Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

1
Philip K. Dick- Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sheep?

• And so Art is dead, not only because its
  critical transcendence is gone, but because
  reality itself, entirely impregnated by an
  aesthetic which is inseparable from its own
  structure, has been confused with its own image.
  Reality no longer has the time to take on the
  appearance of reality. It no longer even
  surpasses fiction it captures every dream even
  before it takes on the appearance of a dream.
  Jean Baudrillard

2
Philip K. Dick

• Our environment, and I mean our man-made world
  of machines, artificial constructs, computers,
  electronic systems, interlinking homeostatic
  components-all of this is in fact beginning more
  and more to possess what the earnest
  psychologists fear the primitive sees in his
  environment animation. In a very real sense
  our environment is becoming alive, or at least
  quasi-alive, and in ways specifically and
  fundamentally analogous to ourselves.

3
Postmodern Critique

• Both film and text can be read as different types
  of postmodern critique.
• Understanding Postmodernism- Post 1984
• Proliferation of mass media
• Computer revolution

4
What is Modernism?

• Refers to the changes wrought by the
  technological effects of industrialization.
• Technology- internal combustion engine, steam
  turbine, telephone, tape machine, synthetics
• Mass Media/Entertainment- advertising, mass
  circulation newspapers, radios, movies
• Science- Genetics, Freud (psychoanalysis),
  Rutherfords model of the atom, Plancks quantum
  theory, Einsteins Special and General theories
  of Relativity

5
The End of Original Art?

• Walter Benjamin argued that the aura of art (the
  fetish of sacred uniqueness) is eliminated by
  mass production.
• This has a disintegrating effect on originality
  itself.

6
The Example of Walter Benjamin

• Benjamin argues that the shift to the mechanical
  production of art undermines its revolutionary
  potential.
• Benjamin theorizes that the changes in perception
  and how we perceive reflects social
  transformations.
• To an ever greater degree the work of art
  reproduced becomes the work of art designed for
  reproducibility.

7
The Android as the End of the Original

• In what way is the end of the original
  portrayed in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

8
The Shift to the Postmodern

• Shift from Industrial to Post-industrial
  Production- the Service Sector Economy
• From Producers to Consumers
• Increasing globalization (world interdependence)

9
Postmodernism

• Has three key items on the agenda
• 1) Reproducibility
• 2) A Consumerist Aura
• 3) Legitimation

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Reproducibility

• Everything is reproducible
• Reproducibility increases the value of the real.

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Consumerist Aura

• Extends to anything that has nostalgia value.
• Image Consumerism- the reproduced is taking the
  place of the real, or replacing it as
  hyper-reality. The reproduced is taking the
  place of reality or replacing it as
  hyper-reality.
• We are living what has already been lived and
  reproduced with no reality anymore but that of
  the cannibalized image.

12
Legitimation

• Whose power will legitimate what is done, and
  the right way of doing it.
• Why are some things in? Why are some things art?
• The Role of the Critic in the process of
  legitimation.
• The irony of postmodernist anti-art as becoming
  legitimated as prized and highly priced
  commodities.

13
Mass Consumption

• Baudrillard provides a critical account of the
  emergence and effect of mass consumption.
• Modernization leads to mass consumption.
• Baudrillard argues Marxs theories have stalled.
• Consumption, not production, is the basis of the
  social order.

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Jean Baudrillard- The Simulacrum

• Postmodernism as the end of theory.
• The border between art and reality has utterly
  vanished as both have collapsed into the
  universal simulacrum.
• The simulcrum is arrived at when the distinction
  between representation and reality- between signs
  and what they refer to in the real world breaks
  down.

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Simulations

• Reality no longer emits signs with guarantee its
  existence.
• Sings now construct the real as simulations.
• It is no longer relevant to say the real world
  exists. No system of representation or
  analysis can refer to the reality.

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Hyper-conformity as Resistance- Baudrillard and
the Masses

• -loss of meaning in media driven world, any
  referent can be attached to any object.
• -the false dichotomy of poles- You can be sure
  that the circularity is total the ones
  questioned always pretend to be as the question
  imagine and solicits them to be.
• - We come then upon a strange paradox the world
  of the polled, the analyzed, the natives, is
  irredmediably short circuited and lost
• -by hyper conforming to the image of the mass,
  the mass becomes meaningless, easily swayed in
  any direction, but it is impossible to direct and
  predict the behavior.

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Understanding Simulations and Culture

• Culture is no longer a living body, the
  presence of a collectivity (religion, feasts,
  storytelling) producing signs.
• Now signs produce cultures.
• Culture is described by the dynamics of
  consumption-fashion cycles, ambience, codes. No
  aspect of culture escapes this.
• The main example of this is cultural recycling
  ephemeral signs of past culture which are
  produced as simulations.

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• - Free choice of individuals leads to the
  opposite effect- oligopoly. Vote becomes
  functionally obligatory
• -vote becomes as if everyone voted by chance. It
  makes no difference at all what the parties in
  power are expressing historically and socially.
  It is necessary even that they represent nothing,
  the fascination of the game, the polls, the
  formal and statistical compulsion of the game is
  all the greater.
• -simulation of opposition between two parties,
  absorption of their respective objectives,
  reversibility of their respective objectives,
  reversibility of the entire discourse one into
  the other.

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• -Monopoly of power already exists, it needs
  binary regulation if it wishes to survive.
• -power is absolute only if it is capable of
  diffraction into various equivalents, if it knows
  hot to take off so as to put more on. Ie.
  illusion of choice
• -the fact that there are two of them signifies
  the end of all competition, the end of original
  reference. (Baudrillard on the World Trade
  Center)
• -For the sign to be pure, it has to duplicate
  itself it is the duplication of the sign which
  destroys its meaning.

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Hyper-Reality

• Reality becomes redundant and we have reached
  hyper-reality.
• Images breed incestuously with each other without
  reference to reality or meaning.

21
The Nullification of Reality

• -For the sign to be pure, it has to duplicate
  itself it is the duplication of the sign which
  destroys its meaning.
• And so Art is dead, not only because its
  critical transcendence is gone, but because
  reality itself, entirely impregnated by an
  aesthetic which is inseparable from its own
  structure, has been confused with its own image.
  Reality no longer has the time to take on the
  appearance of reality. It no longer even
  surpasses fiction it captures every dream even
  before it takes on the appearance of a dream.

22
Baudrillard and Dick on Television

• There is no need to imagine television as a
  state periscope spying on everyones private
  life-the situation as it stands is more efficient
  than that it is the certainty that people are
  no longer speaking to each other , and they are
  definitively isolated in the face of a speech
  without response.
• Is Buster Friendly an Android?
• What is the role of television?
• What is Dicks critique of television?

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• Mercer isnt a fake, he said. Unless reality
  is a fake.
• How do you interpret this statement?

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So what of the self?

• In the postmodern world, then what defines
  humanity?
• How are these things debated and questioned?
• Classic horror style- How is the android like
  Shelleys Frankenstein? (Despising the creator
  for how he/she is made). How is the
  monster/android a mirror of the self?

25
Dehumanization

• Is the postmodern world dehumanizing?
• How do Deckard and Iran connect to humanity?
• In what ways is this dehumanization
  critiqued/exposed in the work?

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Questions for Discussion

• 1) What is Mercerism? Is it real?
• 2) What are the characteristics of the
  Post-Nuclear world?
• 3) What is flattening of affect? Expand on
  this idea and discuss as a critique.
• 4) What is the difference between androids and
  humans?
• 5) What do Edvard Munchs The Scream and Puberty
  represent?
• 6) What does the title mean to you?
• 7) What do animals represent in the work?