Postmodernism and Countercultures alliance for one single man: Philip K.

Dick
B. E. Valdivia
Abstract
Philip K. Dick is one of the best known science fiction writers thanks to, in great extent, the
filmic adaptations that have been made to many of his stories and novels. Moreover, he has
been more widely recognized by the academic literary criticism after the decades of the
seventies and eighties, so that the prestigious publishing house The Library of America did
an edition of his oeuvre the only science fiction author that has been included in the
collection, up to now. It seems a funny paradox that an author whose work was regarded as
eccentric and confusing at his time, had managed to gain so positive reputation, not only
among the circle of science fiction readers, but also in the mainstream academy. In this
paper I try to show how this fact was due to the interpretive strategies of two different
communities, whose critics and interest in Dick put him in the eye of the tiger. These
communities, the countercultural and the postmodern, albeit not similar, functioned at the
same time to provide Philip with the credit and popularity that later on evolved in the
media monster we now know.
Introduction
Anyone who watches the 1977 speech given by Philip K. Dick in Metz, France, at a Science
Fiction Convention (especially if it is the edited video that circulates freely online and
which selects the most controversial extracts of the speech to show) without knowing too
much about the speaker, might have the impression that he/she is in front of one of those
mad guys who claim having been abducted by aliens. In fact, it is not difficult to notice that
the reaction of the audience in a science fiction convention!-, is either of mock or
exasperation. One can find this video under the name Did Philip K Dick disclose the real
Matrix in 1977?, an edited video from the original version, and which, evidently, was
uploaded decades later, at least after the movie Matrix (1999) was released. This
provocative title endorses a rhetorical game, so as if the matrix (according to the
Wachowski brothers movie, a shared simulation of the world created by machines to trap
humans in it) really existed, and Dicks speech, since it was articulated years before the
movie, predicted its existence.

In the video we can watch Philip K. Dick claiming very seriously that some of my
fictional works are actually true and we are living in a computer program reality and the
only clue we have for it is when some variable is changed. The audience strikes, and even
Joan Simpson, one of his closest friends and who is attending the speech, has a look of
disbelief on her face. We could readily anticipate that such an eccentric figure would not be
taken seriously within the intellectual spheres.
Philip K. Dick is known not only for his provocative statements which might lead
some critics and friends- to think he was schizophrenic and/ or paranoid. He is also
known for two suicidal attempts, being addicted to amphetamines and writing an 8,000
pages diary in which he tried to decipher a mystical revelation he claimed to have. But even
if we judge him as a writer, we cannot exclude considering that he only published within
science fiction, a genre that, back in the fifties and sixties, was not taken into account in the
scholar spheres, and was most regarded as a frivolous popular entertainment that did not
endorse the artistic merit of canonical literature.1 However, Philip K. Dick is now one of
the most important writers in America (44 editions of his novels and short stories,
translated to 25 languages, and a Philip K. Dick Award speak for themselves), and his
impact and influence have transcended not just countries but media. How then has he
gained such a positive reputation that even the distinguished publishing house The Library
of America included him in its handsome collection of the best writers in the history of the
United States?
We cannot understand Dicks success without referring to two groups that
contributed greatly to his recognition, to his inclusion in wider circles and to that 1) the
scholar spheres took him into account for academic research, specific lectures on his
oeuvre and, in short, journals and magazines specifically on science fiction, and 2) he
started being more widely known, not just into the science fiction circle, but within a more
broad literary spectrum. These two groups are the postmodern literary criticism and the
North American countercultural movement. How and why they contributed to Philip K.
Dicks success, I will explain in the course of this paper.
The American literary theorist Stanley Fish uses the term interpretive community
to define a group that has its own tacit agreements to interpret a text.2 This approach
allows him to point out to the readers to extract some answers not directly about the text,
but rather about the act of interpretation itself. An interpretive community is a set of
1

