Do Cyborgs Desire Their Own Subjection? Thinking Anthropology With Cinematic Science Fiction

The Personhood of Star Trek’s “Data”

One of the most famous cyborgs of TV and cinema is Star Trek: The Next Generation’s (1987-1994) “Data,” posited as the galaxy’s first android with a fully functional “positronic neural network” that enables him to learn, interact, and foster social relationships as an officer aboard the starship Enterprise. Data is portrayed as having become so integrated among his humanoid crewmates that he often has to remind them that he is in fact a machine and lacks the emotional capacity to have his “feelings hurt” by insult or criticism. Data’s personhood is most critically called into question, however, in the episode “The Measure of a Man” (aired 1989), when a researcher demands that Starfleet transfer Data into his possession for experimentation and disassembly in the hope that Data might be replicated. When Data refuses the transfer and procedure, he is compelled to participate in a legal hearing to determine his status as a person or property, and therefore his right to choose. The arguments and counterarguments employed to define Data’s status draw attention to a Western ideal concept of personhood as an individual with a consciousness. However, on a close reading of the visual and verbal texts of this episode, it becomes clear that such criteria fails to legitimate Data’s personhood, while his “dividuality” via material proof of his social relationships becomes the evidence that grants him agency as a person.

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Picard presents a number of personal items belonging to Data that he has found in Data’s luggage.

Writing with reference to Western conceptions of personhood as highly individualistic, Beth Conklin and Lynn Morgan (1996) identified the “notion of bodily autonomy and the ideal of inviolable body boundaries” (p. 666). Grace Harris (1989) similarly identified the individual as conceptualized biologisitically, and although she acknowledges that the “mutual permeability of the individual human varies greatly” across cultures, she states that we may think universally about individuals as members of a kind (p. 601). The vignette above first appears to illustrate these notions when Data’s arm is removed, seriously threatening his personhood. This action creates noticeable discomfort to those who see him as a person, as the divisibility of his physical body without pain or complaint seems to emphasize his status as a composite object, rather than an individual subject. That a machine is simply composed of painlessly divisible parts draws attention to its alterity and its objectiveness.

While demonstrations of the mechanical body’s divisibility succeed in unmaking the android as a person, attention drawn to its social construal succeeds in remaking him. Picard, acting as defense attorney, demonstrates Data’s social ties to his crewmates by presenting objects that represent Data’s relationships: his attained status through military service, his friendship with his captain, and his intimacy with another person. The objects—military medals, a book, and a portrait—are recognized as concrete evidence of Data’s relational subjectivity. His personhood is therefore appraised through his sociality and not his individuality. Furthermore, the question of Data’s consciousness and his psychic existence as an ego are left unproven. It cannot be determined if Data formed these relationships through intentional actions as an individual, self-conscious agent and “the author of action purposively directed toward a goal” (Harris, 1989, p. 602). The researcher who wishes to obtain Data argues that an android does not have consciousness and is not sentient. Picard gives evidence that Data is self-aware by asking him to describe what he is presently doing, to which Data responds, “I am taking part in a legal hearing to determine my rights and status: am I a person or property.” The court decides that beyond this demonstration, it cannot be proven if Data, or Picard for that matter, have consciousness. Instead, we are left with the proposition of relational personhood similar to that put forward by Marilyn Strathern (1988), that “relations (persons) are both the cause and outcome of acts (not the doing of them)” (p. 287). If the hearing was unable to prove that Data is a person by Western individualist standards of consciousness, then his personhood, and therefore his agency, is the effect of his relationships rather than the cause of them.

Strathern’s (1988) attention to personhood as cause and effect may be applied further here to address the challenge that the cyborg poses to Harris’ (1989) conception of the biologistic individual as distinct from the sociologistic person. Conklin’s piece (Conklin & Morgan, 1996) on the Wari of Amazonia, for example, describes a model of personhood that treats the “social and the biological as interdependent phenomena” (p. 669) in that the biological construction of the body is seen as assured through the social exchange of bodily fluids. We may also consider Strathern’s (1988) discussion of analogic gender in which she states that, in Melanesian conceptions of the gendered body, “persons objectify relations: bodies and minds are consequently their reified manifestations” (p. 299). To consider what this means to the cyborg body and appraisal of personhood, we might further consider the implications of Data’s intimate relationship with a biological human and the imagined possibility of cyborg procreation.

