>[!NOTE] This article was originally published in the 2017 edition of *Momenta*, the student-led, peer-reviewed undergraduate journal at Quest University Canada February 20, 2017 The title of _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ reveals its main theme: fakes imagining fakes. An android is a robot made to mimic humans; dreams are often a tool for interpreting the unconscious, and an electric sheep is a replicant designed to mimic the “real thing. From the title page, Philip K. Dick’s novel explores notions of alternate, “fake” “realities”. This essay is about reading science fiction, and _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep_ in particular, as powerful investigations into “the way the world works.” I borrow from Pramad Nayar’s critrical posthumanism to sketch a picture of human experience as interactional subjectivity that is embedded across traditionally-drawn boundaries like self/other, human/machine, or real/fake.This means reconsidering who we are, and performing this reconsideration on the very presupposition that we are a “who”. In _Do Androids Dream_, World War Terminus has plunged Earth into barren desolation: the atmosphere is clogged with radiative dust, plants are rare, the mass extinction of animals created a prolific robot-animal market, and all “regular” and willing-to-pay humans are refugees on colonized worlds. “Under U.N. Law each emigrant automatically received possession of an android subtype of his choice,” to accompany and aid during the transition off-world (1: 16). Ironically, the androids—pejoratively dubbed “andys”—sometimes kill their masters and escape slavery to relative freedom on Earth. The role of police-affiliated bounty hunters like Rick Deckard is to “retire”—kill—returned androids (1: 117). In the beginning of the novel, Rick Deckard is asked to retire six of the newest Nexus-6 androids. Deckard visits the android manufacturing company—the Rosen Corporation—to verify that his equipment works on the new androids. Afterword, he tracks down Luba Luft, an alleged andy, at the opera house where she performs (1: 84).  Having made his way into her changing room, Deckard demands a Voigt-Kampf empathy test—the test to distinguish humans from androids (1: 100). Reluctant, Luba Luft asks Deckard, if “an android…doesn’t care what happens to another android” and “your job is to kill them” doesn’t that mean that you “must be an android” (1: 101)? Deckard says that he has passed a Voigt-Kampf test and cannot, therefore be an android. Luft suggets that “maybe that’s a false memory” or perhaps “there was once a human who looked like you \[Deckard], and somewhere along the line you killed him and took his place” (1: 102). Dismissively, Deckard presses on. The test goes awry: Luba feels sexually threatened by Deckard and calls another police officer. The responding officer, Officer Crams, takes Deckard to the police headquarters for questioning. To Deckard’s dismay, the headquarters to which he is delivered are in a different building (on Mission Street, not Lombard), employ a different staff, and use different android-discovering tests (1: 110-116). It seems there are “two parallel police agencies” (1: 113). Already, it’s unclear where real begins and fake ends. During the investigation at the Mission Street Department, this “reality” doubling becomes more complex. Deckard learns that the detectives of the Mission Street police agency appear on his bounty list; they are all androids. Lead detective Garland confesses not only that he knows himself to be an andoird but also that he recognizes the andys on Deckard’s list and also—because they all came together from to Mars to Eartch—knows full well that Phil Resch, the Mission Street bounty hunter, is an android (1: 122). If we read Garland’s story truthfully, here’swhat happened: having escaped from Mars, Garland and his compatriots (Luba Luft, Pris Stratton, Roy and Irmgard Baty, and Max Polokov) sought subtle, unseen spots in the strata of Earth society. Garland established a ‘self-contained loop \[wherein] we \[the androids] know about them \[the humans] but they don’t know about us” under the guise of a police station (1: 123). The Mission Street police station is a surveillance system for androids to keep tabs on their human neighbors. The question here is who, if anyone, has control, the creators or the created? In the words of critical posthumanist scholar Pramod Nayar, the android police system is autopoietic. An autopoietic system is a “unity… \[whose] properties are not the effect of the individual components of \[the] system but rather the effect of the interactions of the components” (2: 37-8). Further, the components of the system are themselves the product of these interactions (2: 38). That is, the internal dynamics of a system determine how the system operates as well as define the system as something other than its environment or its neighboring systems (2: 39). In terms of the Mission Street police department, the various social, procedural, and survival-driven interactions among the components (i.e. the persons) are constitutive of the department as such. Without Resch, Garland, and so on, the station would not be a station. As the same time, without Deckard, Resch, and Garland, it would not be the Mission Street department. This accounts