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Week 12: Education and Utopia - Zamyatin's We, and the Borg!
(Resistance is Futile.)
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return to module outline,
last updated 15.12.09.
Review the two readings from your pack and the websites on the resource page and below; and remember that this early Russian Twentieth Century text has been variously described as the precursor to Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. Written in 1921, it post-dates the Russian Revolution by three years and, not surprisingly given its condemnation of totalitarianism, was banned in Russia - no Russian version was ever made available to its intended audience until 1988 and Zamyatin himself was permanently exiled. But why go over week nine's lecture material again? The answer is simple: because in the depiction of a state in which the distinctions between individuals have been reduced to alphanumeric codes we have a perhaps final perfection of Simmel's 'money economy', and in the ultimate aim of One-State's controller an aspiration to produce a society without subjectivity or identity.
Here are some more websites on Zamyatin and We to ponder:-
What George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four owes Yevgeny Zamyatin's ...
Zamyatin's We and Postmodernism.(Critical Essay) - Utopian Studies ...
Gary Cox reviews Human Nature in Utopia- Zamyatin's We by Brett Cooke
Paradise- As Seen in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We and Other Literary ...
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We will discuss the readings and some other aspects of the book in the lecture, but alongside those activities we will also look at the Borg from the Star Trek stable of films, TV shows, and books.
The significance of Zamyatin's intention to write.
Broadly speaking, this can be summarised in one phrase: the loss, or eradication, of the individual subject. This module provides you with a number of narratives that skirt around this idea. From Forster's 'When the Machine Stops' there is the lack of individuality in the machine cells and the fact that all communication is mediated by the Machine, from Wells' The Time Machine both the Eloi and the Morlocks are treated as undifferentiated masses, apart from the almost type-like Weena. The Handmaid's Tale presents a picture of a society in which a gendered class of individuals effectively lose their social identity, while Blade Runner introduces us to clones (who, nevertheless, are uniquely named). AI Artificial Intelligence is similar in this respect, in that 'David' comes to recognise that apart from his unique imprinting he is only 'the first of a kind', which he translates as meaning no more than 'one of a kind'. Finally, The Truman Show starts with an illustration of Truman as bland and literally formed as a product of an apparently utopian environment, while GATTACA gives us a society in which identity is subordinated to genetic characteristics.
In this respect Zamyatin's We is similar in that it draws back from attempting to represent identity-less subjectivity. Instead, we have the depiction of a society where all the outward social discriminations are reduced to codes and stereotypes, and the depiction of subjective experience - when not blasted apart by the irruption of 'natural' and unpredictable impulses - is also similarly stereotyped. Only towards the end of the novel do we move closer to the enforced loss of personal identity which the controller of OneState conceives as the next step in social progress. One might ask at the point why such an outlandish idea struck Zamyatin as so important that it deserved to be developed into a novel. If one digs around amongst the cultural fragments that remain of the first revisions to the Russian Revolution - roughly 1919 through to 1922, one will find that this idea is precisely the kind of poetic culmination of social strategies being expressed by artists, writers, dramatists, and poets favoured by the Revolutionary authorities. One needs to pay close attention to Zamyatin's ending, therefore, but also look for other sketches of this, particularly - since this is our interest - as these relate to education: enter the Borg.
As the clips make clear (supplemented by any complete versions which you can gain access to) the realisation of this idea is experimented with in various ways. Depictions of Borg drones make them robot-like and incapable of making communications to others except as the 'voice' of the collective. When isolated there are various narratives which explore the idea that once released from the collective they are capable of re-gaining their identity, although this is usually impaired or inflected in some way - the principal and spectacular example of this being Seven-of-Nine. However, a number of episodes in StarTrek were devoted to exploring the consequences of Captain Jeanne-Luc Picard and Data being 'assimilated', and in both cases a measure of resistant identity was retained. Similarly, the Borg Queen, although cloned and replaced by another physical body during the course of several episodes, also exhibits a distinct identity, although this is said to be simply as a unified embodiment of the co-ordinating functions of the collective; subsequent stories alter this account, showing her rejecting and over-riding the conclusions of the collective.
