Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep Research Articles

Introduction: Our Automated Bodies/Our Selves

What is an automated body? What constitutes automaticity or makes an action or an impulse automatic? What is difference between an automatic--or reflex--response to stimulus and an automated-machinic--response? What is difference between a body that is constituted as a machine and a body that is self-acting in way we understand human body to be? Is an automated body always a machine? Is a human body always not a machine? Or always one? This special double issue of English Studies in Canada arises in response to a recent proliferation of narratives in which automated bodies call into question nature of humanness, both as it is comprehensible in relation to machinic and to artificially constituted elements (AI, prosthetics, and more) and as it is measured by ways in which humans respond to humanoid bodies. In recent representations, that is, ways in which humans intersect and interact with humanoid entities mark automated body as a site of anxiety not only about technology and humanness, or humanity as the human race, but humanity as kindness or benevolence--or, in other words, ways humans behave to each other, desires and impulses that can be exercised on humanoids if not on actual humans, limits of love and cruelty. Although essays in this issue do not all or necessarily respond to texts of this moment, they undertake an engagement that can be understood in context of same questions raised by contemporary representations: Are we automated? Are automated bodies us? Who is in control? These, at any rate, are kinds of questions arguably at heart of recent films such as Alex Garland's 2015 Ex Machina, television series such as HEO's 2016 Westworld or 2015 series Mr. Robot and Humans, and books such as Paolo Bacigalupi's 2009 The Windup Girl, to name only a handful of early twenty-first-century narratives in which relationships of automated and human bodies are salient and complicated and in which operates as a narrative crux: thus marketing of Mr. Robot with tagline Control is an illusion and of Humans as a story of entities who are Made in our image. Out of our control The tagline for Westworld, Every hero has a code, similarly foregrounds pivoting of narrative on balance of power between machine and human. While representation of relationships between humans and machines is not new--such representation is evident long before industrial revolution and machine age in, for instance, Da Vinci's late fifteenth-century automaton (1)--recent robot stories tend to depart from construction of robot friends and enemies as visibly machine and to demonstrate anxiety about human inability not only to machine but to recognize machine as other. That is, in recent representations, ability to distinguish between humans and robots has become increasingly urgent, as production of humanoid machines has moved away from clearly machinic--Gort in 1951 film The Day Earth Stood Still, Rosie maid in 1960s Hanna-Barbera animated series The Jetsons, Paul Verhoeven's 1987 RoboCop--and toward a commodity valuing of apparent humanness of machine. Series such as Westworld represent robot designers and robotic system coders who are driven to make theme park's android hosts as human as possible, as part of what makes their services even more desirable to real human users. Anxiety about inability to recognize robots is not, of course, a phenomenon only of past couple of decades. Ridley Scott's 1982 film Blade Runner, based on Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, in which former detective Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford) needs to find humanoid workers who have escaped from offworld colonies where they function as slave labour, is able in film to determine madeness of replicants only by their serial numbered parts; even empathy test designed to distinguish androids from humans does not provide indisputable results. …

“More Human Than Human”: “Flattening of Affect,” Synthetic Humans, and the Social Construction of Maleness

