Essay: Artistic Ability as Defamiliarizer

Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go both explore the topic of personhood. In both novels, a group of humanoid beings is brought into existence for a specific purpose; in both novels, these beings are utilized and killed by their creators and are denied the privileges of their human counterparts. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, six androids are pursued by bounty hunter Rick Deckard after they kill their human masters. In Never Let Me Go, the English boarding school students of Hailsham are in fact children who have been raised to serve as organ donors for humans with cancer. In both books, the creative capacities of these beings are examined as evidence of their possible personhood. Although creativity does not serve as sufficient evidence of personhood, it can provoke a reassessment of the status of these beings that is necessary for their ultimate consideration as persons.

On its own, artistic capacity is neither a sufficient nor a necessary criterion for personhood. Computers have produced poetry and music that humans have found meaningful and aesthetically pleasing (Watz). Animals too have shown creative capacities. Primates, after being handed a paintbrush, have produced paintings that humans deem to have balance and composition (Hirschfield). Even when not prompted to do so, some animals engage in creative activity. The male bowerbird spends hours decorating his nest, with aesthetically pleasing results, to attract a mate. On the other end of the spectrum are beings who are clearly persons but who do not engage in artistic creation, such as people who do not have the leisure or are not otherwise inclined to produce art.

The unique attribute of artistic creation seems to be, rather than a necessary characteristic of personhood, important in the role that it plays in our perception of personhood. Artistic creation is accompanied by a capacity of will and motivatedness that interferes with our ability to perceive the creator as a thing, a possession, or a commodity. 

Ishiguro does not think that donors are non-persons, and Dick does not think androids are non-persons. Donors are, after all, are genetically identical to humans. They grow up in every way identical to humans, aside from differences that derive from their differential upbringing. The donors themselves have no doubt they have souls (291). And in Dick’s fictional world, the only criterion used to tells androids apart from humans is the androids’ lack of empathy toward animals and humans, but this emotional deficiency is found in schizophrenics – who are clearly persons – in that fictional world. The assessment of androids and donors as non-persons is artificial, rather than natural; it is a view that the societies of the androids and of the donors adopted when they created their respective beings. The artificiality of the distinction is illustrated by the fact that these beings are not reliably distinguishable by the people in their fictional worlds. In Androids, Rick indeed mistakes the android Rachael for human (35) and the human Phil Resch for an android (120). Similarly, when Ruth, Tommy, and Kathy go to the Portway Studios, the three easily pass as normal art students (180); it is only people like Madame and Miss Emily, who are aware of the children’s donor status, who feel a sense of revulsion toward them (301). Donors and androids function, then, as minorities group exploited and oppressed by their respective society’s majorities, rather than as inherently inferior beings. A real-life example of this is slavery in the U.S. Today we have no doubt Africans are human, but societal prejudices allowed their historical treatment as non-persons.   

Artistic production doesn’t allow these minorities to acquire rights. Rick continues to kill androids even though Luba sings beautifully, and humans continue to harvest the organs of donors despite their proven artistic capacities. This is true in our own history too. In 1760s Boston, for instance, young Phillis Wheatley remained a slave even after she published a book of masterfully metered and rhymed poetry. Instead, art plays the important role of defamiliarization of the androids and the donors to the humans that surround them, that is, causing the humans to view the respective minority beings in a new light. For Rick, androids were obviously non-persons. He has no qualms about killing them until he meets Luba. The moment of defamiliarization occurs when he observes Luba examining Munch’s painting “Puberty” (115). He realizes that she is contemplating her imminent mortality, in a way that he himself might. He is so affected that he parts with some of his very scarce, much-loved money to buy her a reproduction of the painting. Rick begins to question the assumptions he has had about androids.

A similar scenario occurs in the universe of Never Let Me Go. Humans were so eager to produce a cure for cancer that they never considered “whether … [the clones] should have been brought into existence at all” (294). When they did create donors, “people preferred to believe these organs appeared from nowhere, or at most that they grew in a kind of vacuum … In the early days, after the war, that’s largely all you were to most people. Shadowy objects in test tubes” (293-294). Madame tries to counter this perception by displaying the donors’ art as evidence that they “had souls” (291).

The production and appreciation of art are so far removed from the purpose for which both types of beings were created, that it makes the surrounding humans question the moral rectitude of their having created such beings in the first place. Luba Luft wasn’t created to sing; the donors weren’t intended to paint or to love or to dream of deferrals, just as slave-owners never intended their slaves to write poetry. Their engagement in such creative, imaginative, hopeful acts causes their respective oppressive majorities to reconsider basic notions that were long deemed a matter of fact. This reconsideration is not enough: it needs to be translated into action. Whether art can constitute a powerful enough call to action, however, is a debate for a different essay.

A person or not a person?

Image by Aziz Acharki

Works Cited

Dick, Philip K. Blade Runner: (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep). New York: Ballantine, 1982. Google Books. Web. 13 June 2012.

Hirschfield, Eugene. "Can Animals Create Art?" Marxist Theory of Art. 9 Nov. 2008. Web. 13 June 2012.

Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. New York: Vintage International, 2006. LIT file.

Watz, Marius. "Computer Generated Writing." Evolution Zone. 7 Jan. 1997. Web. 13 June 2012.