Why I heart the Cylons: integrated meta, vid recs and notes on Sons and Daughters
(It was a relatively quiet day at work today; my last week in my summer editing job. When I asked my boss what else there was to do she - who knows a fair bit about my interests and my research - said "Nothing, why don't you write something about cyborgs?" The post-vid Cylon theorizing I've been meaning to write up fits the 'assignment' perfectly. Although I doubt I'll be showing it to her.)
***
I'm really excited that people have been watching and enjoying Sons and Daughters despite my inexperience as a vidder and general lack of participation in BSG fandom. I had a wonderful time making the vid and talking with cyborganize and beccatoria about it, and I thought long and hard about Cylons, humans and what they represent while I was doing both.
I also did a lot of obsessive vid-watching, and developed something of a personal canon of Cylon-oriented BSG vids (hugely partial, of course. I'm still catching up on BSG vids.). The vids referenced in this essay are linked at the bottom in order, as a playlist - I've had them all on heavy rotation on my ipod (even my own; yes, I'm a narcissist) and I recommend downloading and watching them all at once. It really shows how many different things can be done with the same footage. Also, it should go without saying, but this is my interpretation of what these vids are saying and may not be the vidder's; I'm skimming for relevance to my argument, rather than trying to account for all the work they do. Also also I am a bad fan and have not left feedback for all of these, though I've enthused about most to the vidders I think. I am attempting to remedy that now for at least some of them but vidders, I do love you, I do.
I got into BSG very late: I only started watching the show on the plane home for Christmas 2007, but I was caught up (in both senses of the phrase) by the time S4 started. There were lots of things I loved about the show from the start - the fact that it begins with the end of the world, the many strong female characters, Starbuck - but it was the Cylons that sucked me in. It was Six and her question about the meaning of what it is to be alive and her offer of an answer of destruction.
It was also the killing of that baby. Regular readers will know that I'm ambivalently fascinated by the critiques of 'reproductive futurism' made most recently by Lee Edelman and by assorted feminists and philosophers before him (alixtii could tell you more about the latter than I could, but Joanna Russ's We Who Are About To is an excellent example of the former in science-fictional format). (Reproductive futurism is the idealization of the figurative Child, who must be protected, as the zero degree of all possible aspirations.)
If you don't give in to the idealization of the child as the only possible way to imagine the future and account for its importance, if you don't take Laura Roslin's post-apocalyptic position that the species must be propagated (and don't get me wrong, in her situation I wouldn't necessarily disagree) - if you don't assume that the only side it's possible to be on is the side of the human race, you choose not to choose life or you think it's better to not be than to be inendurable - well, then what?
The Cylons are one answer to that 'then what'. As the Number Eight who will become Athena says to Bill Adama soon after her defection, everything the Cylons do is based on the premise that the human race doesn't necessarily deserve to survive. Because humanity, who created and exploited their robot cyborgs, didn't see that those robots had the right to survive in and of themselves: and from the robot perspective, if the starting point of consciousness is a place of non-personhood, why should *people* be especially respected? What good are human rights to those defined out of the privileges of humanity?
That is the also the starting point for the radical critique of Western humanism that comes out of anticolonial, feminist and queer thought. The politics that comes from the people off whose backs the whiteness and masculinity of the 'human', its domination over the animal and Other and "savage," was defined. That the Cylons combine, in some ways, this stance with the posthumanist sf idea of the sentient robot and mass technoconsciousness is another reason for my acageeky BSG love.
***
As BSG progresses the Cylon and the human come closer together, but it's crucial (I think) to remember that Cylons are not people. They are not individuals. They share consciousness, download, reproduce by mass repetition. That their collective consciousness consists of wireless networking speaks to the fear of losing mental autonomy we humans may have as we merge further and further into our computers; that the Cylons have grown individuated as the series has gone on is a narrative demand but also a step towards placating us that such loss is impossible, that the human cannot be evaded.