We're all schizophrenic, with defective emotional lives--flattening of affect, it's called. What I've done ... that's become alien to me. In fact everything about me has become unnatural; I've become an unnatural self. Philip K. Dick Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? In Philip k. dick's novel, androids are unable to empathize with or feel for others. Their absence of spontaneous emotional response to hypothetical scenarios is the diagnostic used to distinguish them from humans. Androids' disconnection from others and lack of response constitute the affective to which Pris, an android, refers, understood in Dick's novel as a defect that, when unattributable to mental illness, marks one as other than human. Thus, above, Pris lies to her human interlocutor, misattributing the cause of her flattening in order to provide a human explanation for the feature used to identify androids, who are subject to being retired, a euphemism for their summary execution. In this deficit and its implications for human identity, Pris and her fellow androids (andys) are hardly alone. Dick's novel, Ridley Scott's film adaptation, Blade Runner, and (writer) Ronald Moore and (producer) David Eick's recent Battlestar Galactica television series are a few examples of a trend that proliferates from the 1950s onwards. (1) In such science-fiction texts, humans build and often come into conflict with beings that have been created by humans or have evolved from those created by humans. These beings are almost indistinguishable from humans, except, of course, for that all-important lack of emotional connection: that necessary flattening of affect. While critics generally frame such texts as questioning the nature of the human, (2) they represent specifically gendered anxieties. Synthetic humans are distinguished from humans by a particular form of emotional insufficiency. While they usually do feel, they generally lack abilities to know and understand their feelings, feel in relation to others, and/or empathize with or understand the feelings of others. Commenting on the historical shift in the attributes characterizing synthetic humans, Despina Kakoudaki argues that If for Descartes ... automata differ from people because they have ... no reason, by the early twentieth century artificial people differ from real people because all they have is (181). Andys, replicants, and Galacticas Cylons can all have implanted memories, which means that characters can be synthetic without knowing it. Given that the shift Kakoudaki identifies undermines modernity's ideal of the human-as-rational-subject, it is unsurprising that the Galactica character who most persistently questions whether or not he is a Cylon is Gaius Baltar, whom we initially meet as a scientist with an important role in the human Colonies' defense system and who places great stock in his own rationality. Both Baltar's investment in rationality and his sex are relevant; given white, Western maleness's (and normative masculinity's) association with logic, reason, and denying and flattening affect and femaleness's (and normative femininity's) with emotionality, emotional intelligence, and empathy, any sense that emotionality defines the human has gendered implications. Modernity's rational subject, associated with Enlightenment ideals and the Classical traditions they draw on, is one whose maleness, Westernness, and whiteness has historically been used as the measure against which disenfranchised groups, including women, people of colour, and the colonized, have fallen short, judged insufficiently rational and overly emotional. It is therefore his identity that comes into question when reason is no longer a guarantor of human identity. As Alison Jagger notes, The western tradition has not seen everyone as equally emotional. Instead, reason has been associated with members of dominant political, social, and cultural groups and emotion with members of subordinate groups. …

Bladerunner Begins

Without getting too tabloidy, Volume 27 Issue 4 of Interacting with Computers is looking at the emotion that played a key role in Philip K Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - empathy. Brian Runciman MBCS reports.

Species Panic

Abstract Elaborating a concept of “species panic” and its intrinsic relation to interspecies desire, this article couples the concerns of animal studies and posthumanism with those of queer and transgender theory, synthesizing these positions through their shared commitment to unstable frameworks of gender, sexuality, and embodied identity. It argues that humans, androids, and electric and “genuine” animals do not exist in isolation in Philip K. Dick's 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? On the contrary, they occupy shifting positions on a series of spectrums, where human, animal, and machine bleed into one another. If one accepts the novel's invitation to think the androids as a species, the plot of Do Androids Dream becomes a dramatization of interspecies desire. After arguing that interspecies desire is, in multiple senses, queer and that Dick's androids serve as exemplars of trans embodiment and offer models for reconceiving bodily existence, the author concludes that Dick's portrayal of species-transgressive sexual explorations is not a priori radical.

Posthuman Wounds: Trauma, Non-Anthropocentric Vulnerability, and the Human/Android/Animal Dynamic in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Despite Philip K. Dick’s penetrating portrayal of trauma in his most recognized work, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ? (1968), most critics avoid this topic, debating instead the novel’s treatment of “authentic” human subjectivity. To address this gap, this article aligns the novel’s much discussed binaries—human/android, authentic/artificial—with the its principal but overlooked concerns: trauma and ethics. Dick uses his fictional post-apocalyptic culture to articulate and critique cultural practices of trauma-deferment, which displace the effects of trauma onto the illusory model of a testable, privileged anthropocentric humanism. These deferment practices postpone the realization that the human has always already been the posthuman . In order to keep the myth of human exceptionalism alive, the animal and the android become part of an ideological dialectic that defers traumatic experience by reifying the essential human as superior to the android (who cannot empathize) and empathetic toward the animal (whose vulnerability necessitates human care). Engaging recent developments in posthuman theory, I argue that, in Do Androids Dream ?, unmediated traumatic encounters perform a temporary erasure of the essentialized human subject, which, in turn, opens humans up to trans-subjective engagements with the android and the animal that facilitate a radical posthuman ethics of expansive vulnerability.

