Neocitizenship: Political Culture After Democracy by Eva Cherniavsky

Author:Eva Cherniavsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Media Studies, LIT004020 Literary Criticism / American / General, Social Science, Popular Culture
Publisher: NYU Press
Published: 2017-01-17T01:02:59.307000+00:00

The Models

In the pre-story of Battlestar Galactica’s post-apocalyptic narrative, humanity’s robotic creations, the cylons, rebel against their human masters and are banished to another world. For several decades, all contact between the cylons and the twelve human colonies ceases, until the cylons unleash a nuclear holocaust on the home planets of their human creators, and the survivors flee these radioactive worlds aboard a ragtag assembly of interstellar vessels, presided over by the last remaining war ship, or “battlestar,” Galactica. In the interim between their banishment and their spectacular reappearance, we come to learn, the cylons have “evolved” from their original robotic form into synthetic organisms, indistinguishable from their biological human counterparts. One of the first season plot lines hinges on the efforts of the human scientist Gaius Baltar to devise a “cylon detector” that would differentiate humans from cylons on the basis of blood or other physiologically measurable criteria, and so identify cylon infiltrators on board the humans’ ships. Baltar’s efforts are unsuccessful, and he eventually abandons this work, which loses importance, in any case, as humans confront the serial form of cylon embodiment: there are twelve cylon models (the seven models that comprise existing cylon society, and the missing “final five,” who resurface in season 4), and all cylons have the identical body to others of their model. In other words, each model represents a genetic template that yields thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of iterations, or clones, and because of the limited number of models, the handful of infiltrators are sooner or later exposed, as their exact bodily doubles start appearing elsewhere in the fleet.5

Apart from bodily identity, however, the relation among the iterations of a particular model is harder to specify. Identical genetic material entails not only identical embodiment, but also core personality, all the more so as cylons enter the world fully formed, as linguistically competent “adults.” There is no interval of cylon development—no cylon childhood. As a result, it is not usually possible to distinguish between the iterations of a model on the basis of speech patterns, mannerisms, or forms of performative embodiment, any more than on the basis of physical appearance. The difficulty of distinguishing among iterations is exacerbated by the circumstance that when infiltrator cylons living in human society acquire names, the name routinely slips into general usage for the entire model. Thus, for example, after the Galactica pilot Sharon Valeri is revealed to be a cylon “sleeper agent,” the name “Sharon” gradually becomes an accepted designation for all the model Eights (as in, “the Sharons,” or “a Sharon”), just as the model Ones become the Cavils, after the identity assumed by one of their line, who poses as a human priest, Father Cavil. To a certain extent, the clones’ apparent identity secures the narrative’s intelligibility, by allowing the viewer to proceed as though the Sharon in one scene is the same character as the Sharon in another—even as we are compelled to know that this is not necessarily so. At the same

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