It occurred to me that it might help to provide a radical
literalist reading of some works in order to better get at what and how this
works as a philosophical lens or mode of thinking. To begin with I have chosen one of my favorite science
fiction authors (of which there are many), Philip K. Dick. I think that he works particularly well
for the discussion because he dealt with many of the themes that David Foster
Wallace was concerned with (reality and humanity namely), and his writing is
familiar to most in that so many of his stories and novels have been made into
movies.
So, before I advance any further, I will warn readers that
there my be some spoilers in the following post, so be aware of this if you
feel that you want to read P.K.D. without having anything ruined. I will say though that it might be
impossible to ‘spoil’ Dick’s works, which hold up to multiple readings and
interpretations and are just such a cool and weird experience that explaining
them is akin to explaining the Grand Canyon or anything spectacular in nature
that really just ‘has to be seen.’
It might be best to start with Dick’s essay “How to Build a
Universe That Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” in that this essay deals with
how Dick thinks of reality. I
think that this is cogent in that ‘reality’ and honesty and the literal are
somehow all related. Dick begins
the essay by saying, “the two basic topics which fascinate me are ‘What is
reality?’ and ‘What constitutes the authentic human being?’ (2). Dick was concerned with authenticity
and truth, both of which for him were part of what constitutes reality.
The idea of reality in the singular was incredibly
complicated for Dick, and a concept he didn’t seem to believe in at all. First he talks about what might be
going on in a dog’s head, a dog’s version of reality and that this reality is
certainly different for the dog than it is for him, which leads him to believe
that his reality is different from other humans. This leads him to wonder, “If reality differs from person to
person, can we speak of reality in the singular, or shouldn’t we really be
talking about plural realities?” (2).
Dick is saying that reality is nothing more than a rational (or
irrational as the case may be) construct made by individual human minds. Sure, there might be what is called a
‘consensus view of reality’, that which most humans agree is real – most often
what the senses can verify – but what of those things that lie beyond the
senses? Dick postulates this as a
rather slap-dash definition for reality: “Reality is that which, when you stop
believing in it, doesn’t go away” (3).
This is nice as it goes. I
am fine with reality and belief existing separately, but this then makes me
wonder if ‘belief’ is real? This
then leads me to wonder if belief is part of our inner intellectual and
emotional makeup and if in turn that is capital R ‘real’? I believe so, and I think Dick does as
well, and it is this that I think radical literalism is getting at. Belief and reality are separate, but
belief is real all the same.
Discussing the concept of reality is tough, but I think it
is at the heart of radical literalism.
Reality is subjective in so many ways. Dick writes, “as soon as you begin to ask what is ultimately
real, you right away begin talking nonsense” (5). I think there is a lot of truth in this statement. The real is formed in many ways inside
of us. We can all agree that the
desk we sit at is real, or the person whom we hug at night is real, but is
there a consensus on what love is or how it operates in this same real
world? It isn’t the empirical that
we question or get at when we talk of the real, it is the amorphous and the
intangible that we most often poke at and prod.
Dick further complicates the idea of reality by separating
it from the idea of truth. He sees
reality as something that can be manipulated, “The basic tool for the
manipulation of reality is the manipulation of words. If you control the meaning of words, you can control the
people who must use the words” (7).
Again, I have talked about in my blog post “Radical Literalism
Succinctly Defined (Sort of)” that words themselves are metaphoric or symbolic
representations of actual items, thoughts, ideas, concepts etc. Dick is suggesting that these symbols
can also be tools of manipulation and that not only do they represent reality,
they can create reality. He goes
on to say, “But another way to control the minds of people is to control their
perceptions. If you can get them
to see the world as you do, they will think as you do. Comprehension follows perception”
(7). Now we have words as reality
creation and reality creation as perception creation all of which serves to
control. Dick has literalized the
world of words in that words now have the direct and nearly tangible power to
control one’s reality.
From this we can extrapolate that Dick viewed writing as a
way to make tangible and therefore literalize his own thoughts and therefore
his own reality, which in turn augments the reality of his readers.
It might help to think of Dick’s writing in terms of
feedback loops. Negative feedback
loops look to maintain homeostasis, or an even equilibrium, which then causes a
pendulum swing as systems attempt to find balance towards a central set
point. For Dick this oscillation
might be produced by one simple question: “what is reality?” (2), with
‘reality’ operating as the set point or spot at which equilibrium is attained. What Dick does that is interesting,
though, is not to attempt to create, or portray a negative feedback loop, but
instead to create works that employ positive feedback loops, which add
amplification away from the target or set point. He says, “Our memories are
spurious, like our memories of dreams; the blanks are filled in retrospectively.” He does not trust memories, which, it
might be argued, are one of the prime builders of reality (especially in
non-fiction writing). He goes on
to say that not only are memories filled in, but also that they are
“falsified”, which means, “We have participated unknowingly in the creation of
a spurious reality, and then we have obligingly fed it to ourselves. We have colluded in our own doom”,
which then makes us, “victims of [our] own product” (7). This is a negative feedback loop in that
we, as humans, have a set point for what it is we conceive to be reality, and
we then doctor or “fill in” out past, our memories, to suit that notion, which
then takes us closer to the set point. Normally we, as humans and readers, tend
to try and get closer to reality.
