Cyborg Selves in<i>Battlestar Galactica</i>and<i>Star Trek: The Next Generation</i>: Genre, Hybridity, Identity

摘要

Somewhere in that hard-drive that you call a brain is a beeping message: ‘Error. Error. Does not compute. I don't have a soul, I have software. If I die, I'm gone.’ If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners. Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009) explores some familiar territory for television SF in dramatizing the cataclysmic war between humans and intelligent machines called “Cylons,” but it refreshingly troubles the human-machine binary division. Situating this text within the complex intertextual web of the television SF genre, including comparison with the original Battlestar Galactica (1978–1979) and with Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994), this essay explores Battlestar Galactica's contributions to the conventions of the SF genre. Battlestar Galactica plays with cultural and individual hybrid identities, favoring narratives of self-discovery over those of mastery. Wars of conquest and assimilation become civil wars, as the Other is discovered to be an aspect of the Self. The maintenance of the strict division between human and machine is tied to the scientific racism inherent in the construction of cultural identity. These categories are undone as their boundaries are transgressed through various forms of hybridity, culminating in a hopeful messianic hybrid child. Genre study has been largely out of favor over the last few decades, dismissed as structuralist and essentialist in its apprehension of the ways in which texts and audiences interact. Jacques Derrida, for instance, considered genre as imposing tyrannical limitations on the openness of a text, acting as a “Law” that dictates its formation and interpretation (“Law of Genre”). But genre can be a useful way of approaching a text like Battlestar Galactica, as long as we remember that genres are neither homogeneous, nor static, nor clearly delineated; they are protean, shifting; they bleed into and appropriate elements from one another. According to Rick Altman, genre can be conceived as a language, whose semantic makeup consists in conventions—character types, settings, images, devices—arranged individually within a given text through the syntax of plot (89). But, as J. P. Telotte points out, this semiological model of genre again presumes an unchanging and correct grammar. Telotte suggests that genre is therefore better understood as slang: all elements are subject to appropriation and re-appropriation, and innovation and reconfiguration are not only tolerated, they are necessary to the vitality of the genre (18). Each text participates in an ongoing multiplicity of texts, writers, and audiences, each asserting their own vision of science fiction. In this way, all genre texts are textually or linguistically hybrid in Mikhail Bakhtin's sense, in that a significant portion of what is said is “implicitly or explicitly admitted as someone else's” (354). Multiple voices speak within the text, and each utterance can hold multiple meanings, a phenomenon Bakhtin terms “heteroglossia.” Heteroglossia is endemic to television programs, which are by nature collaborative projects, lacking a single authorial voice, and which are always subject to power struggles and interpretive disagreements among writers, producers, performers, and network executives. Marketers and producers can encourage heteroglossia to attract the greatest possible number of viewers, and thus ensure success in the competitive television market and the survival of the series. Meaning, in a text like Battlestar Galactica, is consequently difficult to pin down, with slippage and ambiguity creating a hybrid text. This particular SF text has a specially hybrid status because it is a remake. The original Battlestar Galactica ran for only one year, from September 1978 to August 1979, airing 21 episodes in all.1 Viewed by many as an attempt to exploit the success of Star Wars, it was cancelled–despite immense popularity–because ABC felt it was too expensive to maintain, costing more than a million dollars per