Objects of Desire and Biopower in Blade Runner 2049

Sean Gerard Ferrier

p. 189-210

Résumés

In Blade Runner 2049, the protagonist, K, is an artificial being created by humans. In a key moment of the film, K identifies having a soul with being born rather than being made. The film’s focus on “procreation” rather than “reproduction” of the replicants calls attention to a distinction made by Michel Foucault, who in his “genealogical” books and lectures postulates that a discourse of biopower emerged in 19th and 20th century government, concerned with the health, growth and welfare of populations. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis of different modes of power that emerged in modernity, this article argues that in the world of the film, artificial beings are subjects of sovereign power, but if it were possible for them to give birth to their own offspring—to procreate—they would become a population, and populations are the objects of modern biopower.

Dans Blade Runner 2049, le protagoniste, K, est un être artificiel créé par les humains. À un moment clé du film, K identifie le fait d’avoir une âme au fait d’être né plutôt que d’avoir été créé. L’accent mis par le film sur la « procréation » plutôt que sur la « reproduction » des réplicants attire l’attention sur une distinction faite par Michel Foucault qui, dans ses livres et conférences « généalogiques », postule qu’un discours de biopouvoir a émergé dans les gouvernements des xixe et xxe siècles, préoccupés par la santé, la croissance et le bien-être des populations. S’appuyant sur l’analyse de Foucault des différents modes de pouvoir qui ont émergé dans la modernité, cet article soutient que dans le monde du film, les êtres artificiels sont des sujets du pouvoir souverain, mais que s’il leur était possible de donner naissance à leur propre progéniture – de procréer – ils deviendraient une population, et les populations sont les objets du biopouvoir moderne.

Entrées d’index

Mots-clés : Foucault, biopouvoir, mémoire, guerre, science-fiction, cinéma

Keywords : Foucault, biopower, memory, war, science fiction, cinema


Texte intégral

1The film Blade Runner 2049 (directed by Denis Villeneuve, 2017) presents many objects of desire, as the prevalent high-tech billboards of its futuristic urban landscape advertise products and companies.1 Such objects include products, for instance watches and cars, experiences such as games, off-world travel (or migration), and relationships and sexual encounters with androids or replicants. As the viewer is exposed to a myriad of objects to be desired and sometimes consumed, these vivid elements of the films’ urban landscape also suggest the desirability of a corporate presence. The Blade Runner films seem to offer insight and warnings about how governmental power and marketing power could operate in a future capitalist society, or in the future of our own society. The film, for example, shows advertising for: Seiko watches, Coca-Cola, an Atari gaming console,2 and a Peugeot car (or possibly a Peugeot hover-car). There also seems to be advertising of products made by JVC and TDK (in the 1982 film). These latter products are interestingly self-referential: both companies at that time made video-projection systems, videotape recorders and VHS cassettes; so these, like most of the above list, are presumably objects of desire to the perspective of the spectator in the audience watching the movie. Hence (in an interesting instance of marketing “synergy”), these movies perhaps are attempting to produce the desire for certain technological products among its audiences, and perhaps the desire to become a certain type of consumer.

2The example of the game as desired object points further towards objects of desire in the films that should be classified as experiences, or meditators of experiences. One experience presented as an object of desire in the Blade Runner films is off-world travel, that is, off-world emigration: migration from Earth to some other planet (extraterrestrial colony) with better living conditions. In the novel by Philip K. Dick and in the films, earth has recently survived, barely, a global war/environmental catastrophe. Hence, off-world migration in the original Blade Runner (1982) film can be, and is, sold and marketed as a desirable experience. This is despite the fact that the reasons for leaving earth involve the utter undesirability of the home-world situation. Therefore, this “off-world experience” is a negative object: it is the desire to not live here on earth. In the world of the films, this desire is cultivated by the authorities still in 2019; although it seems likely that by 2049 they have largely given up the marketing project. These instances concerning experiences indicate that an object of desire need not be something tangible. Indeed, where off-world migration is an object of desire, then it would seem that what is desired is some sort of escape (from environmental hazards), or a condition of being less anxious, or having a longer life-expectancy than on earth (the home-world); all of these are to some degree intangibles. The object of desire I would like to focus on in this article does not fit neatly beside any of the objects mentioned already, nor does it belong in any of the above categories. Drawing from Michel Foucault, I would like to discuss the desire for a soul in the film Blade Runner 2049. For the sake of convenience, I will suppose a soul to be something that is intangible.

3The film’s scenario of recent ecological catastrophe and acute urbanism with continuing corporate hegemony reveals its apocalyptic vision as to where human society is heading.3 I wish to suggest here that this vision is biopolitical, using a concept described by Foucault. Indeed, certain characters’ attitudes and views of their role within the deployments of power are marked by a system of biopower (or biopolitical discourse), while the advent of “replicants” has also provided a site for the re-emergence of sovereign power. The latter is a premodern form of power, an idea tackled by Foucault in his History of Sexuality vol. 1. Foucault’s analysis of these discourses of power provides insight into how the films raise the question of whether replicants should be regarded as having souls—which would seem to entail their “humanity” in view of the juridical apparatus of power. This article will explore how this concept of biopolitics and its particular governmentality can shed light on the film’s exploration of the control and management of “dehumanized” and disenfranchised populations by apparatuses of power, with a particular focus on anxiety about the procreation of a population. Furthermore, the film depicts a version of a problem Foucault identified in his study (the 1976 lecture course) of French and European historiography and political theory: the problem of the possibility of different “nations” within a single state, from which Foucault traced the emergence of discourses of “race war.”4