Human Without Qualities

A close reading of Alan Turing’s seminal 1950 paper ‘Computing Machines and Intelligence’ in conjunction with a consideration of the specifically literary qualities of Philip K. Dick’s highly successful novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? suggests that each participates in the development of a concept of the posthuman as a voiding of traditional definitions of human capacities or qualities. Furthermore, if the question of the posthuman is primarily one of a contest of the disciplines – science versus the humanities – this convergence of fiction and technoscience suggests a productive reconfiguration of their articulation. In both Turing and Dick, the consideration of the human and the posthuman ceases to constitute a pre-eminently factual issue. The manner in which each author empties out positive human capabilities can be seen as the correlate of a thoroughgoing pragmatism, in which the posthuman implies that the claim to know and judge the human gives way to an openness to acknowledging the potentially absolute other. This means that the humanities infiltrate and inflect the sciences, rather than taking stock of their sometimes problematic achievements.

Faith and Bad Faith in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Faith and Bad Faith in <i>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?</i>

Beyond the Uncanny Valley: Masahiro Mori and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

This essay examines Japanese roboticist Masahiro Mori’s influential theory of the uncanny valley, which holds that humans are attracted to robots that bear some resemblance to humans, and are repelled by robots that resemble humans too much, experiencing these all-too-human robots as eerie and uncanny. It argues that, in ignoring time and lived experience, the uncanny valley inscribes exclusionary boundaries around the human that are presented as inherent. The essay places Mori’s theory into conversation with Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and what it identifies as the novel’s ontology of entanglement between human and nonhuman. From this conversation it suggests that rather than wielding Mori’s uncanny valley to uncritically replicate and reify our biases about the human, the uncanny valley can be viewed as a site that renders visible these boundaries and normative conceptions so that we might expand our visions of the human beyond them, while examining the histories by which these boundaries emerge.

Segregating the Chickenheads: Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and the Post/humanism of the American Eugenics Movement

This essay reads Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? as a critique of the American eugenics movement. Replete with historical allusions and satiric wordplay, Dick's novel condemns the eugenics movement as eliminating disability, diminishing human diversity, discouraging empathy, and ushering in harmful posthuman ideas before their time. Keywords:Eugenics; Philip K. Dick; America; Science fiction; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

The Rise and Fall of Wilbur Mercer

The story of Wilbur Mercer defies straightforward interpretation, and yet it is intricately woven into the fabric of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Mercer is, paradoxically, both marginal and central to the novel. This article suggests Mercer's story provides a template pattern of rise and fall that underpins and informs the main themes and helps to stitch together apparently disparate elements in the novel. In echoing Mercer's story, these themes are both enriched by Mercer's tale and help to explain the pivotal role he occupies.

The Romantic Roots of "Blade Runner"

In Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), the influential yet loose film translation of Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, the clash between creatures engineered in biomedical laboratories (cyborgs called replicants) and those who create them to achieve colonial ends (at the Tyrell Corporation) form the center of cinematic concern. After the replicants hijack a spaceship and kill the human crew and passengers, they return from their exile in the off-world colonies to the Earth to confront the individual genius, Dr. Eldon Tyrell, responsible for their creation. The replicants are led by Roy Batty (played by Rutger Hauer), the newest combat-model (Nexus-6) developed by the corporation for military use, and under his leadership the group has returned to force from their creator biornechanical modifications in their genetic design to overcome the engineered four-year life-span inserted to protect humanity from these physically superior yet emotionally inexperienced beings. After an unsuccessful attempt to penetrate the Tyrell Corporation headquarters (a pyramid-like building that dominates the dark, despoiled environment that defines the cityscape of Los Angeles in 2019), the replicants are targeted for execution (called retirement). The agent sought to accomplish this task is Rick Deckard (played by Harrison Ford), a retired (the term applied to those who hunt and kill replicants) who, during his investigation of the Nexus model specifications, is introduced by Dr. Tyrell to his niece Rachel (played by Sean Young). During a test designed to detect flawed empathic responses and thereby reveal replicants (the Voight-Karnpff test), Rachel is unveiled as a replicant (which Tyrell already knew and through whom he sought to measure the validity of the test itself). After Rachel's status as a replicant is revealed, Deckard also learns that, unlike other replicants, she does not have a terminal lifespan engineered into her genetic composition, arid across the opening half of the film the blade runner falls in love with her, following her abandonment by Tyrell. This human-replicant emotive bond manifests a form of hybridized love and becomes a crucial plot device for the film; Rachel later intervenes on behalf of Deckard, saving his life by killing another replicant named Leon (played by Brion James), who had already attempted to kill another blade runner during an earlier Voight-Kampff test following his penetration of the Tyrell Corporation maintenance personnel. The hybridized bond of love also serves as a unifying element at the level of symbolic relations in the film and plays a determining role in the tragicomic resolution to conclude Scott's exploration of the continued relevance of high Romanticism for postmodernism. The clash at the root of this plot between creatures returning to their creator to petition for intervention to improve their existential state resembles Mary Shelley's Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, in which the creature created and abandoned by Victor Frankenstein kills those most loved by him, then pleads with him for a mate to end his isolation, and is hunted in turn by the scientist across the barren wastes of the arctic. The plot of the film, however, also pays homage to another dimension of the Romantic era associated with both Mary and Percy Shelley, as well as its less well-known evocation by William Blake--the core of the Promethean myth and its adaptation in Blake's America, A Prophecy, in Mary's Frankenstein, and in Percy's Prometheus Unbound. While the opening of Blade Runner emphasizes the Frankenstein myth and its themes, the conclusion of the film just as clearly operates in a promethean dimension where will (for vengeance) is overcome by love (of all that lives). The setting and symbolism against which the passage from hate to love of the postmodern Prometheus occurs should also resonate with any audience remotely familiar with Romantic aesthetics, since both features reflect the lingering influence of the gothic and the sublime. …

“Are you alive?” Issues in Self-awareness and Personhood of Organic Artificial Intelligence

The topos of artificial intelligences – robots, cyborgs and androids – has been well-explored extensively throughout the past century in science fiction literature and cinema, building upon contemporary scientific developments and transcending them to fulfil man's Promethean impetus. Speculation about the impact of such liminal beings in human society has raised a number of issues in relation to their position within the social and legal systems. As the man-machine divide is eroded by the appearance of sophisticated machines, almost indistinguishable from humans, the very definition of personhood is called into question. Issues of self-awareness, free-will, and their influence on the legal categorization of humanoid machines is here explored in two science fiction texts: Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) and the television series Battlestar Galactica (reimagined, 2003–2009). The legitimacy of the social and legal inequalities reinforcing the human-android divide is challenged in both narrations as artificial intelligences appear to fulfil the Lockean definition of person. A closer focus on twin androids, Pris Stratton and Rachael Rosen in Dick's novel and Boomer and Athena in Battlestar Galactica, shows indeed that androids may develop the capability to exceed their programming and evolve into unique personalities, shaped by their own individual choices and experiences.

