]ou've got only one tiny life and thatlies ahead of you, not sideways or back.... Are you waiting for last year to come by again or something?"(203). This statementechoes the accusationsmade earlier in the novel by Eric's wife Kathy: "[Y]ou resist life.... Some childish, unconscious part of you won't enter human society" (52). Eric is lacking not only a future, but also a past, which is revealed early in the novel when he reflects on the value of recordedmemory: Humans have always striven to retain the past.... Without it we have no continuity; we have only the moment. And, deprived of the past, the moment-the present-has little meaning, if any. Maybe ... that's my problemwith 78 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)

Kathy. I can't remember our combined past: can't recall the days when we voluntarily lived with each other ... now it's become an involuntaryarrange- ment, derived God knows how from the past. (33-34) Eric suffers from the same delusion as Minkowski's patient, who was "unable to feel any hope or sense of continuity"and for whom "each day was a separate island with no past and no future" (May 66). By allowing him to move backwardsand forwardsin time, however, JJ-180 effectively liberateshim from this static percept-system. With the help of the drug he is able to experience various possible futures, for example, in which he either stays with his wife or leaves her. His ultimatedecision to stay at the end of the novel thus becomes a conscious choice to embrace one particularfuture, which allows him to break out of his previous entropic state. The temporal distortions caused by drugs are also capable of producing schizophrenia,which is clearly illustratedin the 1964 novel 7he ThreeStigmata of Palmer Eldritch. In contrast to Willy Denkmal's E-Therapytreatments at Eichenwald clinic in Germany, in which electrical stimulationis employed to expand the "cortex area" (47) and generate "[h]ighly organized cephalic activity" (51), Palmer Eldritch's drug Chew-Z offers its users "eternallife" in the form of virtually limitless time dilation (60). Eldritch explains: "Whenwe returnto our formerbodies ... you 'llfind that no time has passed. We could stay here fifty years and it'd be the same; we'd emerge back ... and find everything unchanged, and anyone watchingus would see no lapse of consciousness" (61; emphasisin original). This time dilationis associatedwith schizophreniabecause it creates the experience of an endless now, which prevents the user from moving forward in time. Dick reports that a similar time dilation occurred during his own experiments with LSD, when a single night seemed to last thousandsof years. Dick discusses this experience in his essay "Schizophrenia and The Book of Changes," in which he argues that "events can take place outside of time," and that "LSD has made this discovery available to everyone ...not just the schizophrenic"(177). The notion that Chew-Z traps users in a "solipsistic"world (65), endlessly replayingtheir own unconsciousmemories, is also illustratedby BarneyMayerson's repeatedattempts to reconnectwith his first wife Emily, as Eldritchhimself points out: "Mayerson,you're using your time badly. You're doing nothingbut repeatingthe past" (ThreeStigmata 116). Like the faulty cryonic suspension system in "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon," therefore, Chew-Z also creates a closed circuit in which time does not move forward and the user is forced to repeat past experiences endlessly. The notion that drugs affect the user's perception of time is taken even furtherin Dick's 1977 novel A ScannerDarkly, where the experience of taking the drug SubstanceD is once again describedas the transformationof consciousness into a media technology. Junkieswake up, for example, like a machinecranked from position A to position B. "It-must-be-day," the junkie says, or anyhow the tape in his head says. Plays him his instructions,the mind of a junkie being like the music you hear on a clock radio ... sometimes sounds pretty, but it is only there to make you do something. The music from the clock radio is to wake you up; the music from the junkie is to get you to become MEDIA, DRUGS, AND SCHIZOPHRENIAIN P.K. DICK 79

