DiesIraeV1, Main, Corpus, bibRecord, 000301

Machines Making Gods

Identifieur interne : 000301 ( Main/Corpus ); précédent : 000300; suivant : 000302

Machines Making Gods

Auteurs : James Burton

Source :

Theory, culture & society [ 0263-2764 ] ; 2008-12.

RBID : ISTEX:5F724230A4323D265BB9A107077FA3605F2C6BC4

English descriptors

Teeft :
- Agamben, Ancient rome, Androids dream, Badiou, Bergson, Black iron, Black iron prison, Bloch, Burton machines, Central role, Closure, Cosmic puppets, Creative evolution, Crucial point, Ction, Ction writer philip, Ctionalizing, Culture society, Darko suvin, Dick, Early christians, Electric sheep, Ernst bloch, Exegesis, Fabulation, Fabulations, Hardt, Henri bergson, High castle, Human history, Human life, Illusory reality, Impossibility, Incomprehensible nature, Iron cage, Last testament, Late work, Life forms, Mechanization, Mechanizing, Mechanizing principle, Messianic, Messianic klesis, Messianic tension, Messianic time, Messianic vocation, Milbank, Modern technology, Novel valis, Open morality, Open society, Open tendency, Original italics, Original possibility, Originary function, Other words, Palm tree garden, Phil dick, Political theology, Proper health, Religious route, Resurrection, Rhipidon society, Roman empire, Roman republic, Saint paul, Same time, Stanford university press, Subjectivity, Such conditions, Sutin, Taubes, Transcendent, Transcendent saviour, Untimely death, Vali, Vintage books, Visionary experiences.

Abstract

This article addresses shared themes in the writing of Saint Paul and the work of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Much recent philosophical interest in Saint Paul focuses on his contemporary significance as a radical political thinker, following Jacob Taubes' influential late work, The Political Theology of Paul. Assessments of Paul's writing in this context (e.g. by Agamben, Badiou, Milbank) highlight the various ways in which he uses fictionalizing, for example in setting up the tension between the present world and a messianic future, in the role he assigns to faith, and in the importance he assigns to the counter-factuality of resurrection. Yet the common thread of fictionalizing running through these themes has not been explicitly discussed. Meanwhile, the supposed `religious turn' in Dick's late writing has often been taken to have less political significance than his earlier science fiction. Considering Paul alongside Philip K. Dick, this article will attempt to bring out this central role of fictionalizing in the religious experiences of both. Like Paul, Dick experienced a visionary encounter with a God-like entity that shaped his interests and writing for the remainder of his life, and developed his own soteriology in response to what he perceived as the continued existence of (the Roman) Empire in modernity. Bringing out the mutual complementarity of Dick and Paul is facilitated by a framework derived from Henri Bergson's Two Sources of Religion, which theorizes the relation between mechanization as a human tendency characterizing both imperialism and industrialization, and fabulation as a human faculty for using fiction for the jointly immanent-transcendent purposes of survival/salvation. In this context, the diverse modes of fictionalizing employed by both Dick and Paul, including their unconsciously produced visions, may be understood as part of an ongoing, continually renewed strategy of revolutionary transformation of both self and world.

Url:

https://api.istex.fr/document/5F724230A4323D265BB9A107077FA3605F2C6BC4/fulltext/pdf

