The Star Trek Seductions
- Authorized excerpt from “NEGATIVE ECSTASY: The Star Trek Seductions & other Mass Deceptions” -
Star Trek is a troubling example of the circular ruse of distraction in which some of the most questionable values of the day are legitimated. This televisual production has entertained millions of people for more than a quarter of a century and continues to do so in its many permutations. What is it that is so liked? Let us look at some of this - beyond the surface concerns of plot, action and story line.
Family Values?
It has become a common feature for many loyal fans who tellingly call themselves “Trekkies” to wear versions of the costumes of their favourite actor-character when they attend their annual Star Trek conventions. Often entire families don these costumes. This immersion into fantasy through the wearing of clothes is not merely the idolization of the characters in terms of what they are thought to represent, but speaks to the extent to which the thematization of the deep structure of the construed values upon which Star Trek is based, the ideals beneath the surface appearances of the shows, function as fetish in the formation of notions of selfhood. To so adorn the body, is to be also worn by what these accoutrements signify. I am reminded of a mother and a father being asked why their entire family was so dressed, saying, it is because Star Trek is a safe non-violent show, good since it upholds family values and is thus especially good for family life, particularly for the children, and that they are not alone in this view since millions of people also feel this way.
Indeed many others feel this way. This is in itself not surprising. In the age of mass persuasion, mass entertainment incessantly functions in the reproduction of sameness of perspectives. This no longer novel observation, is nevertheless a central feature of contemporary mass culture. Larger numbers of people are produced to think the same way without examining what they are thinking. And to feel good about it. It is the age when difference, particularly in thought, is not only unfashionable, it is dreaded, it is considered dangerous, while sameness breeds smugness, and is even placating. It is when critical thought, necessary for the liberation of vision, is abhorrently abandoned, and individuality is sacrificed to anonymity. This is the triumph of the political economy of conformity necessary for the furtherance of technocapitalism. And it is also the result of the re-construction of the social, designed now in the fashion of the state-corporate control for the perpetuation of itself in power. Where few see beyond what they are educated and trained to see by the owners and controllers of the production of ideas, the order of exploitative control has hegemony. Domination in this context is misconceivingly domesticated as freedom. This is reification56 as a trope of unseeing in contemporary mass culture. The reified are convinced of their intelligence and the correctness of the systems of control in which they have been ideologised, and will angrily defend these. They are the reactionary intelligentsia who have been socialized to refuse to look beyond the surface. They do not see, nor do they want to see what is happening beyond the dazzle and glitter of the techno-screens of their existence. They are the ecstatic cortege fashionably termed “postmodernist”. They abandon reality, deluding themselves that virtuality in the maw of techno-mechanicity is preferable. They dance in the delirium of their own dissolution. This is where the consumers and the manufacturers cohere in the legitimation of the consciousness industry. And the millions of loyal Star Trek fans demonstrate this.
But parents speaking of family values, family life, what’s good for the children.… It all sounds so harmoniously domestic, so well meaning…. But “family values” in Star Trek? Family values, whatever they may be deemed to be, depends on the family as well as the culture in which the family is situated. But family values cannot exist where there are no families. And unless we drastically change the meaning of “family” it will be difficult to find families in Star Trek. Dr. Beverly Crusher is a single mother military officer whose military husband has been killed and whose son, Wesley, is raised by male Star Fleet officers in the sterile confines of a heavily armed and dangerous Federation techno-military space ship, bearing the imprint of an American military name -USS Enterprise. The young man’s greatest aspiration is to become the captain of one of these surveillance and attack vessels of the Federation in space, the frontier to be tamed and conquered in accordance with U.S. techno-military colonizational zeal. His upbringing is highly abnormal. He exists without any significant peer group interaction. He seeks friendship in a male adult military officer and engineer, Jordie, and a machine: the male android, Data.