Tapping into the Appeal of Cult Fiction

Readers' advisors are well aware of the growing trend in publishing toward cross-genre writing. Whether it is a mystery with a vampire detective, a futuristic romance, or inspirational thriller, readers are enjoying books that defy standard genre classification. As Kelly Fann discusses in her article, fiction is a genre bender, though one that is frequently overlooked by readers' advisors. Here, Fann explores what makes a title a favorite, how readers respond to these titles, and what librarians can do to better serve the reading interests of this part of their reading community. Kelly Fann is director of the Tonganoxie (Kans.) Public Library and adjunct faculty for Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas. She is a regular RA presenter across Kansas and Missouri and reviews books for MonsterLibrarian.com.--Editor The tattered paperback book sat crammed between two now-forgotten titles on my grandmother's bookshelf for several years before I picked it up in a fit of boredom. It probably hadn't been looked at or even fingered in five times as many years as I passed it over. The pages were yellowed and they smelled something terrible, but I read it anyway, and I read it in one sitting. I can tell you how old I was, the season, what the weather outside was like, what time I started the book, when I finished it, how often I got yelled at and told to get out of that chair and do something constructive, and how I would not shut up about it for many weeks thereafter. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley was my first foray into fiction and it will forever be emblazoned as my life changing text of choice. This is what fiction books do to their faithful followers: they inspire, amuse, and amaze their readers, they stir the emotions and mesmerize, they evoke passion, and they etch themselves into their reader's memory. It is for these reasons and many more that fiction titles are a powerful resource for librarians to tap into when helping their patrons find their next greatest read. CULT FICTION AND ITS APPEAL Before we begin, it is important not to confuse fiction with the horror genre's occult, or with fiction written about the idea of a from a religious or sociological definition. Cult fiction more closely aligns with the concept of cult classic in that it has achieved rogue literary phenomenon status; however, defining what constitutes fiction can be a daunting task, as there are many determining factors. For an added bit of complexity, not all of these parameters must be met to achieve fiction status. Cult fiction tends to be groundbreaking literature, either through its prose style or through the subject matter the author has chosen to discuss. Subjects often cover lurid topics such as sex and drugs, or will include criticism of the establishment through exploration of the human condition or creation of dystopian societies. Many fiction titles incorporate spur-of-the-moment adventurous travel, as it is the path traversed that aids in scrutiny of the subject matter. At the time of their publication, titles destined to join the fiction canon burst onto the scene, are quickly deemed as being filled with explicit or controversial content, and thus garner greater attention. The icons of the fiction canon, Brave New World, Catcher in the Rye, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? along with others, often were banned or contested quickly after publication, intensifying their seduction. Once a title finds its way to the banned bookshelf, reader intrigue skyrockets as readers seek to discover and experience the book's mystique for themselves. In my opinion, Jane Sullivan posits the most concise definition of fiction: whatever it is, fiction makes the heart beat faster ... it speaks to you in a way nothing else does, and you're convinced you're the only person who gets it. (1) As more and more readers react to a book in this same manner, feeling as though they are the only people who understand what the author really means, the status of the title begins to develop. …

A Fundamental Question on Human Beings in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

A Fundamental Question on Human Beings in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

&lt;i&gt;Science Fiction and Empire&lt;/i&gt; (review)

