I Think I Am: Philip K. Dick

Introjection

1 Introjection Philip K. Dick died in the spring quarter of my first (academic) year in California. For many years during my tenure at the University of California , students would claim to recognize Dick’s influence in my classes. They were each time surprised that I had never read any of his works. I should proceed directly to this, that, or the other title. I was not surprised that all these proclamations of soul mating (or murder) led me not to read Dick. Soon extramural readers of my work noted its uncanny compatibility with Dick’s work. In time for the new millennium I finally broke down and read The Divine Invasion, responding less to any pressure, accumulated or otherwise, behind the prompt than to the pointer that the book included representations of the Devil. In the course of overcoming one large chunk of resistance—I had carefully left the infernal prince out of my casting call for occult figures to play in my mourning show—I was very much aided by the recommendation (by one of the students attending my German science fiction class) of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End. The Divine Invasion did not help me with my interpretation of the Devil. But its placement within a trilogy brought me to both its bookends . As a trio it convinced me to continue. Through the trilogy alone (in which psychosis as science fiction and fantasy as untenable redemption value are ultimately undermined or conjoined through Spiritualist communication with the other side) I was already able to fold out of Daniel Paul Schreber, Walter Benjamin, and Freud my “endopsychic allegory.”1 In the subsequent novels of my long-deferred reading assignment I realized that in addition to all the reasons that crossed my mind with regard to the proclaimed compatibility between us—and all those reasons were indeed represented in Dick’s novels—what really took me by surprise was 2 Introjection the foregrounding of a frame of reference made in Germany for his staging area of future worlds that, essentially and recognizably, never left the field of representation called California. Certainly Germanicity as the open book of evil politics, in which Dick also often inserts his place marker, is not at all a surprising prop in forecast fiction. As I argued in Psy Fi (volume 3 of Nazi Psychoanalysis), Nazi Germany was, in addition to everything else, to some gratuitous point of excess, one big science fiction.2 Plus, investments to this day in maintaining the good war as ongoing frame of reference necessarily require that Nazi Germany keep on winning: loss only entered the field, then, because the winning was/is otherwise limitless. What is unique to Dick’s Californian future, however, is that the German introjects are psychically installed with ambivalence—right up against the ego ideal or its missing place. In the future that Dick foretells, high culture, music, literature, science, philosophy , you name it, are overwhelmingly German, for better or worse. The American or Terran language (in other words, Globalese) includes on its vocabulary list, like kindergarten or blitzkrieg, such words as Selbstmord, Geheimnis, Gift, and Augenblick. That American would go global simply because anyone can stumble through it and still be understood and, same thing, because it is no one’s mother tongue is part of Dick’s accurate forecasting . That the global prospecting of all things Californian (as the teen field of representation) inside the American global language would require a certain ascendancy of Germanicity (as dead language culture) is the part of the forecast that boggles my mind. As I already argued in my first book Aberrations of Mourning, via the Melanesian Cargo Cult, which refers to Djaman in this function, and as the future word of Philip K. Dick confirms, German is, inside Californian or Globalese, the language of the dead. The art world fool who claimed that, because I include typos among the materials and effects of my critical reading, I have a problem with projection3 was dead-head wrong but, beside his point, just the same in my court. I’ve always had a problem with identification, no doubt aggravated by traumatic circumstances in childhood. The corollary to this problem is that, for me, projection is no problem—my unproblem. Like Dick, I enjoy accuracy and “safety” with my projections. While Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok restored the recognition value of “introjection,” gave it back change in currency, they were also setting it up...