Thanatopolitics and colonial logics in Blade Runner 2049

Introduction

A number of theorists have discussed the shifts in which biopolitics becomes thanatopolitics, a politics of life that ultimately generates massive death in a system that is historically embodied in the Nazi regime. Timothy Campbell argues that the distinction between the thanatopolitical ‘letting die’ of liberal biopolitics and the ‘making die’ of totalitarianism ‘grows ever smaller under a neoliberal governmentality’ that no longer operates to turn people into things but operates now ‘to crush the person and thing, to make them coextensive in a living being’ (2011: 72). For Achille Mbembe, contemporary biopolitics is thanatopolitics; it is concerned with ‘the subjugation of life to the power of death’ (2003: 39). In a similar vein, Giorgio Agamben adds that ‘if there is a line in every modern state marking the point at which the decision on life becomes a decision on death, and biopolitics can turn into thanatopolitics, the line no longer appears today as a stable border dividing two clearly distinct zones’ (1998: 122). According to Foucault, 20th-century racism, ethnic cleansing, segregation, mass sterilizations, and wars have to be seen as part and parcel of a politics of life whose flip side has always been a politics of death. Biopolitics ‘is primarily a way of introducing a break into the domain of life that is under power’s control: a break between what must live and what must die’ (Foucault, 2003: 254). Biopolitics is thus always ‘thanatopolitics’ – the paradox of killing to prevent death, that is, exterminating certain individuals or groups to prevent the extinction of the whole.

Biopolitics as thanatopolitics is starkly visible in the current context of the coronavirus pandemic. As can especially be seen in the strategy of so-called ‘herd immunity’, what becomes apparent is some sort of bleak social-Darwinian scenario, making plain that the sacrifice of some lives for the sake of others has been in the nature of the game all along. Of course, Marx didn’t write about the coronavirus pandemic, but his writings help us understand how situations like the pandemic do not affect all communities and all classes of society in the same way. Thus, amidst the glaring class inequalities of the coronavirus pandemic, we have seen horrific examples of people being subject to what Marx (1976: 899) called ‘the silent compulsion of economic relations’, a compulsion to potentially work themselves literally to death. These populations are often differentiated by race, class, and sometimes citizenship status, and also by access to health-care services. Therefore, the pandemic has demonstrated the grim truth that ‘those whose labor is indispensable are among those whom capital renders permanently disposable’ (De Genova, 2020).

These shifts in biopolitical power must be seen as a move from the formal to the real subsumption of life under capital, following particularly Marx’s analysis of formal and real subsumption of labour processes. Under formal subsumption, as Marx (1976) demonstrates, labour processes exist within capital: capitalists take control over existing labour processes born ‘outside’ of capitalist production. Under real subsumption, on the other hand, labour processes are structured according to the needs of capital: they are born ‘within capital’ and thus incorporated as ‘an internal force, proper to capital itself’ (Hardt, 1995: 38). Describing the alienation that occurs with the real subsumption of labour under capital, Marx describes what was once a uniquely human capacity, now externalized, that is ‘not only alien, but hostile and antagonistic, when it appears before him [the worker] objectified and personified in capital’ (1976: 1025). For Marx, ‘species-life’ is inseparable from ‘species-being’ – that is, the creative capacities of humans to constitute and transform themselves and their worlds. In the new biopolitical shifts, we witness not solely the creative capacities of human species-being, but also the biological functioning of life itself externalized, made alien and hostile (Vint, 2020: 26). As a result, increasing numbers of disposable lives are left to confront capital that regards even their biological processes as commodifiable. What matters here is to trace how deeply biopolitics is thus always thanatopolitics that valuates life based on its sacrificability to capital.

