Cyber selves

Woke up this morning to a terrific story from NPR:

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12263532

Online gaming is not a pleasure I've allowed myself, but I LOVE this story about people and their avatars. It illustrates for me the power of the post-human, here and now:

Jason Rowe (left) and his avatar, Rurouni Kenshin, who rides
Imperial speeder bikes in Star Wars Galaxies. Copyright Robbie Cooper/Chris Boot

Cooper's portrait of Jason Rowe, for instance, stops you dead. He stares straight at you out of startled blue eyes. But what takes you aback is his frail body, his clenched hands, and the ominous ventilator strapped to his face. "My condition is called Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy," Rowe told Spaight. "It pretty much affects all the muscles in the body. They don't function." Rowe does have a little movement in his thumbs, which enables him to play the MMO Star Wars Galaxies an average of 80 hours a week. His avatar is a steely, robot-like character who rides Imperial speeder bikes and fights monsters, his head helmeted, his face unseen. "My character in the game is a lot different from what you see here in real life," Rowe says.

"[It] pretty much gave me a window to the world." In the four years since he created his avatar, this frail 32-year-old has had an unprecedented life experience: Online, he is treated as an equal among his peers. "Not disabled," he says. "Not in a wheelchair. In virtual worlds, everyone is on common ground."

Of course, the most remarkable thing about this story is that a man with Duchenne's living into his 30's!

Race and Battletar Galactica

At times, Battlestar Galactica reminds me of the Rudy Giulianni campaign. It's not just the militaristic themes that they both embrace. Mostly it's the fact that if not for 9/11, no one would be paying much attention to either. But also there's this: they are both so pleased wiith themselves that they can't be bothered to acknowledge their own racial blinders.

Dualla, the pretty African American communications officer on the Bridge (oops; I mean "CIC") of the Galactica, had a pretty good scene in the Miniseries when Billy gives her good news and she spontaneously kisses him. Nice. After that, they gave her very little meaty to do, and the actress did nothing meaty with what she was given.

The "Death of Billy" episode (not its real name – "Sacrifice") finally features Dualla being given something to do besides saying the equivalent of "Hailing frequencies open." She, Billy, and Lee are among the hostages in a bar where the hostage takers are demanding the death of the Sharon Cylon. She’s not the first, second, or third most important cast member in the episode, but she makes a strong bid for "tied for fourth," so she’s doing pretty well. After watching it, I read through the Wikipedia entry on her character, so I see where they are going with her–married to the male romantic lead, and XO of Pegasus Apparently, after a few seasons, someone saw the Dualla / Uhuru comparison; and since there is no chance for another "First interracial on screen kiss," they realized they had to do something to prevent her being Uhuru-lite.
So they made her Executive Officer of the Pegasus. Quite a promotion, from Chief Petty Officer, but in wartime, with thinning ranks, these things happen.

Presumably, if this population is the supposed to become the original human seed of Earth, their descendants will, over generations, scatter, to populate the earth of pre-history. What about evolution? It will be interesting to see if they deal with that. Are they going to land on earth and wipe out Neanderthals? Can’t you just hear Mary McDonnell as President Roslin warmly cooing, "throw them out the airlock"?

At any rate, because of the pre-historic setting, one can tsk tsk about tokenist approach to racially diverse casting, but having done that, there is little to be said about race IN the show. All one can say with certainty is this: it solidly reflects the racial aesthetics of mainstream hollywood (and "Blockbuster SF Hollywood"), which presumes of a racially "white" world with allowances for racial inclusions–one African American, one Asian American, one Mexican American. The word for this type of inclusion, by the way, is tokenism. Where is Whoopi Goldberg?

It may be a little unfair to hang the weight of Hollywood America around their necks, but one reason for wanting to do so is that the series deals explicitly and thoughtfully with identity politics, especially nationalist politics, a related issue.

One of the most interesting things the producers Moore and Eick have done is to allow the civilian population to maintain and assert their historical planetary identities, even though the planets they come from have been destroyed or depopulated–as immigrants and displaced persons do, for several generations. These don’t seem to to concur with contemporary racial and cultural identities, but they do reflect the same issues–ie. The Geminis are a traditional, religiously fundamentalist culture, who first accept Laura Roslin as their prophet, and later excoriate her stance on abortion. –And interestingly, it is when she equivocates (Mitt Romney style) that she loses political support.

