CHAPTER FIVE
The Virtual Potentials of Blade Runner 2049: the virtue of the individual
in which I discuss the difference between a reparative position and a paranoid pov, connecting these to strong and weak virtual realities
Blade Runner 2049 is filled with visual strata that Villenueve intended as a throwback to the original film as well as a trope ingredient to the presentation of his movie:
In the first movie, you were seeing layers of time. Most of the time in sci-fi movies, the world is purely a vision of the future, but in the original Blade Runner, you felt the dirt that was coming out of ages. That was something I wanted to bring back.
In 2049, Villenueve “had to struggle with the problem of having to deal with a movie that was made in 1982 that talked about 2019” and to depict its world as evolving thirty years later. This meant incorporating political, cultural, environmental, and economic realities as part of the movie’s engrossing production design.[1] This layering—visions of a past future’s extension—become present as a material canvas on which the action of 2049 plays out its virtual storylines.
Many movies, and especially sci-fi movies, take this approach to time. This approach combines various virtual narratives (discussed above) with generic conventions/conventions/ tropes that assemble the movie’s arc with moments of suspense and moments of climactic release. These conform to a virtual “world” or “context” in which the characters move, and a narrative arc that organizes the behavior. What is unique to the movie is its mode of plotting interactions in a way that culminates into what audiences would understand as a conclusion. Bracketing the first two elements (the background world and the direction of narrative arcs) allows us to look at how the movie models divergent roles of understanding hope, organizational perspectives or points of view that are embodied by K. The character K., although a Replicant, very much is made to parallel the lives of virtually everyone in the audience.
More than existing as the protagonist around which all of the virtual tensions of the movie coalesce, K’s character is comprised and circumscribed by a combination of memories, programming, and intentionality that are the intersection of the movie and the audience. For K, memories are virtual stories that he received upon creation. Even though he knows that these stories are artificial (as the audience is aware that the stories on the screen are artificial), they nonetheless are meaningful: he can see himself in them, and his ability to reflect on these stories proves to be inspirational. The value of the inspiration exceeds any sense of possession: having become habituated to these stories, having seen himself within them, allows them to remain a potent presence even as he knows they are not “his” memories in particular. Revisiting these memories, these stories, allows them to become his—important to his self-understanding, his identity.
K. also has programming—the Wallace directive to obey orders from humans, even if these involve self-termination. Nonetheless, even though his autonomy is limited and although some of his choices remain wholly determined by external influences, K. has a host of options available to him that are not externally constrained. These actions and options are those that fall beyond the purview of his programming, which, like all laws, can only diagnose and proscribe certain specific actions or behaviors. No program and no law can actually be predetermined in advance. Relative to our future orientations, we are like K in blending freedom with certain programmatic tendencies.
What’s unique for K in this movie is the sense of freedom he has beyond the unchosen constraints of world and the nature of his programming. It is this sense of freedom that the movie explores by providing K with the child, who is an object of pursuit that is simultaneously given (by Joshi) and chosen (by curiosity concerning his memories). Even when K learns that the mission is not “personal,” and even after his specific mission exhausts itself (after Joshi’s death, for instance), the movie follows K’s choice to pursue the mission (the story) to a conclusion of his choosing. This direction toward the future arises from a conjunction of the given and the chosen, and becomes folded into a discussion of hope. The hope that K has for the future is one that concerns his character (the entity he is becoming) as well as the world (that his actions inevitably alter in both big and small ways).
The hope is useful in being limited—humans (and Replicants who are virtually human) tend to feel the paralysis of despair (the sickness unto death, the state of hopelessness) when subjected to having no options, or not limits. As a hope, something futural, K’s actions are interested and invested in altering the status quo. Hope, in this way, is the promise of discontinuity that one’s intentions and actions are able to affect. It is the force of agency that allows one to deviate from givens (memories and programming) toward a future in whose becoming we desire to participate.
In her essay Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick examines two contrasting hermeneutical styles. These styles are the points of views or perspectives that define a symbol of hope and bend it toward two different ends. The paranoid style does not wish for the status quo, but wishes to control the factors that govern the status quo. This allows for continuity and familiarity (preserving part of the given) that conjoin with a change in how the subject relates to reality (a desired, virtual possibility). The reparative style, by contrast, understands with joy that reality remains happily ungovernable but subject to occasional influence (a change in how one relates to the given). The paranoid style is reductive (focusing on a single cause), while the reparative is expansive (allowing multiple influences). These perspectives seem to have explanatory value for how K’s choices remain inflected by Luv and Joi.
One of the joys of Sedgwick’s essay is her preference for Klein’s terminology of positions as a way of describing the personality, rather than types (128). I find this a useful way to explore the virtual because a type assigns as determinate the presentation of a particular pattern as the essential quality that constitutes a given thing (seeing other, contrasting elements of the person as “randomness” and the pattern as “true”). To understand a personality as a position provides a more expansive sense of the virtual potential within a person, one that allows for a number of patterns that emerge at different times. Different positions relative to a virtual layer allow different interpretations to be held as viable. This includes positions within the virtual, as well as positions (perspectives, points of view) that would occur outside a virtual layer—something more aligned with what Hayles referenced as the flickering signifier.
