social constructivist perspective

[Turtoni]

Thought this may interest tooly:
http://www.coe.uga.edu/epltt/SocialConstructivism.htm

Social Constructivism
By
Beaumie Kim
What is Social Constructivism?
Social constructivism emphasizes the importance of culture and context
in understanding what occurs in society and constructing knowledge based on
this understanding (Derry, 1999; McMahon, 1997). This perspective is closely
associated with many contemporary theories, most notably the developmental
theories of Vygotsky and Bruner, and Bandura's social cognitive theory
(Shunk, 2000).

Assumptions of Social Constructivism

Social constructivism is based on specific assumptions about reality,
knowledge, and learning. To understand and apply models of instruction that
are rooted in the perspectives of social constructivists, it is important to
know the premises that underlie them.

Reality: Social constructivists believe that reality is constructed
through human activity. Members of a society together invent the properties
of the world (Kukla, 2000). For the social constructivist, reality cannot be
discovered: it does not exist prior to its social invention.

Knowledge: To social constructivists, knowledge is also a human
product, and is socially and culturally constructed (Ernest, 1999; Gredler,
1997; Prat & Floden, 1994). Individuals create meaning through their
interactions with each other and with the environment they live in.

Learning: Social constructivists view learning as a social process. It
does not take place only within an individual, nor is it a passive
development of behaviors that are shaped by external forces (McMahon, 1997).
Meaningful learning occurs when individuals are engaged in social
activities.

Intersubjectivity of Social Meanings

Intersubjectivity is a shared understanding among individuals whose
interaction is based on common interests and assumptions that form the
ground for their communication (Rogoff, 1990). Communications and
interactions entail socially agreed-upon ideas of the world and the social
patterns and rules of language use (Ernest, 1999). Construction of social
meanings, therefore, involves intersubjectivity among individuals. Social
meanings and knowledge are shaped and evolve through negotiation within the
communicating groups (Gredler, 1997; Prawat & Floden, 1994). Any personal
meanings shaped through these experiences are affected by the
intersubjectivity of the community to which the people belong.

Intersubjectivity not only provides the grounds for communication but
also supports people to extend their understanding of new information and
activities among the group members (Rogoff, 1990; Vygotsky, 1987). Knowledge
is derived from interactions between people and their environments and
resides within cultures (Shunk, 2000; McMahon, 1997). The construction of
knowledge is also influenced by the intersubjectivity formed by cultural and
historical factors of the community (Gredler, 1997; Prawat & Floden, 1994).
When the members of the community are aware of their intersubjective
meanings, it is easier for them to understand new information and activities
that arise in the community.

Social Context for Learning

Some social constructivists discuss two aspects of social context that
largely affect the nature and extent of the learning (Gredler, 1997; Wertch,
1991):

Historical developments inherited by the learner as a member of a
particular culture. Symbol systems, such as language, logic, and
mathematical systems, are learned throughout the learner's life. These
symbol systems dictate how and what is learned.

The nature of the learner's social interaction with knowledgeable
members of the society is important. Without the social interaction with
more knowledgeable others, it is impossible to acquire social meaning of
important symbol systems and learn how to use them. Young children develop
their thinking abilities by interacting with adults.

General Perspectives of Social Constructivism on Learning

Social constructivists see as crucial both the context in which
learning occurs and the social contexts that learners bring to their
learning environment. There are four general perspectives that inform how we
could facilitate the learning within a framework of social constructivism
(Gredler, 1997):

Cognitive tools perspective: Cognitive tools perspective focuses on
the learning of cognitive skills and strategies. Students engage in those
social learning activities that involve hands-on project-based methods and
utilization of discipline-based cognitive tools (Gredler, 1997; Prawat &
Folden, 1994). Together they produce a product and, as a group, impose
meaning on it through the social learning process.

Idea-based social constructivism: Idea-based social constructivism
sets education's priority on important concepts in the various disciplines
(e.g. part-whole relations in mathematics, photosynthesis in science, and
point of view in literature, Gredler, 1997, p.59; Prawat, 1995; Prawat &
Folden, 1994). These "big ideas" expand learner vision and become important
foundations for learners' thinking and on construction of social meaning
(Gredler, 1997).

Pragmatic or emergent approach: Social constructivists with this
perspective assert that the implementation of social constructivism in class
should be emergent as the need arises (Gredler, 1997). Its proponents hold
that knowledge, meaning, and understanding of the world can be addressed in
the classroom from both the view of individual learner and the collective
view of the entire class (Cobb, 1995; Gredler, 1997).

Transactional or situated cognitive perspectives: This perspective
focuses on the relationship between the people and their environment. Humans
are a part of the constructed environment (including social relationships);
the environment is in turn one of the characteristics that constitutes the
individual (Bredo, 1994; Gredler, 1997). When a mind operates, its owner is
interacting with the environment. Therefore, if the environment and social
relationships among group members change, the tasks of each individual also
change (Bredo, 1994; Gredler, 1997). Learning thus should not take place in
isolation from the environment.

Social Constructivism and Instructional Models

Instructional models based on the social constructivist perspective
stress the need for collaboration among learners and with practitioners in
the society (Lave & Wenger, 1991; McMahon, 1997). Lave and Wenger (1991)
assert that a society's practical knowledge is situated in relations among
practitioners, their practice, and the social organization and political
economy of communities of practice. For this reason, learning should involve
such knowledge and practice (Lave & Wenger, 1991; Gredler, 1997). Social
constructivist approaches can include reciprocal teaching, peer
collaboration, cognitive apprenticeships, problem-based instruction,
webquests, anchored instruction and other methods that involve learning with
others (Shunk, 2000).

And this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism

Social constructionism
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Jump to: navigation, search
Social constructionism is a school of thought introduced into sociology by
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann with their 1966 book, The Social
Construction of Reality. The focus of social constructionism is to uncover
the ways in which individuals and groups participate in the creation of
their perceived reality. As an approach, it involves looking at the ways
social phenomena are created, institutionalized, and made into tradition by
humans. Socially constructed reality is seen as an ongoing, dynamic process;
reality is re-produced by people acting on their interpretations and their
knowledge of it. Social constructionism is dialectically opposed to
essentialism, the belief that there are defining transhistorical essences
independent of conscious beings that determine the categorical structure of
reality.

Within social constructionist thought, a social construction, or social
construct, is an idea which may appear to be natural and obvious to those
who accept it, but in reality is an invention or artifact of a particular
culture or society. The implication is that social constructs are in some
sense human choices rather than laws resulting from divine will or nature.
This is not usually taken to imply a radical anti-determinism, however.

Some ideas which have been famously described as social constructs include:
race, class, gender, sexuality, morality, mental illness and even reality.
Less controversial but equally important social constructs are languages,
games, money, shares, nations, governments, universities, corporations, and
other institutions.

Contents
[hide]
a.. 1 Early precursors to social constructionism
b.. 2 Social constructionism in sociology and cultural studies
a.. 2.1 Social constructionism and postmodernism
c.. 3 Degrees of social construction
a.. 3.1 Weak social constructionism
b.. 3.2 Strong social constructionism
a.. 3.2.1 Criticisms of strong social constructionism
b.. 3.2.2 Radical constructivism
d.. 4 The anatomy of a social constructionist analysis
e.. 5 Notes
f.. 6 External links
g.. 7 See also

[edit]
Early precursors to social constructionism
Antonio Gramsci's theory of hegemony both prefigures and enriches current
social constructionist discourse. He describes hegemony as that point when
ideology begins to be seen as natural and inevitable.

In the tradition of sociology of knowledge, what seems real to members of a
social class arises from the situation of the class, such as the capitalist
or working classes, especially with respect to the economic fundamentals
which affect the class. According to the theories advanced by Karl Mannheim,
who formulated the classic theories of sociology of knowledge, intellectuals
occupy a special position which is to some extent free of the intellectual
blinders imposed by the social position of other classes.

[edit]
Social constructionism in sociology and cultural studies
Berger and Luckman's work has been influential in the sociology of
knowledge, including the sociology of science, where Karin Knorr-Cetina,
Bruno Latour, Barry Barnes, Steve Woolgar and others use the ideas of social
constructionism to relate supposedly objective facts to processes of social
construction, with the goal of showing that human subjectivity imposes
itself on those facts we take to be objective, not solely the other way
around. A particularly provocative title in this line of thought is Andrew
Pickering's Constructing Quarks: A Sociological History of Particle Physics.

An illustrative example of social constructionist thought at work is,
following the work of Sigmund Freud and Émile Durkheim, religion. According
to this line of thought, the basis for religion is rooted in our psyche, in
a need to see some purpose in life. A given religion, then, does not show us
some hidden aspect of objective reality, but has rather been constructed
according to social and historical processes according to human needs. Peter
L. Berger wrote an entire book exploring the social construction of
religion, The Sacred Canopy.

[edit]
Social constructionism and postmodernism
Social constructionism can be seen as a source of the postmodern movement,
and has been influential in the field of cultural studies. Some have gone so
far as to attribute the rise of cultural studies (the cultural turn) to
social constructionism.

Within the social constructionist strand of postmodernism, the concept of
socially constructed reality stresses the on-going mass-building of
worldviews by individuals in dialectical interaction with society at any
time. The numerous realities so formed comprise, according to this view, the
imagined worlds of human social existence and activity, gradually
crystallised by habit into institutions propped up by language conventions,
given ongoing legitimation by mythology, religion and philosophy, maintained
by therapies and socialisation, and subjectively internalised by upbringing
and education to become part of the identity of social citizens.

[edit]
Degrees of social construction
Though social constructionism contains a diverse array of theories and
beliefs, it can generally be divided into two camps: Weak social
constructionism and strong social constructionism. The two differ mainly in
degree, where weak social constructionists tend to see some underlying
objective factual elements to reality, and strong social constructionists
see everything as, in some way, a social construction. This is not to say
that strong social constructionists (or weak social constructionists, for
that matter) necessarily see the world as ontologically unreal, that the raw
stuff of reality exists only insofar as some group of people believes that
it exists, but that our epistemological access to it to some degree filters
and sorts the world into our set of social constructions.

[edit]
Weak social constructionism
Linguist Steven Pinker (2002, p. 202) writes that "some categories really
are social constructions: they exist only because people tacitly agree to
act as if they exist. Examples include money, tenure, citizenship,
decorations for bravery, and the presidency of the United States."

In a similar vein, Stanley Fish (Fish 1996) has suggested that the
baseball's "balls and strikes" are social constructions (Hacking 1999, pp.
29-31).

Both Fish and Pinker agree that the sorts of objects indicated here can be
described as part of what John Searle calls "social reality". In particular,
they are, in Searle's terms, ontologically subjective but epistemologically
objective. Informally, they require human practices to sustain their
existence, but they have an effect that is (basically) universally agreed
upon. The disagreement lies in whether this category should be called
"socially constructed". Hacking (1997) argues that it should not.
Furthermore, it is not clear that authors who write "social construction"
analyses ever mean "social construction" in Pinker's sense. If they never
do, then Pinker (probably among others) has misunderstood the point of a
social constructionist argument.