This does not seem to me to be the depiction of “family values,” unless we consider it a desirable family value to raise children within the repressive state apparatus of techno-phallic military power, children who will go where, in typical euro-imperialist expansionism and conquest, it is absolutely wrong that no one has gone before, and be ready to interfere in and destroy if necessary civilizations which do not conform to Federation military expectations.
Worf, the federation-colonized Klingon, is also a single father and military officer whose son, when we occasionally see him, has endless problems in adjusting to the civilizationally disparate group of children who are being educated by Kaiko, an American-sounding Japanese school teacher. Worf himself, we are asked to accept was raised by a Greek couple after he had been separated as a child from his parents in an inter-galactic war. He longs for a return to his lost Klingon family, dreaming of the mighty Klingon empire of warriors, of whom he is an odd example. Worf is the orphaned African American who is inducted into military life in space in service to the Federation which sees his people as a volatile, unpredictable and dreaded enemy who must be tamed. Worf in effect exists within the machinations of his own negation. He has turned against his own ancestry, in preference to his alienated and stereotypic existence with the techno-military human personnel on board the USS Enterprise. This corresponds to what Euro-colonization on earth has been destructively able to accomplish during the centuries of domination and conquest: to produce large numbers of people who despise their ancestry in preference to the ways of their colonizers. I am hard pressed to see this as being good for children, or for anyone for that matter. It is an unlikely “family life” scenario.
We are asked to further suspend our reasoning and to accept that Kaiko is wife to a Scottish-sounding military officer and engineer on board the USS Enterprise. She floats in space without family ties of her own. In the story she has no distinctive ancestry, no people. Nor does her husband, Chief O’Brien. These two family-less individuals marry and have a child, but there is no family life as such in their existence in the imperial space craft. Their artificial union quickly fades into absence, and the pressing military realities involving Chief O’Brien and the other officers take precedence.
Captain Picard, the Englishman who is supposed to be French, the commandant-in-chief, has no family life of his own. He remembers moments of his past, snippets of a problematic bourgeois fantasy of belonging to a wealthy grape growing gerontocracy in Southern France. He is depicted as having a vague sexual interest in one of his own military-science officers, Dr. Beverly Crusher. His treatment of her son, Wesley, is formal and paternalistic.
The scenario of broken military families and severed relationships within the over-crowning imperative of loyalty to Star Fleet and the Federation, continues in the case of Captain Sisco in Deep Space Nine. Like Worf, his wife is also killed. His son Jake is being raised by him on board the military space station. Unlike the Farengi boy whom Jake befriends, Jake does not dream of being a Federation killer - like his father certainly is. The Farengi boy, however, is only too willing to so serve, and eventually gets his wish to serve in the killing, depicted in typical military ideology, as being necessary.
Much is made of the importance of an idea of the family in the case of Lieutenant Kira and the policeman-shapeshifter, Odo. But in these, family dignity is a thing of the past. In Kira’s case it is used as the justification of war. Indeed space is invented in the Star Trek episodes as the zone of multiple and deadly techno-wars in places that are light-years apart. Odo is homesick but refuses to go home even when he is being welcomed by his shape-shifter ancestors. He dreams of Kira, a woman, like the other military officers, with blood on her hands.
In Voyageur Captain Jane Way, is another family-less, techno-military officer who functions both as the commandant-in-chief and a pseudo-maternal figure to her crew. She can destroy aliens (other peoples?) with cool and murderous efficiency when the situation arises. She is the female counterpart of the paternal Captain Picard of the USS Enterprise, and she can command and do battle often better than the men in Federation Space, and certainly much more than those from alien threatening worlds. The dreaded Borg who were almost indestructible in Picard’s time, are no real threat to Captain Jane Way and her superiorly advanced battleship voyaging in the nether realms of space. In some galaxies her name is even feared. She might be a version of what has been referred to as the “liberated woman,” with ‘liberated” meaning freed from the stereotypes of the Euro-American woman and doing the job of what in Euro-American military contexts is traditionally a man’s. And like Picard, she also has blood on her hands.