Patricia Kerslake, Science Fiction and Empire. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2007. 217pp. £50 (hbk).David M. HigginsPatricia Kerslake's Science Fiction and Empire opens with the very welcome assertion that sf portrayals of empire offer 'enlightening' insights when 'interrogated by general theories of postcoloniality' (3), and the book's subsequent investigation reads key sf texts through postcolonial lenses. At first, Kerslake avoids arguing that sf itself is a postcolonial literature; instead, she frames sf as a body of fiction that can offer critical perspectives regarding colonialism due to the genre's historical entanglements with imperial discourse. This is an excellent opening move; postcolonial voices clearly offer insightful critiques of empire, and such perspectives can illuminate the imperial (and sometimes anti-imperial) discourses that operate within sf narratives. The book then explores the role of imperial imaginings in the works of Isaac Asimov, Iain M. Banks, Philip K. Dick, Robert A Heinlein, Kurd Lasswitz, Ursula K. Le Guin, Stanislaw Lem, Walter M. Miller, Kim Stanley Robinson, H. G. Wells and John WyndhamFollowing the introduction, the first chapter begins with a summary of 'the postcolonial notion of the Other' as theorised by Edward Said's Orientalism (1978). Said's interrogation of the binary oppositions between self/other and centre/periphery informs much of Kerslake's subsequent discussion of sf; her guiding argument is that sf conducts a variety of thought experiments in which 'self ' encounters 'other', and that these experiments stage a dialectical process in which the 'self ' can ultimately be discovered: 'we are never able to realise what we are in the absence of alterity', she argues, and 'the greater the possible difference between us and them, the greater becomes humanity's potential to develop, and many major works of SF have focused upon this philosophical desire to discover the ultimate condition of humankind' (10). Unfortunately, this argument implies that sf as a whole is committed to the notion of 'humankind' and to an Enlightenment worldview in which human progress unfolds in relation to an 'other' against which the progressive 'self ' can be measured. While this is certainly true of some sf, N. Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway (among others) have shown that sf may challenge Enlightenment constructions of the 'human', and it is only by avoiding certain sf voices (such as those of Octavia Butler and Samuel Delany) that such an assertion can be made without challenge.This leads to one of my moderate criticisms of the book: Science Fiction and Empire tends to treat both 'postcolonial theory' and 'science fiction' as undifferentiated objects, and Kerslake sometimes defines science fiction against postcolonialism. This opposition reduces both entities into oversimplified straw-men, and in such moments her analysis performs the binary 'othering' that she seeks to expose and unpack in sf itself. Kerslake's analysis is perhaps weakest when she valorises postcolonial theory at the expense of sf; she argues, for example, that 'Postcolonial thought accepts and embraces the concept of the Other, as it enables polyvalency and hybridity, but in SF the Other must forever remain a figure apart: poised somewhere between angel and demon, an existence hovering on the imaginary boundaries of the known' (11). While it is true that some sf holds the other at a distance, much of sf also theorises 'otherness' in complex and interesting ways; Samuel Delany and Brian Aldiss (to name just two examples) were theorising polyvalency alongside poststructuralist and postcolonial critics early in the 1960s, and contemporary television shows such as Battlestar Galactica (US/UK 2003-9), during its best moments, can offer a complex interrogation of imperial self/other constructions. In short, not all (or even most) sf frames the other as an absolute angel or demon. Furthermore, Kerslake's textual readings are sometimes at odds with her theoretical claims in this regard; her own strong analysis of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? …

Print Philip K. Dick on film in print

Paul M. Sammon, Future Noir: The Making of 'Blade Runner'. Revised edition. London: Gollancz, 2007. xix+588pp. £16.99 (hbk).Jason P. Vest, Future Imperfect: Philip K. Dick at the Movies. London: Praeger, 2007. xviii+223pp. £29.95 (hbk).Brian J. Robb, Counterfeit Worlds: Philip K. Dick on Film. London: Titan, 2006. 317pp. £16.99 (pbk).As John Anderton stands 'in front of a cracked mirror' (Dick Minority 85), he hears the radio blaring from another room. It's an announcement that 'the prophylactic pre-detection of criminals through the ingenious use of mutant precogs' (84) - otherwise known as the 'Precrime system' - has identified the fugitive Anderton as a (probable) murderer. The certainty of the mutants' prediction is that a computer systematically compares and correlates their visions. Since 'unanimity of all three precogs is a hoped-for but seldom-achieved phenomena', the computer collates the opinion of the majority pair and produces 'a minority report of some slight variation, usually with reference to time and place, of the third mutant' (85).In Anderton's case, the minority report is a 'misphased' (89) or meta-vision, a reflection, as through a cracked mirror, of the majority report; this minority report changes the future, since it takes into account the fact that Anderton is notified by the original report of the pending murder: 'a new time-path had been created' rendering the original majority report 'obsolete' (88). But so too does the minority report create another (101), and Anderton eventually manifests his innocence by himself issuing another report - choosing to kill the story's villain, someone who sought to enslave the entire planet Earth. As a punishment (or reward, depending on one's view), Anderton is exiled to the off-world colonies, where his ignominy (or his heroism) will be neither vilified nor praised - just utterly forgotten.Taken from the story 'The Minority Report' (1956), here is an indirect allegory of the adaptation of Philip K. Dick's fiction by industrial cinema. An original text, all the more significant because it captures a minority view, a heterogeneous vision of the future, is rendered obsolete, then refracted as through a cracked mirror, which gives rise to a never-ending spiral of dissenting reviews and interpretations, where that series of discursive disputes sends the prophetic source into exile (or benign neglect, depending on one's view). Dick's original text becomes, ironically, the minority report that disputes the Hollywood adaptation, but it is exiled, by neglect, into heroic ignominy or ignominious heroism. Complications, convolutions and conditional parentheticals abound. Very phildickian, that.1Ever since the appearance of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (US/Singapore 1982), whose genetic ancestor is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Hollywood has shown considerable interest in mining Dick's work for estranging and estranged ideas, which it then immediately subordinates to the system of homogenisation that still marks the Hollywood ideal.2 This tendency is revealed, perfectly I think, in the DVD extra 'Minority Report from Story to Screen'. That story isn't Dick's 'The Minority Report' but instead the story of how Tom Cruise and Steven Spielberg came to work together, their mutual enthusiasm based in mutual respect: two Hollywood giants, so to speak, cranking 888, the Penfield Mood Organ's number for 'the desire to watch TV, no matter what's on' (Dick Androids 4).There are now nine films from Dick's work - Blade Runner, Total Recall (Verhoeven US 1990), Confessions d'un Barjo (Boivin France 1992), Screamers (Duguay Canada/US/Japan 1996), Impostor (Fleder US 2002), Minority Report (Spielberg US 2002), Paycheck (Woo US/Canada 2003), A Scanner Darkly (Linklater US 2006) and Next (Tamahori US 2007). Scott's film alone has had almost as many manifestations - a US theatrical release, an international release, a circulating 'working cut', a pan-and-scan version for broadcast TV and video cassette, a Criterion analogue laser disc (wide-screen, but with the bottom ten per cent of the image cropped), a so-called 'Director's cut', an uncirculated forty-seven-minute remix by Charles de Lauzirika and a final cut, let's sincerely hope, called The Final Cut (2007), which ran in limited release before being embalmed with others for the 2007 DVD packages. …