DOI: 10.1177/0263276408097807

Links to Exploration step

ISTEX:5F724230A4323D265BB9A107077FA3605F2C6BC4

Le document en format XML

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<abstract xml:lang="en"><p>This article addresses shared themes in the writing of Saint Paul and the work of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Much recent philosophical interest in Saint Paul focuses on his contemporary significance as a radical political thinker, following Jacob Taubes' influential late work, The Political Theology of Paul. Assessments of Paul's writing in this context (e.g. by Agamben, Badiou, Milbank) highlight the various ways in which he uses fictionalizing, for example in setting up the tension between the present world and a messianic future, in the role he assigns to faith, and in the importance he assigns to the counter-factuality of resurrection. Yet the common thread of fictionalizing running through these themes has not been explicitly discussed. Meanwhile, the supposed `religious turn' in Dick's late writing has often been taken to have less political significance than his earlier science fiction. Considering Paul alongside Philip K. Dick, this article will attempt to bring out this central role of fictionalizing in the religious experiences of both. Like Paul, Dick experienced a visionary encounter with a God-like entity that shaped his interests and writing for the remainder of his life, and developed his own soteriology in response to what he perceived as the continued existence of (the Roman) Empire in modernity. Bringing out the mutual complementarity of Dick and Paul is facilitated by a framework derived from Henri Bergson's Two Sources of Religion, which theorizes the relation between mechanization as a human tendency characterizing both imperialism and industrialization, and fabulation as a human faculty for using fiction for the jointly immanent-transcendent purposes of survival/salvation. In this context, the diverse modes of fictionalizing employed by both Dick and Paul, including their unconsciously produced visions, may be understood as part of an ongoing, continually renewed strategy of revolutionary transformation of both self and world.</p>
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<title-group><article-title>Machines Making Gods</article-title>
<subtitle>Philip K. Dick, Henri Bergson and Saint Paul</subtitle>
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         <contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Burton</surname>
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<abstract><p>This article addresses shared themes in the writing of Saint Paul and the work of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Much recent philosophical interest in Saint Paul focuses on his contemporary significance as a radical political thinker, following Jacob Taubes' influential late work, <italic>The Political Theology of Paul</italic>
. Assessments of Paul's writing in this context (e.g. by Agamben, Badiou, Milbank) highlight the various ways in which he uses fictionalizing, for example in setting up the tension between the present world and a messianic future, in the role he assigns to faith, and in the importance he assigns to the counter-factuality of resurrection. Yet the common thread of fictionalizing running through these themes has not been explicitly discussed. Meanwhile, the supposed `religious turn' in Dick's late writing has often been taken to have less political significance than his earlier science fiction. Considering Paul alongside Philip K. Dick, this article will attempt to bring out this central role of fictionalizing in the religious experiences of both. Like Paul, Dick experienced a visionary encounter with a God-like entity that shaped his interests and writing for the remainder of his life, and developed his own soteriology in response to what he perceived as the continued existence of (the Roman) Empire in modernity. Bringing out the mutual complementarity of Dick and Paul is facilitated by a framework derived from Henri Bergson's <italic> Two Sources of Religion</italic>
, which theorizes the relation between mechanization as a human tendency characterizing both imperialism and industrialization, and fabulation as a human faculty for using fiction for the jointly immanent-transcendent purposes of survival/salvation. In this context, the diverse modes of fictionalizing employed by both Dick and Paul, including their unconsciously produced visions, may be understood as part of an ongoing, continually renewed strategy of revolutionary transformation of both self and world.</p>
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<meta-value>262 Machines Making GodsPhilip K. Dick, Henri Bergson and Saint Paul SAGE Publications, Inc.200810.1177/0263276408097807 JamesBurton Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths (University of London) This article addresses shared themes in the writing of Saint Paul and the work of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Much recent philosophical interest in Saint Paul focuses on his contemporary significance as a radical political thinker, following Jacob Taubes' influential late work, The Political Theology of Paul. Assessments of Paul's writing in this context (e.g. by Agamben, Badiou, Milbank) highlight the various ways in which he uses fictionalizing, for example in setting up the tension between the present world and a messianic future, in the role he assigns to faith, and in the importance he assigns to the counter-factuality of resurrection. Yet the common thread of fictionalizing running through these themes has not been explicitly discussed. Meanwhile, the supposed `religious turn' in Dick's late writing has often been taken to have less political significance than his earlier science fiction. Considering Paul alongside Philip K. Dick, this article will attempt to bring out this central role of fictionalizing in the religious experiences of both. Like Paul, Dick experienced a visionary encounter with a God-like entity that shaped his interests and writing for the remainder of his life, and developed his own soteriology in response to what he perceived as the continued existence of (the Roman) Empire in modernity. Bringing out the mutual complementarity of Dick and Paul is facilitated by a framework derived from Henri Bergson's Two Sources of Religion, which theorizes the relation between mechanization as a human tendency characterizing both imperialism and industrialization, and fabulation as a human faculty for using fiction for the jointly immanent-transcendent purposes of survival/salvation. In this context, the diverse modes of fictionalizing employed by both Dick and Paul, including their unconsciously produced visions, may be understood as part of an ongoing, continually renewed strategy of revolutionary transformation of both self and world. Bergson empire fiction religion salvation vitalism Abstract 263 In the last eight years of his life, the science ction writer Philip K. Dick believed he had discovered through religious visions a fact which much recent philosophical writing on Saint Paul has tried to establish: that our own time and that of ancient Rome in some sense coincide. For thinkers such as Taubes (2004 [1993]), Badiou (2003 [1997]), Agamben (2005 [2000]) and Milbank (2007) this is a social and political coincidence, based partly on historical continuity (the Roman Empire and the birth of Christi- anity as conditioning subsequent western history) and partly on analogy (the conditions of empire in Paul's time mirroring those of modern global capi- talism). Dick's mystical episodes, in which he saw ancient Rome superim- posed over his own 1970s California, and found himself sharing his mind with an apostolic Christian, encompassed these political and historical dimensions, yet went beyond them in totalizing the coincidence, simul- taneously placing it in the realms of immediate, affective experience, and metaphysical certainty. In what follows, I want to suggest the value of Dick's attempts to under- stand these and other visions that he experienced around the same time for recent philosophical discussions of Saint Paul's contemporary signi cance. I begin with a notion of Empire in Dick and Paul that transcends the histori- cal and material limits of the Roman Empire (or any empire), signifying both immanent, material processes of human social control, and the apparently transcendent or metaphysical domination of spiritual humanity.1 In explor- ing how these two aspects combine to form a connection with modernity, I will draw on the understanding of mechanization developed by Henri Bergson in his The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1977 [1932]).2 What I want to emphasize through the juxtaposing of Paul and Dick is the central role for both of a certain kind of ctionalizing, which forms as a response to the seeming impossibility of overcoming the conditions of Empire and mechanization through any immanent means. This mode is formally diverse, encompassing unconsciously produced visions, written or oral narrative ction and the construction of ctional truths and scenarios in theologico-philosophical thought and exegesis; yet at the same time, it is functionally restricted to serving the jointly immanent-transcendent aims of survival/salvation – to overcoming mechanization or Empire as it af icts humanity in both registers. Again, I will draw on Bergson in developing an understanding of this mode, since his concept of fabulation brings together such diverse forms of ction within such a functionality, and is directly related to mechanization. The emphasis Bergson places on ctionalizing, prior to religion, makes him particularly valuable for thinking through the relationship between Dick and Paul and its contemporary signi cance. Hence in terms of the central argument here concerning the power of fabulation against mechanization and Empire, I do not draw rigid distinc- tions between Dick's literary and non-literary writing, nor indeed between these and his visionary experiences as documented by biographers and in interviews, in the sense that these may all be considered fabulations in the Bergsonian sense. (Indeed, though there is not space to argue the case fully 264 here, I see the visions themselves as a continuation of a fabulative response to mechanization already discernible, though with less urgency and complex- ity, in his earlier science ction.) Bergson's account of the development of fabulation as a corrective for the mechanizing impulses of intellect makes it possible to conceive of phenomena as diverse as novels, philosophical arguments and mystical visions or hallucinations (e.g. Paul's conversion experience, Dick's encounters with the god/alien/arti cial life-form Valis, as discussed below) as forming a continuity, with the same function and origin. Dick's obsession with understanding his 1974 visions manifests in all his subsequent literary and non-literary writing and interviews. One other thinker who might equally have been used to address the potential role of ctionalizing in challenging Dick's Empire is Ernst Bloch.3 Here I have preferred the systematic approach of Bergson, who situates the function and evolution of fabulation within a coherent general theory of society and religion, to Bloch's more complex and multifaceted deployment of the category of utopia. The constant mutations that Bloch's core concepts go through across his work, and his experimental combination of philosophi- cal argument with at times cryptic and prophetic modes of expression (Geoghegan, 1996: 27–8), may be said to parallel Dick's way of writing in his late work, in particular the journal he called his Exegesis (which is worthy of study in its own right and not simply as an accompaniment to his ction).4 For this reason, the detailed interpretation and reconstruction of the role of ction in both bodies of work that would be needed to do justice to their conceptual, stylistic and strategic parallels, sets it beyond the scope of this article. Nevertheless, such a (larger) project would be an interesting and worthwhile way of building upon the argument presented here. A further reason for employing Bergson rather than a gure such as Bloch here is to avoid taking (implicitly or explicitly) a direct or exclusively Marxist approach to the struggle against Empire, which, though largely co- inciding with capitalism in modernity, is not limited to it, and which I prefer to account for in what I take to be the less prescriptive terms of mechaniza- tion. Nevertheless, in that mechanization here means