Palmer Eldritch is Capital, Androids are “Postmodernism” (Part II)
In spite of the sad paranoia of Dick’s protestations otherwise, one can of course go on cataloguing such transparent symptoms. In the first few pages of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? we run across nearly all the features Jameson diagnoses as constitutive of postmodernism (collage (21), schizophrenia, waning of affect (37)); and the content of getting lost in the Eldritch (ostensibly mediated by 60s drug paranoia) is just that inability to locate oneself in relation to the Real behind the fantasies dispensed by this or that multinational coporation—here licensed by the UN in a naked attempt to achieve ideological control of its citizens and capture the capital of the otherwise illegal drug trade in a single investment—that is the society of the spectacle Jameson’s call for cognitive mapping registers in the negative.
Then there are the more obvious instances: the surface (natch) of Mars as a literal desert of the Real, with its routinized circuits between labor and leisure effacing history in favor of waiting for the man and the brief respite his magic stuffs afford for the price of a layout and a hit; the colonial situation (explicitly driving the plot in The Three Stigmata; implicitly providing its pretext and background in Do Androids); the entropy managing the constant threat of homeostasis by “kippleization” (66) as a consequence of the production of surplus products Mercerism’s Sisyphean empathy desperately attempts to mask until “a point comes when it does not even decay” (213). Most sinister of all, however, is the content of that residuum of collectivity the drug experience effects at the expense of relinquishing all claims on direct experience, inert bodies slumped around cardboard cutouts housing Barbie dolls whose best offering is that “It’s always Saturday.”
But it’s a Saturday on which you can’t be on the beach at noon. The fantasy itself is at all points infected with the desert of the Real, which even Eldritch notes with disgust: “anyhow the structure of their fantasy environment is limited to the artifacts actually installed in their layout; they can’t operate the automatic dishwasher in the kitchen unless a min of one was installed in advance” (89). This, of course, is what Eldritch, in his misguided effort to grant the wish for immortality, will remedy by rendering absolute, finally severing the fantasy from reality altogether in order to cure the fact that “Many of the colonists were as yet unbelievers; to them the layouts were merely symbols of a world which none of them could any longer experience” (37). That is to say, “Eldritch” names the completion of the colonization of the body and the subjectively perceived contents of its experiences by capital, a colonization so complete “the props were no longer necessary as foci” (142) for the spectacle Debord named the commodity’s final form. This is capital transcending its limit, not because it achieves the impossible production of an infinite surplus value but because it has reached its Z, the perfect product freezing bodies in “the weight of empty time” (133) making an eternal present from the fantasy of drifting indiscriminantly through a history in which all imagined pasts and futures are rendered equivalent. Beyond the zero, indeed.
Here is where the novels meet, in their (however unlikely) twinned obsessions with thermodynamics and colonization: The anxiety over some final and therefore sinister stasis that takes the form of kipple is identical with that solipsism Eldritch’s Chew-Z peddles in place of the pale collectivity of Can-D and its merely symbolic layouts. Against which background the incessant questions of android empathy, so uninteresting in their meta-meta varieties worrying whether Deckard is or isn’t (Yes, Virginia, we are all constructs too, call it human or call it android), acquires its properly felt force as a concept. Androids make good cops (118) for the same reason Buster and Mercer are in competition (75), the situation that lies back of the reduction of all human activity to combating kippleization and getting high: the waning of affect Deckard suffers and androids complete is the inevitable consequence of kipple (and electric sheep, as Deckard knew: “The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist” (42)) and the necessary condition for sustaining any colonial situation, off-world or otherwise. The waning of affect, in other words, is precisely what enables the dissociation of center from periphery in subjects’ lived experience, fueling the engine that drives the machinery across the extraterrestrial surface abstracting surplus value from others always kept discretely off-screen; as well as the inability to meaningfully experience that the content of owning (in the world of the novels) Winnnie-ther-Pooh Acres, an empathy box and animal, real or simulated, is (in the terms of our own society of the spectacle) Darfur and Tibet. The question is not whether Deckard is an android, or whether we will be able to test successfully for androids in our midst when they arrive. The question is what are we going to do, now that we have been diagnosed cultural androids Dick’s fiction already had us becoming, so many batteries powering Cinema City in exchange for our minor euphorias under the bright lights of blimps and geishas advertising emigration to the real desert of the Real?
This is why the enabling generic convention of the off-world colonial background—as both economic pretext for the multinational machinations driving stock plots, and convenient distancing of realities from ours for the manufacture of alternative futures—is the real story. And not, in other words, the techno-gadgetry of pop philosophizing and mock (though no doubt earnest in their moment) ethical dilemmas over androids helping to hunt other androids (in the book (91); or killing androids to protect love interests, as in Blade Runner), with their corresponding ethical concerns over our bounty-hunter/hero hunting without affect those things he (it?) has been conditioned to experience as things. (In this context it is worth noting in passing that the one experience capable of rupturing Deckard’s blasé attitude towards the world he reluctantly inhabits—even the stasis of which his wife, so totally a product of her Mood Organ, has to dial up to feel—is “the sight of animals, the scent of money deals with expensive stakes” (167); not empathy but Commerce, which is after all Tyrell’s answer to Deckard’s query “How can it not know what it is?”.)
Mood organs and empathy boxes, Can-D and layouts, confusions “between authentic living humans and humanoid constructs” (142) are enjoyable and certainly prescient enough, in other words. But these are merely narrative trappings inside which is contained the naked brutality of that situation in which we exist in the wake of modernity’s anomie and anxieties over isolation, mere symbols of our private little desires and their private little revolts. Now that we have our pleasantly mediated collective fantasies (of which Dick, not to mention genre fiction generally, must count as a little piece here in the unified spectacle) and the waning of affect that manages them for us, we must struggle to emerge from such trappings for that glimpse of our real situation, the logic of which is so clearly grasped by our own Rosens/Tyrells and the casual carelessness of Dick’s eternally declarative prose style alike:
The two members of the Rosen family studied [Deckard] apprehensively and he felt the hollowness of their manner; by coming here he had brought the void to them, had ushered in emptiness and the hush of economic death. They control inordinate power, he thought. This enterprise is considered one of the system’s industrial pivots: the manufacture of androids, in fact, has become so linked to the colonization effort that if one dropped into ruin, so would the other in time. The Rosen Association, naturally, understood this perfectly. (45)
Such is the real content and force of what we must take as something like our own Real, the experience of our inability to concretely experience which (nevermind confront) schizophrenia names: “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” But such, too, is the usefulness of so openly dystopic a utopian imagining as Dick’s, rendering with crystalline clarity a situation everywhere else habitually obscured. And in doing so reminding us that this future, our dark present and its nightmarish past, may yet (perhaps) be composed of “interlaced possibilities” even pre-cogs can’t quite precisely assess, adrift here in the timeless present of our multinational etc.
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