The suggestion of Data’s ability to affect the social realm of other persons through intimate relations evokes discomfort in the other characters of the visual text described above, yet such a suggestion also critically challenges Data’s ability to be socially erased. Let us also consider then another more recent TV-cyborg, Sharon from the reimagined series Battlestar Galactica (aired 2004-2009), whose mechanical makeup is so advanced in its ability to mimic biological components that she becomes pregnant through intercourse with a human. The creation of a biological child by a person and a machine seems to imbue the machine with biological capacities, a biological agent-in-society, referencing Harris’ (1989) criteria of persons. While not as striking as Sharon’s pregnancy, Data’s not just sexual, but “intimate” relationship with a person seems to establish that he is more than a mere sex object. Additionally, the tongue-in-cheek comment made more than once on the TV series that Data is “fully functional” suggests that the mutual biological effects of the sex act are possible, again affirming Data’s agency by biological markers as evident in and through social intercourse. The Data and Sharon cyborgs are therefore considered to be biosocially constructed, or rather biologically construed through social acts (Conklin & Morgan, 1996). This challenge to supposed Western ideals of biological boundaries and individualism draw attention to the possible overemphasis of incommensurability between sociocentric and egocentric conceptions of personhood (Lamb, 1997).

Implications of Cyborg Personhood

Strathern’s (1988) argument for a different way of conceptualizing personhood was meant to destabilize anthropology’s ground for knowledge making by challenging accepted epistemologies and “organicist” metaphors used to understand individuals and society. While Strathern may have opened a door to new possibilities of thinking about personhood, agency, and sociality, what implications does Haraway’s (1991) metaphor of the cyborg have to established epistemologies of nature and science? Kirkup and Janes’ reader (Kirkup, Janes, Fiona, & Woodward, 2000) begins with an extract from Schiebinger’s Nature’s Body (1993) in which she problematizes Linnaeus’ taxonomy of species and the gender politics inherent in the category of Mammalia. Schiebinger (2000) explains that while the term “mammal” ostensibly marks the site of difference between species to that of breasts and nursing (pp. 11-12), in the same volume in which Linnaeus introduced Mammalia, he also introduced the term Homo Sapien, or “man of wisdom” (p. 15). This invented nomenclature simultaneously structured and gendered a world of kinds. Such categorization positioned women as possessing the physical criteria linking humans to other animal mammals and men with the possession of wisdom, distinguishing humans from all animals. Kirkup (2000) furthers this point by referencing Descartes’ appraisal of animals to automata due to their lack of rational thought and consciousness, stating “at its very core, then, the discourse of the discipline which in the twentieth century becomes biology, in its taxonomy of what it is to be human constructs gendered inequality” (p. 6).

The cyborg as metaphor, in one sense, posits a figure that reveals how the biological body becomes socially constructed. As demonstrated in the example of Data’s trial, the cyborg’s problematic imagined existence discursively foregrounds what qualifies humans and persons, and it allows for their questioning. It reminds us that humanness in the biomedical Western sense is not an empirical given of natural kinds in the world, but of socioculturally constructed boundaries that purport a particular, but not necessarily homogeneous or static model of personhood. In another sense, and as stated above, Haraway’s cyborg looks to technoscience for solutions to the political problematics of “Cartesian gendered dualism” (Kirkup, 2000, p. 7). More broadly, we might say that SF looks to science—both concretely and imaginatively—for ways to problematize and politicize reality’s social fictions.

“Real-world” cyborgs also made similar gains in the 1980s and 1990s that continue to trouble conceptions of personhood today. Advances in robotics and artificial intelligence have called into question objective and biological notions of consciousness in the pop-culture sphere, as illustrated by recent films like Her (2013), Ex Machina (2015), and Chappie (2015). In vitro fertilization and cloning have uncoupled procreation from “natural birth,” explored in films like Gattaca (1997), the reimagined Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009), and the series Orphan Black (2013-present). Other forms of biomechanical/medical engineering such as the integration of prosthetics with the human body, as in RoboCop (1987) and its 2014 remake, have also provoked questions regarding the (gendered) body’s biological functions and wholeness as criteria for personhood. Additionally, information and communication technologies have been suggested as virtual sites, or cyberspaces, where gender, race, and corporeal boundaries in general are dissolving. More recently, Facebook’s two billion dollar acquisition of the Oculus Rift—the highly anticipated head-mounted display for immersive media—demonstrates a renewed interest in virtual reality and its application as (dis)embodied telecommunication (http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/jul/22/facebook-oculus-rift-acquisition-virtual-reality). Although utopian visions of the Internet’s potential for gender liberation drew criticism for its unrealistic optimism, feminist and techno theories like those of Donna Haraway and Sadie Plant also contributed to the emergence of 1990s cyberfeminism (Kember, 2002; Kirkup, 2000). And yet, despite continued enthusiasm that Haraway’s vision might manifest itself through information and communication technologies, several studies demonstrate how gender and race discrimination continue to operate in cyberspace (see Hammonds, 2000, and Wakeford, 2000, and more recently Harrell, 2013). Such cases have, however, brought to the fore persistently taken for granted notions of biological determinism and categorization as discursive objects for further interrogation, and they continue to inspire producers of both science and popular culture to imagine new possibilities of humans, persons, and their technosocial relations.