a means for him to obtainmore junk.... Everyjunkie, he thought, is a recording. (759) In other words, junkies are mediatechnologies. Like the "Penfieldmood organ" in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or Garson Poole's "reality-supply construct" in "The Electric Ant," the mind of a junkie is programmedwith "tapes" that condition his perception and behavior. And, like Chew-Z, SubstanceD also freezes the user in the present, which Bob Arctor describes as the experienceof an "endlessnothing" (Scanner 788). This disorientationresults in an impaired sense of time, which becomes particularlyevident during a bathroombreak: Filling a Dixie cup with water, he dropped all ten tabs. He wished he had broughtmore tabs with him. Well, he thought, I can drop a few more when I get throughwork, when I get back home. Looking at his watch, he tried to compute how long that would be. His mind felt fuzzy; how the hell long will it be? he asked himself, wonderingwhat had become of his time sense.... I can't tell what time it is at all any more. (788) The use of Substance D leads to schizophrenia, as this sense of time dilation takes the form of an endless tape loop. When placed in the New-Path rehabilita- tion center, Arctor (who is now called Bruce) even begins to function as a recordingdevice, repeatingwhatever he hears: "Mountains,Bruce, mountains," the managersaid. "Mountains,Bruce, mountains," Bruce said, and gazed. "Echolalia, Bruce, echolalia," the managersaid. "Echolalia, Bruce-" (838) Schizophreniais also linked to entropyin this novel, as junkies are describedas vampires(759) or corpses (826) who live in a perpetualstate of deathand decay. Dick thus repeatedlyassociates the delirious effects of schizophrenicand drug- inducedhallucinations with media technologies, throughtheir mutualability to alter the speed and direction of time. Dissolution of the Subject: Split-Brain Phenomena, Telepathy, and the Noosphere. Schizophrenia, drugs, and media technologies also threaten the concept of the self. In A ScannerDarkly Arctor's split identity as Bob (a drug addict), Fred (the narcotics officer watching Bob), and Bruce (a rehabpatient) parallels the division of the subject introducedby sound and optical recording devices. This parallel is made particularly clear when Arctor describes the experience of watching surveillance footage of himself: "They say you never recognize your own voice when you first hear it played back on tape. And when you see yourself on video tape, or like this, in a 3-D hologram, you don't recognize yourself visually either. You imagined you were a tall fat man with black hair, and instead you're a tiny thin woman with no hair at all" (742). Arctor's experience supportsKittler's claim that "filmsanatomize the imaginary picture of the body that endows humans ... with a borrowed I" (Gramophone 150). By underminingLacan's mirror stage, in other words, optical media reveal thatthe conceptsof "theinner self, the individual... were only the effects 80 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006) of an illusion, neutralizedthrough the hallucinationof reading and widespread literacy" (151). This confusion of identity is further emphasized by Arctor's "scramble suit," which constantly changes his exterior appearance. The suit contains a memory bank that "held up to a million and a half physiognomic fraction-representationsof variouspeople: men andwomen, children,with every variant encoded and then projected outward in all directions equally onto a superthinshroudlike membrane large enough to fit aroundan average human" (664). Arctor adds that this suit was originally inspired by a drug-induced hallucination, in which the inventor "watchedthousands of Picasso paintings replace one another at flash-cut speed" (663). The suit thus embodies the similarities between visual hallucinationsand film technology, both of which threatenthe autonomyand integrityof the individualsubject. The hallucinationthat inspired the "scramblesuit" was based on a vision Dick himself experiencedwhile experimentingwith large doses of water-soluble vitamins: "One night I found myself flooded with colored graphics which resembledthe nonobjectivepaintings of Kandinskyand Klee, thousandsof them one after the other, so fast as to resemble 'flash cut' use in movie work" (Letters 142). This experimentwas an attemptto stimulateboth hemispheresof his brain simultaneously,which was based on the research on split-brainphenomena he had conductedin preparationfor writingA ScannerDarkly. He was particularly interested in the work of Robert E. Ornstein at Stanford University, who claimed that the brain contains two separate minds. Dick outlined Ormstein's work in his 1976 essay "Man, Android, and Machine": FromOrnstein's work it wouldappear that ... we have two entirelyseparate brains,rather than one braindivided into two bilaterallyequal hemispheres.... [E]achbrain works its own uniqueway (the left is like a digitalcomputer; the right much like an analoguecomputer, working by comparingpatterns). Processingthe identicalinformation, each may arriveat a totallydifferent result-whereupon,since our personality is constructedin ourleft brain,if the rightbrain finds something vital that we to its left remainunaware of, it must communicateduring sleep, during the dream; hence the Dreamer who communi- catesto us so urgentlyin the nightis locatedneurologically, evidently, in our rightbrain, which is the not-I.