the mechanization of the human or the living, in an ethical register, it can have none of the neutrality that might be associated with the term in another context (e.g. as a purely material process or a process of pure objecti cation): thus the critique of capitalism and commodi cation at various points coincides with the critique of mechanization, while it is also fair to say that opposition to the mechanizing forces of Empire cannot be carried out today without occupying at least some common ground with Marxism.5 Mechanization, Empire, Fabulation Dick dramatized the strange, visionary experiences that beset him over the course of a year, starting in February 1974, in his semi-autobiographical novel VALIS (1991c [1981])6 – by splitting himself, in a sense, in two: one main character (Horselover Fat) has the visions and another (Phil Dick) attempts to help him understand them, while ostensibly also narrating the 265 story from some future point. Since the reader later discovers that Phil Dick (the character) has invented Fat as his alter ego, just as Philip K. Dick (the author) has constructed them both in prose, the blurring of different types of ction is built into the novel's premise and structure: indeed, the status of the visions themselves is by this means put into question, such that established biographical facts may themselves take on something of the character of fabulations, in the sense developed below. As expressed in the following passage, the crucial link between ancient Rome and modernity for Dick was Empire, or what he also referred to as the Black Iron Prison: . . . during the interval in which he had experienced the two-world super- imposition, he had seen not only California, USA, of the year 1974 but also ancient Rome, he had discerned within the superimposition of a Gestalt shared by both space-time continua, their common element: the Black Iron Prison. This is what the dream referred to as `the Empire.' He knew it because, upon seeing the Black Iron Prison, he had recognized it. Everyone dwelt in it without realizing it. The Black Iron Prison was their world. (V: 48) The symbolism of the Black Iron Prison is both ancient and modern, recalling on the one hand the Iron Age and the advanced military technology of Rome, and on the other the machines and metallurgy of modern indus- trialization. In terms of modernity, in its capacity for imprisoning people while remaining invisible to them, it resembles Marx's alienation and commodity fetishism, and Foucault's panoptic society.7 It is related in this sense to what had long been one of Dick's central concerns – the threat of what he called `androidization', the becoming-machinic of the human in the era of modern technology. This again bears the characteristics of the alienation of the worker and the disciplining processes that produce docile bodies: `Becoming what I call . . . an android, means, as I said, to allow oneself to become a means, or to be pounded down, manipulated. . . . Androidization requires obedience. And, most of all, predictability' (Dick, 1995: 191, original italics). The Black Iron Prison also calls to mind Weber's stahlartes Gehäuse, in both Talcott Parsons' translation as `iron cage' and the more recently suggested `shell as hard as steel' (Baehr, 2001). The Orwellian complicity of modern bureaucracy (and its Weberian hyper- rationalization of human life) with androidization is found in many of Dick's novels, most explicitly perhaps in the early work Vulcan's Hammer (1976 [1960]) in which a supercomputer designed to safely govern world society attempts to reduce humanity to the status of mechanical extensions of itself; and more chillingly in the internecine Nazi bureaucracy that systematically extends the extermination of non-Aryans to a global scale in The Man in the High Castle (1965 [1962]). A depiction of excessive bureaucratization in Galactic Pot-healer (2005 [1969]) makes a direct connection with `black iron': Mr Job, the career-advising computer whose services everyone desper- ately requires to escape their meaningless, of ce-bound lives, but which 266 almost no-one can afford at their present salaries, is described as `the ultimate visage of black iron' (Dick, 2005 [1969]: 13). Yet where capitalism and the iron cage are considered de ning aspects of modernity, even when understood in the context of long-term historical developments, Dick's Black Iron Prison belongs just as much to antiquity: its apparently modern characteristics are the contemporary manifestation of an oppressive phenomenon that only previously acquired a comparable level of dominance in the form of the Roman Empire (which thus becomes its archetype). The continuity between the two periods is captured in a refrain which appears several times in VALIS and throughout the Exegesis – `The Empire never ended'. Bergson's `mechanization' encapsulates all the above processes associated with modernity while placing them in a continuum with humanity's long-term past: though `mechanization' can be used to refer simply to the rise of industrialization and modern technology, in Bergson's usage it also comes to mean the reduction of the human to the status of the material or mechanical, an ethically understood de-humanizing tendency that is exacerbated or intensi ed by the modern development and use of technology, yet which can be traced back throughout human history to its biological origins in life itself. The `two sources' of Bergson's title refer to two tendencies within life, towards closure, stasis and self-containment on the one hand, and towards openness, creativity and evolution on the other. In Creative Evolution (1998 [1907]) he had developed an account of these tendencies in biological terms; in Two Sources he traces their ongoing effects on human culture, developing a distinction between two forms of society, morality and religion – the closed society in which morality is based on mutual pressure, maintained with the help of `static' religion, and the open society, in which morality is altruistic and aspirational, and religion `dynamic'. No human institution, individual or society is ever purely the product of either tendency, but their nature is to restrict one another, such that `they can be developed only in succession' (MR: 297). The open society has more to do with a hoped-for future (but could be used to refer to a society in the process of opening, moving towards this utopia), while historically societies have tended to be closed and therefore conducive to mechanization. A crucial difference between Dick's Black Iron Prison and Weber's iron cage is that the former bears within it a necessarily irreducible meta- physical aspect, whereas Weber addresses questions of the metaphysical or religious from a sociological and historical perspective; likewise, fetishism for Marx is an aspect of capitalism's mysti cation of the commod- ity, which his analysis aims to penetrate and understand in material terms. As Milbank argues, modern capitalism is doubly religious, not only in its dependence on the belief in fetishes and the worship of the commodity, but in its apparent need `to buttress itself with the approval and connivance of actual religion' (2007: 1).8 While Dick's vision likewise points towards Empire or capitalism's ability to draw on a quasi-religious power of deception – in maintaining the illusion of its own non-existence – the vision 267 also attributes to the Black Iron Prison a genuine metaphysical reality. Bergson's concept of fabulation allows us to theorize the way in which these two modes of ctionalizing may be understood as simultaneously continu- ous and disjunctive, in different but related senses – both employing the same human faculty for constructing and believing in ctions, but for quite divergent ends. Bergson sees both sociality and intellect (the capacity for rational calculation and deduction, as well as for designing and making tools) as human traits that have evolved due to the advantages they confer for survival. Groups of humans living together exert pressure on their members to conform to the interests of the group. The tendency to yield to this pressure appears as a `virtual instinct' mirroring the actual or natural instinct that maintains social unity among hymenopteran insects such as ants and bees (MR: 110–11). Yet since humans conform only because of a virtual, rather than a genuinely determining instinct, there is always the possibility that the individual, through intellectual reasoning, may choose to go against the interests of the group in favour of his or her own; the same reasoning could equally lead to depression and inactivity, just as detrimental to the group in the long run, as a consequence of the individ- ual's rational assessment of the overwhelming number of threats to his or her survival and the eventual inevitability of mortality (MR: 121–40). Hence the need, in Bergson's account, for something else to keep the intel- lect and individualism in check: this is where he sees the origin of the human capacity for ctionalizing and believing in the ctional, a faculty which he calls fabulation. Fabulation enables belief in non-actual forces and entities with the power to support humans in overcoming physical threats, to punish the pursuit of individual self-interest at the expense of the group, and to suggest the reassuring existence of the soul beyond bodily death. Such beliefs form the basis for the development of religious customs (which may eventually be formalized as laws)9 that help maintain the stability of the group. Such a group, to the extent that it is bound together by the closed morality of pressure and the fabulations of static religion, is a closed society. It behaves as though an organism in its own right, not simply in the metaphorical sense employed by early social theorists,10 but in the sense that both the closed society and the organism are products of the same biological tendency towards closure. The closed society is de ned by its real and imagined limits: Bergson assigns it the archetypal image of the walled city. Crucially, therefore, the moral obligations of a member towards others do not extend to the world beyond the closed society. Bergson attributes a warring tendency to humanity arising from the contesting of land and natural resources. It is not a necessary condition for war that there be insuf cient resources or living space to support two closed societies: it just needs to be easier for a group to acquire those claimed by another than to seek resources elsewhere. Those outside the closed society, like the rest of the natural world, thus take on a status relative to their 268 importance for the conatus of that society: they are conceived either as threats or useful natural resources to varying degrees. In other words, the closed society and the closed morality sustaining it have an immanent tendency to mechanize other humans that is actual- ized when contact is made with those outside – whether this results in dis- regard, neglect, enslavement, exploitation, or any other effect that may arise from the treatment of other humans as mere instruments or materials. It is this tendency that the industrial technology of modernity – and a range of modern fabulations that sustain it (maintaining the invisibility of Dick's Black Iron Prison, or in Marx's terms the true social relations between exploiter and exploited) – extend and intensify to unprecedented degrees. As Bergson dramatically puts it: . . . [a]t the pace at which science is moving, that day is not far off when one of the two adversaries, through some secret process which he was holding in reserve, will have the means of annihilating his opponent. The vanquished may vanish off the face of the earth. (MR: 287) Thus Bergson's account of mechanization offers one way of under- standing how Dick's Black Iron Prison may simultaneously represent both the becoming-machinic of humanity in industrial modernity and a far older mechanizing human tendency. At the same time, it presents an account of the originary function of the capacity to construct and believe in the ctional that in one context (that of the individual) sets it against the tendency to de- humanize others, and in another (that of the closed society) allows it to support this tendency. The thesis I want to argue in the remainder of this article is that both Dick and Paul attempt to recover the former capacity of fabulation, whereby it is used to challenge the processes of mechanization, in a manner that avoids reverting to a complicity with such processes on the part of the closed society. The Double Impossibility Many recent readings of Saint Paul pay attention to his use of ctionalizing – that is, to the role of the imaginary, the non-existent or counter-factual in his thought. Indeed, within the Bergsonian perspective I have outlined (as would likewise be the case within a Weberian or Durkheimian perspective), most of Paul's thought would have to be considered to depend on the use of ction, to the extent that it is considered religious. Yet if, following Taubes, Paul's writing is to be read as political theology, then it would be reason- able, perhaps necessary, to pose in addition to the question of how Paul's theologico-religious project is political, the question of why he conducts his political project through religion. Even if we accept that Paul does not choose his vocation any more than he is literally chosen by God, but is `called' (kletos, vocatus), this would not change the fact that a fabulative event occurs for him on the road to Damascus, one which radically alters his thinking about himself and the world, and which conditions all his future 269 writing. The same is true of Dick's rst February 1974 visions. 