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Blade
Runner
Murphy, the Detroit cop in Robocop who is killed
by criminals then reconstructed to become the ultimate cyborg crimefighter,
has his memories erased in order to serve the purposes of the ruthless
OCP company. The Rosen Corporation in Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep (Tyrell in Blade Runner) also subordinate a body, that of
Rachel, but it is one entirely of their own making and instead of
erasing memory they implant memories.What is at stake in both these
scenarios, in a very raw sense, is the construction of identities
and the forces that are at play in these constructions. The manufacturers
of androids and the builders of Robocop are both manipulative of
new technologies to construct identities that are compatible with
their capitalist (profit-making) ends. However, there are commentators
who see very positive possibilities in these technologies. Mark
Poster has argued that what we are seeing in the era of postmodern
culture is an "emerging new individual identity or subject position"
commensurate in its difference from the previous humanist conception
of the subject as that concept was in its self different from the
previous feudal notions of the individual. This is not an analysis
that is contingent upon assumptions about the viability of artificial
life forms such as the Robocop cyborg or the androids in Electric
Sheep and Blade Runner but one which takes the human subject as
its theme. Poster's argument, based predominantly upon the effects
of enormous proliferation of communications systems and mass-media,
and the ways in which these compel humans to interact with one another
and the new technologies at their disposal, can lead to more extreme
arguments such as Harraway's. In her famous and oft-quoted cyborg
manifesto, Harraway says that in "our time, a mythic time, we are
all chimeras, theorised and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism;
in short, we are cyborgs." The extent to which our lives are lived
through technology presently have already rendered us "hybrids"
in other words. As the title "manifesto" suggests this theoretical
viewpoint is an attempt to manufacture a radical politics through
the opportunities that fundamentally new subject positions might
allow, casting aside the 'metaphysical baggage' of the Enlightenment
entirely. The purpose of this essay, through the central locus of
memory, is to expose to what extent representations of 'artificial
intelligence' enable us to form a positive vision of a postmodern
consciousness that is so contingent upon technologies constitutive
of selfhood.
In Electric Sheep, Philip K. Dick portrays a future
society in which real and artificial life are placed in constant
opposition against one another predominantly, though bizarrely,
through the concept of owning pets. It is Deckard's great dream
to own a real sheep instead of the artificial one he has grazing
on the roof-garden of his apartment. Being a communal garden, other
residents of the same apartment block also have various pets living
there and it is clear that there is no behavioural distinctions
that can be made between the real and the artificial:
Of course, some of their animals undoubtedly
consisted of electronic circuitry fakes, too; he had of course never
nosed into the matter, any more than they, his neighbours, had pried
into the real workings of his sheep.
Despite the lack of behavioural differences then,
there is genuine kudos attached to the ownership of a real animal
as opposed to an artificial one. The technology is so advanced in
this society that the artificial animal hospital van driver John
Isidore is amazed by the sophistication of the disease circuits
that he thinks are programmed into an artificial cat (by mimicking
'defects' we realise that verisimilitude is more important than
bionic perfection). That this cat turns out to be genuine is revealing
in the sense that distinguishing the difference between real and
artificial life is evidently an extremely problematic venture, something
which becomes even more evident when we move into the domain of
testing to find out whether a human-like creature is an android
(Andy) or not. The indistinguishability of humans from Andys or
Replicants in Blade Runner is such that Samantha Holland has argued
that "the only way in which their 'inhumanity' can be detected is
by revealing their lack of a (genuine) childhood (and the genuine
memories that go along with it)." For Holland, this means that "they
are, effectively, human beings", an observation which in many respects
is deliberately highlighted in Blade Runner where indecipherability
of clear boundaries is key to a complex vision of postmodern subjectivity.
The first scene of the film is witness to the Voight-Kampff test,
a test which asks a series of questions designed to elicit an emotional
response from a human subject (an amusing quirk of the novel is
that these questions are almost all about animals that, because
of their scarcity, should elicit a particularly strong emotional
response). The interviewee, Leon, stands up when he is asked about
his mother, and says: "Let me tell you about my mother", shooting
the blade runner who is interviewing him. The nihilistic conclusion
of the scene - killing being the final comment upon Leon's childhood
- is a striking metaphor for the lack of a mother and, to echo Holland,
"(genuine) childhood memories". It is this first scene according
to Alison Landsberg, that posits memory as "the locus of humanity"
in the film, emphasising the barren space of a consciousness without
real memory.
