In a striking scene in Ubik, Joe Chip argues with his front door to let him leave his apartment: the door is demanding payment for service, while Joe contends that any payment he has rendered the door is “is in the nature of a gratuity” (24). “I think otherwise,” is the door’s reply, and indeed when consulting the purchase contract Joe learns that he has not purchased a door as a commodity for his use, but rather has committed himself to paying “mandatory fee” (24) for the use of a device that is installed in his home, but not owned by him. This exchange occurs shortly after Joe has failed in his attempts to have the building’s clean-up robots service his apartment because the managers have found that Joe has “dropped from a triple G status creditwise to quadruple G,” meaning that he is now “on a basic-cash subfloor for the rest of [his] life” (23), something tantamount to being excluded from civic society in the economics obsessed world he lives in. This emphasis on credit and on the shift from owned commodities to enterprises that generate a revenue stream for their services are presciently characteristic of the orthodoxies of neoliberalism, the economic ideology dominant today which had yet to secure mainstream endorsement at the time of Dick’s writing. Neoliberalism demands an absolute faith in the market as the site of truth, as Foucault demonstrates in The Birth of Biopolitics, which entails a related shift in the mode of governance toward securing the conditions that enable market freedom. As Melinda Cooper describes it, neoliberalism restructures the relation between life and value that anchored the welfare state into something new, a mode of governance and economic management with debt at their core.
Ubik illuminates what is at stake for the human reimagined as human capital through these transitions, an alienation that expands beyond Joe’s struggles with his apartment door to encompass the deformation of the boundaries of reality itself as he investigates in a world whose ontological foundation has become fluid—commodities are regressing into earlier instantiations of their core use value, and the plot never entirely confirms for us whether it is Joe or his employer who exists in the state of cryonic suspended animation after bodily death that the novel names half-life. We might think of the half-life technology as an sf example of the kind of life sciences that Cooper argues reinvent life beyond the limits of materiality scarcity, precisely the productivity fantasized by neoliberalism and enacted by its financialized economic forms. Cooper uses the term “delirium” to describe neoliberal reason, a term she takes from Freud to describe the fantastical manner in which the psyche might relate to reality via “the breakdown and recreation of whole worlds” (Cooper 20). Biotechnologies seek to compel life toward productivity that exceeds physical limitations, to match pace with the heady accumulation of financialized economic forms, which blur the distinction between value and its representation in market valuations, creating a situation in which the debt form consumes in the present a value that will be produced in the future via the IPOs and other VC funding structures. In this way, “the delirium of the debt form … enables capital to reproduce itself in a realm of pure promise, in excess of the earths actual limits, at least for a while” (Cooper 31). What Cooper diagnoses in analyses, Dick embodies via the strange commodity of Ubik and its ability—at least for a while—to reverse the effects of entropy and keep the delirium world of half-life functioning.
What interests me specifically in this context is the series of epigraphs that describe Ubik in advertising form at the beginning of each chapter. The first time it is mentioned, the epigraph begins “this is clean-up time” (1), anticipating Joe’s coming struggles, although clean-up here refers to reducing product inventory via discount sales. Ubik appears as an electric vehicle, a breakfast cereal, a medicine, and a beer; as instant coffee, as salad dressing, as a razor, and as a cleaner. Each epigraph offers a novel and effusive descriptions of the wonders this commodity might bring, fluently embodying the rhetoric of mid-century commodity culture to suggest the product has some transcendental quality that will offer a benefit far beyond the standard use of commodities of its type. Yet certain phrases recur across multiple descriptions: “safe when taken as directed” (36); “safe when used as directed” (130); “Ubik powder is of universal healing value if directions for use are rigorously and conscientiously followed” (175). We are also warned elsewhere—in reference to a Ubik capable of providing “relief to head and stomach”—that we should “Avoid prolonged use” (49) and “use only as directed. And with caution” (64). The only consistent quality to Ubik is paradoxically that it is fungible, although this is a strange sort of fungibility. It is replacement by another item (especially the spray can of Ubik that Joe receives in half-life, which continually regresses into earlier instances of this product) but the replacement is not an identical item. In the case of ever-changing Ubik in the epigraphs, it seems that the function that Ubik provides—of securing reality, of ensuring happiness and health—can be substituted for by any number of commodities, or so capitalism would have us believe.