In addition to this she is “raising” Seven-of-Nine, the former Borg who has been torn from her parents and the Borg culture in which she was formed, and is being re-trained to be human, where being “human” means being an American military officer. Kidnapping, the military invasion of the Other’s space, this is all legitimated in the demonization of the Other. The old Euro-imperialist racist logic prevails: the Other is deemed inhuman, and this forms the basis for the justification of any and all atrocities committed against them. This is not too far off an echo in the history of the acts of atrocity several European voyageurs committed when they kidnapped Native Peoples from various parts of the earth, took them in chains to Europe, and treated them as specimens of a morbid curiosity where they were always viewed with suspicion. Seven-of-Nine, being humanized, is always suspect. Like Worf, she is still drawn to the evil civilization she has been taken from. And like Worf she is always watched, especially when she has to deal with the members of her prior culture. Captain Jane Way is concerned whenever she has to be involved with the Borg. Captain Picard is similarly concerned when Worf goes among the Klingons. Seven-of-Nine is one of the disfigured Other, unpredictable, potentially capable of treachery.
Racism
In racist cultures57 racist ideals and practices are often not recognized as such by those who engage in them. This is one of the workings in the main-streaming of consciousness which keeps in tact many destructive values. Similar to the racism in the euro-imperialist arrogance which saw, and continues to see, Europeans and their progeny as being superior to all other peoples on earth, Star Trek is steeped in racist cultural ideation.
In Star Trek, the supposed “final frontier” of battle and conquest is rife with threat. In the shattering of rationally we are asked to accept that it is a realm “where no one has gone before” yet it is inhabited by the hundreds of millions of the Other - the disfigured, the grotesque, the non-human, the subhuman, the inhuman, the filthy, those of lesser intelligence who are avaricious, scheming, violent, blood-thirsty, dangerous, and hence can never be trusted, and thus can be invaded, can have their cultures violated, their lands and inhabitants destroyed. “No one” is a reference to EuroAmericans, a minority group in terms of world population. This is the uncanny repetition of the same expansionist British-European racist perspectives which insisted that no one dwelt in the outer regions of the earth when their predatorial imperial voyages of greed and supremacist conquest occupied what they came upon. It is these self-declared “superior humans” who deemed Africa the “Dark Continent” and disfigured Africans as being black (Negra, Negro, and Nigger in the American mode) and hence inferior. Indeed euro-expansionist imperialism saw two-thirds of humanity as sub-human, barbaric, uncivilized, filthy, foolish, back-ward, grotesque, untrustworthy, primitive, with Europeans and European culture as civilized, progressive, beautiful, knowledgeable, and needless to say, supreme. And they proceeded to force their supremacist greed on those whom they demeaned as inferior in centuries of rape, torture and pillage in their military conquests and occupation of lands and peoples.
Those who differed in their views and ways of life, those who resisted this racist domination were demonized the enemy and they were attacked, hundreds of millions of them murdered in wars lasting for centuries. These wars are still going on here on earth although the capitalist press successfully suppresses it. And now in these space-age fantasies there are enemies everywhere it seems, some of them capable of penetrating heavily armoured warships like the USS Enterprise masquerading as a “scientific” vessel. In the colonizational ventures on earth, Europeans tended to project a paranoic notion of their own vulnerability against the presumed viciousness of those whom they called savages, who they believed, were out to do them harm. This is the inversion of the truth. It is the ploy which provided the absolution of guilt and responsibility for their actions against the peoples whom they unrelentingly violated. The analogy holds true in the Star Trek series. The Romulans, the Klingons, the Borg, the Cardassians etc. are the dreaded, the technologically advanced in some cases, but always the intellectually inferior against the superior intellect of the Star Fleet techno-military Command.
