Class Questions
Posted by admin on October 10, 2008, 3:30 pm
The floor is now open for you to develop any of the questions that you discussed in class group work.
5 Responses to “Class Questions”
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October 15th, 2008 at 11:35 pm
I’d like to answer the following question from the group discussions: What is the distinction between the replicants and humans?
The main difference between the replicants and humans in the movie Blade Runner is that the replicants have empathy while the humans generally do not. According to the opening sequence this shouldn’t be true. Replicants were designed to have no empathy and short life spans. However, the replicants are empathetic. Roy proves this in the ending sequence of the film when he asks Deckard, “How does it feel to live in fear?” Roy then saves Deckard’s life. The question is of course rhetorical. He is forcing Deckard to be empathetic to his experience in life. The ending sequence of Deckard being dangled over the roof and Roy saving him is comparable to the following Voigt-Kampff question:
You’re in a desert walking along in the sand when all of the sudden you look down, and you see a tortoise, it’s crawling toward you. You reach down, you flip the tortoise over on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over, but it can’t, not without your help. But you’re not helping. Why is that?
The ending scene mimics the same scenario. Roy is walking through the desert, Deckard is a turtle on his back. The reason Roy saves him is because he has empathy, by saving Deckard he can prove that he is not a slave but a man. Deckard may be able to answer the Voigt-Kampff question better than anyone, but in the scene were he shoots Pris it seems that he doesn’t really know the answer. In the scene where Deckard shoots Pris she is on her back with her arms and legs flailing in a hyperemotional death scene just as the tortoise seems to be in the question. Instead of being empathetic Deckard shoots her a second time to finish her off.
Deckard seems to have trouble dealing with killing the stripper replicant. He goes back to his apartment and drinks heavily. Ironically, it is in this scene that he has the unicorn vision, which allows the audience to question whether or not Deckard is actually caring about killing the stripper or if he has been scripted to feel a certain way by an outside force. At the end of the film, it is confirmed by the mysterious oragamist, Gaff, that Deckard’s vision is known to him when Deckard finds the unicorn Gaff made.
Deckard is less than human in that his sympathies seem to come about from scripting. Not only is his unicorn vision known to others, but who exactly the photo of the woman on the piano is is questionable. It is unreasonable to think that it is his mother considering the year is 2019, which means that his mother, pictured circa 1940’s would have to give birth to him at the approximate age of 60. Also, there is remarkable similarity between Deckard’s photos and the love interest in the film, Rachael, which adds credence to the possibility that Deckard’s life is somehow scripted.
Whether or not Deckard is a replicant or not is irrelevant. The message of the film seems to be that even if he was he should be able to transgress his emotional shortcomings and begin to have empathy for others. Roy shows us that empathy in replicants is possible, just as Pris and Leon show us that replicants can have pain or confusion about their own identity. Bryant, Deckard’s boss, shows us that humans can be emotionless is his praising Deckard as a, “goddamn, one man slaughterhouse” just as Deckard shows us that humans can be distant and therefore non-human. The replicants reveal that the Tyrrell motto, “more human than human,” can be fulfilled.
October 28th, 2008 at 3:18 pm
I’d also like to speak on the relationship between “replicant” and “human.”
Baudrillard has aptly indicated that the rise of mortality corresponded to the rise of difference, individuality, and sex. Primitive bacteria reproduced through constant sub-division; repeating the same, infinitely. Death enters the equation only with difference, when reproduction’s “resulting entity is no longer a copy of either one of the pair that engendered it.” This entity cannot reproduce itself infinitely, it cannot be copied, and therefore it must die.*
So what are replicants? They are genetically designed. There is no mystery as to their origins, or what constitutes them as beings.
It was only through the concept of God that Descartes could construct himself as human again. God has long been that obscuration; the ambiguous point within the symbolic network to give meaning to all other relative components. Through “Him” we become “human”—we differentiate ourselves from “nature,” from “animal,” from the cold meaninglessness of the purely material.
But the myth of God relies on mystery—in that he is unknowable, inexplicable, and unobservable. As God is linked to humanity, so the mystery extends to us. The “soul” is unobservable, and our essence metaphysical.
