Discursive and dialogic interfaces, panoptic power and “penetrative technologies” in Denis Villeneuve’s “Blade Runner 2049”

Abstract

Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) is a culture text that, in many scenes, creatively uses visualisations of futuristic machine interfaces designed to scan and penetrate realms inaccessible to humans. Many of these devices can be interpreted from the perspective of Vilém Flusser’s research on discursive and dialogic technologies. The former, according to the philosopher, serve to enslave individuals, while the latter as emancipatory gestures. The universe presented in Villeneuve’s film has the characteristics of a panoptic dystopia, in which knowledge is an element of strengthening corporate and state power. The discursive technologies associated with panoptic power, and their interfaces and functionaries, are here vested with the mission of finding and archiving data lost in a catastrophic incident to reinforce the oppressive order. The agent of telemetric upheaval, on the other hand, is the main character – the posthuman, who turns out by the end of the plot to be the personification of the idea of a dialogical interface – which can serve the homo sapiens with his cognitive abilities to discover inaccessible truths, enabling them to find a symbiotic way of humanity’s existence with its technological creations and opening up to the Other.