4A brief clarification is in order about my use of terminology from the films’ fictional universe for describing the creatures of its world. For the purposes of this paper, I am using the terms “robot,” “android,” and “replicant” somewhat interchangeably, but the distinction between them is worth noting. The word “robot” is not much used in these texts, and so I have limited my use of it. The 1968 novel by Philip K. Dick (from which the films are derived) prefers the word “android” (slang: “andy”), emphasizing or connoting their near-human appearance. In the novel, key points of plot and action hinge on the appearance or “looks” of these artificial human beings. The Blade Runner films prefer the term “replicant” for describing a sort of robot manufactured with organic materials. The term “replicant” connotes their genetic engineering, and this latter term does a better job of emphasizing that we are speaking of largely organic beings, rather than machines in the strict sense.5 In these stories, the characters inhabit a near-future world in which genetically engineered androids or “replicants” have been manufactured to do certain work for humans on other planets, and then some of these end up (illegally) returning to live on earth. Thus, for replicants, life on earth is an object of desire in the novel and in the earlier movie. This may be one of the fundamental differences or shifts in the characters’ attitudes between the two movies. In this sequel set thirty years later, the characters carry an attitude of satisfaction with, or resignation to, the situation on earth. While Rick Deckard, the protagonist of the 1982 Blade Runner and the novel, was obsessed with animals and a lifestyle in harmony with nature (sheep having been one of the casualties of the prior apocalypse), K in 2049 has no problem eating synthetic protein, and regards the improbable flower found on Rachel’s tomb mainly as evidence in the police process.6

5In Blade Runner 2049, set 30 years after the first movie, the protagonist, a Los Angeles police bounty hunter or “Blade Runner” identified as KD6-3.7, known simply as “K” (played by Ryan Gosling), comes across a cold case: An ossuary-box, buried under a tree at the site where he has just “retired”—that is, killed—a fugitive Nexus-8 unit with the name of Sapper Morton. While K is a replicant himself, he initially does not appear to be particularly uncomfortable about his job or feel incompatible with it. In their confrontation, however, Morton suggests that K should be conflicted about this work.7 Yet, this reduced self-doubt is an effect of the fact that he, like other replicants of his generation, is programmed to obey.8

6Still, as the storyline develops, K increasingly ponders on the condition of being-born, which, in the film, is to be distinguished from having the capacity to give birth. The world of Blade Runner 2049 also implies a distinction between ensouled and unensouled; replicants are deemed to lack a soul because they were manufactured rather than born. This in turn justifies LAPD policy about “separation of kind,” and at a deeper level is wrapped up with a peculiar sort of existential time-problem, such that a being without a youth or childhood could give birth to one who will experience those things. While the first Blade Runner contained problems surrounding the desire for a child, desire to propagate, and concomitant desire for the future, the newer film is much more constructed around a desire for memory—memory as an object of desire—leading to something like a desire for biography. In effect, the 1982 movie (like its source material) is anxious about the future, while the mood in the recent film has, appropriately, to do with being haunted by the past.

7After K “retires” Morton and reports finding the ossuary-box, the film moves to the work of recovering (or destroying) the past, as the police forensics team determines that the bones in it belong to a female who died in childbirth. And when an electron-microscopy reveals a serial number etched in a bone, it is confirmed that this “victim,” a possible mother, was a replicant, an android made by the Tyrrel Corporation. So, a mystery occupying the detectives in the film is: whether a replicant—an artificial life-form—can give birth. In other words, can they reproduce or, rather, procreate? The more urgent problem for the main characters is whether this has already taken place, for the evidence suggests a replicant may have already been born. A “replicant” who was born would, according to the apparent logic of the story, have a soul. This fact would upset the way power is structured in this society and relations between humans and replicants (who work in many vital jobs). Furthermore, the obedience of that population—which the title cards make clear was a desirable design choice—would no longer be guaranteed, since offspring of replicants would presumably not be “programmed to obey” or restricted by such a design constraint.9 In the story, this last possibility conditions the anxiety of several characters, but particularly the police lieutenant, Madame Joshi.

8“That’s not possible,” says the police chief when they notice the serial-number etched onto the skeleton. Her anxiety, and her order to remove or destroy all evidence of this phenomenon, demonstrates that she cannot admit the possibility of a pregnant replicant—such a phenomenon would disrupt the power/knowledge system the police rely upon. Henceforward the past is haunting the future in dangerous ways, as such evidence would upset the discourse that justifies the activities of her job:

LT. JOSHI:
She was a replicant. Pregnant. (Taking a drink.)
The world is built on a wall, that separates kind. Tell either side there’s no wall, you’ve bought a war. Or a slaughter.
(She turns to face K.)
LT. JOSHI: So what you saw—didn’t happen.
K: Yes, Madam.
LT. JOSHI: It is my job to keep order. That’s what we do here, we keep order.

9This conversation between K and his supervisor Lieutenant Joshi (played by Robin Wright) takes place in her office,10 near the top of the LAPD tower, which is built in the style of an off-world fortress or giant robot, armored as it overlooks the dark city; suggesting its active or quasi-panoptical surveillance of the populations, as well as its insularity—the orderly, sterile interior of police headquarters standing apart from and superior to the babel of the city.11 The Police Lieutenant has the desire to maintain order, which may appear somewhat of an abstraction, but it is remarkable that it is built on different populations behaving, or existing, in certain ways and not in other ways, as well as on a quite delicate balance (as we presume she sees it) between visibility and assimilation. And Although K has been created to obey humans, this order puzzles him:

K: You want it gone?
LT. JOSHI: Erase everything.
K: Even the child?
LT. JOSHI: All trace. Do you have anything more to say?
K: I’ve never retired something that was born before.
LT. JOSHI: What’s the difference?
K: To be born is to have a soul, I guess.
LT. JOSHI: Are you telling me no?
K: I wasn’t aware that was an option, Ma’am.
LT. JOSHI: Atta boy.
(K moves to open the door.)
LT. JOSHI: Hey–You’ve been getting on fine without one.
K: What’s that, Madam?
LT. JOSHI: A soul.