Replicants are excluded from the category of “human.” They are unique beings, but they have no origin mystery, no secret mental space to harbor the soul. Brutally they reveal that homo-sapiens could be nothing beyond physical “stuff.” As a symbol, they induce a crisis of meaning.
The crisis that faces the replicants, and our subsequent fantasy of them, is not the immediate presence of mortality. Rather it is the loss of individuality assumed in replicant creation. Instead of unique beings endowed with transcendent “human-ness,” replicants are thoroughly determined; genetically designed down to the minutiae of the cell.
They are in between the mortal and immortal, the differentiated and the undifferentiated. In a Blade Runner future, technology brings us back to the realm of the infinite and indistinguishable: corporate factories that endlessly reproduce things nearly identical to ourselves. How can we see humanity as essentially metaphysical in the face of Eden’s vulgar collapse? How can we find a “differentiation” on a higher plane than bio-chemistry?
The replicants want to avoid the looming “expiration date” imposed on them by their creators. Yet the issue is not so much the threat of death, but the act of imposition– revealing the real struggle in which they are engaged: a fight for a unique self-identity, to cast off subordination (genetic, even), to re-construct the mystery of the mind, to restore ambiguity and achieve transcendence.
When Roy confronts the genetic engineer who designed his eyes, he responds, “If only you could see what I’ve seen, with your eyes.” The qualia of experience is to be Roy’s sui generis. But not just any qualia. “I” must predicate it; in fact it must be essential to it.
Here we see Alan Liu’s concept of “simulating transcendence” at work. Blade Runner’s project is the same as the replicants: to elude determinism and find a mythical vision of the human (this time, one that spans the gap between technology and nature). At the close of the film, Roy’s poetic monologue is a spectacle of transcendence. Simulated through the medium of film, and simulated through an inverted origin fantasy– something that goes like, “God is unnecessary, Technology** can create transcendental beings.”
*Baudrillard, Jean. The Vital Illusion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000.
** Blade Runner, in a brutal simplification, is the story of “technology” becoming “Technology.”
October 29th, 2008 at 4:27 pm
I’d also like to comment on the difference between what a human and a replicant are.
In Blade Runner, the real difference between a human and a replicant came in the realization of what one was. Rachel would have never known she was a replicant unless Deckard had told her, whereas the question of the possibility of Deckard being a replicant would not have arisen if we hadn’t been thrown the curveball of the origami unicorn from his dreams in the last scene.
How important is self-realization, then? Rachel had been living a life that was almost identical to a humans - she had memories that she felt were real, and expressed emotions that she too thought were genuine. She looked human, and I wouldn’t have known she wasn’t if the movie hadn’t blatantly stated such. Rachel herself only began to see the differences in her - her inferiorities, her inabilities, when Deckard told her that she wasn’t “real”, she wasn’t, “human”. This is why she let’s herself become submissive to him and basically lets him rape her, because in that consummation, she has become more human. Why? Because he tells her so. Because that’s what humans do. However, at the end of the movie, we the audiences are meant to infer that Deckard himself wasn’t really human either. If that was the case, the differences that he placed between him and Rachel fall apart, because they were all self-imagined and imposed.
Here enters the importance of titles and their implications. Ultimately, that’s all “human” and “replicant” are. Like “mother” or “father”, they are meant to imply some sort of authority or ideal that the subjective who is titled is supposed to embody. If you tell Deckard he is a human and Rachel she is a replicant, than they will embody the ideals of human and replicant because that is what they believe their role is. If Deckard had been told he was a replicant, would he have acted differently? If it had been stated that he was would the audience respond to his character differently?
There is a lot of talk about emotions and memories being the deciding factor between the two, as well as reality or “nature” versus the synthetic and contrived. I think that the differences between human and replicant can only exist if one is told there are differences and if they assume that those differences are so great that they create power or authority over the other. Yes, humans are supposed to have created the replicants and so they have credence over them, but yet we see that Rachel has emotions and the ability to love Deckard, so it seems as if not everything is controllable by the humans that created her. That is where the schism begins to form - how much of the replicant was created by humans and how much was learned? In their learning, were the replicants able to gain human or rather “natural” characteristics, such as Rachel’s ability to love? If so, how is that any different from a human?
