Exegesis of Phillip K Dick: A Scanner Darkly, Dystopia, & The Angel of History - podcast episode 10

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Exegesis of Phillip K Dick: A Scanner Darkly, Dystopia, & The Angel of History 
- pontos fathom podcast episode 10

Welcome to our tenth episode of the pontos fathom podcast - Exegesis of Phillip K Dick: A Scanner Darkly, Dystopia, and The Angel of History - pontos fathom podcast EP10. In this episode we continue the month long exploration of the Exegesis of Phillip K Dick. This week Benjamin's Angel of History survey's the texts of A Scanner Darkly as Dystopia. What is PKD's view of history and the future? Thanks for watching and let me know your thoughts in the comments below! If you enjoyed this, consider giving a thumbs up and subscribe if you want to! Please checkout these links below to support the channel. Thanks!

welcome back everyone to pontos fathom press today is our pontos fathom podcast episode 10 continuing our month-long study into the exegesis of philip k dick in today's podcast we're going to talk a bit about a scanner darkly dystopia and the angel of history and sort of you know how in some ways a scanner darkly represents a dystopia but it's also kind of a secret coded uh surprise from dick let's call it let's leave it at that for now but but uh yeah we we've uh doing philip k dick all month we talked about his uh in our last one we talked about ubik and uh kw jetters blade runner and some ideas of uh the butcher's wife and formations of the unconscious last time we also have another one about anxiety discontents and gnosis uh today's podcast will definitely talk about the black iron prison a bit as well so uh let's get into it before we start please like and subscribe us down below and check out flowing the tears of the flesh android the curiously short occupancy of oh biden has some dickies influences but definitely kind of like a nova express type send up of the

flash android he is monitored by professor rona crown working for the continuity of government from a low orbital satellite her job is to keep him medicated and viable through his tear salinity to make sure that the alien tentacles stay firmly attached uh and keep the handlers happy so uh hey your your purchase helps out the channel you can also join our patreon love to hear your comments below okay let's dig right into uh the exegesis let's talk a little bit about the influences from scanner darkly as well maybe to start out with i just wanted to read you know jumping right to the punch line of the joke i wanted to read

from first corinthians uh it's first corinthians 13 i'm going to read the whole thing because this is where we get the scanner darkly paraphrased from in a way so let's just go through it so it says gifts nothing without charity so first corinthians 13 though i speak with the tongues of men and of angels and have not charity i am become as sounding brass or a tinkling symbol and though i have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and though i have all faith so that i could remove mountains and have not charity i am nothing and though i bestow all my goods to feed the poor and though give to my body to be burned and have not charity a prophet mean propheteth mean nothing charity suffereth long and is kind charity envieth not charity of aunteth itself it is not puffed up doth not behave itself unseemly seeketh not her own it is not easily provoked thinketh no evil rejoice not in iniquity but rejoice in the truth beareth all things believeth all things hopeth all things endureth all things from what from when that which is perfect is come then that which is part shall be done away charity never faileth but when there be prophecies they shall fail whether there be tongues they shall cease whether there be knowledge it shall be vanished when i was a child i spake as a child i understood as a child i thought as a child but when i became a man i put away childish things for now we see through a glass darkly but then face to face now that i know in part but then shall i know even as also i am known and now abideth faith hope charity these three but the greatest of these is charity so and then we go into preferable speaking it says we have a couple things here that are pretty key to dick choosing a scanner darkly from um from a glass through a glass darkly it says for now we see through a glass darkly but then face to face now i know it in part but shall not know that even i am known so we get a bit of dick's influence here and what he's going with you know a lot of what the dystopian feel of a scanner darkly uh has to do with this sense of identity right the ident the identity of um uh the identity slippering away right so you have some of that is through the drugs you have the uh the suit right he's like an undercover undercover agent right archer is or uh arctur is so i just want to kind of go into this

this area here it says it is almost as if in scanner the or personality which is and was not occluded was able to monitor the conscious occluded one from a detached standpoint

