Much of Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) is concerned with the nature of empathy, its relation to the state of one's humanity, and how we may comprehend the former in order to establish the latter. While it is thus metaphysical in its mode of questioning, the text also paints a satirical caricature of a society where empathy, in being overvalued and overemphasized, has become forced and trite—manufactured instead of genuine. This conflict between authentic empathy and its ersatz copies is embodied in two very different conceptions of animals in the text—as well-loved companions but also tradable property. This leads us to question whether humankind's empathy for animals in the text is truly authentic or not. Furthermore, the text dismisses attempts to empirically measure empathy as futile. This is accomplished by hyperbolically overemphasizing the societal importance of the Voigt-Kampff test, an integral plot device, while simultaneously destabilizing its credibility. Accordingly, I argue that the entire enterprise of being empathetic is demonstrated as superficial, even pointless, within the dystopia of Dick's text.
I would like to begin my paper with a close reading of the excerpt where Pris Stratton and Irmgard Baty decide to mutilate the spider, which spans pp. 179-184 of Androids. Through analyzing the narrative structure in this excerpt, I argue that Dick clearly distinguishes between two aspects of empathy— the mental and subjective reaction, or lack thereof, to external stimuli, alongside the physiological, physical and/or verbal cues which purportedly convey said mental states to other people. While the former cannot be faked in that it is reflexive, the latter can. Unfortunately, the latter also forms the basis of the Voigt Kampff test. Hence, the entire endeavour of empirically testing for empathy collapses due to the deliberately planted epistemological inconsistencies that Dick draws our attention to within the novel.
I would argue that the 'focalizer' in the spider torture excerpt is J. R. Isidore. By this I mean that, despite the third-person narrative style which Dick uses inAndroids, J. R. is the emotional focus of the excerpt. We, as readers, see this episode primarily from his perspective, and are privy to his subjective emotional states. For example, we know that "a weird terror struck at J. R. Isidore" (Dick 179) after he hears Irmgard asking Pris to "cut off four [legs]"(Dick 179). Moreover, when J. R. drowns the spider, the text informs us that "in him his mind, his hopes, drowned, too" (Dick 184). Conversely, we see Pris's actions and responses but do not gain access to her psychological states. Her responses merely hint at her motivations, rather than explicitly confirming them. For instance, she "snipped off one of the spider's legs" (Dick 180); she "clipped off another leg, restraining the spider with the edge of her hand"(Dick 180), and "she was smiling" (Dick 180). We have to extrapolate from her actions in order to derive some sort of understanding about her emotional state. In this way, the narrative structure ofAndroids is self-reflexive in that, just as it consistently brings up empathy, the text simultaneously makes use of itself as a hermeneutic and empathic exercise. That is to say, Androids requires its reader to exercise empathy and comprehend events from Pris's mental perspective, in order for the reader to fully grasp the emotions of the characters in the text. This, in turn, reinforces the differences between subjective mental states and the observable phenomena.
At this juncture, I wish to introduce two possible readings to account for Pris's act of torture, with the aim of arguing that neither of them may be supported or dismissed based purely on information from Dick's text. On one hand, the eight legs of the spider could serve as a possible symbol for the interconnectedness of the eight Nexus-6s. Here, Pris's act of cutting off the legs seems to be driven by her need to project retaliatory violence against the bounty hunters, who are killing the androids off one by one. Alternatively, Pris may have been driven by a kind of scientific curiosity, albeit quite a sadistic one, rather than any sort of reactionary vengeance. The point here is that one may not completely support or dismiss either of these propositions, at least not based on any textual evidence, which is deliberately scarce in this aspect. In a more general sense, we as readers never find out for certain why Pris really does what she does, or why Rachael Rosen kills Deckard's goat, for example. We can only guess and conjecture that Pris was curious or angry or experiencing a mix of these emotions, rather than being able to get at any one definite answer. All we see are Pris's actions, which hint at but do not directly tell us Pris's emotional states or motivations.
