The Alan Sondheim Mail Archive

March 13, 2001


-


brief note

in alphaville, it is the inertness of contemporary space. in blade runner,
the inertness ties to the interiority of the biological: replicants, like
humans, die. it is this parallel trajectory which defines the issues of
identity; if alphaville's paris is a displacement of the real, blade
runner's replicants carry the virus of the real's grain. they are just as
constituted, constructed, as the humans on the hunt - no more or less. i
want to emphasize this granularity or substance as fundamental to culture
and organism; origin and speciation in this regard are secondary.

this is the movement from modern to postmodern: the displacement of alpha-
ville tending towards the pervasive identities of blade runner's inhabita-
tions. neither are productions of terminal identity - both are character-
ized by alterities which are both familiar and absorbed as the same.

_

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