[edit]
Strong social constructionism
"Science is a highly elaborated set of conventions brought forth by one
particular culture (our own) in the circumstances of one particular
historical period; thus it is not, as the standard view would have it, a
body of knowledge and testable conjecture concerning the real world. It is a
discourse, devised by and for one specialized interpretive community, under
terms created by the complex net of social circumstance, political opinion,
economic incentive and ideological climate that constitutes the ineluctable
human environment of the scientist. Thus, orthodox science is but one
discursive community among the many that now exist and that have existed
historically. Consequently its truth claims are irreducibly
self-referential, in that they can be upheld only by appeal to the standards
that define the scientific community and distinguish it from other social
formations." (Gross and Levitt, Higher Superstition)

[edit]
Criticisms of strong social constructionism
Scientists and historians generally do not attempt to refute the idea that
most or all of the world is a social construction. The entire idea is widely
dismissed as a disguised version of solipsism. Some literary critics do
think it is worth refuting this position. A few attempts have been made to
refute the idea that everything is socially constructed. However, it is not
clear that anyone has seriously claimed that everything is a social
construct. (Hacking 1999, pp. 24-25). Consider The Social Construction of
Reality. In the introduction, Berger and Luckmann clarify that they are not
investigating "reality" in any deep philosophical sense, only what the
common man takes as real on a day-to-day basis.

[edit]
Radical constructivism
Radical constructivism is concerned with showing how social processes
influence the very content of technology, for example, what it means for a
technology to be deemed working. It draws heavily upon the sociology of
science and claims that the meaning of the technology, including facts about
its working, are themselves social constructs. This latter view is opposed
to any conception of technological determinism.

Ernst von Glasersfeld is the most prominent proponent of radical
constructivism. He attempts to show that knowledge is the self-organized
cognitive process of the human brain. That is, the process of constructing
knowledge regulates itself, and since knowledge is a construct rather than a
compilation of empirical data, it is not possible to know the degree to
which knowledge reflects upon an ontological reality.

[edit]
The anatomy of a social constructionist analysis
Social construction" may mean many things to many people. Hacking, having
examined a wide range of books and articles with titles of the form "The
social construction of X" or "Constructing X", argues that when something is
said to be "socially constructed", this is shorthand for at least the
following two claims:

(0) In the present state of affairs, X is taken for granted; X appears to
be inevitable. (Hacking 1999, p. 12)
(1) X need not have existed, or need not be at all as it is. X, or X as it
is at present, is not determined by the nature of things; it is not
inevitable. (Hacking 1999, p. 6. Emphasis added.) [1]
Hacking adds that the following claims are also often, though not always,
implied by the use of the phrase "social construction":

(2) X is quite bad as it is.
(3) We would be much better off if X were done away with, or at least
radically transformed. (Hacking 1999, p. 6)
Thus a claim that gender is socially constructed probably means that gender,
as currently understood, is not an inevitable result of biology, but highly
contingent on social and historical processes. In addition, depending on who
is making the claim, it may mean that our current understanding of gender is
harmful, and should be modified or eliminated, to the extent possible.

According to Hacking, "social construction" claims are not always clear
about exactly what isn't "inevitable", or exactly what "should be done away
with." Consider a hypothetical claim that quarks are "socially constructed".
On one reading, this means that quarks themselves are not "inevitable" or
"determined by the nature of things." On another reading, this means that
our idea (or conceptualization, or understanding) of quarks is not
"inevitable" or "determined by the nature of things". [2] Hacking is much
more sympathetic to the second reading than the first (Hacking 1999, pp.
68-70). Furthermore, he argues that, if the second reading is taken, there
need not always be a conflict between saying that quarks are "socially
constructed" and saying that they are "real" (Hacking 1999, pp. 29-30).

The stronger first position, however, is more-or-less an inevitable
correlary of Willard Van Orman Quine's concept of ontological relativity,
and particularly of the Duhem-Quine thesis. That is, according to Quine and
like-minded thinkers (who are not usually characterized as social
contructionists) there is no single privileged explanatory framework that is
closest to "the things themselves"-every theory has merit only in proportion
to its explanatory power.

As we step from the physical word to the world of human beings, "social
construction" analyses can become more complex. Hacking briefly examines
Helčne Moussa's analysis of the social construction of "women refugees"
(Hacking 1999, pp. 9-10). According to him, Moussa's argument has several
pieces, some of which may be implicit:

1.. Canadian citizens' idea of "the woman refugee" is not inevitable, but
historically contingent. (Thus the idea or category "the woman refugee" can
be said to be "socially constructed".)
2.. Women coming to Canada to seek asylum are profoundly affected by the
category of "the woman refugee". Among other things, if a woman does not
"count" as a "woman refugee" according to the law, she may be deported, and
forced to return to very difficult conditions in her homeland.
3.. Such women may modify their behavior, and perhaps even their attitudes
towards themselves, in order to gain the benefits of being classified as a
"woman refugee".
Hacking suggests that this third part of the analysis, the "interaction"
between a socially constructed category and the individuals that are
actually or potentially included in that category, is present in many
"social construction" analyses involving types of human beings.

[edit]
Notes
[1] Numbering begins with 0 for consistency with Hacking's usage.

[2] The distinction between "quarks themselves" and "our idea (or
conceptualization, or understanding) of quarks" will undoubtedly trouble
some with a philosophical bent. Hacking's distinction is based on an
intuitive metaphysics, with a split between things out in the world, on one
hand, and ideas thereof in our minds, on the other. Hacking is less
advocating a serious, particular metaphysics than suggesting a useful way to
analyze claims about "social construction". See (Hacking 1999, pp. 21-24).

[tooly]

I am reading this, absorbing. Thank you for your generous offering.

In the meantime, I have also been thinking, and I have one single thing I'd
like to offer to the subject.

"KILLER BEES."

Think about it. Thanks. Will return later.

[Turtoni]

"tooly" <rd...@bellsouth.net> wrote in message
news:GR5gf.9253$i7....@bignews2.bellsouth.net...

>I am reading this, absorbing. Thank you for your generous offering.
>
> In the meantime, I have also been thinking, and I have one single thing
> I'd like to offer to the subject.
>
> "KILLER BEES."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Africanized_bee

> Think about it. Thanks. Will return later.

"In central and southern Africa, bees have had to defend themselves against
other aggressive insects, as well as honey badgers, an animal that also will
destroy hives if the bees are not sufficiently defensive. In addition, there
was formerly no tradition of beekeeping, only bee robbing. When one wanted
honey, one would seek out a bee tree and kill the colony, or at least steal
its honey. The colony most likely to survive either animal or human attacks
was the fiercest one. Thus the African bee has been naturally selected for
ferocity."

[Roger Johansson]

Turtoni wrote:

> Knowledge: To social constructivists, knowledge is also a human
> product, and is socially and culturally constructed (Ernest, 1999; Gredler,
> 1997; Prat & Floden, 1994). Individuals create meaning through their
> interactions with each other and with the environment they live in.
>
> Learning: Social constructivists view learning as a social process. It

Sounds like a new ideology created to justify the informal social
learning, which teaches different stuff than what we learn in school.

We learn the modern rational views in school, we learn the inherited
cultural patterns through social contact.

We are trying to abolish these old traditions from the stone age.
Social constructivists are very close to excusing and justifying the
old creationist traditions.

--
Roger J

[Turtoni]

"According to Cornelius (1996), four main theoretical traditions have
dominated research in emotions starting in the 1800's with Darwin's
observations of emotion in man and animals. These traditions are not
mutually exclusive and many researchers incorporate multiple perspectives in
their work.
a.. The Darwinian perspective
First articulated in the late 19th century by Charles Darwin, emotions
evolved via natural expression and therefore have cross-culturally universal
counterparts. Most research in this area has focused on physical displays of
emotion including body language of animals and facial expressions in humans.
Paul Ekman's work on basic emotions is representative of the Darwinian
tradition.

a.. The Jamesian perspective
William James in the 1800's believed that emotional experience is largely
due to the experience of bodily changes. These changes might be visceral,
postural, or facially expressive.

a.. The cognitive perspective
Many researchers believe that thought and in particular cognitive appraisal
of the environment is an underlying causal explanation for emotional
processes.

a.. The social constructivist perspective

Social constructivism emphasizes the importance of culture and context in
understanding what occurs in society and constructing knowledge based on

this understanding (Derry, 1999; McMahon, 1997). Much current research in
emotion is based on the social constructivist view.

a.. The neurological tradition (Plutchik, 1980)
This tradition draws on recent work on neurophysiology and neuroanatomy to
explain the nature of emotions. LeDoux (1986) reviews relatively current
knowledge on the neurophysiology of emotion."

So "much current research in emotion is based on the social constructivist
view."

Anybody have any thoughts about that point?

[tooly]

a rebuttal.

Well, I've read about 3/4 of this [the posting below] closely...and scanned
from thereon...and to be honest, I'm not seeing anything all that new? How
is most of the first part of this different from the established,
synthesizing with the anti-established to create a new establishment?
Cultures collide, synthesize, creating a new synthesized culture. Throw a
bunch together in the same pot, and over time, it all becomes a single stew;
but we now see some combinations are more problematic than others...and
there is the question of dominance and recessive. Does a recessive culture
have the right to defend itself from a dominant culture, if they percieve
such not to be about better or worse? One cannot simply subject viewpoint
to some things without altering the concreteness of the prior state. Drugs
are good example [ie, one cannot really understand the drug culture through
that subjectivity as construcvism seems to argue, without great risk of
succumbing to that culture altogether]. Once you go black, you never go
back [sic...:) jokingly, another possibility].

Prurient qualities for another example...say pornography...has a great
natural appeal. Given it's freedom to work in a society, it can pretty much
'take over'. There is a complexity to cultures, whereby, the very best and
finest any given culture might express, it could also exist upon the most
fragile conveyance based upon centuries of succinct psychic and social
interactions. Throw all into a single multicultural stew...and it could be
that the finest and best of all human culture is lost...and the reduced
single version nothing redeemable of value to anyone [save perhaps the
intellectuals, ha]. So, do cultures, having understanding beforehand, just
as your social constructionists argue, work to prevent certain 'synthesis'
to take place [thereby practicing the reasoning as prescribed by your
construcvism? ]

Knowing that will be deemed by most intellectuals as protectionist,
xenophobic, autarkish, or worse, perhaps even socially fascist etc.

