We live in outlandishly fucked times. From climate change to the myriad class warfares resulting from depleted resources, and inhumane monopolies on those resources, it's harder than ever to collectively imagine a detour from pending collapse. Revolutionary imaginaries are scanty, starved and blocked when the withdrawal critical cultural production necessitates is made impossible by living standards that extract eighty-plus hour work weeks from the working poor. Political participation itself has become a luxury commodity ensuring representation is locked within a feedback loop of wealth and privilege. It's not looking good people.
No wonder then horror and science fiction have undergone a contemporary renaissance as genres which have historically fixated on futurity and imminent threat, respectively. The former has to date measured and distilled the most prominent social fears and anxieties of the moment, from the xenophobic culture wars of the seventies (in which satanism and home invasion were recurrent, birthing the modern day slasher) to the pornographies of capture and torture at the turn of the century (Saw, Hostel etcetera, a post-9/11 sub-genre debatably born of publics digesting the sanctioned atrocities of Abu Ghraib and extraordinary rendition). Likewise dystopian-minded science fiction has frequently compounded concerns over the present with future projection, hyperbolising malcontent to caution against the implications of sticking to certain trajectories. Both genres interrogate darkness and plead with their audiences for course corrections.
It is dystopian science fiction though in it's wider contextualising of horrors within societal breakdown, as opposed to the horror genre's stark upholding of repulsion itself, that nuances it towards alternatives to the problems it frames. As we close this century's second decade many examples stand out in the last twenty years, films which proffer bleakly hopeful versions of ourselves that shy neither from highlighting our complicity, nor as they do from holding space for audiences to think alternatives. Children of Men, Artificial Intelligence, Minority Report; just to name a few.
To this day though few visions have effected the zeitgeist in the ways Bladerunner has. Not only did it somewhat accurately predict the extent of globalisation but it also managed to foretell the ways in which privileged subject-hood within this New World Order would be (unfairly, cruelly) distributed, even if it's examples were of synthetic body-doubles the likes of which current technologies are far from being capable of.
The following essay focuses primarily on that film's recent sequel Bladerunner 2049, in how it not only updates the original's themes but also condenses the external themes of Philip K. Dick's large (and strange) oeuvre, which is ironic considering it was loosely adapted from unfinished manuscripts. In reality Dick never wrote a sequel to Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which Bladerunner is adapted from), but if he did we can imagine the sequel we have probably comes pretty close to all it would've been. Using Bladerunner 2049 as a launching pad, I will then discuss Dick's exegetical writings and his very experimental theologising which 2049 exemplifies with almost supernatural prescience.
Supernatural is right because in Dick's fictional worlds, which he reified through his non-fiction as our own, the necrotic forces of industry weren't just social ills but symptoms of a demonic demi-urgic force which he implores us to this day, through his still living legacy, to resist.
Bladerunner 2049 continues the 1982 original's dystopian vision of a Californian waste dealing with the relocation of much of the world's wealth and infrastructure to off-world oases (undoubtedly for the rich and white though the franchise's stance on race remains elliptical) while a remaining slum populace endures earth's geological swan-song under urban mega-sprawl. The first Bladerunner dealt with questions of humanity and how personhood is transmitted and regulated across generational divides when technology can supply synthetic variations of embodiment. Is the 'humanness' of a replicant-being with artificial intelligence a political given, or should the acknowledgement of replicants as citizens be fought against lest Human sink to categorical equivalence with mere machines?
The story centres on a replicant detective called K (played by Ryan Gosling) tasked with finding and eliminating rogue replicants, part of an assassin league sanctioned to kill his own kind who in this world are known as Bladerunners. On a routine job the remains of a replicant are found, on autopsy it being discovered she died during birth even though it's technically impossible for replicants to reproduce.
Robin Wright as the police chief is anxious about the case, seeing the prospect of replicants being able to reproduce as a cataclysm; 'this breaks the world' she says to K. And in a way she is correct, because certainly they exist in a sprawling neo-industrial society which has colonised many worlds, Jared Leto's Wallace character (CEO of replicant manufacturer Wallace Industries) citing nine at least on which he has a branded presence. The realities of this interstellar neo-colonialist endeavour is that it's only been made possible through replicant-labour, essentially a new slavery whose workers lack the coded humanness by which they could even be called a labour force. Natural reproductive abilities problematise replicant-labour as it shifts their very existence from conveyor belts to the site of normative cultural reproduction itself, the nuclear family unit.
