Introduction to the Translator’s Preface to Worlds Built to Fall Apart
by Erik Beranek
Unable to find one quotation anywhere…
Introduction to the Preface
What follows is the translator’s preface I wrote for my translation of David Lapoujade’s L’Altération des mondes. Versions de Philip K. Dick, just out with University of Minnesota Press and reprinted here with their kind permission. The preface itself is unaltered – though, by way of introduction, I thought it would be appropriate to add a quick word about the process of translating the book.
At the end of the preface, I mention the challenges that remain mostly invisible in a finished translation, referring to the research that inevitably accompanies the translator’s work. Research is always there, whether in the form of tracking down references and allusions or seeking out period- or subject-specific vocabulary; but, by the end of this project, it almost began to feel as though the research had outweighed the translation itself.
One of the great virtues of Lapoujade’s book, to my mind, is the extent to which he engages with Philip K. Dick’s work. This isn’t simply the application of a preexisting philosophy to a couple of well-known PKD novels; Lapoujade covers a huge range of PKD’s work, discussing more than thirty novels, over forty stories, several important essays and interviews, and The Exegesis. And rather than develop a single “philosophy,” a single explanation of PKD’s work from them, Lapoujade’s writing focuses on building connections, both between different aspects of PKD’s work and with a wide variety of other thinkers, writers, and artists (Deleuze, Foucault, and William James, to be sure, but also D. H. Lawrence and J. G. Ballard, David Lynch and Robert Rauschenberg, Ludwig Binswanger and Gregory Bateson). The result of this approach, for the reader, is that a proliferation of “versions” of PKD emerge, opening the author and his works onto a variety of directions, connecting him to developments in our intellectual history and to problems in our political realities, and contesting any cliché, cartoonish images we might already have had of him. (I say a bit about one particular “version,” exploring the connection to Lapoujade’s other works, in my preface.)
For the translator, though, this means that all of the myriad quotations and references – especially those from PKD himself and any other author writing in English originally, but also ideally any that have already been translated into English previously – must be found. Not translated (which would honestly be easier in many cases), but found. And when you consider that Lapoujade’s references nearly always cite the French edition/translation of these works, the task becomes quite daunting.
Not even counting the rest, just reverting PKD’s own words back to English was a huge undertaking on its own. It meant reading or rereading large swaths of PKD’s oeuvre; it meant ordering mountains of books, including many French editions, from libraries to check context and pagination; it meant countless blind internet searches looking for uncited quotations; and it meant lots and lots of phone calls and email exchanges with friends and fellow Phildickians. After all that work, I’m pleased to say that I think I found them all – but for one.
Unable to find one quotation anywhere, I managed to obtain a copy of the French collection of PKD stories that Lapoujade had cited. As it turned out, the quotation was a note, written by PKD about his story “Service Call,” which the editor had added at the head of the story, but without citing an original source. I contacted the editor of the volume, Hélène Collon, who very kindly did her utmost to help me seek out the source, ultimately putting me in touch with several PKD scholars. In the end, we collectively decided that the most likely explanation was that PKD had written this as a note to “Service Call,” thinking that it would be included in the collection The Golden Man, though the story was ultimately dropped from that collection. Then, an early French collection of PDK stories, which included many of the stories from The Golden Man and their notes, also included “Service Call” and published this note (in French translation) for the first time. If this is correct, the note has never been published in its English original – and I therefore had to translate it into English myself. (And as my friend and coeditor of Hopscotch pointed out, this makes me one of very few people to have translated PDK into English!)
Before turning to the preface, I’d just like to add one note about the book’s title. As I mentioned at the outset, Lapoujade’s French title is L’Altération des mondes. Versions de Philip K. Dick. For the English translation, the subtitle posed no problem (“Versions of Philip K. Dick”), but the main title caused a few headaches. While the French term “altération” can mean (in English) “alteration” (change, modification…), it typically has a more negative sense than its English counterpart – by which I mean, it typically indicates an alteration that involves increasing disorder or decreasing consistency. So, possible translations of the term would be “degradation,” “deterioration,” “deformation,” or “distortion” – none of which sounded quite right in the title. Initially, I had thought of using Interfering Worlds, which would capture the sense of “distortion” while also nodding to the plurality of worlds in PDK’s works and to Lapoujade’s discussions of the ways in which those worlds affect one another. Happily, however, the team at Minnesota had the great idea of using something PKD says of himself (which Lapoujade returns to on several occasions): “I will reveal a secret to you: I like to build worlds that do fall apart.” I’d like to take this opportunity to thank Drew Burk, Doug Armato, Zenyse Miller, and the whole team at University of Minnesota Press for their insights and support throughout the process.
