Georgia State University ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University English Dissertations Department of English 4-21-2009 "Nam-Shub versus the Big Other: Revising the Language that Binds Us in Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, Samuel R. Delany, and Chuck Palahniuk" Jason Michael Embry Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Embry, Jason Michael, ""Nam-Shub versus the Big Other: Revising the Language that Binds Us in Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, Samuel R. Delany, and Chuck Palahniuk"." Dissertation, Georgia State University, 2009. https://scholarworks.gsu.edu/english_diss/46 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Department of English at ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. It has been accepted for inclusion in English Dissertations by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks @ Georgia State University. For more information, please contact [email protected]. NAM-SHUB VERSUS THE BIG OTHER: REVISING THE LANGUAGE THAT BINDS US IN PHILIP K. DICK, NEAL STEPHENSON, SAMUEL R. DELANY, AND CHUCK PALAHNIUK by JASON M. EMBRY Under the Direction of Chris Kocela ABSTRACT Within the science fiction genre, utopian as well as dystopian experiments have found equal representation . This balanced treatment of two diametrically opposed social constructs results from a focus on the future for which this particular genre is well known . Philip K. Dick’s VALIS , Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash , Samuel R. Delany’s Babel-17 , and Chuck Palahniuk’s Lullaby , more aptly characterized as speculative fiction because of its use of magic against scientific social subjugation, each tackle dystopian qualities of contemporary society by analyzing the power that language possesses in the formation of the self and propagation of ideology . The utopian goals of these texts advocate for a return to the modernist metanarrative and a revision of postmodern cynicism because the authors look to the future for hopeful solutions to the social and ideological problems of today . Using Slavoj Žižek’s readings of Jacques Lacan and Theodor Adorno’s readings of Karl Marx for critical insight, I argue these four novels imagine language as the key to personal empowerment and social change . While not all of the novels achieve their utopian goals, they each evince a belief that the attempt belies a return to the modernist metanarrative and a rejection of postmodern helplessness . Thus, each novel imagines the revision of Žižek’s big Other through the remainders of Adorno’s inevitably failed revolutions, injecting hope in a literary period that had long since lost it. INDEX WORDS: Philip K. Dick, Neal Stephenson, Samuel R. Delany, Chuck Palahniuk, VALIS , Snow Crash , Babel-17 , Lullaby , American literature, Postmodernism, Modernism, Science fiction, Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan, Theodor Adorno, Metanarrative, Logos, Gnosticism, Utopia NAM-SHUB VERSUS THE BIG OTHER: REVISING THE LANGUAGE THAT BINDS US IN PHILIP K. DICK, NEAL STEPHENSON, SAMUEL R. DELANY, AND CHUCK PALAHNIUK by JASON M. EMBRY A Dissertation Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University 2009 Copyright by Jason M. Embry 2009 NAM-SHUB VERSUS THE BIG OTHER: REVISING THE LANGUAGE THAT BINDS US IN PHILIP K. DICK, NEAL STEPHENSON, SAMUEL R. DELANY, AND CHUCK PALAHNIUK by JASON M. EMBRY Committee Chair: Chris Kocela Committee: Nancy Chase Marti Singer Electronic Version Approved: Office of Graduate Studies College of Arts and Sciences Georgia State University May 2009 iv DEDICATION To my eternally patient wife, Kristen, and my beautiful daughter, Harper . Thank you both for enduring. v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks should go to Chris Kocela for guiding me through the formative moments of this piece with calm, ease, and constant reassurance . Thanks to Marti Singer for stepping up at the last minute and helping me push through to the very end . Thanks to Nancy Chase for being flexible with the constant delay of that very first draft . Finally, thanks to Ben Robertson and Lisa Yaszek for getting me involved in the science fiction academic community where many inspirational conversations have me eager for the next project. