FULTON, 'OTHER FRONTIER: VOYAGING WEST WITH MARK TWAIN AND _STAR TREK_'S IMPERIAL SUBJECT', Postmodern Culture v4n3
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AN OTHER FRONTIER: VOYAGING WEST WITH MARK
TWAIN AND _STAR TREK_'S IMPERIAL SUBJECT^1^
by
VALERIE FULTON
Dept. of English
Colorado State University
_Postmodern Culture_ v.4 n.3 (May, 1994)
pmc@unity.ncsu.edu
Copyright (c) 1994 by Valerie Fulton, all rights
reserved. This text may be used and shared in
accordance with the fair-use provisions of U.S.
copyright law, and it may be archived and redistributed
in electronic form, provided that the editors are
notified and no fee is charged for access. Archiving,
redistribution, or republication of this text on other
terms, in any medium, requires the consent of the
author and the notification of the publisher, Oxford
University Press.
In the twenty-fourth century, there will be no hunger,
and there will be no greed.
--Gene Roddenberry, to actor Jonathan Frakes
[1] Following in the footsteps of another primetime
television drama, _Northern Exposure_, which has featured
both Franz Kafka and Federico Fellini in recent programming,
_Star Trek: The Next Generation_ bridged its 1992 and '93
seasons with a cliffhanger that meshed the cast of fictional
Star Fleet officers with another "real-life" historical
figure, Samuel Clemens. This trend of having writers and
avant-garde film makers appear in popular t.v. series
suggests not so much an acceptance of the sort of cultural
criticism going on in academia today as it does an
appropriation of high cultural figures by the corporate
television industry. The industry "sells" Kafka and Fellini
to the viewer, complete with the signifying props that have
come to denote intellectualism--dark clothing, moodiness, an
aura of mystery--all of which serve to take the place of any
real attempt to engage the potentially subversive ideas
expressed either in Kafka's fiction or in Fellini's films.
Such strategies of appropriation are particularly important
to a show like _Northern Exposure_, whose success depends
less on the images of alternative living it presents than on
the standard t.v. equation of thriving capitalism--its main
characters include an ambitious doctor, a millionaire
entrepreneur, and a restaurant owner--with Kantian altruism,
here reenforced by the program's background cast of
righteous but predominantly voiceless Native Americans.
[2] This process by which commodification finally stifles
alternative discourse is described well in Susan Willis's
study, _A Primer for Daily Life_. Willis uses the
California school system's promotion of "earthquake kits" to
demonstrate how consumer packaging can result in a series of
items' "complete condensation to the commodity form" (165).
She differentiates between camping out, which relies on
articles developed for military use yet can also be used to
stage anti-military protests, and the earthquake kit itself,
the contents of which merely "embody the simulated
remembrance of how they might have been used if purchased
for a camping trip, but . . . do not give access to social
practice or its guerrilla theatre reversal" (168). The
process by which high cultural figures become reduced to
t.v.'s commodity form differs only in the sense that few
Americans are aware of the originary ideas behind a
signifying figure. When a friend once defended _Northern
Exposure_ to me on the ground that "a show that quotes
Nietzsche can't be all bad," she hit on the central problem.
We live in a culture where "Nietzsche" is a metonym for
intellectual thought much in the way that "Kleenex" is a
metonym for something to wipe one's nose on: to appreciate,
even identify with, the t.v. character who quotes from
_Beyond Good and Evil_, one hardly needs to have read or
even to know of the text. Networks can thus extend their
appeal to (and in the process help define) the "thinking
American," whose pleasure comes from seeing the metonymic
association in this unfamiliar context, while at the same
time risking neither their mainstream audience nor their
corporate sponsorship.
[3] The appearance of Samuel Clemens on _Star Trek: The
Next Generation_ confirms the idea that intellectual
thought can be reduced to the least common denominator of
the commodity form. Moreover, Clemens's appearance on the
show underscores the extent to which t.v. programs
themselves may unintentionally reproduce ideological
assumptions that we consume, store, and later regurgitate.