Translator’s Preface to Worlds Built to Fall Apart: Versions of Philip K. Dick
“Heaven knows what we mean by reality. Telephone, tinned meat, Charlie Chaplin, water-taps, and World-Salvation, presumably. Some insisting on the plumbing, and some on saving the world: these being the two great American specialties.”
—D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature
This book can be read in a variety of ways. First and foremost, it should be read as a close engagement with the works of Philip K. Dick, and as such, it will appeal to fans of Dick’s works and to readers of science fiction more generally. One of the book’s key merits is the great quantity of material by Dick with which David Lapoujade works: thirty-three novels and forty-six stories, as well as several important essays and interviews from throughout Dick’s career and a number of discussions revolving around The Exegesis. By situating these works in conversation with a wide array of Dick’s influences—from Carl Jung and the I Ching to the contributions to cybernetic theory of Norbert Weiner and Gregory Bateson and the general semantics of Alfred Korzybski—Lapoujade gives a rich portrait of Dick’s unique intellectual world. That said, this book also represents a fascinating step in the development of Lapoujade’s own philosophical thought, and so for the benefit of any readers less familiar with Lapoujade than with Dick himself, I would like to offer a few remarks situating the book in terms of Lapoujade’s philosophy.
For the past fifteen years, David Lapoujade has been publishing a remarkable series of philosophical and critical studies, all but one of which have already been translated into English. After editing two volumes of essays by Gilles Deleuze (Desert Islands and Two Regimes of Madness—he also later edited Deleuze’s Letters and Other Texts), he wrote a striking introduction to the empiricism and pragmatism of William James; an exploration of relations as they function in the works of both William and Henry James; a penetrating study of several crucial though often overlooked aspects of Henri Bergson’s philosophy; a brilliant rethinking of Deleuze’s oeuvre as an encyclopedia of aberrant movements; and an introduction to Étienne Souriau’s philosophy of modes of existence.
Several things clearly hold the works of this series together. For one thing, there is the presence of Deleuze, with whom Lapoujade studied and whose work represents a significant encounter in the development of his thought. Readers of Deleuze will recognize Bergson and William and Henry James as important figures in the fabric of Deleuze’s thought, and the recent revival of interest in Souriau can be traced in part back to a reference to his L’Instauration Philosophique in Deleuze and Guattari’s What Is Philosophy? What’s more, there is a certain stylistic similarity between these works and Deleuze’s early studies in the history of philosophy. It appears as though Lapoujade has been working to constitute a canon of philosophical forebears, one that overlaps at times with Deleuze’s own alternative history of philosophy, to be sure, yet that takes up the impetus of this Deleuzian gesture in its own way and for its own ends. James the “radical empiricist,” Bergson the “superior empiricist,” Deleuze the “transcendental empiricist,” and Souriau the existential pluralist—it seems clear that Lapoujade’s works have been exploring a still minor tradition of rethinking empiricism and pragmatism and inviting us to take up the redistribution of philosophical problems that it has led to.
But where does Philip K. Dick fit into all of this? While it is true that Deleuze said that a book of philosophy should be “in part a kind of science fiction,” references to science fiction itself are quite rare in his work, and he never made a science fiction author the subject of a study. Whereas Lapoujade frequently incorporates literary references into his philosophical reflections—there is Henry James, of course, but countless other literary references are found throughout his works—up to this point in his writing, there has never been any indication that science fiction would emerge as a topic of interest. Moreover, generally speaking, doesn’t science fiction remain something of an outlier genre, still deemed by some to be unworthy of “serious study”? And, within this already marginalized realm, doesn’t Dick himself occupy a somewhat peripheral and extravagant place? Undoubtedly, he remains one of the most influential science fiction authors, and yet, despite his famed penchant for building his stories around epistemological problems, don’t the drugs, the mysticism, and the endless paranoia make it somewhat difficult to reconcile his writings with philosophical theory?