And there are other telling situations. Let us take Worf, the African Klingon, and Jordie, the African American engineer. They are both Africans who are being commanded by a European military man, and they are comfortable with this. Indeed they respect Captain Picard highly. Their loyalty to him is never in question. And many viewers of the series find nothing wrong here. But the history of African Americans has been one where British-European military men in their supremacist racist mania have been the principal orderers and violators of African peoples. To have Africans depicted as being eager and respectful to the commanding “white” man of power who orders them around, smacks of the sanitization of the superiority-inferiority dialectic of racist domination. It is where the “white” man is the man of commanding institutional power, and the African American man is without power, the inferior who carries out the superior’s commands, ordering them to “Make it so!”
For too long a time Euro-American racism has seen the African man blackened into inferiority, as either a threatening brute force, or infantilized as a “boy.” In Star Trek both racist themes are there. Worf is a disfigured, muscle-bound, threatening man of violence. Although he was raised on earth by Greeks he is as fierce and instinctively ready to commit violence as the Klingons he encounters from time to time. We are asked to believe (and this is clearly racism) that he comes from a violent race and hence his warlike tendencies. He is, genetically predisposed as it were, to acts of violence. In one episode he claims that if he were to have sex with a “human” (meaning a “white” woman) she would not be able to endure it, she would die. So Worf, the African man, engages in violent sex with women of his own race who not only survive his brutality but enjoy it. In one episode when some of Worf’s ancestral peoples were living peaceably with their one time Romulan enemies, using their weapons of violence as tools for the tilling of the soil to grow flowers, Worf intervenes, teaching one of the youngmen the pleasure of the hunt, the thrill of the kill - as a desirable attribute. He tries his best to resurrect the ancient hatreds, and then beams out to the hovering spacecraft. This is of course at odds with what Worf does on a daily basis in the sterile Enterprise where he relies on techno-military gadgetry to serve the interests of his superiors.
Jordie is the disfigured emasculated man, the “boy.” He is willing to take orders, to accommodate, to please. He fantasizes about Euro-American women, but has no relationship of his own with any woman. He is the son of a Star Fleet African American family. They are later killed, but even before he learns of their death, he rarely saw them. His best friends on board the star ship are the young Wesley Crusher and a machine, the android, Data. Jordie is infantilized in this manner. He is never equal to a Number One, a role relegated to the blue-eyed Euro-American, Riker. Indeed he is equal to no one on board, and to make things worse, he is blind. However, he is hooked up to the ship’s technological gadgetry, and the visor he wears is the connection which gives him sight. So he is more dependent than the others on techno-computerization, the white man’s invention, for his survival. He is thus in techno-bondage. And this pleasing blind African American man who is a fantastic engineer and an efficient military officer - will also kill as part of his duty when ordered to do so by the superior military “white” man of power whose ancestors have destroyed so many Africans and things affirming the identity and dignity of AfroAmerican peoples.
Then there is Gynan, the African wise woman and confidante to the supreme Picard. Gynan is wise without much reference to what actually makes up her wisdom. She is not a military officer, has not been techno-scientifically educated. She is intuitive, a diviner of events to come, and the superior techno-military Commander listens to her. This is a form of the exploitation of indigenous knowledge to serve the exploiter. Gynan is the African psychic who serves the cause of EuroAmerican supremacy in space. “The spiritual power of native peoples, the indigenous Others,” Sardar has noted, “is psychic power, an acuity to the irrational rationality that Modernity drove out of the Western mind through its dedication to scientific rationality.”58 It is this psychic dimension which is appropriated to provide guidance to enhance the techno-imperialist imperative. In one “hollow-deck” episode Gynan is depicted as a Southern U.S. belle, a role which was historically strictly not in the purview of the enslaved or any other African American woman. Despite her intuitive insight she remains the servant, she is the bartender. Her role is to serve. The figure of the African woman is appropriated to serve the interests of the Federation. Put in another way, her blackness, similar to that of the other significant Africans in the series, is serving the whiteness of the space-race cause. This yet another victory for techno-scientific EuroAmerican supremacy.