(220-21) Dick thus describes the difference between consciousness and the unconscious as the gap between digital and analog technologies, and he even speculatesthat "our 'unconscious' is not an unconscious at all but anotherconsciousness, with which we have a tenuous relationship"(220). This notion of dual personalities existing within the same brain, which function as independentcommunication networks modeled on information technologies, was clearly the basis for Arctor's split subjectivityin A ScannerDarkly. The idea that schizophrenia,drugs, and media technologies could reveal or even produce a confluence of minds is a theme that recurs throughoutDick's work. In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch the drug Can-D enables a collective experience in which the users' minds "fuse" and their individual identities are exchanged for a composite identity or "new unity" (17). Like SubstanceD, therefore, Can-D also fragmentsthe users' sense of self, yet the MEDIA,DRUGS, AND SCHIZOPHRENIAIN P.K. DICK 81 novel's judgmentof this drug is much more ambiguous.While "sensualists"like Sam Regan believe it is simply an escapist fantasy that allows users to "gain something ... to which we're not normally entitled" (29-30), "spiritualists" conceive of the "miracle of translation" as a "near-sacred moment" of communion(26) that "providesa reason for living" (17). It is thus the collective aspectof this experiencethat creates the possibility for empathyand prevents the hallucinatoryworld from degeneratinginto a closed, entropic circuit. The ambiguous nature of Can-D reflects conflicting attitudes towards television during the 1960s. The use of "Perky Pat layouts," for example, illustratesthe role that productplacement plays in the colonists' drug culture, just as television programmingwas designed primarilyto serve advertisers,yet the inherently communal and even spiritual element of television was also praised by media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan, who claimed that television was "above all, an extension of the sense of touch, which involves maximal interplay of all the senses" (290). Unlike a film, whose viewer is "moredisposed to be a passive consumerof actions," McLuhanargues that "the TV image demandsparticipation and involvementin depth of the whole being" (291), and it therefore encourages "over-all considerationof human unity" by "instantlyinterrelating every humanexperience" (310-311). The hallucinations inspired by Can-D similarly engage all of the users' senses, and rather than acting as passive consumers, they become active players in the narrativesthat unfold; indeed, they gradually become so involved in their mutually shared experiences that they lose all sense of self until the hallucinationswear off. This idea is elaboratedin Dick's discussion of the television religion known as "Mercerism,"which first appearsin his 1964 short story "The Little Black Box." In this story, Mercerism is described in much the same way that Rosen describes the "HammersmithMood Organ"in We CanBuild You:just as Rosen makes a distinctionbetween music and cortical stimulationas creative/escapist (a distinctionhe later dismisses), Joan Hiashi describes Mercerismas a genuine form of experience in contrastto the escapist kinds that have saturatedsociety: "If we only could suffer, she thought. That's what we lack, any real experience of suffering, because we can escape anything" ("Little Black" 20). The authenticnature of suffering in Mercerismis emphasizedby the fact thatit is not only inscribed in the flesh (when Mercer is injured, the participant's body receives the same injury), but it is also a communal experience. Like the hallucinationsproduced by Can-D, Mercerismrepresents a consensusreality that engages all of the participants'senses, and empathy is the key to its spiritual appeal: "[T]he communion, the participation that is behind all religion.... Religion binds men together in a sharing, corporate body" (23). Like film, therefore, Mercerism is a media technology that reveals that the concept of the self is an illusion, and it replicates the experience of losing oneself that is already implicit in the consciousness/memorydivide. The emphasis it places on suffering also illustratesMcLuhan's claim that the electric media environment transformsthe world into a "global village," in which people "live in a clutch of spontaneoussynesthesia, painfully aware of the triumphsand wounds of one another" (McLuhan and Powers 95). The collective nature of this suffering 82 