I suggest that such biopolitical shifts are also happening in our contemporary moment of bioeconomy (Waldby and Cooper, 2014; Weinbaum, 2019). With the rise of biotechnology (Cooper, 2011; Jasanoff, 2011), especially synthetic biology (Davies, 2018), production processes are fundamentally changed in nature in order to better serve capital’s ends. In the process, biopolitical processes are organized according to the needs and demands of capitalist accumulation. As management of life becomes management of the market, biotechnology seeks ‘to relocate economic production at the genetic, microbial, and cellular level, so that life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation’ (Cooper, 2011: 19). It should therefore come as no surprise that narratives about recognizing the personhood of artificial beings is deeply shaped by and in conversation with these larger shifts in biopolitical power. According to Sherryl Vint, this shift has to do with a concurrent shift towards commodification of biological life and its implications for the sacred and protected status of the totalizing conception of ‘the human’ (Vint, 2019: 158). Recognizing the personhood of machines is thus a response to the processes of turning people and human life into things ‘whose sanctification in “the human” is increasingly compromised by DNA patents and tissues created via synthetic biology’ (Vint, 2019: 8).

The epistemic violence of thanatopolitical politics has condensed into dehumanizing and subjugating categories; as epistemic means through which biopolitical labour is governed, they find their narrative parallel in recent science-fiction movies. Blade Runner 2049 (hereafter 2049) invokes parallels with these developments, revealing the intimate relationship between colonial logics and biological engineering that understands the natural world as property. Thus, in what follows I argue that the film encourages us to make the connections between the shifting status of biopolitics as thanatopolitics prompted by advances in synthetic biology’s commodification of life and the treatment of replicants within the film. Invoking the history of race and slavery through biological engineering, it shows us that ‘replicants’ (as a literally constructed race) are biopolitically reproduced to fulfil the transformation of labour-power into a never-ending supply.

The thanatopolitics of Blade Runner 2049

Ridley Scott’s original Blade Runner (1982) is based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? ¹ Although Blade Runner changed much in Dick’s novel, it appeared to capture ‘the oppressive core of capitalism’ that creates technology to exploit and commodify human beings (Best and Kellner, 2003: 196). Denis Villeneuve’s 2049 (2017), however, is only related to Dick’s novel in a very distant way – conceptually, so to speak. Blade Runner is a reworking of the novel, but 2049 tells a new story using some of the same elements. But thanatopolitical themes are central to both movies. In Blade Runner, the Tyrell Corporation is portrayed as a thriving bioeconomy that produces genetically engineered human (more than human) slave workers to advance the biopolitical aim of making certain populations live. The corporate power represses replicants, excludes them from history and time by using violence, toxicity, and increasing surveillance. In the context of corporate power that propagates the replicant enslavement (off-world colonies), replicants are treated as though they do not exist, ‘except as a mere tool’ in order to maintain their status as free labour. They are declared ‘illegal’ on Earth, following a replicant revolt on one of Earth’s off-world colonies. As a result of their criminalization/racialization, they do not contribute to the ‘booming economy’ of off-world colonies and, thus, the management and preservation of their life does not matter. In this sense, death becomes the most serious problem they face. This fact is especially made explicit in the scene in which Roy Batty confronts Tyrell:

Tyrell here embodies the thanatopolitical side of biopolitics: the sovereign who issues the death penalty over those threatening his power, the survival of his corporate sovereignty. Roy Batty’s demand for ‘more life’ is, however, a demand for an alteration that allows him to continue living, for replicants are made with a predetermined four-year life span. From the lens of biopolitics, the film seems to point to the fact that when biopower ‘reaches its purest expression in the form of life as replicant, an ironic reversal occurs, after which life itself becomes a monstrosity, something uncontrollable – that which threatens power, and which subsequently must be eliminated’ (Sorensen, 2015: 118). In the film, the monstrous criminal arrives in the shape of the replicant, which at the same time epitomizes the culmination of the biopolitical life (Sorensen, 2015: 118). Thus, the film depicts Los Angeles as a thanatopolitical-scape where corporate power capitalizes on the reduction of human life to its bare forms by destroying unwanted bodies, or letting them waste away.