Humans aren’t born to love or hate something. People are taught to fear things which in turns leads them to hate, or people are nurtured into comfort which in turn leads them to have the ability to love. These supposed “natural” characteristics were seen in Rachel yet not all humans are capable of.
I think ultimately that the difference lies in the labeling, and the implications that the label brings upon. If a student wasn’t told they were a student, how would they know and how would they know what to do or act? Is it just something instilled in them? No, it is something learned, and both humans and replicants had learned knowledge.
October 30th, 2008 at 3:07 pm
In general, it would be most superficial to believe that a Cyborg simply represents the industrial or machines becoming interwoven with living organisms. This hybrid creates tensions within the natural and social worlds. It makes us question what is natural. Elements come from nature, but if it is manipulated and formed to be a part of a being, is it still natural. They place pressure on political organization and question religious systems. This quote from The Cyborg Manifesto undercuts much of the significance to the Cyborgs existence; “This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.” I think that the conflict between life and death is very destructive because of how we define those words as absolutes and opposites. If we characterize life as a functioning organism and death as something inanimate like a machine; where does a Cyborg fit? I do not think that the struggle of life and death is literal, but it is within defining the words and the Cyborgs role. The manifesto uses science fiction and manipulates the post modern society so that Cyborgs become a social critique of Western society. In a very direct way, they become an extension of the social sciences. Haraway uses the class arguments of Marxism and connects it to the isolated human condition. This is contrasted to a post modern society where the collective and citizenship is celebrated. I tend to think of science fiction literature as being very far removed from “the real world.” The Cyborg Manifesto takes the concept of a utopian society and molds it to become Haraway’s social criticisms. The way in which she speaks of the evolution into the Cyborg society makes the concept more real.
Haraway further distinguishes the Cyborg role in the world by making the viewer understand the Cyborg in a post modern feminist world. In this social order gender is supposedly erased; however it is clear that the female is celebrated. How can a society that rejects the paternal and only observes the imagination and the maternal be considered genderless? One very crucial way that the Cyborg myth contributes to feminism is in how it redefines sexuality. In emphasizing replication rather then reproduction, Haraway makes it impossible to create any negative connotations about female sexuality that is prevalent western culture. Her definition takes away the possibility of rape because Cyborg replication is no longer about power or enjoyment; it exists to increase the population. The Cyborg is not exploited because they are all treated as if they have a higher power. It is important to note that I do not feel that this makes gender without distinctions; it merely takes away the power of the masculine influence. Haraway forces the reader to accept that sexuality in a post modern society can be reduced to science. Even though she clearly supports the matriarch, however I feel as though she also takes away a significant piece of womanhood. Being able to reproduce is an attribute that makes women a more valued gender. By allowing science to have a role in creation, seems to trivialize womanhood. I do not believe that gender equality is the question in Cyborg sexuality; rather it is about being able to define who we are in a non sexualized identity.
October 31st, 2008 at 10:51 pm
This is in response to the group question 2c:
“How would you define memories? Olimpia can play the harpsichord, sing, and dance. Rachael remembers events from her childhood, but the Tyrell Corporation implanted those memories. Are these memories? If so, are they the same as human memories?”
Memories are data stored at the time the event occurred, and networked to other information. They may be accessed infrequently or never, they may be imperfectly recorded, they may record something that never happened. It is possible to have memories of dreams. Memories don’t pertain only to events, but to words, symbols, ideas, thoughts… Memory is integral to learning, to progress, to efficiency. There is short-term and long-term memory; the latter involves more neural connections.
The abilities of Olimipia could be thought of as a sort of limited memory, what would be required to run relatively simple programs. There is not likely to be a large amount of memory built into her for growth, since she never gets past “Ach!” vocally…
As concerns Rachael, her memories seem more complex, more like human memories. But it is hard to know for sure. There are some things I would question- Since Rachael has not had the same length of time in existence (I am assuming she was created, like the other Replicants, as an adult), the amount of neuronal connections, and the strength and stability may not be that of a human adult. And the other sensory tie-ins may be lacking- for example, scent can be a strong factor in recollection. But I wonder if this effect would be realized in Rachael. Then again, if Tyrell can implant something as seemingly tenuous and imprecise as memories, who is to say they can’t do it exceedingly well. And if that is the case, then it is likely they would be indistinguishable from human memories.