In February 1974, Philip K. Dick woke up and realized he was living in political theology. To recall this strange episode in his literary career, Dick opened his front door one day to a young woman delivering prescription painkillers from the local pharmacy and experienced the sudden revelation that he was a member of the early Christian community living under the Roman Empire. For Dick, as he recalled in the essay “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” “The girl was a secret Christian and so was I. We lived in fear of detection by the Romans. We had to communicate with cryptic signs.” If this revelation was true, Dick reasoned, then it would explain some bizarre events in his life and work such as the fact that his recent novel Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1970) exactly reproduced a passage from the Acts of the Apostles, even though Dick had never read the Biblical text: this coincidence was obviously neither pure serendipity nor unconscious plagiarism but evidence that Dick was really living in the time of the Acts all along! In Dick’s own head, he was thus a kind of late Californian contemporary of Paul of Tarsus – Phil of Orange County — seeking to live out the half-life that remained before the return of the Messiah: “I remembered Jesus, who had just recently been with us, and had gone temporarily away, and would very soon return,” he wrote, “And the Romans did not know. They thought He was dead, forever dead. That was our great secret, our joyous knowledge. Despite all appearances, Christ was going to return” (270-71).
To “apply” political theology to Philip K. Dick like some magic cure-all spray, as a roundtable such as this one may risk appearing to do, we thus must begin by taking seriously the proposition that Dick was already a political theologian. It is not necessary to believe in the author’s own personal Pauline revelation – and even he wondered whether it was merely a product of drug-induced psychosis – to recognize that his fiction is saturated with theologico-political signatures, themes and concepts that emerge from his own wide reading and deep investment in Christian theology, Judaism, Gnosticism and other fields. If any proposed political theological reading of Dick’s fiction immediately appears to risk redundancy, though, we can take a certain degree of confidence from the fact that the author also recognized in his moment of revelation that his political theology remained a “cryptic” one – even or especially to himself – and, indeed, he spent much of the last eight years of his life obsessively trying to decipher its hidden meaning. In taking up the question of political theology in Dick’s work once again, we are thus only continuing his own half-finished labour of (self-)exegesis (Dick 2011).
If Dick scholars are understandably somewhat sceptical about his claim to be a figure from the Acts of the Apostles, it is at least partly because this story has a more plausible contemporary literary source. It is hard not to feel a sense of déjà vu, for example, at the author’s recognition that he was the unreliable narrator of his own (half-)life. After all, Dick’s own novels are peopled with humble everymen – Rick Deckard, Joe Chip, Jason Taverner — who belatedly come to the realization that what they have been calling “life” is a vast conspiracy orchestrated, not by God or the Devil, but by some shadowy military-industrial-media complex: the Rosen Association, Runciter Associates, the Police State. To read it through the lens of his own work, in other words, Dick’s real revelation in 1974 was not that he was living in the New Testament but in a Philip K. Dick novel: what the author personally experienced as a religious conflict between Church and Empire at the beginning of the Christian Millennium was, in many ways, merely the latest iteration of his fiction’s largely secular struggle between the individual and the state under dystopian late capitalism. In the early 21st century, revealingly, Dick is celebrated less as a prophet of the return of the Messiah (“Christ was going to return”) than of the diabolical metastases of neoliberal modernity: artificial intelligence, surveillance capitalism, cognitive or neurological capture, virtual reality, post-truth politics and biopolitical slavery or proletarianization.
