Real History

In one of those bizarre consequences, I read a social media post from an esteemed senior colleague who announced (with just a bit of pride) on the top of his syllabus: “The pledge: nothing in this syllabus, or in the course it describes, is, or ever will be, generated by artificial intelligence. Real teaching, real learning. Real intelligence, real History.”

This weekend, I read Isolarii 12: How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Laterby Philip K. Dick. You can read it here.

As readers of this blog know, I love Philip K. Dick as much as I distrust (and, in full disclosure, dislike) the recent tendency to advocated for “the real.” In November for example, some of my archaeologist colleagues in a well-meaning, if misguided festival event sought to celebrate “Real Archaeology.” In a word: barf. 

Not a day goes by without some pundit bemoaning “fake news” and another declaiming against inauthentic art and text produced by AI al-gore-rhythms or the threat of pseudo-science. Needless to say, this handwringing is part a genuine fear that “all that is solid melts into air” and part a kind of gate-keeping by particular groups who see appeals to reality as a way to assert the authority of their position. 

It feels like we are encountering a population who has not read Philip K. Dick and become comfortable (or at least) with his stories which regularly interrogate the limits not only to our ability to perceive reality, but also to its value as a concept as the foundation to a universe. Of course, Dick wasn’t the only author to consider the rise of AI models that can imitate human writing and speech (and appearance), but he certainly made a living by asking us whether we these “androids” constituted “real” individuals. That said, he never questioned the human origins of these creations even if they only existed in the flickering memories of an android.

Donna Haraway’s concept of the cyborg remains perennially relevant. It’s hard for us to trace even in our own lives where the “real” (at least in the limited sense proposed by my senior colleague) feathers into the artificial. Most of us integrate common contrivances such as spell checking, web searches, and citation software so deeply into our workflows that it would hard for us to discern where the real ends and the artificial begins. At the same time, we eagerly share the latest article on the virtues of handwriting, reading paper books, and mechanical watches on our favorite algorithmically curated social media outlet.

It is clear that, on the one hand, we live in a world of ontological hybridization, cyborgs, and Cheez Whiz on Real Cheesesteaks and, on the other, increasingly obnoxious, desperate, and shrill appeals to reality. Philip K. Dick’s contribution to this discussion is from 1978 and like much of his work, it is prescient. He argues that reality is a mixture of “mystical experience, reasoning, and faith.” This is not the kind of real that our overheated post-Enlightenment society will find particularly satisfying. After all, there are still plenty of us who see the desiccated reality proposed by the most ardent post-modernists as the partly to blame for our current woes and others who argue that the current “ontological turn” in the humanities has robbed our disciplines of the capacity to produce socially meaningful knowledge. 

I’ve long felt (if not argued) that post-modernism is the only epistemological stance possible when faced with the unmitigated hellscape that is late capitalism. It has allowed me as a human and a scholar to reject the conceits of the Enlightenment. Moreover, it has created space outside of the ontological constraints necessary for modern thinking. For Dick, this space allowed us to interrogate both the “real” and, as How to Build a Universe shows, concepts as universal, but also as slippery, as time without having to reject the possibility that these terms are merely tools used by authority to sort and order society in ways materially advantageous for those in power. (It goes without saying that our predilection for the “Real” either on our syllabus or in our archaeology, news, and cheese steaks represents ways to preempt challenges to institutional systems of power whatever else these things do). At the same time, power isn’t enough to constitute reality in Dick’s works. After all, he noted “Only children, tourists, and visiting Soviet high officials ever go to Disneyland.” 

For Dick, there remains something ineffable, mystical, even spiritual that makes the world real. This is important as we become all the more eager to double down on rationalist claims to knowledge even as the world, largely constructed on the basis of these claims, falls apart around us. No appeal to “Real History,” “Real Science” or “Real Archaeology” or anything other ontological tomfoolery is likely to save us.