Luminosity's vid More Human Than Human deals with these technological matters. It shows the Cylon in their difference and that difference's violence. It celebrates the kinetics and techno-aesthetics of destruction, spectacular space battles and the constant Cylon connection between love and death which both links them to and separates them from the human.
Violence is what the Cylon collective does. If the plan is love it is always also death. Without sexual reproduction, that link is not as obvious as it it might seem. Perhaps it's there because pleasure and violence instigated by and for the machine are both primary acts of rebellion against its programming. Anyway the plans of violence, the rebellions, are made with a reasoning that is not human, that cannot see genocide as genocide - at least not at first. To be alive for the Cylon is not what it is to be alive for us; not when consciousness floats in the ether and another body will make a prior life new. This perspective is shared by machines of metal and flesh. But the Cylon is also not unchanging, and the Cylon story of BSG has been one of a fascination with humanity that brings machine and person closer together.
***
sdwolfpup's vid Fix You figures the Cylon as drastic answer to humanity's ills: as the final solution. It is also about the Cylon's fascination with the human in whose mould they make themselves, and shows it in the figure of model Six: how Six's participation in the antihuman apocalypse mixes her Cylon belief that her kind is an improvement on humanity with her intrigue and love for what she is destroying.
This fascination with what created the Cylon and with the differences of human consciousness from machine is presumably what drove the Cylon to create their stealth models, the skinjobs, and it also pushes them to try alternative technologies of reproduction. aycheb's vid Babies shows us this; making babies without making a baby mythology that would require reverence or even survival for motherhood or a human world, one of the Cylon's last acts as pure collective singularity is to create Hera as the shape of things to come. They discover that babymaking requires a different kind of love than their machinic pleasure and wireless reproduction, one which seems to require duality, conflict and internal violence.
tallulah71's vid Hera Has Six Mommies, and cyborganize's essay of the same name, tells Hera's story and hints at why a pure Cylonity must die out with this new arrival. Not only because Hera's bio-mommy has thrown in her lot with individuation and noncollective love and death, but because the baby seems to be the first place where the Cylon comes so close to the human that it changes, that it can't be fully Cylon any more. Babies and Cylons can't coexist without changing both of them.
***
It's the dissenting Cylons that push the narrative of BSG after a while. It takes the individuated minds of Caprica and Boomer to force a collective change in approaches to genocide, though they can't get as close to the human model as they think they are or might like to. tallulah71's Sunday Bloody Sunday and superduperkc's Meant Well are about those attempts and failures, iterated in the utopian and dystopian project of New Caprica and pushing the two sides in the human/Cylon war closer than leaves either comfortable.
Dissent and discomforting closeness is also what's happening as the Cylons move into their own rebellions, with Three's mystical quests into the heart of what it might mean to be Cylon and the insurrection of her followers. Even as I love the intraCylon rebellion and the various alliances with humans, I am sad for the loss of the resurrection hub and the mass-productive model of Cylon reproduction. Natalie says that to live the Cylon must know how to die, but that's only if they want to live as people. I wonder if the centurions and raiders, unable to follow skinjobs into imitative convergence with the human, might not find another way to be.
My sadness for the loss of techno-wireless-collective cylonity is tempered by the extent to which human/Cylon convergence is changing the humans too. This is clearest in the final four, who've had their every idea of what it means to be human so utterly revoked and whose coming-out rattles everyone else's conceptions. cherryice's Only is a beautiful articulation of this challenge to the difference between human and machine, of the way the ground under everyone's feet is shifted with the final four's emergence even more than it was with the development of human-appearing Cylons. That was (at first) only skin deep; this is more.
