Speciesism and species being in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?(Critical essay)

Criticism on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? has focused on androids and ignored animals. The novel's ethical concerns are best understood through animal studies, revealing political deployments of the species boundary to disenfranchise certain humans. The novel suggests another model of subjectivity best understood through Marx's "species being."

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Central to Philip K. Dick's fiction is the question of what it means to be human, a question generally explored through the opposition between "authentic" human beings and various artificial beings made to imitate humans. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, whose popularity perhaps derives from the wide influence of the film Blade Runner which it inspired, is his best known novel in this mode. Similarities and differences between the two texts have been discussed at length and it is not my purpose to rehearse or contribute to those arguments or to engage with scholarship on these differences. Rather, I want to focus attention on an aspect of the original text neglected in both the film adaptation and criticism: the importance of animals, electric and real. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? develops its ideas about being human through two comparisons: animals and androids.

Dick's novel is set in a future earth that has been devastated by nuclear war. Most of the population has left the planet, a colonization effort aided by the free labour of androids. Those left are either too poor to emigrate or else are designated "specials," a category denoting decreased intelligence and hence ineligibility for emigration. Androids are illegal on earth, although some have escaped slavery in the colonies and try to pass as human. They are hunted down and killed--retired--by bounty hunters such as protagonist Rick Deckard. The remnants of human culture are held together by a religion called Mercerism, which is practiced through empathic fusion with others via a technology called the empathy box. Animals, almost or perhaps actually extinct, are sacred to the religion of Mercerism and the culture in general. Owning and caring for an animal is a sign of one's social and economic status and also an expression of one's humanity. Androids, in contrast, do not care for others, neither animals nor other androids. Their inability to feel empathy is what sets them apart from humans and justifies their enslavement and execution. Organic machines, androids can only be distinguished from humans through the Voigt-Kampff test for empathy which measures involuntary emotional response to certain questions, predominantly about abuse and exploitation of animals.

There is a general critical consensus that the novel's major concern is with alienated, modern, technologized life rendering humans increasingly cold and android-like. While this argument usually concludes that Deckard is healed by reconnecting with nature, most critics ignore the important role of animals in the novel and the specificity of the category of the animal in Western culture. (1) Ursula Heise, one of a few critics attentive to the animals, concludes that, although animals are crucial to the definition of what is human, the novel's theme is that "the technological simulation of animal life" (79) is a sufficient substitute for real animals. In contrast to such readings, I argue that the representation of animals is central to the novel's critique of the Cartesian subject and commodity fetishism, and that only by realizing the centrality of animals can we perceive all the implications of Deckard's change. It is not, as often argued, that Deckard risks becoming increasingly like the androids through his work as a bounty hunter; rather, the risk faced by Deckard and other humans in the novel lies in realizing that they already are android-like, so long as they define their subjectivity based on the logical, rational, calculating part of human being.

The version of the human self that emerges in the novel can be traced back to Descartes's cogito, which marks the entrance of a number of important distinctions that have structured modernity. Descartes conceptualized the human self as separate from nature, including the nature of its own body. He also argued strongly for an absolute split between humans and animals, asserting that animals are merely mechanical beings undeserving of our empathy rather than living and feeling creatures like ourselves. Descartes based this conclusion on his conviction that animals do not have mental capacities as do humans, and thus, while animals might feel sensation, they cannot experience pain as such. Instead, animals respond to stimuli as if they were automata made of "of bones, muscles, nerves, arteries, veins" instead of "wheels and other parts" (41), acting only from the "disposition of their organs" (42) rather than from understanding. The philosophical problem with which Descartes struggled--how to distinguish man from an other (in this case, animals)--is the same question with which Dick continually struggles. Descartes's sense that animals are simply machines responding as designed is similar to the way androids are positioned within Dick's novel: they appear to act as do humans, but lack some non-material capacity (mind for Descartes, empathy in the novel) that would make them truly the same as humans. Tom Regan offers a sustained critique of Descartes's notion of animal subjectivity in The Case for Animal Rights (see 3-25). Nonetheless, as Gary Francione points out in Animals, Property and the Law, despite this critique and new developments in the study of animal consciousness since Descartes, scientific practice regarding animals continues to be structured by the assumption that they do not feel pain as humans do (220-24).

Descartes used such distinctions to insist that the cogito, or thinking self, was distinct from all other life. Dick, on the other hand, critiques the cogito and emphasizes the fragility of such demarcations. At one point in the novel, an android tortures a spider in order to discover how many legs it can lose while still being able to walk. This is typically described as the moment when the androids' truly inhuman nature comes to the surface and all sympathy for them is lost. Another way of reading this scene, however, is as disinterested experiment rather than torture, mirroring the technique of scientists who were (and often still are) able to perform painful experiments on living creatures without any concern. Thus android subjectivity is similar to the Cartesian model of subjectivity, used to justify the exploitation of animals because of their mechanical nature and lack of a soul. The Nexus-6 androids, explicitly labelled "these progressively more human types" (Dick, Do 54), show us the limitations of the Cartesian self. The Cartesian self is clearly not the only way to understand human …