Elsewhere, Elsewhen and Otherwise: The Wild Lives of Radios in the Worlds of Philip K. Dick

ABSTRACT

Dick undoubtedly had, at many moments in his life and his writing, a living experience of the wildness of radio. He encountered voices through his own radio that had encoded messages for him alone, and his novels are rich with radios that are engaged in all manner of unsettling activity: they change form and regress, they carry cryptic messages that can collapse entire political regimes, they spy and report on people and they reconfigure cultural life for survivors of an apocalypse. When domesticated, the radio can play a normalising role in terms of producing space, time and self by articulating the logics of cultural institutions; when encountered as wild, however, radios reframe experience according to the unfamiliar orientations of the non-human: the ‘plot holes’ of elsewhere, elsewhen and otherwise. This paper explores the wild lives of radios through the various encounters in the worlds of Philip K. Dick, with an emphasis on Time Out of Joint (1959) and Dr Bloodmoney, or How We Got Along After the Bomb (1965).

KEYWORDS:

• Domestication
• radio
• plot holes
• science fiction
• schizophonia

Notes

1. Roger Silverstone, ‘Domesticating Domestication: Reflections on the Life of a Concept,’ in Domestication of Media and Technology, ed. Thomas Berker, Maren Hartmann, Yves Punie and Katie J. Ward (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2006), 229–48.

2. Philip K. Dick, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, eds. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011), 330.

3. Philip K. Dick, ‘Schizophrenia and The Book of Changes,’ in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 122.

4. Adam Hulbert, ‘Without Latency: Cathode Immersions and the Neglected Practice of Xenocasting for Television and Radio,’ View: Journal of European Television History and Culture 4:7 (2015).

5. See Philip K. Dick, Beyond Lies the Wub: The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 1 (London: Gollancz, 1988), 404.

6. For further discussion on Dick's approaches to technological objects as living entities, see Erik Davis, TechGnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Information Age (London: Serpent's Tail, 1999), 187.

7. Philip K. Dick, Ubik (New York: Mariner, 2013), 138.

8. Anne R. Dick, The Search for Philip K. Dick (San Francisco: Tacyon, 2010), 254.

9. Anthony Peake, A Life of Philip K. Dick: The Man Who Remembered the Future (London: Arcturus, 2013), loc. 2181of 6176 (Kindle edition).

10. Philip K. Dick Society, PKDS Newsletter, 13:6 (1987) <http://1999pkdweb.philipkdickfans.com/RADIO%20FREE%20ALBEMUTH.htm> [accessed 30 August 2015].

11. Philip K. Dick, Radio Free Albemuth (London: Harper Collins, 2008), 120–21.

12. See Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), XIX.

13. Mikhail Yampolsky and Larry P. Joseph, ‘Voice Devoured: Artaud and Borges on Dubbing,’ October 64 (Spring, 1993), 58.

14. Philip K. Dick, Selected Letters of PKD 1980–1982 (California: Underwood Books, 2010), 146.

15. Douglas A. MacKey, Philip K. Dick, Twayne's United States Authors Series (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1988), 117.

16. Umberto Rossi, ‘Radio Free PKD,’ in Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction 37:106 (2010): 20.

17. Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly (New York: Mariner Books, 2011), 140–41.

18. Dick delivered this at the Vancouver Science Fiction convention VCON2 article in 1972. See R. Graham Cameron, ‘Mad Flight of a Manic Phoenix, or: Philip K. Dick in Vancouver (1972),’ Amazing Stories 6 (2014) <http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2014/06/mad-flight-manic-phoenix-philip-k-dick-vancouver-1972/> [accessed 30 August 2015].

19. James Burton, ‘From Exegesis to Ecology,’ in The World According to Philip K. Dick, eds. Alexander Dunst and Stefan Schlensag (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 343–44.

20. Reza Negarestani, Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials (Prahran: Re-press, 2008), xvi.

21. R. Murray Schafer, The New Soundscape: A Handbook for the Modern Music Teacher (Toronto: BMI Canada), 1969.

22. Philip K. Dick, Time Out of Joint (New York: Mariner Press, 2012).

23. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1991), 283.

24. Steven Shaviro, No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015), 2.

25. Friedrich Kittler, ‘Rock Music: A Misuse of Military Equipment,’ in The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 152–64.

26. John Armitage, ‘From Discourse Networks to Cultural Mathematics: An Interview with Friedrich A. Kittler,’ Theory, Culture & Society 23:7–8 (2006): 17–38.

27. Wolfgang Ernst, Digital Memory and the Archive, Electronic Mediations 39 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), 240.

28. Philip K. Dick, ‘How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,’ 1978, in The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. Lawrence Sutin (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 182.

29. Susan J. Douglas, Listening in: Radio and the American Imagination (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), loc. 649 of 9659 (Kindle edition).

30. Paddy Scannell, ‘Dailiness’ in Radio, Television and Modern Life (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 152–53.

31. Page numbers in this text refer to Philip K. Dick, Dr Bloodmoney, Or How We Got Along After the Bomb (New York: Mariner Press, 2012).

32. R. Murray Schafer, ‘Acoustic Space,’ in Dwelling, Place and Environment: Towards a Phenomenology of Person and World, eds. David Seamon and Robert Mugerauer (Dordrecht: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1985), 87–98.

33. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (Cambridge and London: MIT Press, 1994), 3.

34. For further discussion of hyperobjects, see Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World, Posthumanities 27 (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).

35. In D. J. Moores, Mystical Discourse in Wordsworth and Whitman: A Transatlantic Bridge (Louvain: Peeters Publishers, 2006), 45.

36. Danny Hillis, ‘The Enlightenment is Dead, Long Live the Entanglement,’ Journal of Design and Science (Feb 24, 2016) <http://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/enlightenment-to-entanglement/> [accessed 11 June 2016].

37. All Things Considered 2012, The Medium is the Massage: A Kitchen Sink of Sound, Audio recording (20 March 2012) NPR <http://www.npr.org/2012/03/20/149008718/the-medium-is-the-massage-a-kitchen-sink-of-sound>.

38. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Seem Mark and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 3.