I was watching Star Trek the other day (Enterprise season 4) when the crew of the Enterprise met yet another highly advanced alien species. Not just ‘faster warp drives’ or ‘bigger weapons’ but a really, truly, highly advanced alien species. So advanced that, like others that have appeared on the show, they didn’t have bodies.
Take a second to think about it: why do we assume that the more advanced you get, the less body you will have?
Star Trek is a product of its time featuring all the teleological unilinear evolution you could shake a stick at — more Leslie White and Herbert Spencer than Julian Steward and Charles Darwin. I understand that it views all life-forms as being located on a Victorian continuum with Papua New Guinea on one end and NASA on the other. But even in a world obsessed with technological improvement, since when did the body become something that, technically, it would be better for us to get rid of? I really want to hammer home the incredibly non-obvious nature of this question in: what is technologically backwards about having a body?
The answer, of course, is that contemporary Eurochristian cultures have a long history of viewing the body as the dirty, uncontrolled, appetitive fleshvelope that our pure, divine souls have been crammed into. All of the Star Trek tropes of floating pools of light entering our bodies to possess our engineers and lieutenant commanders; their need to lower themselves by using physical speech to communicate; the promise that someday we might be able to comprehend the infinite majesty of the universe once we’ve joined them…. totally different from angels, amirite?
One of the oddities of anthropology is that once you’ve tuned into a cultural pattern, you see it everywhere — that’s how you know you’ve gotten your analysis right. But for most Americans, say, it takes quite a lot of exposure to American and British culture to see the big picture. Not just because you are too close (although that is a problem) but because you spend most of your life going to work, cooking dinner, etc. and not reading Sacvan Berkovitch and Perry Miller. Or for that matter Madame Blavatsky.
And yet it is a strange, very culturally specific idea that we are more truly ourselves when we are out of our bodies rather then when we are in them. Many people in other cultures think that they are their bodies — a very sensible proposition indeed given the available evidence. It takes analysis and comparison to understand this, even though the examples of the pattern occur regularly on Netflix.
Anyone who thinks a man in a penis sheath is as Other as they come has never locked horns with the denizens of Goddard.
But what about the other trend embodied in the cyberman? Technological progress in the wrong direction – escaping bodies only to become trapped in machines – is potentially even more scary than technological devolution into (happy?) savages. The cyberman is a human soul-brain which has its emotions and other elements of humanity extracted by the sheer fact of having a robot body. The shiny, pristine metal body has indeed removed the dirty, uncontrolled, appetitive fleshvelope, but the moral message here is clearly that this is a bad thing. The value of explicitly admitted irrationality of emotions and so on, normally in contrast to a futuristic “empty”/”soulless”/mechanical alternative, is as common if not more so as a trope in sci-fi and the rest of pop culture as the bodiless angel demigods. Both speak to the imperfection of bodies, but in one case this is celebrated, in the other it is an evolutionary obstacle.
Interesting analysis, Rex. And I think it is largely on-point. But here is a counterpoint/counter-perspective from someone who does *not* experience white-supremacist USA, or georacialized globality (and here a nod to John L. Jackson’s discussion of ‘georaciality’ in Real Black): the concept of evolution as lack of body you write about is also a desire for a kind of post-racism utopia (and let’s not forget Star Trek’s role in broadcasting television’s first interracial kiss between Captain Kirk and Officer Uhuru). While I am certainly aware of the highly problematic angelic and teleological-evolution valences of alien-future disembodiment on Star Trek, I also find this vision of a disembodied future comforting amidst the present and foreseeable-future reality/realities of having to continue to live in a world in which one is daily judged on (the appearance of) one’s body, and the color of one’s skin instead of the content of one’s character.
Correction: meant to type “as someone who does not experience white-supremacist USA … from a white and male body”.
So yes, I think a lot about embodiment, and how sensible it is to understand ourselves as our bodies, and about the *phenomenological experience of race/racial subjectivity* (including, yes, whiteness). And more often than not, anthropological theorizing proceeds from a very disembodied place of universalizing about ‘power and the subject’ without acknowledging the normative assumptions of ‘the subject’ and how much this understanding of subjectivity proceeds from a place of neither fully acknowledging nor critically interrogating the embodied experience of race/whiteness.
