Alone in Sci-Fi: The Impossibility of Oneness in Blade Runner 2049 and Empire of the Senseless

Abstract

As McLuhan prophesized, the new mediums of electric and communicative technology are no longer separate from the human body and have become rather an extension of body and a reflection of contemporary overloaded minds. Anxieties about technological autonomy steadily increase as artificial intelligences strive towards singularity as the boundaries between human and nonhuman become increasingly indistinguishable. Interestingly however, in Denis Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) and Kathy Acker’s Empire of the Senseless (1988), it is not the fear of technological singularity that fuels the narratives, but rather a fear of insurmountable governmental power that utilizes technology to come into direct and unmediated contact with life—further splintering and thus shattering attempts at community building.   Yasmina Jaksic is an English PhD candidate at York University. Her doctoral research focuses on contemporary Asian-Anglophone Cultures and Literatures of diaspora and double-consciousness.