In a similar vein, 2049 brings into focus the existing thanatopolitical regimes through which to govern disposable labour. The film presents a future – dominated by climate catastrophe, a denatured agricultural landscape, a polluted and decaying urban landscape of neon-lit, high-rise gated communities, flying cars, giant flashing holograms, and crowds of faceless people – in which conventional distinctions between reality and fantasy, the real and the fake, humans and replicants seem to blur together: each seems to contain the possibility of the other. Replicants affirm this logic: moulded from synthetic biological components, they usurp reality. In the world 2049 imagines, synthetic biological life has become an industrial product, and human synthetic life – in the form of replicants, biological robots almost indistinguishable from humans – are only one among a wide variety of synthetic life forms. ²

The film’s main protagonist is K, a Nexus-9 model replicant police officer working for the LAPD. His job is to find and ‘retire’ unwanted early model replicants in order to keep the order intact. K has no friends or family. His only companion is virtual Joi, a holographic girlfriend who can instantly switch to a sexy vamp while cooking. K is not human; Joi cannot even be considered non-human. But to each other, they’re real.

K is sent out of LA to hunt down one of the early model replicants who lives under the name of Sapper Morton. K kills him. While he’s getting ready to return to the LAPD, he finds a box of bones buried under a dead tree. The bones carry a secret that could overthrow the existing regime K protects. Subsequent investigation reveals that the bones belong to Rachael the replicant, who fell in love and went on the run with the replicant Deckard in the original Blade Runner. We discover that Morton has helped Deckard and Rachael give birth to their daughter, Dr. Ana Stelline, who designs false memories for replicants. And she lives. No substantive difference now remains between humans and replicants.

The political economy of 2049 is embodied in two seemingly conflicting characters, namely Lieutenant Joshi (the state) and Niander Wallace (tech corporations). Joshi seems to represent the emaciation of the state which is structured around the fundamental premise that replicants can’t give birth, i.e. they can’t reproduce by themselves. They’re genetically engineered to obey. If replicants can reproduce and create life – just like humans – then the strict division between replicants and humans breaks down, and humanity no longer remains the exclusive preserve of humans. For Joshi, therefore, civilization depends on the wall that distinguishes human life from the kind that can be enslaved, exploited and, when necessary, killed. She says, ‘there is an order to things. That’s what we do here. We keep order. The world is built in a wall that separates kind.’ She thus stands for a form of apartheid, for the neat division between humans and replicants. If the wall that separates humans from replicants falls, then civilization falls along with it.

Wallace, on the other hand, stands for corporate genomics as the economy of delirium, a regime of inventing life beyond limits, limits that prevent further capitalist expansion. After the Tyrell Corporation has gone bankrupt, it has been acquired by Wallace, who now seeks to create a new line of Nexus replicants that are more compliant than their predecessors, a new labour force that is cheaper and more easily produced as slave caste. Contrary to the thanatopolitics of Blade Runner, which considers replicants as dangerous and excludes them from biological reproduction, in 2049 replicants are portrayed as necessary tools in order to continue the process of off-world colonization and intensify capitalist developmentalism. Every leap of civilization ‘is built upon the back of a disposable workforce’, as Wallace says, but we have ‘lost our stomach for slaves, unless engineered’. Our ability to stomach this ideology, Wallace hints, depends upon the construction of less-than-human status for replicants in order to legitimize commodifying and exploiting their labour. Exemplifying the thanatopolitics of a biopolitical regime that devalues some lives over others for socioeconomic reasons, for Wallace, therefore, the continuous exploitation and oppression of replicants is the fuel upon which the corporate order is built. The systems of technological reproduction are too slow; hence Wallace wishes to transform the notion of ‘life itself’, shifting the ground upon which only some living things (‘the human’) are accorded the category of the sacred and protected (Vint, 2020: 24). Key to this transformation is synthetic biology, which, once commodified, can intensify ‘the process of generating more surplus value through its innate biological mechanisms’ (Vint, 2020: 16).

