The Cylon Manifesto

Marshall McLuhan’s tribal man and Donna Haraway’s cyborg subject are related concepts; each reflects an opposing status of human society. Where one presents an elegant society of whole individuals, the other describes a world of fragmented figures and failing taxonomies. Both relate different forms of human nature, but neither represents contemporary culture in its entirety. Modern society could be said to be in a state of flux between the tribal man and the cyborg subject and this conflict – as are most societal conflicts – is exhibited in allegorical form in the genre of science-fiction. In fact, through the miniseries that introduced the recent re-imagining of Battlestar Galactica one can see the underlying struggle between these two concepts presented in full-out warfare, the cyborgs versus the tribal man in a battle that will reshape human society.

To begin, it would be best to first examine what McLuhan means by tribal man and how, in theoretical terms, it relates to Haraway’s cyborg subject. McLuhan claims in his interview with Playboy magazine that the tribal man existed in a world where “the senses were balanced and simultaneous,” where no one sense claimed priority over the others. Sight was as important as hearing, smell, taste and touch; he calls this world acoustic space, “a sphere without fixed boundaries” (Carpenter and McLuhan, 67). The eye, facilitator of visual space, frames an object within its scope, whereas the ear simply perceives a directionless source. The reason tribal man lives within this acoustic space is because he exists in pre-literate society, residing under “the binding power of oral tradition” (Carpenter and McLuhan, 65). Stories were told and spread through word-of-mouth, not written and printed.

In fact, McLuhan sees the emergence of communications technology as the cause of the fall of the tribal man. In his heyday, the tribal man existed in an “organic harmony and complex synaesthesia” (McLuhan, Playboy Interview), but as an alphabet was mandated and print became the norm, visual space replaced acoustic space, “giving [tribal man] an eye for an ear” (McLuhan, Playboy Interview), and man moved away from the tribe. As McLuhan states: “the whole man became fragmented man” (Playboy Interview); essentially, the dependence on a single sense refocused perceptions as printed literature allowed for disembodied communication. No longer did stories have to be told by a fire; they could be published and distributed without the author ever having to meet his readers. Human society became focused on the eye and on individuation. People became persons, isolated individuals that are independent and self-oriented by the departure from the tribe.

Into this world of literary isolation and fragmented selves, Haraway’s cyborg subject is born. This is a hybrid creature that emerges “with no origin story in the Western sense” (Haraway, 9); it simply is. The cyborg relates to today’s increasing changes in human society, in the heightened dependence on technology and on the changes within the structure of human culture and patriarchal domination. People are fragmented hybrids by nature anymore; society structures us this way. As Haraway says, “the cyborg defines a technological polis based partly on a revolution of social relations” (9); it restructures social definitions around new rules of various amalgamations. She states that cyborgs offer a sort of middle ground between man and machine, where “the machine is not an it to be animated, worshiped and dominated. The machine is us” (38). In the cyborg identity, there is recognition of human hybridity, an acceptance of this status and thus the willingness to work within this understanding for the betterment of society.

This amalgam identity relates to the tribal man in a number of complicated ways. Often, there seems to be a sort of opposition between the two. For example, McLuhan insists that the tribal man is pre-literate, as he had his “charmed magic and resonating circle” (Playboy Interview) dispelled by the advent of the alphabet and literary technology. The cyborg, on the other hand, tends to favor writing. In fact, “writing is pre-eminently the technology of cyborgs” (Haraway, 34), making cyborgs – by McLuhan’s standards – creatures of visual space, whereas tribal man exists in acoustic space. This also ties the cyborg further to the modern condition, as we are now in a visual world. So, being visually-based and focused on writing, the cyborg, in McLuhan’s terminology, is “able to act without reacting, without involvement” (Playboy Interview). The cyborg is the isolated, detached symbol of the modern world, a literate figure of fragmentation, the image of McLuhan’s civilized man.

In essence, then, the cyborg is what the tribal man has become and a sort of resistance to his return. McLuhan predicts, after all, that the new electronic age will return us full circle to the tribe, but now on a much grander scale. He predicts that the new connectivity accorded by newer forms of electronic communication will unite us again, making us conscious of our “very close dependence in interdependence” (McLuhan, Understanding Me, 142). Basically, electronic media will return us to the tribe by fabricating the illusion of proximity and by stimulating multiple senses simultaneously and approaching an end to our once exclusively visual space. “The development of telephone, radio, film, television and the computer have driven further nails into the coffin” (McLuhan, Playboy Interview). By moving away from visual space and back into an acoustic space, by connecting through electronic media to the whole world, “the planet, in turn, becomes a global village” (McLuhan, Understanding Me, 141), united as though everyone were sitting together in the small tribal villages of old.