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006) allows Dick's protagoniststo break out of the solipsistic universes depicted in many of his other narratives. The notion that Mercerists representa spiritualand potentially subversive community is complicated in Do AndroidsDream of Electric Sheep?, which introducesa certainambiguity as to whetherthese mediatedexperiences actually representescapist fantasiesthat have been sanctionedor even developed by the governmentin order to ensure that the populationremains passive. As Buster Friendly points out: "Ask yourselves what it is that Mercerism does. Well, if we're to believe its many practitioners,the experience fuses ... men andwomen throughoutthe Sol System into a single entity. But an entity which is manageable by the so-called telepathic voice of 'Mercer.' Mark that. An ambitious politically mindedwould-be Hitler could-" (Do Androids473-474). This claim seems to blur McLuhan's distinction between the film viewer as passive consumer and the television viewer as involved participant,yet it is ultimately dismissed by the end of the novel, when Mercer rescues J.R. Isidore from the "tomb world" he collapses into after Pris kills the spider (476-77). Mercer's "timereversal faculty," which also recalls the "timeaxis manipulation"enabled by media technologies, is thus once again associated with the existential psychiatrists'time-based concept of being. By reversing the direction of time, halting the process of entropy, and raising the dead, Mercer enables his followers to break out of the stasis of schizophreniaand experience being as the process of growth and becoming. Indeed, throughoutthis novel Dick appearsto be far less interestedin the issue of media control and appropriationthan he is in the role that media technologies play in the experience of being itself. This is perhapsmost clearly illustratedin Deckard's quasi-mysticalexperience on the hillside in the penultimatechapter, when he fuses with Mercer without the aid of an empathybox. This telepathicfusion representsa mergingof consciousness and media technologies, as Deckard's percept-systemprovides direct access to Mercer's transmissions,and it is a logical extension of Mercerismitself, which was always already an essentially telepathicexperience. Dick first discussed his interest in telepathy in his 1964 essay "Drugs, Hallucinations,and the Quest for Reality," in which he argues that hallucinations represent authentic phenomena that other people are simply unable to perceive: "[E]xternalreality" consists of a subjectiveframework by the perceptsystem ... but how do unwanted, even frightening, and certainly not commonly shared "hallucinations"creep in? Up until the last three or four years it would have been generally agreed that these invasions ... originate in the person, at some level of the neurologicalstructure, but ... research, especially with hallucinatory drugs, points to the probability,whether we like it or not, that, as in the case of Jan Ehrenwald'sparanoids, the percept system of the organism is overperceiving....[T]he overperception emanates from outside the organism; the perceptsystem of theorganism is perceivingwhat is actuallythere, and it should not be doingso, becauseto do so is to makethe cognitiveprocess impossible, however real the entities perceived are. The problem actually seems to be that MEDIA, DRUGS, AND SCHIZOPHRENIAIN P.K. DICK 83

ratherthan "seeing what isn't there" the organism is seeing what is there-but no one else does. (172-73; emphasis in original) In his 1947 book Telepathyand Medical Psychology, Jan Ehrenwaldsimilarly concludedthat schizophrenic hallucinations represent the telepathicreception of "hetero-psychicmaterial, " or otherpeople's thoughts(141). He even speculated that telepathicsensitivity might cause schizophrenia,as these hallucinations may culminatein a state of deliriumor confusion, followed by a break-downand disintegration of the personality. At this stage the boundariesof the self are abolished.... Seen from the angle of the telepathyhypothesis this state marksthe end of the patient's struggle to maintain his personality against the impact of hetero-psychicinfluences. (147) Ehrenwald'sdescription of telepathicschizophrenia clearly recalls the "psycho- kineticist" Richard Kongrosian in Dick's 1964 novel The Simulacra, who is unableto distinguishbetween himself andhis environment.At the same time his body absorbs the objects aroundhim, such as a desk, a vase, and a gun, his internalorgans begin to manifest outside of his skin: In the spot where the vase had been, Nicole saw, forming into a density and mass and color, a complicatedtangle of interwovenorganic matter, smooth red tubes and what appearedto be portionsof an endocrinesystem.... The