Hey, barely related content here… This link is to brilliant stuff, I’m going to use it to teach white male privilege, but it needs to get out there to the anthro-gamers who I know inhabit Savage Minds. http://whatever.scalzi.com/2012/05/15/straight-white-male-the-lowest-difficulty-setting-there-is/ OK, publicize it and criticize it and I will be satisfied.
/bookmark
I love a good Socio-cultural reading of Star Trek, but I disagree with the Author’s premise that: “”Star Trek is a product of its time featuring all the teleological unilinear evolution you could shake a stick at — more Leslie White and Herbert Spencer than Julian Steward and Charles Darwin. I understand that it views all life-forms as being located on a Victorian continuum with Papua New Guinea on one end and NASA on the other. But even in a world obsessed with technological improvement, since when did the body become something that, technically, it would be better for us to get rid of? I really want to hammer home the incredibly non-obvious nature of this question in: what is technologically backwards about having a body?” The show considered over its long arc in fact leans more towards Julian Steward–and so towards more of a multilinear evolution model concerned with distinct path-dependent forms of evolution–energetic, mechanistic, biological etc. It is only the Humans that were in awe of non corporeal beings because they are generally depicted as obsessed with bridging these paths. Fans and scholars of the show will remember that the Borg believed that Species 8472 represented the ultimate form of biological evolution. Species 8472 demonstrated a trans-dimensional evolutionary adaptation which allowed them to exist in ‘fluidic space,’ and in the Milkyway Galaxy. Species 8472 was highly adapted to organic technology, which proved totally resilient in overcoming the Borg, who’s vision of evolutionary supremacy was mechanistic. Also, the series depicts fluidic space as filled with a form of unspecified organic matter, and hence its extra-dimensional qualities stand in contrast to the energy based dynamics of our own dimension. Different architecture’s (environment) different evolutionary outcomes (including technology, but social organization as well). Although I appreciate the cultural argument the author would like to make about why the Humans in Star Trek prefer non-corporeal evolution, the author is committing an exegetical fallacy par excellence, by ignoring the philosophical dimensions demonstrated by the shows’ broader plot line, and hence willfully ignores the potential cultural interventions made by the creators of Star Trek in terms of depicting how evolution at this level of generality may or may not occur. From this angle, a more interesting question is why are the Humans depicted as demonstrating this preference for non corporeality when so many other species demonstrate completely different evolutionary pathways and preferences? We really cannot get at this question from the rather ungenerous approach outlined in this post. I suggest that if we really want to track down popular demonstrations of the type of teleological evolutionary perspective the author would like to find in Star Trek, that we instead examine the ascension ark in Star Gate, where the non corporeal preferences are drawn out in exquisite detail. From there we might inquire into the discrepancies and variation between the two shows in order to comparatively broaden our sample, and explore variation in the type of cultural claims that presented on this matter in popular format.
Commonplace semantics reveal a generalized attitude towards the body: we say “my head” or my heart” in the same way we say “my hat” or “my jacket.”. This mental positioning apiece to the parts of the body, but also to the body as whole. There seems to be an assumption that we wear the body like a suit. What entity is wearing the body?
When a person dies, there is an immediate change in affect. As life ends, the body stills until it becomes a thing. (I’ve only seen this three times, but it was the same every time)
Fiction is an opportunity to explore the implications of phenomena. It seems natural and unsurprising that a show like ST, which pretends to the “Final Frontier,” would be drawn towards plots that experiment with disembodied spirit as being evolutionarily progressive.
It’s maybe wish fulfillment though. In real life, death leaves us with a husk-object that is human in shape only.
We can’t help trying and trying to make some kind of sense of this.
They say “beam me up”, not down, or out, or away. Beam me up!
an interesting observation from ‘amis usage. in a’tolan ‘amis, it is nearly impossible to mention many emotional states without reference to the body (tireng–interestingly, the word also means “structure” in the sense of an architectural structure: tatirengan is the word for a building). for example, “i miss you” or “i worry about you” translates as maharateng ako ko tireng no miso (literally, my thoughts are of your body); “take care of yourself” dipoten to tireng no miso (care for your body); even “you need to reflect” piharateng to tireng no miso (think about your body). yet at the same time, the body appears as an analogue for a house. although it goes against many of the values of my training, i wonder whether one might think about different topologies (i like this metaphor for comparison from leach, ok?) of the relationship between personhood and the body. we might discover some interesting connections, as in the ‘amis case, analogy of the body to a house (not completely alien to europeans) does not mean that it is a structure that the person can live without. at any rate, there are some interesting anthropological questions about here