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER 1. THE PROPHETIC ANNOUNCEMENT 25 2. THE HACKER CODE 55 3. ARCHITECTS OF REALITY 85 4. RETURN TO THE MYSTERIOUS 113 CONCLUSIONS 150 WORKS CITED 158 WORKS CONSULTED 165 1 INTRODUCTION Being bodies that learn language/thereby becoming wordlings/humans are/the symbol- making, symbol-using, symbol-misusing animal/inventor of the negative/separated from our natural condition by instruments of our own making/goaded by the spirit of hierarchy/acquiring foreknowledge of death/and rotten with perfection. Kenneth Burke, The Rhetoric of Religion: Studies in Logology Kenneth Burke 1, twentieth century philosopher and rhetorician, argues that humans, in nature, created language and subjugated themselves to that language, thereby removing themselves from nature and condemning themselves to encounter the world from a distance. For this reason, humans only understand the world around them in opposition to themselves. This alterity 2 is the negative that is invented to acknowledge and cope with the Other 3 which only serves to further separate humans from other things and people instead of linking them together. These relationships are then classified and re-classified in never-ending attempts to capture their true qualities . Alterity lies at the center of Slavoj Žižek’s Hegelian reading of Jacques Lacan . Žižek explains the reason for alterity using Lacan’s “Three Orders” of the Imaginary, the Symbolic, and the Real . Žižek argues that the Imaginary 4 order has 1 Kenneth Burke was an 20 th century American philosopher and rhetorician who spent much of his career studying the social and political power language. He believed that by analyzing what language and its relation to the commentary on action people can better understand their motives and bring about change. 2 This term was coined by Emmanuel Levinas in a series of essays collected as Alterity and Transcendence and used by many philosophers and psychologists of the twentieth century to refer to the otherness experienced when two or more people are together. 3 The idea of the Other has a long and varied history. For the purposes of this argument, the Other should be attributed to Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and other German Idealists of the 18 th and 19 th century. In the early 20 th century, Jacques Lacan and Emmanuel Levinas popularized the phrase in relation to psychoanalysis of literature and critical social theory respectively. 4 The Imaginary order is the social reality that is constructed by language. It depends on the mutual agreement of language users. 2 the appearance of a complementary relationship between thesis and antithesis, the illusion that they form a harmonious Whole, filling out each other’s lack[….] This false appearance of a mutual completion is shattered by the immediate passage of an extreme into its opposite: how can an extreme fill out the lack of its other, when it is itself, in its very opposition to its other, this other?....What ‘holds together’ the two extremes is therefore not the mutual filling out of their respective lacks but the very lack they have in common . ( Tarrying with the Negative 123) The Imaginary order is interpreted by Žižek as that which we experience with other people and things . It has depth . It has connection to other events . It considers other elements in the grand design . It is the hopeful symbiosis of things . It is, for all intents and purposes, the world we see around us . The world is mediated by the language we use to understand it and the otherness that surrounds us . The Imaginary is dependent on the Symbolic relation, language, because it provides that structure for the events experienced within the Imaginary . Whereas the Imaginary is complementary, Žižek describes the Symbolic 5 as differential: the identity of each of the moments consists in its difference to the opposite moment . A given element does not fill in the lack of the other, it is not complementary to the other but, on the contrary, takes the place of the lack in the other , embodies what is lacking in the other: its positive presence is nothing but an objectification of a lack in its opposite element . The opposites, the poles of the symbolic relation, each in a way return to the other in its own lack; they are united on the basis of their common lack. ( The Sublime Object of Ideology 171-2) 3 This statement hits more closely upon what Burke means by the inherent dichotomy of language . Only through the Symbolic relation can people believe they connect with others and experience events as meaningful or important . These experiences illustrate Burke’s “symbol-making, symbol-using, symbol-misusing animal” who depends on language to relate to others . But we are perpetually “separated from our natural condition by instruments of our own making” because these symbols conceptually address a literal lack, a negative relation to the other . For Žižek, this negative relation serves to construct a deceptively “harmonious whole” comprised of the two or more people found using language, the Symbolic order, to connect . Within the Symbolic order lies the big Other 6, a policing agent that ensures proper behavior or, at the very least, the avoidance of impropriety . This big Other acts like the third person omniscient spectator from whom characters are always trying to hide their actions, but are forever unable to do so . The big Other effectively presides over the deceptive “harmonious whole” that is created by the interplay of the Symbolic and Imaginary relations . Žižek notes, “if individuals were able to co-ordinate their intentions via shared knowledge, there would be no need for the big Other” (Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder 138) .