On being an Amateur

A few years back, I put up a post about Philip K. Dick that was my attempt to think through how PKD had come to have a personal significance for me, what that significance was, and, more generally, how and why we invest writers with personal significance in the first place.

Having now finished almost all of the remaining PKD works I hadn’t read up to that point, I find myself thinking back on what might have been going on there. Part of what was at work was the feeling of having been an amateur.

The amateur is a strange role with its own peculiar psychology that reflects distinctive ways of thinking that can be as liberating as constraining. I came to the identity of the amateur naturally and early. As adolescents, I think my friends and I saw ourselves more as novice, informal intellectuals on independent paths than kids who liked to read or even high school/future university students. A community of autodidacts inventing core parts of the academy as we went without knowing that they were core parts of the academy. That was weird, but it fit our mistrust of mainstream institutions (the school in particular), punk rock DIY ethos, and blue-collar provinciality.

This was fed by the fact that a lot of what interested us wasn’t taught in school—at least not our school. That’s obviously true of every kid, but an added twist here was that a lot of that material was academic—philosophy in particular, but huge parts of the humanities and social sciences—which fostered confusion in us about what it meant for something to be “academic.” The internet hadn’t exploded yet, and our parents hadn’t been to college. We were weirdos picking through used book sales and public libraries, and on some level, I think we thought scholarly behemoths like Chomsky or BF Skinner or C. Wright Mills or whomever were the same. Of course, it seems impossible now not to think of them in lavish faculty lounges, but that was how things seemed from our distinctive vantage point.

That belief died a natural death when we graduated. Arriving at college, we were suddenly thrust into a well-defined universe of experts who’d studied those things for years with systematicity and resources we couldn’t have imagined.

The experience was exciting, jarring, and humiliating. There were advantages to having started as amateurs: we brought a lot of passion and authenticity to what we did, and we had developed tastes (albeit idiosyncratic ones). We were limited to what we were able to find, which meant we often started with minor, obscure works rather than major canonical ones (Sartre’s out-of-print reflections on the Cuban revolution but not Nausea). This led to unusual but sometimes interesting emphases turning up in our thought.

In hindsight, I fell for PKD during this period because I was an amateur taken in by his snazzy thought experiments questioning the nature of reality and because I recognized him as a fellow amateur taken in by snazzy thought experiments questioning the nature of reality. His writing has a late-night bull session feel that mirrored what our lives felt like, which might be most directly dramatized in places like A Scanner Darkly, though animates all of his work. I’m far from the first to point out that PKD is the patron saint of the counter-culture humanistic amateur.

The amateur works in a very different way from the expert: more experiential, eclectic, and oriented toward the particular. There’s beauty and power in that authenticity. It can be liberating. At the same time, it can be alienating and constraining. In PKD’s case, his amateurism led to authenticity that resonates with readers even today, and I suspect at least up to a point that is what made his work innovative and visionary. At the same time, it hobbled his prose and thinking. Professions can have blind spots that hinder innovation, but more often than not, the professional does it better, avoiding well-recognized missteps and common errors.

For all his paranoia and cynicism, PKD seems to have had his own ambivalence toward expertise. In a podcast interview, one of his ex-wives, Tessa Dick, mentioned that he dreamed of turning the manic, amphetamine-fueled ravings of his Exegesis into a legitimate philosophical publication and was concerned that it wouldn’t be taken seriously by professional theologians.

Understandable as it is, a part of me hates to hear that. On one level, I like the idea of the Exegesis as the work of an outsider artist’s mind on fire. Yet, another part of me would like to see its rough edges smoothed out by an expert.

I still struggle with where I fall on that, as well as with the attendant social class anxieties bound up with professionalism that have been so brilliantly explicated by Dewey, Ranciere, and many others. Some days, I cheer the technocrat and some days the ignorant schoolmaster. Much like PKD himself, I suppose.