11 Such events may be accorded a function, may have certain bene cial effects, that the intellect need neither have foreseen nor conceived – indeed, the originary function of fabulation for Bergson is to counter the dangers that may arise from the intellect's conscious planning. Also like Dick, having experienced a fabulation in the form of a vision, Paul makes special use of ction in response. One speci c mode is his use of the phrase hos me, or `as not', which Agamben (2005: 24) refers to as a `special type of tensor' that sets a concept not against another concept, but against itself, establishing a `messianic tension' between the two. Badiou (2003: 98) makes the ctionality of the Resurrection central to Paul's politi- cal signi cance as a thinker of universalism, and draws attention to his privileging of `nonbeings' or ` ctitious beings' against beings. Even Milbank, in maintaining that `there can only be an authentically religious route out of the biopolitical' (2007: 25), writes of the importance of the `counter- factual of the Resurrection' (2007: 97). Why should both Dick and Paul nd it necessary to make use of fabu- lation in this way? In Bergson's account, fabulation is rst used in response to impossible situations: situations in which success or survival appears impossible, which are for that same reason impossible to accept. Survival of such situations may itself be the very de nition of salvation: an immanent outcome which until its occurrence would have appeared transcendent. What is the experience of impossibility constituted by the conditions of Empire? Though I am not following Hardt and Negri's approach here, two key aspects of their account of Empire are salient for the Empire as envisioned by Paul and Dick. The rst is Empire's capacity, going back `as far as ancient Rome', to bring together a juridical, ruling order with something having at least the appearance of an ethical universalism (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 10). In Bergsonian terminology, any particular empire, such as the Roman, may be described as a collection of more-or-less interconnected, still relatively closed societies, subsumed within the larger closed society represented by the rule and juridical order of the imperial power. Developments towards such a state are already discernible in the expansionism of the Roman Republic, and before this in the extended cultural and economic networks of ancient Greece (even if this should not yet be described as Empire). Under such conditions, the mechanization of those belonging to certain partially closed groups becomes more widely and intensely visible – both for oppressed and oppressors. Milbank describes how modern Empire (global capitalism) operates in the same way: `neo-evangelical religion assists the extremity of advanced capitalism by ful lling the commodi ca- tion also of people, but without abandoning their formal freedom as subjects' (2007: 22).12 It is perhaps unsurprising therefore that the thought of cosmo- politanism rst arises in Greece during the rise of the Roman Republic, and that Paul's cosmopolitics emerges around the time of Rome's transition to Empire. Imperialism and cosmopolitanism are two radically different 270 movements which rely on similar conditions, corresponding to the two biological tendencies towards closure (mechanization, juridical oppression) and openness (the open society, the cosmopolis). Hardt and Negri correctly emphasize that Empire's strength lies in its production of a seeming unity between these two sides – though Paul's revolutionary religio-political gesture, and the function of Dick's fabulations, including the Black Iron Prison, is to show that this unity should really be understood as Empire's cosmopolitan masquerade – and that this situation may be reversed, so that an ethical cosmopolitanism begins instead to subsume Empire. The crucial point that I want to derive from the comparison of Paul and Dick below is that this unity exists only to the extent that it is believed in: grasping the power of fabulation lies in the realization that by believing otherwise one may render the world, and oneself, otherwise. This also applies to another key characteristic that the Empire of Dick and Paul shares with that of Hardt and Negri – its convincing self-presentation as though it always has been and always will be in place, as the only possible guarantor of social order: `Empire exhausts historical time, suspends history, and summons the past and future within its own ethical order. In other words, Empire presents its order as permanent, eternal, and necessary' (Hardt and Negri, 2000: 11). Empire's great deception is to present itself as necessary, universal and eternal – and by this deception slowly to bring about something like the reality which is conjured by the illusion. Badiou characterizes the difference between the Empire and the way of social being with which Paul wants to replace it in terms of two types of multiplicity: the `particularizing multiplicity', which is `marked by the predicate of its limit', and the `multi- plicity that, exceeding itself, upholds universality' (2003: 78). These corre- spond to Bergson's closed and open societies – the closed being that which is always conditioned by its limits, by an exclusive, theoretically countable membership – and the open being necessarily unbounded in advance, including all humans only by going beyond them, recognizing itself as always incomplete: `We must, in a single bound, be carried far beyond [humanity], and, without having made it our goal, reach it by outstripping it' (MR: 33). The closed society is that which, on the basis of a universalist politics or open morality, must be recognized as fundamentally incomplete, yet which presents itself, with the help of fabulation and law, as complete. The open society, the future community Paul seeks to establish, would re- distribute completeness and incompleteness in their proper sites, through a recognition of its own incompleteness as the only route to a genuine universalism. Part of the need for a transcendent (fabulated) element within the opposition of both Paul and Dick to Empire thus surely lay in its seemingly unshakeable ubiquity, which is contiguous with its citizens' self-identi cation as imperial subjects: though mechanization can be considered an immanent process – not only in its material effects on human bodies but also in its oppression of mind or spirit – it nevertheless presents itself, both in the 271 apparent structure of (social) reality and (individual-collective) subjectivity, as though possessing certain transcendent, essential qualities. In discussing the social value of fabulation, Bergson notes that one of the key roles of such religious phenomena as conceptions of the soul, of family gods and other immortal spirits, is to provide a sense of continuity across successive generations, prior to the establishment of supra-personal institutions (MR: 131–2). From very early on, fabulation had thus been ful lling a key function that would eventually be of great value for Empire, both that of ancient Rome and modern global capitalism. If contemporary capitalism, paralleling the Roman Empire, maintains its biopolitical control partially in an apparently transcendent mode (with the help of what Milbank calls a `sacral economy'), then any hope of resisting or transforming this control must also make use of some aspect of transcendence. I noted above that, for Milbank, `there can only be an authentically religious route out of the biopolitical' (2007: 25). My argument here converges with Milbank on the necessity of this transcendent element, yet differs in seeing this possible escape-route as opened up by fabulative transcendence, that is, a thought or ctionalizing of transcendence that may have effects on the immanent world. Since fabulation indicates a saving power of ction, it may indeed take a religious form, but the use of fabulation as a means of challenging the dominance of mechanization and the hegemony of Empire need not be restricted to such a form. The two aspects of human life where the mechanization of Empire is manifest and must be challenged – inner subjectivity and apparent outer reality – correspond to what Dick frequently identi ed as the two funda- mental questions running throughout his work: `What is human?' and `What is reality?' (Dick, 1995: 187, 260; Palmer, 2003: 8–9). His inability to adequately answer the second question seems to have been a source of both frustration and inspiration throughout his life, spurring innumerable hypotheses, many of which end up in his novels, and none of which he is ultimately able to nd satisfactory. The constantly shifting, incomprehensi- ble nature of reality, and our entrapment within it, are what underpin the notion of the Black Iron Prison. The only constant that emerges is that, whatever reality is, it is not as it appears. Dick regularly alludes to this notion of the illusory reality which we struggle to penetrate using the `glass, darkly' passage from 1 Corinthians: `For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known' (1 Cor. 13 :12).13 Challenging this illusory reality to reveal its true state (its status as illusion and the relation between this illusion and whatever it conceals), and to transform the false now into the future time when the subject will know and be known in full, is the purpose of the juxta- position of the Black Iron Prison with another of Dick's visions, the Palm Tree Garden, discussed in the following section. In contrast, Dick believed he had a satisfactory answer to the other question, `What is human?', which he frequently referred to using the Latin translation of Paul's agape – caritas – which appears directly after the `glass, 272 darkly' passage in 1 Corinthians (13:13). The Latin may have appealed due to its resemblance to caring/charity (a common English translation), since Dick frequently uses it to refer to the capacity for empathy – for partaking in and wanting to alleviate the suffering of others. It is the equivalent of Bergson's open morality, the antithesis of mechanizing closed morality.14 The capacity or incapacity for caritas is, for example, what differentiates android and human in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1993 [1968]), in a sense over and above any physical or material distinction. The experi- ence of impossibility in relation to the human thus lay not in the impossi- bility of nding a de nition, but in the fact that so-called humans are able to relate to others mechanistically, without caritas. In an interview, Dick recalled nding some letters among German SS les in a University of Cali- fornia (Berkeley) archive. The letters were addressed to rms that had built ovens in the past, inviting them to bid for contracts to build ovens for burning bodies. Dick describes his shock on nding that bids were made, `like any commercial project': `It simply cannot be that such is the case and yet indeed it was the case. They actually – Jesus! – bid for that contract. I nd this to be the most extraordinary thing I have ever heard' (in Rickman, 1985: 143). The automatic, impersonal, mechanical reaction to the businesslike request for bids is not simply immoral or condemnable – it is impossible. The ethical inconceivability of this response meets the occluded, incomprehensible nature of reality under the sign of impossibility. It is under such conditions of ontological and ethical impossibility that the saving power of fabulation is critically