Subversive Simulations in DADoES

Subversive Simulations in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep

The question posed by the title of Philip K. Dick’s 1968 novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (DADoES), functions as more than a catchy and provocative come-on for a tale that has received much popular and scholarly attention. Within this seemingly surreal dilemma lies a conundrum that plays on the very foundations of human existence. In the world of the not-too-distant future, where androids appear as real as any human—and often more so—the burning question is, “What separates us from them?” and its logical corollary, “What does it mean when we can no longer tell?” In other words, “What makes us human?” In essence, this is the question that has baffled metaphysicians since the dawn of time. DADoES provides a uniquely appropriate setting for the exploration of this question. By constructing a world which obviates many of the subtleties on which we’ve come to rely in the “real” world of today, the text lays bare the most deeply-held assumptions of its society, subverting the very foundations upon which society is based by showing that they rest on nothing more than imagination, consensus, and perhaps a bit of hope. Through the use of simulations, DADoES precipitates a crisis of ontology that leads directly to a crisis of power, and suggests the potential for the same sort of crises in what Baudrillard has referred to as “the desert of the real” (1).[1]

Humans Do Not Dream of Electric Sheep, Do They?

DADoES builds its central tension, the difference between human and android, upon a mirage which Dick somewhat satirically calls empathy. Its basic premise, that androids are not human because they are incapable of empathy, is iterated by and through three primary constructs, namely: a mysterious secular religion called Mercerism, an obsession with human “regard for animals,” and, finally, the pseudo-scientific Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test. Each of these constructions has its own logic and method of defining and reinforcing the human/android gap; together they form an ideology of difference sufficient to keep the mass of humans in this world blithely unaware of the tension that defines them, but which remains highly problematic nonetheless. [2]

Construct one, Mercerism, is the religion in DADoES society, and it is a religion of empathy in the most literal sense. In Mercerism, the faithful pray, or “fuse,” at their “empathy boxes” whenever they’re feeling glum and desire to be uplifted by joining their minds with those of all others in the universe who are also fusing at that given moment.[3] Hence, Mercerism enacts the definition of empathy, which is “identification with or vicarious experiencing of the feelings or thoughts of another” (Webster’s). As the television character Buster Friendly explains, “If we’re to believe its many practitioners, the experience fuses … men and women throughout the Sol System into a single entity” (185). Androids, because they appear incapable of empathy, cannot participate in Mercerism and this divides them from humans. “An android, no matter how gifted as to pure intellectual capacity, could make no sense out of the fusion which took place routinely among the followers of Mercerism” (26).

Construct two, human “regard for animals” is nearly an obsession for humans in DADoES. It seems that every spare moment of Deckard’s time is spent pondering the acquisition of an animal. The logic behind this is that, since all but the most hearty animals have become extinct, it is only human (because of the empathy humans have for each other and for life in general), to want to own one of the few that are left. Sadly, animals have become so valuable and costly that Deckard can only afford an electric animal, a sheep, which drives him crazy and fuels his internal crisis as he struggles to maintain the “proper” perspective on his life.[4] When his neighbor, Barbour, finds out Deckard’s sheep is electric, Barbour promises not to tell anyone. “I don’t know; maybe it doesn’t make any difference,” Deckard replies, much to Barbour’s surprise. “But they’ll look down on you. Not all of them, but some. You know how people are about not taking care of an animal; they consider it immoral and anti-empathetic. I mean, technically it’s not a crime like it was right after W.W.T. but the feeling’s still there” (10). Of course Deckard agrees, emphasizing how badly he wants an animal and thereby demonstrating his humanity. But Deckard’s crisis continues as he begins to see the inconsistencies in a society that values the simulated caring for simulated life perhaps more than it values life itself.

Deckard’s doubts about animal care and his corresponding doubt about the morality of his job as a bounty hunter, persist throughout the book, at times taking explicit form.

