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Technodemons of the Digital Self 229“human” in our technologic culture and reality, he is not able to cast it offas outrightly Satanic. Rather, the androids are demons for Dick – this figureof a reified, cold and alienated man-machine both obsesses and inspireshim. In his writings during the 1970s, he revises his earlier vision of machineas the modern face of the devil. 122 Now he thought that he shouldhave been talking about masks, rather than faces; the situation is morecomplex, and a troubling ambivalence is more accurate than direct adversity.The relationship is reversible: the machine can be a mask for the humanas well as the human can mask something mechanical. Age-old mythologycan also be applied to these contemporary forms of hybrid selves;Dick calls for recycling, where a Pietà motif, for example, could be appliedto machines. 123CINEMATIC TECHNODEMONS: BLADE RUNNERHere’s to the crazy ones.The misfits.The rebels.The troublemakers.The round pegs in the square holes.[…]We make tools for these kinds of people.While some see them as the crazy ones,we see a genius. […]Think different.– Apple Computer, Inc., advertisement 1997Recycling the mythical motifs is, in a way, exactly what the director RidleyScott and his team did as they adapted Dick’s novel into a science fictionfilm. Blade Runner is loaded with traces from various mythological – oftenalso demonological – intertexts. The emotional coldness of the androids isback-pedalled, leaving more room for the existential anguish (and love interests)of these “replicants.” 124 Some of these changes are motivated bycommercial Hollywood interests, some are outcomes of several people puttingin months of labour to produce a working script from Dick’s novel –which had left quite a few open questions in its plot structure. The rationaleof the androids escaping and getting back to earth, for example, was not122 See Dick, “Man, Android, and Machine” (1976; Dick 1995, 213).123 Dick, “The Android and the Human” (1972; Dick 1995, 206-7).124 Ridley Scott: “The term android is a dangerous one, undermined by certain genericassumptions. […] I didn’t want Blade Runner to be premonitory of android at all. Becausethen people would think that his film was about robots, when in fact it isn’t.”Screenwriter David Peoples got the term “replicant” from microbiology and the practiceof cell cloning. (Sammon 1996, 61.) Replicant also carries the various connotations of theverb “to replace,” the threatening possibility of a supplement usurping the place of theoriginal.
230Demonic Texts and Textual DemonsDying Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) from Blade Runner (dir. Ridley Scott).© Warner Bros., 1982.clear; this future earth is, after all, a dreary, radioactive place everyone elseis trying to get away from. 125 Screenwriter Hampton Fancher and RidleyScott highlighted accelerated decrepitude as an answer; with their beauty,superhuman abilities and their intense mortality the replicants of BladeRunner became embodiments of their maker’s motto – More Human ThanHuman. 126 The climactic sequence between Roy Batty, an escaped replicant,125 Dick suggested that androids were just escaping from servitude (DA, 161). The titlequestion of the novel – Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep – proposes that maybeartificial humans might have their “artificial dreams” (a real sheep is a status symbol inDick’s novel). Deckard’s question “Do you think androids have souls?” and his final acceptancethat even “artificial” lives have their meaning and value suggests an uncertainmove away from essentialism and towards constructivism in relation to human identity.126 The four year life span is mentioned in Dick’s novel, but it is never a central problemfor Dick’s androids (DA, 173). The motto for Tyrell Corporation (corresponding tothe Rosen Association in Dick’s novel) echoes More Than Human (1953), an importantscience fiction novel by Theodore Sturgeon. Sturgeon addresses the question of “super-
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TAMPERE STUDIES INLITERATURE AND TE
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Tampere Studies in Literature and T
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ments, and also such further lines
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IllustrationsCover: “Possessed Re
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The BeginningsAnd Jesus asked him,
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The Beginnings 3mons form an import
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The Beginnings 5negative, demonic a
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The Beginnings 7chapter four), but
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The Beginnings 13The History of the
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The Beginnings 15emphasised that su
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The Beginnings 17turalism,” but i
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The Beginnings 19the materials I ha
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1. The Ancestry of the DemonicÑH.
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The Ancestry of the Demonic 37The f
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The Ancestry of the Demonic 43Chris
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The Ancestry of the Demonic 51tween
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2. The Demonic in the SelfBut ancie
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The Demonic in the Self 55Individua
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The Demonic in the Self 57should be
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The Demonic in the Self 61A number
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The Demonic in the Self 65the nethe
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The Demonic in the Self 69influence
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The Demonic in the Self 71LEADER:Yo
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The Demonic in the Self 73Particula
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The Demonic in the Self 75NIETZSCHE
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The Demonic in the Self 77ing into
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The Demonic in the Self 79Nietzsche
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3. Unravelling the Demonic TextThe
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Unravelling the Demonic Text 83in o
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PART II
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114Demonic Texts and Textual Demons
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The EpilogueIf there are answers to
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BibliographyA note on this bibliogr
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Index2001: A Space Odyssey; 207abje
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