Note on this edition: this is an electronic version of the 1999 book ...

Technodemons of the Digital Self 221pretations for this world, postcognitive questions begin with questioningthis world, its unity, and the unity of the experiencing self. 83 Dick relates thepostmodern theme of the individual’s construction of reality (visible in thenumerous metafictional features of postmodern literature) with moral andtheological concerns. 84 This can be approached by analysing the demonicfeatures in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968; “DA”), the novelthat became later an important influence on cyberpunk in its movie version,Blade Runner (1982; directed by Ridley Scott).Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep approaches the problematic aspectsof postmodern agency by building an opposition between “authentic”humans and androids, the artificial man-machines. Natural humans are born,androids are built. Because the person may or may not know that he or sheis an android, the question becomes more complicated at the level of characterpsychology. The protagonist, Rick Deckard, is a police detective andbounty hunter: his task is to locate and “retire” (kill) any escaped androids.“You and I, all the bounty hunters – we stand between the Nexus-6 [themost evolved type of android] and mankind, a barrier which keeps the twodistinct,” asserts another bounty hunter to Deckard. 85 To be able to makethe distinction, there has to be a viable criteria for differentiation. The ownersof the robotic slaves desire their servants to be as identical to humans aspossible; the company building androids complies with the demand. 86 The“Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test” is designed to identify the essential streak ofotherness – the androids are intelligent (more intelligent, even, than mosthumans), but they lack capacity to feel empathy. They are perfect postmodernnarcissists, self-sufficient and unable to violate the boundaries of theirself through emotional identification.The romantic, isolated individual that confronted his demonic conflictsin Frankenstein reaches a new stage in Dick’s novel. It is no more the suppressionof conflicting emotions that is the problem. Rather, the “androidization”that Dick examines with his demonic man-machines articulates the“lack of proper feeling,” the “schizoid” and cold personality type that Dicksaw as becoming increasingly common. He was not really worried that machineswere becoming more animate, more human; what concerned him wasthat humans were becoming more “inanimate,” reasonable, obedient andpredictable elements in manipulative systems. This blurring of boundariesclearly both fascinated and terrified Dick; he returned to it repeatedly in hiswritings.And – here is a thought not too pleasing – as the external world becomesmore animate, we may find that we – the so-called humans – are becom-83 McHale 1987, 1 (McHale quotes Dick Higgins’s A Dialectic of Centuries).84 The awareness of “real” becoming “unreal” (in the context of fantasy, science fictionand postmodern metafiction) is discussed in Brooke-Rose 1981/1986.85 DA, 124.86DA, 47.