for the department’s double existence, as both veritable (to its component persons) and (to those who permeate its boundaries, like Resch, Deckard, and Garland) as a façade, simultaneously. As the novel progresses, more and more of its subjects find that what they originally saw as distinct boundaries are, at best, vague. The moment when Resch discovers the “truth” about the Mission Street department is also the moment when he questions his own humanness (1: 127). After discovering that Garland was an android, Resch struggles to figure out how Garland was able to convincingly pass as human. Resch reasons that there are two options: either “at one time an authentic Garland existed…and somewhere along the way got replaced” or he was “impregnated with a false memory” (1: 127). Resch decides that, because “false memory systems \[have] been found ineffective on humans,” it must be the case that the “real” Garland was killed and replaced with his “fake” (1: 127). If we also accept Garland’s tale that Resch was implanted with a false memory, we realize how convincing false memories actually are: enough to make Resch appear to himself as human.Memory, here, becomes the condition of possibility for constructing oneself as human or android. Nietzsche traces this idea of memory—as mnemonics to its roots in pain: “a thing must be burnt in so that it stays in the memory: only something that continues to hurt stays in the memory” (3: 38). For Nietzsche, pain is the material practice of enlightenment ascetic ideals; pain, as a type of memorializing learning, constructs the so-called ‘sovereign individual” who has the authority to inflict violence upon an “other” (3: 39-40). In the human/android relationship, who is the burner and who the burned? Who possesses “agency” over the “other”? Where Nietzsche’s critique of humanism renders morality an animalistic exchange of pain, Dick’s critique blurs the boundaries of master/slave, organism/machine, human/android, and fake/real. By tracing these broken binaries through the novel it becomes clear that _Do Androids Dream_ operates on a principle akin to Nayar’s “alterity” (to which I turn below) (2: 50). There are a number of things in _Do Androids Dream_ that appear real but turn out “fake”. Beyond what I’ve already introduced—Deckard, the police stations, empathy—these include the owl owned by the Rosen corporation (1: 60), Rachael Rosen her/itself (as we will see, Rachel is/was the template for all Nexus-6 androids), and Wilbur Mercer and it/his entire world (Mercerism is a religion of sorts that provides meaning to people’s daily lives). When Deckard goes to the Rosen corporation to test Voigt-Kampf’s effectiveness on the newest, Nexus-6 androids, he is greeted by an owl. Initially, Deckard has a hard time determining for himself whether the owl is “real” or ersatz. Later, Deckard becomes confused by two competing authorities. On the one hand, Sidney’s, the catalogue of current animal prices and availabilities, says that owls are extinct. But Rachael, of the Rosen corporation, says that this owl is real; it has not been purchased from Sidney’s (1: 41). Deckard’s faith in Sidney’s leads him initially to doubt Rachael but, by the end, he submits to her authority and considers the owl as real. From two localized perspectives of competing authorities (Sidney’s and the Rosens), the owl is both real and fake simultaneously. Deckard, as an intermediary between the two, forces them into conversation. From Deckard’s perspective, then, and hence his confusion, the undecidable “truth” emerges: the owl is a contradictory living-machine. Nayar’s perspective on systems biology resonates here. To summarize, a biological body emerges from the interactions and relations between elements of the body; systems biology studies how the parts interact with the whole (2: 49). Moreover, systems biology views the interactions of a systems components as necessarily including its environment. Systems biology can be applied conceptually so that, in terms of the owl, the parts are the two perspectives and the whole is the owl itself. Systems biology applies also to the larger relationships between animals, robot-animals, androids, and humans. Is Rachael an android? Is Deckard a human? According to whom or what? When Deckard first meets Rachael Rosen he assumes that she is human but, after Voigt-Kampf testing, she is “proven” an android (1: 59). Rachael’s programming, like Phil Resch’s, is deep enough that she is not aware of her android build so it comes as a shock for her to learn of her origins (1: 59). So Rachael is, verifiably, an android. On the contrary, throughout Deckard’s relationship with Rachael, he treats her as both android and human. These ontological transitions, from Deckard’spoint of view, stem largely from his own confusion about with whom/what he is or is not allowed to empathize. Deckard first realizes that he has begun to empathize with androids when he tests himself in the elevator with Phil Resch (1: 142). In bed, Deckard remarks that “legally you”re not \[alive]. But really you are” (1: 198). Rachael’s double existence is not limited to Deckard’s eyes; she sees herself as having a mirrored existence. When she realizes that Pris is the same model type as her/itself, Rachael realizes “it’s an illusion that I—I personally—really exist; I’m