But more directly, the show reflects the us against them mentality of a country at war, particularly of the U.S. at war against violent Moslem Extremism.

What to make of the 9/11 analogies?
Analogies like this can come in two varieties, intentional and unintentional. For an example of the second, look at the AIDS analogies in Interview with a Vampire. The novel was written before the AIDS epidemic was diagnosed, but took extra levels of meaning because the events that followed. The cold war analogies behind the original Star Trek were entirely planned, and they reek of it--this exemplifies "ham fisted." Somewhere in between are Tolkien's WWII analogies; he always denied they were intentional, but come on! How unintentional could they have been? But no doubt the execution of the novel prospered because the author was NOT trying to plan it out.

Galactica picks up on the blatant cold war analogies in the original (good humans battling the reptillian sired Cylons) and "reimagines" them for a post 9/11 context. First, there is the context of a civilization having been struck a devastating blow by an enemy they knew but weren't paying attention to. Then there's the state of emergency and all out war, and the crackdown on civil rights, fed from time to time by acts of violence. Mostly, though it's the paranoia about who might be a Cylon.

Television is one of the most evanescent forms of drama. Despite the fact that it is now captured on DVD, the half-life of great tv seems to be about five years. No television show was better than Hill Street Blues, but when it was over, it was over. The ongoing tap dance that writers and directors have to do to keep the audience the same show while at the same time find every possible twist to keep it interesting, usually means that each show will mine the same vein until it is clean. It’s ridiculous to talk about the permanent value of a tv show, as the academics who have been championing the enduring value of "Buffy" for years are slowly finding out. (I would even go so far as to say that a truly great stage performance can have more permanency than an equally great performance captured on the tube; the first has a large as life majesty that is swallowed by the night; the second is shrunk to the size of your living room wall and digested with nibbles and spit).

It is ridiculous to talk about "timeless" or transcendent television.

Having said that, BSG is not "about" the post 9/11 world the same way "24" is. The latter assumes a world full of ticking time bombs and effective torture. Torture in the BSG world produces blowback. In contrast to the world of "24," in which a disaster might be averted through the ruthless application of torture, the ruthless torture of Gina in Season 2 of BSG results in her suicide bombing of Cloud 9.

What BSG does, however, is to provide a mirror which too often shows the follies of our own times and leaders in high relief. At the end of season 2, a presidential election is highjacked. Instead of ordering the man who discovered the malfeasance to be sent out an airlock, or raising distracting but irrelevant issues about the voter roles in other districts with names like "Richard Tracy," or claiming that no systematic efforts have been made to purge the cylon vote from the rolls--and then vowing to make voter reform a national priority by coming up with a computer system that can be readily hacked–instead of doing the things real politicians do (not just in America, but here too) Roslin and Adamo agree to set things right.

Similarly, although they both have a blind spot when it comes to dealing with Cylons – in real life, the character played by Dean Stockwell at the end of Season 2.5 would have been much too important to kill–both Adamo and Roslin are constrained in their actions by the moral paradox that sometimes the ethically right thing to do is not the thing that produces the greatest good for the greatest number (with the least pain), and that, as in the case of allowing Baltar to assume his disastrous presidency, taking refuge behind a cocoon of moral correctness might be, ultimately, indefensible.

But then there is the issue of the ethical status of nationalisms, those not entirely meaningless nodes which connect and define and therefore also separate us. The "Downloaded" episode makes a point of looking at the moral complexities of the Cylon world, but never lets us think that we have understood their reason for so doggedly pursuing the extinction of the human race at all cost. In this way, they have set up the perfect "inscrutable" enemy, one who resembles "us" in thought and action but who ultimately views life and death so differently as to desensitize us to their pain, because we "know" they are desensitized to ours.

# # #

In about a month, season 3 is due to be released on DVD. I’m sure I’ll watch it, and I can’t wait for Season 4, when the crew arrives on earth, Adamo gets a guest worker pass to pick cotton for 1.17 an hour, while Roslin puts her elementary school teaching experience to work supervising a sweatshop of 8 and 9 year olds who manufacture parts for a Nokia iPhone ripoff.

