What makes Blade Runner extraordinary is that it artfully presents an alternative to the two predominant ways in which artificially intelligent machines or androids are thought about and depicted in mainstream techno-culture. These modes recur again and again in novels, scientific pundit books, and Hollywood films. For theorist-entrepreneurs like Ray Kurzweil (The Age of Spiritual Machines) or movies like A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001), Bicentennial Man (1999), or The Matrix (1999), there are two possible ways of imagining Artificial Intelligence. Either it is a question of androids attaining human-like characteristics (computational skills, memory capacity, emotions, intuitions, behavior, and consciousness), and therefore accepting to have as their goal to become equivalent to humans. Or it is about androids exceeding human intelligence and skillfulness, and therefore becoming an ominous menace to humanity as they seek to dominate us. Never is it about humans and androids co-existing in difference or, better, otherness.
The job of Blade Runner Rick Deckard, played by Harrison Ford, is to weed out, hunt down, and retire trespassing replicants who have surreptitiously made their way back to decaying Earth society from their slave labor assignments in the off-world colonies or on space exploration expeditions. Deckard is a technical expert at distinguishing android skin jobs made by biotech companies like the Tyrell Corp. from human beings. But the resonating message of the film of ideas Blade Runner is that we are all replicants.
As the future noir hard-boiled detective called back from retirement to handle an especially difficult case gets ready to administer the Voigt-Kampff empathic response analyzer exam to the female Tyrell android Rachael, played by Sean Young, his test subject asks him, “have you ever taken that test yourself?” Deckard later asks CEO Eldon Tyrell, played by Joe Turkel, “how can it not know what it is?” in reference to Rachael, who is uninformed about her origins. But that question applies as well to the sleuth’s own reality. Rachael’s eyes glow a faint red during her V-K trial, as do those of the combat model android Leon, played by Brion James. As Deckard steps out of the bathroom in his highrise apartment, we see camera light bouncing off his slightly out of focus eyes in a similar manner.
Rick Deckard is obsessed with collecting photographs, many of which are strewn about on his piano. “I don’t know why replicants would collect photos,” he comments in the voiceover.
After the protracted showdown of doubles atop abandoned fractal city skyscrapers near the end of the film between the “overinvolved” detective and the replicant Roy Batty, played by Rutger Hauer, another of Deckard’s figurative brothers has a cryptic message for him. Lt. Gaff, played by Edward James Olmos, is the world-weary hero’s shadowy, shadowing, and competitive fellow Blade Runner. Gaff usually talks in a Cityspeak patois, but he tells Deckard just after the movie’s pivotal scene, “you’ve done a man’s job, sir,” as if the protagonist were not really a man. “It’s too bad she won’t live,” Gaff says about Rick Deckard’s post-robotic lover Rachael. “But then again, who does?” he obscurely adds.
The uncertainty of Deckard’s ontological status as human or replicant is brought out more forcefully in Blade Runner: Director’s Cut (1992), which restores an uncanny twelve-second dream sequence of a majestic silver-white unicorn running through misty woods, shown when Deckard nods off while playing the piano. Lt. Gaff, who makes origami figures, leaves the tiny tinfoil form of a unicorn on the floor just outside Deckard’s apartment in the film’s final moments. The juxtaposition of dreamland and decorative variants of the mythical equine creature delicately hints that Gaff and the police authorities know the content of Deckard’s dreams. The divorced sushi lover’s dreams and wishes have been technologically implanted, just as he himself knows of Rachael’s childhood recollection of the baby spiders outside her window, which was the technical reproduction of a memory of Tyrell’s niece.
As director Ridley Scott expressed in a 1982 interview, “the central character could in fact be what he is chasing.” (Phil Edwards, “The Blade Cuts”, Starburst, November 1982) “[The] unicorn scene,” Scott has also said, “would be the strongest clue that Deckard, this hunter of replicants, might actually be an artificial human himself.” (Paul M. Sammon, Future Noir: The Making of Blade Runner, 1996)
But the clues suggesting that Deckard is himself a replicant are only interesting in their provocation of the more significant question of what might the likelihood that Deckard is a replicant itself be a clue to?
The duel confrontation between Rutger Hauer’s Roy Batty and Harrison Ford’s Deckard marks a step beyond the dissolving of boundaries between man and machine or living and non-living characteristic of first-wave cybernetics and its subversion. The breaking down of rigid oppositions between categories of techno-scientific inquiry is made possible by the conversion of all objects of knowledge into information.
Blade Runner’s climactic rooftop scene symbolizes entry into the order of simulation and seduction, or the era of second-wave cybernetics and its discontents. What is crucial is the reversibility of the characters’ roles, or the impossibility of knowing who is leading or following whom in the Blade Runner-android chase.
Although each new epistemic wave in the genealogy of cybernetics preserves the properties of the preceding wave, it is the qualities of seduction and reversibility that separate android from cyborg resistance. In the second order of informatic self-reflexivity and object-orientation, technologies increasingly give rise to effects which are the opposite of those intended. The given system must pay back its debt to the “otherness” which it excluded in order to found itself.
Beyond the question of whether or not Deckard is literally a replicant is the fact that he comes to be endowed with a secret destiny by the androids that he did not have before becoming a Blade Runner. The “original human” starts to imitate, and to be seduced by, that which he created as an imitation of himself.
