PKD and the Subversive Context of the Imaginary

John Tarver

When I first became interested in the much-discussed 2-3-74 matter, that series of hallucinations Philip K. Dick experienced in early 1974, I was thinking about the beam of pink light that struck the forehead of the focal character in Radio Free Albemuth, reminded of Blake's encounter with the spirit of Milton, which fell like a falling star on Blake's (or his fictional surrogate's) tarsus in the poem "Milton". I queried PKD-List, an Internet mail server devoted to PKD's work, for other possible precursors of this aspect of the 2-3-74 matter. St. Paul's bedazzlement on the way to Tarsus was suggested several times, and finally, the following post arrived: "I don't know why you're looking for 'precursors.' The falling star in Milton is just a literary device. PKD's pink light was real. It really hit him in the head."

This post suggested a line I hadn't yet followed. Over and over in the novels in which PKD treats the 2-3-74 matter, a kind a wager is made with the reader: that the hallucinations have a truth value, an objectivity. And PKD uses this assertion of reality status for fantasy material to political effect. The contemporary symbolic is contextualized in a superior, beneficent, alien structure. Nixonian governmentality is a blind gnostic archon trapping humanity away from the alien techno-spiritual plenum. Here the archon's blindness, or visual immaturity, reminds me of Lacan's Imaginary Order, which is characterized by the mirror phase in infants and its emphasis on resemblance in the constitution of meaning. The contemporary symbolic now appears as infantile. My Internet respondent had, then, neatly contextualized me as a tool of literary structure.

The Lacanian "real" might be described as the area where the networks of cultural structure (the Symbolic Order) cannot complete themselves. The real is a kind of window out of the Symbolic. Desire is the desire to complete these networks, to make them whole and seamless. In seeking to complete, the subject projects fantasy material over (or into) the area of incompleteness, the aim being to form up a world that is knowable and controllable, to supply the missing signifier. The idea that the subject endows this fantasy material with a certain truth value is expressed in the ironic Lacanian label "the real". This discussion will approach PKD's 2-3-74 matter as an instance of the Lacanian "real" and show how this process of fantasy projection has a subversive political value in some of his later writing.

Philip K. Dick wrote three novels that make use of his so-called 2-3-74 experiences, a series of primarily visual hallucinations and dreams occurring in February and March of 1974 and through which he came in contact with the benevolent alien entity VALIS: A Scanner Darkly, written in 1973 (and rewritten in 1975); Radio Free Albemuth, written in 1976; and VALIS, written in 1978 (Sutin 1: 309-311). While Scanner does not work through the 2-3-74 matter as extensively as Radio and VALIS, the link between the three novels is clear. In Scanner, a researcher at Bell Labs injects himself with a "disinhibiting substance[ ] affecting neural tissue:

"[H]e had then witnessed lurid phosphene activity projected on the far wall of his bedroom, a frantically progressing montage of what, at the time, he imagined to be modern-day abstract paintings." (Scanner 22) The phosphene activity and rapid-fire abstract visuals appear in both later books (Radio 39, 99; VALIS 20, 106).

PKD, then, returned again and again to the 2-3-74 matter in the fact of his producing these three novels, but also, at least in Radio and VALIS, within the novels. Both Radio and VALIS can be classified as detective fictions, the central subject, who experiences the 2-3-74 matter, returning again and again to interpret and reinterpret the inscrutable alien object(s), figured successively and inter alia in Radio, for instance, as a "plasmatic" or gaseous life form existing in Earth's atmosphere (32), gnosticized extraterrestrial authority "greater than any human power" (51), Roman sibyl "who guards the Republic" (83), communications satellite from a distant star system (Albemuth) (111), and communications satellite from an alternate reality (Portuguese States of America) (133).

From a psycho-analytic perspective, the 2-3-74 matter functions as the site of anamorphotic signification, where "the surplus of a fantasy space fill[s] out the 'black hole' of the real" (Zizek viii). The 2-3-74 matter is, then, the ravel at the "end" of the Symbolic Order, and the return of PKD and of his central characters to explain this matter again and again enacts the circuitous desire of that Order to complete itself: In the first pages of Radio, when the central character, Nicholas, has the first of his "paranormal" or "mystical" experiences, he wakes to find a "figure" in his bedroom. When his wife wakes and begins to scream, Nicholas reassures her: "'Ich bin's!' Nicholas told her. . . . What he meant to tell her was that the figure was himself, 'Ich bin's' being the German idiom for that. It meant, literally, 'I am it'." Unlike Nicholas, his wife "wish[es] she was sure if [she] saw it" (Radio 10-11).

