All the Hooey Here in Whoville

Two weeks ago, I started watching the Dr. Who Series 3, which Netflix has been sending me in the mail; I finished watching last night. All the multi part episodes made it hard to swallow in small bites. The temptation to slurp it down in large gulps was too strong. So while the Christmas episode will be running on BBC any day, kicking off Series 4 for Americans able to stream it through the web, I’ll be Who-less for another year.

It was another good season.

Let’s look at the things that are key to the considerations of this blog (or at least were when I started it): cyborgs and the post-human. I wanted to hug the producers with almost every episode for at least taking these considerations seriously. Let me repeat my first principles: that cyborgism speaks to human relatedness, that cyborgism is proximate and contingent, that it is symbol of strength, and that it stands in contrast to the "back to Eden" myth of essential humanism. On all of these issues, the TV show took the safe, easy route of preferring essentialised humanism to Cyborg relatedness. (Even the Doctor’s relation to the TARDIS is occassionally presented as questionable, though that was more true in Series 1 when it made Billie Piper a Goddess for a brief period).

Throughout the run of Dr. Who, there’s been a recurring theme in the use of the Daleks wherein the Daleks represent Superego and Dr. Who – somewhat uncomfortably– is the spokesguy for the Id. Part of this seems to be a basic conundrum of the problems of creating bad guys. You can imagine the conversation around the writer’s table:

"I don’t get it. Why do these metal R2D2 thingies want to exterminate humankind?"
"Um–because humans are weak?"

Doesn’t make sense unless the metal thingies are complete anal retentive freaks. That makes the Doctor kind of a world hopping inter-species head shrink trying to free the libido. "Tell me again how you feel about your smelting pot."

Regardless of whether it makes sense, the newer series have played with the idea of the Doctor as being whipped through the world by an out of control Id that he himself barely understands. Consider the maniacal grin he flashes whenever he offers his female a sidekick a trip to the wildside of time. In the Tom Baker days (as I remember it) he was kind of intergalactic fix-it man. That still seems to be how he sees himself, but most of the things he fixes turn out to have been caused by him careening through time like an out of control Ariel.

I'm down with that; self-delusion among the over educated is something I have, eh, witnessed from time to time.

The two episodes which did the most with the "Doctor" persona were the "family of blood" episodes (two parts) which show him having trapped himself in the early 20th century without his memory, to avoid a family which is chasing him. As the human version of the Doctor realizes who he really is, he starts to weep, asking "what kind of man is this Doctor?" Just barely glimpsed is a very humanist interrogation of the doctor as someone who has repressed his own Id (the human professor has fallen in love) and therefore is whipped erratically by the principle of the return of the repressed.

Be that as it may, he plot forces him to become his true self: from the terms of his alter ego, this is a tragedy (because he has lost touch with human scaled human values, such as the possibility of a stable loving relationship). From the terms of the series, it is comedy because OUR doctor, the Peter Pan who won’t grow up even though he is hundreds of years old, has been restored.
This IS a post human identity: contingent, proximate (which is to say, in no way an ideal version of the human self).

What the family does, though, the Master undoes.

The last three episodes, in which the Doctor catches up with the Master where he has been exiled as the Professor at the end of time were far and away the best episodes of the third series. Let’s take it from the top: The "Professor" the Doctor first meets (his memory has been erased through the same mechanism the Doctor used to temporarily erase his own) is a LOT like the Doctor of the 60's and 70's: an older, futzy professor with a bright, adoring companion (of a very foreign species).

In earlier decades, the "Master" was indicated by a dark goatee. I like the fact that when he regenerates himself he turns into...Tony Blair (or an actor playing a character designed to resemble Tony Blair). That is to say, he turns into a politician who has been constructed by an evil genius to be appear to be all things to all people. Good! He turns the Doctor into an old man; painful, but good.

Then, at the end of a year, with Martha (who escaped a year earlier) watching on the telly, he turns the Doctor into Yoda.

I wish I were making that up.

Then it turns out that Martha Jones has been spending a year walking the earth to get the whole human race to pray to or for the Doctor at the same precise moment–which they do–which (Holy Mother...) regenerates him.

Can you say Deus Ex Machina? "Day-uus–ecks mack–un–ah"

Still, it’s sci-fi, we can allow for Deus like machinations from time to time. And I mean, just because he gets all glowy doesn’t mean he’s "literally" (as my students might say) a figure of Christ.

Of course, when he wrestles foe to the ground and says "I forgive you" it sort of does.
No wonder the old sot doesn’t regenerate himself when his blonde squeeze shoots him.

Even so, even if it’s the weakest part, that’s not the most interesting thing about this episode. No, the most interesting thing is the appearance the nasty little metal spheres the Master has created. There are something like 3 billion of these he drops on the earth, and they go beyond the usual kind of "heartless metal evil" devices. These devices are snide, occasionally stupid, and downright offensive. Why? Because each one them contains the remains of a human rescued from the end of time.

Again, it’s the show’s absolute humanist perspective which cannot allow, not even for a second, that human consciousness could adapt to this new way of being which is grotesque on the face of it? Why not? Because it’s grotesque on the face of it! It’s like a person being confined to a wheelchair, or only being able to communicate with his eyelids: just plain gross, and anyone who would live that way must be evil.

