Watching the Borg Part 2

Watching the Borg Part 2: of William Wallace, Edward Longshanks, and the rhetorics of assimilation.

Preface

I am reading the scripts for Best of both Worlds Part one and two, and all the while considering the uncanny, terrifying, implacable image of the Borg ship coming toward the viewer. In the next room my 15 year old son is watching Braveheart, which he rented from iTunes for four bucks. It is hard to concentrate on writing when the entire British army of Edward Longshanks is descending on the brave but outnumbered and outgunned (outarrowed?) Scotsmen. (Also the nonbattle music, absent any image, keeps reminding me of Irish Spring soap commercials).

But I’m helpless. I’m listening to the Scots talking about the English army, about how they are uncanny, monstrous, terrifying, implacable. And they were. An army of long spears, of cavalry that shook the very ground when it charged. A force of over 2,000 horses and 12,000 infantry, including a huge force armed with longbows. An imperial army, made up of humans, but humans transfigured by the garb of war, the technologies and prosthetics of battle circa 1280. On the one hand, the Scottish army in their schiltrons, armored positions with spears pointed out at attackers at various heights, and archers between the schiltron formations. On the other, the English with their mounted knights, archers, infantry spearmen. 15,000 British troops (including the assimilated Welsh longbowmen), against 6000 Scots.

Resistance seemed futile. And indeed, while initially the English were repelled by the pikes and formations of the Scots’ hedgehog-like schiltrons, eventually the English adapted their strategy, isolated the Scots formations, and rained down a sky of armor-piercing arrows onto the immobile pikemen. Once the killing was sufficient to decimate the Scots, the cavalry rode down and finished off the survivors. And yet…resistance continued. The Scots fought off the English in two separate wars (1296-1328, and 1332-1357), and remained an independent nation.

In the film version of the battle, Mel Gibson delivers his famous speech to rally the troops at the earlier battle of Stirling Bridge, rather as Picard tells the Borg that he will never surrender:

William Wallace: I am William Wallace! And I see a whole army of my countrymen, here in defiance of tyranny. You've come to fight as free men... and free men you are. What will you do with that freedom? Will you fight?

Veteran: Fight? Against that? No! We will run. And we will live.

William Wallace: Aye, fight and you may die. Run, and you'll live... at least a while. And dying in your beds, many years from now, would you be willin' to trade ALL the days, from this day to that, for one chance, just one chance, to come back here and tell our enemies that they may take our lives, but they'll never take... OUR FREEDOM!

[Scottish army cheers]

William Wallace: Alba gu bràth!

["Scotland forever!"]

Army: ALBA GU BRÀTH! ALBA GU BRÀTH! ALBA GU BRÀTH!

It is a pretty great moment in the movie; it’s hard to see it for the first time and not get the chills, even if it has been replayed on my local sports radio (KNBR THE sports leader) as an audio drop in countless stupid contexts (any time a local team like the Warriors or the Raiders faces heavy odds).

And of course both Picard and Riker say as much to the Borg. But there is another scene in which Wallace meets with the French princess Isabele, who has come to negotiate in King Edward’s name. (In the film she bargains in apparent good faith not knowing that Edward has no intention of keeping his word):

Princess Isabelle: The king desires peace.

William Wallace: Longshanks desires peace?

Princess Isabelle: He declares it to me, I swear it. He proposes that you withdraw your attack. In return he grants you title, estates, and this chest of gold which I am to pay to you personally.

William Wallace: A lordship and titles. Gold. That I should become Judas?

Princess Isabelle: Peace is made in such ways.

William Wallace: Slaves are made in such ways. The last time Longshanks spoke of peace I was a boy. And many Scottish nobles, who would not be slaves, were lured by him under a flag of truce to a barn, where he had them hanged. I was very young, but I remember Longshanks' notion of peace.

