The action of the novel \u2013 and the Blade Runner films based on it \u2013 largely revolves around the central tension and struggle between biological humans and artificially constructed androids. Arguably, however, the story\u2019s greatest continuing relevance is in the way it challenges a particular image of the human that has come to dominate in modern Western culture. This image portrays certain qualities \u2013 whiteness, masculinity, heterosexuality, rationalism, professional success, and physical prowess \u2013 as the ideal symbols of humanity\u2019s success.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The novel revolves around the efforts of bounty hunter Rick Deckard, in his quest to identify, track, and destroy androids posing as biological humans. Unsurprisingly, he repeatedly meets violent resistance. Both his livelihood and his life depend on his ability to tell the difference between humans and androids. Ultimately, however, Deckard is forced to face the possibility that there may not be any fundamental difference. This causes him to undergo a deep existential crisis, finding both his sense of identity, and his literal survival, severely threatened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Deckard\u2019s primary means of distinguishing between humans and androids is the Voight-Kampff test. Combining psychological analysis with a measurement of physiological reactions, the test seeks to determine whether a subject is capable of empathy. If the subject adequately demonstrates concern for the lives of others, they are deemed human, and allowed to live. If not, they are deemed non-human, and must be destroyed. Deckard\u2019s transformation begins when he realises that some newer androids are capable of passing the test, and so passing for human.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A likely response to this dilemma would be to regard the test as fundamentally flawed. A better test would be needed, one based on identifying another trait as the essential feature to distinguish androids from humans. However, Deckard, and the reader with him, is ultimately led to a far more radical conclusion \u2013 that the test is accurate after all. That is, the capacity for empathy is the only value that should ever be used to determine the worth of another being.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This revelation is a kind of update on Descartes\u2019s influential \u2018cogito ergo sum\u2019. In place of \u2018I think, therefore I am\u2019, Dick implicitly suggests, \u2018she loves, therefore she is (human\/worthy)\u2019. (It is no coincidence that Rick Deckard\u2019s name somewhat echoes that of Ren\u00e9 Descartes.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This \u2018posthuman\u2019 gesture abandons any scientific, ontological or material basis for distinguishing between humans and non-humans. Yet it continues to capitalise on the widespread human sense that there is something special and valuable about humans. Such a sense is often referred to as a defining feature of \u2018humanism\u2019. What the novel offers us, then, is a kind of posthuman humanism.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
On this basis, there is no being \u2013 whether mammal, robot, computer, bird, slug, stone, or star \u2013 that is excluded from the category of humanity on the basis of its physical nature. Conversely, each and any being may qualify as human by demonstrating empathy for other beings. Meanwhile, the term \u2018human\u2019 has by this point come to mean nothing more than \u2018worthy of existence\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is far from a mere philosophical or science-fictional game. To see its radical social and political significance in our world, we need only consider the range of ways people have been dehumanised over the millennia of (so-called) humanity\u2019s existence. Slavery, colonialism, alienation, patriarchy, racial inequality, and virtually any form of systemic social injustice you can think of, involve presenting some beings as \u2018less than human\u2019 in order to justify their exploitation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For this reason, it is crucial that Deckard\u2019s entire outlook and sense of self \u2013 rather than simply his understanding of the distinction between humans and machines \u2013 is thoroughly challenged. His (hetero)sexuality, his commitment to the values of marriage, family, legal and police justice, the importance of professional, financial, and social success, all intact at the novel\u2019s outset, have been radically undermined by its end. Seemingly a broken man, he is, nevertheless, left with an enduring sense of the primary importance of an unrestricted, non-prejudiced care or love for other beings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Admittedly, Dick could have pushed this dimension further, as Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany, and a host of more recent science fiction authors have done. But at least it is an integral part of the narrative. The recent film Blade Runner 2049<\/em>, in contrast, downplays this dimension, while retaining the central concern with the relationship between biological humans and artificial androids.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This may be one possible reason why the latest film has attracted great praise as well as intense critique. While Blade Runner 2049<\/em> continues to blur the boundary between human and machine, it seems to uphold the notion that, in the end, the goal of either would equate more-or-less to the supposed values of the average white, Western, heterosexual, bourgeois male. This, ultimately, risks undermining the radical political potential of the posthumanist experiment that drives the original story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Fifty years ago, Philip K. Dick\u2019s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? questioned what it means to be human in ways that have had an immense lasting influence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1382,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[894],"country":[],"authors":[],"class_list":["post-1380","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society","tag-894"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n