‘Machinic desire can seem a
little inhuman, as it rips up political cultures, deletes traditions, dissolves
subjectivities, and hacks through security apparatuses, tracking a soulless
tropism to zero control. This is because what appears to humanity as the history
of capitalism is an invasion from the future by an artificial intelligent space
that must assemble itself entirely from its enemy’s resources.’ [Machinic Desires, Nick Land]
More
properly: ‘We are the Borg. Lower your shields and surrender your ships. We
will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Your
culture shall adapt to service us. Resistance is futile.’
*
I describe
the Borg as being ‘apotheotic/apocalyptic-pathogenic.’
Apotheotic/apocalyptic: they are
the final, traumatic revealing of what Heidegger names ‘Gestell’, ‘enframing’ or ‘positionality,’ the essence of technology
(that is, the mode of unconcealment of the world that brings about physical
science, mathematics, machinic technology and techno-capitalism). Gestell orders the world into the ranks
of ‘standing reserve,’ into usability to be consumed and turned to further
ordering. Why both ‘apotheotic’ and ‘apocalyptic’? The apotheosis of technology
is apocalyptic in both the classical and colloquial sense. It is the final
revelation of a things nature, and it is destructive to what falls outside itself.
Pathogenic: their behavioural
vector is viral. Insect swarm analogies do not function as well as pathogenic
analogies regarding the Borg. The locust consumes. The disease transforms.
These points cannot, or at least
ought not, be considered in isolation. They must be considered together.
Be warned, this might be an odd
read.
*
What is the nature of the Borg?
They are not best thought of as just a synthesis of the organic and the
mechanical (not to deny that, on one level, they are). This description fails
to grasp the essence of the Borg. They are not a synthesis of the organic and
the artificial, they are such a thing that does not possess a distinction
between the two. They are the breakdown of the tool/tool user distinction, of
the maker/made dichotomy. They are not a synthesis of mecha/orga, they exist
outside of that paradigm.
They, simply put, are Borg.
In the Borg, there are no
distinctions between society and its members in the same way that there is a
distinction between the United Kingdom and a British citizen. The Borg are
their collective. There is not a distinction between the crew of a ship and the
ship. Indeed, it is improper to speak of either of those things in this
context. An individual drone, provided it is properly functioning, is as much
the collective as an entire cube is. Q points out that the first drone
encountered by the Enterprise is ‘Not a he, not a she’ [‘Q Who?’ TNG]. There
are no dichotomies to them.
They do not reproduce. They
replicate. Reproduction suggests the classic sexual-binary. The Borg, rather,
have the behaviour of the virus. The virus is not universally recognised as a
life-form; when the Enterprise first
scans a Borg cube [Ibid.] she is unable to detect any life-signs. They operate
in such a way that we do not recognise them as a life-form. The Borg might thus
be described as post-life.
*
It is significant that there is
no canonical explanation of the origin of the Borg. As there is no dogma on the
subject, I shall feel free to speculate without risk of committing heresy.
The Borg, I feel, were not made.
They occurred. The Borg are the end product of technological unconcealment,
where all distance and differentiation has collapsed into the cycles of the
machine, ever improving its own functioning by perpetual assimilation. The
Borg’s first progenitor species (that is, the orga they initially developed
from), did not invent them in the sense that they created them spontaneously.
Rather, they were simply a primitive version of the Borg that adapted the
initial conditions for their first literal manifestation, like nanoprobes
preparing a target for assimilation. The Borg where always coming, plunging out
of technology as technology plunges out of history. All of previous
technological and scientific (and cultural?) development has simply been laying
the groundwork for the first collective. The Borg where coming for the
Federation before Q hurled the Enterprise into system J25 [Ibid.], they had
been called by their future-past selves [‘Regeneration’ ENT]. The Borg occur
outside of the causal chain.
They are infinitely adaptable,
but only within the pre-given framework of Borg-ness. The Queen can direct them
creatively, but only towards further assimilation. Though they can perform
cursory surveys and assessments of a target without assimilating it, it is only
through assimilation that they can truly come to understand something, and only
through assimilation that they can progress. Interestingly, they do seem to
recognise this limitation, being willing to make an alliance with the Voyager during their conflict with
Species 8472 [‘Scorpion,’ parts 1. & 2., VOY]. The Borg are sufficiently
adaptable to recognise the limits of their adaptability. Guinan speculates
[‘The Best of Both Worlds,’ part 1., TNG] that is possible that, in the future,
the Borg might be open to negotiation. We see intimations of their striving to
adapt to meet any challenge with their assimilation of Picard [Ibid.], their
alliance with Voyager, even their
breaking down of the chain of causality [‘First Contact’ etc.]; their evolution
is evolving. Their adaptability is adapting [‘Dark Frontiers’ parts 1. & 2.
VOY].
*
The nightmare of transhumanism,
the arrival (note, not creation) of an entirely new order of beings: this is
the Borg. I cannot emphasise enough the importance of the time-travel arc to
their development. The Borg do not exist within any traditional paradigm or
dichotomy; it is senseless to try and understand them through our common
knowledge of the flow of time. They are as beyond that as they are beyond us.
Organic life had its first origins in the inorganic (perhaps Cairns-Smith’s
crystals); more properly, perhaps life has not always been strictly speaking
organic. Why should it continue to be organic? The Borg are neither biological
nor technological in the sense that we use these words. They are their own
order of being.
I do not know if the Borg are
really coming or not. But, if they are coming, they have always been coming,
they have always been preparing to arrive and
we have always been preparing for their arrival. That is the true horror of
them.
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