He thought, too, about his need for a real animal; within him an actual hatred once more manifested itself toward his electric sheep, which he had to tend, had to care about, as if it lived. The tyranny of an object, he thought. It doesn’t know I exist. Like the androids, it had no ability to appreciate the existence of another. He had never thought of this before, the similarity between an electric animal and an andy. The electric animal, he pondered, could be considered a subform of the other, a kind of vastly inferior robot. Or, conversely, the android could be regarded as a highly developed, evolved version of the ersatz animal. Both viewpoints repelled him. (38)

 Why does Deckard slavishly care for an electric sheep each morning before heading off to hunt and kill electric people if the two are really the same thing?

Despite these apparent contradictions, “regard for animals” provides another of the text’s central criteria of difference between androids and humans. While humans are obsessed with animals (or more precisely, with the appearance of being obsessed with what appear to be animals), androids neither own nor desire animals, therefore, androids cannot be human. In fact, the text suggests that androids demonstrate a glaring absence of respect or concern for animals, going so far as to take a degree of pleasure in picking them apart and watching them die — proof positive that they have no empathy and cannot be human. The first scene[5] of such lack of feeling comes near the text’s end when the android Pris methodically snips off a spider’s legs, in support of her claim, “I think it doesn’t need all those legs” (181). However, the “pleasure” Pris takes in its destruction is the same childlike curiosity of any 5-year-old burning ants beneath a magnifying glass in the sun. Are the androids incapable of empathy, or are they just naïve and unfamiliar with social norms?

Construct three, the Voigt-Kampff Empathy Test, is the final and most conclusive proof of humanity in DADoES, but it, too, is subject to constant doubt. This doubt forces Deckard to visit the offices of the Rosen Association, manufacturer of the latest and most “real” android model, the Nexus-6, to verify that the Voigt-Kampff test can still discern between human and non-human. As its name suggests, the Voigt-Kampff is supposedly designed to detect empathy. As Deckard explains to Rachael Rosen, the test detects empathy through a simulation of science.

“This,”—he held up the flat adhesive disk with its trailing wires—“measures capillary dilation in the facial area. We know this to be a primary autonomic response, the so-called ‘shame’ or ‘blushing’ reaction to a morally shocking stimulus. It can’t be controlled voluntarily, as can skin conductivity, respiration, and cardiac rate.” He showed her the other instrument, a pencil-beam light. “This records fluctuations of tension within the eye muscles. Simultaneous with the blush phenomenon there generally can be found a small detectable movement of—”

“And these can’t be found in androids,” Rachael said.

“They’re not engendered by the stimuli-questions; no. Although biologically they exist. Potentially.” (41)

Here Deckard is forced to admit that the Voigt-Kampff test really measures nothing more than a physical reaction to questions that should produce an emotional response if you have the proper attitude toward animals. In other words, the “empathy” detected by the Voight-Kampff scale is simply a measure of how thoroughly the subject has internalized social conventions regarding life on a planet that is dying.

Deckard’s implicit admission that “empathy” is little more than a social construct is precisely where its use as a justification for the destruction of the androids falls apart. The assumption of each of the primary constructs supporting the notion of a quantifiable difference between humans and androids is that to be human is to have empathy. However, the corollary that to be human is to have regard for animals, to possess (or almost be possessed by) an inescapable need to take care of another life (an animal), collapses with the realization that animals in this world have become nothing more than fetishized commodities that people are socialized to desire.4 The value humans place on animals in this society is not immanent within the animals themselves, but rather, like all values, a social construct, an integral part of the dominant social ideology. That value is reinforced by Mercerism, which encourages its followers to identify with all life, not because there is inherent value in such identification, but because it has become the definition of humanity.

The scene wherein Rachael is subjected to, and nearly passes, the Voigt-Kampff test, makes this point clear. Upon first testing her, Deckard declares Rachael an android. The Rosens claim she is not,[6] and that the test is unreliable. “I can explain why she scored as an android might,” Eldon Rosen says. “Rachael grew up aboard [a starship]. She was born on it; she spent fourteen of her eighteen years living off its tape library and what the nine other crew members, all adults, knew about Earth. Then, as you know, the ship turned back a sixth of the way to Proxima. Otherwise Rachel would never have seen Earth — anyhow, not until her later life” (46). However, Rachael gives Deckard reason to suspect she’s an android by referring to an animal using the impersonal “it” rather than “her.” Deckard retests Rachael and she fails the test, at which point her uncle admits she is an android. While this vindicates the Voigt-Kampff test, the episode demonstrates that it is a given in this society that if you have not been raised within it, if you have not spent an entire life learning its customs, values and norms, you will not be able to participate as a natural member.[7] Deckard never questions the Rosens’ explanation for Rachael’s initial failure; it is immediately sufficient for him. Thus the text admits that its test for empathy, for humanity, for life, is nothing more than a test for the internalization of, and adherence to, social convention. Further, if empathy is nothing more than a social construct, and empathy is the indicator of life, life itself is nothing more than a social construct.[8]

