A Study Of Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep ? Based On Baudrillard’s Postmodernism Theory

Philip K.Dick is a pioneer of science fiction in 20th-century American literature,and he is widely regarded as one of the most influential figures in the history of science fiction literature.His novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?（hereinafter referred to Do Androids）portrays a future world after World War Terminus and tells the story of Rick Deckard,a bounty hunter who chases down androids that escaped from Mars to Earth in order to buy a real goat.The future world with highly developed consumption,media,and technology in the capitalist society presented in the novel has provoked considerable discussions among readers.Thus,it is critical to study the dissimilation of human beings in such a world in depth.With the employment of Jean Baudrillard’s Postmodernism Theory: Consumer Society,Media Critical Theory,and Technical Philosophy,this thesis investigates humans’ dissimilation from the following three aspects to explore how human beings are gradually dissimilated in such a future society envisioned by Dick,and finally become inhuman,unthinking,and senseless androids.First of all,the deformed development of consumer society has accelerated the fading of humanity.The sign value of real animals in terms of wealth,social status,and empathy has become the primary purpose of people keeping pets.The obsessive pursuit of sign value violates the original intention of raising animals.The unrestrained pursuit of difference and the rise of credit in a consumer society eventually lead to the distortion of humanity.Moreover,the totalitarian government and plutocracy use mass media’s unilateral communication nature to manipulate people’s minds,gradually turning them into unthinking machines.The show Buster Friendly is revealed to be an extension of the government’s power to control people’s thoughts.The government and plutocracy manipulate the advertising to influence people’s choices by investigating mass psychology and controlling the production of signs.Individual experiences create unique Mercer’s “revelations” in the empathy box.These Mercer’s “revelations” impact people’s opinions and behavior.Lastly,the simulacra world created by media technology,cybernetics,and biotechnology misleads people’s consciousness,causing them to lose sight of their true perception of the world and lose faith in sensory experiences.Rather than that,they prefer to believe in the enjoyable experience provided by a hyper-real world,thereby losing the courage to live in reality.Eventually,when people realize that androids,the simulations of humans,are even more humane than humans in the hyper-real world,they lose their last perception of the real world but feel helpless to do anything about it and continue to live in the simulation world created by technology in a muddled way.Through the dissimilation research of humans in a future world in Philip Dick’s Do Androids,it shows Philip Dick’s concern about the potential negative consequences for humans of the unrestricted expansion of the capitalist economy,mass media,and technology in the future.Thus,Dick opens up a new perspective for the critique of capitalism.