_Star Trek: The Next Generation_, a show about the
future's altruistic exploration of life on other planets,
tacitly helps to perpetuate the conventional U.S. wisdom
that acts of imperialism by our government against third
world nations are benevolent rather than self-serving,
benign rather than aggressive. Clemens's appearance on the
episode in question as an inquisitive and bothersome fixture
of the western American frontier situates him firmly in a
past where the imperial self was a fixture both dominant and
heroic. This portrayal does more than belie the strong
anti-imperialist tenor of Clemens's later work. In being
asked to consume the writer as a frontier artifact we are
not only encouraged to believe that Star Fleet Command--and,
by extension, the television viewer--has progressed beyond
the sort of "frontier mentality"^2^ Americans have come to
associate with acts of wrongful acquisition; we are
simultaneously *dis*couraged from practicing the kind of
intellectual self-scrutiny that might produce alternative
modes of discourse and lead toward social change.
I. "*to boldly go where no one has gone before*"
[4] _Star Trek: The Next Generation_'s U.S.S. Enterprise,
the flagship for an entire fleet of Federation vessels, has
as its "continuing mission" a duty to "explore strange new
worlds" and to "seek out new life forms." Since it also has
the weapons capacity to annihilate a small planet, crew
members sometimes find themselves obliged to reassure
species from less technologically advanced worlds that,
remarkable as it may seem, the arsenal is for defensive
purposes only. Unlike the incredulous life form who
believes weapons are made to be used, American t.v. viewers
have little trouble accepting the show's nonviolent
premise--in large part because we are accustomed to the
routine stockpiling of nuclear and other advanced weapons
for the protection of our country's "national security."
Yet the program itself, which pretends to see through
twentieth-century self-deceptions by presenting our time in
retrospect as avidly militaristic, provides its viewers with
still another rationale. The Federation's Star Fleet
officers are not inclined to act aggressively, _Star Trek_
tells us, because everything they need is already at their
disposal. In other words, the show relies on Marx's early
notion that human nature is bound to the mode of production
to explain how future generations have become more
"civilized" and "humane." The material substances used to
reenforce this notion are, not coincidentally, food and
energy.^3^ Here human agency has been removed from the mode
of production altogether: "food replicators" provide all
crew members with abundant, effortless, computer-generated
meals, while the "warp coil" draws on a fictitious energy
source to power the Enterprise through space. When not
burdened by the exigencies of frontier travel, _Star Trek_'s
crew is free--with some help, of course, from the Holodeck's
simulated landscapes--"to hunt in the morning, fish in the
afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after
dinner, . . . without ever becoming hunter, fisherman,
shepherd or critic" (Marx, 53). Nor is this multiplicity of
roles limited to recreational practice. Although there is
an ostensible division of labor among the program's main
characters, Star Fleet commanders not only manage to avoid
disaster by employing the critical methodologies or
expertise of absent crew members, they also pool information
to discover unified solutions to most of the emergencies
that threaten their ship.
[5] But if _Star Trek_ implies that the future will
liberate us from alienating modes of production, the
program is finally unable to conceive a community based
on Marx's notion of mutual ownership rather than on the
principles of state control. Star Fleet is, after all, a
military organization, and like all military organizations
its order of command follows a strict hierarchy. The crew
members' willingness to obey their superiors is so routine,
in fact, that _Star Trek_'s writers appear to have become
bored with it; their invention of the renegade "Q," a
representative from a "nearly omnipotent" life form, allows
for the intrusion of Byronic skepticism without the threat
of a specific challenge to the status quo. For instance,
"Q" mocks the egalitarianism which prompts Captain Jean-Luc
Picard to call his first officer "number one" by reminding
Commander Riker that he is, in the established order, no
better than "number two." Yet "Q" himself, who wields
seemingly infinite power for personal rather than altruistic
reasons, does not present a more attractive alternative to
Star Fleet's hierarchical model. In fact, his character
suggests that to be freed from the controlling mechanisms of
an "illusory community" (Marx, 83) is to become capricious,
childlike, and unresponsive to the rights of others.