Another common feature in the three novels containing the 2-3-74 matter is the problematic relationship of the central character to himself. Scanner tells the familiar story of the undercover agent tainted by the culture he seeks to suppress. Here the undercover narc, Officer Fred, becomes both a dealer and user of Substance D, a "mind-splitting," highly addictive contraband drug, as part of his cover under the alias Bob Arctor. As the effect of the drug progresses, Fred's personality splits into Bob the dealer and Fred the narcotics agent, keeping watch via "holographic scanner" playback on Arctor, but eventually unaware that he is Arctor. In VALIS, the character Horselover Fat, his name a translation from Greek and German of "Philip" and "Dick," is the psychotic recipient of the 2-3-74 matter. Together with his understanding friend, the character and narrator Phil Dick (a science fiction writer), Horselover attempts to understand the meaning of the phosphene effects and the other 2-3-74 matter.

In Radio, the alienated identity relationship of the character Phil Dick, a science fiction writer, and Nicholas Brady, who experiences the 2-3-74 matter, is not made explicit; however, the structural correspondence of Nicholas with Horselover, as the bearer of the alien experience, becomes rather obvious after reading VALIS, for which Radio served as a kind of draft (Sutin 1: 311). PKD uses this dissociation of the subject as a kind of lever to move his writing out of fiction; that is, he begins to make a truth claim for the 2-3-74 matter. By the time VALIS appears, the narrative is at once hysteric and psychotic, arising from the perspective of the non-believer and of the fervent believer (he is). It is the SF writer PKD who tells this story, which is based on The Exegesis, a kind of diary of the 2-3-74 matter. If we line the novels up chronologically, this movement out of fiction comes clear: In Scanner, the 2-3-74 matter plays a relatively minor role. Neither half of the split subject is the character who receives this material, and neither is related to, or named as, a "real life" PKD. In an "Author's Note" at the end of the novel, however, PKD seems to step out from behind his fiction, to discourage drug abuse, and to explain his relation to the writing: "I myself, I am not a character in this novel; I am the novel" (277).

This de-fictionalizing leverage becomes more organized in Radio. The 2-3-74 matter becomes central to the story, and the "author" moves from the "Author's Note" into the diegetic reality of the narrative itself. Phil Dick, the SF writer, becomes a primary character, allied with Nicholas, the recipient of the 2-3-74 matter. This movement of the author into the fiction, the fictionalizing of the author, has the paradoxical effect of substantiating (realitizing?) the fiction, as diary, apologia, autobiography. The concept of a split subject, however, is avoided, and the more or less conventional resistance-adventure plot keeps the writing safe within the boundaries of fiction.

VALIS, like Radio, might be described as a kind of detective fiction. What is latent in Radio is manifest here: the narrator and the main character are explicitly written as dissociated halves of the same person, but not at first: "I [Phil Dick] am Horselover Fat, and I am writing this in the third person to gain much-needed objectivity. I am by profession, a science fiction writer. The night before, Bob and I, I mean, Bob and Horselover Fat, drove to Oakland to see Patton" (11-12). Horselover here is not so much dissociated from the diarist PKD as just another term for PKD. The purpose of this term for the narrating subject is only "objectivity"; that is to say, this negligible splitting of the subject is already the making of a claim on truth. As this conceit progresses, however, the term "Horselover" acquires a reality independent of the narrating subject, as, for instance, when Phil writes that he and Horselover both interact within a group of friends (26-27), when Phil writes that he and Horselover glance at each other (188), and when Phil writes that he receives a mailgram from Horselover (221). The parallel to the movement in Scanner from purposeful simulation to dissociation is striking. Where the dissociated subject receives some measure of reintegration at the end of Scanner, however, Horselover and Phil merge in the climax of VALIS, only to reject that integration.