As a sinister corporate engineer, Wallace thus serves as a committed ideologue of thanatopolitics that creates transgenic or synthetic biological replicants that are living but also manufactured, owned. Yet he seems to suggest that the barrier is that the planetary colonization isn’t happening fast enough because he’s failed to figure out how to make replicants breed. Thus, he views himself as the saviour and perfecter of human civilization, going so far as to claim that ‘we need more Replicants than can ever be assembled. Millions so we can be trillions. More. Worlds beyond worlds, diamond shores. We could storm Eden and retake her.’ Hence, when he says ‘we lost our stomach for slaves, unless engineered’, he is admitting the fact that what is known as ‘progress’ requires producing some people as nothing more than a disposable means to an end. For Wallace, replicant lives are disposable before the altar of capitalist civilization.

The thanatopolitics of Wallace’s colonial project is starkly visible in the horrific scene in which he slaughters a newborn female replicant. As Wallace inspects her, he discovers that she cannot give birth. Declaring it another failed experiment, he places his hand on the replicant’s naked womb, lamenting that here, in ‘that barren pasture, empty and salted…right here, the “dead space between the stars”, nothing would grow’. He then slices open her womb with a scalpel, letting her bleed out. Frustrated by his failure to create self-replicating replicants, Wallace dispatches Luv, his trusted assistant, to find the child that K is searching for, with the hope that he can solve the mystery of procreation and thus create a reproducing race of replicant slaves in the service of capitalist civilization.

For Wallace, bioengineered replicants are produced for the specific purpose of being a biopolitically sustainable source of slave labour; a workforce whose exploitation could not be questioned. And the fact that replicants are conspicuously imagined as both machines/things and simultaneously capable of ‘organic gestation’ can destroy any firm boundary between human and non-human life, ‘just as the engineering ethos that characterises the field of synthetic biology blurs the distinction between living organism and inert thing’ (Vint, 2020: 18). This transformation of the replicants points to the eroding status of the human subject (as theorized by liberalism) under the pressure of synthetic biology’s commodification and exploitation of life itself. Thus, 2049 confronts us with the limitations of current ways of understanding the category ‘the human’ and encourages us to acknowledge the complicity of ‘the human’ in violence and appropriation. In this way, it reveals how deeply the thanatopolitics of a biopolitical economy is rooted in an intensification of racialized and colonial logics.

Racial and colonial logics

In her work The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015), Lisa Lowe shows us the colonial and racialized implications of the combined and dynamic production of the human and its other, what she calls the ‘intimacies of four continents’, that is, ‘the circuits, connections, associations, and mixings of differentially laboring peoples, eclipsed by the operations that universalize’ the Anglo-American conception of the human subject (2015: 21). The conception of the human subject, according to Lowe, was produced with the degraded and oppressed status of colonized peoples. Although a number of scholars have discussed how the human subject was always-already presumed to be a white hegemonic subject who is male, European and historically property owning, Lowe demonstrates how the emergence of liberal humanist institutions, discourses, and practices (with ideas of rights, emancipation, wage labour, and free trade) and European colonial appropriation and dispossession of property and peoples was closely entwined, resulting in a racialized hierarchy of humanity and civilizations (Lowe, 2015: 76–7; see also Vint, 2019: 8).

In the process of differentiating populations in the colonies as less than human, labour-power played a crucial role in this historical sorting of humanity through the transformations in biopolitical governance ranging from ‘“negative” power to seize, capture, occupy, and subjugate’ to the ‘productive’ power ‘to administer the life, health, labor, and mobility of colonized bodies’ (Lowe, 2015: 133, 102). These biopolitical regimes ‘take their cue from colonial relations of power’, operated differently across geographical locations, at times ‘enslaving colonialised peoples’, at other times ‘enlisting them into marginalised participation in the economy’ (Vint, 2019: 150).