[6] That _Star Trek_ portrays an ideal future community in
which humans have surpassed twentieth-century greed and
aggression while at the same time relying on recursive
models of the state apparatus is an unavoidable paradox; the
show can, after all, do no more than pretend to know a
future we have yet to live. For that reason, I will not
question its least probable expedients--that all aliens
converse in perfect English, that humans can interbreed with
alien life forms, that most planets seem atmospherically
conducive to human life, etc..^4^ Rather, I concentrate on
the show's central paradox, the fact that its future
orientation coincides with the exploration of "strange new
worlds," something Americans perceive as a completed
historical task. As I have already suggested, the erasure
of the present moment from this formulation helps to direct
viewer attention away from the fact that exploration,
conquest, and colonization continue to be routinized parts
of twentieth-century American economic policy. Just as
important, however, is the extent to which this erasure
reveals the future's dependence on and connection with the
past. Frontier travel can never signify an absolute
departure, since not only does this idea imply that our
invention of new experience or of new means of socialization
is possible; it suggests that we are able to describe
otherness without reverting to the language and ideological
constructions of the same. As Derrida argues in "Psyche:
The Invention of the Other," "invention does not create an
existence or a world as a set of existents"; it "discovers
for the first time . . . what was already *found* there"
(338, original emphasis). Moreover, while invention
"presupposes originality," it will "only receive its status
of invention" when it is "protected by a system of
_conventions_ that will ensure . . . its belonging to a
culture: to a heritage, a lineage, a pedagogical tradition,
a discipline, a chain of generations" (316, original
emphasis).
[7] Tzvetan Todorov, writing about Columbus's voyage to the
Caribbean, provides a means to address these ideas in
relation to a logic of frontier exploration. Because guided
by a system of absolute conventions and beliefs, Columbus
"knows in advance what he will find; the concrete experience
is there to illustrate a truth already possessed" (17).
Thus, confronted by natives who tell him that Cuba is an
island rather than part of the Asian continent, "he decides
to eliminate" this information and "challenges the quality
of his informants" (21) instead of altering his initial
hypothesis. He is likewise unable to register diversity in
language; the "only two possible" ways he can behave when
forced to communicate with Indians are "to acknowledge
[their foreign tongue] as a language but to refuse to
believe it is different; or to acknowledge its difference
but to refuse to admit it is a language" (30). As Todorov
argues, Columbus's inability to perceive otherness stems
from his belief that Spanish language and culture do not
constitute "one convention among others, but [are] rather
the natural state of things" (29). Such foundational
thinking is central to most notions of frontier exploration
and conquest.^5^ Consider, for instance, the statement of
purpose used to introduce _Star Trek: The Next Generation_.
The Federation's goals are both "to seek out new
civilizations" and "to boldly go where no one has gone
before"--missions that clearly contradict each other unless
read through the lens of frontier ideology, which grants new
civilizations existence only to the extent that the
originary culture has "found" them.
II. "Prime" Surveillance
[8] In carrying out their mission of frontier exploration,
Star Fleet officers are at all times bound to obey the
"Prime Directive," a policy designed by _Star Trek_'s
writers to underscore the future's first commitment to
justice and humanity. The ordinance, which prohibits all
Federation personnel from interfering with the cultural
development of less advanced worlds, bears a striking
resemblance to the mandate now issued at federal parks and
wilderness areas throughout the U.S., usually in the form of
a sign cautioning against the destruction of a "fragile
ecosystem" and requesting that visitors leave everything as
they found it. Because the Federation takes an
anthropological interest in developing cultures, but is
prevented by the Prime Directive from openly engaging in
their study, research teams descend to the planet under
investigation and conceal themselves either behind an
electronic blind or within surgically altered bodies; like
the twentieth-century field biologist, their objective is to
collect observable data without disturbing subjects or
taking them outside their natural habitat.