At this "center" Horselover and Phil make contact, a finally ambivalent contact, with the object of desire in the guise of female child-savior Sophia, who reminds Horselover that he is really Phil: "Fat was gone. Nothing remained of him" (190). Here VALIS moves as close to the diary material of The Exegesis as PKD is willing to take it. There is no fictional, deviant objectifier like Horselover any more to perceive and obsessively interpret the anamorphotic blot. Phil is left "by himself" to deal with the reality of this fantasy, and he doesn't like it: I realized that I would never see my friend Horselover Fat again, and I felt grief inside me, the grief of loss. Intellectually, I knew that I had re-incorporated him, reversing the original process of projection. But still it made me sad. I had enjoyed his company, his endless tale-spinning . . ." (194).

This integration coincides with the death of the fantasy object (because "Ich bin's, it is I"): "'The little girl is dead,' Linda Lampton said. 'Mini killed her. By accident. With a laser. He was trying information-transfer by laser'" (215) (emphasis supplied). The subject's desire is drained from the over-mastered object. And once again Horselover emerges: "I began to think about death. Not Sophia Lampton's death but death in general and then, by degrees, my own death. Actually, I didn't think about it. Horselover Fat did." (216). In this second dissociation, however, the object of desire must be sighted and sought out all over again. It is already elsewhere, other: "After he had obtained his passport, Fat left the United States [!] and flew by Icelandic Airlines to Luxembourg, which is the cheapest way to go." (220). Phil, however, does not travel: "My search kept me at home; I sat before the TV set in my living room." (228). The dissociation widens, then, at the same time it becomes less evident. The two no longer see each other, but there is no return to the initial knowing characterization of Horselover as just a label for the narrator.

In this pressure on the fantasy, which would make of it fact, this hysteric and psychotic confrontation with the Symbolic Order, that a political subversion occurs. Its great correlative in Radio and VALIS is the theme of gnosticism, which supplies a political purpose for the symptom. In these books, the psychotic half and, eventually, the objective, normative half of the subject come to believe that the agency behind the 2-3-74 matter is the messenger of the gnostic pleroma, the totalized realm of pure, undifferentiated light, from which humanity has been trapped off in the black iron prison-of-this-world, constructed and policed by the "authorities" or archons: ignorant, alienated, demented and degraded elements of the pleroma, occupying nevertheless an unfortunately high position in the chain of being. Radio identifies Nixonian governmentality with these imprisoning archons. Nixon, appearing in the novel as Ferris F. Fremont, plays the role of Biblical Beast. Counterpoised to the earthly authorities/archons is the messenger of gnosis, VALIS, an acronym for "Vast Active Living Intelligence System." Under the last-accepted theory of the 2-3-74 matter in Radio, VALIS is a satellite sent from the Albemuth star system by a race of highly-evolved beings to remind humanity of its origins in that system's techno-spiritual plenum and, so, foster resistance to humanity's earthly imperial jailers. The VALIS satellite is able, among other things, to transmit information directly into Nicholas' mind, eventually helping him advance from a clerk in a Berkeley record store to a music company executive in Los Angeles. In this position, Nicholas may be of use in VALIS's evangelical/subversive plan.

The subversive effect of gnosticism generally consists in its redefinition of the "god term(s)" of the target discourse. Gnosticism situates such a god term (for example, Yahweh in Judaism) in a larger, theorized system or totality (the pleroma), e.g. not x/y, but y/x. The representation, then, in Judaism of Yahweh as the ontological sum total ("I am that I am") becomes the reductive lie par excellence and, in a sense, the substance of evil. The notion of Yahweh is here subverted away from benevolent creator ex nihilo and into that of an evil/blind jail builder through this contextualization in a greater or more total totality. The dominant discourse is denatured and opaque, emanating now from a contextualized system, all shadow, opacity and, finally, impotence.