That memory is constitutive of some essential notion
of humankind though is left in some doubt in Blade Runner, whereas
in Robocop it is memory that enables Murphy to be a hero as opposed
to merely being a victor. The fight against evil in the form of
corruption in OCP, is as much a fight for Murphy to regain a notion
of his subjecthood before he became the Robocop. As he kills the
main perpetrator of the crime within OCP and sends him tumbling
to his death from the window of the boardroom the Chief Executive
says: "Nice shooting, son. What's your name?" Robocop, with a triumphant
smile, replies "Murphy" signifying not only the fact that he is
aware of their being someone called Murphy from whom he was built,
but that he is Murphy. In effect, he triumphs in that most nostalgic
way, he has remembered what it is that makes him human (in essence).
It is this remembering that enables him to overcome all the programming
that has attempted to construct his identity as something distinct
from his human identity.
Many commentators have noted how Dick's naming
of the central character in Electric Sheep, Deckard, is significant
due to the fact that it is a homophonic of 'Descartes,' the rationalist
philosopher whose Discourse on Method and Meditations are seen as
cornerstones of the philosophical project of constructing the rational,
autonomous subject of the Enlightenment. Descartes is often looked
to when explanations of human consciousness are required - cogito
ergo sum being seen as some transcendent guarantor of autonomous
thought. A well known modern philosophical argument contesting the
truth claim of this sentence is that of the brain-in-the-vat argument
(BIV). BIV postulates that there is a 'super-scientist' conducting
an experiment in which he places a brain in a vat so as to preserve
it. Whilst in the vat, he feeds this brain a series of electronic
impulses that simulate the workings of consciousness in all of its
sensuous fullness, its understanding of a material reality and other
beings with which it interacts. At any moment, the scientist is
capable of pulling the brain from the vat though or stopping the
electrical impulses going into it: in no way is there autonomous
thought. Hans Moravec, in Mind Children: The Future of Robot
and Human Intelligence, makes a similar point when he says:
A simulated Descartes correctly deduces
his own existence. It makes no difference just who or what is doing
the simulation - the simulated world is complete in itself.
This reworking of Descartes is philosophically
entirely plausible and to a large extent is exactly the same scenario
as the one in which Rachel in Blade Runner is placed in. She has
justified belief in the truth of her own autonomous existence as
there are no observable signs that she is different in any fundamental
respect from real humans. She has a personal history that includes
memories of her mother and of piano lessons. The truth of course
is that she has never had piano lessons as such but instead has
been programmed to be able to play the piano, with the memory of
being given lessons a prosthetic implant. In order to prove to Deckard
that she is human she shows him photographs of her mother, a gesture
which proves nothing whatsoever except that memory is being contextualised
as exterior from the self and that verification is sought through
material criteria. That photographs can be challenged as representing
any sort of conclusive evidence for truth claims through an equivalence
with reality is hardly a new idea yet the storage of photographs
as a kind of external memory bank has become a commonplace phenomena
in western society. It is also the case that Rachel does not use
the photographs as an act of deceit because they correspond with
the memories that have been implanted in her. Consequently, the
fact that her models of verification are ultimately 'un-testable'
in the environment in which she exists, serves to sustain her belief
of subjective human autonomy. Landsberg argues that:
We might say that while the photograph
has no relationship to reality, it helps her to produce her own
narrative. While it fails to authenticate her past, it does authenticate
her present.
The significant point of course that Landsberg
does not quite make is that her past is only not authenticated because
there is no imposition of external criteria - an omniscient viewer.
She is unable through her own 'testing' of reality, to overcome
her programmed memory and see that she is in fact a replicant.
A number of critics have argued that Blade Runner
is symptomatic of the "spatiality of postmodernism: a decentered
ahistorical pastiche" and that the lack of real memories in the
replicants emphasises the ahistoricity of the film in general. It
is not only the individual replicant psyche that is saturated with
simulations of reality, but the entire society in which they are
situated. In part, this is underscored through the visual aesthetic
of the film that has a vast mingling of cultures, that is a mediation
of 1940's film noir through cyberpunk science fiction. There is
an uncoordinated heterogeneic mixture of styles and historical periods
in the movie that indicate a death of historical referent and a
movement into the arena of simulation, a short-circuit of reality.
The postmodern landscape of Jean Baudrillard seems to be a particularly
fitting model for Blade Runner, a film which:
exaggerates the presence of the mass-media,
evoking sensations of unreality and pervasive spectacle: advertising
'blimps' cruise above the buildings...and gigantic vid screens dominate
the landscape.