On the other hand, there is a way in which this book can be read as a direct development of the last chapter of Lapoujade’s previous book on Souriau. That book—The Lesser Existences: Étienne Souriau, an Aesthetics for the Virtual—functions effectively as an introduction to Souriau’s thought. Unlike William James, Bergson, and Deleuze, whose works are already entrenched in fairly established interpretations, Souriau remains relatively unknown even in France. In the former case, when writing on James, Bergson, or Deleuze, Lapoujade was able to use his studies to displace their thought from the usual interpretations and to establish new connections. In the case of Souriau, however, Lapoujade presents The Lesser Existences as a more straightforward introduction to the main features of Souriau’s thought, focusing on identifying a main line of questioning and developing a reading of Souriau’s major concepts on that basis. And yet, even under the guise of a more straightforward approach, Lapoujade still gives it a particular twist of his own.
As with the patchwork world of William James’s pluralistic universe, Souriau’s philosophy aims to shift the emphasis from a single, preexisting reality, within which everything that exists would be found, to an interrogation into the various ways in which different kinds of existences do in fact exist and exist as distinct manners of existing. For Souriau, a stone exists, a person exists, and a tree exists, but a forest exists in a manner all its own, separate from the individual trees; likewise, a fictional character like Don Quixote, the idea of a nation, and the unmade film to which an already written screenplay refers all have their distinct modes of existence. Particularly important within Souriau’s analysis of these different modes are virtual existences, which is to say incomplete existences or existences in the making that seem to call for an intensification and development of their own reality. Souriau refuses to make these existences dependent on the mind that would be the agent of their completion, looking at them rather as existences that make a claim on their own future development. As a result, he is able to push away from the traditional primacy of the already fully constituted to show a picture in which the world remains something in the making, one in which existences can exist with a greater or lesser reality and must affirm their own rights to exist.
In the final chapter of the book, Lapoujade pushes Souriau’s analysis one step further, making explicit a political dimension already inherent in the aesthetic and metaphysical problems that Souriau raises. Lapoujade turns his attention to those existences that find themselves dispossessed of their reality; that is, those beings that find themselves to have less reality than others who control what has been determined as most real. If existences need to make a claim on their own reality and right to exist, what happens when an existence is prevented from doing so by other forces within its world and is therefore stripped and dispossessed of the very reality to which it makes its claim? Through discussions of a wide variety of artists—from writers like Kafka and Beckett to visual artists like Agnes Martin and Robert Rauschenberg to video artists like Bill Viola and Nam June Paik—we come to see a picture of twentieth-century art as striving to give a sensible presence to the particular types of limits to which these dispossessed existences are pushed in their attempt to grapple with a reality that has been taken from them.
Dick could easily have been featured in that chapter. It almost seems as if Lapoujade could have begun his engagement with Dick there, but then realized the extent to which his work would require a discussion entirely its own. For Dick, any preexisting faith in the world is almost always taken away from his characters, whether through implanted memories, drugs, psychosis, or thoughts beamed into the mind by a government agency or extraterrestrial satellite. There is always something preventing the characters from taking the reality of their world for granted; there is always a combat going on between two realities in struggle.
Following the work of The Lesser Existences, Lapoujade here shows how the worlds that Dick constructs are always on the point of collapsing, precisely because they are worlds whose appearances are determined by a clash of multiple minds vying for control. What’s more, the stories are often told from the perspective of a perfectly unremarkable character: an average person whose rather average problems have little to do with the fate of humanity yet become bound up with some larger force or confrontation. In Lapoujade’s hands, the drugs, the psychosis, and the fantastic, paranormal occurrences that are commonplace in Dick’s writings all result from the constancy of this struggle in which certain minds exert an influence or control over the appearances of the world that other minds are forced to live in. This is a problem that, for Dick, is theoretical, theological, and psychiatric but that also relates to the invasion of advertising images and disposable luxuries in the public sphere, the proliferation of new technologies in everyday life, and the rapid development of a new service-based society with its attendant new forms of surveillance and control. Insofar as Dick’s work dramatizes this type of very real struggle, giving us a way to understand a form of dispossession that makes certain really real beings exist in a manner that is less real than certain others, we might say that he is something of a “physician of civilization,” a term of Nietzschean provenance that Lapoujade uses to describe Bergson in the third chapter of Powers of Time. To be sure, the present book should be read as a critical essay, but also as a clinical one.
