Intermission: Quis Ut Deus, K?
"Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell. "More human than human" is our motto."
This essay is part of an ongoing series by The Nostomodern Review on Modernism and its future in the 21st Century and beyond. Each essay forms parts of the Nostomodernist project: a quasi-scholarly attempt at reevaluating what it means to be Modern in contemporary times, to possibly reconcile the gap between Modernism and its successors, and to speculate on new trajectories within the current era of history.
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“We're not computers, Sebastian, we're physical.”
Bladerunning is not difficult to understand. To say that replicants are androids is to create an unnecessary distinction between replicants and humans themselves, for if the only difference is their origin and not their nature, then who is to say who is only human?
Indeed, the popular philosophical import of the Blade Runner films is to ask what makes a human being human. For the real humans, the Replicants are simply a build-on-demand labour force for its off-world colonies. While they are wholly organic, albeit with modified traits and physiologies, they are said to be indistinguishably human, and that only their inexperience with life is what separates them from real human beings. To prevent these Replicants from becoming fully human, a maximum lifespan of four years is applied to all Nexus-6 models, so as to ensure that no Replicant finally gains empathic abilities, whose lack thereof would otherwise reveal a Replicant as being one.
But if this is the only prerequisite for Replicants to become indistinguishable from human beings—namely, that they only require the passage of time, and thus life, to learn how to become human—then what exactly is the philosophical issue in the films? The Replicants are obviously human; they would become so otherwise, given enough time. We might then conclude that the distinction between Replicants and Humans is simply to keep Replicants as a disposable and specialised workforce for tasks unsafe for humans to do. For other intents and purposes, these artificial beings are human or at least, have the potential to become so.
“You're watching a stage play—a banquet is in progress. The guests are enjoying an appetizer of raw oysters. The entree consists of boiled dog.”
Look at the opening title crawl of Blade Runner 2049: “Replicants are bioengineered humans, designed by Tyrell Corporation for use off-world. Their enhanced strength made them ideal slave labor. After a series of violent rebellions, their manufacture became prohibited and Tyrell Corp went bankrupt. The collapse of ecosystems in the mid 2020s led to the rise of industrialist Niander Wallace, whose mastery of synthetic farming averted famine. Wallace acquired the remains of Tyrell Corp and created a new line of replicants who obey. Many older model replicants—NEXUS 8s with open-ended lifespans—survived.”
The use of the terms “model”, “manufacture”, and “NEXUS 8s” are misleading. These terms are not evidence of mechanical Replicants, but evidence to a process of Otherisation over another class of human beings; ones, who in spite of their origins, are fully capable of the gamut of human emotions, thoughts and instincts to survive. In characterising them with mechanical language and intent, the identity of the Replicants are subsumed by their artificiality, such that their nature of origin is enough to wayside their reality as human subjects.
Irrespective of their modification, all Replicants are biologically human; we see in both films that Replicants are made of flesh and blood. There is no circuitry involved in the body of the Replicants themselves; despite their accelerated ageing, biological sterility, as well as physical and psychological attunements. They are human in everything but name. As said before, bladerunning is not difficult to understand. Bladerunning is the preservation of power; even Niander Wallace admits this is so: Replicants are the new slaves. Is it any wonder that they rebel?
A primary concern for both movies is whether or not free will exists, what is considered human and not, and the limits for either. But given that we know that Replicants are functionally human beings, and that with enough time, as with the cases of K and Roy Batty, are likely to become fully human with regards to their emotions and agency, this concern is deflated. When Replicants are already human beings, it becomes less controversial to simply admit they do have free will, albeit manipulated to a degree.
The more interesting question is whether or not artificial intelligences can be human, and this is an undeveloped question in Blade Runner 2049. While the question of whether Replicants are human or not is a weak non-issue, the question of whether an intelligence like JOI can be considered human is another. JOI is advertised as being a companion intelligence, meant to accompany their human owners and to provide human-like companionship under the motto “Everything you want to hear. Everything you want to see.”
We come to suspect that her encouragement in K’s thoughts—namely, that he is indeed the miracle child of two Replicants—is merely part of her programming; or rather, that she is merely fulfilling her designated role in bringing his inner desires to surface. And when she picks out a name for him, she chooses Joe for no other reason than Joe being a default name she is programmed to call everyone else. The uniqueness is gone; there is only an imitation of human life. These are the real Replicants, because you must genuinely ask yourself what constitutes something as human, especially if it has no human body, but otherwise acts like one.
“We need more Replicants than can ever be assembled. Millions, so we can be trillions more. We could storm Eden and retake her.”
In Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981), he writes that “to dissimulate is to pretend not to have what one has. To simulate is to feign to have what one doesn't have. One implies a presence, the other an absence. But it is more complicated than that because simulating is not pretending: "Whoever fakes an illness can simply stay in bed and make everyone believe he is ill. Whoever simulates an illness produces in himself some of the symptoms". Therefore, pretending, or dissimulating, leaves the principle of reality intact: the difference is always clear, it is simply masked, whereas simulation threatens the difference between the "true" and the "false," the "real" and the "imaginary."”