Accordingly, how Pris resists being read and empirically measured reflects Dick's stance on how emotions in general are not so easily read. This leads one to question the efficacy of Voigt-Kampff test as a means of measuring these emotions. While the test purportedly measures empathy, it actually measures the subject's "primary autonomic response … to a morally shocking stimulus" (Dick 40) in the form of bodily "eye-muscle and capillary [reactions]"(Dick 41), whereas the subject's psychological or mental state remains elusive. That said, one might argue that the bodily responses are still indicative of empathy in and of themselves, even if they are simply an effect of said empathic states. However, the text itself shows that these responses can easily be faked or manufactured, even by androids, as when Rachael Rosen pretends to turn "pale, … [nodding] fixedly" and "[flinching]" at Eldon Rosen's touch after she 'discovers' that she is an android (Dick 51). Subsequently, however, she confesses that she has fooled other bounty hunters before, "nine times" in fact, and one of whom is Resch (Dick 173). Therefore we can conclude that she must have already had prior knowledge of her being an android before meeting Deckard. At this point, we discover that Rachael was merely pretending to be shocked, fooling Deckard by mimicking the expected physiological responses that accompany a genuinely shocked state. These include turning pale, which is caused by the constriction of the very same capillaries that the Voigt-Kampff tester observes. Hence, physiological responses are no longer reliable despite the alleged authenticity and authority surrounding the Voigt-Kampff test.
Furthermore, the correlation between a subject's mental state and their bodily or physical response is not one-to-one. By one-to-one, I mean that one psychological state inevitably results in a single physical reaction. Instead, the text demonstrates that a variety of psychological states, not all of them strictly empathic, can conceivably result in the same kind of physical response whichseems empathic. In order to further develop my thesis, I would like to raise the issue of how the humans in the text seem to be so preoccupied with their animals. My argument here is that there exists a conflation of the concept of an animal as property, along with the concept of the animal as a companion, and therefore a social symbol of one's emotional warmth. This, in my opinion, further complicates our understanding of emotions and empathy in the novel, since the line between genuine and false empathy is blurred. The humans in the novel certainly prize empathy toward animals, as in the case of Phil Resch. I would venture to suggest that the social status attached to owning an animal is also related to the concept of an animal as a sign of one's humanity and therefore, lack of 'androidness'. Resch embodies this mindset most tellingly, especially when he tries to convince Deckard (and himself) that he is not an android based on the way that he cares for his squirrel. Here, Resch rationalizes that he cannot be an android since his "Buffy is doing fine, as sleek as an otter" (Dick 113) in the "atmosphere of love" (Dick 113) that Resch allegedly immerses him in.
However, Resch's claim is problematic. For instance, Deckard problematizes this mode of thinking by stating, "In two cases that I know of, andys owned and cared for animals" , although he concedes that this is "rare" (Dick 113). Despite this, Deckard and the two exceptions have already proven that caring for an animal is no longer a failsafe guarantee of one's humanity. Additionally, Resch's inability to empathize with androids problematizes our sense of his capacity for empathy as a whole, which is destabilized by the contrast between his love (or 'love') for Buffy and his blatant lack of "feelings toward androids" that Deckard terms a "defect" (Dick 122). Furthermore, while Resch's act of caring for his squirrel is evident, it is not clear how much of this is actually due to an altruistic concern for the animal's well-being and how much is simply just adherence to a tiresome, Sisyphean routine. In other words, we never know if Resch really loves his squirrel, or if his attitude is similar to Deckard's, who must program his mood organ to make him "want to … check out [his] sheep" (Dick 4, emphasis mine). Ironically, Resch's squirrel, a symbol for his empathy toward animals, can alternatively be read as just another devalued piece of evidence that points to Resch acting out a brand of mechanized social performance to indicate that he is not an android. That said, I am not arguing with certainty that Resch does view his squirrel in this way, but merely that the text, especially with all its thematic preoccupations with deception and lying, does not give us a definite answer regarding Resch's and the other humans' attitudes toward their animals.
Another issue which complicates our understanding of the authenticity of empathy towards animals is the fact that the animals in the book are not just objects of empathy, but that they have also been reduced to a kind of capitalistic commodity or status symbol. Thus, I argue that the ontological and thus ethical issues surrounding the animals are further complicated when economic 'cents' are conflated with emotional sensibility. Even the title hints at this, where the "Electric Sheep" has become a kind of "Dream", leading us to draw parallels between Deckard's thirst for a biological animal and a kind of twisted parody of the 'American Dream', or capitalism in general. The most blatant symbol of this social phenomenon is Deckard's catalogue for Sidney's, which is described as "bent" (Dick 28) and "much-thumbed" (Dick 35) in order to highlight his excessive preoccupation with it. Moreover, the fact that the rarer animals like "the only ostrich on the West Coast" (Dick 23) and what is presumably the last owl on Earth (Dick 37) are more expensive suggests that much like a commodity, the value of an animal is based at least partially on its rarity, which is then translated into economic worth.