from having been intoxicated for one and a half years i know that the occlusion resembles an intoxication perfectly recorded in a scanner including the identity confusion amnesia regarding the original personality a sort of forgetting is chronicled in scanner it is the epitome of the occluding process and then uh he's saying that now scanner was something like his 374 event so we as we know uh the exegesis of philip k dick he has this event kind of comes up with this idea of the black iron prison has these gnostic revelations and he works through that through his his notes um he says right here what i see is only a matter of degree for me to stigmatize my own processes as occluded i need to point i need a point of reference i am now to know what they are i was in scanner as 374's to now ie 374 now now scanner we are damaged mines trying to monitor our own damage all right this is amazing right so this idea of reflection it's impossible to reflect right one of the one of these crises we see here is the impossibility to reflect right and and we have that kind of two-fold knowledge here so the two-fold knowledge here that we have are one um in that corinthians passage we're talking about um not only prophecy but being part and being the whole right and this idea here is that part and whole is broken let's kind of go into let's go into scanner here and talk a little bit about the paranoia right so i think if we look at paranoia here as well um i believe i've got a quote here

so he says when i regard narcissism as anti-establishment

right still going to talk about hegelianism and scanner is an account of what it's like to have a self in each brain hemisphere ideologically on opposing sides of the barricade okay so let's let's kind of go with that let's kind of go with that one right there so in in scanner um i've got a foot book bookmark here to lead us to some of these points so there's lots of these chilling moments in scanner darkly where you know the hope just starts to slip away i mean obviously the end is so so much like that the the circular nature of things but let's go into a less cosmic detail here just a more standard paranoia detail and you know in exegesis uh dick monitors his progress through his novel so he talks about how each of the novels he wrote is sort of like the the um part of the gnostic story of his of his finding out about this gnosticism right so this is what the exegesis really means he's looking through his old works and when he gets to scanner he's talking about the fall and when we say the fall of man it's very interesting because it's the fall of arctur right but there's lots of falls in this and let's let's talk about that in the sense of black iron prison which can politically mean you know soviet system or the worst kinds of uh you know american um closed mind uh or or uh paranoia culture say like cia kind of things and that and how dick would react to those sort of things but also on that gnostic level where you know reality is like a prison or the meat the meat of the you know the light trapped in the meat kind of concept but let's ground it here with this quote from scanner darkly in a dystopian form here so he's talking arctur's talking about um you know he's undercover he's been wearing the uh the suit he's been doing drugs and he's living in the house or he's staying in the house with his friends slash drug friends slash investigation right so uh as he drove

as he drove he continued his theoretical analysis of his situation

by means of a second well-established example they had brought it up and drilled it into his own memory banks during his police training at the academy or else he had read it in the newspapers item one of the most effective forms of industrial or military sabotage limits itself to damage that can never be thoroughly proven or even proven at all to be anything deliberate it is like an invisible political movement perhaps it isn't there at all if a bomb is wired to a car's ignition then obviously there's an enemy if a public building or a political headquarters is blown up then there's a political enemy but if there's an accident or a series of accidents if they occur if equipment merely fails to function if it appears faulty especially in a slow fashion over a period of normal time with numerous small failures and misfirings then the victim whether a person or party or country can never marshal itself to defend itself