Lawrence Sutin (1989): Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. New York: Citadel-Carol, p. 1.
Stanley Fish (1980): Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
2

cultural assumptions regarding the rules that play out (and those that do not) in the
interpretation and meaning of a text. Therefore, in the reception of an author like Philip K.
Dick, the cultural set of assumptions made of his oeuvre count a lot in how he will be
regarded within the literary and academic circles.
Summarizing, if we revisit the literary criticism of Philip K. Dicks work, we can
point out to at least two different interpretive communities that played a role in the
reception of his work. My intention in this paper is to explore the interpretative strategies
of these two communities, the postmodernist and the countercultural, and see how and
why they operated in Philip K. Dicks reception. To reformulate my central question, I want
to define how these two communities interpretive strategies functioned at the same time
to provide Philip K. Dick with recognition and credibility as a writer, since I suggest that
reading and understanding these two communities interpretations is core to solve the
apparent paradox of how an author that had everything to be considered a madman, got at
the end so much success and authority within the main spheres of current literary
criticism. At the same time, I sense that acknowledging the interpretive strategies that
worked out for Philip K. Dicks oeuvre, can possibly give us some insights in what these
two different communities have in common and how they related not just contextually,
but interpretively- at their time, which can lead us to understand why is Philip K. Dick,
along with other writers that gained the praise and protection of these two communities at
the same time, among the most well respected non-canonical writers of our time.
Who is Philip K. Dick?3
Philip Kindred Dick was born with a twin sister in Chicago in 1928, Illinois. His family was
so poor that the mother could barely buy milk for the twins. They both were
undernourished, but since Phil was always hungrier, he usually got more milk than his
sister, who died from malnutrition six weeks after she was born. Philip would always regret
this episode and, in a way, he could not help feeling guilty for his sisters dead; so this
tragic starting of his personal story would never abandon him in life, and even in his forties
and fifties it would haunt him along his writing.

One can find a great extent of Philip K. Dicks biographical information in Gregg Rickmann (1988) Philip K.
Dick: In His Own Words. California: Fragments West, and in Lawrence Sutin (2005) Divine Invasions: A Life
of Philip K. Dick. Carroll & Graf. For the purpose of this chapters these two are my main sources and some
other that might come amidst.

From June 1938 forward, Philip lived in California, first in Berkeley with his
mother, and it was around that time that he became first interested in science fiction
stories, writing his first one for a magazine (although not being published) at eleven years
old.
His relationship with the University of Berkeley was bittersweet from the
beginning. He was enrolled in 1949 but dropped out after only few weeks. The reasons of
this swift are uncertain, but according to his third wife (Philip married five times, all of
them ended in divorce), Anne, it was because his unwillingness to participate in the
Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC)4. Indeed, even though Phil tried to stay out of the
political scene and was not politically active, he opposed to the Vietnam War and joined
the 1968s Writers and Editors War Tax Protest.
Another remarkable fact in Dicks live is that he was constantly treated by
psychologists due to his phobias first, and his addiction to amphetamines later. As a matter
of fact he has asserted that all his books up to 1970 were written on amphetamines.5 Two
suicide attempts were also the reason for his marked trajectory through psychiatric
hospitals and therapy, the first in 1972 and the second one in 1976. Maybe Philip K. Dick
was paranoid, he himself would bring in question his own mental sanity, but the truth is
that in 1971 someone whoever- broke-in into his house and took random objects: expired
checks, his stereo, some documents and letters, leaving behind jewelry and other valuable
belongings; his file cabinet had been blown apart by explosives and his floor was covered
with water. Thank God! I guess Im not crazy after all, he thought to himself.6 By that
time Dick had separated from his fourth wife and, depressed, let young students from the
University of Berkeley and around stay at his place whereas he got drugs from them. This
was the only way in which he actually kind of delved into the sixties and seventies
American counterculture.
Philip K. Dick and the counterculture
It was just after the seventies that science fiction started to be taken in account more
seriously within the Berkeley academic circles. Apparently. Before that it was ludicrous to
think in a serious scholar work about the genre. Therefore, as Lawrence Sutin, one of the
4

