Theoria

The most interesting part – and the least developed part as well – of my presentation/talk yesterday on Battlestar Galactica, is, as they say, “below the fold.” Due to circumstances both beyond and within my control, I didn’t actually finish putting it together until about a half hour before it was my turn to speak. More developed comments later.

Carl Schmitt, approximately two-thirds of the way through The Concept of the Political, evokes a plot device frequently found in science fiction: what happens when aliens invade Earth? Schmitt writes, “Humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy, at least not on this planet. The concept of humanity excludes the concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to be a human being – and hence there is no specific differentiation in that concept” (Schmitt 1996[1932: 54). The point here is that so long as humans are limited to earth and have no contact with alien species, humanity cannot become a political concept because humanity as a whole could not confront an enemy and thus act politically or even find itself in a political situation. Schmitt’s comment follows from an earlier argument he makes: the political as such cannot disappear because it is a relation that always creates more than one. That is, a universal state comprising all of humanity and the political cannot co-exist in effect because there would be no ‘outside’ to form the ‘inside.’ If the political persists, then, of necessity, there must be more than one political entity. However, if there is only one universal state, then the political cannot exist. Schmitt comments, “What remains is neither politics nor state, but culture, civilization, economics, morality, law, art, entertainment, etc” (1996[1932]: 53). The very moment at which humanity becomes universal, that activity which is specifically human – i.e., politics – disappears. We are thus reminded of a comment made by Aristotle: humans are animals with the capacity for politics. Thus, when humanity is universalized and the political disappears, humans cease being human and once again become mere animals. This point is fully recognized and, indeed, is the very content of the first half of the ‘mini-series’ pilot, this time from the perspective of the Humans. The famous warship, the Battlestar Galactica, is to be de-commissioned and turned into a museum; its commander, a hero of the first Cylon War, William Adama, is also to retire. Adama and the warship he commands are relics of a previous age: they remember and participated in politics in Schmitt’s sense. The transformation of the Battlestar Galatica into a museum is precisely the transformation of politics into culture. Meanwhile, Adama, a man who once participated in politics, is to retire and, with him, politics as well. This is underscored by what becomes, after the Cylon invasion, Adama’s civilian counterpart, the Secretary of Education, who, we later learn is quite removed from politics being 43rd in line of succession to the office of the Presidency and who only entered government out of personal loyalty to the President. The Secretary of Education, mockingly called a schoolteacher by Adama, is the government’s representative at the retirement/decommissioning ceremony. When each finally hear that war has begun, Adama immediately seizes command of all remaining military assets in order to begin a counter-attack; Roslin, the Secretary of Education turned President, wants an immediate and unconditional surrender.

Obviously, as the Humans are ritually destroying the remnants of the political, the Cylons begin their pre-emptive nuclear war of extermination. The action that subsequently unfolds explores the rebirth of the political and how a confrontation with the political transforms the participants. Neither Humans nor Cylons know what it is to be alive, hence the opening scene – “Are you alive?” “Yes” “Prove it” – repeats itself a number of times throughout the first seson. The result is that politics rapidly transforms from policy and government (and, in this sense, the war of extermination is little more than a carrying out of policy – albeit a divine policy) into, to borrow Nik Rose’s phrase, “the politics of life itself.” For the Cylons, eradication transforms into the attempt to discover the difference between Human and Cylon life by attempting to cross-breed Humans and Cylons thus proving Cylons are as alive as Humans. Meanwhile, for the Humans, politics becomes the attempt to articulate the difference between Human and Cylon so as to develop means of distinguishing between Humans and Cylon at the biological level. Where the biopolitical leads to an existential crisis for the Cylons, for the Humans it leads to the destruction of humanity as a universal concept as the survivors are increasingly decomposed into factions supported by the gradual erasure of the difference within humanity between civil and military authority. As Nietzsche says somewhere, a caged animal soon turns on itself.