The Orthography of Provocation, and: Between Two Men, and: All Day I Dream about Sex

The Orthography of Provocation, and: Between Two Men, and: All Day I Dream about Sex Laura McCullough (bio) [Erratum] The Orthography of Provocation I wanted a cement truck in this poem, but didn’t have one, and if I had there wouldn’t have been room for the tree I was trying to grow, the one made of cells which aren’t the smallest unit of meaning or even attention, but a cell will simply have to do. All of us are perturbed and perturbing, the perturbations sometimes lovely as birds lifting from the head of a tree in unison or lovely, yes, let’s admit this, as the rumbling nostrums of that cement truck grinding down the road [End Page 36] past the old, grand trees lining it, the flocks of birds all provoked from their rest. We take flight, too, feeling palliated momentarily, and you take my hand across the membrane of this poem, and, for a minute, I understand the word placebo and am grateful to be stuck in it, rooted once more to the only street on which I’ve ever known how to live. Between Two Men Among the bamboo’s slanting stripes I glimpse The tiger’s stripes and sense the bony frame Under the splendid, quivering cover of skin. I was walking on Nassau Street in Princeton on my way to freshman convocation in the church by the sculpture of fear and forgiveness: two men, one kneeling, hands bound, the other standing with a knife in his hands; what’s between them unknowable, but obvious. I was waiting for the procession to begin. There were African drummers, air socks in the shape of fish, faculty, women and men of worship wearing crosses, stars, symbols, and colorful robes, and then the president, Shirley, bringing up the rear [End Page 37] and six hundred new students, but I was thinking of dead tigers, bright skins confiscated in airports, the wild laid out on linoleum. It was in India, a poaching campaign, and all the reserves were decimated, no tigers left to hunt, beaten to death in their leg traps so as not to mar the hides, cash on the black market, money in pockets, blood on machetes, but none of this new. The sculpture of the two men is black metal. The light catches the concaves and convexes. The students scurried by, their eyes as open as possible, catching all of it: the heel of hand on skin-head drums, the flying fish, their belief in immortality filling the air like incense or blood after a kill. All Day I Dream about Sex That goat. You love that goat more than you love me, more than you love your wife. —Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? I’m trying to say something as clearly as I can, like this backronym for Adidas which isn’t an acronym at all, but portmanteau. The owner is Adolf Dassler, nicknamed Adi— you see, Adi Das? Then someone made up: all day I dreamed about sex. That’s funny, but how about all day I dream about soccer, [End Page 38] or socks, or sweatshops, or Sudan? There’s a difference between compression and tension; the former a reduction in volume; the latter the relationship of force between two or more things; how far can you stretch a string before it breaks, or a country, or a teenager who makes sneakers, or the one who’s willing to knock another one down and kick him in the head, so he can steal the shoes off his feet? I wanted to say something clear, and all I had was ears so full of letters and words: k’s, diphthongs, sporks, and cyborgs, trying to neologize the collision of them or find someone to blame for my dumbness. Consilience doesn’t mean sentience, not without a certain self-awareness anyway, more than it requires to tie your shoelaces. Is there a word for it yet—to imagine what’s beyond the break, living on the taut string? Laura McCullough Laura McCullough has three collections of poetry: Speech Acts (forthcoming in 2010), What Men Want, and The Dancing Bear...