Cf. Anne R. Dick (1995): The Search for Philip K. Dick. California: Tachyon Publications.
Paul Williams, The Most Brilliant Sci-Fi Mind of Any Planet: Philip K. Dick in Rolling Stone. November 6,
1875.
6
Williams, loc. cit.
5

most important biographers of Dick, remarked, Philip K. Dick remains a hidden treasure
of American literature because the majority of his works were produced for a genre
science fiction- that almost invariably wards off serious attention7.
However, what made Philip K. Dicks oeuvre eccentric among the eccentrics is the
event that occurred to him in February and March of 1974.
Phil was coping with the pain of a recently extracted wisdom tooth and ordered to
the pharmacy some sodium pentothal for deliver. When he opened the door to the
pharmacy girl, he was especially attracted for the pendant on the girls neck: a golden
icthys, a Christian symbol formed by two intersecting arcs, and which Dick later called
vesicle pisces8. He asked the young woman about the pendant, and when she answered
This is a sign used by the early Christian, he was stroke by a pink beam that made him
see the ancient Rome superposed to the actual times and a series of visions in which he
experienced anamnesis, or loss of forgetfulness: wisdom and awareness. He passed the
rest of his life trying to understand what had happened to him, giving hundreds of possible
answers in a diary he kept under the name of Exegesis: more than 8,000 pages of
possible explanations. These explanations were addressed more to himself than to a public,
as he never had the intention of publishing them, and therefore the fact that he included
some passages of them in his novel Valis, published in 1980 but written in 1977, was more
due to economy reasons.
The fact that Dick did not referred to the 2-3-74 episode (short for February,
March, 1974) in his published fictional work, did not prevent him from talking about it
with friends, acquaintances, and even in some interviews and speechs (as the one
discussed at the beginning of this work). It becomes more interesting if we consider that
those were the years in which Dicks oeuvre began to have a bigger impact in science fiction
circles. His novels and stories began to be translated, and they reached the intellectual
circles in Europe. Phil himself states the great benefit that represented the French
reception, which he considered more aware of his quality as an author: The greater
stimulus to me as a serious writer has been the French reaction to my writing, which began
somewhere between 1964 and 1968.9
In America, however, the academic circle at Berkley disparaged Science Fiction and
did not consider it a serious genre. There were no scholarly works before the 1950s
7

Sutin, loc. cit.

This name is derived from the vesica piscis, the shape formed by the intersection of two circles with same
radius so that the center of each circle lies on the perimeter of the other.
9
Interview to Philip K. Dick, 1977, Metz, France. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGyhT5nVsEU
8

dedicated to the genre, and Philip himself was restricted almost exclusively to pulp
magazines and low-budget science fiction publishers. Yet Berkeley was the scene for a vivid
movement that would change (some of) the artistic paradigms in the intellectual world: the
countercultural movement.
The countercultural movement was set on the background of the Vietnam War in
the late 1960s and early 1970s. It started from a part of the youth, who felt frustrated and
began to question the traditional American values. With this questioning also came a
disdain toward the American dream and a valorization of Eastern philosophies, mindaltering drugs and a more political involvement of art.10 Some of the main figures of the
countercultural scene, such as Timothy Leary, Robert Crumb and Robert Anton Wilson,
read Philip K. Dick and highlighted his philosophical thinking, admiring him as a prophet
or a visionary. Leary, who acted as the spokesman of counterculture for his advocacy of
LSD and other psychedelic drugs- and for being considered by the president Nixon as
the most dangerous man in America11, called him an exceptional writer, a fictional
philosopher of the Quantum Age12. Robert Crumb, founder of the underground comic,
illustrated the speech that Philip wrote in 1978, How to Build an Universe that Doesnt
Fall Apart Two Days Later, about his 2-3-74 experience in a strip entitled The Religious
Experience of Philip K. Dick. The praise of these important figures of the counterculture,
hence, gave Philip K. Dick a ground floor to a bigger audience: now he was read and
admired not just by science fiction readers, but also by the countercultural youth that felt
fascinated by Philips psychedelic fictional explorations and found in his stories of alter
realities a strong political meaning against North American establishment, putting him at
the same level of authors such as Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathe in Las Vegas,
1971), William S. Burroughs (Naked Lunch, 1959) or even Aldous Huxley (The Doors of
Perception, 1954). They were especially attracted to Dicks The Three Stigmata of Palmer
Eldricht, a novel in which a man induces some people to take a drug and makes them
believe it can transport them out of time and space, whereas he is actually controlling their
minds in a collective hallucination. Sounds similar to an LSD trip? Well, Philip K. Dick
wrote it before even trying the drug, merely after reading an article on its discovery by
Aldous Huxley.