in fact like this is funny like i remember my dad used to say like you like the instruction manuals were purposely made to drive him crazy right this is like the kind of idea it's not like you're not gonna make a faulty product but you make a small error in the instruction manual just to torment people and it raises everybody's anxiety it's very funny right it's paranoid and it's funny in fact arctur speculated as he drove along the freeway very slowly the person being to assume his paranoia has no enemy he doubts himself his car broke down normally his luck had just been bad and his friends agree it's in his head and then he wipes out more thoroughly than everything that can be traced however it takes longer the person persons doing him in must tinker and putter and make use of chance over a long time that is his advantage every nation in the world we know trains and sends out a massive agents to loosen bolts strip threads here break wires start little fires a wad of gum instead of xerox copy machine right too much soap and toilet paper as the yippies of the 60s knew can screw up the entire sewage of an office building so so you get the kind of idea here just a small detail of how that looming paranoia fits in well how does it fit in with it with dystopia well now this is where it starts to get the institutionalized side that the erasure the erasure of safety right there's no more safety you know so look at arctur as fred he's the drug addict friend right as archer he's in his suit he's an undercover agent and then there's the blurring right the blurring between the roles so what's worse in dystopia even if we look at a classic like a 1984 where there's ingsoc and newspeak right the idea is language has been stripped apart right dystopia used to just mean a totalitarian thing right but the worst dystopia is where you know um you know people are lied to about assassinations that were sponsored by the government for generations and they believe the lies and people believe buildings falling down and believe the lies and then or they don't and they do and they create that cross chatter so i mean really the dystopian idea here that's really at the heart of scanner is internally you don't recognize yourself in in the mirror sort of just like the uh just like the the scatter suit there you know the uh you know like you can't even look at yourself in the mirror um so yeah i think that that's definitely idea of uh uh the paranoia so let's just dip back into the exegesis again for a moment and let's just talk about vip right so one thing he says i'm really in error when i talk about distinguishing experience or recalling worlds that there are and he and he does one of his many lists he goes one the black iron prison rome ussr fascist usa two this our normal world three the garden world for the experience of two at the normal world under the revealed guise in which zebra or logos was seen including the set ground separation into mundane versions the illuminated letter passage in tears so again to talk about seeing our normal world through the glass darkly through the scanner darkly right so what is that seeing that's happening right let's go back to corinthians again uh first corinthians 13. right so you we know that exegesis dick was very interested in early christianity and narcissism let's go right here to see it says and though i have the gift of prophecy and understand all mysteries and all knowledge and though i have all faith so i could move mountains and have not charity i am nothing right so interestingly the concept of charity comes in here so usually with dystopia you know we have the do it to julia kind of moment where everyone's heartbreaks or like we have arctur ending up working for the flowers that make the d and it's the treatment plant and it's like the self-licking ice cream cone of capitalism and and the full ariamonic weight of that uh that process um i'll probably do philip k dick up again in next month we're going to be doing rudolph steiner next month and ariman and lucifer will be one of those topics but maybe a dick will come we'll play back in there again but uh but yeah anyway while we're while we're here um hey if you guys like what we're doing here please like and subscribe and uh join us on our patreon leave us a comment below we can chat through the comments for now i'd like to get these going live and once we get the state the channel big enough i'll start doing these as live broadcasts and then we can uh we can chat live i think that will be great so looking forward to hearing from everyone okay so let's talk a bit about the dystopia now so um where does this vip kind of say fit in with you know scanners the fall we have prophecy but no charity and you know even dick in the end of uh in the end of a scanner darkly he has a kind of epilogue where he talks about

friends who have died so he talks like so while this is a dystopian has its political side to it has its prophecy side to it this he does have a charity moment in here where he talks about like the nemesis of drugs and then he lists out friends gone or brain damaged or in psychosis and he talks about you know dedicates it with his love so there is this tender moment of charity here from dick you know despite his cynicism despite his um

at the time quite a abrasive and abrupt um hemispheric shift between different roles right he does have this moment of charity here so i think some of this you know like he says in the opening of exegesis as well he says giving voice to the voiceless you know and here here he's called out the names of the dead what can i do exactly what i've done my voice for the voiceless so he's sort of holding a line he feels you know he's connecting to the black iron prison world in the garden world to the metamorphosis the former is that what is it was our world is a continually advancing state of the process going on the garden world the tranquility outcome the end state headed toward basically my speech is correct but not radical enough so this is a great place to maybe jump into the idea of dystopia in history here because you know some of this is about uh forgetting too right so um when he talks about black iron prison here he mentions uh he mentions like the soviet system and you know how the logos comes down for us right one of the things that's very uh fascinating here would be the angel of history and um people who are know the work of walter benjamin will he points to a painting by cle clay called uh angelus novus right so this is now this is i'm reading from benjamin here it says angelus novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating his eyes are staring his mouth is open his wings are spread this is how one percy pictures the angel of history his face is turned toward the past

where we perceive a chain of events he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet the angel would like to stay awaken the dead and make whole what has been smashed but a storm is blowing in from paradise it is caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel angel can no longer close them the storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned while the pile of debris before him grows skyward and this storm is what we call progress right so walter benjamin the angel of history right the angel angel novus right this angel of history his back toward the future at his feet the rubble of the past he can see all the sins right and yet he keeps moving and let's go back to forgetting because archer ends up in a forgetting state too but let's before he forgets he has his doubt right he has a i guess then gastonomi garden kind of moment almost we'll say

