Becoming
Post-Android

The work of Philip K. Dick, best known as a master of ontologically and psychologically unsettling science fiction, has had a wide-ranging if sporadic influence on modern cultural theory, playing key roles in works by thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, Erik Davis, Katherine Hayles, Fredric Jameson, Laurence Rickels and Steven Shaviro. In this one-day symposium, comprising a workshop and panel discussion, three Dick scholars address his continuing significance for the contemporary rethinking of subjectivity, the (post)human, and ontology.

In 1974, renowned science fiction writer Philip K. Dick began to experience a series of visions which he attributed to a mysterious entity with qualities that seemed to lie somewhere between the alien and the divine. He would spend the remaining 8 years of his life seeking to explain these encounters, recording his attempts in the collection of writings that eventually stretched to 8,000 pages, and which he came to think of as his ‘Exegesis’.

In this workshop we will take up, through a selection of brief excerpts, a recurring theme of the ‘Exegesis’, that of nonhuman subjectivity. Drawing on ideas from theology, mysticism, psychology, information theory and modern science, Dick engages in a seemingly interminable effort to think the notion of a perceiving, communicating, feeling being that would not be bound to human modes of existence, bodily, psychological or social, thus destabilizing the ontologies of both subject and object. We will attend not only to the ideas and figures that emerge, but to the effects of Dick’s aberrant method – or lack of method – as he tinkers, in a manner Erik Davis has referred to as ‘garage philosophy’, with bits and pieces of ideas snatched from encyclopedias, fiction, and various other readily available sources of information – not the least being his own dreams and visions.

The significance of Dick’s science fiction for posthumanist thought is reflected in his influence on cultural theory, notably Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman. Yet it can be argued that Dick does not develop a coherent posthumanist perspective by design, but rather arrives at something like one by default, through repeatedly setting out to find the human and stumbling across the absence at its core. In this sense, the repeated inversions and superimpositions of humans and androids found in many of his narratives seem to suggest that the human was only ever an artificial construct – literally an android – to begin with. The panel will feature three short presentations and a discussion of Dick’s continuing significance for contemporary posthumanism and its ethical, ontological, and political stakes.

Followed by the book launch of James Burton’s The Philosophy of Science Fiction (2015) and The World According to Philip K. Dick (2015), edited by Alexander Dunst and Stefan Schlensag.

James Burton
Fabienne Collignon
Alexander Dunst
Laurence A. Rickels

An ICI Berlin event, organized by James Burton (ICI Berlin) and Alexander Dunst (University of Paderborn)
In cooperation with the University of Paderborn

The event, like all events at the ICI Berlin, is open to the public, free of charge. The audience is presumed to consent to a possible recording on the part of the ICI Berlin. If you would like to attend the event yet might require assistance, please contact Event Management.