From both a social and educational perspective it is worth while trying to work out how this identity-less subjectivity can be represented in more fulsome terms, and how a social function like education might impact on this subjectivity. As one explores this idea, one also begins to explore just what it is that one wants to claim for inter-subjective meaning. If this is removed, and there is no longer any need for individuals to have efficient 'theories of mind' with regard to other individuals, what happens? Is there no variation amongst the drones - is the experience of one immediately shared by all - does education happen instantaneously for the entire collective? More fundamentally, is the notion of subject and objective transcribed so that I/We is the single subject of the collective, and everything that is not part of the collective is an object of one sort or another, inculding the category 'animate'? It might be helpful to find out about the Cylons - a cloned race of cybernetic humanoids that come in a number of distinct configurations - introduced in the revised series of Battlestar Gallatica, and the various embodiments of cybernetic beings illustrated in The Matrix particularly Mr. Smith. In each case, the interesting educational and philosophic question is - what happens to subjectivity either after assimilation (the Borg, the Matrix world) or the realisation that one's identity is compromised by being one of a type (Cylons, David, and the replicants in BladeRunner)?
Here are some related sites for the Borg - first the Queen - and then other forms:
The Borg Queen- one of the creepiest and most menacing film villains of recent years.
Borg Queen - Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki
Borg Queen - STARTREK.COM - Biography
Star Trek Voyager Season 5 the borg queen speaks
and the Borg themselves:
Borg (Star Trek) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Borg - Memory Alpha, the Star Trek Wiki
One aspect of nearly all of these representations of quasi-human subjectivities that features, time and again, is their quest for perfection - however conceived. As far as the Borg are concerned, it explains their drive to incorporate all other life forms in their pursuit of this ultimate goal, since individual characteristics, if judged to be of value, are assimilated. But even when the clone, etc. is represented as being limited in some respects, there is nearly always a counter-claim for their perfection in others, thus making them, perhaps, that much closer to the angels. Clearly such perfection has an educational dimension, and it is not too fanciful to return to Rousseau's (and Wordsworth's) conception of the child arriving in the world already possessing certain desirable qualities in abundance. But here Émile, David, the 'human' cylons, the Borg themselves, and the replicants from BladeRunner are interesting in that they all in various ways are ignorant of what they possess, or of their true nature. It is at this point in the analysis that I think one can usefully return to Suvin's table and begin to make some more serious statements - and raise some more fundamental questions - about the nature of education in relation to these collective 'types'. Inevitably, if you press hard enough, these questions and conclusions will drive further across Suvin's table towards issues relating to the 'duration' of the social types portrayed, while descending further down the table gets you to the level of what Suvin calls 'actants', and here one needs to reflect on something else. Clearly, these non-human entities are usually presented as antagonistic or, if not directly antagonistic, at least of such a nature as to question the moral stability of what it is to be human. Golding achieved this form of question-raising simply by abstracting one form of humanity - children - who were normally expected to have certain fixed characteristics, i.e., in Suvin's terms, to be readily identified 'types'; through his narrative he showed how this type could turn into something equally fixed, but utterly undesirable.
Spectacular as these non-human types may be, therefore, are they simply best understood as literal embodiments for ideas that sluggish minds need because they are incapable of imagining the possibilities that ordinary humans have in extraordinary circumstances, i.e., is this the ultimate put-down for all claims for utopian and dystopian fiction? Alternatively, if we are to allow that these forms of representation bring something positive to the party - just what is it, and whatever 'it' is, does it have any contribution to make to our understanding of education? You may find it interesting to include within your thinking about these representations Michael Crichton's novel Prey, and the 'birth' of SandMan in Spiderman 3, at
Spider-man 3- birth of Sandman
Fox bought the rights to Prey, but never produced the movie for reasons that are interesting to investigate. Apart from the book, which is up to Crichton's usual high standard, this review by Freeman Dyson is well worth reading:
Freeman Dyson’s review of Prey
Over to you,
but remember, 'You will be assimilated!'