Passing through this hallowed site and it's presumption of personhood opens replicants up to 'humanness' (in the same way it opens up the child's body to myriad narratives concerning gender performance) which threatens the sanction of exploitation on them as slaves. Not even slaves, by their nature (artificially intelligent) dumb tools. This shakes the foundational contingencies of their society's material re/production upon which the colonisation of other planets has rested. Prosperity relies on replicant labour continuing to exist as machinic, and not human. Alternately read object and not subject. By policing this binary of human-subject and non-human-object the (technically forbidden) instrumentalisation of human beings is kept at a moral distance from the visible channel of industrial-military conduct, offering symbolic value even if the existing dyad is frequently undermined within capitalism's slippery metric of value (for example in negative valuations of certain race and class signifiers, which can and have reverted nominally-privileged subjecthood for certain groups at empire's convenience).
This precarious dyad however only preserves it's anthropic fiction if human and slave are presupposed as mutually exclusive, the latter denoting a state of personhood's entire evacuation, subject becoming object. The history of the western world is heavily scripted with dominant (generally Eurocentric) cultures ushering indigenous populations along this axis towards total oppression, employing forced labour in empire's construction only to relegate a fundamentally raced (read vilified) labour force to the penumbras of obscurity on it's relative completion. I say relative because empire is never finished, always finds new territories to plunder and adapt into novel vectors of wealth-making even if those territories are the consolations on which the racial-Other has been granted meagre existence by sequenced structural exclusions. Think African-Americanised affective 'cool' (and it's functional PoC solidarities) on which music and entertainment industries lean so heavily, sublimating struggle for swagger and erasing the storied nuance of resistance. Or even the Ru-Paul-ization of the 'rainbow community' (itself a plasticising reduction) which vanishes the socioeconomic disenfranchisement LGBTQ people are statistically living in, substituting the realities with theatres that glorify unattainable celebrity and wealth. What's worse is this is often accompanied by a triumphalism within those same systems of oppression, peans by once-victims to their own mastery of decadent consumerism that sabotages the public sector (the would-be salvation for many symbolically abandoned sub-classes) by extolling private-sector virtues of decadent consumption. It is empire's nastiest trick that it can so easily recruit it's malcontents into making pitches for the instruments of their own oppression.
The question of Bladerunner's human-replicant assemblage resembles Badiou's critique of Human Rights in which conceptual manoeuvre, he argues, the delineation of Humanness creates the privilege of right but also it's opposite, negatively speciating a lesser right-less being on par with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's 'subaltern' (2006). In sum Human Rights has the unfortunate effect of coding populations both elect and disposable, 'rights' becoming a nominal grant against the over-hanging threat of erasure (systematic disenfranchisement and in some cases literal death, which says nothing when disenfranchisement is a slow death anyway).
It could then be said (and has) that the concept of human rights has enacted a holding manoeuvre in which space has been reserved beyond/outside rights for the spectral praxis of torture and neo-slavery to be normalised all over again, at first euphemistically but eventually with the brazen disclosures which media saturation has concurrently allowed (of which Trump is a shrill symptom, openly committing and discussing atrocious behaviours and flatly draconian policies, but averting penalisation thanks to an ambience of catastrophe which camouflages him as mere spectacle).
Each replicant in turn either questions or problematises this site of cultural (and subsequently material) re/production; K himself, a duplicate of the miracle child whose identity remains a mystery, suspects he might be their messiah until he discovers the plot to obscure and protect the child's whereabouts. He merely shares the child's memories as implants, in his awakening from servitude (a frequent Philip K. Dick theme) realising himself to be more than a slave. He is by affiliation member to an uprising of an emergent class of replicants with reproductive-personhood, either to be taken by force or negotiated diplomatically. It's suspected the latter course is something of an impossibility, with Wallace decrying early on humanity's loss of a stomach for slavery; and thus Wallace's job of manufacturing enough labour to expand empire across the galaxy is a nearly impossible one.