In Radio, the context in which Nixonian governmentality is situated is that of the "fullness" of alien technology, a sort of futuristic universal solvent. Alien technology in Radio contextualizes and demonizes contemporary science (and by extension the governmentality and institutions that rule through science). For instance, Nicholas is involved in a serious automobile accident that punctures his lung. During surgery, VALIS appears to him and shows him the plenum of Albemuth. As Nicholas regains consciousness, his surgeon visits to examine the bandages. But the surgeon finds no wound at all. VALIS had accelerated the healing process. Just as contemporary science cannot not allow for the possibility for such an instantaneous healing process and, in effect, masks off even that possibility as a kind of low-culture superstition, the PKD's situation of contemporary medical practice in a context of miraculous, alien science, makes the former appear impotent and blind. But again, the political effect of this contextualization depends on a certain pressure, a claim of truth of more or less force implied by the presence of the name-of-the-author in the narrative. The surgeon becomes a kind of impotent jailer as he insists that Nicholas remain in bed pending further tests: "We are going to study you until we know what has taken place in your body following surgery." (Radio 164). Manifestly, Nicholas' "body" is the wrong place to look.

If the hallmark of Nixonian governmentality is the dirty trick, a kind of calculated and aggressive maneuver that masquerades as conventional or just, alien technology is more tricky. In Radio, Ferris Fremont posits a quasi-Communist organization called Aramchek that is bent on the destruction of America from within, just as the Communists in North Vietnam are bent on becoming an external threat (48). Radio figures this external and internal threat as connivance on two levels: first, the USA and the USSR are only two complementary sides of the same imperialistic structure, so any attempt to root out communism becomes only a ruse to extend and consolidate imperial power; second, Fremont had as a youth joined the Communist party and, so, is interested in diverting attention away from his own political liabilities. Fremont launches his war against Aramchek ("Mission Checkup") through the creation of a cadre of inquisitors called Friends of the American People, or FAPers (Radio 49). VALIS sends Nicholas an "impression" that a highly dangerous letter will arrive in the mail. Indeed, FAPers send him an envelope containing an advertisement for Real World Shoes with an elaborately encoded, incriminating message. VALIS instructs Nicholas to contact FAP Headquarters to report the message in the advertisement, rather than follow his first impulse to burn the advertisement, which would have demonstrated guilty mind. While the governmentality represented by the FAPers technique can turn a simple shoe advertisement into a trap, contextualized in a structure that already "knows" the stratagem, this governmentality's discursive practice begins to appear futile and ludicrous in the new totalizing context. The transcendental signifier is replaced and other. This gnostic-style trope, which drags the Symbolic Order out of its enforced transparency and sets it back down in the Imaginary context, begins to open the possibility of some freedom for the marginalized subject, the PKD, a bit of purchase on the discursive straitjacket.

If the apparent failure of the '60s counterculture by 1974 is the trauma for which the 2-3-74 matter acts as a kind of unraveling absence at the other end of the Symbolic Order, we can turn to a well-known, non-fiction alien encounter of the mid-'80s for a lesson in how much worse it can get. Whitley Strieber's somewhat ironically titled Communion: A True Story contains a striking number of points in common with the 2-3-74 matter running through Radio and VALIS, including alien-to-human techno-telepathic data transfer (Radio 23; Communion 60); the subject's obsession with note-taking and theorizing about the fantasy material (Radio 31; Communion 9); alien concern with air pollution (Radio 32; Communion 268); the figuring of alien "society" as hive-like (Radio 189; Communion 231); talking audio components (Radio 88; Communion 136); reference to mechanism functioning on principle of counter-rotation (Radio 32-33; Communion 112), etc. In view of these carry-overs, Strieber and PKD appear to be telling the same story, and obviously draw on common sources in popular culture, but if PKD is pressing against fiction into reality, Strieber has already made the leap. It is "A True Story." But also absent is the gnostic contextualization that enables PKD his subversive elbow room. There is, in Communion, no appeal to the alien, because it is precisely the alien who occupies the place of the archon/authority, the power wielder. As Strieber comments regarding his hesitancy in allowing himself to be hypnotized: "Control, as may be imagined, was a central issue in a life such as the one I had been leading." (51).

