Schizoid Android

'''Hayles, N. Katherine. "Schizoid Android: Cybernetics and the Mid-Sixties Novels of Philip K. Dick."' Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts'' 8.4 (1997): pp. 419-42. Special Issue: Papers from the Eighteenth International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Rob Latham, editor.

This is not the script for Hayles's presentation but a full scholarly essay of over 20 printed pages (see above), starting with an elegant opening section on "the state of cybernetics in the 1960s and 1970s" (p. 419) and the implications of cybernetics in that second stage of development in terms of "challenges [...] to scientific objectivity" (p. 420,) and — complementing analyses in some social sciences — challenges to the idea of the individual "in liberal philosophy [...] considered as an autonomous, independent subject" (p. 421). We might guess that these two different accounts of subjectivity — one a cybernetic story in which the observer produces and is produced by autopoetic [self-constructing] processes, the other a socio-economic fiction in which the autonomous liberal subject produces and is produced by market relations — might be related, since both exemplify the dynamics of codependent arising [where "the observer creates the system, and the system creates — or rather, is — the observer"]. But who would be crazy enough to take on the almost unimaginable task of articulating these connections, at once so wide-ranging and elusive. Who else, indeed, but science fiction writers like Philip K. Dick. (pp. 421-22)

Deals with Dick's essays "The Android and the Human," "The Evolution of a Vital Love," How to Build a Universe that Doesn't Fall Apart Two Days Later," and "Schizophrenia and the Book of Changes." Among the novels referred to in the title, the essay deals with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), and The Simulacra (1964).

Of immediate interest for this Wiki is Dick and a general question of boundaries and disturbed binary oppositions. In the mid-Sixties novels, the boundaries between autonomous individual and technological artifact become increasingly permeable. Circulating through them are not only high-end products such as intelligent androids but also a more general techno-animation of the landscape, including artificial insects that buzz around spouting commercials, coffeepots that demand coins [...] and homeostatic apartment doors that refuse to open for the tenants until fed the appropriate credit. The imbrication of the individual into market relations so thoroughly defines the subjects of these novels that it is impossible to think of them apart from economic institutions into which they are incorporated, from small family firms to transnational operations. The corporation is in-corporated [approximately, «made flesh»] in multiple senses, expressing itself through corporeal beings who frequently owe to the corporation not only their economic and social identities but also the very corporeal forms that define them as physical entities, from organ implants and hypertrophied brains to completely artificial bodies. Given this dynamic, it is no surprise that the struggle for freedom often expresses itself as an attempt to get "outside" this corporate encapsulation; the ultimate horror for the individual is that he will remain trapped 'inside' a world constructed by another being for his own profit. (pp. 422-23)

This essay should definitely be consulted for relating such transgression of boundaries to mechanisms, psychology, and androids. Around the time Dick wrote these novels, the idea of "tropism" from biology was adopted by Norbert Wiener "and other cyberneticians to refer to the mechanically-determined affinity of a cybernetic machine for some attribute of its environment." Tropisms evolve in organisms; in cybernetic entities, they can be engineered in, along with approach/avoidance behaviors for the environmental "attribute" — for tensions that could produce "complexly nonlinear behavior." The real-world writer P. K. Dick "In repeatedly seeking out the dark-haired girl [...] was following a program he was helpless to alter." This can be reflected in the novels. If programmed behavior marks the difference between the human and the android, Dick's tropism for dark-haired girls puts him in the paradoxical position of acting most machine-like when he repeatedly seeks out the woman who, he says, "evolved" until she represented the authentically human. These subterranean connections between the dark-haired girl, machine-like behavior, and construction of masculine subjectivity are explored repeatedly in the fiction through configurations that link androidism in an attractive dark-haired woman with a radical confusion of boundaries between 'inside' and 'outside' for a male subject. The linkage also has implications for female subjectivity. Replication, the mark of the machine, is injected back into the dark-haired girl even after she has supposedly evolved beyond androidism, because the male subject's 'tropism' converts her into one of a series, a succession of brunette women who are at once different and the same. (p. 425)

Note Dick's «thing» with "the dark-haired girl" for the dark-haired woman or female android/replicant Rachel Rosen in Do Android's Dream? and blade runner (pp. 431-33). See last sections of this essay also for considerations in Do Android's Dream? OF J. R. Isidore's hallucination of Ry Baty's as "made of fears and coils rather than flesh and blood" and for a fine discussion of Mercerism as both scam and gift, "the Tomb World," and the discovery of a toad that turns out to be electric/electronic and elicits the insight by Deckard that "The electric things have their lives, too. Paltry as those lives are" (214 in Blade Runner edition of 1982), supporting, Hayles believes "the mixed conditions of humans who are at their best when they show tolerance and affection for the creatures, biological and mechanical, with whom they share the planet" (Hayles pp. 439-40).

Note: Hayles discusses Dick's mental issues in detail (see pp. 426-27) and asserts that Patricia Warrick "has insightfully argued"— in "The Labyrinthian Process of the Artificial" — "that Dick's fiction is structured as a series of reversals designed to defeat the reader's expectation that it is possible to discover what the situation 'really' is" (p. 431). However, Hayles does not cite John Huntington's "The Labyrinthian Process of the Artificial" and Dick's use of A.E. van Vogt's "dictum that every 800 words a new idea should be introduced," which Huntington suggests is the "mechanical narrative device" inspiring those reversals. This raises the possibility that between his mental problems and use of the van Vogt ploy, P. K. Dick as "author" (in quotation marks) functions only to a limited degree as "an autonomous, independent subject" who makes real, free-will choices on how to narrate stories undermining the concept of the "autonomous, independent subject" of liberal theory.

RDE, Initial Compiler, 12Mar19