Save for the added element of 'intellectuals' argued in your articles as
having a disposition of advantaged view of society...that hints of the very
elitism I've been talking about [arrogance taken to the nth degree by
intellectuals, thinking themselves now so wise and knowledgeable and
capable, that they can redesign and engineer all of society for the rest of
us; which in the west is dispacable due to our history]. It's just tyranny
if the will of the people is not consulted, freely, openly...and not
covertly 'manipulated'.

I've argued here many times how 'social science' has formulated means by
which to tear down culture and recreate in the visions of whatever
'god-for-a-day' [or university committee thereof] sees fit. We do in our
corporations all the time...and ever since WWII, the entire scope of the
European Union, World Bank, and the creation of various trade groupings
around the globe had a philsophical core that advocated 'intellectual'
overseeing to restructure humanity. No one wanted a repeat of WWII...and
'nation-state' existence was seen as a major cause to the effect.
Multiculturism has been a gameplan long in the making of new world
overseers, and it's reality only recently coming onto the radar screen of
the masses [that middle class of western societies]. Today we are seeing
the reality of this vision as it breaks inertia and quickens us to a new
world order no one recognizes.

[I really don't think even the intellectuals really like what they are
seeing now...with the rise of muslims in Europe, hispanics and blacks in
America...and Asians in Austrailia. Their ideas of synthesis I don't think
realized the hardships when such collisions were of cultures of far
disparate nature, at least, not until they were committed on this road.
Now, there is no turning back of course...and instead of seeing the losing
horse for what it is, intellectuals only beat it that much harder trying to
force it along]. Like it or not, there is a sharp rise to conservativism,
traditionalism, and even a radical recoil to all this, such as a rise in
nazism and other fascist groups found all through the industrialized nations
of the world. That middle class is not going to just sit back and let
themselves be sold out like this.

I see Antonio Gramesci quoted as a source here...the noted godfather of
cultural marxism, which perhaps has one the most intricate gameplans for
cultural restructuring...or by some notions...overthrow [I still suscribe to
that view myself]. If one sees that gameplan, and then compare to what has
happened, there is a good argument for a grand conspiracy here...that 'grand
march' through our institutions by slow 'possession' from within [through
our media, education, hollywood, and all avenues of thought forming
institutions].

Something we have had to learn hard lessons about is that 'tampering' with
complex systems, such as the macroeconomic health of a society. Such
tampering almost always ends up creating worse outcomes than the supposed
'problem' we were trying to correct. Communism was a 'theory' whose
designers meant well...but look at the terrible suffering it unleashed upon
half the world and still does so in some areas even today. Intellectuals
cannot see all angles, all subtleties, all the psychological makeups, all
the genetic meanderings, all the succinctly entertwined enmeshment of our
social interactions in the world...though will forever try and figure it all
out of course. But to step in affirmatively, as intellectuals have now, and
force culture along their own visions of their own ideals...and in such a
total way subtrafuting our ancestral duties to uphold our tether to a past,
that gave us 'vector' in the world today...well, invasions of armadas and
armies have done no less.

That's one reason I mentioned the Killer Bees. If there can exist a
'hybridized' bee at that insect level, whereby an entire domesticated honey
bee industry is threatened for ruination, then I argue that similar
unforseen 'forced' unnatural entwinings, perhaps formulated by a well
meaning intellectual community [tempted by the various technologies they now
have at their employ, often like guns in children's hands, being that as a
kind, we are trailing far behind in wisdom that we might handle such
technologies safely]...well, disaster could loom in our future now for sake
of all this 'tampering'. Anyone on the street living today can 'see' that
disaster plainly. But our polticians, thinkers, and universities seem so
distanced now they just ignore such man on the street, declaring them to be
boobs...just backward natives. Well, the natives are restless...I keep
trying to tell someone who might listen. Our politicians need a clue...and
universities world wide need to rethink this out better. I argue we are on
the brink of disaster here.

As in Economics, we learned that lassaiez faire 'unleashes' the invisible
hands that Adam Smith described, and thusly, our greatest benefits realized.
We might in time, if we survive todays coming holocaust [that I believe is
now bound to happen], that the same applies to our social meanderings among
ourselves, that when left to our own design, we find our greatest movements
for achievement and civilized order, while when we tamper, we only delay the
natural psychic and social energies from their proper discourse, allowing
them to aggregate improperly, and in time, creating the need for great
upheavals for correction [as seen in the USSR this last century...twice].

The other comment here is that I'm not sure we are even talking about the
same things you know. Most of this social constructivism speaks about mind
creation...idealism and change of ideas etc. Killer Bees never existed upon
that level, but the 'hybrized' outcome was simply a creature far less
conducive to 'peaceful temperment'. IN many ways, smallville is being
transformed, as I mentioned, right before our eyes, to a place less
conducive to such peaceful temperment, but not based so much on ideas, but
on 'temperment'...an actual genetic proclivity that precursors the ideas now
prevailing.

Ultimately, multiculturism's greatest impact on us might not be about ideas,
but about that temperment, much as western civilization was based upon
[relatively speaking]. Multiculturism perhaps is reducing social existence
to 'lowest common denominators', that in nature, might be an eqivalencey to
that 'ferocity' of the killer bee [essentially, a more primal state]. At
that level of ferocity, the very ideals of any intellectual, including this
of social contructivism, have no meaning...and human existence reduced to
nothing more than who carries the longest teeth, the sharpest claw.
De-evolution in other words.

Multiculturism, I still argue, results in Blade Runner chaos. Relative
homogeneity on the other hand, leads to a far more peaceful order and some
hope for a true happy citizenry and gives rise to group membership that
inspires our greatest levels of 'gestaltive mental drive' to create, build,
and achieve. Otherwise, you assign us all to hell. -sic [as I see it]

"Turtoni" <tur...@alt.philosophy> wrote in message
news:S96dnUoTws8...@comcast.com...

[Turtoni]

> "tooly" <rd...@bellsouth.net> wrote

>a rebuttal.

It was just a pointer in the direction of your interests: "Social
Constructionism".

"The focus of social constructionism is to uncover the ways in which
individuals and groups participate in the creation of their perceived
reality."

> Well, I've read about 3/4 of this [the posting below] closely...and

Social Constructionism is a school of thought within the social science,
Sociology.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociology

[Turtoni]

The Multiculturalism of Fear.

http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/oso/public/content/politicalscience/0198297122/toc.html#

[Turtoni]

> Multiculturism, I still argue, results in Blade Runner chaos.

Muliculturism is more than one culture..

There isn't much multiculturism in Blade Runner. It's the becoming of one
culture from all cultures.

http://www.br-insight.com/display.php?contents=analysis&cat=ANALYSIS&sub=0&res=1024
A Study of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner
Written by Majid Salim

Contents
a.. Introduction

b.. Moral and Political Paradigms

c.. Romantic Paradigms and the Satanic Myth

d.. Postmodern Analysis

e.. Bibliography
f.. Notes

Introduction

Blade Runner opened in US cinemas on the 25th June 1982, amid media hype,
and yet proved to be a commercial failure, only just recouping its
$28million costs. Critical reaction to the film was generally negative also:
the Los Angeles Times cautioned: "(Don't let the words blade runner confuse
you into expecting a super-high speed chase film. Blade crawler might be
more like it...[1]". Indeed, reaction to the film was so hostile that
director Ridley Scott later commented, "You'd have thought we were boiling
babies or something [2]." His previous film had been Alien (1979), a sci-fi
horror film that proved an enormous commercial success, and Blade Runner's
star, Harrison Ford, was (and still is) one of the most bankable stars in
Hollywood, with Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back and Raiders of the Lost
Ark breaking box office records a few years previously. Blade Runner's
producer, Michael Deeley, had last worked on The Deer Hunter, which won
Oscar for Best Picture in 1979. It is to some extent understandable, given
Scott and Ford's previous films, that the public were disappointed with
Blade Runner; expecting a special effects laden action film, they were
instead presented with a dark, depressing vision of the future, in which
most Hollywood values are overturned [3].

However, despite its initial failure, critical reassessments have steadily
become more favourable. It has acquired a cult following, and is credited
with having inspired the basic aesthetic of the science fiction subgenre
cyberpunk, the best example of which is William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984).
Blade Runner is one of only 50 films to be stored in the United States
Library of Congress, on account of its contribution to film culture. The
British film magazine Empire once described it as 'a seminal work and an
undeniable classic...[4]'.

The general volte face of critical and popular opinion towards the film may
have been the reasons behind Scott's decision to release a Director's Cut of
the film in 1992, which restored his original intentions for the film. As a
text, the Director's Cut reveals exactly how Scott planned the film
originally, and as such allows a variety of new readings of the film's
themes. This dissertation argues that the Director's Cut of the film reveals
subtextual complexities and motifs which question the status of Hollywood
science fiction.

Many critics have cited Blade Runner as a postmodernist film. However,
postmodernism carries with it an inherent tendency to devalue art, insofar
as postmodernism posits that all semiological systems are self referential
and as such incapable of any truly representative relationship with reality.
In this dissertation I will argue that this may not be true of Blade Runner,
because it makes use of mythical, and in particular Biblical, imagery to
espouse some of its themes. In the first section of the dissertation I will
consider the films moral and political themes, which relate to the politics
of power and oppression. I will argue that the film debunks the idea that
humans are superior to replicants. I will then consider the wider
metaphorical implications of this through two historical phenomena which
inform Scott's semiology, the first being North American slavery, and the
second being South American slavery, in the form of the Mayan civilisation.
In the second section I will analyse the films theological themes and their
relationship to the film's literary antecedents, such as Paradise Lost. The
film's use of mythical and Biblical imagery is a rejection of the
depthlessness of postmodern ideas in favour of a view of Man which is
redemptive, and which contradicts the celebration of meaninglessness which
typifies postmodern theory. The use of imagery from mythic and religious
metanarratives offers humanity self-definiton through moral truth. It is
argues that the film's optimism id the result of a creative paradox. While
the film suggests that dehumanisation is all that technology have to offer,
it is the ultimate creation of this technology, the replicant Roy Batty, who
finds the path to spiritual and moral enlightenment. I the third section, I
apply popular postmodern theories to the film.

This dissertation was written between September 1997 and February 1998, and
formed part of the final examination for my undergraduate degree in English
Literature and Philosophy, at Manchester University, England. I would like
to thank Dr. Marcus Wood, formerly of Manchester University and currently
teaching at the University of Sussex. As my dissertation supervisor, he
offered advice and judgement which were hugely helpful. It goes without
saying that any errors are my own.

Moral and Political Paradigms

Science Fiction is a Genre which deals, primarily, with outlandish ideas,
such as time travel, or human cloning. It is for sheer convenience's sake
that most science fiction novels are set in the future, since this allows
the author to disregard realist conventions which may hinder the exploration
of the chosen idea. Most science fiction authors consolidate their readers
acceptance of their vision of the future by inventing realistic vernaculars,
not only to add a realist essence to their work, but often to help to
express their ideas as well. Perhaps the best example of this would be
William Gibson's invention of the word 'cyberspace' to describe the
'consensual hallucination' of a direct neural interface with a computer - a
word which has since passed into mainstream language itself [5].