needed. World and Self `As Not' In Agamben's reading, the central operation of Pauline messianism is the putting to work, in various forms, of what he calls `the messianic tension', which is the means by which Paul develops the concept or paradigm of `messianic time' (ho nyn kairos, `the time of the now'; 2005: 143). One of the most prominent operations of this messianic tension is achieved through Paul's use of the term hos me. Agamben's preferred translation of this term is `as not' (quasi non) rather than, for example, the `as though' or `as if' sometimes used. In the messianic time of the now: `those who have wives may be as though they had none; and those who weep, as though they didn't weep; and those who rejoice, as though they didn't rejoice; and those who buy, as though they didn't possess' (1 Cor. 7:29–30, following Agamben's rendering). The essential aspect of this operation – the reason Agamben prefers the translation `as not' – is that it does `not compare two distinct terms but puts each being and each term in a tension with itself' (2005: 43). In nearly every case, Agamben notes, the hos me does not contrast one verb or state with another – nor does it contrast two verb tenses or different times – but negates the same verb, and in the same time-frame. The same tension is operative in Paul's use of the term klesis (calling, vocation). By virtue of the fact that he is `called' (kletos) by God to be an 273 apostle, Paul is able to oppose every worldly klesis, every calling, profession, social position as designated by law and the state: `The messianic vocation is the revocation of every vocation' (Agamben, 2005: 23, original italics). Just as the hos me places a term and state of being in tension with itself rather than with another, the messianic vocation does not confer on Paul a social role that is superior to other roles, but revokes `every factical vocation' (Agamben, 2005: 25). The divisions the state (the closed society) makes in the identi cation and organization (mechanization) of its people, in terms of the varying rights, freedoms, prohibitions it accords to people of different groups, classes, professions, are thus nulli ed, at least so far as Paul is concerned, by this messianic klesis, which is thus bound inextricably to the operations of the hos me. The hos me is the linguistic tensor signifying and constituting the effect of messianic klesis. It contracts what in a transcen- dent soteriology would be two times or epochs (the present dominated by oppressive worldly conditions and a mythical heavenly future) and two states of being (factical existence and an imagined, prophesied or fantastical other state) into the here and now: `the messianic vocation is a movement of immanence, or, if one prefers, a zone of absolute indiscernibility between immanence and transcendence, between this world and the future world' (Agamben, 2005: 25). In this new experience of the present, the Empire, previously perceived as permanent and unshakeable, is experienced in a state of coming to an end. The same messianic tension may be found in Dick's juxtaposition of his Black Iron Prison against another vision which he referred to as the Palm Tree Garden. In this vision, experienced in January 1975, modern California once again began to fade out, this time to be replaced by a dry, dusty land- scape punctuated with palm trees, accompanied by an overwhelming feeling of goodness. Dick wrote in a letter that the experience was reproduced directly at the end of his novel Dies Irae (1978 [1976]), co-written with Roger Zelazny (Sutin, 1991: 228): Somewhere, he thought, a good event has happened, and it spreads out. He saw to his amazement palm trees. . . . And dry dusty land, as if I'm in the Middle East. Another world; touches of another continuum. I don't under- stand, he thought. What is breaking through? As if my eyes are now opened, in a special way. (Dick and Zelazny, 1978 [1976]: 177) In Dick's Exegesis, the Palm Tree Garden is frequently opposed to the Black Iron Prison, for example in his diagrams of temporality, where the two appear in linear succession or in parallel/alternate timelines, or as super- imposed `levels of reality' – always separated by `our world' as a third category (Dick, 1991a: 83). Given Dick's fondness as noted above for 1 Cor. 13, in which Paul juxtaposes the now in which we see as in a glass, darkly with the future in which we will see things clearly, face to face, it seems likely that the opposition between the Black Iron Prison and the Palm Tree Garden bears a Pauline in uence: at the very least, there is a strong parallel. 274 Discussing the Black Iron Prison in VALIS, Dick tells us that it is under attack: An organization of Christians, not regular Christians such as those who attended church every Sunday and prayed, but secret early Christians wearing light gray-colored robes, had started an assault on the prison, and with success. The secret, early Christians were lled with joy. (V: 48) These secret militants would, presumably, be Paul's people. Their joy is due to the fact that they feel certain of success – they have seen the good world underlying the evil of the Black Iron Prison, which their victory over it will restore. Thus in addition to the temporality of the Black Iron Prison and the Palm Tree Garden respectively, there is `our time', the time of the now (ho nyn kairos) in which Empire and its illusory temporality are beginning to end. Yet this ending is only occurring on the basis of faith: the `secret, early Christians' would not be carrying out their attack at all without the inspira- tion or the joy deriving from their sense that they will succeed. Conversely, Empire's apparent permanence and unassailability are actualized to the extent that people believe in them. Hence there are at least two possible paradigms for the conditions of the present, one in which the Empire continues to expand its reach, to subsume and mechanize human reality, and another, messianic present, in which the Palm Tree Garden is `spread- ing out', `breaking through'. In other words, `our time' is a time in which either trajectory, towards the completion of Empire or its ending, is a possibility. Both Paul and Dick, intuitively at least, seem to realize something along these lines, when initially they are struck without warning by visions which both af rm they are never really able to communicate.15 But what their writing does, in the special place it accords to the role of ctionalizing and the counter-factual, is to announce that we have the capacity to take up the power of fabulation and use it to render the present a messianic or emancipatory time. The two processes by which the Black Iron Prison and the Palm Tree Garden respectively seek to realize themselves could be interpreted as two metaphysical forces battling for control of the cosmos, or equally as the two potential paths available for any part of the material universe, entropic and negentropic movements of matter towards greater or lesser complexity. These would correspond to Bergson's open and closed tendencies: one creative, evolving, perpetually shaping matter into new forms, one mechan- ically repetitive, devolving, tending towards stasis and sameness. That such interpretations may be superimposed is suggested in Dick's Tractate: Cryptica Scriptura, a document included as an appendix at the end of VALIS (V: 229–41), combining soteriology and cosmogony. Here, an overall organ- izing cosmic force is referred to as Mind, and conceived in the form of living information. Under Mind, `two principles contend', referred to as twin hyper- universes I and II, which Dick also links to Parmenides' two Forms and the 275 Yin and Yang of Taoism. In Dick's cosmogony, hyperuniverse II was born early, and became defective and deranged: it is `the origin of entropy, un- deserved suffering, chaos and death, as well as the Empire, the Black Iron Prison; in essence, the aborting of the proper health and growth of life forms within the hologrammatic universe' (V: 237). This would also be a good de - nition of Bergson's closed tendency, with `the proper health and growth of life forms' as the open tendency which the closed limits and impairs. The Tractate also makes the crucial point that the struggle between the two principles or hyperuniverses is not a war waged between two autonomous forces but that, to the extent that it affects the status of human life, what humans do, what they believe, affects that struggle – indeed, constitutes it. The process by which the deranged, mechanizing principle is to be overcome is a process which `we, as parts of the universe, the Brain' must undertake: `Out of itself the Brain has constructed a physician to heal it' (V: 234). Dick says that this physician has been known in many forms, including Jesus, but has still not yet succeeded in completing its work of healing – the Empire never ended. In other words, we have made many attempts to fabulate a way of saving ourselves from mechanization, but none has yet succeeded. The reason is that ghting Empire on its own terms is doomed to fail: To ght the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox; whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies. (V: 235) To counter the apparent impossibility of challenging Empire, it is necess- ary to fabulate the physician, who moves through the Brain, our universe, transmuting its deranged parts into parts of itself in a process of phagocy- tosis (V: 235). Since each of us `contains a component of each' of these two transformative processes, `Each of us will die or survive according to which he aligns himself and his efforts with' (V: 236). Dick's attempt to develop a way out of the paradox that the Empire `becomes its enemies' re ects and is re ected in Paul's call, in the Letter to the Romans (3:27), for a law that would both end and ful l the law: that is, a `law of faith' (nomos pisteos) set against the law that he uses as `a compromise formula for the Imperium Romanum' (Taubes, 2004 [1993]: 23), that would also be a ful lment of the spiritual law (nomos pneumatikos). This is a call, effectively, for the physician of Dick's soteriology, manifest in Paul's time in the new subjectivity constituted by Jesus and the fabulation of his Resurrection. Yet even with such fabulations, the tendency to revert to closure is a perpetual threat. Hence the open morality of Jesus' ethics is ossi ed into the dogmas and rituals of the institution of the Church. Hence also the spirit of every political revolution risks being institutionalized into the dogmatic juridicality of a new state. Bergson writes of the antitheses of the Sermon on the Mount (`Ye have heard that it was said. . . . I say unto 276 you . . .') that they represent closed and open morality respectively. Jesus' gesture in the Sermon is not to abolish the old morality but to t it into `a more general method, as is the case when the dynamic reabsorbs the static' (MR: 59). This reabsorption is the reason Jesus' attack on the law is cast as its ful lment.16 Yet as history testi es, this attempt to restore the old law to its proper dynamism is itself in danger of being reinscribed, or transformed once again into mechanizing dogmatism (the fabulations of Jesus becoming the support for the closed society of the Church). Taubes argues that Paul's `strategy of outbidding' Moses is far more radical than that of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (2004 [1993]: 39–40). One reason for this, we might argue, is that Paul is looking for more and new ways to protect the dynamism of open morality from reverting to the static, the closed – to prevent even the physician from being absorbed by Empire.17 The power of mechaniza- tion to absorb its enemies is seen in the degree to which Paul's gestures have been institutionalized despite him. Yet at the same time, the radical- ity of Paul's writing remains legible despite that institutionalization (to Taubes' excitement). In this writing we may read, in the light of Dick's own soteriological fabulating, at least the outline of a mode of fabulation that would perpetually resist closure. In the following, concluding section, I will point to this mode in both writers, through a consideration of the necessity of the ctionality of the Resurrection and the death of the Saviour. The Counter-factual of Resurrection Paul allows us to see that life lived under the conditions of Empire is a form of death (his vocabulary of sarx/pneuma, esh/spirit, is one way of making the distinction – life under the Empire is life according to the esh only, but death according to the spirit). To die as a