Blade Runner's blade runners
-
Neil Badmington
Abstract
Who but a nostalgic reactionary would take an interest today in the version of Blade Runner that was originally released in 1982? With its anchoring voice-over and ‘happy ending,’ the film appeared to retreat from posthumanist subjectivity into a humanist shelter, where the lines between human and inhuman are firm and clear.
In the wake of Blade Runner: The Director's Cut (1992) and Blade Runner: The Final Cut (2007), the ‘impostor’ that has been on the loose since 1982 appears to have little hope of survival. The ‘real thing’ is apparently here, unafraid to depict authentic posthumanist subjectivity.
To approach the earlier version of the film in this manner is to ignore the flickering of subjectivity running through the text. This essay offers, therefore, a reading of the 1982 version that draws out how, regardless of its yearning for humanism, the film baffles the anthropocentric understanding of subjectivity. I am not seeking to rescue Blade Runner in the name of nostalgia, and my point is not that the version released in 1982 is actually the ‘authentic’ text. My argument, rather, is that Blade Runner frustrates all attempts to limit its depiction of subjectivity to the space of humanism.
© 2009 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin
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- Introduction: What is sociosemiotics?
- Semiotics of resistance: Being, memory, history — the counter-current of signs
- Political semiotics
- The habitual conception of action and social theory
- Sign, dialogue, and alterity
- Ten theses on perception in terms of work: A Rossi-Landian/Wittgensteinian point of view
- The social semiotics of space: Metaphor, ideology, and political economy
- Modernity and the articulation of the gender system: Order, conflict, and chaos
- Collective remembering
- The socio-symbolic function of language
- Observations on the structure and function of communicative genres
- Multimodal genres and transmedia traversals: Social semiotics and the political economy of the sign
- The world according to Playmobil
- Language and globalization
- Semiotics as semioethics in the era of global communication
- Preface
- Exchange and subjectivity, commodity, and gift
- Subjectivity out of irony
- Subjectivity and objectivity in the domain of POSSESSION
- A theory of psychosomatic medicine: An attempt at an explanatory summary
- The subject and the indexicality of the photograph
- Blade Runner's blade runners
- ‘For crying out loud’: The repression of the child's subjectivity in ‘The House of Tiny Tearaways’
- Playing the system: Videogames/players/characters
- Subjects and reading strategies in hypermedia: The re-emergence of the author
Articles in the same Issue
- Introduction: What is sociosemiotics?
- Semiotics of resistance: Being, memory, history — the counter-current of signs
- Political semiotics
- The habitual conception of action and social theory
- Sign, dialogue, and alterity
- Ten theses on perception in terms of work: A Rossi-Landian/Wittgensteinian point of view
- The social semiotics of space: Metaphor, ideology, and political economy
- Modernity and the articulation of the gender system: Order, conflict, and chaos
- Collective remembering
- The socio-symbolic function of language
- Observations on the structure and function of communicative genres
- Multimodal genres and transmedia traversals: Social semiotics and the political economy of the sign
- The world according to Playmobil
- Language and globalization
- Semiotics as semioethics in the era of global communication
- Preface
- Exchange and subjectivity, commodity, and gift
- Subjectivity out of irony
- Subjectivity and objectivity in the domain of POSSESSION
- A theory of psychosomatic medicine: An attempt at an explanatory summary
- The subject and the indexicality of the photograph
- Blade Runner's blade runners
- ‘For crying out loud’: The repression of the child's subjectivity in ‘The House of Tiny Tearaways’
- Playing the system: Videogames/players/characters
- Subjects and reading strategies in hypermedia: The re-emergence of the author