Baudrillard is constantly seeking to challenge
epistemic assumptions in postmodern society, arguing that we are
saturated in repetitive, circular forms of representation that through
their guise of reality, constitute a new zone of the real - the
hyperreal. It is clear that Rachel is in some senses a personification
of this simulation due to the fact that her consciousness is constituted
from simulations, but equally the technologies of mass media impact
simulatory notions of the real upon genuine humans in capitalism's
relentless drive for profit. In many ways, this is a conclusion
similar to Harraway's - that the distinction between cyborg and
human is not to be based upon ideas of embodiment of technological
and biological hybridity but rather through the notion of an interaction
with technology that leads consciousness into strategies contingent
upon it.
Baudrillard may certainly be accused of wrongly
positing an essentialist reality which communications and mass media
technologies have subverted, destroying a referent that never actually
existed due to the fact that reality has always been mediated through
discursive strategy. There is a distinction to be made though between
the utopian model of equivalence of sign with the real that has
operated as the key epistemological premiss in modernity, and the
advent of postmodern technologies in which referentiality is mediated
in infinitesimally more complex ways, a mediation which doggedly
refuses metaphysical evaluation. Baudrillard's vision of the hyperreal
is a fairly bleak one in contrast to Harraway's model of human and
technological hybridity - rather than forming a radical new politics,
it enables the most totalizing kind of regime yet known to mankind.
In Blade Runner though we can see some evidence of Harraway's model
of cyborg politics being in some ways a viable one.
For Harraway the cyborg is important partly because
it is not natural and recourse to arguments about inherent biological/genetic
traits can not be used to narrowly classify the cyborg - it opens
up new spaces of identity to be explored. If we treat the cyborg
as a new organism then we can consign 'man' to the status of a relic,
something that Moravec sees as being the inevitable conclusion of
advances in artificial intelligence:
Very little need be lost in the passing
of the torch - it will be in our artificial offspring's power, and
to their benefit, to remember everything about us, even, perhaps,
the detailed working of individual human minds.
Though Moravec is addressing intelligence in purely
technological terms, his ideas can be seen as analogous with the
adoption of new identities in cyborg theory. Against the universalising
instinct of so much thought, it is difficult to grasp the possibilities
of transcending an essentially humanist conception of identity,
though Michel Foucault invites us to consider deeply what a fundamentally
constructed notion of humankind modernity has sustained:
man is only a recent invention, a figure
not yet two centuries old, a new wrinkle in our knowledge; he will
disappear again as soon as that knowledge has discovered a new form.
The replicant Roy Batty in Blade Runner is perhaps
the most sympathetically portrayed character in the film - certainly
more so than in Dick's novel where despite his obvious intelligence
he is seen as brutal, sneering and, as Dick himself has notably
commented, "less than human." It is through Roy that we can perhaps
see the possibilities of radically new subjectivities. Despite his
evident strength and Ayran features, Roy is a character capable
of every emotion who is hungry for life and cannot cram enough experience
into his life-span of four years. He is both poetic and ruthless,
"straight" and camp ("gosh...you've got a lot of great toys here"
he says at one point) but most strongly exhibits a strong sense
of performativity. There is no fixed character to Roy as he, unlike
Rachel, relishes his status as a being without memory and metaphysical
baggage for whom the universe is a huge poetic landscape. His actions
resonate with Harraway's words on the cyborg.
The cyborg is resolutely committed to
partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity. It is oppositional,
utopian and completely without innocence.
Roy certainly demonstrates the way in which cyborg
identity can be consciously constructed. However, it seems an inescapable
conclusion that Roy is weighed down by concepts of subjecthood that
have both been programmed into him and which he has learnt from
humans. He is in essence a romantic, aspiring to achieve heights
of the humanist sublime, exemplified by his last words when he recounts
the experiences that he has had: "I've seen things you people wouldn't
believe, attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion, c-beams
glimmering near the Tannhauser gate..." Roy can consequently seem
like a character who bereft of memories, and aware of his lack of
connectivity, seeks solace in trying to beat humankind at its own
humanist game - and in doing so becomes an exemplar of modern human
identity.
Just as Derrida has often said that his thinking
is inevitably tinged with metaphysics no matter what strategies
of resistance he might employ to expel it, so we might posit that
it is impossible to try and represent 'new identities' distinct
from the paradigms of modernity. In many ways, we are operating
in the arena of the speculative because representations are so inescapably
mired in the models of thought from which we are trying to escape.