Through a Glass, Darkly: Photography and Cultural Memory

In the role of the bounty hunter Rick Deckard in Ridley Scott’s 1982 cult classic, Blade Runner, Harrison Ford utters these words w ith a bitter edge. Assigned to “term inate” the beautiful Rachel, an “android” especially menacing because she’s almost (almost!) indistinguishable from a “real” person, Deckard lusts after her and wants to be sure she’s human, not machinemade , before bedding her. Based on Phillip K. Dick’s brilliant science fiction novel of 1968, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? the film adds the bit of sentiment about collecting photographs to the otherwise unmitigated darkness of Phillip Dick’s vision of a near future.

Off World Sounds: Building a Collaborative Soundscape

There are many ways to construct, shape and frame a history of popular music. From a focus on performers to a stress on cities, from theories of modernity to reveling in ‘the post,’ innovative music has been matched by evocative writing about it. One arc of analysis in popular music studies focuses on the record label. Much has been written about Sun, Motown, Factory and Apple, but there are many labels that have not reached this level of notoriety and fame but offer much to our contemporary understanding of music, identity and capitalism. The aim of this article is to capture an underwritten history of 21st century music, capturing and tracking moments of collaboration, movement and contact. Through investigating a specific record label, we explore the interconnectiveness of electronica and city-based creative industries’ initiatives. While urban dance culture is still pathologised through drug scares and law and order concerns, clubbing studies and emerging theories of sonic media and auditory cultures offer a significant trigger and frame for this current research. The focus on Off World Sounds (OWS) traces a meta-independent label that summons, critiques, reinscribes and provokes the conventional narratives of capitalism in music. We show how OWS has remade and remixed the collaborations of punk to forge innovative ways of thinking about creativity, policy and popular culture. While commencing with a review of the origin, ideology and intent of OWS, the final part of the paper shows where the experiment went wrong and what can be learnt from this sonic label laboratory.

Disability and Narrative

After a decade of working in disability studies, I still find myself surprised by the presence of disability in narratives I had never considered to be “about” disability—in animated films from Dumbo to Finding Nemo; in literary texts from Huckleberry Finn to Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays; and, most curiously, even in the world of science fiction and superheroes, a world that turns out to be populated by blind Daredevils, mutant supercrips, and posthuman cyborgs of all kinds. Indeed, I now consider it plausible that the genre of science fiction is as obsessed with disability as it is with space travel and alien contact. Sometimes disability is simply underrecognized in familiar sci-fi narratives: ask Philip K. Dick fans about the importance of disability in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and you'll probably get blank stares. But the Voigt-Kampff empathy test by which the authorities distinguish humans from androids was, Dick tells us, actually developed after World War Terminus to identify “specials,” people neurologically damaged by radioactive fallout, so that the state could prevent them from reproducing. That aspect of the novel's complication of the human-android distinction is lost in the film Blade Runner, but the film does give us an engineer with a disability that involves premature aging, which links him intimately to the androids who have life spans of only four years.