The insertion of the improbable Captain Sisco in Deep Space Nine, seemingly goes in the other direction. Here is an African American man as a techno-military Federation Captain, a lone “black” commandant in a “white” world, a man it seems, of power, a man who has repeatedly killed “enemies” of the Federation. Surely this is blatant evidence, it has been argued, of respect for the “black” man. However, this tokenistic “respect” is drawn within some of the racist stereotypes of the African American man. His is muscle and brawn, he loves competitive sport, and is obedient to his “white” owner-overlords. Unlike Worf, who appears occasionally in the same stultified coarse aggressive abraisive role, Sisco is an enthusiastic athlete, a pleasing Star Fleet Officer who will do what more senior officials than he, officials like the “white” Admiral Picard, and those higher up in the piling of command, order. This is his military duty. He has to carry out orders whether he likes them or not. He commands and responds to commands. Among other things this kind of typecasting conveys the message to those who are sensitive to the intricacies of racism, that the underlying theme here purports that the way to respect for the African American man is to join the EuroAmerican military supremacist venture, to conduct himself in a manner that will be approved by these “white” authorities, even becoming the rarity of a Captain.
Tuvak, the African American Vulcan in Voyager, is another diminished man, a “boy” who serves his EuroAmerican superiors. In addition to being the unsmiling calculating alien in service to the Federation, he is also an example of appropriated native psychic power. He is also an Other, a native of elsewhere who spends a great deal of his time trying to develop the minds of some of the EuroAmericans on board. He too is separated from his family. He is the only African Vulcan there. But unlike the Vulcan Spock in the first series, he is not always correct in his calculations, and is often slower than some of his EuroAmerican male counterparts. In one episode he even sings a lullaby to soothe a frightened group of children - something Spock would have never deigned to do. One wonders whether there might not be a significant relationship of racial denigration in the caricaturing of Tuvak. The technological wonder so celebrated in the imperium of western science might be talking of a time centuries ahead in other galaxies far away, but the racism upon which the western scientific imaginary has thrived as a politically supremacist power, is disturbingly there. The “white” man has his way and it is the duty of the “black” man to follow and serve if he is to “get up” in life.
Sexism
The principal women protagonists in the series are all phallic EuroAmerican gals. They are not Feminists. They enjoy phallic authority. They do not see themselves as the dominated. They are professional women who will fight alongside their men, similar to the history of British-European women in the onslaughts against the “native savages” in the battle for their space, their land. These are the women who will kill “aliens” without a touch of remorse or human concern when the situation requires it. And this includes Dr. Beverly Crusher who much of the time makes much pretext about her role as a doctor in helping the injured and the ill, but occasionally serves in the noble cause of the defence of her own kind. They are the military women of science who nevertheless play the stereotypic EuroAmerican sexist roles. They are nurturers of EuroAmerican men, their sexual partners when it is convenient to so serve, and unquestioning participants in the techno-phallic preoccupation with military conquest and expansionism.
The cooing Counselor Deana Troy, the Betazoid in The Next Generation series is a prime example. She, more than any of the other women on the Enterprise, is dressed to invite attention to her body as a sexualized object, particularly the revealingly low neckline of her outfit which exaggerates the form and size of her breasts. A most unusual attire for a woman whose job it is to therapize the womenless military men who are predominantly her clients. In her state of half dress, this temptress figure, not only is lover to the fully clothed and uniformed Riker, she is also seen by external forces in the universe as a thing of sex. In one episode she is impregnated by one such force and gives birth. We are led to believe she has had a number of lovers at different times. This type of a sexual motif is not there in the way the men of uniform and violence are presented. But this object of sex is also a military officer, ready to go on armed missions when so ordered by the Captain.