# # #

Last thought about BSG season 2: Near the end, Chief Tyrell is given a union speech which doesn't quite seem to relate to the circumstances which surround him. According to the pod cast, they lifted it, hand gestures and all, from an anti-vietnman war speech a Berkeley union organizer had delivered in the 1960's. Except Chief Tyrell doesn't seem to be protesting the Cylon war, or any war. --An example of why this show is both better than you think and not as good as it could be.

The Women of Battlestar Galactica (Contiued)

First a word about these two views of Tricia Helfer.

The second of these photos is typical six: Slinky red dress, backlit so that her crotch glows like a ray gun. The first one scares me. The first seems to be the actress’s idea of a real person…

Do a Google search for images of tricia helfer, and you’ll find her as Six, or in her underwear, often having a hard time putting it on, as if she’s not very good at that sort of thing.

The whole sex goddess thing is at least an adult persona. The sex kitten thing is what? Depth?

But onward:

WHAT I LIKE ABOUT BOOMER/SHARON: The whole bit about the Cylon who doesn’t know she’s a cylon, acts counter to her programming, but ultimately follows it, is cool. Mostly, though, she reminds me of some the young women I know who’ve been in the armed services. She looks almost waifish, but she has training, and she has skills.

WHAT I HAVE A MIXED RESPONSE TO: In an attempt to assert her “humanity,” they appeal to the “woman’s essential nature” argument. In terms of playing typologies against each other (in a world in which natural = good, then motherhood is good and a cyborg is evil, so a cyborg mother is . . ?)


WHAT I LIKE ABOUT PRESIDENT LAURA: She defies any easy stereotype. She’s intuitive, touchy/feely—but also a calculating politician. I like the fact that the writers allow her to play against the audience expectation that she will see the “good” in the “good” cylon, when Sharon comes back.

It is a relief to see a middle aged woman being played as a middle aged woman. What a radical idea! They don’t hide her wrinkles behind inches of make-up, or hide her behind an “old battle axe” persona.

In depth of character, she Gaius Baltar are the richest characters on the show.

NEXT UP: RACE on BSG (or “What a novel idea, to have a pretty African American Woman as a communications officer on a starship”!)

Women in Battlestar Galactica: Take one

Battlestar: Galactica

First. let me say that I HATED the original series, which appeared when I was a teenager. I was a fan of Star Trek, Star Wars, and had even watched enought Space: 1999 to know the characters. I watched a few episodes of the original BSG, enough to be caught by the basic premise, and to experience an admittedly mild spiral of self-loathing for watching anything with Lorne Greene.

I resisted the reimagined series for years. This was very easy, as I don't have cable, and can't watch the SF channel.

Two months ago, I took out disc 1 of season 2.5. This was not a mistake; my reasoning was that be several years into the project, they should know what they are doing.

I wasn't exactly impressed with the depiction of Helena Cain, the commander of the Pegasus.. Let's see, she's young and attractive, so if she's commanding a Battlestar, there must be something nefarious afoot. She probably got the command over other, more qualified people.But I've spent enough time in This Life to know that sometimes people do get promoted into positions more on the basis of ambition than ability; presumably when this happens in the military, the results would be devastating not to a department, but to human lives. For TV to develop, it's got to develop complex female villians as well as complex female heroes, and this show did that.

So I went back and watched the miniseries, and series 1 and series 2.The Miniseries begins with Starbuck going througn a morning exercise routine while the rest of the ship is preparing for decommisioning. I was pretty sure that Starbuck had been a man on the original series, so I was pleasantly surprised by this reversal. So far, they've done a good job of creating a female action hero, and that's not nothing. I like the way that the actress, Katie Sackhoff, handles herself with aggressive ease among her male peers. In the miniseries, I wasn't sure she had found the "core" of the character--I never quite believed her facial reactions in the close-ups--but by the first and second series, I was convinced she knew the character better than the writers (which needs to be the case on episode TV).

