The Condition of Postmodernity 13 - autonomous learning

310 The experience of space and timespans, four replicants fight and kill their way back into Los Angeles,where the 'blade runner' Deckard, an expert in methods of detectingand retiring escaped replicants, is summoned to deal with them.Though tired of all the killing and violence, Deckard is forced out ofretirement and given no option by the authorities except to undertakethe task, on pain of his own reduction in status to that of 'littleperson.' Both Deckard and the replicants, therefore, exist in a similarrelation to the dominant social power in society. This relation definesa hidden bond of sympathy and understanding between the huntedand the hunter. During the film, Deckard's life is twice saved by areplicant, while he, in turn, saves the life of a fifth, a recently createdand even more sophisticated replicant called Rachel, with whomDeckard eventually falls in love.The Los Angeles to which the replicants return is hardly a utopia.The flexibility of the replicants' capacity to labour in outer space is,as we have recently come to expect, matched in Los Angeles by adecrepit landscape of deindustrialization and post-industrial decay.Empty warehouses and abandoned industrial plant drip with leakingrain. Mist swirls, rubbish piles up, infrastructures are in a state ofdisintegration that makes the pot-holes and failing bridges of contemporaryNew York look mild by comparison. Punks and scavengersroam among the garbage, stealing whatever they can. J. F. Sebastian,one of the genetic designers who will eventually provide access toTyrell for the replicants (and who himself suffers from a disease ofpremature aging called 'accelerated decrepitude') lives alone in suchan empty space (actually a deserted version of the Bradbury buildingbuilt in Los Angeles in 1893), surrounding himself with a fantasticarray of mechanical and talking toys and dolls for company. Butabove the scenes of street-level and interior chaos and decay, theresoars a high-tech world of zooming transporters, of advertising ('achance to buy again in a golden land,' proclaims one advertisementcirculating in the sky of mist and pouring rain), of familiar images ofcorporate power (Pan Am, surprisingly still in business in 2019,Coca-Cola, Budweiser, etc.), and the massive pyramidal building ofthe Tyrell Corporation that dominates one part of the city. TheTyrell Corporation specializes in genetic engineering. 'Commerce,'says Tyrell, 'more human than human, that's our business.' Opposedto these images of overwhelming corporate power, however, is anotherstreet-level scene of seething small-scale production. The citystreets are full of all sorts of people - Chinese and Asiatics seempredominant, and it is the smiling face of a Japanese woman thatadvertises the Coca-Cola. A 'city-speak' language has emerged, ahybrid of Japanese, German, Spanish, English, etc. Not only has theTime and space in the postmodern cinema 311'third world' come to Los Angeles even more than at present, butsigns of third world systems of labour organization and informallabour practices are everywhere. The scales for a genetically producedsnake are produced in a tiny workshop, and human eyes are producedin another (both run by Orientals), indicating intricate relationsof sub-contracting between highly disaggregated firms as wellas with the Tyrell Corporation itself. The sense of the city at streetlevel is chaotic in every respect. Architectural designs are a postmodernmish-mash - the Tyrell Corporation is housed in somethingthat looks like a replica of an Egyptian pyramid, Greek and Romancolumns mix in the streets with references to Mayan, Chinese,Oriental, Victorian and contemporary shopping mall architecture.Simulacra are everywhere. Genetically reproduced owls fly, and snakesslither across the shoulders of Zhora, a genetically reproduced replicant,as she performs in a cabaret that looks like a perfect 1920simitation. The chaos of signs, of competing significations and messages,suggests a condition of fragmentation and uncertainty at streetlevel that emphasizes many of those facets of postmodern aestheticsthat were described in Part 1. The aesthetic of Blade Runner, saysBruno, is the result 'of recycling, fusion of levels, discontinuoussignifiers, explosion of boundaries, and erosion.' Yet there is also anoverwhelming sense of some hidden organizing power - the TyrellCorporation, the authorities who commission Deckard to his taskwithout offering any choice, the rapid descent of the powers of lawand order when necessary to establish street control. The chaosis tolerated, precisely because it seems so unthreatening to overallcontrol.Images of creative destruction are everywhere. They are mostpowerfully present, of course, in the figure of the replicants themselves,created with marvellous powers only to be prematurely destroyed,and most certainly to be 'retired' should they actually engagetheir own feelings and try to develop their own capacities in theirown way. The images of decay everywhere in the landscape reinforceexactly that same structure of feeling. The sense of shattering andfragmentation in social life is highlighted in an incredible sequence inwhich Deckard pursues one of the women replicants, Zhora, throughthe crowded, incoherent, and labyrinth-like spaces of the city. Finallytracking her down in an arcade full of stores exhibiting theircommodities, he shoots her in the back as she goes crashing thoughlayer after layer of glass doors and windows, dying as she sendsshards of glass flying in a million and one directions in the finalplunge through a huge window.The search for the replicants depends upon a certain technique of