Abstract
This article performs a close reading of the Philip K. Dick novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? While developing the argument for an ‘ironic’ usage of the concept of the Anthropocene. This ironised conception is one that intends to countenance both the Anthropocene’s strength as a designation of human impact on the non-human and the important, valid critiques responding to the Anthropocene. Philip K Dick’s work, in particular Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a superb illustration of such an ironic dynamic because of the dual narrative structure present. For example, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? raises questions about human identity that, while metaphysical, have great significance materially for the characters in the novel, and can be understood as a form of structural discrimination. To demonstrate this ironic duality that should be brought to the Anthropocene, the article draws on Nick Land’s essay Kant, Capital, and the Prohibition of Incest: A Polemical Introduction to the Configuration of Philosophy and Modernity.
Highlights
Why Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?When thinking of Philip K Dick in relation to climate change, the obvious place to start is his novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Temperatures of 180°C in formerly temperate zones such as New York make emigration from Earth necessary, while the high capitalist society seeks to profit from the immiserating circumstances in which the colonists find themselves via the Perky P Layouts and the communal hallucinogenic CAN-D
While global warming underpins the novel, and one can discover motifs of ecological disaster in almost any major Dick story, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the novel most thoroughly saturated by questions pertaining to the Anthropocene and late capitalist society, and, the question of borders
Summary
When thinking of Philip K Dick in relation to climate change, the obvious place to start is his novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. The second is the fallout that is always at work degrading the human faculties of the remaining human inhabitants, most importantly mental and reproductive Combined, these comprise the stick part of the deal motivating the human population to leave earth for off-world colonies in hope of a better future. Like many of Dick’s other novels, it is characterized by a ‘deep ontological doubt [and] profound questioning of every reality claim’ (Miller, 2017: 18) Another Dick hallmark DADES exhibits is its ‘double marking’ or the complex relationship of ‘two narrative levels, so that each of the elements in a Dick novel has two antithetical uses which can be exercised simultaneously, the one corresponding to a socio-political, the other to an ontological-metaphysical reading of the novel’ (Ibid: 23). What distinguishes Do Androids from other novels in Dick’s oeuvre is the anxiety the novel’s interior world has about separating the two
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