subject of Empire, to cease to be counted as one of its members, is potentially to live in a new register – whereby `the subject participates in a new life' (Badiou, 2003: 86) in reaction to the prior subsumption of life under death and the Law (Badiou, 2003: 62). Fabulation in its originary functioning is a response to the ultimate impossibility of survival. It forms the basis for the law of the closed society, the Empire, for its self-presentation as complete, and thus for the mainten- ance of life dominated by the principle of closure, of mortality. As Milbank writes: It is precisely this life that lives to preserve itself and grossly to augment itself that must supplement itself with law and contract: self-protective and self-augmenting devices, mutually consented to. They are therefore essen- tially reactions in the face of the overwhelming fact of death – they seek for a futile while to economise death or to delay its arrival. (2007: 41) The originary function of these fabulations, these `self-protecting and self-augmenting devices', is to prevent the untimely death of certain indi- viduals. Yet this function is only ful lled in a limited sense, not just because 277 they can only defer death until mortality catches up with those individuals, but also because they defer untimely death (whether according to the esh or the spirit, or both) laterally on to other individuals, those not protected by the same closed morality within which those fabulations emerge. Thus further acts of fabulation will be needed, when and where this deferral becomes widely visible – as under Empire, where the widespread status of being partially within and outside the larger closed society provides a priv- ileged perspective on the suffering of others, and on others as the cause of one's suffering: hence Paul begins with `a vision of a resurrected man' – a new fabulation that `discloses . . . another and more original life – a pre- fallen life without death which has now been restored in its original possi- bility not by economising or resisting death, but by enduring it to the end' (Milbank, 2007: 41). This `pre-fallen', `original possibility' of life is life as a creative movement, life governed by Bergson's open rather than closed tendency. Re-connecting with this open tendency, though it may be encour- aged or facilitated by rhetoric and the presentation of new ideas, neverthe- less requires a decision. This is the reason confession of faith becomes crucial to Pauline salvation: `For man believes with his heart and is so justi ed, and he confesses with his lips and so is saved' (Rom. 10.10; cited in Badiou, 2003: 88). Agamben (2005: 132) nds this confession to have to do with a magical-performative power of language. Badiou (2003: 88) highlights the importance of the declaration of delity to the event of resurrection (not a literal, historical occurrence, but an event capable, once committed to, of producing the truth of a new subjectivity). Yet what is not emphasized in these accounts – though it may be implied18 – is that for it to retain its revolutionary potential, such a mode of fabulation needs to be continually renewed. This is not a renewal in the sense of a repetition of the statement of belief – in Christ, in the literal Resurrection, in the existence of an unknowable God. Indeed, it is a renewal radically opposed to those gestures of repetition that become ritualized, institutionalized by the Church. When Milbank writes that Paul `has founded a community that lives always in the expectation of the arrival of the new' (2007: 61) – when Badiou attributes to Paul the founding of the truth of a new subjectivity – it is the `always . . . new', the continued process of creating subjectivity, rather than a particu- lar new, a particular subjectivity (that will in time become old) that is essential. It is in order to prevent such ossi cation of the new that Paul privi- leges love: faith and hope (which we could translate as the initial moment of fabulation and its product) can be enlisted in the service of mechaniza- tion, used to help sustain Empire, even as their originary function is to counter the debilitating effects of the awareness of mortality; yet love, properly understood as a creative emotion expressed in the direction of life (as ongoing, progressing, knowing no death, rather than life as the tempor- ary deferral of death), cannot be enlisted by the products of closure. Dick's de nition of the human as that which displays Pauline caritas is thus a 278 de nition of the human under the principle of the open, as against the mechanizing (androidizing) impulse towards closure – a valuation of the life that knows no death against the life determined by a repeated deferral of death and displacement of death onto others. The death of the Saviour is crucial for both Badiou and Milbank. For both, it signi es the end of the living death that is life within Empire, and the possibility of a new life beyond (or subtracted, self-exiled from) Empire. The ctionality of the Resurrection means simultaneously that Jesus literally died, and is therefore mortal, possessing no special power beyond the potential of any other mortal, and that a new kind of life is possible – likewise available to any mortal. Yet we may add a further function to the death of the Saviour. The fabulation of this new life which emerges in the ction of the Resurrection, and becomes a real possibility for whoever commits to a belief in it in this sense – this fabulation alone is not enough. Though it must be a symbol of perpetual future salvation, simply accepting and rejoicing in this symbol now will not secure that salvation: to be perpet- ual, to continue to save, further fabulations must be constructed, endlessly, in the same spirit, in order to maintain, in Bergson's terms, the continued re-absorption of the static into the dynamic, as each past fabulation risks ossifying into religious doctrine. The nal meeting of the main characters of VALIS with the gure they take to be the Saviour incarnate, a 2-year-old girl called Sophia, the two essential instructions she conveys to them, and her subsequent death, illustrate this point. After deriding, debating, theorizing and, nally, con rming the meta- physical signi cance of the visionary experiences of the central character Horselover Fat (all of which are based on Dick's own experiences), at the end of VALIS he and his friends, having formed themselves into a group called the Rhipidon Society, are nally granted a meeting with the Saviour. Sophia, an explicit reference to Wisdom, is the biological daughter of Eric and Linda Lampton, who with their friend Brent Mini consider themselves to be the vanguard of a new religious movement based around Sophia and VALIS – the Vast Active Living Information System (also referred to in Dick's Tractate as Mind) that is supposed to be responsible for the visions experienced by both Horselover Fat and themselves. Yet the Lamptons, though inspired by the same source, are diametrically opposed to the Rhipidons. In seeing themselves as chosen by God to participate in the coming of the Saviour – as members of the elite society of the `Friends of God' – they have come to exhibit all the characteristics of the closed society. In trying to convince the Rhipidons to join them, their logic is one of inclusion–exclusion – of closure rather than openness: `This is the most important event in human history; you don't want to be left out, do you? And after all, VALIS picked you out. . . . We are a privileged group' (V: 206, original italics). Sophia's rst key instruction to the Rhipidons is thus that they must dissociate themselves from the Lamptons, who seek to doctrinize her message from the outset, subsuming its call to open morality under the mechanizing principle of the closed society. 279 Sophia's second essential piece of wisdom is directed at Phil Dick – hitherto appearing as Horselover Fat's friend as well as the narrator of VALIS, who has already informed the reader that Horselover Fat is in fact his own alter ego. With a fabulative declaration that the Rhipidon Society has only three members, not four, Sophia restores unity between the two. Fat disappears, and Phil Dick feels a part of himself restored: `“He was with me all the time,” I said' (V: 191). Though this renewal occurs for a single individual, the import Sophia attaches to it is general: `Unless your past perishes,' Sophia said to me, `you are doomed. Do you know that?' `Yes,' I said. Sophia said, `Your future must differ from your past. The future must always differ from the past.' (V: 191) In contrast to the project into which the Lamptons would like to recruit them – that of extending and empowering a secret society – Sophia now gives the Rhipidons another mission: What you teach is the word of man. Man is holy, and the true god, the living god, is man himself. You will have no gods but yourselves; the days in which you believed in other gods end now, they end forever. (V: 198) A god – or at least, a gure understood as such – tells them to cease believ- ing in gods. Thus the purpose of fabulation is made clear: we fabulate gods, transcendent others, saviour- gures, in order to realize our own potential for transformation, for self-salvation. The Rhipidons must not join the Lamptons, but resist them, as they should resist all mechanizing in uences. Those who claim to speak for god re-institute closure, in complete contra- diction to the message of openness that does not, ultimately, require a tran- scendent god, but derives from wisdom itself, which is potentially a human property, however rare. Sophia declares herself human, not a god, and says she is `the child of my father, which is Wisdom himself' (V: 199). Her death not only af rms this for them, but forces them to follow her instructions and undertake their own fabulative self-salvation. This need to maintain the newness, the creativity of fabulation, rather than to repeat or dogmatize the same fabulations, also indicates the positive aspect of the fact that Dick never succeeds in gaining a lasting, satisfactory understanding of reality: rather, he continues to fabulate, both consciously and unconsciously, an unending chain of elaborate possible explanations for the world he nds himself in – a world which, through his less conscious fabulations (hallucinations, visions, dreams), he continues to transform – the novel VALIS and the experiences it draws on being prime examples. Though certain features recur and thus acquire a certain privilege (in this novel at least) – such as the Empire/Black Iron Prison, Valis, the informa- tional phagocytosis discussed above – no totalizing interpretation is allowed 280 to stick to any of them: they become more like focal points or nodes with which Dick continually connects other ideas, ctions, theories, whether these are drawn from further visions, encyclopaedias of religion and phil- osophy, arrived at through personal re ection or in constructing his novels. At the very end of the novel, Phil sees what he takes to be a message from the television announcing a new hope of salvation – not something absolutely con rming it, but connecting too well with his previous fabula- tions to be ascribed to pure chance. What is happening here is ambiguous: is he fabulating, creating from the raw material at hand a reason to go on believing in the possibility of salvation, or is he, within the fabulation that is VALIS, being sent a message from a transcendent god-like saviour gure who is `on the way'? The interpretation must hang in the balance, oscillat- ing between these two positions. Phil, Fat, and the Rhipidon Society still have the choice to take up their mission – to render themselves as gods, as their own saviours, even with Sophia having perished. Indeed, the very strength of open fabulation is that it will allow them to undertake this task even in the knowledge of the mortality or immanence of what they had previously taken to be the transcendent saviour: this itself is their own transcendent potential for self-transformation, and the choice to make use of it is likewise theirs. Bergson concludes Two Sources with this same point: Men do not suf ciently realize that their future is in their own hands. Theirs is the task of determining rst of all whether they want to go on living or not. Theirs the responsibility, then, for deciding if they want merely to live, or intend to make just the extra effort required for ful lling, even on this refractory planet, the essential function of the universe, which is a machine for making gods. (MR: 317)19 Notes I am grateful for the insightful comments of Howard Caygill, John Hutnyk and Scott Lash on various aspects of the argument presented in this article, which is developed in part from earlier research conducted with the support of Arts Humanities Research Council funding. 