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Hrenko, Christopher

English

2005

MA

'Humanity' has been a historically contested field of meaning, held in opposition to animal, machine, and savage-barbarian. Discussions about 'human rights' and 'ethical humanism' serve as a reminder of how dependant our ethical sensibilities are upon this concept of 'Humanity.' Science-fiction film and literature has long been concerned with the ethical difficulties involved in defining humanity. It asks questions like: Is it okay to kill or enslave others, as long as they have different colored skin (whether green or black), weird physical features, and come from a different place? If a complex machine could hold conversations and appear to have emotions, should it be treated as if it were human? If scientific knowledge suggests that humans themselves are nothing more than complex machines, do they deserve any kind of special treatment, or is there any reason why not to use one another as labor-saving appliances or cogs in an enormous money machine? For a long time, Western thinkers have distinguished their ethically-loaded versions of humanity from animals and machines by means of 'something special,' an extra ingredient added into the regular old physical substance that allows for freedom where there would otherwise be only law-bound matter, and moral sensibility where there would otherwise be an undifferentiated series of meaningless events. I will explore the way that two science fiction films, RoboCop and Blade Runner, affirm and/or interrogate this kind of traditional Western humanism, and suggest that they give us clues about what to throwaway and what to keep when it comes to deciding what is human, and what ought to be done.
RoboCop affirms humanist virtues of freedom, autonomy, and justice, telling a familiar kind of story in which these traditional values act as a liberating force in a rationalized world of bureaucratic exploitation. Blade Runner also militates against rationalization and bureaucratization, but in a way that destabilizes the concept of essential humanity from which RoboCop's triumphant ending originates. Like Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, a study of early-American literary triumphalism and its relationship to racial slavery, Blade Runner forces us to ponder the conditions that allow for assertions of freedom, autonomy, and justice. For Morrison these ideals, prized by early Americans, originate not from some intrinsic metaphysical qualities, but rather, from concrete power relations involving slavery. Similarly, Blade Runner calls into question the kind of familiar humanist affirmations found in RoboCop by disassociating qualities like freedom, autonomy, and justice from an assertion of authentic or essential humanity; at the same time the film portrays the active and violent enforcement of the privilege that accompanies supposed human authenticity. Although it undercuts the traditional foundation of humanist values like freedom, autonomy, and justice as portrayed in RoboCop, Blade Runner is far from undercutting the desirability of these ideals. And if RoboCop is seen as a conventional affirmation of traditional humanist values, there is something in its very conventionality that strengthens Blade Runner's revision: a closer look reveals that even in a seemingly straight-forward affirmation essential humanity like RoboCop, freedom isn't free.