The Future as Predictive Text
Another way of looking at this issue, is that as soon as present-Jennings’s past is constructed as a thing, in this case a narrative created by past-Jennings, then the future becomes a form of predictive text. There are only a limited number of possibilities and everything slots into place. Predictive text creates a future that mirrors the past. It takes all our past text corrections and uses these to limit future ones—another means of closing the gate. Jennings even makes such a suggestion when he reflects on the missing letters of a ticket stub:
He smiled. That was it. Where had he been? He could fill in the missing letters. It was enough. There was no doubt: he had foreseen this too.
Everything begins to follow a pattern. We can guess what letters will fill the spaces because the future is a reflection of the past. Jennings can predict what’s going to happen because his life is now determined by a logical pattern of events and his role is no longer to live time but to fulfil a future sketched out for him in advance.
Both Minority Report and Paycheck investigate ways of imagining the future. Dick’s stories are short and simple, and do not provide too much detail about the main character’s future. It’s always a possible future that determines how the characters will act in the present. The films however take a slightly different approach to imagining the future because they fill the narrative with all forms of visual technology.
In Paycheck, the past is like a videotape rewinding and the future is a series of headlines and videos of an exploding city. In their level and kind of detail they are almost indistinguishable from the present. Likewise, in Minority Report, the crimes are always foreseen through a computer-editing suite. In both films the only thing separating the future from the past is the thin surface of a television screen. For Bergson, the future can never appear on a television screen because this assumes a camera actually living in the time of the event—witnessing the atomic bomb in Paycheck or an individual’s crime in Minority Report. If the future is to be imagined at all, it is as a gate closing or as picture frame narrowing to allow only a vague sketch of what is to happen.
25
Untimely Speculations
HEATH MASSEY
In a section of The Gay Science entitled “Our New ‘Infinite’,” Friedrich Nietzsche writes, “it is a hopeless curiosity that wants to know what other kinds of intellects and perspectives there might be; for example, whether some beings might be able to experience time backward, or alternately forward and backward (which would involve another direction of life and another concept of cause and effect).”
Fortunately, this is a warning that speculative fiction writers have ignored. Philip K. Dick, for one, uses fiction to explore an impressive variety of strange perspectives caused by alterations in our sense of time. His curiosity about extraordinary temporal perspectives, some demonic and others divine, helps him to pursue the question: what does it mean to be human?
If our experience of time is one of the defining features of human existence, Dick wonders, what happens when that experience is radically altered? Do we lose contact with the human world and those who live in it? Is it possible to overcome ordinary human existence thanks to an extraordinary relation to time? Dick’s speculations on these matters take the form of imaginative variations of human temporality, and they diverge in two opposing tendencies, which follow the directions of Nietzsche’s own thinking about time and eternity.
Nietzsche himself is not prevented by his own injunction against trying to “look around our own corner” from meditating about the possibility of a radically different relation to time. Nietzsche’s idea of eternal recurrence is an imaginative variation of our sense of the passage of time. In the section of The Gay Science entitled “The greatest weight,” he asks:
What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: ‘This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession or sequence’.
The demon’s secret, and Nietzsche’s “abyssal thought,” is that time does not pass, but each moment returns over and over again. Thus the world neither begins nor ends, life is not followed by eternal rest, and existence has no aim or purpose. For human beings, this means that the future is sealed as irrevocably as the past, for we do what we are destined to do—we have already done it. We are specks of dust in the “eternal hourglass of existence turning over and over.” Nietzsche considers two ways this revelation could be received:
Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: “You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are or perhaps crush you.
If we took this idea seriously, then either it would be a tremendous burden, a crushing sense of futility, or it would give cause for celebration, liberating us from the need for an aim of existence.
For Nietzsche, eternal recurrence is a test of the will that distinguishes between “man” and “overman.” As opposed to the traditional notions of time and eternity, it is “the highest formula of affirmation.” One could not celebrate it if one believed that the world needs a divine purpose, for a world in which everything returns would have no aim. Nor would it be possible to celebrate if one regarded oneself as fallen into finitude and separated from the infinite source of all meaning and value, namely God.
From a traditional religious and metaphysical perspective—one that has too long defined what it means to be human, for Nietzsche—the idea of eternal recurrence is terrifying. However, the ability to embrace it and experience amor fati (love of fate) would be a sign of having overcome the need for a source of value outside of life. Eternal recurrence is therefore an idea of time that separates the human from the superhuman, or those who are crushed by the meaninglessness of existence from those who can rejoice in it as if were their own creation.