There are two other commodities imagined as having this kind of universal fungibility: money as the value form that allows anything to be exchanged for anything else, and labour-power, as capital’s alienating way of imagining concrete humans to be only so many stores of labour-power, one unit not especially distinct from another. Regarding the money, we might take note that when the Ubik substance regresses to its earlier form, this elixir is deemed to have value because it contains gold flakes, the commodity long deemed necessary to secure or “back” the notional value of money, until the floating rates system of currency valuation was introduced in 1973, shortly after this novel was published. The earliest period to which the world regresses in Ubik in the 1930s, another period of financial crisis when the gold standard was briefly suspended, and citizens were order to turn in to the government all holdings of gold in any form to be redeemed at a fixed exchange rate. Here we might also take note that the novel ends with Joe Chip’s face appearing on a new currency, a currency that seems to portend a different kind of reality going forward. And the final epigraph represents Ubik not as a commodity but as a god: “I am the word and my name is never spoken, the name which no one knows. I am called Ubik, but that is not my name. I am. I shall always be” (226). In this final chapter, Ubik transcends from being an endlessly fungible commodity to being the market itself, the structure of Truth to which neoliberalism insists that all policy must be subjected. This is precisely the shift in political reason that Foucault seek to understand, pointing out how the hegemony of neoliberalism marks an end to a sense that one function of the state is to mitigate against the consequences of market competition for the most vulnerable citizens: under this new logic, government must do the reverse, “it must nullify the possible anti-competitive mechanisms of society, or at any rate anti-competition mechanisms that could arise within society” (Foucault 160). That is, protect the market from the demands of democratic society.
The fungibility of Ubik also indexes the fungibility of huma labour under changing economic conditions that were only just beginning to be felt as Dick wrote his work. As Foucault demonstrates in his analysis of the rise of neoliberal reason, it substitutes the concept of labour-power with that of human capital, but a strange sort of capital that “is inseparable from the person who possesses it” (Foucault 224). This way of thinking transforms the worker into something like a machine, entity with a set of skills or capacities that can produce an “earnings stream” for its owner, that is, the human self who simultaneously is this fixed capital machine. Like other kinds of fixed capital, this machine “has a lifespan, a length of time in which it can be used, an obsolescence, and an ageing” (224-225), indexing one of the reasons that entropy is imaged as a kind of human mortality or vulnerability in Dick’s novel. And like Dick’s door, human capacity is no longer labour-power, a commodity bought and then used, but a machine intended to produce an “earning streams” so long as it continues to operate. And we see evidence of this kind of fungible human-machine not only in the half-life technology: we see a passing reference to surveillance technology that enables one to adopt “a different physiognomic template every month” (2); and Joe notes that his boss is almost immortal: “Probably Runciter’s body contained a dozen artiforgs, artificial organs grafted into place in his physiological apparatus as the genuine, original ones, failed” (8).
Reading Foucault’s work, Cooper finds an analogy between the economic shifts that he traces and the reinvention of life beyond material limits that interests her in biotechnology: classical economic theorized labour as the source of value, but post-Fordism locates value in the intangible, in “economies of innovation, scope, and pre-emption—the ability to anticipate the next wave, to keep ahead of the curve” (24). This predictive power of the market links it once more with the final transcendent vision of Ubik as god. Foucault similarly notes the importance of innovation to neoliberal accumulation, arguing that for them this engine of value is tied to the management of one’s subjectivity as if one were “an entrepreneur of himself” (226). We see hints of the tyranny of this new market deity in the early section of the book as well, just before Joe argues with his equally despotic door. Asking a device for the news, but preferring the setting of gossip over distressing facts, Joe receives a report on Stanton Mick, “reclusive, interplanetarily known speculator” who has just “asked for and may possibly receive a staggering and unprecedented loan of …” (Dick 19; ellipses in the original). Before we can hear the staggering amount, Joe cuts the report off and is advised by the device to request “low gossip” (20) to receive his desired content about celebrity peccadillos, not financial speculation. Dick seems to anticipate the debt-fueled economic growth to come based on financialization and its speculative modes of value production as the central engine of the economy. And indeed, prior to its apotheosis as the market/god in the final chapter, one of the Ubik epigraphs names it a Savings & Loan bank offering precisely the kind “interest-only loan” (59) that fueled the 2008 market crash based on predatory mortgages. Financialization substitutes a speculative kind of reality for the concrete commodities of much earlier modes of trading, and Dick’s novel and its concept of living in a half-life of uncertain ontology aptly captures the experience of living in a market-driven world in which, as the Communist Manifesto so pithily put it, “all that is solid melts into air”: what is less often cited is the line that immediately follows, “all that is holy is profaned” (Marx and Engels 179).
For Dick, part of what is profaned is the value of humanity, the erosion of full human being into what he will elsewhere describe as the android consciousness of human beings who seem more like machines than feeling people. The androids of his other fictions—he explains in this essay—are figurations of the type of human that “does not care about the fate which his fellow living creatures fall victim to; he stands detached, a spectator” (211). In Ubik, such spectators are also speculators, figurations of the coming godhood of the market. And rather than androids, we have humanity reinvented as human capital, as self-entrepreneurs who must continually fight their own obsolescence, must continually upgrade their skills to remain relevant in an ever-changing marketplace. The exhaustion Joe feels as he constantly fights the dissolution of entropy that slow his body down to the point of death emblematizes the precarity of the human figured only as human capital. And the predatory ethos Dick elsewhere associated with his cold and calculating android characters figures here as the market logic signified by Ubik as God. Little wonder then that the only escape for Joe is to become one with the market itself, no longer the commodity of labour-power or even asset of human capital, but instead to become like money itself, the Joe Chip coin whose universal fungibility allows him to extend into whatever new market reality will next materialize.