The cyborg resists this, however, as cyborgs are not concerned with “ a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before writing” (Haraway, 33) because the cyborg prefers to look to the future within present circumstances. As mentioned earlier, cyborgs identify with writing and they do so because in the currently visual world, writing is access to power, the power to redefine social beliefs and hierarchies that were established by the patriarchal biases that were inherent in those who once controlled writing. Today, though, writing is more widespread and the still-present source of visual space and is thus sought after by cyborgs so they may have “access to the power to signify” (Haraway, 33), to assert their own meaning onto the world.

It is for this reason that cyborgs would oppose acoustic space and the re-tribalizing of man. In acoustic space, power is omnipresent and influence is omni-directional; there is no focus to either. In visual space, writing offers sway over the eye, the primary sense organ; but in acoustic space there is no primary sense organ, so the access to power is lost. The means to asserting cyborg identity is gone. Thus the cyborg opposes the tribal man and the once-upon-a-time wholeness he seeks to promote because cyborg identity “is resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy and perversity” (Haraway, 9) It is a nest of contradictions and combinations within a single person that would not mesh with the tribal world.

This conflict, this fluctuating status, is reflected not only in society and through communications media, but also in entertainment. So, when looking at a show like Battlestar Galactica – specifically, the miniseries that began it – one can see the impact of this conflict in allegorical form. Here, the struggle between tribalization and detribalization and re-tribalization is not solely relegated to discourse, but actually takes the form of a full-scale war between tribal man and cyborg. The human society presented in this miniseries seems to be on the same technological level as contemporary America. People are shown driving cars and watching television; clothing resembles modern styles and architecture is reminiscent of contemporary buildings. This ubiquity of modern technology in science-fiction – a genre usually filled with ray guns and teleporters – serves primarily to emphasize those few instances where the technology of the Twelve Colonies surpasses our own.

One such example of this is space travel. Each of the so-called Twelve Colonies exists on a separate planet, so space travel is an important part of human life. This facet, in conjunction with the prevalence of recognizable technology, can be seen to draw on McLuhan’s global village. If we here on Earth are currently undergoing the formation of such a society – if electronic communication is uniting us across physical borders – then it could definitely be said to be happening in Battlestar Galactica, except instead of “airplanes and television” (McLuhan, Playboy Interview), it is spaceships and television and instead of a global village, it is a galactic village. It would seem that the Twelve Colonies are undergoing the same re-tribalization as the world that fabricated them.

This, then, brings the discussion to the second instance of advanced technology: robotics, namely the Cylons. As the show’s opening states: “the Cylons were created by man” and in that regard they represent some of the most advanced technology in the miniseries. A war breaks out when “the Cylons decided to kill their masters” and thus a dualism is created between man and machine, where the machines become the enemy. However, strictly robotic Cylons are a rarity in the miniseries; instead the Cylons are generally represented by a new model, one in the form of a human woman, a cyborg, one who will “generate antagonistic dualisms … until the world ends” (Haraway, 38). This particular character, known only by her model number, Six, acts as the main face of the Cylons throughout the series, thus making them into a hybrid of man and machine, a cyborg force opposed to the re-tribalizing Twelve Colonies.

Being a human-model Cylon, the ways in which Six is a cyborg are hardly ambiguous, yet there are instances where it is not just her physical nature, but her mannerisms that reveal her hybrid identity, her inability to mesh with preconceived social roles. Perhaps the most profound of these is when she encounters a mother with her infant child. Six becomes fascinated by the young baby, seemingly genuinely impressed by the young life before her. Yet as she reaches to touch it, not understanding how fragile it is, she accidentally snaps the infant’s neck. This moment shows her ignorance and ineptitude with maternal care-giving, a role to this day often attributed as feminine, and demonstrates her hybrid status. Though she looks like a woman and seems to possess some maternal desire or instinct, both of these things are façades; in actuality, she is just a machine and thus ill-suited to fitting into the polarizing world of human society.

Yet this human society does not last. In a grand gesture of the cyborg animosity for the global village, the Cylons destroy it utterly. They travel to the Twelve Colonies and obliterate them. The symbolic significance of this event is quite apparent; here is where “the cyborg is … the awful apocalyptic telos of … escalating dominations of abstract individuation” (Haraway, 9). The cyborg Cylons, those who represent the opposition to the re-tribalizing of man, have destroyed the galactic village and seemingly halted this process, foisting “the final imposition of a grid of control” (Haraway, 13) on the galaxy, the forced mandate of the cyborg lifestyle. However, what makes this occurrence more interesting is that the audience never sees it. There are no epic battles over the colonies, no images of fleets dying and cities burning. Rather, the narrative focuses around those few humans who survive the apocalypse and how they come about this news, particularly through radio.