10

Christophe Gair (2007), The American Counterculture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Peter O. Whitmer (1991), Aquarious Revisited: Seven Who Created the Sixties Counterculture that
Changed America. New York: Citadel Press.
12
In the Introduction of Lawrence Sutin (ed.) (1995) to The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick. Selected
Literary and Philosophical Writings. New York: Vintage Books. P. x
11

Although Philip K. Dick was never active part of the countercultural movement, he
did maintain some ideas against Nixons government, which he called the Black Iron
Prison13, and many of his novels endorsed a questioning of the established reality and the
capacity of governments for maintaining people blind against what was really going on.
Also, in The Postmodern Humanism of Philip K. Dick, Jason P. Vest recounts the
humanist values of Philip K. Dicks writing: he dares to rehearse the values of individual
autonomy, personal liberty and political freedom14, features that the sixties and seventies
youth of Berkeley endorsed themselves and to which they might felt bonded when
approaching Philip K. Dick.
Besides, Phils interests in alternative knowledge sources, such as Zen Buddhism,
Taoism (he, for example, was one of the pioneers to introduce the now so westerly popular
I-Ching as a medium of self and universal knowledge) put him voluntarily or
involuntarily- in the eye of the counterculture. However, for him that knowledge
represented simply the expected influences for a science fiction writer:
Journals that deal in the most advanced research of clinical psychology, especially
the work of the European existential analysis school, [] Medieval works, especially
dealing with crafts, such as glass blowing and science, alchemy, religion, etc. Greek
philosophy, Roman literature of every sort. Persian religious texts. Renaissance
studies on the theory of art. German dramatic writings of the Romantic Period. 15

That way it was not only Dicks experimental fiction which pulled the attraction of
countercultural intellectuality and youth of the America of the sixties and seventies, but
also his engagement with theological and philosophical ideas that were out of the
mainstream. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., co-editor of the magazine Science Fiction
Studies, notes that many readers in America of the sixties and seventies thought that Philip
K. Dick was expressing sly critiques of capitalism and the American bourgeois world
picture16.
Nevertheless, it does not seem that it was Philip K. Dick intention to be openly
linked with the countercultural movement. Due to his paranoia and fear to be scanned by
the FBI, he preferred to remain out of the spotlight and always maintained a simple and
austere life in the Californian suburbs.17 He was not a celebrity in the sense Timothy Leary
13

In Valis (1980).
Jason P. Vest (2009) The Postmodern Humanism of Philip K. Dick. USA: The Scarecrow Press. P. xi.
15
Philip K. Dick quoted by Sutin (1995). pp. 64-65.
16
Csicsery Ronay (1996) Gregg Rickmann and others on Philip K. Dick in Science Fiction Studies.
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/icr67.htm
17
Eric Carl Link (2010) Understanding Philip K. Dick. Columbia: University of South Columbia Press.
14

was, even though his writing became more and more renowned. His shorts intellectual
interchanges with figures like Stanislaw Lem, one of the major characters until then in
science fiction, who acclaimed him as the only American science fiction writer with any
merit, a visionary among the charlatans18, and Thomas M. Disch, another science fiction
writer contemporary of Dicks, were gray: despite the praise, and probably given to his
paranoia, Philip suspected of them and tried to denounce them (unsuccessfully) to the FBI.
However, he maintained a friendship with some others. The music journalist Paul
Williams interviewed him a few times and considered himself a good friend of Dicks,
whereas the writer Robert Anton Wilson, another icon of the countercultural movement,
and Philip K. Dick had several conversations regarding their mystical visions (Anton
Wilson had had one of his own around the same days of Phils):
Phil Dick and I had a long conversation one afternoon at Santa Rosa, and it was only a
year later that I found out that he and I had exactly similar experiences at approximately
the same time, which left both of us wondering if we'd been contacted by god, by the devil,
by an extra-terrestrial from Sirius or by some evil parapsychologist working for either the
CIA or the KGB, or if we had just gone temporarily crazy. Then I realized this whole long
conversation was Phil's attempt to find out how crazy I was. If I was sane, there was a
chance that he was sane too. But if I was crazy, that increased the probability that he was
crazy. He apparently decided that I was sane enough that he could trust that he was
possibly sane too, so he started publishing some of his experiences, which now are in
several books: Valis, The Divine Invasion, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer, Radio
Free Albemuth and the Exegesis. My accounts of similar experiences are in Cosmic
Trigger Vol. 1.19