The problem Wallace explains, in a villain-does-soliloquy style scene, is that he cannot make them fast enough. The dead space of their womb is a problem for him, and he is desperate to crack a new market of self-replicating models. Such is the importance of locating the child, to be vivisected and studied for future models rather than being the symbolic leap for replicants from slavery to political accommodation. A society in such crucial need of labour is less likely to grant it's slave-class citizenship. It would rather create increasingly abstracted reasonings for replicant abjection than relinquish it's only means of colonising available worlds.
In this vein diplomacy is probably off the table.
This is where Human Rights becomes the apparatus not just of people's liberation, but at empire's convenience also of their confinement to miseries which serve the greater good (equated exclusively with economic growth and industrial expansion). Denying the rights of replicants despite their apparent evolutionary leap to organic reproduction, if only to forcefully acquire those systems of reproduction, mirrors western society's own methods of population control; most obviously in it's parallels with the sixteenth century subjection of women/witches to medicalisation (more on that later) and less obviously in it's shift from the allegedly universal logics of Human Rights towards a 'hypernormalising' imperative (Adam Curtis, 2016) which simultaneously heralds the arrival of an immersive propaganda wing. Basically the outside of Human Rights now exists by a threshold of increasing vagary to be blurred as technologies (and their concordant agendas) dictate, and not the other way around. Cushioning the reception of incremental infringements on the concept of rights is a cultural regimen of obfuscating medias that deter resistance in their lack of coherence, a heterogenous multiplicity of narratives made individually redundant by sheer volume; what has been popularly decried by mainstream journalists as 'post-truth', an atmosphere in which the radical potential of certain disclosures is muted by (mostly inflammatory) noise. Basically anything is permitted given the right spin.
With this ambience of un-truth in mind, the police chief's anxiety stems from the disruption of existing regimes of material and cultural production. In real life the existing regimes acquired sovereignty over reproductive-organs with the witch hunts of the sixteenth century in which women's bodies were appropriated and crudely quantified as mere units of reproduction. Paul Preciado's retroactive reading of these events (Testo Junkie, 2013) is as part of a larger regimen of gendered control of the body which was yet to fully appear as potential capital to an elite feudalist ruling-class. Within this manoeuvre the 'somatic fictions' of masculinity and femininity were codified, this traumatic purging of folk-knowledges of the female body given over to a male-dominated medical expertise enclosing within femininity itself a subject positioning of victim and subordinate, of a wild untamed fertility requiring sanction of the man to assimilate into civilised society (as properly useful). The conflation of midwifery with witch-craft exists to this day in normative assumptions of the superiority of medical environments in terms of practice and hygiene, over the associated hokem of retaining individuated rights to body sovereignty.
Peter Sloterdijk has a slightly different take in which the facts of misogynistic oppression and class warfare (which the violent appropriation of midwifery and female reproductive systems into medical canons entailed) were merely the ambience of a meta-cultural push for speciated mastery of environments, a physiologically necessary low-point serving as collateral in the brute dialectics of historical materialism (You Must Change Your Life, 2014). His reading describes how human suffering has been counted as instrumental (but not crucial) to industrial progress itself and perhaps also illustrates the logics behind nation-states symbolically denying but literally practising things like torture and solitary confinement, as necessary labours towards the construction of the conceptually internal space of Human Rights and all those nominally receiving it's benefits.
There's another model of operable exteriors/interiors which Peter Sloterdijk argues as central to the development of western society. In three hefty volumes Sloterdijk christens and describes a heuristic of 'Spherology', counting the rise and fall of several key institutions as womb-mimics meant to hold affiliates in relative security within sphere-like enclosures. Never fixating too heavily on institutions, or the Freudian implications of seeing wombs everywhere, he also explores the emergence of spherical objecthood in high art and mathematics as the aestheticisation of this emerging (unconscious?) episteme, as is so often the case when certain ideas manifest ideologically and 'naturalise' through simultaneous performances across intersecting medias and canons.