Because Sedgwick invests in the Freudian tradition, she understands the appeal of it as a way to illuminate a mechanism of oppression that (in the terms of this essay) have virtual control over the world. A paranoid hermeneutic of suspicion provides an awareness of the pattern, and, as Sedgwick advises, this awareness is “contagious” (126). Paranoia’s pattern identification requires a perspective that is outside of what it analyzes. The paranoid position, in Sedgwick’s words, “knows some things well and others poorly,” and then proceeds to describe five qualities of paranoia (130): it is anticipatory (wishing to avoid bad surprises (130)), reflexive and mimetic (reaching an understanding by emulating what it wants to know and inducing that in others (131)), a strong theory (which is reductive in order to have a greater reach (134)), has negative affects (prioritizing avoiding pain rather than providing pleasure (136)), and places its faith in exposure (assuming a naïve, unenlightened group who will change when hearing the truth (139-141). The paranoid contrasts specifically with the reparative in the following way:
Allow each theory its own, different prime motive…the anticipation of pain in one case, the provision of pleasure in the other—and neither can be called more realistic than the other. It’s not even necessarily true that the two make different judgments of “reality”: it isn’t that one is pessimistic and sees the glass as half empty, while the other is optimistic and sees it as half full. In a world full of loss, pain, and oppression, both epistemologies are likely to be based on deep pessimism: the reparative motive of seeking pleasure, after all, arrives, by Klein’s account, only with the achievement of a depressive position. But what each looks for—which is again to say the motive each has for looking—is bound to differ widely. Of the two, however, it is only paranoid knowledge that has so thorough a practice of disavowing its affective motive and force and masquerading as the very stuff of truth (138).
Luv and Joi are two Wallace products, each of which faithfully executes its programming. Both of these entities are created to explore and execute the desires of their owners. Luv’s directives tend toward possession, as a way for Wallace to obtain control of Replicant breeding, and she employs violence to do so. Her demand is for answers, for certainty, and this demand often results in death. By contrast, Joi asks questions and attempts to lead K. toward an enhanced understanding of his own special nature (his moral goodness, his virtue) without worrying about whether this enhanced understanding is more than an active, guiding possibility.
A reparative motive, and thus position, is “about pleasure” and is “frankly ameliorative,” which renders it incompatible with paranoia’s exclusive “faith in demystifying exposure” that makes pain “conscious…and intolerable” and thus facilitates the condition for change (144). Sedgwick associates reparative readings with weak theories (a weak theory allows for a strong virtual, a strong theory demands a weak virtual) that don’t seek “a systematic, self-accelerating split between what one is doing and the reasons one does it,” which open to “exploring the extremely varied, dynamic, and historically contingent ways that strong theoretical constructs interact with weak ones in the ecology of knowing.” She mentions the importance of “imaginative close reading” as an example of “important phenomenological and theoretical tasks that can be accomplished only through local theories and nonce taxonomies,” which have “potentially innumerable mechanisms” that relate to stronger theories (145). This description, of course, retains an awareness of the flickering signifier and delights to play with it, allowing theories that make sense of some things, some times, without the guarantee of absoluteness that paranoia demands.
As a virtual entity, Joi recognizes that her limitations are less restrictions than what allows for a position of wonder. She’s capable of embracing weak theories, and using them to influence specific moments rather than controlling entire futures. As she and K. look through genetic codes from a hospital to find “a ghost,” as K. calls the child, Joi reflects on their relationship as a reflection of different coding vocabularies: “Mere data makes a man. A and C and T and G. The alphabet of you. And them. Books made of sentences made of words and all from four symbols. Where I am only two. 1 and 0.” She stands behind him, then overlaps with him in order to show him a memory from his childhood, imaged for K. and the viewer. There’s no clear boundary between Joi and K., just as there isn’t between the “present” reality and the memory. This same unconcern for strict borders persists as her hand caresses K and she whispers: “I always knew you were special. Maybe this is how…A child…of woman born. Pushed into the world… Wanted… Loved…” K. responds from a paranoid position: “If it were true, I’d be hunted for the rest of my life by someone just like me,” which neither admits nor denies the possibility as true but shuts down the desirability of the question. His refusal to allow Joi’s question is the single cause that allows him control over the status quo. Joi remains insistent with the pleasure allowed by the probing: “It’s okay to dream a little, isn’t it?” The important truth for Joi is not any one detail that “proves” how special K. is, but in engaging in a hermeneutic practice that opens speculations posited on the position that K is special, and open to ways the world may demonstrate how.
