Content area
Full Text
Set in a postnuclear world that is being reassembled elsewhere in the solar system as the double of its predetonation self, Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) registers its protest against the dehumanizing effects of bureaucracies and technology as it follows bounty-hunter Rick Deckard on what begins as a search for six renegade androids and becomes a quest for an uncontestable essence of human being that separates "us" from the ever more humanseeming androids. Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner (which gave its name to the reissued novel) preserves the essentials of Dick's world. In both versions of the story, the negation and recuperation of a specific human difference is represented as fundamental to the rhythm of capital; the production of ever more sophisticated androids and detection devices to catch them constitutes the major form of research and development in both economies. Likewise, each version condemns the social and economic relations it depicts. The line between the human and its simulations, however, describes a different figure in the film than in the novel, as we shall see. My particular concern is how the dissolution of markers of the human informs the attempt to imagine an alternative to the forms of domination and dehumanization each telling of the story portrays.
Androids takes place in a gray, crumbling San Francisco whose nearly deserted apartment complexes typify the logic of fifties and early sixties urban renewal. Their programmatic neutrality embodies the universalist intent of rational planning and also those planners' impoverished conception of the actual lives these structures would house. In the context of the novel, they offer a metaphor for the administration of the private lives of a population whose affects are programmed by devices like Penfield mood organs, which feature "[t]he desire to watch TV, no matter what's on it" and even the desire to select an affect (4). As it moves toward a conclusion in which the hero and his wife free themselves from dependency on artificially induced desires and emotions, Androids, like so much of American cultural criticism, offers as its solution to the crises of modernity the possibility of disalienation and the restoration of a natural basis for individual life and social order.
Instead of reinforcing the border...