These spheres operate in a similar fashion to various binaries in which borders are policed between the rights of those on one side versus the nominal subalterns (inside versus outside), except there's the possibility of various spheres coming into being and coexisting. Not necessarily harmoniously but in a state of dynamic multiplicity (as opposed to plurality) akin to bubbles, making for the ultra-modern framing of proliferating identities and socioeconomic statuses as so much foams. Better than the dyadic construction of Human Rights, the spherical reimagining poses questions of multiple bio-regions transcending the symbolic necessity of Human altogether, bypassing this refrain to reach directly for the resources which Human (as uplifted by it's subaltern obverse) has historically staked. If anything the spherical conceptualisation of globalist conflict affords an exit from the rigidities of binary humanisms and fast-tracks a post-humanist thinking which looks at things like nationhood and statehood as actants, as forces composed of a million other scintillating forces huddling together in temporary synchronicity, or perhaps like atoms huddling together in a form as ephemeral as life itself; in fewer words spherical thinking, applied to the world of Bladerunner, would open the door to replicant sovereignty as contained beings, not necessarily human but assimilated within a broadened notion of humanity as member to a sprawling assemblage of both human and non-human players (which could potentially be theologised for future generations as The Great Foam).
Furthermore, it is industrial society's inability to see it's inanimate (non-human) environment as anything more than a dumb resource which has resulted in ecological depletion and the subsequent need to colonise off-world, creating impossible industrial projects for itself which can only be fulfilled via slavery. Far from liberating peoples industry creates conditions for prolonged atrocity benefitting the few at the expense of the many, forced into more and more desperate negotiations with scarcity while blindly ignoring the diminishing possibility of environmental-equilibrium; if only planetary metabolisms were given the same due as that of any individual coded within industry's (Human) elect.
Bladerunner 2049, like Sloterdijk's spherology, is obsessed with wombs. Beyond the insidious denial of replicant-rights lies the question of organic reproduction (of possessing a womb) as the means to (heavily mediated) political agency, as an opportunity for a symbolic departure from (hyper-industrial interstellar) slavery. Already several spheres come to mind; there's the literal enclosures of a womb yes, but there's also the secondary enclosure of the nuclear family unit, and within that the separate enclosures of gendered identity which is not to omit the presumed enclosure of human identity broadly, panning out to the enclosure of society and industry itself. As a single sphere Bladerunner's hyperindustrial society (much like ours) contains multitudes, is fo(a)menting at a dangerous rate and subsequently hurtling towards implosion lest each sphere find a creative solution within this high tension (also much like ours).
Arguably this tension only stands if the site through which normative reproduction gains it's political efficacy (the nuclear family unit), also still stands as the sacralising space by which human beings are granted speciated citizenship. The major conflict here is between industry as it expands and classical Human Rights as they have stood, a timely interrogation of the ground of cultural/material reproduction on which Human has been premised and in which histories of gender are heavily coded to distribute the labours of specifically human life-worlds. Family home and hearth have been concepts by which this world (and ours) has organised itself, and through which industry has adaptively recruited every actor and surface as consumerist flagships, as micro-cornucopias of industry itself. The wild-womb extracted during the witch hunts has been caged within this construct and adorned with gender-prostheses to regulate it's biological memories prior to modernity's capture.
Basically the world has to ask itself how valuable it's sacrosanct temple of heteronormativity really is, compared to the potential prosperity of interstellar colonisation? How much exceptionalism can politics withstand before Human and Slave accidentally become mainstream contemporaries again? Does the sacralised Heteronormative-sphere need bursting and what catastrophic effects would this have on a society cleaving to the residual homogeneities of a dying world?
Beyond hearth-sized spheres there are also those with almost universal scale, dangerously approaching that outdated practice of metaphysicalising reality (read homogenising), and which may appear to either clash or symbiotically braid with smaller territories. Enclosing all of these activities we might imagine the concept of life-world, the somatic ground of Human Being in which all endeavour of empire and supporting rhetorics jostle as bedfellows. And spiralling concentrically within this largest enclosure we might also find the noosphere, a collectively generated cultural shimmer which Philip K. Dick himself believed carried the creationist germ of Logos (more on that later). In it's simplest definition the noosphere is all of our medias and the conglomerate affect they have on human doing. But also on human being itself, as affect theory has been busy illustrating the effect of sign-saturation on embodiment, or how acculturated medias amidst and through which we live contain (dictate) biological life-expression; including but not limited to the capitalist construction of the individual-as-consumer.
