#more nuance than 'their brain makes them ontologically evil'

[spitblaze]

Casual ableist language is absolutely an issue worth addressing but maybe instead of focusing on people saying 'stupid' and 'idiot' we could look at how (non-psychotic) people throw around 'delulu' and then are shocked when people who have delusions talk about them, and people on YouTube and tiktok and really just in real life consistently using 'psychopath' and 'narcissist' as shorthand for 'evil person'

#spitblaze says things #i am not talking about narcissism in the classical 'self obsessed/self infatuated' sense #i am talking about it in the NPD way that people think turns you into an unremorseful gaslighting abuser #not to say people cannot suffer abuse at the hands of ppl with npd. just the assertion that ppl with that are inherently abusive is bullshi #also psychopqthy hasnt even been a valid dx since at least the latest edition of the dsm #its almost like ppl are realizing that saying 'this guy has Evil Remorseless Killer Disorder' is a fucked up thing to do and maybe has #more nuance than 'their brain makes them ontologically evil' #shocker. i know #ableism

[jkachinsky-criticalpractice]

Assignment 7

             While many pieces of science fiction deal with androids (especially “evil” ones) which look and can to some extent act entirely human, Blade Runner is relatively unique in making these androids physically indistinguishable from human beings. One of the absolute first bits of exposition that the movie gives the viewer is the set of ways in which replicants differ from humans. They are faster and stronger, but do not possess the same emotions. The issue for blade runners, of course, whose primary task is to weed these androids out of the population, is using these differences to distinguish replicants from “real” humans. In most stories, the issue of humanity is neatly reduced to biology- if you cut an android, it does not bleed. Likewise, we can tell humans from animals on the basis of biology; of clear physiological differences. Yet replicants do bleed, and when they are “retired”, they take on injuries, fall, and die exactly like humans do. They are possessed of superhuman strength and speed, but these are attributes which are easily concealed or engineered away- the only way to tell a replicant from a human, Blade Runner tells us, is to administer a Voight-Kampff test, which deliberately provokes emotional reactions in order to reveal how they differ from those of a human.

             But even this test is not a perfect barometer of humanity. A replicant that is allowed to live for too long can develop emotionally to the point where it can pass a Voight-Kampff test, necessitating an artificially shortened lifespan. And a replicant equipped with memories (even memories not its own) of a normal human childhood immediately becomes far more difficult to identify than a normal replicant. Beyond that, we certainly never see a replicant without any emotions at all, nor many emotions that no replicant ever displays in the movie. We see them happy, we see them upset, we see them desperate, and we see them love each other and humans alike. It takes dozens of questions in a controlled environment to distinguish the minutest of differences in their responses to emotional provocation, differences we know can disappear after only about four years (the length of a replicants inbuilt lifespan). Early on, Deckard is asked if he has ever mistakenly “retired” a human, a question which he easily dismisses. This inquiry, however, can come to haunt the viewer. Knowing the vast neurological variation in humans, one is led to wonder if there are any natural-born human beings who would fail the Voight-Kampff test. When the sole meaningful criterion for humanity (and thus the right to life) is the minutest nuance of your emotional response, one begins to wonder how many mentally ill, developmentally disabled, or brain damaged people have at one point or another been executed for failing the critical test. And more than that, it’s common knowledge that human four-year-olds have brains, and resultantly psychologies and emotions, that are wildly different than those of adults. We can say that four-year-olds are still human because we know that they will grow into psychologically “normal” adults, but the movie tells us quite explicitly that replicants also tend to develop into passable human mindsets.

             Blade Runner, as a text, seems at first to pose the question, “What makes a human different from a machine?” A serious analysis, however, makes it clear that the only answer can be “nothing”. In Blade Runner’s future, technology is so advanced that machines can be engineered to be empirically identical to humans, except for the very engineering that is their origin. But at the same time, the technology for artificially creating or genetically engineering humans is already developing now. Any line drawn can be easily crossed or erased by some hypothetical technology, leaving only an abstract sense of ontology. We accept that replicants are not human (and conversely, that humans are not replicants, or otherwise machines) only due to an ingrained and constructed division; a cultural sense of human exceptionalism with no real bearing on reality. Blade Runner is one piece of media that, in seeking this boundary, only proves its nonexistence.