***
In S4 and, presumably, beyond, the difference between human and Cylon gets ever more complex and difficult to discern as hybrids and prophets and quests interweave. Earth is the greatest convergence-in-adversity; how, exactly, the uneasy allies ended up there is still fairly shrouded in mystery.
kiki_miserychic and beccatoria's dyad of Flobots vids explore the correspondences, connections and possibilities that define the indecisive endpoint where the Cylons' plans end up. So Say We All I (Handlebars) shows births of new forms and new plans, the generativity of the changes I've traced in this post. There's a War Going on for your Mind, Laura has the Cylon as voices in humanity's heads, the hybrid as a unifying force whose knowledge suggests that wireless connectivity isn't only for those unproblematically defined as machines.
***
I remain fascinated by the show's hints at how Cylons and humans might not be what we thought, but I don't want to lose the original Cylon collectivity either. Its unsettling naivetes and brutalities, its pleasures hand in hand with and not contradicting death and destruction, are essential to its sheer *non*humanity. Beccatoria and I have talked a lot about this: about the hybrid's happiness as she JUMPS to the next disaster, about the innocence in Six's curiosity about what constitutes life and the authenticity of the Cylon's belief that their murderous acts constitute evolution, or perhaps technological development.
In my own vid, Sons and Daughters, I tried to take that Cylonity and trace its throughline through the show. I wanted to show how the complications and conflicts and visions and colonizations might look from the standpoint of a Cylon footsoldier, a conscious machine with access to memories and plans but not much individual agency to alter them. It wasn't always easy, as the Cylon become less an elemental force and more a set of divergent characters as the series goes on. But I've always been fascinated by the background visuals of centurions, repeat models, raiders - in the last few episodes of S4, some of them came forward, and I hope that along with the prophesies and plans of Earth and the final Cylons we'll see more of them.
There's no way the future of BSG's or our own world is a purely human one; so my vid's an attempt to hint at how the story of the Cylon's history and changes might be told in the future of a collectivity reconstituted, re-downloaded or reborn - by the descendents perhaps of centurions and raiders, perhaps of the four, perhaps of Hera and her kind.
Cylontastic playlist for an imaginary vidshow, aka all the vids discussed in this post in a row:
More Human Than Human
Fix You
Babies
Hera Has Six Mommies
Sunday Bloody Sunday
Meant Well
Only
So Say We All I (Handlebars)
There's a War Going On For Your Mind, Laura
Sons and Daughters
***
I'm really excited that people have been watching and enjoying Sons and Daughters despite my inexperience as a vidder and general lack of participation in BSG fandom. I had a wonderful time making the vid and talking with cyborganize and beccatoria about it, and I thought long and hard about Cylons, humans and what they represent while I was doing both.
I also did a lot of obsessive vid-watching, and developed something of a personal canon of Cylon-oriented BSG vids (hugely partial, of course. I'm still catching up on BSG vids.). The vids referenced in this essay are linked at the bottom in order, as a playlist - I've had them all on heavy rotation on my ipod (even my own; yes, I'm a narcissist) and I recommend downloading and watching them all at once. It really shows how many different things can be done with the same footage. Also, it should go without saying, but this is my interpretation of what these vids are saying and may not be the vidder's; I'm skimming for relevance to my argument, rather than trying to account for all the work they do. Also also I am a bad fan and have not left feedback for all of these, though I've enthused about most to the vidders I think. I am attempting to remedy that now for at least some of them but vidders, I do love you, I do.
I got into BSG very late: I only started watching the show on the plane home for Christmas 2007, but I was caught up (in both senses of the phrase) by the time S4 started. There were lots of things I loved about the show from the start - the fact that it begins with the end of the world, the many strong female characters, Starbuck - but it was the Cylons that sucked me in. It was Six and her question about the meaning of what it is to be alive and her offer of an answer of destruction.
It was also the killing of that baby. Regular readers will know that I'm ambivalently fascinated by the critiques of 'reproductive futurism' made most recently by Lee Edelman and by assorted feminists and philosophers before him (alixtii could tell you more about the latter than I could, but Joanna Russ's We Who Are About To is an excellent example of the former in science-fictional format). (Reproductive futurism is the idealization of the figurative Child, who must be protected, as the zero degree of all possible aspirations.)