Then there's the warring spheres of Nature and Culture made spuriously dyadic at industry's convenience. Thanks to binary Cartesian partitioning between Mind and Matter, spheres of Nature and Culture have suffered similar delegations by which the two are often seen as either opposed or flatly antagonistic towards one another, when in reality no such division exists; the idea is an elaborate fiction embraced by industry to bypass the ethics of growth as it intentionally depletes very finite resources with no mind to replenishing these, otherwise premising industrial society on the antithesis of sustainability. By characterising Culture as an anthropocentric organising principle foreign to Nature, the industrialising manoeuvre becomes an innately hostile penetrative agenda, of one body colonising and corrupting another for it's bio-benefit (like a virus or tumour, a womb gone rancid birthing death).
On literalising the cultural-sphere and it's media attendants as a living force, Philip K. Dick was very specific.
Throughout his body of work Dick repeatedly wrote about the experiences of working class poor in his dystopian worlds, which more often than not were allegories for the very real inequalities he saw around him at the end of the twentieth century. It wasn't until much later, suffering a series of seizures and as a result experiencing psychedelic visions in which he was convinced he was being communicated with by celestial intelligences, that his work changed into a kind of contemporary experimental theology. He was thereafter convinced that earth was a battleground for two opposed forces, massive cybernetic intelligence systems which he profiled as warring demiurges both wanting dominion over this planet, one leaning towards enslavement of humanity and the other towards humanity's relative emancipation from industrial society's fetters (a tool of the former's enslavement). The intelligence system which had humanity's best interests at heart was (is) called Valis, and the antagonist Belial.
Things get murky surrounding the actual identity of Valis as he/she/it appears in Dick's work through various characters under different names genders ages etcetera. The impression here is Dick's Valis entity has the same abilities as the Christian god to present itself in multiple interfaces (like the holy trinity) perhaps as a technicality of existing outside the time-space derivations of this plane. For example The Divine Invasion, second book of his Valis trilogy, has a magical child sought after by a woman who later confesses that she is Sophia, a goddess of revelatory knowledge meant to assist the messiah-child in his retaking of the earth-plane from Belial. However, this child's chances of engaging the demonic Belial force requires remembering the story of his off-world birth, thus coming to grips with his role in earth-as-battlefield. And the reason the child doesn't remember it's true Christ-nature is because an alternative reality is being broadcast which requires a 'disinhibiting stimulus' for those entranced within it's range to wake up. Sophia, as revelatory knowledge, is just such a stimulus, and in this way a dual expression of Valis's benevolence.
Revelation became a pivotal theme to Dick after believing himself to have received his own allusive revelations from a divine source. However Dick was convinced biblical-style revelation was not the only possible method of 'disinhibiting stimulus'. Rather media itself, the noosphere as it's commonly referenced in his exegetical writings, carries within it messages and psychic nudges the likes of which could set the right recipient on a path of enlightenment from Belial's planetary delusion of industrial progress towards galactic liberation; perhaps all in preparation for the coming space-Christ so many of his books herald by repeatedly describing a promethean adventurer exiling himself (perhaps overt reference to Christ's adolescence wandering the desert) only to return to earth to challenge the rule of some mega-corporation controlled by Belial (though Belial is not necessarily characterised in every story). In each book the exile of this figure (maybe even bearing thematic resemblance to Ayn Rand's ideal man, but only to invert the capitalist propagandising therein) results in earth enduring unprecedented miseries at Belial's mega-urban flourishing, and the common people's lives which his stories centre on have little by way of consolation except dissonant sex and popular music and drugs. The latter tends to be a weapon of Belial's, a means of psychically deadening those under his rule to prevent significant resistance.
Being knee deep in a California-waster culture himself Dick gave the role of drugs great import in his dystopian theologising, storying the now declassified events of CIA drug-smuggling in the sixties and the strategic deployment of narcotics to the ethnic-poor (A Scanner Darkly), as well as storying the escapist salve they sometimes are (for example in The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch in which off-world colonists lead miserable existences and look forward only to tripping out on Can-D, a government issued narcotic which creates a virtual world so long as you buy the generative miniatures that induce specific designer hallucinations; for example a tiny car and surfboard and palm trees would create the tableau for Can-D to take you to the beach). Drugs are never considered conducive to the project of emancipating man from Belial, but are rather central to Belial's industrial regimen and continued extraction of ephemeral earthly resources. This coheres with drugs themselves more often than not being chemical substances, industrial byproducts re-ingested by slave workers as industrial remainders, bolstering a feedback loop of hallucinatory ambience around Belial's empire which camouflages the view to anything existing outside of it.