Simulation’s Challenge to Power

If the concept of life itself is nothing more than a social construct, and if that construct is threatened by the realization that its definition is without foundation, society itself is suddenly suspect. To borrow a cliché from Marx, “all that is solid melts into air.” In DADoES, the presence of simulated life in the form of androids precipitates just such a crisis. Once the concept of empathy, the defining characteristic of the human, is evacuated of meaning, humans in this world can no longer define themselves with any certainty — society, and the individual’s role within it, suddenly becomes meaningless. The threat, then, posed by the dissolution of the difference between android and human, is a threat to the status quo, or, to put it another way, a threat to power. Although this threat is never made explicit in DADoES, it is implicit throughout the text and is the source of much of its resonance. This raises the question: What is the status quo in DADoES? Who’s in charge here? More important, why is it necessary to for the existing power structure to define androids in such a way that their extermination is justified?

The answer to these questions are also absent from the text. Who, or what, is Deckard working for? Deckard works for the police. But from whom, or what, do the police derive their authority? Who is in control? Why does this society exist? Again, none of these questions are explicitly addressed by the text,[9] but the exact structure of the status quo in this world does not matter. Assuming that the centers of Power have moved to off-world colonies (a logical assumption given that we’re informed by the text that staying on earth in the year 2019 will kill you), it is also safe to assume that said Power has some sort of interest in things continuing on earth as they are—otherwise, why bother with the attempts to maintain order via religion, bounty hunting, etc? Furthermore, in a world where some kind of poisonous dust threatens to kill or genetically deform all life, the physical threat posed by androids—the possibility that they might rebel and kill humans—is not the issue here. The issue, then, must be that androids pose a psychological, metaphysical, and ideological threat to the status quo that is far more dangerous than any actual, physical crimes they might commit.

The theory of simulation as outlined by Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation brings the threat posed by androids in DADoES into sharp relief. “To simulate,” writes Baudrillard, “is to feign to have what one doesn’t have” (Baudrillard 3). In the context of DADoES, the androids feign to have life when they do not, in fact, have it (according to the terms of the text). This is threatening because it “attacks the reality principle itself” (Baudrillard 20). Thus, Deckard, and his society, are concerned by the presence of androids because the androids’ presence threatens ideas of reality within that society. This threat is more important to stamp out than any actual violence or crime committed by androids, as Baudrillard explains, “Transgression and violence are less serious because they only contest the distribution of the real. Simulation is infinitely more dangerous because it always leaves open to supposition that, above and beyond its object, law and order themselves might be nothing but simulation" (Baudrillard 20). This explains why it is so important to exterminate androids, even if they are opera singers with beautiful voices who have given no indication whatsoever that they intend harm to anyone. And this means that the division between the android and the human—however difficult to prove or justify, or even discover or create—is necessary as an excuse for “retiring” the androids.

In the end, then, the central concern of DADoES, the difference between human and android, is a concern with power. However, this concern is never made explicit, because as Baudrillard explains,

The challenge of simulation is never admitted by power. How can the simulation of virtue be punished? However, as such it is as serious as the simulation of crime. Parody renders submission and transgression equivalent, and that is the most serious crime, because it cancels out the difference upon which the law is based....

