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Do Androids Eat Electric Sheep?: Egotism, Empathy, and the Ethics of Eating in the Work of Philip K. Dick

2013; Routledge; Volume: 24; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/10436928.2013.754238

1545-5866

Josh Toth,

Posthumanist Ethics and Activism

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes I refer here to Derrida's phrasing in “Eating Well,” which I discuss in some detail below. The concept of speciesism comes, of course, from Peter Singer's Animal Liberation, a sustained and impassioned critique of animal cruelty as an effect of the illogical yet pervasive tendency to privilege one form of life over another. Examples of such rhetoric abound. But perhaps the most famous will serve as a satisfactory example: I still have a dream … deeply rooted in the American dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed—we hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal. I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slaveowners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. (King 219) For an insightful look at the potentially dangerous ramifications of America's early (and on-going) appeals to fraternal sympathy, see Elizabeth Barnes's “Fraternal Melancholies: Manhood and the Limits of Sympathy in Douglass and Melville.” As Barnes notes, both Douglass and Melville suggest that “one of the problems of empathy is the threat it holds to the empathizer's sense of self” (241). And while, as Ursula K. Heise points out, most American science fiction simply perpetuates and expands upon the problematic ideal of fraternal sympathy – “cast[ing] the alien as a figure for class, racial, ethnic, national, or religious difference, with the implication that alienness is ultimately knowable and assimilable” (504)—I am arguing that Dick (like Melville and Douglass before him) is interested in problematizing this “implication.” In other words, Dick's theme of empathy (along with his obviously satiric conjectures about human/animal/android relations in a post-apocalyptic world) in no way affirms, as Heise claims, an “authentic humanness … associated with biophilia” (506). Instead, Dick offers a critique of empathy that openly re-considers a problematically persistent tendency in America's various efforts to make manifest its ideal democratic state. The novel, I am suggesting, is no more concerned with “reclaim[ing] the essence of humanity” (Sims 67) than it is with promoting a “community of the posthuman, in which human and machine commiserate and comaterialize, vitally shaping one another's existences” (Galvan 414). Nor is it concerned with simply and finally “rejecting the speciesist discourse that attempts to construct hierarchies and divisions” (Vint 117). See Freud's Civilization and Its Discontents, in which he argues that the injunction to “love one's neighbor as thyself” is ultimately an injunction to restrict and thus direct inward an essential human drive: aggression. The effort to restrict or deny this drive results in a hyperinflated superego that bombards the ego with untenable feelings of guilt. As I show in the final section, Zizek “plays off” this argument in a manner that is particularly germane to my analysis of Dick's novel. Moreover, Freud's consideration of the destructive and aggressive desire to exclude (as it both compliments and opposes an empathic desire to belong) echoes his earlier conception of the death drive, a conception which also informs my analysis of Dick's novel. How else might we account for Dick's strange endorsement of Blade Runner? After initially and emphatically rejecting the possibility of a Hollywood adaptation (particularly one filmed by Scott), Dick (after seeing only a brief scene of the still-unfinished film), announced that “It's like they took my brain out and did sight simulation on my brain, so it projected an image on the screen” (qtd. in Rickman 103). Oddly, the scene in question depicts Harrison Ford, as Deckard, jumping down onto a very crowded LA street. As Dick notes, “it takes a long time for [Ford] to find an empty spot amongst [the] milling throng to hop down” (qtd. in Rickman 106). Hayles' excellent discussion of consumption in Dick's oeuvre and biography can be found in Chapter 7 of How We Became Posthuman. As Hayles points out, a large portion of Dick's novels deal (in one way or another) with the tension between consuming and being consumed. I am referring here to Dick's discussion of schizophrenia in a letter to Patricia Warrick (as discussed by Hayles). The quotes from Hayles are thus descriptors of the different “schizophrenics” Dick describes: the “psychotic schizophrenic” and the “neurotic schizod,” respectively. For a detailed investigation of Dick's indictment and valorization of schizophrenia as an effect of late-capitalism, see (again) Hayle's chapter on Dick in How We Became Posthuman. I use the concept of supplement here in its most Derridian sense—i.e., as that which is both necessary to yet a corruption of what it aids, or defines. Indeed, Derrida's various discussions of the supplement in his earlier work (particularly Plato's Pharmacy) would not be inapplicable here. A useful digression might in fact compare the Nexus 6 android to the “pharmakeus”—i.e., “A being that no ‘logic’ can confine within a noncontridictory definition, an individual of the demonic species, neither god nor man, neither immortal nor mortal, neither living nor dead” (Derrida, Pharmacy 117). We should note, as Deckard himself intimates, that “You shall only kill the killers” is no less undecidable than “Thou Shalt Not Kill”—an injunction which, as Derrida notes, “has never been understood within the Judeo-Christian tradition … as “thou shalt not put to death the living in general” (“Eating well” 279). More specifically, I am here extending Cheng's concept of “racial melancholia.” According to Cheng, “Racilization in America may be said to operate through the institutional process of producing a dominant, standard, white national ideal, which is sustained by the exclusion-yet-retention of racialized others” (10). While Cheng sees the dissolution of the self as the effect of this melancholic double bind, I am suggesting that (in light of the above discussion and the definition of melancholia laid out by Freud in “Mourning and Melancholia”) racial and/or social melancholia can be better understood as a reassuring if problematic evasion of the self's perpetual lack of stability. One might (and perhaps should) compare the treatment of the android in Dick's novel to the treatment of any number of racially (or sexually) ambiguous characters in American literature and film. In other words, a critic like Michelle Reid is wise to link Dick's androids to Leilani Nishime's concept of a “mulatto cyborg” (362). As Vint astutely notes, “the treatment of androids within the novel comments on our historical and current exploitation of animals, and also our exploitation of those humans who have been animalized in discourse, such as women, the working classes, and non-whites, particularly slaves” (114). The point here is that (as Freud suggests throughout Beyond the Pleasure Principle) the pleasure principle (Eros) and the death drive (Thantos) are caught up and conflated in a compulsion to repeat, a compulsion that links the desire for utter satisfaction and/as the fulfillment of selfhood with the desire for the utter dissolution of selfhood and/or the possibility of satisfaction. Both signal a desire to “return to the quiescence of the inorganic world” (62). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJosh TothJosh Toth is Assistant Professor of English at Grant MacEwan University. He is the author of The Passing of Postmodernism: A Spectroanalysis of the Contemporary and co-editor of The Mourning After: Attending the Wake of Postmodernism.