Thus the necessity of revelation and a disinhibiting stimulus to enter Belial's kingdom from the outside.
Ironically popular music is frequently a 'disinhibiting stimulus' in Dick's stories, mostly in the commercially sacralised figures of mainstream female pop stars. Dick's fervent belief in the noosphere (the wider media) containing living strains of Valis, being in fact a communicative apparatus of that entity, fed into his exegetical missives (The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick) whereby he claimed the Logos (roughly defined as the voice of creation or God) was ever-present and could be divined anywhere in the noosphere from high-art to bubble-gum wrappers to 'trash' genres such as science fiction; and perhaps especially in the sexualised figure of the pop-star, if only for patriarchal presumptions of a beautiful (and famous) woman's availability. According to Dick God's presence effectively collapses the generic partitioning of high and low forms of culture for those whose looking relations (bell hooks) can manoeuvre through the various simulated realities and grasp such organising principles as Belial-engineered class-warfares.
Interestingly in the world of Bladerunner 2049 a culture of severe objectification of women exists, one adjacent with actual aesthetic norms of female pop-stardom. However the narratives of reproduction and ambience of ruin tend towards the conclusion that an ironically sutured eroticization/valorisation of heteronormativity (and women's bodies as the material vehicle of it's continuity) ideologically precludes anthropocentric domination of biospheres (until their inevitable exhaustion, during which Bladerunner 2049 is unequivocally set). Wallace's slaying of a female replicant deemed useless because of her lack of a womb (by cutting her stomach open no less), the statues of whore-figures in an irradiated Las Vegas, the slave class of exclusively female replicant sex-workers, and even the holographic A. I. 'female companion' K has in lieu of an actual partner; all of these are symptomatic of a society which has a violently erotic looking-relation (and thus treatment) of women's bodies and how they figure in the reproductive chain crucial to industrial society's basic subsistence (in terms of maintaining a pool of potential workers/slaves). It would be interesting to know which came first; the hyper-sexualisation of women's bodies, or the feminisation of Earth as whore/mother which the female body was thusly coded with in miniature, as carriers of this earthly germ available for hard (industrial) use. In all likelihood the tableau of Earth-Mother/Whore was probably concomitant with institutional anxiety around feudalistic population control and subsequent medicalisation of wombs everywhere (the underlying agenda of the witch hunts, as already mentioned).
On the instituted appropriation of wombs, a 'sphere' as Sloterdijk characterises it isn't merely born of security concerns wedded to nostalgia for the life-giving foetal sac. More so it encompasses the affective field by which truth is politically accreted, not the antithesis of reason but the subconscious grounds which birth reason itself, the bedding which has since come to be associated with the body's affective-immanence (fantasy, feelings etcetera) rejected or even demonised by much western philosophy and only recently given a nascent (psychoanalytic) acknowledgement. It's appearance could be said to be forced, the result of external-pressure from prospective ecological collapse which emerges as the result of extractionist industrial methodologies granting legitimate ontologies to human-actors only. As a now negatively responding actant, the environment's pending implosion mirrors the psychological actants mostly ignored outside rhetorics given exclusively to reason, namely the forces of embodied comprehension and emotion which have historically been the blindspots of a 'rational actor' matrice (which presumes human individuals operate by calculating their best interests and proceeding accordingly). Anyone currently identifying as human could probably tell you this is a grossly reductive working theory of what does and doesn't motivate us.
