Thinking About Style

While I was watching Blade Runner again this week, I kept being reminded of what a massive influence it has been on subsequent depictions of the near-future, whether in film, on television, or -- perhaps most prominently -- in videogames. Something about the overall look and feel of Ridley Scott's picture, what we might call its "aesthetic", continues to resonate with people who try to imagine how the world might one day soon become both more dangerous and more exciting.

Back in the 1980s, the fact that Blade Runner showcases the multicultural dimension to future Los Angeles -- think of the giant advertisement with what appears to be a Japanese lady; the street-side stall where Deckard eats a bowl of Asian noodles in broth; the strange way in which the character played by Edward James Olmos speaks, mixing words from a variety of languages -- was thought by many to a way of expressing the fact that American society was in decline.

These days, when even people in places like Oklahoma and West Virginia tend to have a passing acquaintance with "international" foods and the goings-on in other nations, that aspect of the film tends to stand out less than its relentless gloom, with barely a trace of daylight and constant rainfall. As I mentioned in class, the film and the 1968 Philip K. Dick book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? on which it is based were preoccupied with the radical changes that might happen on Earth in the event of nuclear war that did not destroy the planet outright, particularly the belief that a massive increase in ambient particulate matter would lead to massive global cooling. Now, by contrast, most of us in the Southwest and West are more concerned with the opposite prospect, a world becoming progressively hotter and drier, which makes the idea of a dark, wet Los Angeles in 2019 seem especially strange.

Regardless of what features of Blade Runner your attention is drawn to, though, I think it's safe to say that it makes as big an impression -- or perhaps an even bigger one -- with what's going on in the background than the story does in the background. It's isn't only <em>about</em> style, obviously, but a screenplay or a summary of the plot is not going to convey what makes the film interesting and important. And that makes it very useful for getting us to think about aesthetics more generally.

I was looking today at the writings of Nick Land, a kind of futurist thinker who helped found a movement called Accelerationism, and was struck by the ways in which his breathless, convoluted prose in some ways resembles the cluttered, obscure look of Blade Runner:

"An animal with the right to make promises enslaves the unanticipated to signs in the past, caging time-lagged life within a script. The variably -scaled instant of innovation is shackled to the historical temporality of inheritance, obligation, and propositional thought, projecting future time as a persistent dominion of the past (rigorously correlative with a repression of real numbers). Now is delimited as a moment, and pluralized as linear succession. Theopolitical false memory syndrome deifies reason, subordinating distributed systems to serialization, unitary historical time, linear determination from a pseudotranscendent primordial element, and the dominion of the word. Monocult gerontocrats launch their whitelight demented onslaught against amphibian nomadism, smothering the earth in priests, cops, and bureaucrats. Cultural eradication of the sacred. Imprisonment within the face. The socius cancerizes a head, cephallic concentration, rationalizing itself into nuclear capital. K -insurgency parallel communication goes underground into occulted spaces."

What I mean by this is that Land goes out of his way not to explain how the different terms he uses here relate to each other or even how he means for us to understand them individually. It's like he wants us to make our way through the lexical obscurity of his sentences, keeping an eye and an ear out for any monsters that might be waiting to pounce on us. Personally, I'm not a huge fan of this kind of writing when it's also trying to convey an argument -- as opposed to aspiring to be poetry -- but I do find it interesting to think about and respond to.