10K speculates here that something is different in the event that you have been born. K has not been born (as far as we know), but he conjectures to the Lieutenant that there is an important distinction if one has been born: that if one is born, then one has a soul. So with the dialogue of this scene, a few interesting propositions are placed into consideration, including the following:

  1. Everyone who is born has a soul.

  2. Whoever has not been born, does not have a soul.
    Still, is this second proposition truly representative of K’s belief on the matter? Perhaps it is only that,

  3. If one has not been born, then one might not have a soul, or probably does not have a soul.

11We could conclude that if K did believe (II), then his understanding of himself as a replicant who was not born (and whose “childhood memories” are implanted and so “false”), would entail that he has no soul, although he lives and works among beings who do. Yet, such belief in the stricter proposition (II) would produce an easy justification in the minds of K and Lt. Joshi for the “retirement” of Morton and other fugitive replicants. Such a justification for the policy is in a sense an object of desire for Joshi and the LAPD, who desire loyal, obedient subordinates. Thus (III) with its probabilistic condition, is not a good fit for Joshi, and would be difficult for her to accept: if they believed proposition (III), their actions would be significantly harder to vindicate. In any case, K seems of the view that being born is a guarantee of being ensouled (this is proposition I above), but for him, in the case of a sentient being not having been born—in the absence of the condition of birth—there is no guarantee of being ensouled. K, being a replicant, presumably does not need or desire much justification of the policy that directs his job.

12This marks a shift in philosophical stance from earlier iterations of the Blade Runner stories. Salient issues within the earlier versions turned around questions of whether androids, as manufactured beings, possessed emotional responses, and if such responses should be regarded (by humans and the police) as being genuine or simulated. While it seems replicants are characterized for police purposes by their lack of something that humans obviously possess, what was construed as lacking in them had been their presumably inauthentic or incomplete array of emotional responses—this is at issue both in Philip K. Dick’s novel and the Ridley Scott movie. In other words, for Deckard from the 1982 Blade Runner, it had mattered that they were “robots,” and his problem was that they did not act “robotic” enough. To the humans, this increased the perceived threat. Replicants in 2049 are even less robot-like, yet also programmed to obey; what matters though is that they might have a particular history, and possibly even a soulful relationship to that history. This is the point at which the police power is compelled to block access to that desired “object”—that history.

13So, the stakes for K and Joshi in 2049 are not a concern over replicants having emotions; what matters for them is that replicants could have offspring. This would mean that replicants might have souls, a complication for K.12 It would also mean that collectively, they would have a history or be subjects of history, a problem for Joshi. However, we learn that in 2049 the Wallace Company, successor of the Tyrell Corporation of 2019, is working to develop self-replicating replicants, or more precisely, procreating replicants. Niander Wallace (played by Jared Leto) seems aware that Eldon Tyrell had indeed achieved this, but the secret was lost and not transferred to the company’s new owners.

14The issue for the Lieutenant and LAPD is that, if replicants/androids can produce more beings like themselves, if they can procreate, then a civil war—really to her mind, an inter-species war—is not far off. Or perhaps such a conflict would only become a distant possibility, but the worry is that people will think it imminent, making it more likely by a vicious circle of mass psychology. This police chief is not so intensely concerned for battling criminals, rebels, and illegal android immigrants as were previous generations’ lieutenants; rather (for a charitable interpretation) she appears concerned with the anxieties of the human community, discerning that the humans, in a resource-starved California, would likely start the conflict pre-emptively. Or less charitably, she is anxious to preserve the system of human privilege and control over replicants—and to avoid some part of the population embracing a “counter-history” challenging the basis of LAPD authority over them.13 Here is where the story’s bio-political dimension enters. The lieutenant’s argument about maintaining walls between “kinds” raises the specter that replicants are at least potentially a population whose history would provide them with a counterclaim against the power she exercises, a possibility she desires to avoid or head off. The authorities might have to treat them like human beings, while the human residents of Los Angeles would not accept their equality as a community. So if it is the case that a replicant has given birth, this truth must not get out. “This breaks the world, K,” says Lt. Joshi in a later scene.14 Joshi believes it is her job to prevent or pre-empt the outbreak of a race war:15 human society must be defended, even in post-apocalyptic Los Angeles.16

Biopower, Disciplinary Power, and State Racism

15On the whole, the film’s representation of a police apparatus maintaining surveillance and control of a less-privileged group, within its territory, which has a distinct and separate history of struggle, can be placed in context of Michel Foucault’s discussion of state racism and its descent or emergence from a discourse of war between nations. In order to fully contextualize the film via Foucauldian ideas regarding race and nation, it will be necessary to explain Foucault’s understanding of the historical development of different modes of power and theories or discourse of power that have held sway in Europe since the Renaissance. In doing so, I will show how the film explores power in a comparable manner to Foucault’s analysis.17

16In his lecture-course titled Society Must Be Defended, Foucault conjectured that “one of the basic phenomena of the nineteenth century was what might be called power’s hold over life.” By this he meant “the acquisition of power over man insofar as man is a living being, that the biological came under State control, that there was at least a certain tendency that leads to what might be termed State control of the biological.”18