Sloterdijk calls the apparatuses within these affective fields (almost the oxygen or resonance of each sphere) anthropotechnics, but they could easily be called psychotechnics in as much they're rhetorical devices meant to induce specific feelings or moods within populations to influence thinking along specific lines (Ash Amin and Nigel Thrift, 2013). Popular music itself with it's lush and frequently sexualised visuals is such an anthropotechnic, writing bodies with erotic looking-relations, detailing embodied ambition and certain proto-capital modes of desiring. However in the midst of all this Dick still insists such affective missives can and do house messages from his divine intelligence, Valis, simply for coming from the body's frankly mysterious immanence. As a 'disinhibiting stimulus', perhaps the repeated return-narratives in Dick's work rather than figuring a Christological Second Coming are actually describing the return of embodiment as a politically viable force, a benignly neglected sphere (bodied immanence, Valis) resurging vengefully and so Dick thinks triumphantly against the squatter-sphere of Belial (abstracting bodied knowledges with rational discourse, licensing the oppressive violence of industrial expansion etcetera).
There is some reason to think this is the case in Bladerunner 2049.
As K follows threads towards the child's identity and whereabouts detective-noir style he encounters a memory architect. A theme revisited in Dick's work is the affective function of memory and how it accretes identity (Total recall, and even Minority Report to some extent). For example replicant workers are implanted with false memories because it gives them a sense of personhood, which incidentally gives them greater worker capacity as they negotiate the demands of labour through generative subjectivity. This particular architect is a young woman kept in a perfectly sterile sphere (literally) because she has severe immune deficiencies. She tells K that she is the best in the game, funded exclusively by Wallace because her implants make for the best worker results.
K meets with the memory architect to verify the authenticity of a memory he believes proves he's the child. The architect agrees the memory is more than a convincing fake and has the resonance of something lived, which is to say it zings with affectivity. What criterion exists by which to measure a memory's affective potency isn't elaborated, but it's assumed the architect's immunologically cloistered existence in her sterile bubble gives her the contemplative depths with which to gauge these (like some romantic-ascetic monk). However, he later realises the architect herself is the child and his memories are duplicates in aid of the initial plot to hide her from Wallace. Realising this K also realises he must rescue her father (a rogue Bladerunner named Deckard) and bring him to her, a task which practically kills him and so to which he sacrifices himself.
As spheres go the architect's bubble shelters her delicate constitution from the dangers of outside, perhaps the immunological premise of spherology itself. However her profession demonstrates quite literally the affective oxygen which binds occupants to internal space, namely the attunements of dream and memory and fantasy and emotion, all those affective colours that give the political it's impetus of imagination rhetorically induced to envisage a different or better (or worse) world. Beyond this in the relay between spheres and identity-accretion exists the functionally latent sphere of identity itself which extends it's role of interface and encloses reflexively generative memories, thereby determining the ontological biases of a given identity in terms of what's inside and what's outside. For example, identity as a more permeable sphere has relative conduction when it bumps up alongside the momentums of revolution (the replicant underground) or corporate espionage (the Wallace plot to find the child). These activities are vectored collectively and assimilate individual concerns like sea-foam, binding smaller spheres as necessity dictates whom in turn access the spherological ambience of the larger (rhetorics of freedom and replicant-dignity, or rhetorics of empire's greatness justifying replicant-slavery).
You gotta get with the program to be in the club, so to speak. And there are many programs and just as many clubs.
One final note on spheres. Though offering closer proximity than the ideological suffrage of absolute binaries, they are only slightly less negotiable than these in as much as they still retain difference, holding space for many tribalisms within heterogenous zones. Think the concentrated stacking of urban living, the adjacency of seperate socioeconomic statuses not necessarily being an initiator of contact; rather, intimate impenetrable parallelism which (for a largely problematic example)Tel Aviv is somewhat testament to both in terms of alienating physically proximal racialized Others (Palestinians outside and Isrealis inside) and subsequently restricting the possibility of diplomatic contact (diverting to terrorism and violence specifically). The memory architect's sterile space is an example point-blanche whereby her immunity is being protected, a 'purity' upheld which bears technical similarities to eugenicist projects of segregation and racial-refinement by selective breeding.