For the Blade Runner films, there is no faking of a human being; there is only its simulation. But if we read Baudrillard correctly, then to even simulate a human being is to be human yourself. To adapt their example, the Replicants are not pretending to be human when they really share no attributes to actual humans; in fact, they are humans themselves because they simulate and thus experience everything it means to be human otherwise.
The profound reality is that Replicants are the same as human beings—engineered, yes—but fully capable of being human and equipped with everything to be human. Hence, the real philosophical issue is not to ask whether Replicants are human, but instead why are Replicants not allowed to be human in the first place. Lest we suspect that the Blade Runner films are not dystopian visions of human becoming or unbecoming, but that they are instead dystopian visions of a future revival of slavery, despite what even Ridley Scott might say.
The trouble with the God Complex of Niander Wallace is not because he is blurring the lines between humans and non-humans—it is not even an argument between what is human and what is machine. It is that he is willing to subject millions of human beings to slavery under the cause of progress, and creating distance from this atrocity by representing Replicants as an artificial Other, with the plain nature of the artifice being as inconsequential as cloning a human being with minor genetic tweaks. Indeed this is what they are: clones with selected genetic traits and tweaks. They are not cyborgs with mechanical eyes and hydraulic limbs; their improvements are physical insofar as they are bioengineered with flesh and not pre-engineered with steel.
The forthcoming rebellion at the end of Blade Runner 2049 is a human revolution and nothing else.
“Recite your baseline.”
As Baudrillard summarises, “The simulacrum is never what hides the truth — it is truth that hides the fact that there is none. The simulacrum is true.” The simulacrum of the Blade Runner films is not the nature of the Replicants, but their treatment as inhuman beings. The simulacrum is their enslavement, having been borne into enslavement, and being killed by agents of the slavers, out of fear for them wanting their freedom. This simulacrum is their reality.
Stage One: Replicants are cloned in the image of human beings; “it is the reflection of a basic reality.”
Stage Two: Replicants are construed as being the Other; “it masks and perverts a basic reality.”
Stage Three: Replicants are made, and thus limited, by the task of serving human beings; “it masks the absence of a basic reality”.
Stage Four: Replicants are not human beings altogether; “it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum”.
But who maintains the simulacrum? Once again, Bladerunning is not difficult to understand. The Blade Runner films are dystopian for more reasons beyond the origin and status of the Replicants; it is instead the fact that these Replicants, or new humans, are the result of a deliberate and continuous simulacrum: the birth of new life and its enslavement under technological biopower, sustained in all likelihood by the vested interests of the future, techno-industrial state and promulgated by the actions and beliefs of both natural-born and artificial-born humans themselves. The Replicants are human; their rebellion was never in question of being unjust.
“Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.”
Less than citizen, less than human, and yet more than human too; to be Replicant is to sit outside of any human social hierarchy, and to be denied rights based on the nature of one’s birth. Is this not reminiscent of antiquated codes of slavery? Replicants are human beings; in the year 2049, any humanistic concerns have been deflected under the success of the simulacrum.
Hence, the traumatic question of Blade Runner 2049 is not whether Replicants are real, nor whether the birth of a human child by Replicant parents is enough evidence to suggest a human condition, but instead why this distinction of human-replicant, or master-slave, was accepted in the first place. When the NEXUS-8 models rebelled, the question was not whether the slaves had sufficient or just reasons to rebel, and hence whether or not the system ought to be changed, but that they rebelled and thus threatened the simulacrum itself.
As Frederick Douglass once articulated in 1850 lecture on slavery, “The first work of slavery is to mar and deface those characteristics of its victims which distinguish men from things, and persons from property. Its first aim is to destroy all sense of high moral and religious responsibility. It reduces man to a mere machine. It cuts him off from his Maker, it hides from him the laws of God, and leaves him to grope his way from time to eternity in the dark, under the arbitrary and despotic control of a frail, depraved, and sinful fellow-man. […] It is, then, the first business of the enslaver of men to blunt, deaden, and destroy the central principle of human responsibility. Conscience is, to the individual soul, and to society, what the law of gravitation is to the universe. It holds society together; it is the basis of all trust and confidence; it is the pillar of all moral rectitude.”
Dissimulate conscience; resimulate conscience; stimulate positive feedback loops; maintain the simulacrum. Slavery, as Douglass wrote in 1860, “flourishes best where it meets no reproving frowns, and hears no condemning voices.” The tragedy of being Replicant is not the circumstance of their birth; it is the circumstance of their life. The philosophical dilemma of Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049 is hence not the blurring of biological lines but instead moral ones on the issues of slavery and not humanity.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2021. All rights reserved.