1. This is not, however, the paradigm of Empire conceived by Hardt and Negri (2000) — though there are necessarily common features, some of which are mentioned below. 2. Hereafter referred to as Two Sources or by the abbreviation MR. 3. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing the relevance of Bloch to both my argument and Dick in general. 4. This judgement is based on a reading of the relatively small proportion of the Exegesis currently available — most of which appears in a single volume edited by Sutin (Dick, 1991a), with a few pages appearing periodically and haphazardly on the official website of the Philip K. Dick Trust (www.philipkdick.com). Admittedly, Sutin has made careful selections from a large collection of handwritten papers, not all of which are likely to be of the same level of interest, but it is a shame that thousands of unpublished pages remain inaccessible, preventing a full assessment of the philosophical and cultural value of the Exegesis. 281 5. A detailed tracing of the compatibility of Bergson and Marx would be a productive project. The integration of the fabulation function with the mystification of capital would be one major theme in such an undertaking. However, there are several details in The Two Sources in particular that are suggestive of an incipient Marxism, e.g. the recognition of the importance of the money commodity in commodity exchange (MR: 69); the fundamental importance of such exchange-relations to concepts of social justice and the class inequality at work in both types of transaction (MR: 70); the situating of ownership (of land, resources, slaves) as the source of social conflict (MR: 284); the discussion of the role played by industrialization in `revolutioniz[ing] the relations between employer and employed, between capital and labour' (MR: 307), which calls for an awakening to consciousness of this situation and action against it on the part of humanity. Such a study could pave the way for the application of Bergson's philosophy of process and duration to the temporal operations of capital that are important in many parts of Marx's critique. Indeed, a useful resource for the project of bringing together Bergson and Marx might well be found in Bloch's `dynamic materialism', which, despite some disdainful references to Bergson — `the sentimental penis-poet' (quoted in Kellner, 1997: 90) — emerged from a reading of Marx influenced by process philosophy, Bergson's work included (Geoghegan, 1996: 28; Hudson, 1982: ch. 3; Jay, 1984: 191). 6. VALIS is abbreviated to V in page references throughout this paper. See Sutin (1991: 208—33) for an account of Dick's annus mirabilis; for Dick's own accounts, see In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis (1991a: particularly 1—62) and the interviews in Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament (Rickman, 1985). 7. The capacity of several of Dick's 1960s novels such as Martian Time-slip (1999 [1964]), Dr Bloodmoney (2000a [1965]) and Ubik (2000b [1969]) to be read as critiques of modern capitalist society and ideology was already by the mid-1970s attracting the praise of Marxist critics like Fredric Jameson, Darko Suvin and Peter Fitting (see the articles collected in Science Fiction Studies 5: March 1975, reprinted in Mullen et al., 1992). Many such critics later expressed distaste for (or disappointment with) Dick's later `religious' works. Since in my reading Dick is primarily the opponent of mechanizing social forces (in Bergson's sense) rather than of capitalism exclusively, I see more of a continuity than a shift from the earlier to later works. 8. Bergson also notes that `imperialism becomes mysticism' by `deck[ing] itself out with . . . the nationalism of the ancient gods' (MR: 311). 9. Bergson discusses the stabilization of customs as laws and the mythical/religious roots of modern notions of law and justice (MR: 123—9). 10. Soulez and Worms (2002: 93) note that Bergson drew specifically on Schaeffle's and Spencer's presentations of the organism—society analogy in his lectures at the Lycée Clermont and the Lycée Henri-IV during the 1890s. 11. Gabriel McKee (2004: 33—7) discusses the parallels between Saint Paul's conversion experience in the Book of Acts (9:3—8) and Dick's February 1974 visions. 12. Cf. Bergson: `When the victor grants the conquered populations a semblance of independence, the grouping lasts longer: witness the Roman Empire' (MR: 276). 13. The `glass, darkly' translation appears in the King James Bible. The New International Version translates the passage as: `Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, 282even as I am fully known.' References to this passage appear, for example, in The Cosmic Puppets (2006 [1957]) (originally titled A Glass of Darkness ), The Man in the High Castle (1965 [1962]), A Scanner Darkly (1991b [1977]) and VALIS. 14. The open soul, Bergson writes, `embraces all humanity . . . its love may extend to animals, to plants, to all nature' — yet is not dependent on such content — `“Charity” would persist in him who possesses “charity,” though there be no other living creature on earth' (MR: 58). 15. Cf. Dick: `And I saw things, Gwen, that I've never been able to tell anybody except Tessa, and it was like Paul on the road to Damascus when the light hit him and he never could tell people everything . . .' (in Lee and Sauter, 2003: 149). 16. Cf. `Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them' (Mat. 5:17). 17. In the Exegesis, Dick writes that his account of the `microform physician' in the Tractate `dovetails with St. Paul's doctrine about Christ versus the old law or “planetary powers” (angels)' (Dick, 1991a: 88). 18. For example, in Milbank's conclusion `that the investment, by hope, in the counter-factual of resurrection, alone permits us to imagine through hope (although this imagining remains to be done) a politics that does not inevitably support regimes of abjection' (2007: 97). Though the injunction to undertake this imagining is both pertinent and urgent, it would still need to be an imagining able to recognize that in a sense it always `remains to be done', just as the open society must recognize its own incompletion as the condition of its universalism: it must be open not only to hitherto abused, abject others, but to others-to-come, those not yet encountered or imagined. In this sense the open society seems to relate directly to Bloch's concept of `Not-Yet', especially when used in relation to the (human) universe as not-yet-complete. As Geoghegan summarizes, for Bloch: `[t]he universe was unfinished; it was in need of completion, it was “not-yet”, and its future was decisively in the hands of an active humanity . . .' (1996: 30). 19. Once again, Bergson's outlook here appears surprisingly close to that of Bloch, for example in the following: `it is given unto our hands to nurture the possibilities already pending. . . . The seventh day of creation is still before us, the seventh day of which Augustine said: “dies septima ipsi erimus,” we ourselves shall be the seventh day' (Bloch, quoted in Suvin, 1997: 136). Darko Suvin, himself one of the most influential Dick scholars, emphasizes the call for humanity to adopt the task of self-salvation in the conclusion (subtitled, `Physician, Heal Thyself') of an essay on Bloch and utopia (1997). References Agamben, G. (2005) The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. P. Dailey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Originally published in Italian as Il tempo che resta: Un commento alla Lettera ai Romani, 2000.) Badiou, A. (2003) Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. R. Brassier. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Originally published in French as Saint Paul: La fondation de l'universalisme, 1997.) Baehr, P. (2001) `The "Iron Cage" and the "Shell as Hard as Steel": Parsons, Weber, and the Stahlhartes Gehäuse Metaphor in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism', History and Theory 40(2): 153-69. 283 Bergson, H. (1977) The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, trans. R.A. Audra et al. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. (Originally published in French as Les Deux Sources de la morale et de la religion, 1932.) Bergson, H. (1998) Creative Evolution, trans. A. Mitchell. Toronto: Dover Publications. (Originally published in French as L'Evolution créatrice, 1907.) Dick, P.K. (1965 [1962]) The Man in the High Castle. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Dick, P.K. (1976 [1960]) Vulcan's Hammer. London: Arrow Books. Dick, P.K. (1991a) In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis , ed. L. Sutin. Novato, CA: Underwood-Miller. Dick, P.K. (1991b [1977]) A Scanner Darkly. New York: Vintage. Dick, P.K. (1991c [1981]) VALIS. New York: Vintage Books. Dick, P.K. (1993 [1968]) Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? London: Harper-Collins. Dick, P.K. (1995) The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, ed. L. Sutin. New York: Vintage Books . Dick, P.K. (1999 [1964]) Martian Time-slip. London : Gollancz. Dick, P.K. (2000a [1965]) Dr Bloodmoney. London : Gollancz. Dick, P.K. (2000b [1969]) Ubik. London: Gollancz. Dick, P.K. (2005 [1969]) Galactic Pot-healer. London: Gollancz. Dick, P.K. (2006 [1957]) The Cosmic Puppets. London: Gollancz. Dick, P.K. and R. Zelazny (1978 [1976]) Dies Irae. Newton Abbot: Readers Union. Goeghegan, V. (1996) Ernst Bloch. London: Routledge. Hardt, M. and A. Negri (2000) Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hudson, W. (1982) The Marxist Philosophy of Ernst Bloch. London: Macmillan. Jay, M. (1984) Marxism and Totality. Oxford : Polity. Kellner, D. (1997) `Ernst Bloch, Utopia and Ideology Critique', in J.O. Daniel and T. Moylan (eds) Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch. London: Verso. Lee, G. and D.E. Sauter (2003) What If Our World is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick. New York: The Overlook Press. McKee, G. (2004) Pink Beams of Light from the God in the Gutter: The Science Fictional Religion of Philip K. Dick. Dallas : University Press of America. Milbank, J. (2007) `Paul Against Biopolitics', Centre of Theology and Philosophy, University of Nottingham, online papers, URL (consulted January 2008): http://www.theologyphilosophycentre.co.uk/papers/Milbank_PaulAgainstBiopolitics.doc Mullen, R.D., I. Csicsery-Ronay , A.B. Evans and V. Hollinger (eds) (1992) On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from Science-Fiction Studies. Greencastle, IN: SF-TH. Palmer, C. (2003) Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Rickman, G. (1985) Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament. Long Beach, CA: Fragments West/Valentine. Soulez, P. and F. Worms (1997) Bergson: Biographie. Paris: Quadrige/Presses Universitaires de France. 284 Sutin, L. (1991) Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. London: Harper Collins. Suvin, D. (1997) `Locus, Horizon, and Orientation: The Concept of Possible Worlds as a Key to Utopian Studies', in J.O. Daniel and T. Moylan (eds) Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch. London: Verso. Taubes, J. (2004) The Political Theology of Paul, trans. D. Hollander . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. (Originally published in German as Die Politische Theologie Des Paulus, 1993.) James Burton recently completed his PhD on philosophy, ction and salvation at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths (University of London), where he continues to teach cultural theory.</meta-value>
</custom-meta>
</custom-meta-wrap>
</article-meta>
</front>
<back><notes> 
         <p><list list-type="order"> 
               <list-item><p>I am grateful for the insightful comments of Howard Caygill, John Hutnyk and Scott Lash on various aspects of the argument presented in this article, which is developed in part from earlier research conducted with the support of Arts Humanities Research Council funding.</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>1. This is not, however, the paradigm of Empire conceived by Hardt and Negri (2000) — though there are necessarily common features, some of which are mentioned below.</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>2. Hereafter referred to as <italic>Two Sources</italic>
 or by the abbreviation <italic>MR</italic>
