San Francisko: postapokaliptički grad-simulakrum

Abstract

In the paper San Francisco: A Post-Apocalyptic City-Simulacrum, we will try to illuminate a post-apocalyptic city in the novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick, using Foucault’s interpretation of heterotopia and Baudrillard’s notion of a simulacrum. We will also, with the help of an interdisciplinary approach and analytic-synthetic methods, take a look at the spaces within which we recognize places where the city established by narration tells us something about itself (e.g. buildings, museums, citizens). While demonstrating the post-apocalyptic city, we will try to answer questions about how San Francisco lives after the Terminal War and the nuclear catastrophe, and how citizens (people and androids) can live in the city as they did before the apocalypse, if there is a possibility of life beginning again on old foundations. We will also try to answer the questions regarding the new living conditions and the specific symbolic figures which create the image of a post-apocalyptic urban world. What are these absolutely other worlds, other places-heterotopia in relation to the utopian ones, can San Francisco be read and considered as an absolutely different city.