She also has a special Betazoid psychic ability to know whether someone is telling the truth or not, and she uses this psychological invasiveness with seductive coyness to spy on suspects whom she interviews, and reports her findings to the man of supreme power on board, Captain Picard. We must, however, remember she is not human, she is a native Other, a Betazoid, whose psychic power, similar to Gynan’s, is appropriated to serve the cause of the Federation. But unlike Gynan, she is also the Other as erotic property. She is Number One’s sexual partner, and as I have already indicated, a sex thing for entities in the cosmos to use at their whim and fancy. Her mother, when she occasionally appears, is also depicted as being obsessed with sex, with a high preference for EuroAmerican men. In Deana Troy, both her native psychic power and her body, are used in service to federation intelligentsia and phallic lust.
We have in the entire series the pathological exploitation of sexuality in the service of military interests. In Voyager the Borg turned semi-human, is also a perversely sexualized woman-object. Similar to Deana Troy of the Enterprise she is dressed to titillate a voyeuristic gaze. These figures serve in the production of the exploitative gaze - techno-lust as desire. But “virtual” though this fantasy may be, it has nonetheless a significant relationship to the formation of derogatory modes of perception in regard to EuroAmerican and many other women. Perhaps the rape fantasy words of one Trekkie speaking of Deana Troy sums it up disturbingly well: “Great tits and ass, man. Would I love to fuck her!” This is an example of techno-voyeurism fostering the porno-graphic imagination.
I am still thinking about those families who have been persuaded that this is a “safe” show, the children-viewers as well as their approving parents.
Techno-Militarism and Imperialism
PRIME DIRECTIVE: To imperialize where no one has imperialized before.
I have been making references to techno-militarism in Star Trek as the sanitization of imperialism, but more needs to be said of this since this mass entertainment presentation is a prime domesticator of the directives of cultural imperialism, to the demonstrated approval of its entertained audiences. One of the repeated concepts in the series is that through the endeavours of technocapitalism, want and scarcity have been eliminated from the earth, and that this has resulted in the formulation of Space as a techno-military zone of inter-galactic surveillance patrols and wars. There are many problems with this view.
It deceives its viewers into thinking that the most destructive and exploitative economic system in the history of the earth-world, capitalism and its marriage with technology - that which has caused much want and scarcity and thrives upon it - is that which has eliminated want and scarcity. To accept this is to fall into the unreasoning necessary to accept the unreasonable as being reasonable. It becomes worse when the totalitarian rule of militarism is seen as a good thing by people who stridently proclaim themselves free, peace-loving, democratic. This is the kind of “doublethink” George Orwell has observed. It is where the state manipulation of meaning through language has resulted in the creation of a populace incapable of recognizing the dire contradiction there is in the upholding of these views. This is a form of regressive thinking characteristic of contemporary reified capitalist nation-state corporate culture. It forms and holds the status quo.
When surveillance and military control are accepted as the promulgators of peace, the meaning of peace has been destroyed. Peace becomes that which military resolution brings about - repressive tolerance - with intolerance aggressively there in each armed peacekeeping patrol. And in this the fundamentally authoritarian, armed and murderous, anti-democratic violent nature and function of militarism, gets reinforced. This approval is the predictable outcome of a populace ideologized into not finding anything particularly wrong with empires and wars. It has been estimated that close to 80% of the American-Canadian populace support the warring missions of their states, despite their unctuous pretexts about being peaceful peoples. The NASA space exploration project which makes a great deal about the science involved in their space missions - is also a corporate state-military venture. There is calculating interest in developing star-war technologies. The space above the earth is already mined with surveillance satellites. Spokespersons of the NASA project have repeatedly and explicitly stated that their interest in reaching the planet Mars, for example, is to “colonize” it. This is no different from the aims of expansionist missions which left Europe to colonize two-thirds of the earth during the predatorial heyday of Euro-imperialist delusions of grandeur which sought conquest wherever they went. But when the population has been schooled into finding nothing wrong with colonization, it is unlikely that the decision to colonize another place will be condemned. In fact just the opposite happens. It is lauded as a good thing.