Dick’s curiosity about time manifests itself in his many equally strange imaginative variations on ordinary human temporality. Like Nietzsche’s eternal recurrence, Dick’s ideas follow two opposing tendencies. In one direction, his characters are rendered powerless by disruptions to their experience of time, and in the other direction, their power is expanded. The first group not only does not transcend human temporality, but the disturbance of their relation to time threatens their humanity. The second group, like Nietzsche’s overman, is liberated from finite, human temporality. Through these variations, Dick eventually develops a theory of supertemporality, a beyond-time that differs from eternity as traditionally conceived. This theory accounts for a variety of transformations in the ordinary, human experience of time, both real and imagined.
Human, All Too Human
One of Dick’s most interesting variations on human temporality involves the tempo of life. Martian Time-Slip takes place in a colony on Mars, where repairman Jack Bohlen finds himself struggling against mental illness. Having suffered from schizophrenia in his youth, Jack had recovered (or so it seemed) and moved to Mars to start over. While functioning highly in his profession and family life, he begins experiencing symptoms of the disorder, particularly feelings of alienation and detachment from reality.
At the same time, he meets Dr. Milton Glaub, a psychiatrist who hypothesizes that autism stems from “a derangement in the sense of time in the autistic individual, so that the environment around him is so accelerated that he cannot cope with it.” This appears to be true of Manfred Stein, a boy who is completely withdrawn and unable to communicate with others, except for the Martian “Bleekmen” (who presumably experience the flow of time differently). Manfred is also haunted by visions of the future, including his slow deterioratio
n in a decaying retirement facilty. Jack builds a device to slow Manfred’s sense of time, bringing him closer to the tempo of “normal” human beings. However, Jack’s own schizophrenic episodes worsen, and he experiences severe temporal disruptions, including glimpses of the future accompanied by lapses in memory.
Through his contact with Manfred and his self-observation, Jack concludes that psychosis amounts to “the utter alienation of perception from the objects of the outside world,” including others, and a replacement of communication with others by a “dreadful preoccupation with the endless ebb and flow of one’s own self.” He discovers that temporal acceleration draws vanishingly closer to a point where time no longer flows, but is given all at once (an idea that Dick explores further in his essay “Schizophrenia and The Book of Changes”). This would account not only for the detachment from a shared reality, but also for the connection—or the fine line—between prophecy and psychosis.
Unfortunately, while Manfred has visions of the future, it is a future that he seems powerless to change or even communicate. As Jack’s sense of time accelerates, his world grows increasingly hostile, and he becomes less capable of dealing with others. Although Manfred’s tempo is so accelerated that his narrative point of view is unintelligible, from Jack’s perspective we can feel his powerlessness as his grasp on reality and his connections with others slip away.
Another story focusing on temporal disturbances is “Your Appointment Will Be Yesterday” (later expanded into the novel Counter-Clock World), in which Dick imagines a world where time has changed its course and now flows backward. As the result of a phenomenon known as the “Hobart Phase,” which has reversed the flow of time, people now begin their day by getting out of bed, putting on dirty clothes, and disgorging their breakfast. They remember the future and make appointments in the past.
And things get even stranger when Dick considers the implications of this reversal for creation and invention. Great minds do not bring new things into existence, but remove them from it. The library is not an institution for preserving and disseminating knowledge, but for eradicating books as their ideas stop making sense. Rather than sending their work to publishers, authors submit it to the library, and if their appeal is successful, they are permitted to reduce the final remaining copy of their manuscript to a bundle of clean paper and a typewriter ribbon. These authors are regarded not as geniuses, but cranks whose ideas must be destroyed for the benefit of society.
A paradox arises, however, because the Hobart Phase is controlled by a human invention, the swabble, which can be assembled out of ordinary household objects. What will happen when the inventor’s work is eradicated? As people take apart their swabbles and the inventor Ludwig Eng’s how-to manual is removed from circulation, the Hobart Phase weakens and Standard Time begins to return. With this second reversal of the flow of time, the threat of a closed loop emerges: “as soon as Eng built and placed in operation his pilot swabble, the Hobart Phase would resume. The swabbles would then be abolished by the syndicate until, once again, all that remained was the original typewritten manuscript—at which point normal time would re-establish itself.”
Unless something is done, everyone will be trapped in an endless oscillation between Eng’s discovery of the swabble in Standard Time and his construction of a model capable of producing the reverse temporality of the Hobart Phase. The solution comes from the crank Lance Arbuthnot who, recognizing the impending re-reversal of time, appeals for the eradication of his own manuscript on disassembling the swabble. If his manuscript is eradicated, knowledge of how to disassemble swabbles will be lost, and the Hobart Phase will remain in effect.
In this story, Dick imagines precisely the scenario that Nietzsche disparages: time flowing backward. What makes his treatment of the theme more than idle speculation is the paradox for those whose relation to time is changed. The reversal of time may, at first glance, appear to provide the key to immortality. Indeed, the characters in Dick’s story all grow younger, having either avoided death with the change in time’s flow or returned from the dead, rescued from their graves (a central motif of the novel). Yet human life remains finite, ending in birth rather than death. More menacingly, the reversal of time, in this case controlled by humans, ends up producing a closed loop from which escape may not be possible. Ironically, the power to alter the flow of time is ultimately incapacitating.