17This form of exercise of state power, at issue in the recent film, stands in contrast to the classical theory of sovereignty (and is also distinct from disciplinary power). In the older model, “the right of life and death was one of sovereignty’s basic attributes.”19 Foucault surmises that during the era of absolute monarchies, a discursive system of sovereign power prevailed in Europe. While its outstanding features have never entirely disappeared, it was eclipsed after the eighteenth century by two strands of power-discourses or configurations of the power-knowledge apparatus: disciplinary power and biopower. While disciplinary power views the body as a machine, prefers rational organization of space, and tends toward normalization, surveillance and hierarchization; biopower is a governmental system that “fosters, regulates, and manages life”20 but which, according to Foucault, is reliant on racism to justify war, or to kill in the name of the State. Foucault’s “genealogical” works on the whole suggest that the twentieth century is marked by biopower; while the long nineteenth century was an era of broad deployment of disciplinary power.21 Bio-power in particular regards the growth and health of a population. To wit: the police power depicted in the first Blade Runner movie is more disciplinary, and in the sequel more biopolitical.22

18Foucault states that it was the monarch’s having the “right of life and death” that was the key domain of the paradigm of sovereign power. In the sovereign-subject relationship, the right to be alive was held by the sovereign. Elaborating on this point, Foucault notes that this right meant that

[the sovereign] can, basically, either have people put to death or let them live […]. If we take the argument a little further, or to the point where it becomes paradoxical, it means that in terms of his relationship with the sovereign, the subject is, by rights, neither dead nor alive. From the point of view of life and death, the subject is neutral, and it is thanks to the sovereign that the subject has the right to be alive or, possibly, the right to be dead. In any case, the lives and deaths of subjects become rights only as a result of the will of the sovereign.23

19This kind of power is claimed by the police over replicants in the first Blade Runner. Foucault called it a “strange” right, because among its puzzles and paradoxes, the sovereign cannot actually grant (or start) life, so the exercise of the sovereign right is tilted toward death: the sovereign reserves the right to kill, to take life. Therefore, it is “at the moment when the sovereign can kill that he exercises his right over life.”24 In the world of Blade Runner, however, the lives of replicants are started, by a capitalist corporation, so the sovereign power over them should appear more absolute. Hence, the police department seems tied, perhaps by institutional inertia, to aspects of the old, sovereign model. To a significant degree this LAPD still desires sovereign power, the power to take the life of older, disobedient replicants. Wallace, on the other hand, has adopted a very different paradigm, since he desires to make replicants live, and especially, to grow their population more efficiently. This tension between the police desire for control and surveillance, and the corporation’s desire for growth and procreation (and additional labor) sketches the bio-political dilemma of the story.

20The desire to grow and manage a population can be understood as what Foucault termed “biopower.” This arrangement of power, which from the 19th century “permeated” the apparatus of power, is expressed as the power to “make live and let die.”25 An entire semiology becomes embedded around this right and its conditions and possibilities of exercise. This governmental functionality is tied to a discourse of procreation, and sexuality becomes a field of strategic importance for this power to make live.26 The desire for this type of power is visible in Blade Runner 2049. While the old sovereign power is still exercised by the police especially over replicants (such as in the case of Morton), the police also contend against agents of the Wallace corporation regarding a biopolitical matter of replicant procreation.

21Foucault’s genealogy of biopower identifies another historical theoretical shift, besides the fundamental distinction in the operation of sovereign right from “let live” to “make live”: the earlier system of sovereign power did not recognize the concept of a “nation” without a king, or conceive of one prior to a formation of sovereignty.27 Still, around the time of the French Revolution, models of power emerged which presume that a nation might exist independently of such political power or constitutional authority.28 In their underground movement introduced later in the film, replicants desire this sort of “national” status or something close to it; they believe that if they can discover Rachel’s child, it cannot be denied full rights by the powers that be. That is to say, this group of replicants (perhaps heirs of Roy Batty’s movement from the earlier stories) desire to have a sort of “national” status prior to any incorporation in a sovereign state. They wish, in other words, for a collective existence, and rights, whose source is independent of the state and economic apparatus. This means that in a way they do desire to be part of a biopolitical order rather than a sovereign regime.29

22Phenomena of biopower include natalist policies and “plans to intervene in all phenomena relating to the birth rate as well as the need to deal with aging and other factors that sapped the population’s strength… wasted energy, and cost money.”30 Biopolitics may be aimed towards identifying a nation through historical and future time; it emerged partly by description of multiple “nations” living within one state; but it seems it should also be exercised towards “control over relations between the human race, or human beings insofar as they are a species, insofar as they are living beings, and their environment, the milieu in which they live.”31

23These latter issues would include phenomena of desire, and directing or influencing the population towards approval of some desires and away from others in order to regulate the population’s procreation and health.

24The path for biopower was opened up when 17th—and 18th—century jurists theorized that people form a social contract in order to protect their lives from threat. This launched the problematization of life in the analysis of political power, until the old sovereign right to take life (“faire mourir”) was “complemented by a new right: This is the right, or rather precisely the opposite right. It is the power to ‘make’ live and ‘let’ die.”32 While the 17th and 18th centuries developed techniques of power centered upon the individual body, including their visibility and “spatial distribution of individual bodies,” towards the advent of the 19th century Foucault finds a new technology of power “embedding itself in existing disciplinary techniques.”33

The new technology that is being established is addressed to a multiplicity of men, not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form, on the contrary, a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on… [t]hat is directed not at man-as-body but at man-as-species.

25Biopower thus focuses on “a set of processes such as the ratio of births to deaths, the rate of reproduction, the fertility of a population […] the birth rate, the mortality rate, longevity, and so on—together with a whole series of related economic and political problems.”34 It addresses the “urban problem” as well, considering matters of environmental effects on the population. With respect to the film, we may infer that as the environmental factors for human beings became harsher, the governmental apparatus became more biopolitical.