Blade Runner uses its own terminology: the clones of the film are described
as 'Replicants', a word chosen for its connotations with cell replication
(the action which allows genetic engineers to clone genetic material [6]).
The terminology is introduced to the viewer by use of a narrative device
often found in film noir - that of the scrolling text, either before,
during, of at the end of the film itself. Once the opening credits of the
film have rolled, this text is scrolled past the blank screen [7]:

Early in the 21st Century, the TYRELL CORPORATION advanced Robot evolution
into the Nexus phase - a being virtually identical to a human - known as a
Replicant. The NEXUS-6 Replicants were superior in strength and agility, and
at least equal in intelligence, to the genetic engineers who created them.
Replicants were used Off-world as slave labor, in the hazardous exploration
and colonisation of other planets. After a bloody mutiny by a NEXUS-6 combat
team in an Off-world colony, Replicants were declared illegal on Earth -
under penalty of death. Special police squads - BLADE RUNNER UNITS - had
orders to shoot to kill, upon detection, any trespassing Replicants. This
was not called execution. It was called retirement.

This crawl introduces us to some of the terminology used in the film - such
as replicants and blade runners - but much more interestingly, it can be
seen to have an element of bias, also. The replicants are specifically
referred to as slaves. The text also mentions that they are retired, but
suggests that this is more or less synonymous with execution, WE are allowed
to ponder this deliberately emotive language for a few moments, perhaps long
enough to intuitively feel some sympathy for the replicants before a single
one has even been seen, before the words LOS ANGELES, NOVEMBER 2019 fill the
screen, and the film proper begins.

The fade from black is marked by the sound of an explosion, and the first
image of the film, the cityscape, is revealed. Los Angeles, the City of
Angels, is a hellish, endless maze of giant, industrial buildings; an oil
refinery spews flames into the night sky, which is an ashen, polluted grey.
A flying vehicle emerges from the fog, and shoots past the screen. Lightning
strikes a building, to no apparent effect. This is a place of poison and
decay, and it is hard to believe that human could inhabit it.

The vast hell is dominated by the Tyrell Corporation headquarters, two
Mayan-style pyramids, each 700 storeys high [8]. For decades, one of the
greatest riddles of archaeology was why the Mayans, having built such huge,
terrifying, aesthetically impenetrable cities, abandoned them en masse, to
crumble and become overgrown with vine and jungle. The riddle was solved
when it was recognised that the Mayans, despite their impressive
astronomical knowledge, had agricultural practises so primitive that they
did not even have ploughs; the farmland around their cities was overused,
drained of nutrients, and cities had to be abandoned because staying in them
would mean starving to death.

This historical fact is echoed in twenty first century Los Angeles. Earth
has been drained of its resources - once the Garden of Eden, it is now a
place of death and pollution. Those who can afford it have emigrated to the
greener pastures of the Off-world colonies; those who cannot have no choice
but to stay and live in the sulphurous ruins.

Suddenly, the screen is filled with a blue eye, in which is reflected the
explosions watched a moment earlier. It stares straight at the camera. The
next scene begins with Holden, a blade runner, staring glumly out of a
window at the city, at which point the eye can be inferred as being his. But
when it is on screen this inference cannot be made, because we are yet to be
introduced to any characters. Cinematically, it is a slightly unsettling
experience. The film is being watched - and suddenly, quite literally, the
film begins to watch the watcher. Throughout the film, as shall later be
described, a sense of paranoia is sustained, contributing to an
all-pervasive sense of negativity.

The camera zooms into a window, and the next shot is an interior one; the
film's first character, Dave Holden, a blade runner, is seen staring out of
a window, drinking coffee. A large man enters the room, and a loudspeaker
introduces him as Leon Kowalski, a new employee working as a waste disposal
engineer. He waits for instructions, and is told to sit down. There begins a
bizarre and sinister test: Holden creates a hypothetical situation - not
helping an animal in distress - which suddenly becomes accusatory. This both
aggravates and upsets Kowalski. A certain tension is created by a lingering
close up of Kowalski's upset face, as well as a thudding heartbeat noise o
the soundtrack.

Abruptly, the mood changes. Holden smiles, visibly relaxes, and is suddenly
conversational and friendly:

HOLDEN: They're just questions, Leon. In answer to your query they're
written down for me. It's a test, designed to provoke an emotional response.

(He smiled a genuine smile)

Shall we continue?

The tension in the atmosphere dissipates, since the reason for Holden's
earlier hostility is known. His next question contributes to the new,
friendly mood of the test. It is neither confrontational nor accusatory.
It's a nice question.

HOLDEN: Describe to me, in single words, only the good things that come
into your mind about your mother.

Leon thinks about this question for a moment, before responding, 'Let me
tell you about my mother...' and shooting Holden with a gun hidden under the
table, in a moment of violence so quick be barely have time to register it
before the scene ends.

Leon Kowalski is, in fact, a fugitive replicant. The question 'describe in
single words only the good things which come into your mind about your
mother' may seem mild to us, but to Kowalski it is the most sinister
question of all - because he has never had a mother, he is a manufactured
being, and so cannot but reveal his status as such in any attempt to answer
this question verbally.

In Mayan culture, the ruling classes were known as the almehenob - 'those
with fathers and mothers', a reference to their noble lineage. There was no
middle class in Mayan society; people were either fabulously wealthy or
miserably poor. The very poor made up the huge majority of the population,
and worked for the almehenob as slaves. Again, another reference to the
Mayans - this time, their practises of slavery and oppression - is being
made. Holden is asking Kowalski about his mother, but Kowalski is a
replicant, and replicants are used as slaves: literally and symbolically
speaking, he does not belong to the class of individuals who have fathers
and mothers [9]. He kills Holden because he must; Holden has the authority
to kill any replicant upon detection.

This scene introduces us to some of the themes that feature throughout the
film: visually, it gives us the first two examples of 'eye' imagery (the
giant disembodied eye, and Kowalski's eye on the monitor), and thematically,
it introduces us to some of the political and moral issues of the film.
Should the replicants be killed for being on Earth? Should the replicants
themselves kill, simply to get here? What is the difference between
replicant and human anyway? After all, the fact that Kowalski is a replicant
is by no means obvious. He is, in fact, indistinguishable from a 'real'
human - he exhibits fear, nervousness, and a capacity to kill in cold blood.

In the past, many film noirs have had recurrent images of eyes, an pun on
the idea of the 'private eye'. Murder, My Sweet (1944) is a good example of
this, as L Heldreth observes:

In its opening and closing scenes, the detective, temporarily blinded by
powder burns, sits in a pool of light with his eyes bandaged. Earlier he had
been unable to see figuratively, i.e. detect the killer, and at the end he
has temporarily lost his vision [10].

In Blade Runner, the eye motif of earlier film noirs is again used, in
connection with the replicants. At various points in the film, each
replicants eyes are seen to 'glow', a clue that they are replicants (this
effect is most clearly seen in the artificial owl, as Tyrell dies). Consider
the scene at Chew's Eye Works; Chew, a genetic engineer who designs eyes, is
confronted by Batty about morphology:

CHEW(nervously): I don't know ... I don't know such stuff! I just do eyes
... genetic design ...just eyes. (Squints) ...you Nexus, huh? I design your
eyes.

BATTY(smiling): Chew - if only you could see what I have seen, with your
eyes...

Batty accepts his artificiality here, the fact that he was manufactured, but
celebrates his experiences, the things he has seen. For Batty, eyes and
vision are the keys to the development of an almost Romantic consciousness,
emancipated from his status as an automaton. For Chew, eyes are simply units
of production. He manufactures eyes, but only Batty 'sees' their
significance. In some ways, Batty is the human, and Chew the automaton.

The politics of power involve a distinction between oppressed and oppressor,
salve and master. In Nazi Germany, Jews were forced to wear a Star of David
badge, a visible symbol of the inferior status forced upon them. In Dan
Simmons sci-fi novel Endymion(1995), androids are used as slaves, but given
bright blue skins, so there is never any confusion over who is slave, who is
master. In Blade Runner, there are no distinguishing features between
replicant and human, oppressed and oppressor. The only distinction that may
be made is with the use of the Voight-Kampff test.

As Holden says, the Voight-Kampff test is 'designed to provoke an emotional
response'. Because replicants are at most four years old, and hence to an
extent emotionally immature, their responses to emotionally resonant
questions is different, because their lack of experience may lead to them
not knowing (or understanding) the correct reaction to some of the
questions. Thus the two made be differentiated, and replicants, upon
detection, executed.

The Voight-Kampff test has a monitor which displays a close-up of the
subject's eye for the duration of the test. It is with the aid of this
close-up that the exminer may judge emotional response by involuntary iris
fluctuations. The Voight-Kampff machine is part of a continuous theme
throughout the film, the idea that those in power have more 'vision' than
those lower down the social scale. At street level, everything is chaotic,
obscured; constantly unsteady shots have extras passing in front of the
camera, forcing us to strain to see the often out of focus background
images - for example, after Kowalski's death, whilst Deckard is buying his
bottle of Tsing-Tao, Gaff (the blade runner who originally arrests Deckard)
approaches Deckard from behind. Background images are so blurred that he is
visible only when he practically right behind Deckard. However, those in
positions of relative power - the police, Eldon Tyrell, have access to much
clearer view of the city. The constantly roving spotlight, present
throughout the film, suggest constant surveillance. The police spinners [11]
afford vast, panoramic views of the city, and even have panes of glass in
the floor to allow the pilots to see below them. Characters in the film are
occasionally watched by the apparition of a strangely sinister Oriental
woman, which floats over the city, embedded on the side of a giant airship.
David Dryer, co-special effects supervisor for the film commented:

The one scene we ... were sorry to lose was supposed to occur in the fight
between Deckard and Leon (Kowalski). The idea was we were going to do a
matte painting of a giant building above Ford and James with an oriental
woman on an animated billboard looking down on the and reacting to what they
were doing. She was going to be puffing on one of those big cigarettes and
acting as if she was watching a televised fight. That bit was supposed to
give a feeling of oppression, that these billboards are watching everyone
everywhere they go [12] (italics mine).

Another example of this is Tyrells office, at the very top of one of his
pyramids, which has picture windows that survey the entire cityscape. The
spaciousness of the office, emphasised by the spartan furniture in contrast
to the overcrowding at street level, suggests that space itself is a status
symbol. This contrasts sharply with the lot of the replicants, for example
Zhora, who works in a crowded ground level strip club. When Deckard visits
her, he tells her that he is from the 'Confidential Committee on Moral
Abuses' and that he is investigating claims that the management have peep
holes in the ladies dressing rooms. He claims to protect her from the
intrusive surveillance of a higher authority, when in fact the only
surveillance she need fear is his. Surveillance appears to be a key feature
of Los Angeles in the future - the entire city appears to have turned into
one of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticons, whereby one cannot tell if one is being
watched, but it is possible that one is being watched at all times, which
means extreme caution must be exercised at all times. The replicants of the
film must stay 'in character' at all times, even when alone.