Harraway's manifesto seems to run up against these boundaries and
deploys strategies for a radical politics that is ostensibly anti-foundationalist
but which forms a vocabulary precisely out of the very ideological
forces that it is trying ot rebel against. Derrida has written specifically
about the "cybernetic programme":
If the theory of cybernetics is by itself
to oust all metaphysical concepts - including the concepts of soul,
of life, of value, of choice, of memory - which until recently served
to separate machine from man, it must conserve the notion of writing...until
its own historico-metaphysical character is also exposed.
To imagine a complete rebellion is evidently a
naive project in Derrida's terms. The obliteration of all those
constitutive aspects of the essentialist human has its own metaphysical
agenda which is not capable in a single stroke of upstaging existing
ontological narratives.
In the director's cut of Blade Runner, Scott focuses
on the possibility that Deckard is himself a replicant, an approach
that has resulted in much debate. Dick never poses the same ambiguity
in the novel but does suggest that Deckard is equally as incapable
of empathy as the androids. In both instances the distinctions between
Deckard and the beings that he is "retiring" are ambivalent in the
upmost which is to say that the human animal is losing the criteria
for separating itself from the artificial. This separation can not
be complete as it must retain, as Derrida says, aspects of dominant
ontological narrative. However, in marking the ambivalence, Blade
Runner and its pre-text Electric Sheep offer a direct confrontation
with the project of postmodern consciousness in the age of technology
and mass communications.
This ambivalence is not one that Robocop maintains
and is why Blade Runner remains a much richer source of exegesis
for examinations of postmodern consciousness in confrontation with
technology. However, it is a film that is complimentary in an understanding
of the type of problematic that Blade Runner confronts us with.
Rather than offering an escape from metaphysics, Robocop emphasises
the importance of the human over and above that of the technological
which is reductive and limiting. The story, though rather firmly
with tongue in cheek, offers charicature and stereotypes (the tiring
Chief Executive, the ambitious Vice President, the ruthless capitalist
corporation) in an exemplar of postmodern surface. After Murphy
becomes the robocop, he maintains a particular behavioural trait
that makes a fellow cop (his previous partner Lewis) aware of the
fact that the robocop is in fact Murphy. This trait is the peculiarly
human way in which robocop whirls his gun in his hand before replacing
it a la Clint Eastwood, back in its holster. Murphy learnt this
skill ostensibly to impress his son who wants to have an impression
of his father resembling a fictional TV crime-fighter, but when
Lewis asks him about it when he is still alive, she reveals through
questioning that it is something of the 'child' in him. He has learnt
the skill because it impresses him. That this type of 'irrationalism'
is carried over into his robotic form gives the audience of the
understanding that beneath the programming there somewhere remains
a human being. Memory is the crucial aspect of Murphy's process
of rediscovering his true self. In his caged home in the police
station he begins to dream about his family and as the dreams become
more and more emotional, he transgresses the programming that has
constituted his new identity, and breaks free from his shackles.
The film is effectively a humanist myth or fable about the invincibility
of the human spirit, about the need for metaphysics as providing
a true understanding of what the human animal is. No matter how
much technological control exercises itself, the human spirit will
shine through. History is not dead and memory is alive and well.
It is in the light of this analysis that Blade
Runner reveals itself as a film that offers itself both to the aspirations
and fears of man's engagement with technology and the implications
that this has upon conceptions of human consciousness. As Landsberg
has pointed out, the film "problematizes any concept of memory that
posits it as essential, stable or organically grounded." By revealing
the scope of construction, the ease with which man can become indistinguishable
from machine, with the new technologies that surround it and divorce
it from its metaphysical criteria of consciousness, Blade Runner
is a text that offers great possibilities in the formation of a
discourse on postmodern consciousness. It also refers the terms
of reference towards humankind as opposed to writers on artificial
intelligence such as Penrose and Moravec who still maintain strong
distinctions between man and machine, predicting either the triumph
of humankind or, in more cases, the triumph of computers. It is
important to understand our present-day involvements with technology
that render us complicit with the structures that these technologies
engender. It is also significant to notice the way in which technologies
in all three of the texts that I have looked at are manipulated
by bastions of capitalism and memory/programmes are reified as commodity.
We can understand perhaps that this is, as Jameson would have it,
the "Cultural logic of late capitalism" arguably rendering critique
redundant and participating in a politics of passivity. Whether
or not this is a negative factor or not is one which rests primarily
upon a humanist criteria of ethics and understanding of the individual
and is a judgement that I should prefer to avoid. If Rachel is able
to exist quite happily with her simulated memories though, why should
we similarly not do the same so long as we remain clear of the Descartes
(Deckards) of this world.
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