26Ultimately, biopolitics “deals with the population […] as a biological problem and as power’s problem.”35 In the film, the prospect of Rachel’s pregnancy and replicant procreation complicates the situation of power inasmuch as her kind would be able to claim a potentiality towards the future that should be within the sphere of state protection, and this matter also has the interesting aspect that replicants are (as designed) less susceptible to environmental hazards than are humans. Hence two axes of biopower would conceivably come into play. The movie depicts a scenario where, due to the advent of replicant beings, the sovereign right “to let live or to make die” has re-established itself, setting itself over the replicants. This provides ground for their being “legally” permitted on Earth (not just off-world) and for working as police or in other human-governmental functions. Sovereign right even appears less paradoxical here, since the replicants’ lives have been “made” by human beings.

27While sovereign power is manifest in the film’s premise, K, a replicant who works for the police, is also subject to “disciplinary” power. After every mission, he is made to take a psychological test to ensure he is not “out of line” psychologically, namely that he is not getting emotional or suffering trauma. This disciplinary apparatus is aimed towards the state’s interest (and Wallace Corporation’s) in maximizing the capacities of the replicant police officers’ bodies and minds. These “post-traumatic baseline” tests, having the aspect of a military drill in verbal form, are designed to ensure that the replicant is performing in a “normal” and optimized way, not pursuing—or even developing—desires beyond the requirements of police work that would interfere with his ability to obey.36

28Unlike replicants, human beings are primary subjects of biopower, attested by the campaign to move people off-world in protection of the species’ health, and Joshi’s rhetoric presuming a distinction of “kind.” However, the possibility that a replicant might give birth (an aleatory event related to future possibility) would disrupt this careful balance of power-regimes. One who is born could not, in an unqualified way, be subject to the archaic system of sovereign power. The state would have a duty to protect the life of such a being, a duty that could not be evaded through the sovereign claim. Such a being should expect the apparatus of power to aid in making it live or letting it die. And this is precisely the risk confronted by the police chief in 2049: that a strategy of procreation could be adopted or inhabited by replicants, or by “natural” offspring of replicants. While the film is haunted by the past, the fear is that replicants would have a discourse of the future, concerned with the health and welfare of their population. Their sexuality might be engaged (as it already has been with humans) as a power-knowledge complex applied productively for the life of a population, or a “nation” formed around a new species. Therefore, there is a desire for procreation due to the access to the power/knowledge system that this population could gain.

Pastoral Power and the Memory-Maker

29In the timeline between the two movies, a great blackout occurred, causing a remarkable lack of access to this information. Presumably the effect of a high-tech weapon, this blackout disrupted digital storage media so that “only paper survived.” Indeed, this shows that throughout the story humans and replicants have a desire for memory, a desire to know the truth-value of memories, and a desire to know who one is. The situation of the past blackout helps achieve the exclusion of many people from one of the most subjective and pastoral objects of desire of all: memory and its concomitant self-knowledge. Characters in Blade Runner 2049 make note of memory and self-knowledge: K and Luv (a replicant who works for Wallace) view fragments of Deckard’s testing of Rachel in the first movie, a scene that highlights desire itself and the human presumption that androids would possess a rather limited set of desires. K and Luv hear Rachel counter Deckard’s question, shooting back: “Is this a test to tell whether I am a replicant or a lesbian, Mr Deckard?” To Luv, this is evidence that it was not clear what sort of being Rachel was, and that “we were difficult to spot then.”37 K on the other hand notes that “she likes him… this officer Deckard, she’s trying to provoke him.” But Luv’s attempt at flirtatious banter with K, too transparent and algorithmic, falls flat. The scene demonstrates that a substantial amount of the subjectivity of desire has been lost since the first movie—or programmed out—at least in the replicant population.

30K also does not know whether he is the child of the replicant, Rachel. In fact, K seems mainly unaware of the history of his police bureau and his predecessors Deckard or Gaff; clearly some institutional memory was lost. Personally, he possesses memories of being a boy, but understands these as implanted, like those of other replicants such as the archive clerk. Thus, one quandary with memory as object of desire in Blade Runner 2049 is the core presumption that many memories of many beings, are “false.” K doubts his own memories, and being a police officer, he is equally skeptical of the childhood memories other androids have, for these are presumed to be implanted. Yet he does not initially appear as a person who believes or finds himself “living a lie”; perhaps being indifferent to having a soul oneself helps avoid that.

31The notion of the soul that is at stake in the film can be understood in terms of Foucault’s concept of pastoral power. It turns out that Foucault’s working-out of the genealogy of biopower was concomitant with his attempt to describe a sort of “Oedipus complex in our civilization [that] does not involve our unconscious and desire.” Thus, as Brandon Konoval convincingly argues,

Foucault’s “Oedipus complex” corresponded with a power-knowledge complex of exceptional social and political impact that would figure prominently in what Foucault sometimes characterized as “bio-power,” and at other times in more overtly genealogical terms as “pastoral power.”38

32Foucault’s account of pastoral power “highlighted the gradual transfer of apparatus of power once characteristic of ecclesiastical authority to the domain of the state,”39 and in the 1977-78 lectures he regards the development of biopower as “a latter-day transformation of ‘pastoral power.’” Pastoral power hence clearly regards desire and the soul, and the desires of the soul; and the awareness or revelation of one’s own personal narrative. In the latter part of the film Blade Runner 2049, these concepts come into play.

