ABSTRACT
Despite Harvey’s forceful reaffirmation of such a base-superstructure relation, it is arguably Bruno’s account that has set the parameters for all subsequent discussion of the film-particularly in terms of its spatiality (characterized by the city’s architectural pastiche) and temporality (marked by a schizoid experience of time). Underwriting much of the literature, therefore, has been a conceptualization of postmodernity as an epoch progressively instituted in spacetime in accordance with a logic of de-differentiation, which explodes the relative autonomy of the distinct spheres of economy, polity, civil society, culture and so on, through the negatory process of postmodernization; and from which a
correlative cultural logic or ‘structure of feeling’ (postmodernism) may be directly discerned. Blade Runner may then be viewed as an exemplary mirror of the essential, latent and virtual horrors of our own postmodern condition ramified to the nth degree-in which the fractal stage of value reigns supreme and the cultural logic of everyday life is triangulated by banality, fatality and simulation (Clarke and Doel, 1994; Doel and Clarke, forthcoming). Whilst we do not necessarily dissent from such an understanding of the fissiparous present, we see none of this exemplified in the film itself.