organ, whatever it was, regularlypulsed; it was alive and active.... "I'mturning inside out!" Kongrosian wailed. "Pretty soon if this keeps up I'm going to have to envelop the entire universe and everything in it, and the only thing that'll be outside me will be my internal organs and then most likely I'll die!" (202; emphasis in original) Kongrosian'sdisintegration represents a mirrorimage of Merceristcommunion, as both phenomenaeffectively implode the boundariesbetween the self and the environment. Despite the fact that telepathy represented a threat to the integrity of the subject, Dick experimentedwith water-soluble vitamins in order to boost his psychic activity: "I had read about which vitamins in megadoses can improve neural firing and producevastly increasedbrain efficiency" (Letters 141). Like Garson Poole in "The Electric Ant," therefore, Dick wanted to increase the amountof informationhis braincould process, andhe was particularlyinterested in the informationthat people typically perceive as noise: "I tried again and again to exclude the ordinaryexternal electrical fields that we customarilytune into: man-madefields, which we consider 'signal,' and at the same time I tried to directly transducewhat we usually think of as 'noise,' in particularweak naturalelectrical fields" (Letters 142-43). Dick reportedthat he was able not only to increase his "neuralefficiency" but also to receive informationfrom a "CosmicTeletype Operator," who transmitted"information in the form of print- outs: words and sentences, letters and names and numbers-sometimes whole pages, sometimes in the form of writing paper and holographic writing, sometimes, oddly, in the form of a baby's cereal box on which all sorts of quite meaningfulinformation was written and typed" (Letters 143). He claimed that he was tappinginto a "broadcast"that "radiatesout in all directions and some 84 SCIENCEFICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006) people tune in, some do not," yet he sometimes failed "to transduceproperly (error at the receiving end) or else there is a lapse of accuratetransmission (as if the teletype operatorhas his fingers on the wrong line of keys, etc.)," which producedtexts like the following: 832 835 5412960 Eleanor Mr. Arensky Mrs. Aramcheck Sadasa Ulna 17 Command-Odd G- 12 5242681 P-13 (Letters 145) This list of names, words, and numbersrepresents a prime example of Shannon and Weaver's concept of "information entropy," as the randomness and unpredictabilityof the message is so great that it graduallydevolves into noise. Yet Dick comparedthe teletype operatorto the mysteriousforce describedin his 1969 novel Ubik: "Ubik talks to us from the future, from the end state to which everything is moving; thus Ubik is not here-which is to say now-but will be, and what we get is informationabout and from Ubik, as we receive TV or radio signals from transmitterslocated in other spaces in this time continuum"(Letters 144). Like "Ubik," therefore, Dick saw this cosmic transmitteras fundamentally anti-entropic because it not only liberated him from his own unconscious feedback loops, but was also primarily future-oriented.Dick even speculated that the novel Ubikmay have been unconsciously "writtenthrough" him by the teletype operator in order to explain the natureof these transmissions(Letters 144). This theory is outlined in greater detail in "Man, Android, and Machine," which describes the teletype operatoras Jung's collective unconscious: [T]his collective brainentity, consisting of literally billions of "stations,7"which transmitand receive, would form a vast network of communication.... This is the noosphere ... a layer in our earth's atmospherecomposed of holographicand informationalprojections ... the sources of which are our manifoldright brains. This constitutesa vast Mind. (221-22) The conceptof the "noosphere"is takenfrom PierreTeilhard de Chardin's 1959 book The Phenomenon of Man, in which he argues that human minds will graduallyevolve into a collective form of consciousnessthat will cover the entire planet. Reviewers of the book noted that "Teilhard'sradial, spiritual,or psychic energy may be equatedto 'information'or 'informationcontent' in the sense that has been made reasonably precise by modem communications engineers" (Medawar 103), yet Dick takes this comparisoneven furtherby suggestingthat the noosphere will also derive its power from communicationstechnologies: MEDIA, DRUGS, AND SCHIZOPHRENIAIN P.K. DICK 85