Although it was not Philips intention to become part of the countercultural

movement of the seventies, such immersion gave him popularity and, in a way, credit. His
crazy stories were now part of a movement. The fact that he did not experience with LSD
for writing his stories only gave him more praise: he was regarded as a visionary, and the
2-3-74 episode was taken seriously by his fans. He started selling more and more editions,
so his economy went better.
The counterculture community was looking for heroes, for more and more
personalities who whether they intended to or not- supported and endorsed their ideas.
That way they only saw in Philip K. Dicks oeuvre the discontent towards American
establishment and the lucid vision of that alter realities could set us free. They excluded
any psychological interpretation of his work, the one that actually prevailed among his

18

Jeet Heer, Philip K. Dick versus the Literary Critics in Lingua Franca (May/June 2001).
Charles Platt, Memories of Dick. Quoted on http://pkdreligion.blogspot.nl/2012/09/robert-anton-wilsonon-meeting-pkd.html.
19

closest friends20: Philip was paranoid and maybe schizophrenic due to amphetamines he
had taken for years; or even that one in which, following Jungs archetype theory, Philip
tries to reach the ancient memory of humanity in the form of a black-haired girl namely,
his dead twin sister.21 The metaphysical reading of the countercultural community stayed
over the time, and if it did not imbibe contemporary interpretations of Philip K. Dicks
oeuvre (because there has been more interpretive communities ever since), its influence
can be stated in the credit and authority Philip maintains in many of the artistic circles
that pay attention to his oeuvre, as well as to the kind of discourse (metaphysical arguing)
he elicited: from magazines whose main subject is the alter culture22, to articles in
newspaper as The New York Times23 or the literary supplement of Times.24
Philip K. Dick, the postmodernist
It was most likely after the work of Philip K. Dick reached Europe and, in concrete, France,
between 1964 and 1968, that his reputation took off and his writing started to be more
praised. Not only was he invited to speak at a Science Fiction Convention at Metz and
received the Graoully dOr Award in 1983, but his work made a huge impact in French
postmodern thinkers, such as Jean Baudrillard, who applied Marxist readings to Philip K.
Dicks oeuvre. Baudrillard was working on the concept of simulacra, a term and idea Philip
K. Dick himself had already portrayed in his novel of the same name, and which suggest
the notion of one caught in a network of representations of things without being capable of
catching the reality as it is.
It was in Europe that Frederic Jameson heard about Philip K. Dick for the first time
and, after Dicks decease, Jameson regarded him as the Shakespeare of Science Fiction.
In his book, Archaeologies of the Future (New York: Verso, 2005), Jameson names Dick as
one of the main portrayers of the dystopian future.
Although the warm reception Philips work had in France was partially due to the
appraisal of his quality as an author, the complexity and clairvoyance of his themes and the
eccentricities that made him an exceptional science fiction writer among his peers, the
20

Sustained also by Gregg Rickmann in What is this Sickness, in Philip K. Dick: in his own words (California:
West Valentine Press, 1984), but disregarded quickly by many others.
21
Maxi Kim, Two or three ways to resurrect Philip K. Dick. In http://htmlgiant.com/reviews/two-or-threeways-to-resurrect-philip-k-dick/ December 2013 January 2014.
22
http://pijamasurf.com/?s=philip+k.+dick
23
http://www.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/d/philip_k_dick/
24