It’s interesting exactly because the character at the center is himself cyborgian, defined by his relationship to his living TARDIS, dependent for emotional support on intense relationships with beings from another species.

Even though I don’t like the direction they are thinking, I DO like the fact that show is thinking.

Cyborgs are "Proximate and Contingent." Pass it on.

Let me explain what I mean when I say that cyborg relations are always proximate and contingent.

First let me give some examples of cyborgian relations:

An athlete on steroids.
An athlete on blood pressure meds.
An accident
survivor with an artificial leg.
A wheelchair bound news reporter.
A commuter.
The civil rights coalition of the early 60’s.

Numbers 3 and 4 are perhaps the most obvious, and 1 and 2 are a logical extension, since they merely entail a different form of advanced technology. Let me focus on the last two.

The civil rights coalition of the early 60’s was an odd conflagration of old lefties from the 30’s (Pete Seeger’s friends), MLK and his followers, the NAACP and their members, black radicals and their followers, Jews, and middle-class white kids who believed in the idealism of the GI generation, i.e., their parents. The poster children for this has always been Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman, three young civil rights workers, two Jewish, one Black, who were murdered in 1964. The story of discrimination waged against Jews is very different from that waged against Blacks, but there existed a clear commonality of interest in opposing all forms of discrimination.

What happened to this coalition? The Arab/Isreali war of 1967, for one. As a group, Ameican Jews backed Isreal in great numbers. African Americans—owing in part to the Nation of Islam movement, but not only—were much more likely to see Isreal as an aggressive, imperialistic force.

I don’t know if this schism could have been avoided. I do know that the coalition was proximate and contingent, not forged around a “naturalized” identity.

By contrast, when black women, in the seventies and eighties, often began to see that their interests didn’t always rest in supporting the political/social/economic interests of black men or white women, they were criticized, ostracized (and critical OF) those groups, precisely because they weren’t backing their “natural” allies. No identity has been more technologically created than that of “Black American,” to the extent that it is often considered as a “natural” identity.

Most commuter’s probably don’t see themselves as cyborgs. I do.

This year, 2007, we are celebrating the 50th anniversary of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road, that book which celebrated the power of the automobile, by featuring a new American archetype, the cyborgian centaur--half man, half car. “See the USA in your Chevrolet,” the post WWII generation was told, and we did!-- Or they did, I wasn't there. You want to be in Denver instead of NYC? In four days you’re there. Mexico City? No problem. San Francisco? Three more days.

“It’s not just your car, it’s your freedom,” my generation was told, and not without honesty. Thanks to my car, I live in a small, rural area surrounded by farms, though my work has nothing to do with farming. I have almost 1.5 acres, and next to me is a tiny, tiny pond that attracts all kinds of pleasant wildlife.

Thanks to our cars, millions of Americans live miles from their work, to a notable increase in their individual quality of life. This is a fulfillment of the man/technology promise. And the blowback has been incalculable.

 Every ten years, our roads kill a population roughly that of Miami, Florida, or Oakland, CA.
 The infrastructure of our cities has been neglected.
 Public transportation is woefully neglected.
 The infrastructure of our country is decaying. It is simply too large to maintain; witness the bridge collapse in Minnesota. Bridges collapse every week.
 We are a nation addicted to gas and oil.
 Are foreign policy adventures as a nation have been driven by the need to secure access to oil.

I haven’t mentioned carbon emissions, the loss of farmland that has been paved over, or the steady decline of songbirds to feral cats who follow humans to the country, but you get my point, or. It is not population growth that has presented these problems. It is the lack of population density, and lack of planning. Without cheap abundant automobiles, some of these problems never raise to the level of problem (though obviously others would rise up).

For the majority of Americans, owning a car is preferable to not owning one. Progress is measurable! For a society as a whole, though, some lesser reliance on the personal automobile would have clear advantages.


***
One of the sillier ideas on the “quiz” that I responded to in my last post was the idea of transferring human consciousness into a machine.

Let’s consider for a moment what in the real world that might mean..

Let’s say we created a machine that can fool us into thinking it is human by reliably passing the “turing test.” What would this mean? That we have a machine that can fool us into thinking it is human by reliably passing the “turing test.” When you IM with it, you can’t tell if you’re talking to a machine or teenager.

Let’s further suppose that the software exists to make it mimic me or mimic you, or mimic John Wayne in terms of thought. What have really done? We’ve created a machine that can mimic you or me or John Wayne, in some way.

The illusion wouldn’t have to be very deep to be convincing. A few phrases would do it.

The idea of uploading your consciousness into a supercomputer is absurd. Your thoughts are embodied. They exist in you, in your brain, in your body. With a few drugs, though, I could easily convince you that you are having an out of body experience. Give me 30 million, and I’ll build a machine that can talk just like you and promise to keep it alive. Think about the possibilities! I’ll have your estate paying me in perpetuity!


AT&T will probably start up a business offerering this service, then sell it to a European conglomerate. Apple will have the public trust, but Dell will offer a cheaper service. An entirely new arm of the FCC will grow up and later be merged departments from health, and human services and the FDA.

And it will all be a sham, regulations designed to promote the illusion that there is a legitimate service there to be regulated. But of course, you’ll be dead. All I have to do is keep a program running, and convince the courts that “it” “is” “you.”