In his essay “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later” (1978), Philip K. Dick describes a “wonderful” error he found in the German translation of his classic speculative fiction Ubik (1969) (Dick 1995: 277-8). To recall the original ending of this novel about two cryogenically suspended brains struggling for sovereignty over the remaining heat-life of the universe, Dick’s titular “mysterious entity or mind or force” – Ubik — starts out communicating to the world via “a series of cheap and vulgar commercials” for coffee, painkillers and so on, but ends up revealing itself to be something like the God of John 1: 1: “I am the word.” It was this last claim that confused the novel’s translator, however, who apparently had no knowledge of its Biblical source. As William Mazzarella, Eric Santner and Aaron Schuster remind us in their excellent account of this episode, the German edition of the novel instead rendered “I am the word” as “I am the brand name” (Mazzarella, Santner and Schuster 2020: 5-7). If the translator’s mistake appears to grotesquely reverse the great metaphysical reveal of Dick’s work, which is to say that it reduces the mysterious and omnipotent Ubik to nothing more than a commercial trademark like Apple, Google or Nike, it is typical that the author himself finds something perversely right – indeed wonderful — in its essential wrongness: Dick already knew very well, after all, that capitalism can quite literally change your life. In February 1974, as he disarmingly confesses earlier in the same essay, Dick’s chance encounter with a young woman delivering a prescription painkiller under the brand name Darvon for his impacted wisdom teeth apparently produced in him the sudden and intense Gnostic revelation that the last two millennia had all been an illusion created by a Demiurge and he was really a member of the early Christian community living under the Roman Empire: ““The girl was a secret Christian and so was I,” he remembered, “We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs” (Dick 1995: 270-71) Why, to pursue a question originally posed by Mazzarella, Santner and Schuster in a different context, might the logo – the brand name — be Dick’s cryptic sign of the logos or word (Mazzarella, Santner and Schuster 2020: 7)?
To pose the question of the political theology of branding, we obviously enter a vast philosophical terrain that extends from Marx’s commodity fetishism, through Weber’s Protestant ethic of capitalism, to Benjamin’s capitalism-as-religion, but my far more modest goal in this short essay is to explore what I want to call the cryptic economic theology of the brand name at work within Dick’s own, allegedly materialist or a-theological thermodynamic universe. Firstly, though, I merely want to note some of the defining properties of Dick’s “mysterious entity or mind or force” in all its different incarnations: Ubik, like all commodities, promises a state of material freedom to its consumers (fresher breath, glossier hair, a curvier figure) but, again like all commodities, it always carries the small-print threat or warning that it must be used as prescribed or unspecified dire consequences will follow (use only as directed, avoid prolonged use, do not exceed recommended dosage and so on). If Ubik takes different material forms in the novel (granules, cream, powder, etc.) its privileged mode of expression is the classic 1960s gadget of the aerosol spray can: “‘Ubik,’ Runciter said, he shook the can mightily, then stood before Joe, aiming it at him. ‘Don’t thank me for this,’ he said, and sprayed prolongedly left and right; the air flickered and shimmered, as if bright particles of light had been released, as if the sun’s energy sparkled here in this worn-out elderly hotel room” (Dick 2000: 174). In anticipation of the famous “Here comes the science bit!” in millennial cosmetics advertisements, Dick’s novel finally reveals that the real reason why Ubik is able to make us happier, slimmer, better-looking and so on is because it is a negentropy machine whose application of the “sun’s energy” arrests the slow heat-death of the universe: “A spray can of Ubik…is a portable negative ionizer,” we are told in a piece of Star Trek-style 60s technobabble, “with a self-contained, high-voltage, low- amp unit powered by a peak-gain helium battery of 25kv. The negative ions are given a counter-clockwise spin by a radically biased acceleration chamber, which creates a centripetal tendency to them so that they cohere rather than dissipate” (Dick 2000: 205).
If Ubik literally re-energizes Dick’s protagonist Joe Chip – ““Feel better? It should work on you right away,” Runciter explains, “you should already be getting a reaction” (Dick 2000: 174) — it seems to have had the same effect on Dick scholarship, which has energetically interpreted the text in Marxist, psychoanalytic and postmodernist terms over the last six decades. To put my own counter-clockwise spin upon Dick’s novel, however, I instead want to situate it in the (apparently incongruous) context of Giorgio Agamben’s theological genealogy of modern government in The Kingdom and the Glory (2011) which, as we will see, narrates an uncannily similar religious origin story for neoliberal political economy. It is Agamben’s hypothesis, recall, that the early Church seeks to reconcile the Gnostic dualism between a transcendental God (who is infinitely foreign from the created world) and a base Demiurge (who governs that world) by the construction of a precarious economic theological edifice founded upon the inter-relationship between God the Father and God the Son. As Agamben recounts, Christian theology integrates Gnostic dualism into one single two-stroke theological machine that is apparently capable of performing both God’s transcendence and immanence, His self-relation and His relation to the world, His sovereign omnipotence over creation and His economic management of creation at the same time. For Agamben, of course, what is at stake in this obscure economic theological dispositif is nothing less than the beginning of modern governmentality, which is to say of the “light-touch” management of the apparently immanent, self-organizing and self-regulating state: “these original polarities have, at different levels, developed into the polarities of transcendent order and immanent order, Kingdom and Government, general providence and special providence, which define the operation of the machine of the divine government of the world” (Agamben 2011: 207). Perhaps most importantly for our purposes, however, Agamben insists that what greases the wheels of this bipolar theological machine – which is to say what prevents it from relapsing into the abyss of Gnosticism – is a performative economy of mutual and vicarious glorification: “Government glorifies the Kingdom, and the Kingdom glorifies Government.” In its unending praise of itself, Christianity conceals the inglorious fact that it is itself nothing but this work of performative self-glorification: “the center of the machine is empty, and glory is nothing but the splendor that emanates from this emptiness, the inexhaustible kabhod that at once reveals and veils the central vacuity of the machine” (Agamben 2011: 211).
