PKD: How Do You See the Invisible?

In order to see beyond yourself, you have to get outside of yourself. Hegel talked about the self-alienation of making yourself into an object for yourself. The subject must become a subject of its own inquiry, so it must somehow objectify or exteriorize itself. But from what perspective other that the interior first-person can one observe the objectified self? The material sciences operate on the faith that third-person objective observation is possible when the observation is purified of as much of the observer as possible. Without the interference of the observer in "scientific" observation, all the motivated bias of the observer is eliminated, but there's no one left there to report back any findings. The phenomenological intention is both the projection and the screen of whatever appears to us as the world. The world that appears is then necessarily motivated or biased by the intentions of the intention.

PKD often puts himself in his narratives as both the observer and the observed. In "Valis," he is both the author PKD and the character "Horse-lover Fat." He demonstrates how these two positions of "from-within" and "from-without" separate from each other when they are trying to see the self from somewhere outside of itself like an author imagining his protagonist's person. But he also shows that observation, or any sort of knowing, requires the mediation of a located, embodied self in an intentional, first-person world. In "Valis," a four year old prophetess heals PKD and Horse-lover Fat of their self-division. Now that the author is fully embedded in his story from what perspective is it told?

Nick Land didn't invent "hyperstition," but he did invent the locution. HP Love craft's "Necronomicon" may be an excellent example of how fictional objects realized in a virtual possibility space can cross over into the material plane, but it follows the recursive loops of the imaginal into the physical and back again ever since the split between body and soul was introduced into human thought by the virtual possibility space of the subjunctive in human language. The material sciences have collapsed the body / mind division into a purely physical monadology in which virtuality is an immeasurable mode of matter. However, the modal relation between the qualitative mode of matter exemplified by experience and thoughts on the one hand and matter's measurable quantities, usually thought of as physical on the other, has been asserted without explanation. The sciences equate physical states and mental state without a physical substrate while promising that one will eventually be discovered. In such physicalism, possibility is also somehow physically real, which is why the endless multiplicities of possible worlds have been physically realized but in hidden dimensions that cannot be scientifically verified, but maybe, someday.

PKD's search for gnosis looks a lot like madness at times, but he is able to present this madness as a kind of insight into the nature of the Universe because his depiction of it is from the position of the observer who too removed from his subject, but removed enough, through the process of authorial self-alienation, to laugh about the absurd, hermeneutic circle he must ride to uncover this hidden knowledge. But the honesty of Dick's fiction is that in trying to get a glimpse of himself, our human situation is revealed as it hides more deeply in unknowing.