so the other scene that we you you may know where we're going here but is when arctur with his undercover name of fred he's he's being checked in in the all-white room where steel fixtures and steel chairs and steel desk all bolted down in fact on the right stood a weighing scale with a sign have technician only adjust two deputies regarded him both in full uniform of the orange county sheriff's office but with medical stripes your officer fred uh yes sir fred said he felt scared all right fred first let me state that as you undoubtedly are aware your briefings and deep briefings are monitored and later played back for study in case anything we missed it in the original session this is sop of course and it applies to all officers reporting orally not only you the other medical deputy said plus all the other contacts you maintain with the department such as phone contacts additional activities such as your recent public speech in anaheim at the rotary club boys uh lions card fred said do you take substance d the left-hand medical deputy said that question the other deputy said is moot because it's taken for granted that your work in your work you're compelled to take d so don't answer not that it would be incriminating but it's simply moot he indicated a table with a bunch of blocks and other riff-raff colored plastic objects lay step over here and be seated officer fred we're going to administer briefly several easy tests this won't consume much of your time there's no physical discomfort involved yeah about the speech i gave fred said what this is about the left-hand doctor said as he seated himself and produced a pen from some forms stems from a recent departmental survey showing that several undercover agents working in this area have been admitted to the neural aphasia clinics during the past month you're conscious of them highly the fact of highly addictiveness of substance d the other deputy said to fred sure fred said of course i am we're going to give you these two tests now in this order starting with what we call the bg or uh you think i'm an addict fred said whether whether you're an addict or not is not a prime issue since it's a blocking agent is expected from the army chemical warfare division sometimes in the next five years these tests do not pertain to the addictive properties of substance d but too well let me give you this set ground test first it determines your ability to readily distinguish set from ground so they kind of go on through this testing of him and it gets into the cross chatter uh he goes what do you see and he goes i see a coke bottle a soda pop bottle is correct have you noticed anything fred said in studying my briefings like that anything slushed it's the speech he thought what about the speech i gave he said did i show bilateral dysfunction there this is why i've been hauled in here for tests no this is routine the seated deputy said we realize officer that undercover agents must of necessity take drugs in the line of duty and those who go into the federal permanently no not many permanently again this is a percent contamination that could be a course of time rectify itself as murky fred said it murks over everything are you getting any cross chatter one of the deputies asked him what he said uncertainly between hemispheres if there's damage to the left hemisphere where the linguistic skills are located then sometimes the right hemisphere will fill in its best ability i don't know he said not that i'm aware of thoughts not your own as if another person or mind were thinking but different from the way you would think even foreign words that you don't know that's a learned that's learned from peripheral perceptions sometimes during your lifetime nothing like that that i've noticed you probably would from people with left hemispheric damage who've reported it evidently it's pretty shattering evidence experience well i guess i noticed that so anyway the paranoia of the scene is great right the paranoia here is is really palpable in in that he's doubting himself he's got these two deputy doctors talking to him at the same time on slightly out of phase with each other right uh and and we see this here where he says

uh scanner is an account this is back from the exegesis scanner is an account of what it's like to have a self in each brain hemisphere ideologically on opposing sides of the barricades right and so he talks about the uh anti-establishment christianity and he talks about this like this hegelian idea too where there's there's this need for this synthesis right so i think this is a good place for us to jump into just a bit of um we're talking about phasing again again we started out with through the glass darkly and then through a scanner darkly and then let's just jump in for a moment into uh into lacan so in lakhan's akrit uh he has a couple of different essays uh one of them is the mirror phase so in lakanis talks about the mirror phase again this is one of those um early theories of lacan where it's about when a child first recognizes himself in a mirror okay and it sort of leads into some other things but before lacan developed his mirror phase he had worked on something called the looking glass phase which is very interesting because it's through the glass darkly right a scanner darkly and it even reminds us of the film version of scanner darkly where um keanu reeves plays arctur and fred but then keanu reeves also has that mirror scene in the matrix right where he wakes up from the matrix which is very much exegesis like you know so uh so the idea of ego formation is really at play here so it's the way that the person identifies with the self and you know some of this is a mimic some of it is copying right there is some copying going on and they even think that um many some writers claim that lacan sort of borrowed these concepts from this idea of animals altering their physical appearance in accordance with the environment you know again we see the octopus the octopus changing i don't think le con ever fessed up to that but the idea is you know there's this idea of lacan doing many studies into the idea of