Their functions place them, forcibly, in the lowest social classes; whether
hazardous, such as nuclear fission loading (Kowalski) or sordid, such as
prostitution (Pris), the replicants are given only the most menial and
degrading jobs. They have childlike qualities: Roy tells Sebastian he's got
'some nice toys' whilst Pris watches, toying with a broken doll. They are
also linked with animal imagery - Roy's wolflike howl, Zhora's snake tattoo,
Pris's racoon makeup. Both childlike and animalistic qualities have been
attributed by slave systems to their victims. Stanley Elkins, in his book
Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life(1963),
offers a historical explanation for this fact, using as his example the
racial stereotype of the black colonial plantation worker as being lazy and
childish. It was common belief at the time that these personality traits
were racially inherent, but Elkins debunks this argument by reminding us of
the physical and mental torments many slaves suffered, not least in their
capture and transportation. The vary act of capture was in itself traumatic,
but what followed was the long march to the sea, which was sometimes
hundreds of miles away. Upon being sold as slaves to European slave traders,
the African would then be transported by ship to the America in what became
known as the Middle Passage, which Elkins described as 'almost too
protracted and stupefying to be described as a mere "shock"... brutalizing
to any man, black or white, ever to be involved with it [13].'

Only the strongest and healthiest men and women survived the entire
experience, from capture in Africa to arrival in America [14]. Upon arrival,
Africans knew absolutely nothing about where they were; the cultural codes
by which they had lived their lives no longer had any relevance. The life
these men and women went on to lead was one of hardship and constant
surveillance. Given these facts - the mental scarring that their capture,
transport and subsequent lives of slavery left upon them, it is not
surprising, Elkins argues, that many of them responded to a situation which
their deaths could occur at any time, and for any reason, by reverting,
first to a state of utter detachment, and then to a state of childish
loyalty to their new masters. Because as Elkins says:

The (old) African values, the sanctions, the standards, already unreal,
could no longer furnish (the slaves) with guides for conduct, for adjusting
to the expectations of a complete new life. Where then were (they) to look
for new standards, new cues - who would furnish them now? (They) could now
look to none but their master, the man upon whom the system had committed
their entire being: the man upon whose will depended (their) food ...
shelter ... sexual connection, (any) moral instruction (they) might be
offered ... in short, everything [15].

By casting Roy Batty as the perfect Aryan - 6'5", with a muscular frame,
blonde hair and blue eyes - Scott is pointedly contrasting his appearance
with black slavery, perhaps to bring emphasis to the fact that oppression
need not be contingent upon race. Elkins finding are relevant in the way
that Roy Batty has come to see Tyrell as his father, in the same way slaves
in the colonies attributed 'father-figure' status to their oppressors [16].
All this would come to suggest that the replicants are strangle childish
because of the unimaginable traumas they have been made to suffer. But,
although these traumas may have affected them, they have not broken their
spirit, or desire to return to Earth. Although slave ships often had
insurance against mutiny by the slaves, it rarely happened. But the
replicants in Blade Runner did mutiny, and killed humans in doing so.
Although the Blade Runner script identifies J F Sebastian as a chess Grand
Master, and Tyrell is referred to several times as a genius, Batty's chess
strategies are superior to both. Mentally and physically, Batty is the
Neitzschean 'superman' - he is 'More Human Than Human', as the Tyrell
Corporation motto puts it. And yet Batty, the 'prodigal son' is a enslaved.
But nothing, not even being born into slavery and suffering hardships we
cannot imagine, can or will prevent him from coming back to Earth, to meet
his maker.

John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, argued that
personal identity comprises nothing but memories: the mind is a tabula rasa,
or 'blank slate' at birth, and all subsequent experiences shape our
personalities, and make us human. Subsequent philosophers (notably Noam
Chomsky) have shown that there are in fact various things 'pre-programmed'
into the human mind (such as the capacity for language acquisition, for
example) but do not contest that our personalities, the ways we are that
make us human, are acquired through experience.

This raises a compelling question: if humans are defined as such because we
have personalities, based upon years of memories and experience, and there
now exist replicants with personalities, based upon (albeit ersatz) memories
also, at what point may the two be differentiated? According to Tyrell,
there now exist replicants with memories so perfect that they believe they
are human. The film encodes this idea in reverse; Rachel is presented as an
ostensibly human executive at the Tyrell Corporation, part of the structure
that creates and sells the replicants. But she is subsequently revealed to
be a replicant - the Voight-Kampff machine gazes into the windows of her
soul, and pronounces her a machine, also.

TYRELL: She's beginning to suspect.

DECKARD(incredulous): Suspect? How can it not know what it is?

There is no change in Rachel's appearance, but once the distinction is made,
it is final, and she ceases being human. Deckard's switch to 'it'
foregrounds the fact that Rachel is now an object, not an individual.

Later, Rachel goes to see Deckard at his apartment. She has with her a photo
of herself as a child, with her mother. History is made up of linguistic and
photographic artefacts from the past. Deckard proves to her the illusion of
her past, by telling her her own memories. Although clutching a fake
photograph, the tears are very real. It is at this point Deckard realises
that she is not simply a machine, like other replicants, perhaps. Equipped
with a memory, an entire lifetime of experienced, she becomes human - she
has the life experiences that the replicants four years lifetimes forcibly
prevent them from attaining. So seamlessly human, in fact, that even she did
not realise that she was a replicant.

Rene Descartes, in his Meditations Upon The First Philosophy, pointed out
that our senses are far from trustworthy. We have no direct one-to-one
contact with reality, and must instead rely upon sense data to help us
construct some simulacrum of it within our minds. His famous Demon Argument
argues that our senses may be deceiving us - the modern form of the argument
is to posit that it is quite possible that your brain actually resides in a
nutrient vat somewhere, and that all the sense data you receive, convincing
you of the existence of an external reality, is fed to you via strategically
placed electrodes, by a mad scientist. It is a conceit entertained by us
all, occasionally - how do I know that my existence is not just a virtual
reality game? Reality is a very ephemeral thing. Rachel's predicament is
Descartes' argument come true, the difference being that she has been
unfortunate enough to have her illusion of reality shattered - the scientist
has revealed his cruel trick to her. We feel sympathy for Rachel because she
is forced to face a truth that we all, in our more fanciful moments, imagine
and dread - the fear of verisimilitude being destroyed. Rachel responds by
throwing away her photo, which contrasts with Kowalski, who knows he is a
replicant, and yet treasures his photos. He may be an artificial human, but
he knows that within that context his memories are real... and he cherishes
them.

Rachel has neither father nor mother, and so is just like any other
replicant, and faces the danger of being retired. For the sake of her
survival, she must adapt quickly.

RACHEL: What if I go North ... disappear? Would you come after me? ...
hunt me?

The reference to going North brings to mind the Underground Railroad, the
method used by blacks in America to escape slavery in the southern states.

DECKARD: No ... no I wouldn't. I owe you one.

This is an important point in Deckard's moral development. He ceases his
previous coldness to her, and begins to treat her like a person. This moral
development is encouraged by the climax of the film, where Deckard,
oppressor and hunter, is hunted by Batty a deadly game of cat and mouse. The
terror-stricken Deckard is forced onto the roof of the Bradbury Building by
a chillingly amused Batty, yet to break a sweat even when Deckard is
exhausted. With no other options available to him, Deckard is forced to try
and jump to the roof opposite, and barely manages to cling to the edge of
it, dangling precariously.

Batty clears the gap with ease, and spends a few moments watching the
crippled blade runner grapple with the edge, trying to survive even as his
grip begins to weaken.

BATTY: Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is ,
to be a slave.

These words are not spoken with rancour, nor is there any sense of gloating
over Deckard's predicament. They are spoken in a perfectly conversational
tone, although there is a sense of bitterness with the last few words. It is
almost as though Batty has hunted Deckard throughout the scene not to wreak
vengeance or otherwise punish him, but to educate his viewpoint, to help him
understand fear and consequently develop empathy. Batty, the replicant, is
humanising Deckard, the ostensible human.

Deckard, realising he is about to die, spits at Batty, his face a mask of
fear and hatred. But then Batty saves Deckard's life, grabbing his hand just
as his grip fails, and lifting him to safety. This restores a symmetry to
the film, a symmetry Deckard cannot help but be aware of: he has killed two
replicants, and now two replicants have saved his life. Edited out of the
Director's Cut, the voice over at this point in the original film had
Deckard saying:

DECKARD(voice-over): I don't know why he saved my life. Perhaps, in those
last moments, he loved life more than he ever had. Not just his life,
anybody's life. My life.

Although the Director's Cut dispenses with this narrative, the implications
of Batty saving Deckard's life are nonetheless clear. He cannot simply
dismiss replicants as machines. the Voight-Kampff test may be designed upon
the principle that replicants lack the empathic, emotional responses of real
humans, but they do possess empathy, a humane side - had they not, Batty
would have left Deckard to die. They are as human as us.

The final scene of the film, in Deckard's apartment, is perhaps one of the
most interesting scenes in the film. Having completed his assignment as
ordered, Deckard returns to his apartment to get Rachel and escape out of
Los Angeles before anyone tries to retire her. Having woken Rachel, they
head for cautiously the elevator. Earlier in the film, in a scene where
Deckard is drunk and picking out a tune on his piano, there is a slow fade
into a sylvan wood; a unicorn gallops in slow motion past the camera,
shaking its mane, and then the scene fades back to Deckard's apartment. The
image, as with the giant eye at the beginning of the film, makes no sense
whatever in its immediate context, and is somewhat surreal. The audience is
led to infer that the unicorn is of some private significance to Deckard, a
recurring dream, perhaps.

As Rachel walks toward the elevator, her foot knocks over something on the
floor. Noticing this, Deckard picks it up. It is an origami unicorn, made
out of tinfoil. Gaff, the other blade runner, is skilled at origami - we
watch him make a chicken in Bryant's office, when Deckard is refusing to
take the job. But how could Gaff know Deckard well enough to know about the
unicorn? The only logical answer is to suggest that Deckard himself is a
replicant. Just as Deckard revealed to Rachel her replicant status by
telling her her own memories, so Gaff has done for Deckard, leaving with
origami the one symbol, whose real meaning is never made clear to us, which
convinces Deckard that he is not human. In fact, there is evidence that he
was already beginning to suspect; earlier in the film, when Rachel asks him
if he has ever taken the Voight-Kampff test himself, there is a pregnant
silence, and Deckard ignores her. Also, his piano is covered with old
photographs; he appears to spend his free time sitting at the piano, drunk,
looking at the photographs, trying to convince himself that they are real,
that they prove he had a father and mother. The most reliable evidence that
Deckard is a replicant occurs in the scene between him and Rachel, in his
apartment. Rachel asks Deckard if he would hunt her if she went north. He
replies that he wouldn't, and the moves behind Rachel. At this point Rachel
is in the foreground and to the left of the frame. Deckard is to the right
of the frame, a few feet behind her, and out of focus. But nonetheless, his
eyes can be seen to glow slightly, a device used by Scott to distinguish
replicants from other animals.

