This implies that they had memories that were emotional and messy. Freysa tells K that many others took themselves for the chosen one. The political miracle may already have taken place. However, the risk is that this simple inversion of the dominant political ideology maintains its dualism without subverting it. Thesis 3: to be a subject you must come from the dominated class and give your life for a cause decided by and led by anotherĤ) Memory. K later seems to get indoctrinated into acting on the Freysa’s that giving one’s life for a good cause is the most human thing a replicant can do, and so the most accessible way to become a subject. K obeys, until he understands that disobedience is an option. Political uprising is another mode of becoming ensouled, and Freysa’s army of replicants waiting for their miracle-born messiah are already revolting against their programming (unlike her, who is presumably one of the free nexus-8s). Thesis 2: to be a subject you must bear witness to and be faithful to a “miracle”.ģ) Resistance and rebellion. It takes a miracle to break the world, but it also requires a subject who is faithful to that miracle.Īntagonists like Joshi and Wallace (the mad hubristic creator of the nexus-9s) do not see the possibility of a miracle, but see the potentially world-changing event reductively in terms of political management or technological innovation. He declares that K and his line, the re-asimoved obedient nexus-9 series, have no compunction about killing their own kind because they “have never witnessed a miracle”. Another response is suggested even before this ideological doctrine is stated, by Sapper Morton, the replicant that K “retires” in the incipit to the film. Thesis 1: to be a subject you must come from the dominant classĢ) Faithful to a miracle. This dualistic ruling ideology is spelled out again and again in the film, with its pedagogy of explicitation and repetition. This discovery threatens to “break the world”, as Robin Wright’s character Joshi phrases it, as the world in place is based on a Cartesian (and Christian) dualism separating made replicants from born humans. This implicit hypothesis will be falsified by the discovery that the replicant Rachael from the original BLADE RUNNER gave birth to a child, presumably by that fact both replicant and ensouled. It contains the presupposition that replicants cannot reproduce, but must always be made. This is the official doxa and forms part of the ideology that justifies the world order. The protagonist, K, gives one answer near the beginning of the film, endorsing the thesis that to have a soul one must be born, not made. The film gives several answers to this.ġ) Dominant class. The film poses the question of whether an artificial intelligence can have a soul, and of how this could come about. THE RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE REPLICANTS would be a soulless film indeed. Unlike some commentators I do not wish to see a sequel recounting the ascension of the replicant “messiah” to the head of an uprise, in the disastrous manner of the planet of the apes franchise. The new film’s positive force is to relate the question of being a subject to the process of subjectivation, or of soul-making, and to give an enlarged typology of these processes of subjectivation. My impression is that the new film is much more explicit about some of the issues raised by the first film, and even about its enigmas, which are no longer simply suggested but explicitly discussed. As explained in my last post, I greatly enjoyed BLADE RUNNER 2049 but I do not share the opinion that it is somehow “surpasses” the original film.
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