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[new] transhumanist conference - racism of hybrid-trek. (Avg. Score: none / Raters: 0) (#4)
by JohnHutnyk on Fri Aug 8th, 2003 at 08:48:43 AM EURODISCORDIA TIME
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I agree its all too 1980s sci fi - cyborg is as old as androids what dream of sheep. Why would a supercomputer even want to play chess?

Its very much in the twighlight zone, even in its later academic forms. But there is a racist element underneath the machine-people interface. And I see no difference here between the academy and the enterprise, sadly. So, some background, in studies of science and technology it has been possible to present hybridity as the central coordinate of contemporary capitalist relations, and sometimes as an unmitigated boon. If anthropologists were obsessed with saving culture, linguists with the specificity of language, then science studies personnel have been obsessed with the human and industrial hardware. The cyborg is the `hybridization of human and machine' in the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (Hardt and Negri 2000:405) - though they do note that the cyborg is a fable, and that hybridity, like mobility and difference, is not libratory in itself (Hardt and Negri 2000:154). Other presentations of the cyborg are altogether more upbeat, postulating an advanced fantasy multicultural future similar to the blind uniformity of television sit-com a la Star Trek. Geordi the black engineer with prosthetic eyewear in the New Generation series, and Seven of Nine, the technologically enhanced Borg poster girl in the Voyager series, are classic examples of the type (we can ignore the android Data as just a robot, an inferior point of view character for pre-teens). Don't get me wrong, I still like Star Trek but wince because of its forays into racial politics, with the first cross race screen kiss in the original 1960s series (Captain Kirk and Communications Officer Uhura were under the influence of mysterious drugs) no-one less than Martin Luther King thought it worthwhile to congratulate director Gene Rodenberry and visit the set. Yet the prime directive of Star Trek's Federation (a kind of intergalactic American Empire) exhibits the same anxiety about racial mixture that its key character roles seem designed to deflect. The prime directive counsels against interaction with `pre-warp' cultures (i.e., underdeveloped planets) - though more often than not the plot requires this directive be breached. The overt text is about the volatile dangers of unrestricted technological advance (i.e., against technology transfer), but in nearly every case the transgression of the rule takes on a voluptuous cross species sexual charge. Up above, in the starship, purity is secured, Geordi and Seven are integrated into the Starfleet crew. The cyborg of science fiction is significantly the moment of erasure of cultural difference under the efficiency of the machine-human interface, eradicating or compensating for structural defects (Geordi's blindness, Seven's sense of collective responsibility as one of the technology-fixated Borg). Rant over. Back to the telly.

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