Retrofitting Star Trek's Humanism, Post
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University of Calgary PRISM: University of Calgary's Digital Repository University of Calgary Press University of Calgary Press Open Access Books 2006 Drones, clones, and alpha babes: retrofitting Star Trek’s humanism, post -9/11 Relke, Diana M.A. University of Calgary Press Relke, Diana M. A. "Drones, clones, and alpha babes: retrofitting Star Trek’s humanism, post -9/11". University of Calgary Press, Calgary, Alberta, 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1880/49319 book http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives 3.0 Unported Downloaded from PRISM: https://prism.ucalgary.ca University of Calgary Press www.uofcpress.com DRONES, CLONES AND ALPHA BABES: RETROFITTING STAR TREK’S HUMANISM, POST- 9/11 by Diana M.A. Relke ISBN 978-1-55238-667-5 THIS BOOK IS AN OPEN ACCESS E-BOOK. It is an electronic version of a book that can be purchased in physical form through any bookseller or on-line retailer, or from our distributors. 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Acknowledgement: We acknowledge the wording around open access used by Australian publisher, re.press, and thank them for giving us permission to adapt their wording to our policy http://www.re-press.org/content/view/17/33/ rones, Clones, AND Starship Captains: Encounters with the Posthuman Drones_Book 73 2/23/06 12:34:31 PM Drones_Book 74 2/23/06 12:34:31 PM 6: Humanism/Transhumanism What is lethal is not the posthuman as such but the grafting of the posthu- man onto a liberal humanist view of the self. – Katherine N. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 286–87. Postmodern cultural criticism is ingenious (and very usefully so) in expos- ing the political and hegemonic interests behind any point of view or line of inquiry.… But can this mode of criticism also serve as a positive point of reference? – Jon Wagner and Jan Lundeen, Deep Space and Sacred Time, 212. THE OPENING SCENE of the Star Trek Voyager episode “Scorpion” intro- duces viewers to Captain Kathryn Janeway’s new interactive holodeck novel. It is set in the fifteenth-century workshop of Leonardo da Vinci. As the holographic Leonardo (played to perfection by John Rhys- Davies) tests a robotic arm constructed of wood to resemble a human arm and mimic a blacksmith’s motions, the Captain – “Katarina,” as Leonardo calls her – negotiates with him for space in his workshop where she can work on her sculptures and paintings. As the Maestro sets his contraption in motion, Katarina looks on in admiration. “Someone once said that ‘all invention is but an extension of the body of man,’” she enthuses. As she moves about the workshop, her admiring gaze takes in Leonardo’s sketches of flying machines and a model of one suspended from the ceiling. By agreeing to help him build another machine – one that will actually fly – she convinces him to rent her a workbench and take her on as apprentice. Thus begins a charming relationship to which Voyager will return in later episodes. For those critics whose approach to Star Trek is grounded in the modern/postmodern opposition, this scene would be yet more evidence of Star Trek’s unwavering commitment to creator Gene Roddenberry’s Humanist vision. And they would be right. After all, Leonardo da Vinci, 75 Drones_Book 75 2/23/06 12:34:32 PM an iconic figure in the history of Renaissance Humanism, is here depicted as an appropriate role model for Captain Janeway, Voyager’s inheritor of the liberal humanism of The Next Generation’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard. But for me, Leonardo’s robotic arm and Katarina’s comment on it re- call a passage from Katherine N. Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman in which she quotes and interprets a statement from Kenneth P. Oakley’s 1949 book, Man the Tool-Maker: “Employment of tools appears to be [man’s] chief biological char- acteristic, for considered functionally they are detachable extensions of the forelimb.” … Significantly, he imagined the tool to be at once “detachable” and an “extension,” separate from yet partaking of the hand. If the placement and the kind of tool mark Oakley’s affinity with the epoch of the human, the construction of the tool as a pros- thesis points forward to the posthuman. (Hayles 1999 34) Similarly, the slender wooden fingers of Leonardo’s robotic arm point forward to the posthuman theme of “Scorpion”: Voyager’s first real en- gagement with the Borg, and Captain Janeway’s “liberation” of Seven of Nine from the Borg collective. In this episode, the Captain gets to see what intelligent life looks like when modelled on transhumanist phi- losophies that take Enlightenment humanism to its techno-scientific extremes. The Battle for the Future What I want to attempt in this essay is an extended reading of Star Trek that is not explicitly feminist but is nevertheless provoked by feminism – specifically, a passage from a feminist book review that’s been haunt- ing me since I read it back in 1996: Is it really enough to identify the Enlightenment as authority … without recognizing also the significance of thought’s liberation and that the women’s movement, including the feminist politics of dif- ference, rejoices in just this freedom? It may not always be with us. Here, then, I also question [the] dismissal of “liberal feminism” … when, in the North American context and particularly in the United States, we (I and whoever else joins me in this) may well be looking 76 rones, Clones, & Alpha Babes Drones_Book 76 2/23/06 12:34:32 PM back on liberalism as a honeyed country from which we are sev- ered forever by forms of totalitarianism we never dreamed of. (Smith 766) This is a passage from Canadian Dorothy Smith’s review of a collec- tion of postmodernist essays not unlike scores of others that poured from the academic presses during the 1980s and 1990s. It resonated with my growing dissatisfaction with postmodernist critique of the Enlightenment project. In the years since Smith made this statement, I have become even more curmudgeonly in my views: critical theorists have effectively extinguished the Enlightenment’s light without provid- ing an alternative for illuminating a possible way to the future. I’m with Smith in questioning the repudiation of liberal feminism – not because I want to rehabilitate the liberal humanist subject, given its complicity in sexism, racism, and economic Darwinism, but because no one has been able to come up with an appealing replacement for the liberties that adhere to it. I took Smith’s intention as trying to get feminist academics to wake up to the changes going on all around us in the 1990s. Her words seem even more prophetic today than they did in 1996. George W. Bush’s rise to power, the PATRIOT Act’s assault on civil liberties, and the mili- tarization of U.S. foreign policy are all reminders that postmodernist critique hasn’t even made a dent in the status quo – quite the opposite, in fact. As Terry Eagleton wrote in the mid-1990s: Postmodernism is radical in so far as it challenges a system which still needs absolute values, metaphysical foundations and self-identical subjects; against these it mobilizes multiplicity, non-identity, trans- gressions, anti-foundationalism, cultural relativism. The result, at its best, is a resourceful subversion of the dominant value-system, at least at the level of theory.… But postmodernism usually fails to recognize that what goes at the level of ideology does not always go at the level of the market.