Media, Drugs, and Schizophrenia in the Works of Philip K. Dick Author(S): Anthony Enns Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol
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SF-TH Inc 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 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=sfth. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. SF-TH Inc is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Science Fiction Studies. 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 simulta- neously 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 that consciousness 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