[T]he noospherecontained thought patterns in the form of very weak energy until we developed radio transmissions;whereupon the energy level of the noosphere went out of bounds and assumed a life of its own. It no longer served as a mere passive repository of human information ... but, due to the incredible surge of charge from our electronic signals and the information-richmaterial therein, we have given it power to cross a vast threshold.... Informationhas, then, become alive, with a collective mind of its own independentof our brains. ("Man"224) Dick thus conceives of the collective unconsciousas a mediatechnology capable of storing and generating information, like a tape recorder creating its own symphoniesor a librarywriting its own books (224). Like Mercerism,therefore, communicationwith the noosphere is a spiritual, communal, and full-sensory experience, and because it can be performed without any hardware, it also resembles Deckard's telepathic fusion with Mercer in the penultimatechapter of Do AndroidsDream of Electric Sheep? These theories play a significant role in the narrative of VALIS,which represents perhaps the ultimate convergence of Dick's interests in media technologies, cortical stimulation, drugs, schizophrenia, and telepathy. The narrative is a loosely-disguised account of his communications from the noosphere, and the narratordescribes the effects of these transmissionson his brain (in the thirdperson) using Penfield's terminology: "Sites of his brainwere being selectively stimulated by tight energy beams emanating from far off, perhapsmillions of miles away. These selective brain-sitestimulations generated in his head the impression-for him-that he was in fact seeing and hearing words, pictures, figures of people, printed pages" (24). He receives these transmissionsin the form of "pinklight," which he describes as a "phosphene after-image"that sometimes appears "on a TV screen" (20). This process of informationreception and patternrecognition is reenacted within the narrativewhen Phil andhis friends watch the film VALIS,which they describe as a vehicle for "informationtransfer" (144). The film's soundtrack consists of "SynchronicityMusic," which is composed of "computer-created randomsounds" (139), and Phil speculatesthat the "subliminalmaterial" in the film is "encoded"in this "randommusic" (144). Because "ninetypercent of the details are designed to go by ... your conscious mind" and "register in your unconscious," Phil and his friends express a desire "to study the film frame by frame" (146). The problem of informationoverload is thus described in much the same way that Dick previouslydescribed schizophrenia: "The schizophrenic is having it all now, whether he wants it or not; the whole can of film has descended on him" ("Schizophrenia"176). Milton Glaub, the psychiatrist in MartianTime-Slip, similarly claims thatthe schizophrenic"is unableto perceive properly, precisely as we would be if we faced a speeded-up television program"(41). In orderto sift throughthe mass of subliminalmaterial contained in the film, Kevin claims that "you'd have to take a fucking magnifying glass and go over stills from the flick, single-framestills. One by one by one by one" (149). This statement also recalls Glaub's proposed experiment to place an autistic child in a "closed chamber, where he faced a screen on which filmed sequences were projected slow down" (41). 86 SCIENCEFICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)

In other words, the film VALISdisorients the viewer's perceptionof time in the same way that schizophreniadoes, and this is emphasizedwhen Kevin adds that "we're getting retinallag" (VALIS149). The parallels between the process of recognizingpatterns in the film and the process of interpretingmessages from VALIS are also emphasized when Phil points out that this "retinal lag" is a result of "[p]hospheneactivity ... [i]n the retinas of the audience"(149), which implies that the film radiates the same "pink light" that VALIS is transmitting directly into his brain. VALISthus repeatedly representsconsciousness as the interplaybetween a perceptualapparatus and a recordingdevice, yet it carries this concept to anotherlevel by conceiving of the recording device itself as a means of tapping directly into the unconscious. Media technologies not only promise to extend cognitive functioningand increase neuralefficiency, but they also provide spiritualexperiences that dissolve the boundariesof the self. VALISappropriately ends with Phil sitting in front of his television set, decipheringsubliminal messages in commercialsand waiting for furtherdivine revelations(228). Phil's obsession with patternrecognition appears to illustrate Kittler's definition of paranoia as recognition itself: "When the symbolic of signs, numbersand lettersexercises controlover so-called realities, the securing of traces becomes the first obligation of the paranoid" ("Media and Drugs" 162). Dick's notion of schizophrenia,however, was entirely different. Rather