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The above is a still from the Galactica episode, “The Farm” (scr. Carla Robinson). And so, following on from previous remarks on Battlestar Galactica and sovereignty - throughout the series the distinction between norm and exception unravels at a rapid pace, and in many respects this unravelling parallels a constant traversal between what it means to be human and what it means to be machine, while humans are ostensibly at war with machines, at a number of levels.

From an interview with Anne Cofell Saunders, the writer of the “Pegasus” episode:

“That’s exactly what you want as a writer, to provoke an emotional response,” Saunders said. “I liked bringing up the issue of … is the Cylon a human, or is the Cylon a machine? When you threaten Sharon with rape, you crystallize the moment. People who believe she’s human have to respond. You know clearly who thinks of her as a human and who thinks of her as a machine.”

Humanity is “very, very good at dehumanizing their enemy to justify their own needs,” Saunders said. “I would rather write a script making you think of how prisoners are treated even in a sci-fi context than just writing a script that makes everyone feel good about themselves.” [+]

Which brings up the thread of the second series, namely: the centrality of the female body, the politics of reproduction and population, in shaking up the - often affective but not only - distinctions between human and machine. Plotwise, and more specifically: the removal of Starbuck’s “ovarian cyst” (or was it an embryo?) in the Cylon reproduction “farms”, Cylon Sharon’s pregnancy and the abduction of the baby by the President and Adama, Cylon Gina’s (Six) commentary on “God bids us to be fruitful and multiply”, the increasing reference to the military fleet as “a family”, the Presidential decree banning abortion, Vice-President Baltar’s dream sequence of fathering a human-cylon hybrid with Six, and so on.

It shouldn’t be understated, I think, that the decisive argument in persuading the President of the ‘necessity’ of banning abortion - who expresses with some conviction that she has “fought all her life for the right of women to control their own bodies” - comes when the population figure is brought, once again, into focus.

In other words: the “survival of humanity” ‘demands’ the politicisation of the womb - just as, it might be added, in the parallel universe of American, AU and European politics, the question of ‘declining reproduction rates’ has increasingly girded calls for the a new round of the politicisation of reproduction on the grounds of a more or less explicitly posed ‘choice’ between securing the racialised purity of ‘Western’ nations and immigration (or, in its cruder versions: ‘Islamification’ or ‘Latinisation’). Any sense of ‘necessity’ here is a priori established by the demarcation of the world into separate ‘races’, and ‘choices’ are subsequently posed in light of such.

But, as Federici writes in Caliban and the Witch:

the human body and not the steam engine, and not even the clock, was the first machine developed by capitalism

In this respect, in BSG the figure of the proletariat is not confined to either the anthropological or masculine register, as it was presented by Marx. Nor is the terrain of biopolitics and sovereignty constrained to its racialised terms, as it was by Foucault – indeed, the racialised and gendered aspects are, almost, impossible to disentangle in the series.

Rather, by transforming the figure of robot-Maria from Metropolis into the multiple characters of cylon Six, and in deepening the rebellion of robot-proletarians (that harks back to Bladerunner) in the form of an all-out war, Battlestar Galactica turns around the questions of biopolitics and labour as explicitly questions of the female body as a mechanised body, brought into the field of social production and reproduction, controlled, politicised.

But, more importantly perhaps, in dramatising female bodies, BSG also, particularly in the Second Season, becomes the site and source of the constant disruption of any fine distinction between human and machine, friend and enemy, us and them, around which sovereignties are installed.

Femina ex machina - ex can mean: of, out of, from; by reason of; according to; because of, as a result of. And, it bears some consideration that machina was once used to refer to ’siege machines’ - that is: catapults which can go over and through walls.