33As in Oedipus’ encounter with the prophet Tiresias, after finding an object that K seems to remember from “long ago,” he seeks out the memory-designer Dr Ana Stelline, a sort of photographer/videographer. K comes to her as a detective (also self-referentially investigating his own mind or mental contents) for help in deterring whether certain of his memories are “real.”40 Stelline is discerning of subjectivity and desire; she must indeed have some intuition of what images other replicants would like to have in their minds.41 Hence, she embodies part of the pastoral function.42

34Indeed, the encounter with Dr. Stelline evinces from K an emotional reaction to his memory—something from which he is supposed to remain detached, “programmed” or designed to remain detached. When he learns about the truth-value of this memory, K has a very uncharacteristic emotional outburst, so intense it gets him arrested and suspended from the police force for having disrupted his “baseline” emotional equilibrium. The rather cold emotional detachment is also, therefore, an “object of desire” in the movie: desirable to the LAPD as an institution in hiring police officers and produced more or less on demand by the Wallace Corp. to satisfy this political-institutional wish. At the same time, the Joi algorithm is at least apparently more emotional and expressive than the replicants, and that emotional constitution is marketed as an object of desire by the same corporation, at least to replicants.43

35What this shows is that memory is an object of desire in this noir-style story of a police investigation. K desires a clearer understanding of his memories; Joshi, negatively, tries to eliminate any record (memory) of Rachel or her child, while the militant faction of replicants wishes to identify and perhaps reveal the child; Stelline creates “false” or implanted memories because it is desired (by Wallace Corporation) that replicants have these mental contents.44 The entire story in fact is haunted by a memory, related first by Sapper Morton, of having “seen a miracle” in a replicant giving birth—and by the lost, desired object of the memory, Rachel’s child. All of these attitudes to memory, of course, are different aspects of the desire for a soul. These aspects regard mental contents, memories and accounts of memories, and as such fall under the influence of what Foucault termed “pastoral power.” Still, this power is actually an inflection of biopower, and so we should now return to the film’s presentation of its bio-political problem.

36The desire for a soul—or rather, the realization that ensouledness could not be gratuitously denied to someone who was born (and whose memories were “real”) is another thread of resistance to the precariousness of being an entity whom the state simply has the authority to “retire.” With a soul, the state will be deprived of a justification for closing off the being’s possibilities. Yet, this having-a-soul has a special quality: it is an interiority, a subjective experience/belief, or an intangible property (perhaps the ability to form, retain, and interpret memories) that born humans may be assumed to have. Still, the phenomena by which one discerns oneself as having a soul are somewhat ineffable. That is the significance of K’s linking birth with ensouledness. The replicants’ memories and mental experiences seem very similar to the mental phenomena of human beings. Nonetheless, under the regime of power-knowledge presented in the movie, the same sort of subjective phenomena are not held to be dispositive evidence of ensouledness for them. But evidence of birth, of the event of his own birth (if it happened), would be sufficient for K to understand himself as having a soul. And since the possibility of procreation opens towards the future, K’s attitude to being a blade runner would have to change. His job could not be described as only protecting others from a dangerous legacy of the past as he hunts fugitive replicants. The situation would concede the possibility that his actions were precluding the future.

37If replicants could procreate and assert their own biopolitical agenda in contradistinction to that of humans, this would of course affect their relational attitudes. It is the case that K’s sexuality, early in the story, is replicative. His object of desire is a “woman” called “Joi.” However, this “woman” is not human, but instead a hologram; Joi is the name of a computer program with an artificial intelligence. When K arrives home from work to his apartment,45 reproductive discourse is revealed. Joi presents dinner, acting as if she was living in the early 1960s and they are a “typical” young American couple (heterosexual with a single breadwinner and a wife as a homemaker). Assisted in this illusion by the hologram-projector, they act as if the meal consisted of animal meat, that is, food from the twentieth century. When in fact, in the world of Blade Runner, almost all the farming has been synthetic for over a generation and there are practically no animals left for meat. A childless couple, they try to act, in short, as if nothing much had changed, as if by living in accord with the lifestyle of the past they could maintain a domestic ideal that is fundamentally stable. K and Joi act as though they are in alliance.46 This is one manifestation of their desire for humanity, an idealized (at least for Joi), prelapsarian humanity.

38The Wallace Corporation is encouraging in their performance of American domesticity. Or exploitative of this desire. Mr. Wallace’s assistant, a female replicant ironically named Luv, is happy to learn that K—a product of Wallace Corporation—is also a customer, having bought (or licensed) a Joi unit. So, for some replicants, there is a practice of ideational reproduction, effected and mediated by the Wallace Corporation. Still, Wallace desires to make a replicant that can give birth, a being that would be, in principle, procreative, which would alter the human/replicant hierarchy and change the biopolitical discourse about population; it would particularly change the relationship of governmental power to the health and welfare “of the species”; in this case, of the replicant species.

39It is significant that Niander Wallace is to all appearances a more religiously-minded man than was Eldon Tyrell in 2019. He seems to have a messiah-complex or God-complex. Like a biopower-aware capitalist, his business pursues, as Foucault might describe, “adjustment of phenomena of population to economic processes” along with the increase of a labor force, so he has to “have methods of power capable of optimizing forces, and life in general without at the same time making them more difficult to govern.”47 Wallace believes that having procreative replicants would afford a much wider, more efficient expansion of the human race to other worlds. He expresses this desire in postlapsarian language, saying that if the effort is successful: “We could storm Eden and re-take her.”48 Does this mean Wallace desires a new Beginning? Is his object-of-desire a new Eve of his own creation? The script is ambiguous on this, but Wallace’s hubris is noteworthy.