In a final example of powerlessness produced by an alteration to one’s sense of time, the novel Ubik explores not a reversal of time, but a reversion of things in the physical world. Dick imagines a society in which the recently deceased are preserved in “moratoriums” in order to continue communicating with the living, and in which telepathy and precognition are not only well-established phenomena but services provided by a booming cottage industry. There are companies that employ spies with psionic talents, and there are also antipsi firms or “prudence organizations” for counteracting such talents.
Joe Chip, a slovenly, financially-strapped milquetoast with no telepathic or precognitive abilities, is a technician for one such organization, Runciter Associates. After an incident on the Moon in which his boss, Glen Runciter, is killed, Joe has a series of unsettling encounters with ordinary objects undergoing accelerated decay. First there are the stale cigarettes and spoiled milk. Then appliances begin to revert to archaic forms, such as the TV that becomes an old-fashioned AM radio. Struggling to understand the transformations in his apartment, Joe surmises, “The past is latent, is submerged, but still there, capable of rising to the surface.” Indeed, the physical world regresses as things in it devolve into prior “templates” or “configurations” and eventually disappear. Although Joe and his associates do not regress in age, their shared reality slips further into the past due to their “constantly declining timebinding capacity.”
In these stories, the alteration of human temporality turns out to be incapacitating, as it threatens to crush the individuals whose sense of time is disrupted. The degeneration of reality for Joe Chip and associates in Ubik mirrors the disconnection experienced by Jack Bohlen and Manfred Steiner in Martian Time-Slip. In both cases, their altered relation to time poses an obstacle to their very survival, and rather than embracing the transformation, they struggle to maintain their connection to the time in which others live and not to be overcome by despair.
In “Your Appointment,” while those experiencing the reverse time of the Hobart Phase may know the future and survive death, their lives still come to an end—at birth. If there is immortality, it is only in the form of an infernal circle brought about by their design. What might have been a temporality worth celebrating turns out to leave them powerless in the face of their own inventions, still crushed by the weight of the inexorability of time.
Preparatory Human Beings
Contrary to these demonic alterations of our sense of time, Dick also imagines temporalities closer to the divine. In “The Golden Man,” radioactive fallout from a nuclear war has produced an abundance of strange genetic mutations. A government agency that apprehends and euthanizes mutants (called “deeves”) dispatches a team to bring in an elusive case: a “blond beast” with golden coat and mane, who has escaped capture by living like a feral animal. They fear that this young man, with his striking appearance and extraordinary ability to remain free, represents Homo superior, a form of life capable of supplanting human beings: “A deeve who would be to us what we are to the great apes.”
When they finally catch him and lock him in a room with a random-firing gun trained to spray in every direction, he escapes harm with incredible agility. To his captors’ surprise, a brain scan reveals an extremely underdeveloped frontal cortex, which explains his inability to speak. It suggests that he has eluded capture not because of his intelligence, but thanks to an instinctive ability to “pre-think.” In his experience, possible futures appear along with the present situation, much as for us the present is interwoven with memories of the past. At every moment he sees a panorama of
future scenarios and his position in them (depicted vividly in Next, a movie loosely based on the story). Consequently, the authorities are forced to revise their conception of Homo superior; the golden man’s prescience makes him invincible as long as he can see a scenario in which he survives, but this ability is more akin to animal instinct than human intelligence. Lacking the linguistic and technological capacities we tend to associate with intelligence, it is his sense of time—his experience of the possible futures implicated in the present—that makes him a superhuman beast.
A similar idea is explored in Now Wait for Last Year, in which the human race, under the leadership of Gino “the Mole” Molinari, is embroiled in a war between its allies from Lilistar and an insectoid race called the reegs. A highly toxic and addictive hallucinogenic drug, JJ-180, is developed for the purpose of spiking the reegs’ water supply. As it turns out, the drug’s primary effect (not unlike the drug Chew-Z in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch) is to dislodge users from time, sending them into the past, the future, or the present in a time sequence parallel to our own. Molinari uses JJ-180 to time-trip into parallel universes, confer with other versions of himself, and in some cases bring them back to his time for insurance against any coup, assassination attempt, or fatal illness. By tripping from one present to another, rounding up a team of alter-egos, “healthy duplicates of himself from the rank of parallel worlds,” he virtually overcomes his mortality, founding “a dynasty consisting of himself.” Molinari cannot see the future, but his power is even greater: by moving “sideways” into alternate presents, he gives himself—or himselves—the ability to maintain control in almost any future imaginable.
Philip K. Dick and Philosophy Page 30