So, taking reality as the set point, a positive feedback loop, such as
those Dick builds in his texts, would tend to swing or oscillate further and
further away from this. This is
why Dick’s stories tend to feel less and less real as they go on.
It seemed that for Dick it was easier to get at notions of
reality by looking closely at the unreal via positive feedback loops. Dick says
that, “I like to build universes which do fall apart” (4) so, again, we can see
that he was working with positive feedback loops in that he wanted his stories
to progress further from the set point of reality. The implication here being that he starts his stories with
moments or in places recognizable enough to readers to feel real, and then he
goes about tearing these places apart in order to question reality – Dick is
questioning what is real by taking a close look at what we normally think of as
clearly unreal.
In the short story “I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon”, Dick
creates a character named Victor Kemmings who is in a “homeostatic device”
which is showing a “malfunction” (455). What Dick does with this is to create a
situation in which it is not the physical condition of Victor that is in
trouble, but it is his consciousness that is in danger. The danger is that he will be
“conscious for ten years”, which means that the ship’s computer will have to
“feed” Victor “sensory stimulation” (456). There has been a disassembly where
the body and consciousness are now separate. So what Dick does here is to literalize the concept or idea
that the mind and body can exist separately. Instead of intellectualizing the concept, Dick literally
pulls Victor’s mind out of his body and places it in the control of his ship’s
onboard computer’s matrix.
In A Scanner Darkly a
drug called Substance D operates to literally disassemble user’s identities as
well. In the book Fred, the story’s protagonist, finds that he needs to
reassure himself of his identity as his drug use continues, “When you get down
to it, I’m Arctor” (168). He goes
on to lament, “I’m slushed; my brain is slushed” (168). Fred here is starting confuse his own
identity with his undercover persona, that of Arctor. Substance D has created a rift in Fred and he is starting to
come apart. Later, during an examination
by psychologists, Fred/Arctor is told that his brain is sending “two signals
that interfere with each other by carrying conflicting information” (208). The psychologists go on to say,
“bilateral function is not mere duplication; both percept systems monitor and
process incoming data differently…one tells you one thing, the other another”
(210). The suggestion here is that
both Arctor and Fred are becoming real; the split is becoming literal and not
just perceived (or mis-perceived).
Fred’s/Arctor’s brain is split in two, and each half encapsulates a
personality, each of which inform, spy upon, and question the other. The psychologists say of this, “It is
as if one hemisphere of your brain is perceiving the world as reflected in a
mirror. Through a mirror. See? So left becomes right, and all
that that implies” (212). It is at this point that he receives a final moniker:
Bruce. This new persona (Bruce) is
the result of a complete disassembly of the original Fred persona. Not only has the original persona come
apart, but also now Bruce, the nearly catatonic leftover personality, has no
sense of reality any more. Bruce
is the result of two competing realities both of which contradict the other
resulting in a deep sense that nothing is real. Dick is talking about the dangers of drugs, which have the
ability to change the ways in which people construct reality and the ways
people perceive the world. He does
this by literalizing the split in personality, by literalizing disconnection
and disassembly.
While many of Dick’s stories and novels employ a positive
feedback loop-like structure to get at notions of reality, Dick seemed to fear
that in society these problems operated more like a recursive feedback loop,
which is to say that drugs and technology feed into the ways humans behave,
which in turn feeds back into the ways that people manufacture both drugs and
technology, all of which is like a snake eating its own tale. Dick says of all the detrimental recursive
loop-like aspect of technology that,
the problem is a real one, not a
mere intellectual game. Because
today we live in a society in which spurious realities are manufactured by the
media, by governments, by big corporations, by religious groups, political
groups – and the electronic hardware exists by which to deliver these
pseudo-worlds right into the heads of the reader, the viewer, the listener (3).
He sees reality as something that can be ‘manufactured’ and
his concern is that individuals, or maybe even humans as a whole, are not the one’s
doing the manufacturing, but instead that reality is being determined by
outside forces, whether those forces are corporate, the media, or other.
*
Science fiction is a great vehicle for the radically
literal. It allows for the
creation of landscapes and ‘realities’ that recontextualize reader’s
senses. Science fiction writers
aren’t relegated to talking about alienation as a concept, they can simply
plant an alien (from another world or system) into our world; in other words,
they can create a literal alien.
This is essentially the plotline of The Man Who Fell to Earth and
Starman and a host of others.