Even so, I don't think the writers have ever given her the kind of free rein they would have given a male action hero. For that matter, they have done a much better job so far writing Jamie Bamber's "Apollo" character, but they deserve credit: Starbuck has been the wild kid on the block.

Ah but the Cylons.

The development of the "skinjob" cylons has been intriguing. First setting the artificial humans up as the evil beyond all evil, patricidal, genocidal forces. ( Where did they get the idea that human looking cyborgs would come back to hunt their human fathers? And where is Harrison Ford when you need him? )It may not be unique, but it is creative in its borrowings.The premise of the BSG deals inherently, and a little hamfistedly, with archetypes. Adam, Cain, the dead Zak filling in for Abel. (Where's Seth? )But okay, archetypes are archetypes because they are everywhere. What's important is what you do with them.

The premise of BSG deals a little hamfistedly with archetypes, but the exectution has been more subtle. The miniseries sets up a crude good/evil dynamic: humans good / cyborgs bad. Their attempted genocide of the human race makes that pretty close to an absolute. For my purposes, I’m interested in the way this reflects the natural (good) / unnatural (bad) binary opposition Donna Haraway’s cyborg figure splits. And then, having set up this opposition, they slowly go about deconstructing the opposition.

Let’s start with Six, since in many ways she’s the most two dimensional of the cyborgs. Introduced as the woman who has been fulfilling Baltars dreams (by passing advanced technology to him) and fantasies, she becomes, after her apparent death on Caprica (she later returns in "Downloaded," season 2.5) as "Inner-Six," a version of Six only Baltar can see an apparent male fantasy projection, who reeks of sexual power. The DVD of the first season used her image, with eyes glowing, as the iconic image of the first season, an appropriately so. This thread hits a weird type of apex in a scene where Six has bent over a table so that Baltar can take her from behind, and Kara walks in on them. The camera, weirdly, shows Six apparently from Kara’s point of view—though Kara can’t see her—apparently naked from the waist down (showing the camera a lot of thigh/buttock). Then we get close ups on Baltar, where Six is NOT there—showing not what he sees but what he knows Kara is seeing.

The actress playing Kara looked suitably unimpressed about what would have appeared to be a shipbound male taking himself by the hand. Nothing happening here!

I have to give the director’s credit for this: they play the Sexual Goddess straight. She embodies an archetype, and they play it that way. --I suspect that in the miniseries and in season 1, the producers, Moore and Eick, had little confidence in the actress to play other that "sultry"; if so, they may have been correct, but she gained some chops.

In season 2.5, Tricia Helfer gets to play several versions of Six. The version known as Gina is more complicated than the sex goddess Baltar sees. A Cylon who has been tortured aboard Pegasus, Gina is the flip side of the woman as sexual demon archetype that Six represents. Ginas—rape victims—are produced by the “Six” archetype. That is, the belief that women sexually manipulate men is a product of male anger and leads to male rage.

This is not how they play it in the show. Gina seems to be Admiral Cain’s shadow figure. She is the target of the Pegasus crew’s rage, including Admiral Cain’s, including the rage that might otherwise be directed at Admiral Cain. This is good if troubling psychology, but it’s also a new level of pandering. Showing an abused battered woman is another type of pornography, just as showing a woman being sexually available is porn. Consider the time that Helo and Sharon spend on Caprica. Caprica-Six beats the hell out of Sharon—why exactly? To make Helo feel for Sharon? As if he didn’t already?

Battlestar Galactica likes to show women who’ve been abused.

In all the scrapes they were in on Caprica, I don’t remember Helo being beat up. Seldom do the men show signs of physical trauma. For women on the show, it’s common.

Helfer gets her best chance to actually ACT (as opposed to "pose and strut") in the episode "Downloaded," where the reincarnated Caprica-Six turns out to have an Inner Baltar--who is just as cool, confident, and manipulative as Baltar's Six. She gets to play several versions of the same character in the same scene, and pretty much pulls it off.

Up Next: Boomer, Sharon, and President Laura.
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For other views on Starbuck, click here ("why Starbuck is Hot") or here.

Why "Cyborg Companion"?

Why “Cyborg Companion”

I was recently invited to contribute to a friend’s blog. When I tried, Google Blogger seemed to think I was trying to set up my own blog, and led me step by step in that direction. I gave it the first title that came to my mind.

