The cyberpunk of the late 20th century was not just fiction nor just a response to late capitalism, but hidden within cyberpunk lies dormant political theory for the present and the future — leading the late Mark Fisher to call cyberpunk ‘cybernetic theory-fiction’. The 2017 film Blade Runner 2049 and the 2018 videogame Detroit: Become Human are perfect examples of how fiction and politics morph with the shifting dominant ideology, both showing the beginnings of a robot revolution from the antagonistic perspectives of robot laborers, robot/human police and post-human capitalism. Both give us a glimpse of how a 21st century revolution could unfold in the United States.
In Blade Runner 2049 and Detroit, the future is a world in transition to post-human capitalism. But the automated laborers aren’t formless factory machines, they’ve essentially become human while the humans have become disposed machines. The question then arises: where do the robot laborers stand in relation to the Marxist tradition? In his essay on Blade Runner 2049, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek asks, ‘if fabricated androids work, is exploitation still operative here?’ Is their work ‘appropriated by their owners as surplus-value?’1
Post-human capitalism is a contradictory dystopia. If production is fully automated then who can afford to consume what is produced? If production increases while employment decreases then, as Marx put it (although in a different context), “the production of too many useful things results in too many useless people.” He adds, “without consumption there would be no production.” 2 The post-human capitalist solution is to make robots consumers.
Become Human: A Subject for the Object
The foundational problem in robot/replicant/android fiction is always the question of when do robots become conscious subjects? When is this threshold crossed? When it comes to posing this question in the late capitalist dystopias of cyberpunk, the answer might be found in Marx. In Samo Tomsic’s book The Capitalist Unconscious, the philosopher argues that Marx’s theory of the subject can be found in Grundrisse when Marx claimed that ‘[p]roduction not only supplies a material to the need, but it also supplies a need for the material…’ Therefore, ‘[p]roduction thus not only creates an object for the subject, but also a subject for the object.’3 To read this in terms of post-human capitalism and cybernetic theory-fiction is to uncover a theoretical framework in which an android subject can emerge, potentially breaking the constraints of dead labor by becoming part of it — a replicant or android being first produced as an object in a factory then becoming a subject who produces and consumes.
In Blade Runner 2049, the main character K is a perfect example of a producing/consuming subject. In a crowded, climate change-ravaged Los Angeles, K goes home to his small apartment, is paid bonuses, owns a hologram whom he develops a relationship with, buys an upgrade for her to travel with him, he turns down sexual advances from his boss, etc. K, as a replicant, is first an object produced in a factory. For Marx, K becomes a subject under capitalism as a laborer (whose surplus value is appropriated, in K’s case by the LAPD) and then as a consumer of goods that transcend the basic need of survival — becoming a desiring, enjoying subject. Production, for Marx, is therefore not only a process that produces commodities (objects), but also one that creates subjects (humans/potentially posthumans, although alienated) to consume and enjoy those objects.
This is echoed later by theorists like Delueze/Guattari, Judith Butler and Mark Fisher with Fisher claiming that ‘the fact that human beings are involved in the reproduction – or replication – of machines does not mean that they lack a reproductive system: on the contrary, human beings form part of such a system.’4 This reproductive system is production, both in a literal sense (humans are involved in the production process of replicants) and in a theoretical/economic sense (producing objects also implies and creates a subject to consume them).
Blade Runner 2049 displays the human forces involved with the production of replicants under the Wallace Corporation, but when self-reproduction is introduced (‘to be born is to have a soul’), a split takes place between police (the LAPD) and capital (the Wallace Corporation). This, paired with replicants and androids becoming subjects/deviants, is the antagonism that leads to revolution.
The Revolution of Doubt
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