Neither the Same As Nor Different From the Human
In considering the android as a figure who doubles the techno-scientific system which has spawned him, we pursue an activist reinterpretation of Jean Baudrillard’s thought that views his two key concepts of simulation and seduction as reversible near-synonyms. Simulation and seduction are not antinomical principles of negative critique and positive intervention, resignation and hope. The popularized misreading of Baudrillard is that he diagnoses contemporary techno-culture as an empire of signs which has forfeited the referents of the real and spun itself off aimlessly into a never-never land of meaningless simulations. Having thus been caricatured, Baudrillard is condemned as the pope of the ‘takeover’ of reality by semiotic signs or the solipsistic denier of the existence of an externally objective real. (Robert Hughes, “The Patron Saint of Neo-Pop”, in New York Review of Books, June 1, 1989; Christopher Norris, Uncritical Theory, 1992) He is the David Bowie of philosophy, the king of the carnivalesque, or the vanguard prophet of pessimism. (Steven Poole, “Meet the David Bowie of Philosophy”, The Guardian, March 14, 2000; Douglas Kellner, Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond, 1989, Raymond Bellour, “The Double Helix” in Timothy Druckrey, ed., Electronic Culture, 1996) [Kellner has since changed his mind about Baudrillard, coming to a much more appreciative view of him, but that dismissive work of 1989 became a sort of textbook for a whole generation of American and British graduate students, leading them to miss out on the importance of the greatest social thinker of our time]
Consistent with the reductionist legend of the French high priest of postmodernism is the glorification of Blade Runner as a fable of how reality has been replaced by signs. From the perspective of one of Baudrillard’s admirers, seen through the lens of an indefatigable pomo Zeitgeist, Blade Runner is a film of visual exhibitionism, architectural pastiche, images dissociated from specific places and times, and endless recycling of discontinuous signifiers. In a frequently cited article, Harvard University literature professor Giuliana Bruno discusses the 1982 Warner Bros.-released film as a metaphor of the postmodern condition. (Giuliana Bruno, “Ramble City: Postmodernism and Blade Runner”, in October 1987; reprinted in Kuhn, Annette, ed., Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema) For Bruno, the replicants imagined by Philip K. Dick are perfect copies without originals or android symbols of the schizophrenic state of fragmented subjectivity and temporality rampant in late capitalist techno-culture.
What Professor Bruno forgets is that the distance of the copy from the original resulting from the proliferation of technical systems of media reproduction in the twentieth century leads the culture of simulation to desperately try to make something which is (humanly) real to the extreme to compensate for the “modernist” diminishing of (human) reality. In Ridley Scott’s early twenty-first century science fictional Ridleyville, even animals, which are largely extinct, have been substituted by genetically engineered animoids. Examples are the snake used by the exotic android dancer Zhora, played by Joanna Cassidy, in her nightclub act, and the two replicant ostriches whom Deckard stands aside for near the snake-maker’s booth at the “carnival.” Artificial Life-forms have not been built by hypermodern society to make something less than real or less than human that can work for us. What the replicants embody is the insistent restoration of the real within the withering of “postmodern simulation.” Simulation as thought by Baudrillard is the panic on a massive techno-cultural scale to resolve the emergency crisis of postmodernist reality-drifts via reality-effects. It is the project of reestablishing a rock-solid foundation for the real on the plane of genomic, informational, micronarrative, and microscopic codes.
As with Holodeck technology, the mania arises to define Holo-reality at ever more refined levels of resolution, down to the minutest constituting base unit of molecules, subatomic quantum wave-particles, or magnetic bubble optical matrix digital holo-clusters.
Australian art historian Rex Butler has written a full-length study that treats Baudrillard’s thinking systematically, gestures beyond the postmodernist worldview, and delineates the hidden complicity between simulation and seduction. Seduction is the enabling (or disabling) condition which makes simulation possible (or impossible). Seduction is that which encompasses, precedes, and exceeds simulation. Seduction is the difference between the original and the copy which simulation seeks to suppress in its attempt to represent or institute reality. The main questions that Baudrillard poses in his philosophy are how can one speak of the real when all is simulation? and how can one speak of simulation when there is nothing outside it, no exempted location from which one may observe it, only an “outside” which exists on simulation’s own terms? (Rex Butler, Jean Baudrillard: In Defence of the Real, 1999) [Rex Butler's book is the best book on Baudrillard, in my estimation]
The power of activism, theory, or art consists in its ability to embody or bring about its own real. When we investigate a universe of simulation like the Star Trek culture industry, we must “devise a statement about a system that at once follows its internal logic to the end, adds nothing to it, and inverts it entirely, reveals that it is not possible without this nothing. It is a statement that is totally specific to each system examined, having to be invented afresh each time.” (Rex Butler) Star Trek (or the dark fiber virtual reality of cyberspace, Geert Lovink) is great, but only for reasons which are other than those which it “gives itself,” or officially and habitually states are the reasons for its greatness.
Since everything of value either originates from or is assimilated to it, the vampiric consumer cultural system of simulation no longer has any locatable here and elsewhere. The system’s preeminent attribute is its unfaltering production of differences, to ensure that it will never have any true other. The “other” can never truly achieve exteriority to an assemblage that has manufactured it. Given this situation, what must be thought is the question of “what is excluded to allow this all-inclusiveness”? (Rex Butler) The android condition can unravel this conundrum and challenge simulation. It must articulate a double strategy that opens towards an “outside” of a system that, in its very design and core algorithms, excludes nothing.