reflecting on one's self right so we talk about dystopia now in the modern sense dystopia almost becomes not the prison of bars not the totalitarian machine but the place in which one can no longer reflect on oneself it's the fear of losing oneself and now again back you know again at the end of you know spoilers alert at the end of scanner darkly obviously arctur is you know in a vegetative state he's kind of joined the recovery cult he's a he's a fraction of the person he used to be um but there's that kind of forgetting that definitely happens right there's forgetting that happens and we see some of that forgetting in ubik too right so in ubik the series of forgetting we roll back the history right we're going back to the past we're forgetting stuff right but the grimmest version of this might be with freck's final final moments right where he's gonna leave this world on schedule ahead of schedule the next thing he knew so he has his uh he has his uh merlot his mundavi cabernet sauvignon that's what it is the next thing he knew a creature from between dimensions was standing beside his bed looking down at him disapprovingly the creature had many eyes all over it ultra modern expressive looking clothing and rose up eight feet high also it carried an enormous scroll you're going to read by my sins charles frick said the creature nodded and unsealed the scroll yes freck said lying helplessly in his bed and it's gonna take a hundred thousand hours fixing its many compound eyes on him the creature from between dimensions said we are no longer in the mundane universe lower plane categories of material existence such as space and time no longer apply to you you have been elevated to the transcendental realm your sins will be read to you and ceaselessly in shifts throughout eternity the list will never end

it's horrible but it's funny know your dealer charles freck thought and wished he could take back the last hour of his life a thousand years later and he was still lying there in his bed with the ein rand book and the letter to exxon on his chest listening to them read his sins to him they had gotten up to the first grade when he was six years old ten thousand years later they had reached the sixth grade that year he had discovered the spicy self-love act uh he shared his eyes but he could never see the multi-eyed eight-foot high being with the endless skull reading on and on and next it was saying charles freck thought at least i got a good wine right so so this is sort of this it's a twist on dystopianism right it's a twist on dystopianism uh the last point and again i just want to call call this out again you know we we talked about benjamin's angel of history with the back toward the future uh but we if we go back to that tradition of what's happening inside of

the exegesis the escape from the bip is more akin to something about forgetting right so the idea here is something is coming into existence

so uh he calls out dick calls out where scanner is the fall valles is sort of like his paul paul moment right so here he says um to me thomas is millennialism here christianity and marxism unite the ptg in the place of the vip christians are communists and the real secret communists are christians christians the dangerous visions and faith is correct to know the side thomas is a dedicated marxist revolutionary from his viewpoint he is a true secret christian but i would never grasp this is thomas from um

uh biblical and this footnote here from the editor says dick's christianity was somewhat revolutionary here it becomes marxism it's not quite the leftist christian christianity but it does mention here walter benjamin whose visionary angel of history sees that we experience as time and progress as a mounting pile of wreckage dick anticipates the return to christianity like almond baidu and zizek so the idea here is it's a twist on the dialectical materialism and again we're talking about the mustard seed right so in the end although there is a huge dystopian fall in scanner it reveals itself that well there are more mechanisms like in ubik right we find there's more mechanisms we're awakened to more mechanisms and in the end you know again homage back to corinthians this might be a crypto way f a crypto vehicle for dick's newfound spirituality right so in the in the end i guess we'll kind of leave it at this point that that you know in the uroboros of things you go from and i've got a yin yang here on the page as well he goes i'm dead i'm alive i'm dead i'm alive so the idea of this circular nature uh sophia logos the return of the logos right

the the axe within the hole right the acts can be derived right so the idea is we're coming back around to um a final redemption almost so while there's a dystopian side and i'm not saying the redemption is you know archer arctur in the in the new life fields growing the plants that's not the redemption worth the redemption though is it's in the going across dick's work in this exegesis work that he's done

and maybe i'll end it with this quote which is quite good he says i seek beauty like participle sought the grail but what a price i pay i don't write beautifully i just write reports about our condition to go to those outside of cold pack i am an analyzer and then finally he says um whoever the funning player is she is a delight sophia i think it's you right so i think in the end yes there's dystopianism yes if you buy into it all and you try to track it you know there's lots of examples of this and i think what we'll do in the next uh in the next podcast is we will talk about uh dick as a prophet versus dick as as a political activist because i think that that's really the key to how one digests the dystopia right if you look at the bars you see bars if you float through the bars there are no bars right and i think again this is where that charity comes back in that a lot of what dick's exegesis work is is it coming to grips with

some of these ideas and we'll talk more about those in our next podcast so guys hope this was uh interesting to you uh we talked a little bit about scanner darkly we talked about dystopia and dick's kind of uh crypto redemption his his moment of you know saul of taurus taught saul of tarsus kind of moment where he becomes the apostle paul kind of this is dixon exegesis looking at his books as a gnostic journey so hey guys i'd love to see your comments below anybody's read the exegesis please check it out if you haven't read scanner darkly please check it out if you have some comments on dystopia scanner darkly please leave them below and we will see you in the next podcast thank you very much and talk to you soon bye bye

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