Whilst the film as a whole has important moral and political implications,
this scene, upon the discovery of the tinfoil unicorn, works as the keystone
of both. Throughout the film, we have been encouraged to view replicants as
the Other, as slaves, or simulacra. This scene demonstrates that such a
differentiation is false, that replicants are no different from humans, and
that it is quite possible that we may be replicants. This is the film's
moral message; slavery, racism and sexism have always been defended on the
grounds that the group being discriminated against represent an Other who
deserve demonisation. But this scene in Blade Runner server to demonstrate
that there is no Other - no slaves, no masters, no blade runners: only
humans.

Romantic Paradigms and the Satanic Myth

The human/android relationship has always lent itself to metaphors of
slavery and equal rights. The best example of this would be Isaac Asimov's
Robot series of novels, which began in 1957 and foretold in epic style the
story of a future race of androids, their fight for equal rights, and
revolutions. The theme of Man's overreaching pride in thinking himself God's
vice-regent on Earth has been explored often in literature, most memorably
in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. In cinema, examples would include Planet of
the Apes, The Terminator and 2001: A Space Odyssey. These films all explore
our relationship with nature and technology, and the potential dangers to be
faced if we, in our pride, think ourselves masters of these forces. Blade
Runner employs these themes, but almost uniquely, it's Christian imagery
also raises theological questions about the definitions of humanity. Insofar
as it was based upon a novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1969) by
Philip K Dick, Blade Runner also has strong connections with literature,
which are reinforced by the film's use of literary allusions and themes.
This chapter of the dissertation will examine these aspects of the film.

In his excellent essay The New Eve, critic David Desser has observed a claim
made by others that Blade Runner's power rests on its adaptation of a
'fundamental mythic structure' also found in Frankenstein: the struggle
against human facsimiles. Frankenstein itself, he points out, is a Romantic
reading of Paradise Lost. Blade Runner, in its own way, pays homage to both
Shelley's novel and Milton's epic. the film's dialogue with Christian
symbolism begins with one of the first shots of the film, that of Tyrell's
futuristic Mayan pyramid.

The only type of buildings that the Mayans built as pyramid shaped were the
temples in which they worshipped the Sun through ritual human sacrifice.
Tyrell, who lives on the top floor of one of his pyramids, is a small, thin,
middle-aged man with weak eyesight (he wears thick trifocal spectacles) and
little visual presence; and yet, in a visual contradiction typical of the
film, he is presented as a sort of deity. He has the highest, most panoramic
viewpoint over the city, suggesting he is the most powerful person in it.
The only time the sun is seen in the entire film is from Tyrell's office
windows, in the scene where Deckard gives Rachel the Voight-Kampff test.
Tyrell tints the windows with the push of a button, suggesting that he, the
owner of the Pyramid of the Sun, controls the sun itself, and so is in that
respect a godlike figure. We are told by Chew that Tyrell designed the
replicants very minds. As William Kolb points out:

Nexus is a Latin word meaning 'to bind' and refers to the tie between
members of a group, eg members of a series. The replicants who arrive on
Earth are literally and metaphorically the Nexus-6.

And as such, the replicants can be said to be a species distinct from us.
thus Tyrell can be said to be their God, in that he created them.

'Commerce is our goal here at Tyrell - "More Human Than Human" is our
motto', explains Tyrell. This is a point stressed by Scott throughout the
film: the replicants display not only great physical strength in the film,
but also great intelligence, too. In the scene where Deckard is being
debriefed, Captain Bryant describes Roy Batty as being a 'combat model.,
with optimum self-sufficiency'. From these words, and the image of Batty's
cold blue eyes, it is easy to imagine him as some sort of generic robot
killing machine, as seen in countless science fiction films and novels:
toneless production line automata. But Batty, as played by Rutger Hauer,
defies these epithets. He is intelligent, sometimes cold and calculating,
sometimes witty and frivolous. Whereas Deckard is shown constantly in
transit, Batty is only ever shown arriving. He is somewhat of an enigma.

Upon his meeting with Chew, the genetic designer, the combat model asserts
his independence from generic cliché, and shows that there is more to him
that meets the eye, by reciting (quite well) a line of poetry:

Fiery the angels fell,
Deep thunder roll'd around their shores,
Burning with the fires of Orc.

This is a misquotation from America: A Prophecy, by William Blake, a poem
that uses the American Revolution as an allegory for the struggle for
personal freedom. Many freed slaves fought in the War of independence,
believing that victory would mean the abolition of slavery. As such, this
quote is particularly apposite; the replicants themselves are seeking
freedom from slavery, and so this is Batty's way of stating his agenda, his
reasons for returning to Earth. Blake's actual lines were:

Fiery the angels rose, and as they rose deep
thunder roll'd, Around their shores; indignant
Burning with the fires of Orc.

Batty's angels fall rather than rise, however, giving his quote a Miltonic
ambience. In several ways, in fact, Batty and his fellow replicants may be
seen as fallen angels. Literally, the murder of the crew and passengers of
the shuttle that facilitated their return could be seen as an offence
against nature: as slaves, it is above their station to murder, or return to
Earth. Once humankind's servants, they are now demonised, hunted and
executed on the spot. Damned, they have fallen from their 'More Human Than
Human' status, prey to amoral blade runners like Deckard. Insofar as he is
the leader of the fallen angels, Batty becomes a sort of Satan figure: the
strongest, most intelligent of the fallen angels, unhappy with his station
in life, now disgraced.

Desser states that if Batty can be seen as Satan, then Deckard, world-weary
blade runner, can be seen as Adam. In Paradise Lost, Milton stressed that
his intention were to create Adam as the epic hero, but later generations
read Satan as being the real hero of the text. Similarly, Desser argues,
Blade Runner presents us with the ambiguity concerning the issue of the
film's hero. Insofar as Deckard is the character we are made to identify
with, he appears to be the film's ostensible hero - he survives. But what
kind of hero shoots a woman in the back? Batty's quest in the film is truly
heroic - he seeks more life, to confront his creator, whereas Deckard is
just doing a job he has been forced to do. deckard tries to kill Batty
several times at the end of the film, and yet when the roles are reversed,
and Batty has a chance to kill Deckard, he spares him. At a structural
level, the question of who is the hero in Paradise Lost is echoed in Blade
Runner: Batty is Satanic, and so Deckard can be seen as Adam-figure of the
text, the character who the audience is ostensibly made to sympathise with,
but who cannot capture the imagination quite like the ostensible villain
can.

Desser also states that Rachel is Eve, and again, I agree with him. Eve was
created for Adam, using one of his ribs. When children are born, we have no
idea what kind of people they will grow up to become. Rachel, like Eve, was
specifically created using human tissue to become a specific person, with
the memories and personality of that person predetermined. As such, she is
very much like Eve. Desser argues that Rachel's role as Eve is reinforced
with film noir imagery:

To the contemporary reader of Paradise Lost, foreknowledge of Eve's tragic
succumbing to temptation, bringing Adam down with her, makes her image a
profoundly ambiguous one. On the one hand, as described by Adam, she has
many desirable qualities; and yet she leads to the Fall. Blade Runner
similarly relies on an archetypal set of conventions to create an ambiguous
image of woman, the classic femme fatale of film noir. Rachel wears her hair
pinned up behind her head, and is often seen wearing jackets with the
classic Joan Crawford padded shoulders. Her links with the noir era of
filmmaking are further stressed by the ... use of low key lighting with
heavy reliance on shadows, especially the 'bar effect' created by light
streaming in through half open blinds. This iconography automatically makes
Rachel suspect - a potential spider woman, the woman-as-temptress, our
fallen mother, Eve.

Rachel believes she is a perfectly normal human being, until she fails the
Voight-Kampff test, and Deckard ends all speculation by telling her about
the spider that lived outside her window: a memory of childhood innocence,
seared into meaninglessness. The transformation that Rachel subsequently
goes through is one of the most beautiful moments in the film. Deckard,
having numbed himself with alcohol, has fallen asleep. Rachel sits at his
piano, and studies the old photographs: testaments of a past, a family, a
history: all the things she has lost. She is no longer wearing her jacket.
Slowly, very slowly, she begins to let her hair down.

She is no longer the spider-woman that Desser describes; as Milton says:

She, as a veil ...
Her unadorned golden tresses wore
Dishevelled, but in wanton ringlets waved
As the vine curls her tendrils...

Humans are born with original sin, and as such, are fallen creatures,
tainted with evil.

Rachel becomes a replicant, and automatically her sin is annulled. As such,
she returns to a prelapsarian state of innocence, as evidenced by her Eve
imagery. She becomes a true human, free of original sin.

The Director's Cut of the film ends with Rachel and Deckard entering the
elevator together, the closing doors cutting off our view of them. If we
extend Biblical imagery, it would be logical to infer that they, having been
cast out of the Garden, now venture forth into Earth, their futures
uncertain. But how valid is this inference? Can Los Angeles really be said
to be the Garden of Eden? Literally, it is Earth. But it is also a
metaphorical Hell, with its infernal landscape into which the fallen angels
descend. Having said that, it is also a metaphorical Heaven, insofar as it
is Tyrell's domain. That they are leaving Los Angeles is clear - but what is
Los Angeles? Heaven, Earth, or Hell? The answer to this presumably
determines their destination. It must not be forgotten, however, that they
are both replicants - Rachel was sentenced to execution the moment she
disappeared, and one may assume that Deckard's incipient departure will lead
to the same sentence being passed on him. are they, then, a new Adam and
Eve, progenitors of a new race who must suffer in a hostile world? Or, given
their death sentences, have they just left Earth, only to enter Hell, with
the constant fear of surveillance that will characterise their lives as
replicants? We can never know. The bleak, gnawing agony of their predicament
is telescoped into eternity by celluloid.