The only weapon of power, its only strategy against this defection, is to reinject the real and the referential everywhere, to persuade us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and the finalities of production. To this end it prefers the discourse of crisis, but also, why not? that of desire. “Take your desires for reality!” can be understood as the ultimate slogan of power since in a nonreferential world, even the confusion of the reality principle and the principle of desire is less dangerous than contagious hyperreality. (Baudrillard 21-2)

Thus, the status quo in DADoES attempts to “reinject the real and the referential,” and “to persuade us of the reality of the social” through constructs, or simulacra, such as Mercerism and desire for animals. However, the androids constantly compromise these attempts. The ideological threat of the androids is made explicit by Buster Friendly,[10] who unmasks Wilbur Mercer as nothing more than a well-constructed hoax.[11] Near the end of DADoES, Friendly reveals that Mercerism is a powerful ideology exercising control over society. He starts to go further but he is cut off by the android Irmgard, who seems unable to understand that Buster’s revelation is confirmation of what she already knew, namely that “empathy” is itself a construct of Mercerism. Here Irmgard shows that even the androids have internalized the construct of empathy to such a degree that they can only grasp its function as their death sentence. Friendly describes Mercerism as fusing its practitioners into a single entity, “‘but an entity which is manageable by the so-called telepathic voice of ‘Mercer.’ Mark that. An ambitious politically minded would-be Hitler could— ’

“‘No, it’s that empathy,’ Irmgard said vigorously. … ‘Isn’t it a way of proving that humans can do something we can’t do? Because without the Mercer experience we just have your word that you feel this empathy business, this shared, group thing’” (185). This is precisely what Buster is trying to tell them. Androids must be exterminated because, in their inability to appropriately empathize, they have already realized the absence masked by Mercerism and society as a whole.

Baudrillard provides a more concrete parallel to the weaknesses of Mercerism within DADoES society in his discussion of the Iconoclasts (so-named because they destroyed idols, or “icons” because they considered them blasphemous) “whose millennial quarrel is still with us today” (5). Baudrillard explains that argument of the Iconoclasts remains today.

This is precisely because they predicted this omnipotence of simulacra, the faculty simulacra have of effacing God from the conscience of man, and the destructive, annihilating truth that they allow to appear—that deep down God never existed, that only the simulacrum ever existed, even that God himself was never anything but his own simulacrum—from this came their urge to destroy images. If they could have believed that these images only obfuscated or masked the Platonic Idea of God, there would have been no reason to destroy them. One can live with the idea of distorted truth. But their metaphysical despair came from the idea that the image didn't conceal anything at all, and that these images were in essence not images, such as an original model would have made them, but perfect simulacra, forever radiant with their own fascination. Thus this death of the divine referential must be exorcised at all costs. (Baudrillard 5)

In other words, the existence of any simulacrum can call into question the “reality” supposedly supporting all other simulations. Because Mercerism is based on the icon of Wilbur Mercer, its status and power as a simulacrum is constantly in danger of crumbling and it is the presence of the androids (as simulacra themselves) that eventually unmasks Mercerism.[12]

The Desert of the Real?

The ideological struggles of DADoES can be seen as a simulation of those found in our own society in which political factions and religious ideologies battle continuously against being emptied of, or revealed as never having, meaning. In place of Mercerism we have various theologies, one of which, Christianity, asks for a similar empathy to that of Mercerism. Rather than requiring its followers to fuse with Mercer, Christianity asks for a fusion with Christ, but its status as anything more than a simulation is suspect, just as Mercerism is proven to be in DADoES.[13]

In politics, recent remarks made by President Clinton in a fundraising speech before Access Now for Gay and Lesbian Equality echo the concern within DADoES for a clear and coherent definition of human identity. DADoES attempts to establish this definition in opposition to a clear and specific simulation; our own equivalent of the simulation provided by the androids remains an open question. Nonetheless, Clinton  makes a clear effort to at least mask the possibility that no coherent definition for humanity exists.[14] “I'm going to do everything that I can every day that I have to remind people... that we have to be one America. We can have honest differences over issues, but we can't have honest differences over whether we share a common humanity.”

These parallels suggest that our world today may be just as ideologically unstable as that of DADoES. Perhaps even more so, as the multiplicity of ideologies we’re able to create and draw upon in the formation of our own cosmologies indicates we have entered a world which, as Baudrillard puts it, “has no relation to any reality whatsoever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (6). Do androids dream of electric sheep? Perhaps it makes no difference in the end.

Works Cited:

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1994.

Dick, Philip A. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. New York: Ballantine Books (Del Rey), 1968.

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1999,