In fact, even the terminology used to describe animals points to their commodification. For example, "[the pet shop] expects you to car-trade, like in the old days" (Dick 27, emphasis mine) and describes an animal's condition as "mint" or "used" (Dick 28), while people who sell pets are not known as pet shop owners, but are repeatedly referred to as salesmen (Dick 28, 146-7). The Rosen Association outlines various "conditions" (Dick 49) for Deckard's procurement of the owl as a bribe, including the proviso that he "can't will [his] owl to anybody" (Dick 49). We are also told that the company "acquired [their raccoon] … from a subsidiary corporation" (Dick 35) and "invests its surplus capital on living animals" (Dick 35). In short, the language surrounding animals in Androids is saturated with commercial and financial terms, thus indicating that they have become an integral part of the text's capitalistic economy. Moreover, after Pris cuts the legs off the spider, Irmgard reassures J. R. by saying, "You didn't lose anything, we'll pay you" (Dick 183, emphasis mine). Assuming that Isidore will think in similar terms, she seems to imply that the act of torturing the spider is regrettable because it results in damaged goods, and not because pain is being inflicted on a living thing.
With these two rather different concepts of animals in mind, how do we as human readers negotiate the tricky quagmire of what is 'genuine' empathy for animals and what is merely a kind of crude, perhaps even mechanical, simulacrum of empathy for the sake of social mores? Here, Dick blurs the line between innate 'human' feelings and a societal pressure to prove or act out what one feels. This, in turn, problematizes the Voigt-Kampff test even further, especially since so many of the questions seem to revolve around measuring one's empathy toward animals. Examples of this include a scenario with "a little boy and… his butterfly collection, including his killing jar" (Dick 41), where one of the socially appropriate responses seems to be to "take him to the doctor" (Dick 41). Even if the test detects that one shows the physiological signs of responding empathically, could it be that what is measured is a kind of distress at the loss of 'animal-as-investment', instead of the empathic response to an animal's pain? Alternatively, one could simply be committing themselves to a kind of politically correct response which is erroneously measured as genuine empathy.
What, then, distinguishes a more callous focus on practicality or capitalism, that is, a staged or inauthentic, socially learned response, from genuine empathy? Dick seems to suggest that we should be cautious precisely because that question, like so many more, cannot be answered easily. This is especially so when all humanity can glean from Voigt-Kampff testing are observable fragments of empirical evidence which hint at, but do not explicitly confirm, the test-taker's subjective motives and mindset. Here, humanity debases the altruistic resonances of empathy in favour of adopting a more frivolous, pre-programmed empathic code for its own sake. The novel makes us consider this issue both with regard to the Voigt-Kampff test and where social interactions are concerned, since a variety of mental states can conceivably give rise to the same perceived bodily reactions. Ironically, it is precisely because of the thirst to prove that humankind is empathetic that humanity's understanding of empathy, like Pris's spider, seems to have been subject to a sort of mutilative reductionism. In other words, humankind hubristically assumes that its own oversimplified knowledge on empathy is an absolute, given truth, and passes it off as such.
In conclusion, Androids sets up a world in which empathy is prized as one of the primary means of measuring one's humanity, only to problematize the ways through which the humans in the text negotiate with empathy and empathizing. Dick distinguishes between the mental and bodily aspects of empathic response, satirizing a fictional society that simplifies humanity's understanding of the former by naively claiming that it can 'detect' the presence of empathy based entirely on the latter. Accordingly, Androids is epistemologically liberating in that it dismantles the enterprise of 'testing' for empathy—an endeavor which simultaneously reduces and misunderstands what it truly means to be empathetic, in favour of allegedly allowing us to empirically measure what, in reality, cannot be empirically measured. In other words, even as the text poses the great ontological question of what it means to be human, it conscientiously attempts to regulate our means of getting to one of the answers.
Lu Zhengwen is an English Literature student who is, unfortunately, in his third year of study. Among other topics, he is interested in postcolonial and feminist studies, science fiction and fantasy texts, postmodern texts, and ecocriticism. He also finds most Victorian poetry quite charming to read (out loud, if he is alone and feels particularly brave). He believes that he is as starved for free time as the next student. That said, he insists on investing his scraps of spare time in playing computer games, writing poetry and short stories, and fretting over potential topics for his upcoming honours thesis…
Works Cited
Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? London: Gollancz, Orion Publishing Group, 2007.
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