Longshanks’ “peace’ is simply the assimilation of the Scots, by any means. And he uses guile, Machiavellian tactics, lies, corruption within the enemy, bribery, all the usual modes of political and economic warfare. His word means nothing unless it is forced to mean something by his inability to destroy his enemy.

And this brings us to the Borg.

The irrelevance of what has been said before.

Listen, and understand. That terminator is out there. It can't be bargained with. It can't be reasoned with. It doesn't feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And it absolutely will not stop, ever, until you are dead.” Kyle Reese, in The Terminator, 1984.

The immense popularity of the Terminator film in 1984 certainly influenced the making of the Borg series of Star Trek episodes. For one thing, both cyborg texts play on the horror, not simply of aliens coming to kill humans, but of humans or the once-human turned into aliens, merged with boundary-invading prosthetics. Both are in effect horror films, which play upon the uncanny and inhuman aspects of the cyborg to produce a threat that seems undefeatable, unstoppable. The frisson this produces is heightened by terrifying scenes of human destruction by the machinic cyborgs, scenes made more terrifying by the lack of any human motivation or emotion. The Terminator of course is simply a cyborg assassin and thus is like many emotionless assassins in films, humans who carry out cold blooded killings with machine like precision. And while the Star Trek film shies away from showing the actual human deaths involved in the genocidal career of the Borg, the extent of the killing is on the order of the nuclear exchange shown in Terminator 2. Thus the series begins with a crater where 900 colonists once lived, and includes a scene of 350 Starfleet ships destroyed after the battle of Wolf 357, implying a death count that stretches back 7000 light years behind the Borg ship and must be in the millions.

But like the Terminator, the Borg cannot be communicated with, or rather, the communication is one-way. Even the pretence of terms (as say Edward would proffer) is missing; communication, intention of the opposite party, cultural difference, are all irrelevant. And it is this term, irrelevant, that gives the scenes of “communication” with the Borg their dramatic power. So, when Picard is captured, the Borg “speak” with that machinic voice that has become clichéd, and yet it is a voice of thousands of voices merged into one unnerving personality-free voice. Like Wallace, Picard speaks the language of resistance, of freedom, while the Borg speak an instrumental, strangely euphemistic language:

PICARD: I have nothing to say to you, and I will resist you with my last ounce of strength.

BORG: Strength is irrelevant. Resistance is futile. We wish to improve ourselves. We will add biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your culture will adapt to service ours.

PICARD: Impossible. My culture is based on freedom and self-determination

BORG: Freedom is irrelevant. Self-determination is irrelevant. You must comply.

PICARD: We would rather die.

BORG: Death is irrelevant.

Both the Terminator and the Borg speak in mechanical, emotion free tones. Both speak as if from a kind of internal, prerecorded script, or tape loop, as if programmed to respond in this minimal and yet eerily effective language. The Terminator doesn’t kill; he terminates, as in terminating a program. There is a sense of ex-terminate, of killing that is not worthy of much thought or feeling, as when humans hire someone to kill termites. It is not, in any sense of the word, personal. And this is also what makes the Borg language so effective a representative of what is frightening about living in the latter half of the twentieth and the first half of the twenty first century. Things that were previously not only important, but definitive of human culture and human beings, are not longer so. Freedom, self determination, strength, resistance, even death, no longer have meaning, in a world dominated by the kind of organization, technology, and impetus of the Borg.

This latter is an important element of the Borg series. Death means nothing to an assassin, of course, and killing is just business, a set of skills. The horror of such films resides in this contrast between a normative notion of death as the ultimate reality and meaning, and death as beneath interest and not deserving of emotion. (I often get Holocaust echoes in these films, where businesslike killing is represented). But in the case of the 1991 cyborgs, death has a new irrelevance; one can “die” and still be alive to use, to manipulation, to assimilation as material. The Borg series spends valuable screen time developing this notion: is “Picard” still alive if the Borg have taken over his body and his mind? If his skin is inhumanly white, his face half covered with prosthetics, his mind linked with and mostly controlled by a network of commands and codes? As we watch the “survivors” consider how to recapture Picard, the narrative begins to name Locutus as “that thing” in the Borg ship, as “a casualty of war,” as no longer in any way a recognizable human.