than representinga static, closed circuit, the transmissionsfrom the noosphere provide a constantstream of informationfrom outside the subject, which seems to embody the process of growth and becoming thatthe existentialpsychothera- pists describe as the very nature of being. Dick's personal revelatory experiences are thus fundamentallydifferent from Kemmings's "tombworld" in "I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon" or the world of the doomed crew in A Maze of Death (1970), who are trappedin a computersimulation where they endlessly recycle their own anxieties and hostilities. Instead,his quasi-mysticalexperiences more closely resemble Poole's desire, in "The Electric Ant," to receive, process, and store ever greaterquantities of information.Hagen thus offers perhapsthe most useful approachto understandingthe importanceof mediatechnologies in Dick's work, as his attemptsto discern patternsin noise repeatedlyillustrate the notion thatthe "languageof media" represents"a linguistic structurearticulated by the unconscious" (113; my translation). The element in Dick's early fiction that remains consistent throughouthis late theological writings is his desire to tap into this language. WORKS CITED Binswanger, Ludwig. "The Case of Ellen West." Existence. Ed. Rollo May et al. Northvale, NJ: Aronson, 1994. 237-364. Bukatman,Scott. TerminalIdentity: The VirtualSubject in PostmodernScience Fiction. Durham:Duke UP, 1993. Burroughs,William S. The Job. New York: Grove, 1974. Dick, Philip K. "The Android and the Human." 1972. The ShiftingRealities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings.Ed. Lawrence Sutin. New York: Pantheon, 1995. 183-210. MEDIA, DRUGS, AND SCHIZOPHRENIAIN P.K. DICK 87

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McLuhan, Marshall, and B.R. Powers. The Global Village: Transformationsin World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1989. Medawar, P.B. Review of ThePhenomenon of Man by Pierre Teilhardde Chardin.Mind 70.277 (January1961): 99-106. Palmer, Christopher. "Postmodernismand the Birth of the Author in Philip K. Dick's Valis." SFS 18.3 (November 1991): 330-42. Penfield, Wilder. The Excitable Cortex in Conscious Man. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 1958. . "TheInterpretive Cortex: The Streamof Consciousnessin the HumanBrain Can Be Electrically Reactivated." Science 129 (June 1959): 1719-25. and Phanor Perot. "The Brain's Record of Auditory and Visual Experience." Brain 86 (December 1963): 596-695. Penfield, Wilder, and Lamar Roberts. Speech and Brain Mechanisms. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1959. Rickman, Gregg. To the High Castle: Philip K. Dick: A Life: 1928-1962. Long Beach, CA: FragmentsWest/Valentine, 1989. Roberts, Mark S. "Wired: Schreber As Machine, Technophobe, and Virtualist." ExperimentalSound and Radio. Ed. Allen S. Weiss. Cambridge,MA: MIT, 2001. 27-41. Schreber, Daniel Paul. Denkwiirdigkeiteneines Nervenkranken.1903. Berlin: Kadmos Verlag, 1995. Shannon,Claude E., and WarrenWeaver. TheMathematical Theory of Communication. Urbana: U Illinois P, 1963. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. The Phenomenonof Man. London: Collins, 1959. Wellbery, David E. "Foreword."Discourse Networks 1800/1900. 1985. By Friedrich A. Kittler. Trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens. Stanford:Stanford UP, 1990. vii-xxxiii. Wolk, Anthony. "The Swiss Connection:Psychological Systems in the Novels of Philip K. Dick." Philip K. Dick: ContemporaryCritical Interpretations.Ed. Samuel J. Umland. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995. 101-26. ABSTRACT This essay employs the work of Germanmedia theorists FriedrichKittler and Wolfgang Hagen to introducea new way of understandingthe role of media technologies in Philip K. Dick's fiction. Dick incorporatesmaterial from a wide range of scientific fields in orderto formulatea conceptualmodel of consciousnessas a medial interface, thoroughly integratedwith the electric media environment,thus illustratingKittler's claim that the discovery of the unconscious followed a "media logic." Dick also combines the time- based theory of schizophreniadeveloped by existential psychotherapistswith the time- axis manipulationmade possible by film in order to describe unconscious processes as cinematographiceffects, supportingHagen's notionthat schizophrenic hallucinations and media technologies both reflect "a linguistic structurearticulated by the unconscious." Instead of describing the boundary problems in Dick's fiction as an effect of late capitalist surveillance systems, as much previous scholarship on the author does, this essay shows how they illustrate the interpenetrationof consciousness and media technologies.