We have to bear in mind that both of these countries developed through the cultural modalities of the colonizing forays of Europeans against the original dwellers who were there long before their land and peoples were preyed upon by Euro-imperial greed and racism. Part of the ideological production of the subject in the technocapitalist corporate-nation-state is through the formulation of perception to approve of, and hence legitimate, the adventurism and the atrocities committed in the history of the formation of this structure of power. This also applies to other state formations. The principal function of patriotism is to bind the loyal subject to the tyrannic control of the state which names itself “democratic.” Love of the state also requires loyalty to what the state does. This is one of functions of state-run systematized education, the perception management business in service to the political economy of corporate state-order of perception. It reproduces patriotism, the emotion necessary for the perpetuation of Corporate-State-power. And the patriotic gaze is blinded by the mythology of patriotism. In warring States militarism is an essential dimension of patriotism. It is where the armed forces are not seen for what they are. They are not seen as the repressive and violent arm of the state. Today soldiers are seen as peace-keepers. There is a romance with the agents of repression and slaughter. Their acts of killing are deemed heroic. Their actions are the stuff of adventure. The population is titillated by their deeds. This population is also the Star Trek population, the audiences who enjoy the techno-military appropriation of “The Future” without recognizing the horror of this possibility. The colonization of space for them is: scientific military expeditions, the zone of high-tech combat, bloodless death of aliens, explosions of colour in far-off galaxies.
Much has been affirmingly written about Star Trek - from those claiming all they really need to know was learned from watching Star Trek59 - to the study of science fiction audiences on both sides of the Atlantic60 - to encyclopedias proclaiming they are reference guides to the Future,61 and many more. The popularity of the series is related to the colonization of consciousness where surface-text readings serve to prevent the avid viewer from seeing the disturbance at work beneath the deceptive play of appearances. Educating people to see only that which they are allowed to see, is the process through which the colonization of consciousness works. If you see only what you are told to see, your freedom to perceive has been undermined. The colonization of consciousness is necessary for the hegemony of technocapitalist control. And television audiences have been the target recipients of such ideological instruction, during their schooling, and their socialization in the image-discourse of superficiality. They have been produced to fit within the meta discourse of conformity - without necessarily recognizing what is actually happening. This convergence of influence reinforces a positivistic relationship to much of what they see - to the loss of critical insight.
This is a dimension of the ideological control in the colonization of perception. The positivistic imagination has a positive relationship to the en-trenchment of the structures of control, and this includes the control of thought itself, while the human subject is contradictorily persuaded s/he is “free.” This is the regression of thought. It is thus, for ex-ample, that in Star Trek the stated non-interventionist Star Fleet edict, the “Prime Directive”, is held on to, despite the fact that it is broken in every televised episode. The reified eye does not see surveillance as interference. Beaming into another country, another world, is not considered interference. Intervening in the domestic disputes of other peoples in other worlds is not seen as interference. Engaging in war with the designated enemy is not seen as interference, or as the breaking of the Prime Directive since these acts are always rationalized as being necessary, given the circumstances. The enemy is always blamed, and to be blamed, for forcing the circumstances. To the reified eye the designation of sections of Space as Star Fleet Federation Space is not recognized as the horrible occupation of outer Space as a Federation war zone. These are all violations of the Prime Directive. Without the violations there would be no story to tell, no adventure, no confrontation with suspect aliens. But the retainance of the notion of the Prime Directive lends credibility to the sop which the principle of non-interference addresses. It is part of the self-mythologizing of the interfering forces. The justifications for intervention - blaming the enemy - are ways of rationalizing interference. In this way audiences are being prepared to view Space as a frontier of unknown threats requiring the scientific intensification of military control.
There is in this a remarkable correspondence to American foreign policy on Earth where non-interference is the buzz word which masks the daily interferences with other nations and states who are required to comply or suffer the consequences of techno-military attacks, wars lasting years, slaughtering children, women and men, the old, the feeble, even at times the bombing of mental hospitals. It is in this way that the EuroAmerican primary directive in furthering imperial technocapitalism works - with the approval of the vast majority of their domestic populations.