He isn’t technically dead, but that is irrelevant; he has been assimilated, entirely, his culturally specific knowledge used to hurt those he previously would have died for. What does it mean to live in a world where even death is not necessarily final?

Here I am reminded of editing The Cyborg Handbook, in which several articles commented on this; one went into the notion of “triple death” by which dead bodies are judged as to the harvestability of organs, etc; in addition, many have flatlined or otherwise technically died, only to be brought back to life by cyborg medical technologies.

So the question from watching the Borg, and listening to William Wallace, is: how is the Borg like Edward Longshanks? And how is the Borg unlike what has come before?

Edward bought many of the nobles of Scotland with land; many of these assimilated Lords were dispossessed after the first war of Scottish independence, and were much of the cause of the second war. The Borg do not buy their mouthpieces; they make them. In case this wasn’t clear, they say so:

PICARD: What is it you wish of me?

BORG: Your archaic cultures are authority driven. To facilitate our introduction into your culture, it has been decided that a human voice will speak for us in all communications. You have been chosen to be that voice.

Notice: not that person. That voice. That language. That rhetoric. And the voice is “translated” from the Borg’s nonarchaic, non-authority driven culture, to the kinds of cultures that still imagine leaders, authorities who run things. The point of this is simply to “introduce” the Borg “into” these other cultures, as one would introduce bacteria into a culture, say.

When Picard is then massively cyborgs, he is renamed Locutus (the one who speaks), and he says exactly what the Borg say, from within their rhetoric, mission, and structure:

PICARD/BORG: I am Locutus of Borg. Resistance is futile. Your life as it has is over. From this time forward, you will service... us.

The transition from human to posthuman is somehow accomplished so that any formerly effective resistances are neutralized and made irrelevant. When Locutus and Riker speak in Part two, Riker asks that they be given a chance to discuss terms, which we know is pointless. And Locutus (in the script he is no longer PICARD/BORG) says

LOCUTUS: Discussion is irrelevant. There are no terms. You will disarm all weapons and escort us to sector zero-zero-one where we will the assimilation of your and technology.

RIKER: We would like time to prepare our people for assimilation.

LOCUTUS: Preparation is irrelevant. Your people will be assimilated as easily as Picard has been.

When one tries to “read” the Borg by plugging in values (Borg as postmodern corporation or state; Borg as cybernetic technologies and their proliferation throughout the world; Borg as neoliberal imperial rhetoric backed up by technology and weapons; Borg as example of Naomi Klein’s shock doctrine, or of the shock and awe of the Iraq war “strategy”), one gets some fascinating outputs. Who are the spokespeople from these archaic cultures that have been assimilated? How does the strange Borg technology that links them all together in a nonhierarchical, decentralized way allow them to do an end run around cultural resistances? How does it make them literally inhuman?

And: why did the Borg show resonate with so many people, such that elements of the show have gone viral and are now part of the general culture?

I’ve tried your patience, I know, with the length of this writing. But let’s consider for a moment two worlds: one square, one round. One still boasting an ecosystem, one still mainly organic; the other with a completely artificial, constructed system, mainly cybernetic. One represented by archaic authority driven systems; another announcing another, apparently different driver, with no discernable human in control of it. One culture with gender difference and conflict, the other without discernable gender or reproduction.

The show asks, inside of its slightly silly cyborg tale: what would the best of both worlds look like? And what will it look like if instead we end up with the worst of both worlds? That is: the implacable terror of an Edward Longshanks, combined with the machinic powers of command and control implicit in modern technologies and institutional structures?

What indeed?

Next: William Wallace, Picard, and the experience of torture.