[9] These measures bear a less obvious but important
resemblance to current naturalist strategies in the extent
to which both justify surveillance as the necessary
precondition for scientific research and, ultimately, the
greater good of humanity. I do not wish to suggest that the
surveillance of wilderness areas or game preserves is in
itself problematic, but simply to point out how readily a
logic of "stewardship" translates into a logic of
imperialism.^6^ On a recent episode of _Star Trek: The Next
Generation_ entitled "First Contact," Commander Riker has
been disguised and sent on a recognizance mission to
determine whether a species about to attain warp drive is
ready to assume to the sort of responsibilities Federation
officials deem necessary in using such advanced technology.
Unfortunately, Riker is hospitalized on the planet's
surface; the surgeons who operate notice his strange
internal structure and conclude that he is a different
species from themselves. Although this series of events
might easily have led to a critique of Star Fleet
surveillance practice, the episode focuses instead on the
threat these aliens' recognition of Commander Riker poses to
the Prime Directive, which Picard must violate if he wishes
to save his first officer's life. The show encourages us to
identify with Picard's "human" dilemma before we consider
the inconsistency presented by his "away team"'s
surveillance procedures, in large part because it portrays
the aliens themselves as xenophobic--so much so that they
resolve to postpone warp drive testing until they can face a
universe in which their culture is neither dominant nor
central. This resolve, culminating in a refusal to join the
Federation alliance, reconstitutes the marginal and
particularly non-human status of the alien race; unlike
their leading scientist, who prefers to accompany the crew
of the Enterprise rather than live among outmoded ideas and
technology, the others are content to remain behind. That
Picard's largesse permits them this freedom, moreoever,
obscures a more pressing issue--the impossibility of their
ever regaining the cultural autonomy they seek. Like the
earth's remaining predators, which roam our wilderness parks
while human advocates tag them, keep track of their
procreative habits, and lobby for their protection, the
aliens have already been inscribed within Star Fleet's
cultural heritage. They have been seen, regardless of
whether they choose to see.
[10] In "The Eye of Power," Michel Foucault evokes the
"Panopticon" as a conceptual model for the Enlightenment's
more general goal, first to erradicate "any zones of
darkness . . . established by the privileges of royal power
or the prerogatives of some corporation," and then to
realize "the dream that each individual, whatever position
he occupied, might be able to see the whole of society, that
men's hearts should communicate, their vision be
unobstructed by obstacles, and that opinion of all reign
over each" (152). Instead of the social attainment of this
goal, however, what emerges is a disciplinary system in
which authority becomes "a machinery that no one owns" and
"class domination can be exercised just to the extent that
power is dissasociated from individual might" (156).
Foucault's rejection of "ownership" as the primary means of
attaining and inscribing power is especially pertinent to a
discussion of _Star Trek: The Next Generation_, since most
property on board the Enterprise is collective, and money
no longer exists as a form of exchange within the
Federation's economic system. In fact, one might argue that
the bodies of the crew members themselves have become the
abstract property (in Deleuze's sense of "abstract machinic"
arrangements)^7^ of the moral capital established at the
interface between Federation members and the all-
encompassing surveillance mechanism within which they live
and work. This device, the ship's computer network, no
longer represents the strictly _visual_ surveillance that
Foucault theorized, but is instead a kind of "infosensorium"
internalized in the body-*as*-computer, with the result that
the frontier of the body itself becomes "colonized" as a
self-monitoring machine.^8^
[11] Not surprisingly, and despite the fact that the
computer is used as frequently to obtain information about
Federation staff as it is to investigate other, possibly
hostile life forms, _Star Trek_ viewers are discouraged from
making an overt connection between the constitution of power
relations and the surveillance of crew members. Instead,
they are asked to see the computer as a direct extension of
benign human agency, a tool no better than the individuals
responsible for its use. Potential anxiety about the
dangers of surveillance technology is further minimized--
while, ironically, the process by which the body becomes
machinic is advanced--by giving the computer a human
counterpart. Ship's counselor Deanna Troi, a genetic
mixture of the human and Betazoid races, has inherited
powers of mental telepathy that enable her to bring others'
hidden emotions to light much in the same way that a
computer probe can determine their physical structure.^9^
However, the counselor escapes becoming the mere agent of
surveillance practice in large part because, as she is also
portrayed, she is a feminine woman who loves chocolate,
gossip, and romantic settings. Channelled through this
familiar and nonthreatening human personality, Troi's
telepathic powers emerge as little more than a refined form
of "female intuition." Thus, while the television viewer
may be able to trivialize her role as a Federation officer,
it is almost impossible to imagine Troi as an alien endowed
with the potential to "access" human minds.