In his classic speculative fiction Ubik (1969), which is the subject of this roundtable, Dick tells the story of Joe Chip, an employee of a security company called Runciter Associates, who works to protect his clients’ privacy against a kind of psychic or telepathic equivalent of corporate espionage in the near future of 1992. To briefly summarize the novel’s labyrinthine plot, Joe and his team are apparently lured into a trap by one of their corporate competitors which leads to the death of their boss, Glen Runciter, in an explosion. It seems that the explosion sets in motion an uncanny series of events that transform Joe and the other survivors’ experience of reality: they each regress into the past to the point where they start to shrivel up and die. At the same time, Joe’s dead boss’s face appears on coins and then Runciter himself returns to save Joe’s life by spraying him with a miraculous product called Ubik. For Joe, the real truth of his situation gradually begins to emerge over the course of the novel: it was actually him who died in the explosion, not Runciter, and he now exists in a kind of radioactive half-life from which the living Runciter is trying to save him. If the conclusion of Ubik remains deeply ambiguous and contested, it is eventually revealed that everything that has happened in the novel is the result of a struggle between two other cryogenically suspended brains desperate to maintain their half-lives in a universe that is experiencing entropy: Jory Miller, a predatory teenager, who seeks to eat or consume other half-lifers like Joe to prolong his own existence, and Ella Runciter, the wife of Glen, who uses Ubik as a protective negentropic shield against Jory. Finally, we should add that each chapter of the book is prefaced by an advertisement for Ubik beer, coffee, hairspray and so on, which all promise amazing results if used correctly. In the last chapter, Ubik assumes God-like powers – claiming that it has created the universe – and the novel ends with the (allegedly living) Glen Runciter now seeing the (allegedly dead) Joe’s face appearing on coins and asserting in the book’s final line: “This is just the beginning” (Dick 2000: 208).
This roundtable seeks to explore what we call the “half-life” of political theology in Philip K. Dick’s fictional universe. To appeal to the scientific concept of the half-life in order to describes the trajectory of Dick’s own late modern political theology, rather than falling back on such exhausted terms as secularization or the return of the religious, we offer what we hope will be a new and appropriately energetic way of thinking through the undecidable relationship between Judaeo-Christian or Gnostic messianism and (historical or scientific) materialism in his work: political theology’s half-life is quite literally the time taken for it – like any other physical, biological or pharmacological quantity — to reduce to half of its original value. It is our hypothesis that Dick’s political theology is neither divine revelation nor ideological false consciousness but something that contains a hard, if entropically diminishing, material core over and as history. Across the following four essays, we attempt to measure the half-life of political theology in Ubik in different ways.
Firstly, Sherryl Vint’s “Entropy as Neoliberal Governance in Ubik” argues that the deformation and entropic erosion of reality in the novel captures – but also critiques as fundamentally prone to crisis – the way that emerging orthodoxies of neoliberal reason privileged the market as a site of transcendental truth while reducing humanity to the anaemic form of human capital.
Daniel Conway’s “Death, Incorporated: Redemption for the Rest of Us” interprets Ubik as Dick’s attempt to transpose the familiar (i.e., macrocosmic) imperial aspirations of late modern capitalism into the potentially infinite microcosmic worlds of virtual reality, wherein a fully secularized redemption is available to those—viz. “the rest of us”—who cannot afford to chase the fantasy of everlasting life.
Arthur Bradley’s “I Am the Brand Name” reads Ubik as a materialist reimagining of Christian economic theology in which the precarious political theological relationship between God the Father and His Son is superseded by the – equally precarious –political economic relation between the brand name and the commodity.
Finally, “Miguel Vatter’s “On the Ubiquity of Entropy” reads Ubik as a fable illustrating the theological mysteries of the Second Law of thermodynamics, where entropy is figured both as a world-destroying and world-creating principle: central to this theology after the “death of God” stand paradoxes of eternal recurrence and the possibility of localized reversals of the arrow of time. If our four contributions all come from different disciplinary and methodological perspectives – philosophy, political theory, religious studies and literary studies – and arrive at different conclusions, what we share is a commitment to re-thinking Dick’s political theology in (historically, philosophically and scientifically) materialist terms, whether as a form of ideology critique, as a libidinal economy or even as a real energetic event in its own right.
In bringing Dick’s work into dialogue with contemporary work on sovereignty (Agamben, Santner), political economy (Foucault, Cooper) and thermodynamics (Boltzmann), this Roundtable seeks to stage a new debate between political theology and speculative fiction as distinct but cognate commentaries upon what Paul’s Letter to the Romans calls the time that remains or, in Agamben’s intriguing reading, the time that time takes to end (Agamben 2005). What, we seek to ask, will have been the half-life of Dick’s political theology – the time that political theology itself takes to end — exactly 50 years after his own alleged divine revelation?
This roundtable on Ubik and political theology is dedicated to the memory of Bruce Rosenstock. Bruce was one of the great interpreters of 20th century political theology and a passionate reader of Philip K. Dick’s oeuvre. It was he that suggested we write on Ubik but his sudden illness and death prevented him from completing his text, at least in this iteration of our world.