The title is taking from Donna Haraway, whose book “Simians, Cyborgs, and Women” happened to be at my feet. For Haraway, the cyborg is an image of strength which doesn’t rely on an assumption of edenic innocence or organic unity. She wanted to laud the coalition building that was typified by the phrase “women of color,” which makes no nod to an assumed shared biological identity, but instead formed around existent socio-political realities. By contrast, she, a feminist and lesbian, presents the cyborg as an alternative to the “earth is our mother” / “back-to-the-garden” / “goddess” feminism that emerged at the same time–precisely because the latter assumes a transcendent essence. Cyborgs are not images of innocence; they are images of strength.

What is a cyborg? A man with an artificial leg. A woman writing stories on the computer. A lesbian/poet/cancer survivor/mother. One of her great examples of cyborgism is drawn from Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis series, which features the melding of the human race with a very alien species in a post-apocalyptic landscape. The cyborg is “post-human,” and “post-gender” in that it cedes no special value to identity determined by reference to traditional markers of identity (i.e., race, sex, humanity). “I’d rather be a cyborg than a goddess,” she says.

Written within a context when mainstream feminism was more likely than not to extol the virtues of “natural” and shun the “artificial,” Haraway’s work is an attempt to move the discussion of feminism a little bit further down the “post-modern” road. Of course the problem with being post-modern is that you can be right, influential, and widely cited without ever being heard, which in some respects has happened to Haraway. More directly, her work has been co-opted as part of a large “post-human” “cyber- “ school of cultural studies. As she put it, “as an oppositional figure, the cybory has a short half life.”

In her more recent writings, she has turned to the image of “companion species.” Writing of the relations between dogs and humans, she points out that’s not exactly a relation of equals, but its also not exactly reducible to a “pets.” The most remarkable part of the dog / human story, she suggests, is the way dogs have trained us to be baby sitters for their offspring. Though dogs might treat us as members of a pack in some ways, just a humans often treat dogs as children, fundamentally, we are all quite aware of the differences which define our relationship. A human/dog/human/dog/dog household is not exactly a “family” or a “pack.” It’s a chimera of sorts (“an organism of genetically different tissues”). The companion species model has the same sort of intimacy as the cyborg model, but it is first and foremost a social model–but again, like the cyborg model, one founded on differences, not similarity. Cyborg is to companion species as metaphor is to metonym–I think. Both are figures of a social unity which respects difference.
What this means to me.

I am fascinated by science fiction, and especially by SF that redefines what it means to be a self.
What are the problems with the word “human”? Let me do something more or less post modern here, and quote Wikipedia:

Humanism ... claims that human nature is a universal state which ... is autonomous, rational, capable of free will, and unified in itself as the apex of existence.

That’s a good summary. The problem is that we are not “autonomous” or “unified.” We exist in complex relationships to one another and to the world at large, and we change

Thus, the posthuman recognizes imperfectability and disunity within him or herself, instead understanding the world through context and heterogeneous perspectives while maintaining scientific rigor and a dedication to objective observations of the world. Key to this posthuman practice is the ability to fluidly change perspectives and manifest oneself through different identities.

"Posthuman (critical theory)." Wikipedia, The Free
Encyclopedia. 13 Jul 2007, 05:07 UTC. Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. 19 Jul 2007
<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Posthuman_%28critical_theory%29&oldid=144336280>.

Got that? We exist in relations. In flux. In networks with the decidedly non-human.

This brings me to vampires.

Vampires

I am somewhat less interested in vampires as such, than I am with interest in vampires. It is not that vampires are necessarily figures of the post-human. It’s that vampire fiction and movies necessarily posit ways of being sentient and alive that are not necessarily human.

I expect to have a lot to say on this. Big fan of the Southern Vampire series.

Daleks and Cylons.

Interesting, isn't it, that the best two SF series ever, Dr. Who and Battlestar: Galactica feature archvillians that are cyborgs? No doubt the Cylons are more fully realized than the Daleks, but I like the way way the newer seasons (i.e., series) have played the hand they were dealt with the Daleks.