[12] As these examples suggest, surveillance technology
intersects frontier ideology at the level of the distinction
between self and other. The concept of an "imperial self"
is especially important: regardless of a given Star Fleet
officer's race, that officer's success as a member of the
Federation is contingent on how closely his or her actions
correspond to the specifically *human* ideals of hard work,
loyalty, and compassion; aliens, on the other hand, are
those who do not willingly subordinate their cultural
impulses to the dominant model. For the American television
viewer, this ought to be a familiar concept, since it is
directly analogous to the commonly held belief that
marginalized peoples should be accepted only to the extent
that they assimilate white, middle-class notions of culture
and value. Dissent among Star Fleet officers, when it
occurs, is thus an effect not of bad Federation policy, but
rather of covert intrusions from the outside which conspire
to make Federation personnel "other"--much in the same way
that rising suburban crime rates are thought to result not
from discriminatory U.S. economic policies, but instead from
the immigration of ethnic minorities into predominantly
white neighborhoods. Likewise, aliens who serve as members
of Star Fleet Command must continually prove their
allegiance to the Federation, usually through confrontations
with their native cultures that are designed to reconfirm
the superior ideological position they have adopted. For
instance, the program's Klingon Security Officer, Lieutenant
Commander Worf, has not merely chosen to join the
Federation; his father has been wrongly denounced as a
traitor by the Klingon High Council, a mistake that makes
Worf "alien" to his own people while at the same time
showcasing the autocratic, rash, and narrow-minded impulses
of the Klingon race.
[13] Ultimately, characters like Worf allow _Star Trek_'s
writers a convenient means of circumventing the Prime
Directive, since all such characters engage in a continual
conversion to the Federation's higher goals and principles.
Moreover, as the figure of one-of-a-kind android Data
suggests, the conversion must take place even when there are
no originary cultural impulses to challenge those of the
Federation. Lieutenant Commander Data's ambition to become
"more human" in particular belies the facile
multiculturalism implied both by ordinances like the Prime
Directive and by Star Fleet's ready tolerance of other
cultures' cursory habits of mind--their holidays, foods,
ornamental objects, etc.. Designed to resemble an
anatomically correct Caucasian male, Data is a perpetual
human drag show whose attempts at imitation result in a
series of comedic postures. Despite the fact that they may
initially suggest multiplicity or play,^10^ Data's
approximations reaffirm, in the long run, the forces of
social hegemony on board the Enterprise, since, of course,
these gestures signify each time the dominant rather than
suggest an alternative ideological commitment. Data's
choice to become the same thus points once again to the
surveillance mechanisms that, in a Foucauldian sense,
constitute disciplinary power: by watching, acting,
imitating, Data demonstrates how "the effects of power"
circulate "through progressively finer channels, gaining
access to individuals themselves, to their bodies, their
gestures and all their daily actions" (Foucault, 151-2).