1986. Trying to Settle Down [review of In Milton Lumky Territory], Times Literary Supplement, 17 January,
p. 56.

truth is that the political and cultural turmoil of the events after May of 1968 in the whole
world set an exemplary ideological scene in which Dicks anti-Americanism stance, his
constant questioning to the establishment and the alternative knowledge he endorsed were
actually fashionable to intellectual spheres.
Indeed, the postmodern critic to the late capitalism and its colonization of cultural
spheres, and of course, the notion of simulacra as the fabrication, exchange and sale of
images rather than artifacts, fits perfectly with Dicks uncertainty about reality. In Valis he
states that the universe is composed of only information. Valis is a machine, a god or
something that sends this information to humans so they can remember where they came
from: the real reality. The world in which we live is a hologram, which Philip called the
Black Iron Prison. Apart from the political reading of this material, in which the Black
Iron Prison in his present time was Nixon (argued before in this paper), the
epistemological uncertainty of reality attracted postmodernist readings. All of his work
endorses the assumption that there cannot be one single reality.
Moreover, the metafictional devices he used, such as reflecting on himself as a
character, the fragmentation of the narrative point of view and his complex plots,
resembled other postmodern fiction stories, such as those by Jorge Luis Borges or Italo
Calvino25, expressing that way the tensions, conflicts and ambiguities of the twentiethcentury life.
From the moment the European eye laid on Philip K. Dick the rules of the game
shifted a little bit. His writing timeline started to be considered placed within the
postmodern period as well as the nature of his themes and narrative techniques. It is true
that the literature and philosophy that informed his thinking, and which were fashionable
within Berkeley academy, were characteristic of the decline of Modernism, but before his
work reached the postmodern criticism, his writing was considered only within the science
fiction genre; a little bit too peculiar if compared to his more mainstream peers, true, but
still nothing one could not expect from a science fiction writer. Besides, the fact that he
published only within this genre, whereas at the beginning it was only a way for making
life and to find a niche in which he could publish, now started to be considered a
postmodern manifesto: he had brought postmodernism out of the high academic spheres
to the popular culture, the mass-culture who was the actual public for science fiction26, so
his lifetime fruitless conquest of a mainstream public with more realistic novels was
ignored and turned into the feat of a postmodern hero.
25
26

Link, op. cit.

Idem, p. 27.

And that is when his praise as a quality artist became popularity within the
academic spheres. He had already conquered the youth countercultural public, but before
he reached Europe he had still a long way to go to be taken into account into more
serious scholarly research. It is strange, for example, that Baudrillard, although amazed
by Philip K. Dicks thinking and even considering the obvious impact the latter made on
the former in works such as Simulacres et Simulation (1981) and Le crime parfait (1995),
could not quote him properly, mixing up Dicks novels and just referring to the general
Dickian concept of simulacra without giving specific examples.27 If Baudrillard did not
actually read Philip K. Dicks novels and just heard about his theories, then this instead
of discourage the believe of the impact of Philip K. Dick in European minds, might be a
clue that leads us to suspect the importance and authority that he held in intellectual
spheres at that time. Why else would Baudrillard have wanted to be intellectual and
theoretically linked to such an eccentricity as Philip K. Dick?
One of the first deeds to bring science fiction and Philip K. Dick to the scholarly
circles and debates was the academic journal Science Fiction Studies, founded in 1973 at
the Indiana State University by the English professor R.D. Mullen. Later on, he and Istvan
Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., among others, published On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles, which
contained everything published about Philip K. Dick in Science Fiction Studies between
1975 and 1992. The tenor of all of those publications was predominantly postmodernist,
with articles by Frederic Jameson, Stanislaw Lem, Peter Fitting, Carl Freedman, and other
intellectuals that, while not part of the main wave of Postmodernism, wrote about themes
such as Dick and Meta-SF28 and The Opus: Artifice as Refuge and World View29.
It took almost ten more years for other kind of discourse to gain access to the
academic debates since the predominant community who either took care of Philip K. Dick
or held the privilege of discussing his work was the Postmodern. However, it is not
surprising that the following interpretive community to enter the academic discussion over
Dick and science fiction was the metaphysical. Indeed, the next wave of publications over
this topic started in 1980, with articles such as Patricia S. Warricks The Encounter of

27

Jorge Martins Rosa writes about this in his reading of Jean Baudrillards oeuvre. Cf. A Misreading Gone
Too Far? Baudrillard Meets Philip K. Dick in Science Fiction Studies (Num. 104, Vol. 35, February, 2008).
28
Carlo Pagetti; first in Science Fiction Studies #5, March 1975.
29
Darko Suvin; first appeared in Science Fiction Studies #5, March 1975.