40It is known to a few characters in the movie that Tyrell had already succeeded, once, in producing a procreative replicant android. Perhaps Wallace does not appreciate, the way Lieutenant Joshi does, that in 2049, replicants exist and live and work under a certain discursive regime, a particular regime of power-knowledge that is substantially different from the one pertaining to humans. Joshi believes that success for Wallace’s project would make L.A. more difficult to govern. In Foucauldian terms, the power-knowledge strategy to which the replicants are subject, at the point the film opens, is necessarily a reproductive sort of strategy—one characterized only by alliance and law—not a procreative one. It is a system/discourse of power that indicates or is marked by the fact that the replicants’ makers, or bosses, or the human police, hold what Foucault called the “right of death” over them. Were they capable of giving birth, the apparatus of power would have to regard such beings as ensouled. It would have to regard their memories as meaningful and their projects as self-conceived and self-owned. They, the replicants, would no longer be just a subset of workers, no longer be functionaries. In that event it could no longer go uncontested that they are slaves. The old sovereign right of death could no longer be exercised so absolutely over them.

41If there were the possibility of birth and discourse of birth for the replicants, they would then be not a mere group, but a population, at which point all the strategic and productive relations of biopower would pertain to replicants, and not exclusively to humans. Furthermore, the obedience of that population would no longer be guaranteed, since offspring of replicants would not be “programmed to obey” or restricted by such a design constraint.

42In Blade Runner 2049, the protagonist K, being a replicant, desires a soul; or perhaps wishes there were at least one of his kind of being that presumably had a soul. This suggests he longs to break free from submission to human institutions, which would be an inner conflict. His desire for a soul indicates a desire to escape from the position of always already being a subject constrained within sovereign power, and to possibly interrogate possibilities for procreation and growth in a “human” style relationship to the processes of life and being.

43K also finds himself in an investigation to clarify his own identity. He does not know whether he himself is the replicant who was born to Rachel in 2019. Consequently, he does not know whether he has a soul, although he can no longer exclude this possibility. The film leaves room for doubt about this question. Nonetheless, K does possess a set of memories (although he is at the outset unsure whether or not they have been “implanted”). He can give some account of his “childhood,” as can other replicants he meets. Clearly, he has already been given knowledge of what he is—a replicant with implanted memories—and of what other beings like him are. He can thus be self-critical and self-reflective about his condition and about his existential situation. He can act with reference to, or as motivated by, those memories. He also seems to like having conversational partners around to possibly discuss both his work and his existence.

44Still, what other than that could possibly be necessary for having a soul? Why does K believe that there is something else, a required sine qua non for ensouledness, that he lacks? And why does he think that those who are born, whoever they are, would have this even though he does not? Is it ensouledness, or being-born, that is his object-of-desire, the key to being human as he perceives it? Is it about having an open-ended mind capable of questioning authority, and which does not prematurely preclude awareness of certain options in life, such as quitting one’s job or committing suicide in protest? Viewers are left in the dark about these things, and about K’s initial reasons for believing that a replicant, not born, does not have a soul. Yet, Blade Runner 2049 reveals itself as being set within a world, perhaps a dystopian vision of our own future, where for reasons that I hope to have pointed out here it is important—and a function of the prevailing discourse of power—that not everybody sees themselves as ensouled.

Notes de bas de page

1 Blade Runner 2049, directed by Denis Villeneuve, performed by Ryan Gosling, Robin Wright, Harrison Ford. USA, Warner Bros, 2017. In notes referring to scenes, the time-point and “chapter number” of the DVD release are included when possible.

2 On computer games based on Blade Runner, see Atkins, B., “Replicating the Blade Runner,” in W. Brooker (ed.), The Blade Runner Experience, London, The Wallflower Press, 2005, p. 79-91.

3 On the apocalyptic aspect of the first Blade Runner film, see Kerman, J.B., Post-Millennium Blade Runner,” in W. Brooker (ed.), The Blade Runner Experience, p. 31-39.

4 Foucault, M., Society Must be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, New York, Picador, 2003, c. 11. (Hereafter abbreviated SD). Lectures 3-4, 7, and 10-11 are particularly involved in the current analysis.

5 Director Ridley Scott apparently renamed the beings “replicants” because he found the novel’s terms overly familiar; he also extended his film’s sense of otherness by renaming Deckard’s occupation to “blade runner,” using the title of a screenplay by William S. Burroughs about smugglers of medical equipment (Bukatman, S., Blade Runner [BFI Modern Classics], London, British Film Institute, 1997, p. 17-18).

6 I am indebted to an anonymous reviewer for this observation.

7 Morton asks K: “How does it feel—killing your own kind?” K replies, “I don’t retire my own kind because we don’t run. Only you older models do.” Morton has both described the Blade Runners’ activity as “killing” replicants and asserted K’s commonality with him. But K’s response refuses both propositions, using the euphemistic, human-centric term “retire” to describe this police operation and separating himself from “older models” (Blade Runner 2049 at 9’/Ch. 1).

8 The film’s opening crawl stipulates that Niander Wallace “created a new line of replicants who obey” following “the collapse of ecosystems in the mid-2020s” (Blade Runner 2049 at 1’).

9 The child of Rachel would be the offspring of a Tyrell Nexus-8 replicant, who famously did not have obedience by design.

10 In this scene and generally in the film, K and others in the LAPD address Lt. Joshi as “Madam”; it also seems that K says “Yes, Madam” more often than necessary.

11 The visual style of Joshi’s office evokes Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. The metaphor may be extended to the characters being like neurons or parts of the city’s brain talking to each other.

12 At least, the replicants’ offspring would have souls, individually. Collectively, they would have more than a story: a history.