If you don't give in to the idealization of the child as the only possible way to imagine the future and account for its importance, if you don't take Laura Roslin's post-apocalyptic position that the species must be propagated (and don't get me wrong, in her situation I wouldn't necessarily disagree) - if you don't assume that the only side it's possible to be on is the side of the human race, you choose not to choose life or you think it's better to not be than to be inendurable - well, then what?
The Cylons are one answer to that 'then what'. As the Number Eight who will become Athena says to Bill Adama soon after her defection, everything the Cylons do is based on the premise that the human race doesn't necessarily deserve to survive. Because humanity, who created and exploited their robot cyborgs, didn't see that those robots had the right to survive in and of themselves: and from the robot perspective, if the starting point of consciousness is a place of non-personhood, why should *people* be especially respected? What good are human rights to those defined out of the privileges of humanity?
That is the also the starting point for the radical critique of Western humanism that comes out of anticolonial, feminist and queer thought. The politics that comes from the people off whose backs the whiteness and masculinity of the 'human', its domination over the animal and Other and "savage," was defined. That the Cylons combine, in some ways, this stance with the posthumanist sf idea of the sentient robot and mass technoconsciousness is another reason for my acageeky BSG love.
***
As BSG progresses the Cylon and the human come closer together, but it's crucial (I think) to remember that Cylons are not people. They are not individuals. They share consciousness, download, reproduce by mass repetition. That their collective consciousness consists of wireless networking speaks to the fear of losing mental autonomy we humans may have as we merge further and further into our computers; that the Cylons have grown individuated as the series has gone on is a narrative demand but also a step towards placating us that such loss is impossible, that the human cannot be evaded.
Luminosity's vid More Human Than Human deals with these technological matters. It shows the Cylon in their difference and that difference's violence. It celebrates the kinetics and techno-aesthetics of destruction, spectacular space battles and the constant Cylon connection between love and death which both links them to and separates them from the human.
Violence is what the Cylon collective does. If the plan is love it is always also death. Without sexual reproduction, that link is not as obvious as it it might seem. Perhaps it's there because pleasure and violence instigated by and for the machine are both primary acts of rebellion against its programming. Anyway the plans of violence, the rebellions, are made with a reasoning that is not human, that cannot see genocide as genocide - at least not at first. To be alive for the Cylon is not what it is to be alive for us; not when consciousness floats in the ether and another body will make a prior life new. This perspective is shared by machines of metal and flesh. But the Cylon is also not unchanging, and the Cylon story of BSG has been one of a fascination with humanity that brings machine and person closer together.
***
sdwolfpup's vid Fix You figures the Cylon as drastic answer to humanity's ills: as the final solution. It is also about the Cylon's fascination with the human in whose mould they make themselves, and shows it in the figure of model Six: how Six's participation in the antihuman apocalypse mixes her Cylon belief that her kind is an improvement on humanity with her intrigue and love for what she is destroying.
This fascination with what created the Cylon and with the differences of human consciousness from machine is presumably what drove the Cylon to create their stealth models, the skinjobs, and it also pushes them to try alternative technologies of reproduction. aycheb's vid Babies shows us this; making babies without making a baby mythology that would require reverence or even survival for motherhood or a human world, one of the Cylon's last acts as pure collective singularity is to create Hera as the shape of things to come. They discover that babymaking requires a different kind of love than their machinic pleasure and wireless reproduction, one which seems to require duality, conflict and internal violence.
tallulah71's vid Hera Has Six Mommies, and cyborganize's essay of the same name, tells Hera's story and hints at why a pure Cylonity must die out with this new arrival. Not only because Hera's bio-mommy has thrown in her lot with individuation and noncollective love and death, but because the baby seems to be the first place where the Cylon comes so close to the human that it changes, that it can't be fully Cylon any more. Babies and Cylons can't coexist without changing both of them.
