In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

58 Belief System Surveillance According to Emmanuel Carrère, Dick’s 1977 novel A Scanner Darkly is, as the author’s bid for a sane or mainstream intermission from his psychotic states, his most deluded work. The nonfictional afterword in which Dick declares A Scanner Darkly to be his own work of remembrance could indeed be seen to fit or foot that bill. However one should also note that it is in this novel that Dick makes breach of contact between his revalorization of psychosis in terms of alternate present realities and external topical points of interest such as drugs, violence, and surveillance. It took this Christian mystic or psychotic to see through and project surveillance as belief system. What Dick adds to the closed quarters of doubling under realizable conditions of surveillance is his longstanding question: Where are the dead here? Where are they housed, installed, included? In A Scanner Darkly surveillance is doubly internalized via everyone’s drug of choice, Substance D, otherwise known as Death. In Dick’s war of the world on drugs, actual surveillance is pressed into the service of containing the drug scene in second-stage alert. Undercover agents who hang with the druggies and report back in scramble suits to their superiors occupy the first stage. To maintain their cover, however, the agents must pass at the communion they are observing as fellow Death heads. By the time agent Fred, who is Bob Arctor, is assigned to watch the tapes of the nonstop surveillance cameras that have in the meantime been installed in the house he shares undercover with the milieu he at first was alone observing for his reports, Death’s effect on his brain reflects the pull of a larger structure of control release whereby the whole mass media Sensurround recycles addiction and recovery as low maintenance subjecthood. The tabs he keeps end up subsumed by the tabs he’s already taken. Belief System Surveillance 59 Fred/Arctor is handed his brain fry diagnosis right before the book enters its own internal doubling in chapter 11, which is essentially a sequence of untranslated incorporated quotations from Goethe’s Faust surrounding the two souls in Faust’s breast. Arctor’s own interior dialogue intercuts with these excerpts just as the wasted side of the brain responsible for language prompts the surviving side to find compensation through translation or cerebral lateralization. The compensation that proceeds as lateralization opens wide the alternate worlds or self-reflexive interiorities of delusion. Faust’s downbeat of doubling follows his own failure to pass the Übermensch -test on a scale of doubling or nothing. “Superhuman” is a good enough translation of Übermensch, the term or concept we saw first in Goethe’s Faust. The Earth Spirit Faust conjures expects to meet in him match and maker, in other words an Übermensch. But the term comes up as a put-down: The Earth Spirit declares that Faust is no Übermensch, and must go elsewhere to meet his Ebenbild or double. While Übermensch can be found in use around the time of Luther, but to signify the superiority of the especially good Christian, or also already in Herder’s lexicon, but linked and limited to superiority on the sliding scale of existing humanity , it was first in Goethe’s Faust that Übermensch came to mean, via the rebound of negation, a human being equal to divinity, which is up for grabs or, in Faust’s case, just out of reach. As we first encounter Faust, he is a mood swinger. Even after the songs of his childhood reopen a future of possibilities coming toward him and stay the mirroring merger with the poison in his father’s cup, he still dips into depression. But this lack can find compensation, he announces, as he turns to the New Testament to translate into German the word or logos that was in the beginning. The German word for the work of translation, Übersetzen, points toward the translation of Übermensch as “transhuman,” a translation grounded in ambiguities inherent in the related words or prefixes over and über. The “over” or “über” human has crossed over to one in a series of stations of the crossing but also or alternatively as crossed out: man as over, over and out. Certainly that’s how Faust starts out. In the course of the translation attempts that usher in the performative word as deed or act, as the pushbutton temporality or technology that Faust...

Share