And yet, even if we pursue our focus on the cyborg to its most imaginative potential, such as those presented in SF film, the ability of our own imaginations to move beyond gendered boundaries and racialized categories remains in doubt. As much can be gleaned from further textual readings of SF film and television series in which the cyborg protagonists’ deepest desire is to be human, perhaps it is this limitation that grounds our ability to use the cyborg metaphor in the problematics of the present, especially when we consider the culture industries and media markets that have the final say in the proliferation of popular cinematic cyborg personages. Culture studies therefore offers another productive framework for exploring theoretical approaches to cyborg subjectivity, both as a field that has been taken up by psychoanalysts, culture critics, and philosophers alike, and seeing that the imagined cyborgs discussed here are mediated through film and television. By continuing our attention to the cyborgs of popular SF films and television series, we might critique the cyborg subject as a posthuman that still desires contemporary modes of subjection, and the implications this has for a theorization of cyborg and human agency.

Cyborg Subjectivity and Passionate Attachment

Judith Butler (1997), through her inquiries on The Psychic Life of Power, has attempted to bring together Foucault’s approach to power through knowledge and discourse with psychoanalytic approaches to human development to explain the relationship of power and subjectivity. Beginning with a Foucauldian understanding of power and subjection in which “the subject is initiated through a primary submission to power,” Butler applies psychoanalysis to elucidate the “mechanisms” of the subject’s formation through submission (p. 2). To put it another way, subjection implies that a person is identified, defined, and understood by others and institutions, and that there is power carried in this identification, definition, and understanding that is external to the person/subject. While this recognition from elsewhere is a form of subjugation, it is also the source of psychic and social existence. Only through becoming a subject, a process of subjection, is one able to act and exert power through opposition to the very power that created one as a subject. There is theoretical space here for Strathern’s positioning of agency as both dependent on, and produced through, relationality. Although less concerned than Foucault with power, Strathern also described subjectivity as manifested through acknowledgment and recognition from other subjects. For Butler, “passionate attachments” become a critical mechanism for further exploring how subjectivity, entangled with power, is psychically developed (p. 6): a process that might offer insight to our reading of problematic cyborg subjects in SF.

Butler (1997) posited that in the process of subjectivity, the subject becomes passionately attached to, and therefore desires, its own subordination. This does not suggest that blame can ultimately be put on the subject for its own subjugation, but that such attachment is part of the operation of power as a psychic effect. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the subject emerges through the repression of this subjugation to attachments, which becomes relegated to the unconscious. Autonomy then emerges from what is left to reside in the conscious. One such attachment that has been famously linked to Freud’s theories of psychosexual development is that of a child to a mother. The result of appropriately navigating stages of psychic development through attachments in accordance to social norms is the regulation of particular kinds of relations and the prohibition of others. The development of the subject is then made possible through the foreclosure of certain kinds of relationships. The formation of such attachments and foreclosures are only possible through subordination to power, yet they are vital to psychic development in that they create the conditions for existence. Butler (1997) explains,

A subject is not only formed in subordinations but that this subordination provides the subject’s continuing condition of possibility. . . . The child does not know to what he/she attaches; yet the infant as well as the child must attach in order to persist in and as itself. No subject can emerge without this attachment, formed in dependency. (p. 8)

Desires for loving relationships that have been foreclosed are then played out only in the unconscious as such desires threaten to unravel the subject. “To desire the conditions of one’s own subordination is thus required to persist as oneself” (Butler, 1997, p. 9). This theory carries significant implications for agency, as we are made to grapple with the idea that the ability to act is presupposed by subordination. Agency may then be thought of as the ways in which the power that subordinates as well as creates the subject is then transformed by the subject into power.