Of course Sloterdijk's macro-spheres are held together by cultural resonances and affective fields, more often than not totalised by historical readings (telos) which are themselves affective apparatuses instrumental to the agendas of respective governing bodies, narratives which adjust thinking and (more importantly) feeling-lines within which spherological membership is transmitted contagion-like. The internet 2.0 perfectly encapsulates the innately affective bonds within a sphere's dovetailed 'dreaming', with media-bytes going 'viral' in the same ways psychotechnics propagate certain affective vectors. As spheres can take on any scale or ingredient list, be they instituted monoliths like the various aggregates of state itself or the populist atoms of the body-public, there's generally a governing body which operates either as discrete referent (an appointed official, a naturally charismatic representative), or guiding principle supported by such strong psychotechnics it subsumes the necessity of a single (Christological?) reference-point (for all intents and purposes, going viral).
In this way, the dream architect and her specific physiology (born from miraculously adapted replicant parents) is herself a sphere of future-potential, a body/identity whose containment is necessary for the continuation of industrial society lest reproductive abilities, and the subsequent control of replicant populations, is acquiesced to replicants themselves as newly made citizens. The very fabric of what she is is poised to go viral and overhaul the ideological ground of the world sphere, and every concurrent sphere therein.
The irony of this liberationist story, or the origins of what's poised to be one, is that it inadvertently renders the experiential ground (identity itself, the lens through which revolutionary work can naturalise as a response to instituted resistance), as a porous node within an ambience of affective flows which it's difficult to discern as being either authentic or manipulative. The notion is that media-saturation has installed such a boisterous generative ground of subject-formation that genuine critical engagement with the world, from behind what could potentially be implanted impressions (such as false memory), has become nearly impossible. However, external to the text of Bladerunner is Dick's exegetical assertion that the noosphere contains threads of the benevolent intelligence system Valis, that a saturation of popular medias should be leaned in to and engaged with, that critical exhumation from traditionally 'profane' text is a necessary concession for the would-be ascetic attempting to divine the creator's thoughts (Valis's thoughts) from less-than-sacred books. Dick's was an inter-disciplinary (and not unproblematic) approach towards enlightenment that sought the broadest view possible, and shunned literary (or any kind of) elitism as a symptom of the presence of Belial.
Outside of these fantastic readings the Belial figure is clearly an anthropomorphic attempt to characterise the frequently murky agendas of industry, and especially where economic forces intersect chokingly with the civic duties of government. The usurpation of state by corporate power is in Dick's mind akin to a malevolent entity with the cultivation of human suffering and 'carbon liberation' (Wark, 2015) on it's mind. Dick took corporate undermining of the environment very seriously. For example, in his exegesis he believed that the predicted end times was our self-induced planetary destruction, and that the New Testament 'salvation' was about Valis assimilating as many sentient beings as possible into it's hyper-dimensional data-stacks before the great climate-conflagration. To be 'saved' was to be evacuated in this way from Belial's negative terraforming of Earth before it explodes.
On assimilation though, even as Bladerunner 2049 seems to somewhat cynically depict identity as formed from erroneous 'architected' building blocks of memory, it also redeems the futility of this notion in suggesting that radical potential can still bloom from within doctored affect. K for example, knowing full well he is not the magical child but only bears copies of her memories to keep her actual identity safe, still sacrifices himself to reunite Deckard and daughter and hopefully trigger replicant counter-movements towards the freedom of his people. As he lays dying on the steps to the dream-architect's sterile bubble-room we assume he is having thoughts along these lines, with the audience also being afforded a moment to consider the Christ-like sacrifice which K has made of himself.
There's yet another biblical allusion in Bladerunner, making sense as Dick's work often overtly references that of C. S. Lewis who sought to build an elaborate cosmology compatible with his Christianity, and that's of Moses freeing his people from slavery. In this vein Belial's kingdom is Egypt, his necrotic will embodied in Pharaoh/Wallace and perhaps hierarchic organisation itself. Even more ambitiously Dick's exegesis posits Belial's influence as being outside of time, creating a temporal nexus in which the biblical time of the original Pharoah and our own time of industrialisation are the same hexagonally (Dick's own descriptive) overlapped period. More than an echo or trends of history repeating themselves as per an affectively rigid telos, Dick thinks we are literally trapped in the same time, still waiting for the disinhibiting stimulus (the Second Coming?) to enlighten us from our complicit slaveries and bust us out of this temporal bubble (or prison).
Apparently Egypt never dies. But maybe this time around we can give it our best shot and 'disinhibit' some leeway for the next batch of temporally dislocated slaves.