Taoism and Fascism in The Man in the High Castle30 and Daniel Fondaneches Dick, the
Libertarian Prophet31.
Postmodernism and Counterculture
There is still a loose end in this dissertation. Postmodern and countercultural interpretive
communities do not seem that far away between each other; and something tell us that
despite what can we argue in favor of Philip K. Dick, the relation between counterculture
and postmodernism is, evidently, beyond one single author. How, then, these two
communities relate?
A lot has been written about the close roots of these two movements. What has been
written, however, is not always a consensus. Lets begin from the most obvious: the
assumption that postmodernism is a countercultural movement itself. To go through this is
first necessary to define what counterculture is. The counterculture (cultural habits and
values that differ substantially from those of mainstream society32) of North America of
the sixties was more given to sociohistorical context than to a shift on theoretical thinking.
The economic prosperity and the Baby Boomers demographic expansion led to an easier
reception and cooptation of Afro-American music (which came along with rock and roll
advent) and emerging new waves of art and literature.33 Cristopher Gair states that
counterculture was largely (though by no means exclusively) composed of members of the
white middle class34. The postmodernism, on the other hand, is defined, by the Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy35 as a set of critical, strategic and rhetorical practices
employing concepts such as difference, repetition [] to destabilize other concepts such as
presence, identity, historical progress, epistemic certainty []. Although postmodernism
opposes to a mainstream movement which we call modernity, the nature of its kind is
more theoretical than historical, since it implied a metacognition, a reflection on the
current way of thinking and acting that counterculture itself did not carry.
However, one can argue as well on the historical proximity in which
postmodernism and counterculture emerged. Although some authors, like Linda

30

In Science Fiction Studies #21, July 1982.

In Science Fiction Studies #45, July 1988.
32
According to the Merriam-Websters Dictionary, 2008.
33
Christophe Gair, (2007) The American Counterculture. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
34
op. cit. p. 4.
35
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/postmodernism/ January, 2014.
31

Hutcheon36, locate the beginning of the postmodern thinking in the late seventies or
eighties, some others, like Ihab Hassan37, think one can trace its roots from the very
twenties. However, if we rather not to take so radical bids and just abide to the more
evident ideological facts, we can easily find that postmodernism and counterculture
emerged both from the same nuisance and frustration toward the postwar American
politics as well as from the youth movements of the sixties. Marianne DeKoven, in her
book Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern (2004), explores
the political aspects of the sixties that made the modernity lead toward postmodernity,
being her text of special interest since she does not argue that these two movements were
the same (or, in other words that counterculture was postmodern) but else that the
modernity of countercultural movements kind of shifted toward postmodernity.
If they have origins in common or if one led to the other, when it comes to the
interpretive strategies they had to read Philip K. Dicks oeuvre, we can make a major
distinction. While postmodernity endorses a pessimistic world view using fragmentary
narrative to portray absurdity and uncertainty; behind the countercultural movements in
general, and even more, behind the metaphysical readings of those exploring alter realities,
alter philosophies, alter lifestyles, there was a pessimistic belief in change. The notions of
simulacra and simulation developed by Jean Baudrillard38 condense the idea that there is
not any true reality anymore: the simulation substitutes the reality; simulation is the
ultimate truth. The rules under which a postmodern reading of Philip K. Dick operate,
claim that what he is actually telling us is that there is not a reality anymore, we cannot
access to the original reality and we are lost in a labyrinth of simulacra unable to
transcend.
On the other hand, the interpretive strategies of the metaphysical community, and
by which I mean not just the readings that were born among writers peers and Dicks
contemporary leading figures of counterculture, but also those that have grown over the
years nourished by the allowance of a more liberal criticism within scholar spheres (an
allowance that Stanley Fish himself refers in his book, quoted at the beginning of this
paper), try to look for the less conventional influences Philip K. Dick could have had in his

36

A Poetics of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1988), Cit. pos Marianne DeKoven (2004): Utopia
Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of Postmodern, USA: Duke University Press, p. 8.
37
The Postmodern Turn: Essays in Postmodern Theory and Culture (USA: Ohio University Press, 1987).Cit. pos
Marianne DeKoven loc. cit.
38
Jean Baudrillard (1981) Simulacra and Simulation. USA: University of Michigan Press.