There is a strong relationship between - to boldly go where no one has gone before - and to boldly imperialize where no one has imperialized before. The disturbing successes of the Star Trek phenomenon is that it has persuaded its millions of faithful viewers over the years that it is about peace, freedom and decency in a future freed from toil through science - a future invigilated by techno-scientific militarism. In this future, Space is the zone of command and obedience based on the treat as well as the actuality of violence. In this future there is no longer any privacy. None of the protagonists in Star Trek is beyond the surveillance reach of the computer. No “life-form” escapes detection. As such this show is not merely the celebration of what has been deemed “the technological imperative” but rather it is the inseparable fusion of the politics of techno-centric military combat and the intensification of surveillance and control. A frightening scenario of the future.
These frightening scenarios have exploded into ecstatic techno-babble adventure series for youth - as in the YTV shows - bloodless violence and violent explosions aimed at conscious vindictive techno-beasts, violence as the resolution to problems, wars irrationably seen as that which stops wars and warring. The manipulation of images may be clever, but the stories are fundamentally the same. The unchanging proposal is that there is an evil force out there who must be defeated through techno-military intervention. Destruction dissolves threat, resolves problems, unites “the good guys”, even brings love. These are in effect the workings of the death of the imagination. They are the death scenarios in the macabre ecstasy of nihilism. This is what Baudrillard has termed the evil demon of conformity, negative ecstasy.
Endnotes
- For a discussion on reification see Georg Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988, pp.83-109.
- For an insightful discussion on the subject see David Goldberg, Racist Culture, Blackwell, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1996.
- Ziauddin Sardar, Postmodernism and the Other, Pluto Press, London, 1998, p.103.
- See Dave Marinaccio, All I need to know I learned from watching Star Trek, Crown Trade Paperbacks, New York, 1994.
- John Tullock and Henry Jenkins, Science Fiction Audiences, Routledge, 1995.
- See Michael Okuda (et al), The Star Trek Encyclopedia, Pocket Books, 1994.
NEGATIVE ECSTASY: The Star Trek Seductions & other Mass Deceptions
by A.H. Itwaru, from Other Eye Books, a division of the Other Eye Cultural Collective. 160 pages, ISBN 1-896887-01-5, Price: $22.
Negative Ecstasy is available in Toronto at York University Bookstore, A Different Booklist, Book City (Annex & Bloor West Village), Pages Books & Magazines, Dec Bookstore.
CONTENTS PAGE:
Foreword 6
Amidst Towers and the Towering 9
The CN Tower 14
Image Consumption in the Production of Meaning 25
The Rock Video 37
Live Aid and Incoherence 43
Lifestyle Advertising 54
Entertainment as Enchainment and Delirium unto Death 58
The Star Trek Seductions 61
Family values? 61
Racism 68
Sexism 75
Techno-militarism 78
Disney as Mass Deception 85
The Lion King 86
Pocahontas 90
Pornographic Imagination and Industrial Eroticism 94
Eroticized Production as De-eroticization 100
Free Speech as Farce and Information as Domination 105
Unbearable Delirium as Negative Ecstasy 135
The Critique Must Continue 138
Addendum:
Of Bondage and Blindness: an Inquiry into Language and Social Control 139
Endnotes 155
A.H. Itwaru lectures in the Social Sciences at York University and in Caribbean Studies at New College, University of Toronto.
Books by A.H. Itwaru
Fiction
Shanti
The Unreturning
Morning of Yesterday
Poetry
Shattered Songs
entombed survivals
The Sacred Presence
Body Rites
Scholarly
Mass Communication and Mass Deception
Critiques of Power
The Invention of Canada
Closed Entrances (co-author: N. Ksonzek)
Other Eye Books
new writing new knowledges incisive social & cultural analyses anti-imperialism anti-racism quality fiction
contact e-mail
Other Eye Cultural Collective
P.O. Box 84623, 2336 Bloor St. West, Toronto, Ontario M6S 4Z7 Canada, contact e-mail, Tel: 416-762-7961