.</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>3. I am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for emphasizing the relevance of Bloch to both my argument and Dick in general.</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>4. This judgement is based on a reading of the relatively small proportion of the <italic>Exegesis</italic>
 currently available — most of which appears in a single volume edited by Sutin (Dick, 1991a), with a few pages appearing periodically and haphazardly on the official website of the Philip K. Dick Trust (www.philipkdick.com). Admittedly, Sutin has made careful selections from a large collection of handwritten papers, not all of which are likely to be of the same level of interest, but it is a shame that thousands of unpublished pages remain inaccessible, preventing a full assessment of the philosophical and cultural value of the <italic> Exegesis</italic>
.</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>5. A detailed tracing of the compatibility of Bergson and Marx would be a productive project. The integration of the fabulation function with the mystification of capital would be one major theme in such an undertaking. However, there are several details in <italic> The Two Sources</italic>
 in particular that are suggestive of an incipient Marxism, e.g. the recognition of the importance of the money commodity in commodity exchange (<italic>MR</italic>
: 69); the fundamental importance of such exchange-relations to concepts of social justice and the class inequality at work in both types of transaction (<italic>MR</italic>
: 70); the situating of ownership (of land, resources, slaves) as the source of social conflict (<italic>MR</italic>
: 284); the discussion of the role played by industrialization in `revolutioniz[ing] the relations between employer and employed, between capital and labour' (<italic>MR</italic>
: 307), which calls for an awakening to consciousness of this situation and action against it on the part of humanity. Such a study could pave the way for the application of Bergson's philosophy of process and duration to the temporal operations of capital that are important in many parts of Marx's critique. Indeed, a useful resource for the project of bringing together Bergson and Marx might well be found in Bloch's `dynamic materialism', which, despite some disdainful references to Bergson — `the sentimental penis-poet' (quoted in Kellner, 1997: 90) — emerged from a reading of Marx influenced by process philosophy, Bergson's work included (Geoghegan, 1996: 28; Hudson, 1982: ch. 3; Jay, 1984: 191).</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>6. <italic>VALIS</italic>
 is abbreviated to <italic>V</italic>
 in page references throughout this paper. See Sutin (1991: 208—33) for an account of Dick's <italic>annus mirabilis</italic>
; for Dick's own accounts, see <italic>In Pursuit of Valis: Selections from the Exegesis</italic>
 (1991a: particularly 1—62) and the interviews in <italic>Philip K. Dick: The Last Testament</italic>
 (Rickman, 1985).</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>7. The capacity of several of Dick's 1960s novels such as <italic>Martian Time-slip</italic>
 (1999 [1964]), <italic> Dr Bloodmoney</italic>
 (2000a [1965]) and <italic>Ubik</italic>
 (2000b [1969]) to be read as critiques of modern capitalist society and ideology was already by the mid-1970s attracting the praise of Marxist critics like Fredric Jameson, Darko Suvin and Peter Fitting (see the articles collected in <italic>Science Fiction Studies</italic>
 5: March 1975, reprinted in Mullen et al., 1992). Many such critics later expressed distaste for (or disappointment with) Dick's later `religious' works. Since in my reading Dick is primarily the opponent of mechanizing social forces (in Bergson's sense) rather than of capitalism exclusively, I see more of a continuity than a shift from the earlier to later works.</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>8. Bergson also notes that `imperialism becomes mysticism' by `deck[ing] itself out with . . . the nationalism of the ancient gods' (<italic>MR</italic>
: 311).</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>9. Bergson discusses the stabilization of customs as laws and the mythical/religious roots of modern notions of law and justice (<italic>MR</italic>
: 123—9).</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>10. Soulez and Worms (2002: 93) note that Bergson drew specifically on Schaeffle's and Spencer's presentations of the organism—society analogy in his lectures at the Lycée Clermont and the Lycée Henri-IV during the 1890s.</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>11. Gabriel McKee (2004: 33—7) discusses the parallels between Saint Paul's conversion experience in the Book of Acts (9:3—8) and Dick's February 1974 visions.</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>12. Cf. Bergson: `When the victor grants the conquered populations a semblance of independence, the grouping lasts longer: witness the Roman Empire' (<italic>MR</italic>
: 276).</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>13. The `glass, darkly' translation appears in the King James Bible. The New International Version translates the passage as: `Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.' References to this passage appear, for example, in <italic> The Cosmic Puppets</italic>
 (2006 [1957]) (originally titled <italic>A Glass of Darkness</italic>
 ), <italic>The Man in the High Castle</italic>
 (1965 [1962]), <italic>A Scanner Darkly</italic>
 (1991b [1977]) and <italic>VALIS</italic>
.</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>14. The open soul, Bergson writes, `embraces all humanity . . . its love may extend to animals, to plants, to all nature' — yet is not dependent on such content — `“Charity” would persist in him who possesses “charity,” though there be no other living creature on earth' (<italic>MR</italic>
: 58).</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>15. Cf. Dick: `And I saw things, Gwen, that I've never been able to tell anybody except Tessa, and it was like Paul on the road to Damascus when the light hit him and he never could tell people everything . . .' (in Lee and Sauter, 2003: 149).</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>16. Cf. `Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them' (Mat. 5:17).</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>17. In the <italic>Exegesis</italic>
, Dick writes that his account of the `microform physician' in the <italic>Tractate</italic>
 `dovetails with St. Paul's doctrine about Christ versus the old law or “planetary powers” (angels)' (Dick, 1991a: 88).</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>18. For example, in Milbank's conclusion `that the investment, by hope, in the counter-factual of resurrection, alone permits us to imagine through hope (although this imagining remains to be done) a politics that does not inevitably support regimes of abjection' (2007: 97). Though the injunction to undertake this imagining is both pertinent and urgent, it would still need to be an imagining able to recognize that in a sense it always `remains to be done', just as the open society must recognize its own incompletion as the condition of its universalism: it must be open not only to hitherto abused, abject others, but to others-to-come, those not yet encountered or imagined. In this sense the open society seems to relate directly to Bloch's concept of `Not-Yet', especially when used in relation to the (human) universe as not-yet-complete. As Geoghegan summarizes, for Bloch: `[t]he universe was unfinished; it was in need of completion, it was “not-yet”, and its future was decisively in the hands of an active humanity . . .' (1996: 30).</p>
</list-item> 
               <list-item><p>19. Once again, Bergson's outlook here appears surprisingly close to that of Bloch, for example in the following: `it is given unto our hands to nurture the possibilities already pending. . . . The seventh day of creation is still before us, the seventh day of which Augustine said: “dies septima ipsi erimus,” we ourselves shall be the seventh day' (Bloch, quoted in Suvin, 1997: 136). Darko Suvin, himself one of the most influential Dick scholars, emphasizes the call for humanity to adopt the task of self-salvation in the conclusion (subtitled, `Physician, Heal Thyself') of an essay on Bloch and utopia (1997).</p>
</list-item> 
            </list>
</p> 
      </notes>
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<mods version="3.6"><titleInfo lang="en"><title>Machines Making Gods</title>
<subTitle>Philip K. Dick, Henri Bergson and Saint Paul</subTitle>
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<titleInfo type="alternative" lang="en" contentType="CDATA"><title>Machines Making Gods</title>
<subTitle>Philip K. Dick, Henri Bergson and Saint Paul</subTitle>
</titleInfo>
<name type="personal"><namePart type="given">James</namePart>
<namePart type="family">Burton</namePart>
<affiliation>Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths (University of London)</affiliation>
</name>
<typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource>
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<place><placeTerm type="text">Sage UK: London, England</placeTerm>
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<dateIssued encoding="w3cdtf">2008-12</dateIssued>
<copyrightDate encoding="w3cdtf">2008</copyrightDate>
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<language><languageTerm type="code" authority="iso639-2b">eng</languageTerm>
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<abstract lang="en">This article addresses shared themes in the writing of Saint Paul and the work of the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Much recent philosophical interest in Saint Paul focuses on his contemporary significance as a radical political thinker, following Jacob Taubes' influential late work, The Political Theology of Paul. Assessments of Paul's writing in this context (e.g. by Agamben, Badiou, Milbank) highlight the various ways in which he uses fictionalizing, for example in setting up the tension between the present world and a messianic future, in the role he assigns to faith, and in the importance he assigns to the counter-factuality of resurrection. Yet the common thread of fictionalizing running through these themes has not been explicitly discussed. Meanwhile, the supposed `religious turn' in Dick's late writing has often been taken to have less political significance than his earlier science fiction. Considering Paul alongside Philip K. Dick, this article will attempt to bring out this central role of fictionalizing in the religious experiences of both. Like Paul, Dick experienced a visionary encounter with a God-like entity that shaped his interests and writing for the remainder of his life, and developed his own soteriology in response to what he perceived as the continued existence of (the Roman) Empire in modernity. Bringing out the mutual complementarity of Dick and Paul is facilitated by a framework derived from Henri Bergson's Two Sources of Religion, which theorizes the relation between mechanization as a human tendency characterizing both imperialism and industrialization, and fabulation as a human faculty for using fiction for the jointly immanent-transcendent purposes of survival/salvation. In this context, the diverse modes of fictionalizing employed by both Dick and Paul, including their unconsciously produced visions, may be understood as part of an ongoing, continually renewed strategy of revolutionary transformation of both self and world.</abstract>
<subject><genre>keywords</genre>
<topic>Bergson</topic>
<topic>empire</topic>
<topic>fiction</topic>
<topic>religion</topic>
<topic>salvation</topic>
<topic>vitalism</topic>
</subject>
<relatedItem type="host"><titleInfo><title>Theory, culture & society</title>
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<identifier type="ISSN">0263-2764</identifier>
<identifier type="eISSN">1460-3616</identifier>
<identifier type="PublisherID">TCS</identifier>
<identifier type="PublisherID-hwp">sptcs</identifier>
<part><date>2008</date>
<detail type="volume"><caption>vol.</caption>
<number>25</number>
</detail>
<detail type="issue"><caption>no.</caption>
<number>7-8</number>
</detail>
<extent unit="pages"><start>262</start>
<end>284</end>
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<identifier type="ArticleID">10.1177_0263276408097807</identifier>
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Machines Making Gods

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