Sedgwick offers a crucial, culminating consideration of reparative and paranoid styles in understanding. She begins by taking a perspective beyond paranoia, one that makes it a weak theory that works as a possibility among others. As a choice, paranoia is only sometimes helpful: “To recognize in paranoia a distinctively rigid relation to temporality, at once anticipatory and retroactive, averse above all to surprise, is also to glimpse the lineaments of other possibilities.” She then returns to Klein’s notion of position rather than type to recover the advantages of flexibility that come with allowing a healthy willingness to be, to not know the future in advance: “ …to read from a reparative position is to surrender the knowing, anxious paranoid determination that no horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever come to the reader as new; to a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise.” This offers a way of returning to Hayles’ contrast of pattern and randomness and the paradoxical relation of information and the unknown. A paranoid reading always finds the expected data that supports its theory and thus is ill-equipped to discover new information. A reparative reading is far more open to receiving information, as such, that equips it to discover what is yet-to be. In short, the paranoid invests in the weak virtual, while the reparative embraces the strong virtual.
The non-predictive nature of a reparative reading is courageous. Again, Sedgwick: “Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there can also be good ones. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates.” This understanding of hope relates itself to the virtual and material present in a way that provides a temporary orientation toward a less awful future. Even if you cannot change past circumstances nor control future ones, you become empowered to collaborate in a future that may not be ideal, that may include pain, but in which you are now complicit as an entire participant.
Importantly, having permission to occupy this position not only opens a new, less anxious perspective concerning the future but also re-presents the past as something malleable. This occurs throughout the movie as K’s relationship to the child that he hunts and the memory that haunts, an odd twist on the typical Oedipal plot, proves (as is true of Oedipus) a way to understand the power of the past and future as something virtual rather than certain. Sedgwick writes: “Because the reader has room to realize that the future may be different from the present, it is also possible for her to entertain such profoundly painful, profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities as that the past, in turn, could have happened differently than it actually did” (146). This tragic contingency is damning, of course, as suffering is deprived of meaning made from its necessity; however, this position is also empowering toward understanding how to no longer suffer (undergo, submit to) future situations but instead offers information about how to avoid it.
Sedgwick’s final point of comparison between the paranoid and the reparative entails their aesthetic preferences. The paranoid tends toward “minimalist elegance and conceptual economy,” while the “desire of a reparative impulse…is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plentitude on an object that will then have resources to offer an inchoate self” (149). The generosity of reparation differs from the possessive position of the paranoid, although the accuracy of each remains parallel: “No less acute than a paranoid position, no less realistic, no less attached to a project of survival, and neither less nor more delusional or fantasmatic, the reparative reading position undertakes a different range of affects, ambitions, and risks” (150). The weak (incomplete), reparative position relinquishes the dream of domination and the certainty administered control, and allows itself to take on a small, local curiosity with the hope for obtaining a (strong) virtual past and (strong) virtual future conducive to its pleasure and to its desires.
Hayles also speaks to the paranoid position in her analysis of Dick’s oeuvre. Her sense of the paranoid reinforces Sedgwick’s by showing the psychological continuity that connects the minimalist economy of the paranoid perception and the desire for control:
The paranoid feels compelled to interpret all the surrounding mysterious signs and order them into a single coherent system. From here it is a small step to feeling responsible for the signs. If everything that happens is the paranoid's responsibility, the belief easily follows that the paranoid actually caused all these events.
This kind of paranoia provides an empowerment that becomes equivalent to wish—it operates in the haunting subjunctive that recreates a non-reality as though it could be observed. Hayles then speaks of the relationship of the reader’s point of view as it works through the virtual (often paranoid) perspectives that Dick provides within his stories. Her comment about the need to win the battle for an “external” position relative to other characters and actors seems apt:
The stakes are high, for if the self is unable to expand to megalomaniac proportions, it is likely to shrink so that it becomes merely a dot on the horizon, an atom in a cold, pitiless, inanimate landscape shaped by the dead forces of cause and effect and completely unresponsive to human desire (169).
Within a zero-sum universe in which other actors and characters are attempting to dominate by wielding the power of determination, it would make no sense to donate new possibilities in line with a reparative position.
Theologically, Sedgwick’s analysis also demonstrates how symbols of hope might be constructed. The perspective of Luv, informed by Wallace’s desire for domination and expansion, is informed by the paranoid position that desires to find a core cause that allows for the maintenance of control. The perspective of Joi comes from a reparative position: it expands K’s memories and installs K.’s actions within the story of the child, enhancing his connection to it. The child has a conceptual economy when reduced to a function for Wallace, while Joi’s hopeful donation understands that the surrounding economy is hostile to the child—an understanding that arguably influences K to shift the child out of the economy an restore the father-child relationship as an alternative to the more utilitarian (reductionist) senses of the child’s worth. In this way, the reparative position ends up disrupting the pretense of control that accompanies paranoid desire by remaining entirely beyond that economy. By holding to the potentiality of the strong virtual, in hope, actors are able to “win” by redefining the rules of play.
Notice how the symbol’s futural import changes tenor in each circumstance. The rival Replicant parties wished for the child as a way to highlight and make real a new virtual future which the party could dominate. Finding the child would open a path to that future, allowing the event of finding the child to become part of a narrative chronology, a series of before and after. The father-child relationship provided a different attitude toward the future of the relationship. Its unfolding and its culmination are anchored in less of an event-based transformation from one reality to the next (like a switch was flipped); it is instead more the kind of hope that emerges through a slow process of collaborative development—the growth of a plant, a child, or relationship. It is an organic, not technological, model of development.