13 It is worth dwelling on this difference a bit more: in Blade Runner 2049 “criminality” does not appear as the same concern of the police that it did in the earlier stories. The present concern is “order” and maintaining the “wall”; yet as noted below, this barrier is quite imperceptible given the parameters of who is a subject and what is known at the outset. Yet the barriers between the police and the people, or between the capitalist and the people, are much higher than thirty years earlier. And the game is between the police and the Wallace Corporation, who have different intentions vis-à-vis Rachel’s child.

14 Blade Runner 2049 at 51’/Ch. 6.

15 On representations of race in the original Blade Runner, see Locke, B., Racial Stigma on the Hollywood Screen from World War II to the Present: The Orientalist Buddy Film, New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009; and Alessio, D., “Redemption, ‘Race’, Religion, Reality and the Far-Right: Science Fiction Film Adaptations of Philip K. Dick,” in W. Brooker (ed.), The Blade Runner Experience, p59-76.

16 To be sure, things the humans desire, such as defense of their society and human identity as a species, the increase of riches scientific and monetary, and the enhancement of human capabilities via the advance of technological instruments (these latter embodied by Wallace), differ from objectives desired by the replicants, such as procreation, self-knowledge, freedom and community. Hence, it may be significant that replicants are shown with desire for self-knowledge and other abstractions, rather than material objects, and such desire is what makes replicants seem quite human. After all, the salient point of the story-concept is that replicants are very difficult to distinguish from human beings, with the segregation between these being largely invisible, except, it seems, to the police, and maybe to the corporate interests.

17 For a fuller treatment of Foucault’s views on the development of “race theory” in European historiography, see Ferrier, S. G., “Subjects of History: Foucault on the Emergence of Conflictual Nationhood and Biopolitics,” Genealogy+Critique 6.1, 2020, p. 9, 1-46.

18 SD, p. 240.

19 Loc. cit.

20 Chloë Taylor notes that biopower leads to a problem “when [the state] wishes to wage war, kill or expose to death. How can a biopolitical state engage in these typically sovereign actions? How can it justify war and murder when its function is to foster, manage, and optimize life?” Taylor, C., Race and Racism in Foucault’s College de France Lectures,Philosophy Compass 6.11, 2011, p. 753.

21 On the differentiation of sovereign power, disciplinary power, and biopower in Foucault’s lectures, see Taylor, C., op. cit., p. 751-754.

22 This is not to overlook the aspect of Foucault’s theory which follows a Nietzschean-genealogical analysis and thus regards that historically this power was deployed on the ruling or dominant social class first. Thus, the bourgeoisie were the primary subjects of biopower at its advent in the 19th century. It was later that bio-power reached the working classes, and we would read a similar dynamic along the human-replicant axis in the film.

23 SD, p. 240-241.

24 Op. cit., p. 241.

25 Foucault, M., The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: The Will to Know [1978], trans. R. Hurley, New York, Vintage, 1990, p. 136. (Hereafter abbreviated HS)

26 See SD, p. 251-259 passim, see Taylor, op. cit., p. 754.

27 SD, p. 217.

28 See Ferrier, S., “Subjects of History,” op. cit., p. 30-33, 36-38.

29 See Lecture 10 of SD, esp. p. 215-225. In a biopolitical discourse, there could be a nation or distinctions between and among nations even outside of a political or constitutional order, as the idea of nationhood was more centered on a historical element. (The scene of the film mentioned here is at 2h 01' / Ch. 13.)

30 SD, p. 243.

31 Ibid., p. 245.

32 Ibid., p. 241.

33 Foucault summarizes that the jurists in that era were posing the question “Isn’t life the foundation of the sovereign’s right, and can the sovereign actually demand that his subjects grant him the right to exercise the power of life and death over them, or in other words, simply the power to kill them?” Loc. cit.

34 Loc. cit.

35 Loc. cit.

36 See Foucault, M., Discipline and Punish, op. cit., part 3, esp. p. 162-194.

37 The truth-value of Luv’s statement is doubtful: as noted above, replicants seem, at least on a surface level, more, not less, assimilated or integrated into earthbound human society than in Rachel’s generation.

38 Konoval, B., “From Sexuality to Governmentality: The Oedipus Complex of Michel Foucault,” Modern Intellectual History 16.1, 2019, p. 223.

39 Loc. cit.

40 Stelline states that she is “Immuno-compromised.” For this reason, she has to live within a sealed bubble, which seems to limit her opportunities for inter-subjectivity. So, like Tiresias, her direct and physical field of vision is limited, yet the knowledge she has is of the world is of unusual value and importance.

41 The scene between K and Stelline utilizes the conventions of the encounter between the protagonist and the psychologist or spiritual guru. She lives in an isolation-chamber, distant from his work headquarters, ascetically detached from events but with keen insight for minds and emotions. Other notable examples of this convention in film include Dr. Melfi in the The Sopranos and the interaction between Helen Smith and Dr. Ryan in The Man in the High Castle.

42 As one of the few characters in the film whose parentage is known and relevant, she also represents a desire for endogamy. On the bourgeois anxiety for endogamy, see Konoval, “From Sexuality to Governmentality,” p. 219.

43 The Joi algorithm seems to be a reflection of its user’s tacit wishes, feelings, and desires. See below for a further discussion of this character.

44 Perhaps because they will then consider themselves as having a “human” lifetime-experience, as opposed to Deckard’s antagonist Roy Batty, who was aware he had only been existing for three and half years; perhaps the corporation perceives a pacifying link between long memories and obedience.

45 At 16’/Ch. 2.

46 See HS, Part 4, sec. 3, p. 106-114.

47 HS, p. 141.

48 At 42’/ Ch. 4.


Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.