P.K. Dick

Dick’s work takes up a major “event” of post-modern culture: the “death of the subject.” If this death is characterized by the closing of the aesthetically-mediated distance which once separated the subject of desire from the social object-world and by desire’s correlative immediate investment in the social, it entails in Dick’s work not the abolition of negation, but its re-emergence in an intensive experience immanent to the everyday itself. Dick attempts to think the immanent negation lived by the dissolving subject of late-capitalist everyday life in terms of a radically contestatory politics of experience associated with the emerging counter-cultures of the ’60s. But as his work progresses, Dick must increasingly confront the following questions at the level of form: What is the relation of the narrating authorial subject to the dissolving subject whose intensive experience it narrates? Does the authorial subject undergo the death for which it attempts to account? And if so. by what ruse does it narrate its own death? These questions are not only formal, but political, for upon their resolution depends the constitution of a counter-memory for the counter-cultural project out of which Dick’s work emerges. Dick’s attempt, in A Scanner Darkly, to resolve them within the formal limits of ST leads to a political impasse: in VALIS, he attempts to resolve them by abandoning not only SF, but perhaps even literature as such, in favor of what one might describe as a liberation-theology of late capitalism. (SD)

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• The Shunts in the Tale

  Umberto Rossi, Umberto Rossi Umberto Rossi•Science Fiction Studies•2012

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