This idea is borrowed from Philip K Dick , author of the novel - Do Androids
Dream Of Electric Sheep?- that the film was based on. In particular it is
seen in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch(1973); the eponymous hero of
this novel is a man who, having survived interstellar travel, brings back
from an alien race an hallucinogenic drug, Chew-Z, which allows people to
spend their lives in Paradise, whatever their definitions of Paradise may
be. The price to pay, however, is Palmer Eldritch's assumption of the role
of God in every Paradise this drug creates. Given that Palmer Eldritch is
the villain of the novel, he uses this omnipotence for generally negative
purposes, leading those who have already taken the drug, trapped under his
power, to wonder if they really are happy, if they really are in Heaven, or
in some subtle, slow-burning Hell of Eldritch's devising. Another character
undergoes an unrelated treatment called E-Therapy, that will turn him into a
superhuman genius. There is, however, a slight possibility that it will have
the reverse effect on him, and turn him into a simian dimwit. In the weeks
that follow the treatment, his worries escalate into full blown paranoia, as
his life falls to pieces, and he wonders whether this is a result of his
oncoming stupidity, or a natural consequence of possessing genius in a world
of lesser men. He quite literally cannot be sure if he is entering a Heaven
or a Hell.

In fact, Dick's books are filled with recurring motifs of paranoia and
dehumanisation that illuminate Blade Runner. Dick dies in 1982, four months
before the film's release, as an indirect result of amphetamines misuse in
his earlier career. The paranoia attacks that drug users commonly suffer was
a source of interest to him: he once joked in an interview, 'the ultimate
paranoia would be when it is attributed to objects - not "My boss is
plotting against me" but "My boss' phone is plotting against me."This
ultimate, object based paranoia does turn up in Dick's novels, for example
Radio Free Albemuth (1985 - published posthumously), in which a character
called Nick, who is feeling unwell, thinks his radio hates him because it
says nothing but 'Nick, you're a prick' all day. But in the world of Blade
Runner such paranoia seems commonplace, even encouraged: even the billboards
watch the city's population as it goes about its daily business. The
audience is forced to share this uncomfortable sense of being watched by the
giant eye at the beginning of the film, helping us to understand the
nightmarish plight of the characters in the film, watched wherever they go.

However, the film does offer hope in the form of its ostensible villain, Roy
Batty. Chew points Batty in the direction of J F Sebastian, a genetic
designer and friend of Tyrell's. Sebastian, both enthralled by and terrified
of Batty, agrees to take him to see Tyrell.

They ascend in the lift to Tyrell's living quarters. Tyrell is lying in his
bed (apparently modelled after that of the Pope's). Tyrell allows Sebastian
entrance, to discuss his chess gambit:

SEBASTIAN: Mr Tyrell...? I ... I bought a friend.

TYRELL (to BATTY): I'm surprised you didn't come here sooner.

BATTY: It's not an easy thing, to meet your maker.

TYRELL: And what can he do for you?

BATTY: Can the maker repair what he makes?

TYRELL: ...do you wish to be modified?

BATTY (to SEBASTIAN) : Stay here. (Advances) I had in mind something a
little more radical.

TYRELL: What ... what seems to be the problem?

BATTY: Death.

TYRELL: Well, I'm afraid that's a little out of my jurisdiction, you ...

BATTY: I want more life ... fucker.

Tyrell's first scene in the film opened with an owl flying from one perch to
another, reminiscent of Goya's sketch The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters.
Tyrell is now faced with his monster/creation, but cannot help it - although
having experimented with life itself, he admits that it's 'out of my
jurisdiction'.

TYRELL: You were made as well as we could make you.

BATTY: But not to last.

TYRELL: The light that burns twice as bright burns half as long, and you
have burned so very very brightly, Roy. Look at you. You're the prodigal
son. You're quite a prize!

BATTY: I've done ... questionable things.

TYRELL: Also extraordinary things. Revel in your time!

BATTY: Nothing the God of Biomechanics wouldn't let you in Heaven for.

Tyrell's reference to Batty as the prodigal son is understandable: Satan was
the second most powerful being in creation, after God. Batty's confession
that he has done 'questionable things' certainly debunks the idea that he is
some kind of conscienceless robot. Batty's final words are spoken with an
ironic smile, and some sadness. He was not created by some supernatural
agency, but by a man with no more control over mortality than Batty himself.
Batty then kisses Tyrell, and kills him.

This scene works in tandem with other key scenes in the film to demonstrate
how indefensible slavery is. The slave asks his master for help, but the
master cannot provide it, for he too is a slave - a slave to circumstance
and mortality. We all are. What right have we, then to enslave others? It is
interesting that Batty chooses to attack Tyrell's eyes - perhaps this is his
visceral way of ending the surveillance the city forces the replicants to
cower under.

Having killed Sebastian also, Batty takes the elevator down, alone. His
initial crimes are compounded by the murder of Tyrell and Sebastian. We see
Batty staring through the roof of the elevator - the stars, impossibly, rush
past him. He is literally falling from the sky, damned in Hell forever.

Milton's Satan could be defined as an empiricist, insofar as he did not
accept God's superiority until it was proven to him:

...so much the stronger proved
He with his thunder: and till then who knew
the force of those dire arms?
...(God) I now
of force believe almighty, since no less
Than such could have o'erpowered such force as ours...

He could also be described as a humanist, in that he rejects preordained
standards, and prefers self-advancement to servility. Most admirable of all
is his self-belief: even when cast into Hell, he remains unbroken:

The mind is its own place, and in itself
Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.

It is these qualities of Satan's that Batty inherits. Satan accepts, given
the facts, that he is damned, but this does not stop him from building a
palace and continuing his existence on his own terms. Nietzche once claimed
that God was dead: from his argument we may infer that if he is not then we
should kill him, because it is only once humankind has dispensed with the
childish notion that there is some supernatural agency governing his fate
that we can truly become responsible for ourselves. Batty does exactly
that - kills his God. He must now take responsibility for himself. Tyrell
cannot make Batty live longer, nor make him human. Batty must therefore find
redemption himself.

During the confrontation between Batty and Deckard, in which Batty proves
completely superior an opponent - even dodging Deckard's bullets - his hand
begins to seize up, a sign, perhaps, that his body is beginning to shut
down. 'No!' he cries. 'Not ... yet!' He searches desperately around the
room, and sees a nail protruding from a floorboard. He pushes this nail
through the palm of his hand, and the pain unlocks his hand. 'Yes...' he
breathes.

There is an obvious analogy to the Crucifixtion here, but given that Batty
is supposed to be Satan, it seems misplaced. But it is further reinforced
once the confrontation has ended. Deckard clings to the overhanging girder,
finger slipping. Batty has stripped down to his shorts, holding a dove in
his unimpaled hand. After he saves Deckard's life, deckard warily scrambles
backwards, thinking this some macabre continuation of the hunt. But Batty,
simply, wearily, sits down.

BATTY: I've seen things you people wouldn't believe ... attack ships on
fire, off the shoulder of Orion... I watched C-beams, glitter in the dark
near Tannhauser gate ... all those ... moments ... will be lost ... in time
... like ... tears. In rain.

Even if we don't understand the images, it is still a powerful moment.
Batty's entire quest throughout the film has been to prolong his lifespan.
But in those final moments, he accepts the inevitability of what is known as
the human condition. An essential part of being a blade runner is presumable
a lack of empathey, in order to kil replicants withour remorse. Yet once the
positions have changed, and Batty is in a position to let Deckard die, he
shows empathy, and saves him. If there is one thing the film tells its
audience, it is that replicants are superior, not just physicaly, but
morally too.

In the end, it is not Tyrell or anyone else who can make Batty human - he
must achieve this himself. After murdering Tyrell and Sebastian, and
descending into Hell once more, Batty realises that "human" is not a
particular DNA combination, but a state of mind. If is he who pushes the
nail through his palm, who picks up the dove. He turns himself into a Christ
figure, and in those final moments, by accepting his own death and saving
Deckard's life - by showing empathy - he makes himself human, redeems
himself. The film's themes are mostly conveyed visually, and so it is that
Battty's death is signified by the dove flying up into the only blue sky
seen anywhere in the film: the heavens have opened. We are reminded of
Christ's baptism, when the heavens opened, and the ove flew down as a
personification of the Spirit of God. Now, the dove returns from whence it
came. Batty, once Satan, is redeemed, and become an angel once more.

Postmodern Analysis

Many critics have cited Blade Runner as a postmodernist film [17]. Some
would argue that all Hollywood films are inherently postmodern, in that they
generally recycle earlier forms of popular culture, such as comic books or
gangster novels ( Batman, Pulp Fiction etc.). Indeed, they can sometimes go
so far as to recycle themselves, as the five Rocky films demonstrate. The
difference, I believe, is that whilst most popular cinema is postmodern by
virtue of existence, Blade Runner is consciously postmodern, in that it
explores some of the issues the phrase relates to.

Postmodernism is a word that refers to many things, not least of them being
a reference to the ways that signs become more important than the things
they signify; as Dominic Striantii says:

The mass media, for example, was once thought to hold a mirror up to, and
thereby reflect, a wider social reality. Now reality can only be defined in
terms of this mirror. Society had become subsumed within the mass media. It
is no longer even a question of distortion, since the term implies that
there is a reality outside the surface simulations of the media, which can
be distorted, and that is precisely what is at issue according to postmodern
theory [18].

The idea of the 'simulacra' lies at the heart of Blade Runner. The simulacra
of the film, replicants, are indistinguishable from humans. 'Human' is a
very ambiguous term. Structuralism dictates that it is the relationships
between elements of the code that give it signification. The word 'human'
requires a context, in this case, 'replicant', to give it meaning - by
juxtaposing ourselves in binary opposition with another we define ourselves.
This sheds light on many aspects of the film. Why are the replicants not
allowed on Earth? Why, if they are capable of developing their own emotional
responses, are hey ruthlessly denied the opportunity to do so? The answer to
these questions relates directly to the Human/Replicant relationship. The
humans of the film treat the replicants ruthlessly because, in a way, they
must, in order to give the concept of human meaning in the postmodern world.
But they cannot keep this violent hierarchy from collapsing; the replicants
prove they can be just as human as the humans themselves. the cultural code
upon which the world of the film is based is, like the city itself,
corroding, resulting in a crisis of definition for humanity.