writing: Jungian archetypes, Taoism, Middle Ages Philosophy, Gnosticism39, and arguing
then that all Dickian oeuvre was the work of a visionary. This view, as I mentioned before,
helped science fiction to stand out and be considered a more profound genre than it used
to be.
In short, although counterculture and postmodernism might have touching points
in their rejection to Capitalism, consumerism, and American establishment, the
interpretive strategies each of them used for reading Philip K. Dick where not the same,
and we can trace a delimitated line in the course that the successive interpretations
followed: those who continued using postmodern parameters for reading Dick, and those
who bet for a more metaphysical explanation of his oeuvre.
Conclusions
The decades of sixties and seventies were furnished by a row of sociopolitical events that
triggered a shift on thinking and a bright opening to new tendencies in arts and
philosophy. In a way, those tendencies continue, for they represent a more critical view of
capitalism maladies and, along with the reflection of what is art, a gateway for new forms
of art and the acceptance of new academic research.
The contribution of the metaphysic countercultural community has been beneficial
for literary studies since it has allowed new ways of interpreting texts, new rules to be
considered, as well as the revaluation of artists that, before that, had had a difficult way to
scholarly recognition.
It is striking the amount of articles, books, magazines and events devoted to Philip
K. Dick. And, although contemporary criticism on the author does not restrict to the two
interpretive communities argued in this paper, if we follow, as I tried to, the historical
reception line, we will note that it was the first positive remarks coming from these two
communities which led to a more broad, open and enthusiastic critic.
Also, it is remarkable the positive reception within the academic spheres that
science fiction has had ever since. Jason P. Vest says on this respect that:
Scholars and educators, after all, no longer need to apologize for their interest in
Dicks writing or for their belief that science fiction is a valuable genre of
contemporary literature. Debates about the artistry, sophistication, and

39

For further reading on these interpretations, see among others-: D. E. Wittkower (2011) Philip K. Dick
and Philosophy: Do Androids Have Kindred Spirits? USA: Carus Publishing Company.

canonicity of SF texts have receded in recent years as science fiction has become a
legitimate area of scholar inquiry.40

In effect, what I have tried to show is how the interpretive strategies of two different
communities functioned at the same time to give prestige, authority and popularity to an
author whose discredit was tangent. Actually, the sociocultural context in which his work
bloomed, namely the countercultural movement of the sixties and seventies and the
postmodern theories, helped Dick to not to stay sunk in a seas of science fiction writers a
genre traditionally considered minor. And this was a completely lucky strike for him. He
wrote science fiction because he was authentically amazed, curious and blown away by the
epistemology and nature of reality. His whole work was an attempt to answer questions
that overwhelmed him and kept him visiting psychiatrists. This kind of writing, whereas
for him was the only way to answer his own questions, played the rules of a postmodern
community, which let him enter in its chest and gave meaning and transcendence to an,
otherwise, incomprehensible and fragmentary narrativity. It helped Phil to dive into the
higher scholarly circles without being questioned, proving he was a very rich and fertile
field for academic research.
On the other hand, the political and ideological coherence that personalities like
Timothy Leary and Stanislaw Lem showed helped Philip K. Dick to build up an
authoritative image toward not only society, but also art criticism, working indirectly for
the positive image that he endorses nowadays. And this is because this generation criticism
grew on the basis of countercultural ideas, and a big part of the community that worships
Philip K. Dicks oeuvre was raised by figures who dared to play with alter realities, drug
influence and non-conformist political ideologies while using art to represent what had
remained hushed. This community has now built up a huge altar around Philip K. Dick:
there is at least two official web pages on the author, one international annual festival on
Philip K. Dick, one Philip K. Dick Award for the best science fiction novel of the year, 13
film adaptations of his stories which have accumulated a total revenue of over US $1 billion
up to 200941, as well as a Philip K. Dick Society that devotes to promote the literary works
of the author.
Finally, although a lot has been written with regard to the relationship between
counterculture and postmodernism, I think it is clearer when seen at the light of two kinds
of different interpretive strategies that functioned in reading an author like Philip K. Dick.

40
41

Vest, op. cit. p. x

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick January, 2014.

It is more difficult to distinguish the repercussions and transcendence of this two

communities separately in our days, since they seem to act and walk to the same way. But
although their set of interpretive rules does not oppose to each other, the results on their
different kind of allowed interpretations can throw some light in the kind of critic of art
they both have managed to generate.

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