Seven of One

At my last meeting with my advisor, I mentioned my obsession with Seven of Nine and the blog posts I made summarizing the episodes she appears in (obviously it's relevant), and she suggested that it might be relevant to contextualize the concept of cyborgs for our readings. She actually seemed surprised I hadn't made the connection already. So last night (why do it ahead of time if you can wait till the last minute?) while I was reading through my blogs and skimming through some Voyager episodes, I asked myself why I hadn't made the connection. Borgs are pretty much always on my mind, at least in the periphery, because Star Trek: Voyager is something I'm pretty passionate about. I think the reason is that I haven't been able to fully articulate why I find Seven of Nine and her struggle with her Borg and Human natures so compelling.


After I watched Seven's first real episode, The Gift, I felt like there were possible points to explore in relation to the chapter we recently read from Plugged In, Stanley Harrison's "Our Cyberbodies, Ourselves." For example, I thought of the line "bodies in collective are quick to discover the necessity of co-operation" (p 48). The Borg, as Seven points out many times, are more efficient because they act as a collective consciousness. In the episode Voyager first encounters the Borg, Scorpion, Janeway and Chakotay's differences almost derail their mission to reach earth. But in the end, the fact that they act as individuals means that they can create a diverse backup plan, and learn about species 8472 (and destroy much of it) through experimentation, whereas the Borg fails to predict their backup plan or assimilate information useful to their war on species 8472 due to the limits of their collective mind and methods of learning.

This is an interesting point to begin discussion of cyborgs, certainly, but I think the reason I didn't think of it before is because I don't see the term "cyborg" as used by Harrison to be a fraught term worth exploring. He seems to use it as a way to alienate his students that he doesn't understand, a way to belittle and criticize them. So, what relation would the Borg have to Harrison's cyborgs? Would a discussion of a link between the two be a completely fabricated connection? I momentarily had a vision of creating an entire curriculum based on watching Voyager and Seven of Nine, and noting how the writers indicate humanity (and cyborg-ness) and reading articles about cyborgs for theoretical context, the purpose of the class being to understand the unique problems faced by teachers and students who have to communicate as/with both cyborg and human. But then that glorious idea faded into doubt, as Star Trek's idea of the Borg was never having intended to be read in conjunction with crazy rhetoric and composition texts.

Maybe I can keep running over this in my mind. Maybe the path will clear eventually. But I think if I've learned anything from my Rhet classes, it's that when the path clears, it's because you've got your blinders on and you're in for a big surprise.