In his influential work Simulations(1981), Jean Baurillard charts the
history of simulations, and posits that there are three order of simulacra.
The first order was that of pre-Industrial Revolution, counterfeit
simulations of Nature, such as using a fork as an artificial prosthetic in
place of the hand. The second order of simulation was the production of
industrial times, where the idea of 'counterfeit' becomes meaningless,
because industrial production requires no natural template and yet can mass
produce identical objects in their thousands. The third order of simulation
is us, insofar as cells replicate, they become genetic simulacra of one
another. Baurillard calls this the 'code': the binary system of ones and
zeros that id the basis of DNA structure. As a system of signification, it
is forever beyond our grasp:

The code's signals ... become illegible ... no possible interpretation can
ever be provided, buried like programmatic matrices, light years,
ultimately, from the biological body, black boxes where every command and
response are in ferment ... the code itself is nothing other then a genetic,
generative cell where the myriad intersection produce all the question and
all the possible answers to select (for whom?). There is no finality to
these questions (information signals, impulses) other then the response
which is either genetic and immutable or inflected with minuscule and
aleatory differences ... Instead of prophecy, we fall subject to the
(genetic) 'inscription' ... (this) is the outcome of an entire history where
God, Man, Progress and even History have successively passed away to the
advantage of the code ...[19]

In effect, Baurillard implies that there is nothing that can be done - any
hope of a significant relationship with reality is lost:

Every closed system protects itself ... from all metalanguage that the
system wards off by operating its own metalanguage, that is, by duplicating
itself as its own critique ... reality is immediately contaminated by its
simulacrum. [20]

If there can be no reality, but only a simulacrum of it, we must surrender
to simulation. To pick up an earlier point, Blade Runner's humans attempt to
protect their identity in the postmodern world by enforcing a violent
hierarchy between human and replicant: but doings this is not possible. As
Raman Selden says of Blade Runner:

(In Blade Runner), in a parallel scenario to Baudrillard's view that
humans should surrender to the triumphant world of objects, human subjects
are involved in a (mostly losing) battle with invasive postmodern
technologies. [21]

We cannot uphold the human/simulacra relationship because we are, in effect,
simulacra ourselves - genetic simulacra, and simulacra in terms of our
ontological assumptions (ie we create a simulation of reality in place of
the reality which, according to Baudrillard, is forever beyond us).

The relationships between humans and replicants aside, Blade Runner also
presents us with a fascinating view of human class relationships.
Historicists believe that when one accepts the existence of historical
styles of art - eg High Renaissance, Abstract, pre-Raphaelite - one must
also accept that, insofar as they had different definitions of art and
quality, there can never be objectively measured against each other. Clement
Greenberg defined avant-gardism as a way of sidestepping this: all art
periods nonetheless shared the formal apparatus of the medium, paint,
brushed, and so on, and Greenberd believed it was the task of the
avant-gardist to concentrate on this. But postmodernism, in particular
postmodern architecture, has rejected this theory in favour of the view that
one can hold a relativistic view of all former styles of art or
architecture, and engage in pastiche. Pastiche is perhaps the favourite form
of postmodernists: the best example of this would be Andy Warhol's painting
Thirty are better than one [22]. Blade Runner itself engages in pastiche on
more than one level. first, its architecture reveals several different
styles. The first few shots of the film show futuristic looking refineries,
but then concentrate on a futuristic building that is a pastiche of Mayan
architecture. The interiors of the Tyrell Corporation that are shown,
however, are designed in an Establishment Gothic look [23]. The police
headquarters of the film was designed to echo the Art Deco look of the
Chrysler Building, in New York City [24], and the Bradbury Building, in
which the final chase scene of the film is set, is an architectural anomaly,
built in 1883 by an architect heavily influenced by a utopian book he had
read about the year 2000 [25]. Animoid Row, where Deckard goes to discover
the origins of the snake scale, seems to resemble a Middle Eastern bazaar.
Blade Runner's presentation of Los Angeles in 2019 as a postmodern
architectural entrepot accentuates the ahistorical nature of postmodernist
art.

The work of Jean Francois Lyotard is also of relevance. Lyotard's book, The
Postmodern Condition(1979), offers as a symptom of the aforesaid condition
the downfall of metanarratives, which are paradigms which make total,
all-encompassing claims to truth, such as Marxism, or science. The
postmodern condition rejects any claim to absolute truth in favour of
relativist interpretations of the world (a staple part of postmodernism),
which results in metanarratives collapsing into meaninglessness. For
example, History, as a metanarrative, seeks to chart human behaviour in
terms of sequential causality. Blade Runner was made in 1982. Although it
contains the futuristic elements of forty years in its future - 2019- it
also contains the film noir elements of forty years in its past. Time
appears to obey different laws in Blade Runner - it is both present, future
and past simultaneously, without respect to sequential causality. Science
and religion are both metanarratives, but Blade Runner throws them both into
doubt by using religious imagery in reference to biotechnological
creations - are the replicants machines? Or prophets? Or neither - are they
just human, like us? Tyrell's death signifies the both the literal failure
of science and the metaphorical failure of religion to provide solutions
withi
n the film: Tyrell cannot help Batty, either as his scientific creator, or
his God.

Even Deckard's total, all-encompassing belief in his own existence - what
one might tentatively define as the Cartesian metanarrative - is devalued by
a tinfoil unicorn, a crude simulacra of one of Deckard's dreams.

[Bob]

On Mon, 21 Nov 2005 09:55:09 -0500, "Turtoni" <tur...@alt.philosophy>
wrote:

>Blade Runner opened in US cinemas on the 25th June 1982, amid media hype,
>and yet proved to be a commercial failure, only just recouping its
>$28million costs. Critical reaction to the film was generally negative also:

That's probably why I liked it so much. I have watched it several
times and have included it in my DVD archives of favorite movies along
with other movies that these "critics" (or is it really "cretins")
panned, like David Lynch's Dune and Mel Brooks' History of the World.

It's too subtle for the dull minds of cretins.

--

BOYCOTT SONY!

SONY IS TRYING TO TAKE OVER YOUR COMPUTER!

HOMELAND SECURITY TOLD SONY TO CEASE AND DESIST!

YOU DO THE SAME - BOYCOTT SONY!

[minus]

tooly skrev:

> Multiculturism, I still argue, results in Blade Runner chaos. Relative
> homogeneity on the other hand, leads to a far more peaceful order and some
> hope for a true happy citizenry and gives rise to group membership that
> inspires our greatest levels of 'gestaltive mental drive' to create, build,
> and achieve. Otherwise, you assign us all to hell. -sic [as I see it]

Let's say that multiculturalism is bad. What do we do? How do we
enforce a mono-culture? How would we distinguish between individual
choices and group choices and identity? Are white, middle-class
americans allowed to practice Buddhism? I suppose growing up in New
York makes me feel like these discussions are moot. They was this
great mixing and cross-pollination between cultures (both those defined
by religious and ethnic groups and those created/selected by
individuals) and also separations between cultures. I don't see any
way back from this mish-mosh, even if this were a good thing.
Individuals can of course separate themselves out - but then, doesn't
that contribute to multiculturalism as they begin to identify as a
group and develop habits - dictators can come along and try to purify,
but what is the option here.

One potential response to my question is to stop putting
multiculturalism on a pedestal and have more honest dialogue between
cultures. As far as I can tell this happens alongside those who are
strong relativists, but it is still a valid point.

But in the same ways that I don't really care what my neighbors do in
their private lives (be they eccentric members of my groups however you
want to define it, or more 'normal' members of some other group.)

It seems like whatever mono-culture one would like to be a part of out
there has within it a vast range of cultures, individual and otherwise
- heavy metal heads and vegans, scientists and born again christians,
the guy who collects bottle caps and talks to no one and has all his
food ordered to his house and the workaholic scientist doing
experiments on rabbits for a cosmetics company can all come from white
anglo-saxon working and middle-classes.

Hell my own family is multicultural. Three nationalities, two (or is
it three) ethnic groups, and three nearly completely incompatible
lifestyles. But man do we laugh when I come into the city for dinner.
In our house we have one scientist, one privately mystic secretive
person, and one psychology oriented person (but a quite non-traditional
one, at least to the scientist). Have we made a boo-boo by existing?
Does it make things better that the scientist is from the 3rd world and
the mystic is the 'white' on?

[minus]

tooly skrev:

> Multiculturism, I still argue, results in Blade Runner chaos. Relative
> homogeneity on the other hand, leads to a far more peaceful order and some
> hope for a true happy citizenry and gives rise to group membership that
> inspires our greatest levels of 'gestaltive mental drive' to create, build,
> and achieve. Otherwise, you assign us all to hell. -sic [as I see it]

Let's say that multiculturalism is bad. What do we do? How do we

the mystic is the 'white' one?

[Edgar Svendsen]

"Turtoni" <tur...@alt.philosophy> wrote in message
news:S96dnUoTws8...@comcast.com...

> Thought this may interest tooly:
> http://www.coe.uga.edu/epltt/SocialConstructivism.htm
>
> Social Constructivism
> By
> Beaumie Kim
> What is Social Constructivism?
> Social constructivism emphasizes the importance of culture and
> context in understanding what occurs in society and constructing knowledge
> based on this understanding (Derry, 1999; McMahon, 1997). This perspective
> is closely associated with many contemporary theories, most notably the
> developmental theories of Vygotsky and Bruner, and Bandura's social
> cognitive theory (Shunk, 2000).
>
> Assumptions of Social Constructivism
>
> Social constructivism is based on specific assumptions about reality,
> knowledge, and learning. To understand and apply models of instruction
> that are rooted in the perspectives of social constructivists, it is
> important to know the premises that underlie them.
>
> Reality: Social constructivists believe that reality is constructed
> through human activity. Members of a society together invent the
> properties of the world (Kukla, 2000). For the social constructivist,
> reality cannot be discovered: it does not exist prior to its social
> invention.
>

If it should turn out that there is intelligent life elsewhere in the
Universe, does this premise imply that, if found, they will have been
created by us humans and did not have their own evolutionary path? There
are other, analogous, questions about "reality".

Ed

[Turtoni]

"Edgar Svendsen" <solo...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:VDpgf.3787$N45....@newsread1.news.atl.earthlink.net...

I didn't write that (and there's a whole bunch more i quoted about Social
Constructivism)

But to begin with we'd have to define what we meant by "reality" to answer
your question.

[Edgar Svendsen]

"Turtoni" <tur...@alt.philosophy> wrote in message

news:vaedncRON6u...@comcast.com...

Well........, I don't know how to do that, so I'll be polite and say "You
first!"

I was really asking if social constructionists think that other beings are
constructed by us or have their own thing. Doesn't have to be aliens, what
about dogs? A recent article has suggested that man and dog coevolved and
that dog's influence on man's formation is at least as strong as man's
influence on dog's. I know nothing of social constructivism so I was hoping
your familiarity would let you answer.

Ed

[Turtoni]

"Edgar Svendsen" <solo...@earthlink.net> wrote in message

news:3dsgf.3853$N45....@newsread1.news.atl.earthlink.net...

I believe that some of them are anti-realist. (Ian Hacking)

"The anti-realist position in the philosophy of science is often called
Instrumentalism, which takes a purely functionalist view of the existence of
unobservable (or only indirectly observable) entities: X exists only to the
same extent that it works within a theory Y, and nothing more useful may be
said about it ontologically."

> Ed
>
>
>
>
>

[Turtoni]

"Edgar Svendsen" <solo...@earthlink.net> wrote in message

news:3dsgf.3853$N45....@newsread1.news.atl.earthlink.net...

A "dog" exists in our senses but it only becomes a "dog" by social
construction.

Anything we cant "observe" doesn't exist until we socially construct the
thing we do "observe". So we don't discover it, we invent what it is.