The same violent, racialized and biopolitical histories that created dehumanizing and subjugating categories through which to govern expendable labour find their parallel in 2049. It must be emphasized that the film does not explicitly state the role of racialization fully woven into biopolitical production; it seems to suggest the problem is Niander Wallace’s deep megalomaniacal ambitions to replace God in his seat in heaven, not the capitalist machine as we know it. But it brings to mind a history of racialized exploitation of labour in the service of biopolitical production. Thus, it makes visible how biopolitics as thanatopolitics is part and parcel of contemporary structures of colonialism and differentiations made all the more apparent by the racialized implications of capital.

In Blade Runner, the healthiest and wealthiest were relocated to ‘off-world-colonies’ because of environmental cataclysm, and racial and colonial efforts were aided by the forced labour of replicants. The replicants were created as slaves to work on the planets and forbidden from returning to earth. They were not welcomed. Thus, they were treated as the colonial ‘other’, the off-world subspecies who behave and act like humans but are considered less than human. In 2049, similarly, humanity colonizes nine planets, which frustrates Niander Wallace, as he aims to rapidly expand across the stars. If the history of colonial relations is based on the notion of labour as a living tool, then the replicants are caught in the racial and colonial logic, in the sense that they are manufactured entities, which rationalizes the commodification and exploitation of their labour in a manner analogous to racialization. That is, biopolitics as thanatopolitics in the form of biological engineering is intermingled with racial and colonial logics to render replicants more easily appropriable as labour-power, required at times, simply discarded at others.

According to W.E.B. Du Bois (1989), African Americans face a ‘double-consciousness’. On one hand, they are told they are humans, but on the other hand they are denied the freedoms and liberties granted to white Americans. We can imagine the replicants of 2049 in a similar way as they mimic humans in every way but are treated as mere servants whose lives are disposable. What the indeterminacy surrounding the replicants symbolizes (illustrates) is our thanatopolitical present as much as its invisible past: their cinematic presence retraces a racialized (post) colonialism and reconfigured slavery, or the voluntary labour of the occupied – as normalized in synthetic biology and the ongoing processes of the real subsumption of life to capital. The cinematic narrative about an ambiguous raciality such as ‘replicants’ shows how the biopolitics of manufactured slaves simply builds on an anthropocentric conception of life that deems colonized peoples of colour less than human (Vint, 2020: 24). Wallace aims to create a new line of replicants in the service of those privileged in the hierarchy, the humans. ‘My Replicants will live as long or as short as a customer will pay. [They] will never rebel, they will never run, they will simply obey’, Wallace says in Nexus: 2036, a mini-prequel to 2049. His attitude toward the replicants exemplifies the thanatopolitics of a biological regime rooted in the subsumption of life to capital, a life whose only value is economic but, simultaneously, expendable. The process of real subsumption ‘leaves no aspect of life uncolonized’; it attempts to capture, and to put to work, ‘even those things that are uneconomical, or “not part of the mechanism”’ (Shaviro, 2013).

In this sense, the recent cultural shift from fearing to sympathizing with the artificial beings needs to be seen as a symptom of larger shifts in biopolitical power which is deeply rooted in the violent colonial histories and continues to persist in our contemporary moment of bioeconomy as the real subsumption of life. Wallace, therefore, exemplifies this biopolitical continuity that seeks to transform nature itself beyond the limit, a thanatopolitical economy that needs endless reproduction and circulation to remain ‘healthy’. As with the scene discussing his desire to self-reproduce replicants in order to solve a problem of production, the ability to expand its reach beyond nine planets is Wallace’s ultimate aim, revealing the fact that his politics is intimately allied with the ongoing structures of colonialism. For Wallace, our future lies in colonizing beyond Earth, and the ‘replicants’ (as a literally constructed race) are perfect entities to fulfil this purpose, thereby rewriting the history of racialized exploitation in the bioeconomic present.