There are numerous points of con- and divergence between PKD’s Exegesis and the diaries produced by Schmitt’s buribunkologist. While the clearest contemporary analogue to Schmitt’s buribunk is, well, all of us. Tweeters, Facebookers, consumers/producers of social media are always in the act of autopoiesis and, in Schmitt’s estimation, consequently become the particular instantiations of the movement of world history. PKD, by contrast, wholly abstracts and/or overdetermines the auto- in his poiesis. The Exegesis is, arguably, about everything that ever has been or ever will be with one notable exception: the individual, autonomous human subject. PKD’s originary worry is made clear fairly early on. “Am I losing touch with reality?” PKD writes, “Or is reality sliding towards a Phil Dickian type of atmosphere? And if the latter, then for god’s sake why? Am I responsible? How could I be responsible? Isn’t that solipsism?” (22). Reality is is, he believes, undergoing some atmospheric change that resembles the metaphysical technoscapes “he” created. (The scare-quoted “he” will be explained and elaborated upon below). This serves as a strong counterpoint to Schmitt’s buribunk who is writing and being written by world history (q. in Kittler 242). The buribunk is made immortal, is pacified by the guarantee that the diary participates in something greater than itself. “What is the great engine that elevates me out of the complacent circle of egohood? History!” This is the buribunk’s call and response. ‘Nothing to worry about,’ says the buribunk, ‘history will sort everything out.’ PKD, on the other hand, is not comforted by what is being made manifest in/through him, nor is he content to accept that it all devolves back into his ego. This is PKD’s negative dialectic. The Phil Dickian atmosphere is a threat to and a problem for PKD. We should briefly pause to note the ambiguity of the threat PKD has identified. It is an atmosphere, some nebulous and amorphous area/mood, and it is Phil Dickian, that is, it shares some qualities of the vast and labyrinthine texts that can be attributed in some way or another to Philip K. Dick. [I should note here for clarity’s sake that my use of PKD as a sort of stand-in for Philip K. Dick is an attempt to create some distance between the historically situated person who goes by ‘Phil Dick’ and the sci-fi author ‘Philip K. Dick.’ It is my contention that something, not someone, new comes about in the writing of the Exegesis and I have decided that the easiest way to refer to that something is as PKD.]

“I feel I have been a lot of different people,” PKD writes, “Many people have sat at this typewriter, using my fingers. Writing my books. // My books are forgeries. Nobody wrote them. The goddam typewriter wrote them; it’s a magic typewriter. Or like John Denver gets his songs: I get them from the air. Like his songs, they – my books – are already there. Whatever that means.” (22). The books and, thus, the Phil Dickian atmosphere is always-already there, but nobody authored or authorized these things. No world history, no buribunk, no dialectic; just the damn typewriting machine. The Dickian atmosphere is not localizable in any one individual and certainly not in any one text. Where, for Schmitt, “the mental region in which these numerous and contradictory elements, this bundle of negated negations, are synthesized – the unexplainable, absolute, essential that is part of every religion – that is nothing but the Buribunkological” (236). There is no synthesis for PKD, no resolution or closure to the dialectic. There are no final negations of the negations that lead to sublimation. The buribunk writes whatever in dutiful service to the homogenizing force of humanity and world history. PKD is, on the other hand, “always ferreting out elliptical points, odd angles. What I write doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. There is fun and religion and psychotic horror strewn about like a bunch of hats” (324). PKD is a buribunk, in that he writes about himself and events that he has undergone in some form or another, but a buribunk with a difference and the method that is imminent in the Exegesis offers us a way out of the world-historical Tweeter, the diary-keeping buribunk, and, most importantly, Kittler’s apocalyptic visions of technology’s endstage.

Kittler proposes a technological eschatology where “literature has nothing more to say” (263). As though the typewriter were extinct, extant only in archived advertisements of the past. As if the typewriter were merely some link on the great chain of technological progress. Granted, digitalization gives every indication that it is a totalizing force, but there must remain gaps, points of rupture. One of these gaps is the typewriter. As Erik Davis notes, PKD “made philosophy a kind of transcendent punk-rock machine music: repetitive, incessant, sometimes hysterically Romantic, but also a work that can be appreciated, not as rigorous argument, but as a flowing pattern of variation, affect, rhythm, and return” (434n). Outside the intellect, the totalizing force of the dialectic, and bizarre notions of linear progress and obsolescence, there is a way of maneuvering. PKD does just that.

Schmitt’s promise that “no second peeling off of the future is getting lost, no hit of the typewriter key will miss the page” parallels Kittler’s guarantee that digitalization “transforms sources of accidental noise into absolute all-or-none organs” (242, 250). Against these assertions, here’s PKD:

“If you recall the weird word found on deserted Roanoke Island in 1591, which was CTOSYOAN, carved on a tree and everyone mysteriously gone, – well, look I did it just then; I had my fingers one key to the right on my keyboard: the word is CROATOAN; I was copying it from my text book and had my eyes away from my hands. Thus marvelously proving my point. But for centuries scholars have been trying to figure out what “Croatoan” means. Probably it means nothing; the terrified colonists of the island, faced by one or more hostile forces (famine, Indians, plague, etc.), had an inspiration and left the island from some other sanctuary, believing that those letters spelled out something meaningful. Perhaps the Cosmic Teletype Operator turned his head for a moment, as I did, and erred” (12).

Contingency over necessity. Accident that is mistaken for an “all-or-none organ,” but can be read as accident all the same. Negative dialectics over dialectics. Agon over rigid binary. The cosmological over the world historical. PKD allows us to rethink what seemed so certain. The use of vestigial technology allows for a re-orientation. The typewriter, not as ante-computer but anti-computer, allows us to change the coordinates of writing. The means of writing dictate what is written, but there are ways to pervert the means and distort the message. Out of PKD’s typewriter, a supposedly restrictive technology, comes a kaleidoscopic, gnostic wikipedia before the internet. The typewriter which, to PKD, was a “dream machine that models cosmic processes,” gives us a site to think otherwise about our given discursive formation.  PKD’s typewriter and the Exegesis that came out of it demands that we think of the typewriter in a new fashion and not as some intermediary between pen/paper and keyboard/screen.  The typewriter, symbol of the bureaucrat and the beatnik, does not coalesce into one singular object, but rather is an open technology that can be used and abused.

The typewriter is not a precursor to the computer since the typewriter is not any one thing, nor does it inaugurate any one type of speech. We need some way to move beyond the Buribunk, to move outside the linear, dialectical idea of technological progress, and, most importantly, away from some “I” that writes/thinks/speaks itself into being. There is no need for another reformulation of Descartes ever-enduring ‘I think, therefore I am,’ which has become, as a former professor of mine liked to say, “a statement of lifestyle and void of any philosophical worth” (cf. T-Shirts carrying the slogan “I surf, therefore I am” or some other such derivative). Perhaps we need an “It is, we think,” the opposite of Descartes stabilizing gesture of providing an ontological foundation via an “I’s” doubt. The typewriter is and we continue to wonder about it, question it, probe it.  The possibility opened up by PKD’s typewriter is the revelation of a fundamentally unstable ontology via some thing’s material certainty. Not subjects and ideas, but objects and matter. Not existentially appeasing doubt, but phenomenologically disruptive certainty. (Our cri de coeur could be, pace Husserl, “<em>From</em> the things themselves!”). PKD, typewriting the cosmos on his punk-rock dream machine, gives us an entry point to exploring such a possibility.

Works Cited

Dick, Philip K. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Eds. Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011.

Kittler, Friedrich A. Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999.

— John Casey