A consideration of the representations by PKD and by Strieber of the alien's eyes illustrates this transition from alien as liberator to oppressor. Again and again in Communion, Strieber describes the alien's eyes: for instance: "Got eyes. Big eyes. Big slanted eyes. A bald head. He's got a ruler in his hand." (57); and again: "I could see those limitless, eternal eyes glaring right into the center of me." (89); and again: "[The female Visitor's] gaze seemed capable of entering me deeply, and it was when I had looked directly into her eyes that I felt my first taste of profound unease. It was as if every vulnerable detail of my self were known to this being." (101); and again: "And somewhere there's someone watching me with great big eyes. Big black eyes. Just watching me." (147); and again: "It's got great big eyes that just scare the hell out of you. Scare you real bad. Big, big eyes." The visage of this sort of typical "gray" alien is rendered by an artist for Strieber and appears on the cover of Communion (Figure 1). In The Exegesis, PKD produces his own line drawing of his VALIS alien. As with Strieber's, PKD's figure has an elongated, pointed face, but instead of two huge slanted black eyes, the figure has somewhat small round eyes as well as a "third eye" between and slightly above the others (In Pursuit 77). And this third eye is closed (Figure 2). The eyes of the alien in the 2-3-74 matter are not emphasized, however; in VALIS, the third eye is an attribute of humanity: "'Yes,' Mini said. * * * 'It is the third eye which VALIS reopens.' 'Then it's the third eye that gets us back out of the maze,' Fat said." (187). If vision is the exercise of power/knowledge, the Communion aliens' large, glaring, penetrating eyes are a good indication of who or what wields power in Strieber's world.

In Communion those who act within the discourses of governmentality have as much to fear from the hyper-manipulative Visitors as do the patients of that governmentality. Class and other hierarchies lose their significance with the advent of these alien power-wielders, with their biopsy punches, needles, probes and ability to induce amnesia. Rather than benevolent leaders of the subversion, the alien in Communion becomes a rapist, and "[s]coffing at [abductees] is as ugly as laughing at rape victims." (4) Indeed, in a world of omnipotent, inscrutable alien violators, we well might look back on the relatively straight-forward repression of McCarthyism with nostalgia: "[The Visitors] are involved with us on very deep levels, playing in the band of dream, weaving imagination and reality together... Nowadays men find themselves on examining tables in flying saucers with vacuum devices attached to their privates." (246-247).

On the other hand, Strieber suggests that the human authorities are in league with these visitors: "In my research I found an undertone of claims that the government knew more about this matter than it was saying. There is some small reason to speculate that the United States government may have had some sort of communication from visitors as early as the late 1940s. . ." (228-229). Instead of creating a sense of commonality between human repressor and repressed, then, this figuration of the alien moves back toward PKD's model of human archons, but where the alien in PKD wished to help subvert the earthly authority, Strieber's visitor appears at best neutral toward it. Either way, the subversive political value of the psychosis is gone.

In Fantasy and the Origins of Sexuality, Laplanche and Pontalis talk about levels, or extremes, grades of fantasy, proceeding from the irrational depth, on their way "up," accreting material from other fantasy complexes, and proceeding as far as possible into the restructuring of therapeutic theory: on the one hand, for instance, the "fantasy which lies at the heart of the dream," and on the other, "the fantasy which serves to make it [the deeper fantasy] acceptable to consciousness." (21) Laplanche and Pontalis' essay is concerned to show Freud's wrestling with his own study of psychic processes, processes that he wished to conceive as unreal, a whole set of circumstances that he negotiated into the concept of psychic reality, the subjective state becoming an object and receiving, through his couching it as a res, a certain validating objectivity. I have pointed out that this process of larding fantasy with reality status is a central preoccupation in the 2-3-74 novels. Radio and especially VALIS are exegetical; in the same way Freud would read the unconscious. These books read the 2-3-74 matter into a form more acceptable.

Both Freud and PKD regard this "deeper" matter at the "heart of the dream" as a priority, but from different perspectives. Freud has recourse first to the therapeutic situation, in which he is the analyst. In Radio, PKD has recourse to the use of this matter in politics, a social therapy. And here it is the structure of politics which will receive the therapy, not the fantasy. The deep fantasy rises, not through a theory of individual adjustment, but around political structures, contextualizing and correcting them. In VALIS, however, the revolutionary appears to give way to the analysand. Horselover sees a therapist. The symbolic is waxing. Phil sits at home watching his television in a kind of mental paralysis. The whole project of subversive contextualization is failed, or at least abated momentarily. There is no sense of concrete action against the authorities that is present in Radio. The movement, then, from Scanner to VALIS gives a sense for the movement "up" and "down" of fantasy matter, out of and into the Symbolic Order, and so of the political use of fantasy.