just representative of a type” (1: 189). Moreover, this “identification” with Pris is a type of empathy, an emotional response reserved for the domain of the human (1: 189-90). Rachael’s ontological complexity is made explicit when Deckard confronts Pris. “As it \[Pris] approached him, its arms reaching…. But the eyes, the same eyes. And there are more like this; there can be a legion of her, each with its own name, but all Rachael Rosen…. He fired at her as, imploringly, she…. The android burst and parts of it flew” (1: 221). The switching pronouns in this passage show that Pris/Rachael is both a “her” and an “it”. Here the question of who is a “who” and what a “what”is unanswerable. The passage also exposes Rachael’s clandestine coitus: readers learned earlier that Rachael was sent to delay Deckard’s bounty hunter-related tasks by seducing him. On the one hand, Rachael can empathize towards Deckard: “if I entered a room and found a sofa covered with your \[Deckard’s] hide I’d score very high on the Voigt-Kampf test” (1: 194) and on the other, her empathy is revealed as a ploy to stall Deckard in his quest to retire the Nexus-6 androids (1: 183). Does empathy demarcate human from android? Moreover, Rachael was “the prototype used by the manufacturer to protect the others” and therefore served as the template to create all of the similar androids (1: 221). If the “master” form of android is capable of empathy, human-like memories, and so on, what does it mean to create a “race” of androids from this mold? “Have not its thoughts been suggested in the bone?” (4: 00:02:38). The boundaries between Rachael-as-human and Rachael-as-android have deteriorated. In similar ways, Deckard too is both android and human. I’ve already hinted at this but will expand here. When Deckard sleeps with Rachael he is, in his mind, doing what only humans can do: empathize. But he’s doing it as a moral violation that might construe him as sub-human (1: 193). Furthermore, why would a human need a mood organ and Mercerism in order to feel empathy? Let it suffice to say that when Deckard says that he “broke down…and had to call \[Rachael]” he is only speaking a half colloquialism (1: 198). Deckard is also unconsciously referencing—“the conduits of his brain humming, calculating, and selecting”—his “android”materiality (1: 124). For both Rachael and Deckard, it is unclear where the boundaries for the human and android lie but also unclear what role each of them play within the larger system of android/human relations. What does a bounty hunter represent? What does it mean to be the prototypical form for a “race” of androids? Before addressing those questions, there is one clear thing about the system in which these characters find themselves: the system of constructs that make humans and androids appear as such functions on alterity. Nayar views “alterity (…and its concomitant characteristic, difference) as constitutive”, meaning alterity is the ‘source” that construes things as such (2: 51). “The system is not closed operationally to the environment—on the contrary, the environment has a very real “agency”… in the system’s reconstitution of itself” (2: 51). This adds to the discussion of autopoiesis by emphasizing that autopoietic systems cannot operate in isolation but rely on ongoing interaction. Moreover, “the human-machine interaction \[is] mutually constitutive, and subjectivity \[is] a hybridized condition that emerges in this interaction when the ‘subject’ accounts for the alterity that is the machine, in-corporates it into itself” (2: 52-53). While an android de-humanizes itself so too do the humans de-androidize themselves; the android and the human are no-things in and of themselves; rather, they are categories that arise from a series of interrelations between ‘self” and “other”.  The bounty hunter stands in between human and android and in many ways represents Nietzsche’s higher man. Phil Resch says “all the bounty hunters—we stand between the Nexus-6 and mankind, a barrier which keeps the two distinct” (1: 141). In “On the Higher Man” Zarathustra addresses the higher men who will enact a becoming Übermensch (overhuman): the higher men must become “rulers” to “overcome” the human and are praised for “despising” (5: 231-232). Indeed, the tests of the bounty hunters—their rule—are often used as justification for murder—a literal “overcoming” (5: 231-32). But which one is the animal and which one the Übermensch? This is where _Do Androids Dream_ departs from Nietzsche’s latent teleology. Because the categories of android and human emerged from alterity it is impossible to claim one as “higher” than the other. Finally, I turn to kipple and Mercerism as fodder for understanding alterity. Mercerism is a material practice of a type of Enlightenment humanism. The first in-depth perspective on Mercerism comes when J.R. Isidore—a ‘special” living alone on the fringe of the city—“grasp\[s] the twin handles” of his “black empathy box” and a “visual image congealed,” showing “one single figure, more or less human in form, toil\[ing] its way up the hillside” (1: 21-22). Momentarily after grasping the handles, J. R. Isidore himself enters into the Mercerian world and becomes the one walking up the hill. Likewise, everyone in the universe who grasps the handles at the same time joins in the merger. The “fusion of their mentalities oriented their attention on \[one thing:] the hill, the climb, the need to ascend” (1: 22). The merger represents the Enlightenment idea of mind/body dualism where man, if only he were separate from his body, could achieve salvation. The ascent almost represents the humanistic telos of progress but differs in one way: characters must return again and again to the ascent, making it more of a cyclic, Nietzschean eternal return than actual telos. Moreover, Mercerism is a counter-force to kipple. “Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopage. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself…. It’s a universal principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization…. Except of course for the upward climb of Mercerism” (1: 65-66). This quote shows that there is a “natural” order of things from which humans—or at least Mercerians—are exempt. Mercerians are the singular force operating in opposition to the “natural” degradation of the universe. Materially, kipple is a metaphor for the system of capitalist waste-production that threatens the sanctity of our biosphere. For a globe whose inhabitants livea mongst the very tangible “entropic” dissolution of matter towards chaos, kipple is an everyday reality (1: 20). Dick and Nietzsche are making similar observations about the unfeasibility of viewing the earth as a readily exploitable resource (5). More basically, though, kipple is like a quantum field of differing, deferring; a network of difference from which things arise (a la alterity). “The First Law of Kipple \[is that] “Kipple drives out nonkipple” (1: 65). It is precisely this play between two binary ontologies that makes Mercerism and kippleization appear. In Nayar’s terms, the ‘so-called Other is constitutive of the self, the Other is incorporated into the self” (2: 76).  J. R. Isidore has a cunning intuition about the material practices of Mercerian ideology. Reflecting on the various viewpoints he receives—from the radio character of Buster Friendly to Mercerism—Isidore decides that “they’re \[all] fighting for control of our psychic selves” (1: 75). In a very real sense, the competing ideologies that confront Isidore and the other characters are brainwashing forces. When Isidore is grasping the handles of his empathy box he feels free and connected to all other humans (1: 22). Žižek critiques democracy for containing a latent dictatorship as “the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom” (6: 00:04:53). Likewise, the subjects of Mercerism feel free but are constrained by forces they cannot see. The character development in _Do Androids Dream_ progresses similarly to John Nada in They Live: throughout the book, the characters become aware of the ideologies at play in their world (6: 00:06:15). The final ontological blurring for the characters of _Do Androids Dream_ is of the worlds themselves. The Mercerian world that persons experience when they merge is “painted” (1: 207) and Wilbur Mercer himself “is not a human, does not in fact exist,” but is merely the rendition of a movie set (1: 209). Contrarily, Deckard, somewhat dazed and confused, travels to the “uninhabited desolation to the north” (1: 227). In the demolished rocky deserts of southern Oregon, Deckard lives the storyline from his Mercerian mergings: “I am Wilbur Mercer; I’ve permanently fused with him” (1: 233). Deckard claims to have become the ideology of his time. With astounding acuity, Deckard perceives the alterity that is the “true” structure of his world. We are all “only fragments of crates…, containers which signify nothing in themselves” (1: 228). In the end, _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?_ suggests that human experience is not summarized as easily as “there is a world out there that I get to decide how to interact with”. On the contrary, our experience of ourselves as ‘selves” or “human”—or our experience of “things”as inert material—are fictions, albeit fictions with real consequences. _Do Androids Dream_ explores these fictions; it asks what is this thing I call “me”? Who “are” we to call us “us” and them “them”? It goes beyond asking “how ought I respond to the world around me?” by destabilizing the meaning of those categories so easily defined by “I”, “around” or “world”. Lastly, we’re challenged to investigate the parameters by which we construct our very real dreams. References: 1. Dick, Philip K. 1996. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? New York: Ballantine Books. 2. Nayar, Pramod K. 2014. Posthumanism. Cambridge: Polity Press 3. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2006. On the Genealogy of Morality. Translated by Carol Diethe. Edited by Keith ​Ansell-Pearson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 4. Kahane, Gabriel. 2014. “Bradbury” on The Ambassador. Digital MP3. Sony Masterworks. 5. Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2006. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Adrian del Caro. Edited by ​​Adrian del Caro and Robert B. Pippin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 6. Žižek, Slavoj. 2013. Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. Digital Film. Directed by Sophie Fiennes starring ​Slavoj Žižek. P Guide Productions and Zeitgeist Films, accessed from iTunes store.