There is another connection with Lapoujade’s work on Bergson worth mentioning here. For Bergson, the intellect becomes overdeveloped to the point of dissolving our relation to ourselves, to society, and to the world. Lapoujade shows how first obedience, then fabulation, and then ultimately mysticism and creative emotion create ways of maintaining our attachment to life in the face of this dissolution and are for Bergson constitutive of humans’ social and historical existence. In Dick, then, the extreme overdevelopment of the intellect—or, as he will put it, of the brain’s “digital” left hemisphere—to the point of androidization, is a constant and central theme that threatens to overwhelm and even eliminate the empathetic, sympathetic relations of the right hemisphere. Lapoujade understands this latter kind of relation in a manner that hearkens back to the notion of sympathy that he analyzes in his discussion of Bergsonian intuition in Powers of Time. In Dick’s work, the left brain and the intellect are represented by figures like the android and the engineer, while the intuitive, sympathetic right brain tends to be represented by the handyman, the tinkerer, or the bricoleur, a figure famously developed in Lévi-Strauss’s La pensée sauvage, which Lapoujade discusses at length in the final chapter of this book. If Dick is, in fact, a physician of civilization, it is certainly due to the vision and symptomology of contemporary society that his works present, but also to his promotion of the figure of the bricoleur as the person most suited to the time after, the person who mends and patches together fragments of a world, not with the aim of reconstructing the world of violence and exclusion that came before but in the service of an intuitive relationship to the world that forges connections of sympathy and empathy, piecing it back together in a manner completely otherwise.
Without a doubt, much remains to be said about these connections back to Lapoujade’s work on Souriau and Bergson, and the list of connections could certainly be expanded to include his other books as well. But rather than overdetermine things, I would prefer simply to welcome the reader into this introduction to a multiplicity of “versions” of Philip K. Dick, displaced from any cartoonish notion one might have of him and brought in on his own terms as a thinker of radical empiricism. While reading this book, perhaps you’ll start to see his works as spiritual siblings of Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, or maybe you’ll be tempted to imagine The Exegesis as a case study in James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, or hear Horselover Fat as an added interlocutor in Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Be that as it may, I hope that Worlds Built to Fall Apart: Versions of Philip K. Dick will lead you back to the novels and stories of Philip K. Dick, reading them to enjoy them, but also with a renewed understanding of the ways in which certain seemingly extravagant features of Dick’s worlds—the mind-altering drugs, the madness, the acute experiences of religious delirium—come together with the resources of science fiction as a means of diagnosing a world that has come unhinged.
Each translation entails challenges all its own, though these often remain invisible in the finished text. In the present case, perhaps the most difficult part of my work was returning the many passages from Dick’s works, essays, and interviews, which the author cited in their French translations, back into English. Doing so required many hours of research and veritable mountains of books, and I am thankful to the librarians at the Firestone Library and the Van Pelt Library for the important part they played in making that happen. I would also like to thank Samuel Martin, my good friend and coeditor at Hopscotch Translation, whose input has been invaluable throughout the process. Above all others, I am endlessly grateful to Kelsey Borrowman, without whom none of this would have been possible. I feel very lucky that “the world she wanted” overlaps so nicely with my own.
Erik Beranek is a writer and translator based in Philadelphia. He has translated works by Jacques Rancière, Étienne Souriau, Michel Foucault, and David Lapoujade. He works at Princeton University Press.
“Translator’s Preface” by Erik Beranek from Worlds Built to Fall Apart: Versions of Philip K. Dick by David Lapoujade; translated by Erik Beranek. Published by the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2024 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota. Used by permission.
Published on Hopscotch Translation on Tuesday, June 11, 2024
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