***
It's the dissenting Cylons that push the narrative of BSG after a while. It takes the individuated minds of Caprica and Boomer to force a collective change in approaches to genocide, though they can't get as close to the human model as they think they are or might like to. tallulah71's Sunday Bloody Sunday and superduperkc's Meant Well are about those attempts and failures, iterated in the utopian and dystopian project of New Caprica and pushing the two sides in the human/Cylon war closer than leaves either comfortable.
Dissent and discomforting closeness is also what's happening as the Cylons move into their own rebellions, with Three's mystical quests into the heart of what it might mean to be Cylon and the insurrection of her followers. Even as I love the intraCylon rebellion and the various alliances with humans, I am sad for the loss of the resurrection hub and the mass-productive model of Cylon reproduction. Natalie says that to live the Cylon must know how to die, but that's only if they want to live as people. I wonder if the centurions and raiders, unable to follow skinjobs into imitative convergence with the human, might not find another way to be.
My sadness for the loss of techno-wireless-collective cylonity is tempered by the extent to which human/Cylon convergence is changing the humans too. This is clearest in the final four, who've had their every idea of what it means to be human so utterly revoked and whose coming-out rattles everyone else's conceptions. cherryice's Only is a beautiful articulation of this challenge to the difference between human and machine, of the way the ground under everyone's feet is shifted with the final four's emergence even more than it was with the development of human-appearing Cylons. That was (at first) only skin deep; this is more.
***
In S4 and, presumably, beyond, the difference between human and Cylon gets ever more complex and difficult to discern as hybrids and prophets and quests interweave. Earth is the greatest convergence-in-adversity; how, exactly, the uneasy allies ended up there is still fairly shrouded in mystery.
kiki_miserychic and beccatoria's dyad of Flobots vids explore the correspondences, connections and possibilities that define the indecisive endpoint where the Cylons' plans end up. So Say We All I (Handlebars) shows births of new forms and new plans, the generativity of the changes I've traced in this post. There's a War Going on for your Mind, Laura has the Cylon as voices in humanity's heads, the hybrid as a unifying force whose knowledge suggests that wireless connectivity isn't only for those unproblematically defined as machines.
***
I remain fascinated by the show's hints at how Cylons and humans might not be what we thought, but I don't want to lose the original Cylon collectivity either. Its unsettling naivetes and brutalities, its pleasures hand in hand with and not contradicting death and destruction, are essential to its sheer *non*humanity. Beccatoria and I have talked a lot about this: about the hybrid's happiness as she JUMPS to the next disaster, about the innocence in Six's curiosity about what constitutes life and the authenticity of the Cylon's belief that their murderous acts constitute evolution, or perhaps technological development.
In my own vid, Sons and Daughters, I tried to take that Cylonity and trace its throughline through the show. I wanted to show how the complications and conflicts and visions and colonizations might look from the standpoint of a Cylon footsoldier, a conscious machine with access to memories and plans but not much individual agency to alter them. It wasn't always easy, as the Cylon become less an elemental force and more a set of divergent characters as the series goes on. But I've always been fascinated by the background visuals of centurions, repeat models, raiders - in the last few episodes of S4, some of them came forward, and I hope that along with the prophesies and plans of Earth and the final Cylons we'll see more of them.
There's no way the future of BSG's or our own world is a purely human one; so my vid's an attempt to hint at how the story of the Cylon's history and changes might be told in the future of a collectivity reconstituted, re-downloaded or reborn - by the descendents perhaps of centurions and raiders, perhaps of the four, perhaps of Hera and her kind.
Cylontastic playlist for an imaginary vidshow, aka all the vids discussed in this post in a row:
More Human Than Human
Fix You
Babies
Hera Has Six Mommies
Sunday Bloody Sunday
Meant Well
Only
So Say We All I (Handlebars)
There's a War Going On For Your Mind, Laura
Sons and Daughters