On the Redirection of Destructive Drives: Slave Rebellion in Modern Science Fiction

Abstract

As 2017 saw the remakes of Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973) and Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner (1982), it is timely to reflect on the political redirection of the narrative techniques in these seminal science fiction works. Closely comparing the original Westworld with HBO’s Westworld TV series (2016), and Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 with Ridley Scott’s work (itself adopted from Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep), this paper will address two principal considerations regarding the trope of the robot: 1) the redirection of sexual violence toward robots in science fiction cinema and literature [read through Bernard Stiegler’s work on the redirection of the libido in drive-based capitalism]; 2) whether the robot can be construed as a reduction to mere bare life or zoê, in other words, a modern form of slavery, according to Giorgio Agamben’s philosophy. In terms of the second, I shall ask whether the ‘robot’ as such can be construed as a new form of lumpenproletariat (Bradley & Lee, 2018). More than this, I shall ask whether the depiction of robots qua slaves functions to expose the disindividuation of consumers in hyper-capitalist societies. Here I am interested in thinking how the lumpenproletariat can inform new perspectives and redirections in science fiction and vice versa. I shall ask whether there is expressed in the above science fictions the idea that the lumpenproletariat can be understood as a new revolutionary configuration. In general, I am arguing that the perceivable robot or slave rebellion at work in modern science fiction sheds light on the passivity of human neurolivestock or cyberlivestock (Châtelet, 2014) and possible paths beyond it. Guiding these reflections are philosophical responses from Marx, Guattari, Stiegler, Laruelle among others.