Cinematic Cyborgs as Sites/Sights of Possibility?

The cyborg purports to be a metaphor that creates the possibility to escape a particular kind of subjection, one that has been tied to the body in the West by a preexisting history of science and taxonomy (Schiebinger, 1993). Through a transformation from corporeal to virtual, and biological to biomechanical, the constructed boundaries that subordinate the subject to (and create the subject through) a socially determined conception of the body are in danger of being dissolved, a matter of great enthusiasm for poststructural- and cyberfeminists. The dissolution or blurring of boundaries, such as gender and race that fix the position of the subject in and through power and psychic development, may offer a serious challenge to what Debbora Battaglia (1999) refers to as the “hegemony of the locatable subject-in-position” (p. 118). We may thus consider the cyborg as a possible open subject, in Battaglia’s sense, in that it unfixes itself from the limits of situated knowledge (p. 118). She explains,

The notion of the open subject refuses to limit issues of subjectivity to the skin-bound individual, or identity to the boundaries of the body politic. It resists any notion of an ideal or “core” self, authentic and ideally unchanging. (Battaglia, 1999, p. 118)

The cyborg is a particularly useful metaphor in this regard. Intended as an ahistorical subject, it does not represent a longing for a time of ungendered unity “before the fall,” or before language that led to gendered subjectivity as we know it today (Haraway, 1991, Kirkup, 2000). The cyborg is historical in another sense, however, in that it is the illegitimate child of a technologizing age (Kirkup, 2000), but rather than search for an original innocence, the imagery of cyborgs seizes “the tools to mark the world that marked them as other” (Haraway, 1991, p. 175). Perhaps here then, in the process of imagining the cyborg, a transformation of the subordinated subject into a creature of agency beyond that power that first subjugated it is taking shape. Such agency is then not a greater attainment and control of subjugating power, but it is the unraveling of powers of previous subjugation.

What is to be said then when such an optimistic view of a potentially revolutionary metaphor is so often presented in cinematic form as desperately desiring the very subjection that their existence is said to free them from? Star Trek: The Next Generation’s (1987-1994) Data, for example, is endearingly referred to as “the professor of humanities” due to his unrelenting interest in emotional experiences and the human life span, two critical things that his mechanical existence has liberated him from. Furthermore, in “The Measure of a Man,” Data never once considers the possibility to reject the state power seeking to define him, his dialogue suggesting that recourse would not be possible outside of the law. The cylons of Battlestar Galactica (1978 and 2004-2009) reject their creator’s polytheism for a “one true God” under whose commandment they desire biological procreation. Last, the replicants of Blade Runner (1982) reference memories of a mother, or lack thereof, as a point of particular resentment (Doane, 2000, p. 117). Roy, the replicant leader in Blade Runner, visits vengeance upon his creator, the owner of a massive bioengineering corporation, justifying murder with the sarcastic phrase, “nothing the God of biomechanics wouldn’t let you into heaven for.” Roy’s comment is less the rejection of God and morality than an expression of deep resentment at not being one of God’s subjects.

The tempered plot lines of most mainstream SF films can perhaps be accounted for in the Western culture industries and media markets that operate under a particular politics of representation. It may also represent, at least partially, audiences’ unwillingness to consume images that destabilize notions of humanness and liberal humanist ideologies. Vivian Sobchack (2000) claims that mainstream SF’s positioning of cyborgs and aliens as “just like us,” rather than insinuating that “they are us” maintains alienness as difference and celebrates a new (or renewed) humanism, rather than challenging it (Sobchack, 2000). In this respect, the cyborgs of mainstream cinematic SF do not represent a new agency accomplished through the unraveling of present social constructions of the body and its politics, but it rather reinforces familiar models of subjection and personhood. The cinematic cyborg’s desire for passionate attachments to (or subjection through) a mother, lover, government, and God articulate the cyborg subject position as lacking in humanness, rather than de/reconstructing it. That new agency through the transformative powers of cyborg imagery seems to remain possible only at an academic level of articulation, rather than a popular cinematic one; it should not diminish the significance of the power to imagine, however. The growing popularity of genres like postcolonial SF and Afrofuturism may well represent new endeavors to decenter hegemonic narrative conventions, pushing the possibilities for representation beyond Euro-American notions of personhood that claim to be universal. While the imagination may owe its genesis to the material experiences and mass-mediated images of the present psychic life of power, it need not be grounded by the presently possible. It may be the desire to bring the two together that offers a site for transformation.