While in the colonies themselves humans are shown to have televisions, on the ships that escape radio becomes the dominant communication medium. Throughout the attack, reports fly in that the colonies have fallen and the people are lost. Yet remembering that McLuhan’s favorite adage is “the medium is the message,” which he explains as meaning it is “a hidden environment of services … that changes people, not the technology” (McLuhan, Living at the Speed of Light, 242), one can identify another message hidden within these transmissions. In this instance, it is the immediate availability of radio over television that causes a quick shift in sensory priorities, giving humans an ear for an eye and depositing them into an acoustic space. While McLuhan never saw television as a strictly visual medium, but rather as “tactile” (Playboy Interview), it is still a medium with pictures, whereas radio is just a medium of sound. So, the characters of Battlestar Galactica, while listening to the radio reports, are hearing a message they do not notice; they are receiving a signal carried by the medium itself – the only remaining service provided for them – that thus changes their sensory focus to best facilitate its usage. The message they hear without hearing is that in spite of the destruction of their galactic village, they are still a re-tribalizing society.

In fact, the return to acoustic space is not all that signals a continued return to the tribal man. By destroying the colonies, the Cylons have forced mankind back into a small civilization living physically close together on a small fleet of ships. While they no longer comprise a galactic or even global village, humans now comprise something closer to an actual village where closeness is not fabricated, but real. In spite of all they have endured, the humans still move on in search of that goal of the simple wholeness of the tribal man. In fact, they do so explicitly, as the fleet proclaims they will search for the fabled “Thirteenth Tribe,” a legendary group that allegedly ventured elsewhere to a planet called Earth. This reflects a viewpoint of the current re-tribalizing of Earth, that this is or will be the global village McLuhan has predicted and that the cyborg nature of today’s world is a passing thing that cannot stop the inevitable return of the tribal man.

This discussion of Battlestar Galactica ties into Ivan Kalmar’s assertion that “theories of society … can achieve popular success only if they are presented in the form of a story or … a myth” (232). Battlestar Galactica has its own story of re-tribalization in the myth of the Thirteenth Tribe, but the miniseries itself acts as a story and a reflection on two separate and somewhat oppositional theories of modern cultural trends. However, while the show would seem to favor McLuhan over Haraway, that does not necessarily mean McLuhan was right or Haraway was wrong, as the cyborg feminists Haraway proposes are not the genocidal killing machines depicted in the miniseries. Yet it is a helpful way to contextualize a discussion otherwise rooted in abstract theory. Ultimately, despite their differences, both McLuhan’s tribal man theory and Haraway’s cyborg subject are attempts to understand the impact of new technology on traditional social roles. What becomes of a literate society in the advent of acoustic space? What becomes of a structured society of dualisms in the face of new manifestations that defy classification?

The miniseries in question, while somewhat grandiose and blunt in its presentation, addresses these questions with the simple answer of Armageddon. Yet that hardly suffices as a rational, academic resolution. Rather, Battlestar Galactica can be seen as a reflection of mounting cultural concern over these changes in society, over the constant emergence of new groups that just do not seem to fit and over the increased communicative abilities that connect us to an entire world of strangers. The show stages a war between two theories that were not created to refute or conflict with each other, but were designed to help reconcile the changing world, to give answers to the din of questions and to just represent the bewildering, hodgepodge, interactive, mass communicative mayhem of the modern world in some way that makes sense. It gives a concrete narrative structure to an elusive theoretical dilemma and makes the whole confusing world into a story of strangers from places we have never known.

http://www.anders-fischer.net/essays/cylon-manifesto/

Battlestar Galactica the Miniseries. Writ. Ronald D. Moore and Christopher Eric James. Dir. Michael Rymer. Sci-Fi Channel. December 8-9, 2003. DVD. Universal Studios, 2004.

Haraway, Donna J. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” The Haraway Reader. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Kalmar, Ivan. “The Future of Tribal Man in the Electronic Age.” Marshall McLuhan,Vol. II. 2005.

McLuhan, Marshall. “Fordham University: First Lecture.” “Living at the Speed of Light.” Understanding Me. 2003.

McLuhan, Marshall. “The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan.” Playboy Magazine. March 1969. Digitallantern.net. September 21, 1998. <http://www.digitallantern.net/mcluhan/mcluhanplayboy.htm>

McLuhan, Marshall and Edmund Carpenter. “Acoustic Space.” Explorations in Communication. Eds. Marshall McLuhan and Edmund Carpenter.Boston: BeaconPress. 1966.