Why, though, might we read the “mysterious entity or mind or force” called Ubik as a — quite literal — economic theological machine that, so to speak, dispenses its glory into the world via an aerosol spray can? To at least begin to answer this question, I first want to recall here that Dick’s original Biblical host text – John 1: 1 — is itself nothing other than the classic description of the becoming-incarnate in the world of the transcendent God: Jesus is, of course, the “Word made flesh.” It is precisely this economic theological relation between God the Father and God the Son, I think, that Dick’s novel rewrites in its description of the political economic relation between Ubik the master or meta-brand and Ubik the commodity form or “brand made flesh” that dispenses divine being into the world (Dick 2000: 148). As Eric Santner recently observes in his own psychotheological genealogy of neoliberal modernity, Marx had already deployed a cryptic economic theological metaphor to describe the primal scene of capital itself: “It [Value] differentiates itself as original value from surplus value as God the Father differentiates himself from himself as God the Son,” the latter contends in volume one of Capital, “although both are of the same age and form, in fact one single person” (Marx quoted in Santner 2020: 27). For Dick, whose own encounter with a commodity provoked the revelation that he was really living in the time that remains, God is not merely a metaphor for capital but the obscure economic theological paradigm for the general formula of capital as M-C-M: “Ubik is a metaphor for God,” the author’s former wife Tessa Dick revealingly observes, “Ubik is all-powerful and all-knowing, and Ubik is everywhere. The spray can is only a form that Ubik takes to make it easy for people to understand it and use it” (Dick 2008) By incarnating its brand name in material form as the commodity, Ubik diffuses or dispenses its glory into the world for human beings to use and, mutatis mutandis, we human beings glorify the name Ubik ourselves via our incessant use of its instruments: a housewife sprays Ubik onto her old refrigerator, for example, and “in a flash, a modern six-door refrigerator replaced it in splendid glory” (Dick 200: 122). If Ubik consequently appears to describe a very similar circle of mutual glorification as Agamben’s theological genealogy of governmentality, however, it also papers over the same Gnostic crack or fissure as the original economic theology. In Ubik’s uncomfortable combination of promise and threat, freedom and coercion, we can begin to detect the Christian entente cordiale between God the Father and God the Son, brand name and commodity, hands-on authority and light-touch management beginning to return to Gnostic stasis or civil war: please feel free to use however you like, so long as you do exactly as I say.
In drawing this paper to a close, though, I want to propose that Dick’s alternative theological genealogy of neoliberalism also raises the question of what – if anything – lies behind Ubik’s hymn of unending (self-)praise, but his own unique answer is not the metaphysical void of inoperativity (inoperatività, désoeuvrement, worklessness) so much as the thermodynamic void of entropy. It often appears as if Dick scholarship (like, say, Walter Benjamin scholarship) struggles to square the circle between what we might crudely call the “messianic” and the “materialist” dimensions of his work. After all, Ubik’s great Gnostic struggle between God and the Demiurge is at one and the same time a neurological struggle between two cryogenically suspended brains belonging to bodies living a kind of radioactive half-life: Ella Runciter and Jory Miller. Yet, what Dick’s fiction demands of us is not a criticism that polices the border between the material and the messianic – still less one that seeks to posthumously “claim” the author for one side or the other – but a criticism that seeks to think through the undecidable relationship between these two ways of thinking the time that remains. To risk a hypothesis that is obviously not capable of verification or falsification in this short essay, I thus want to conclude by proposing that Dick’s magnum opus should be read neither simply as an esoteric messianic tract nor as an early experiment in the neuro-novel, but as a work of political theological physics: God’s incarnation, death and messianic return at the end of the time are converted not simply into historical materialist conditions but into thermodynamic events (Crockett 2023). For Dick, Agamben’s precarious economic theological machine of mutual glorification – which both conceals and reveals the void of inoperativity at its core – is reimagined in thermodynamic terms as a kind of heat engine that generates incredible energy but, nonetheless, experiences resistance, leakage, entropy. If Dick’s modern economic theology converts glory into energy – and energy into commodity fetishism — it perhaps also activates an obscure physics or energetics that has always been latent within the modern political theological tradition but which has too often remained untapped within scholarship: think of Schmitt’s theory of the political as a moment of intensification, for example, or Benjamin’s quasi-Newtonian concept of the theologico-political, or even Agamben’s own economic theology, which revealingly speaks of inoperativity as “nothing but the waste products of the immaterial and glorious fuel burnt by the motor of the machine as it turns, and that cannot be stopped” (Agamben 2011: 246). In his own thermodynamic political theology, I think Dick also permits us to glimpse what we might call the radioactive “half-life” (Dick 2000: 116) – which is to say the physical or material time that remains, the time that it takes for time to end — of economic theology. What will remain, he asks, when the economic theological machine’s glorious immaterial fuel runs out and it falls out of the sky?