III. High Plains Data
[14] In all the ideological assumptions that _Star Trek: The
Next Generation_ and its American television viewers share,
a complex and contradictory notion of individualism
predominates. Just as we are encouraged to "be ourselves"
and are at the same time bombarded by stimuli that ensure
dominant forms of mimetic desire, just as we are trained to
believe that "all people are created equal" while at the
same time asked to compete in an economy that routinely
discriminates against women and minorities, so does _Star
Trek_'s position contend that individualism is both desired
and improbable. I have already suggested the extent to
which the program's tacit imperialism complicates notions of
autonomy and difference. Here, I would like to comment on
_Star Trek_'s attitude toward radical individualism. On the
one hand, the program advocates personal achievement and
self-determination, two individualistic qualities necessary
for movement within the Federation's ranks. Captain Picard,
for instance, has achieved his dominant status precisely
*because* he is willing to take risks and work outside the
strict parameters of the law. It is important to realize,
however, that Picard's autonomy is contingent on an
ideological commitment to and ideal understanding of the
status quo so strong that even his insubordination
constitutes obedience to the Federation's larger goals and
principles; in attaining the highest position of power,
Picard has become synonymous with power and its agencies
alike. By constrast, the radicial individual invariably
poses a threat to both ship operations and the cooperative
efforts of Star Fleet Command. Frequent episodes
demonstrate that individual crew members who have succumbed
to the invasive influence of some alien culture or identity
must be subdued, brought back in line; moreover, given the
extent to which Federation culture is meant to exemplify the
most advanced stage in a strict teleological progression,
individuals who evince revolutionary or renegade tendencies
often come to be associated with the past.^11^
[15] "Time's Arrow," the two-part episode which features
Samuel Clemens, is readily able to engage this process by
which radical individualism is marginalized and suppressed,
since the story's premise involves travel to a time which
most U.S. citizens recognize as one of vigilantes and
solitary gunmen. The first episode in particular draws on
the American frontier's symbolic resonance to construct a
contrast between past and future habits of mind. It begins
with the discovery that archaeologists have unearthed
android Data's decapitated head from a cavern beneath
twenty-fourth century San Francisco alongside "several
artifacts from the 1800s--a watch, eyeglasses, a gun."^12^
That Data's positronic circuitry should be placed alongside
items which Federation technology has rendered obsolete
makes immediately clear the juncture between past and
future. But the decision to focus on Data is also more
subtly significant. Data's state of Deleuzian "human-
becoming"^13^ places the android in a perfect position to
confront the frontier past, since not only do self-
fashioning and a lack of feeling define both the android's
and the Hollywood outlaw's %modus operandi%; Data's unique
status as a life form makes him the ideal candidate to
assume a guise of radical otherness.
[16] In fact, the first part of "Time's Arrow" features Data
as a type of the "man with no name" persona Clint Eastwood
has popularized in westerns like _High Plains Drifter_.
Having unwittingly followed a group of aliens through the
time portal that connects the planet Devidia Two with
nineteenth-century Earth, Data finds himself on the
streets of frontier San Franscisco armed with nothing but
his clothing and Star Fleet communicator badge. He
immediately uses the latter as collateral in a poker game,
earning him both the means to continue researching the
mystery of his anachronistic "death" and the admiration of
bellboy Jack London, who becomes his faithful sidekick.
Data's success in manipulating the economic resources around
him to serve his own interests and his ability to command
respect despite the fact that he occupies a position of
complete anonymity are only two features he shares with
Eastwood's nameless drifter. Though motivated by a sense of
urgency ostensibly unrelated to the concerns of those around
them, both figures form a temporary alliance with certain of
these others in order to overpower a common enemy. Thus,
Data's search for the cause of his own destruction becomes
inextricably bound with Star Fleet's investigation into a
series of deaths on nineteenth-century earth; these deaths,
attributed to cholera but really the work of aliens from the
planet Devidia Two, give common, humanitarian cause to
Data's mission while at the same time displacing the role of
radical otherness from the android to the parasitic
Devidians, who have travelled back in time to feed on human
energy.
[17] That Lieutenant Commander Data's presence in frontier
America can be justified only when the android undermines
his claim to individuality finally separates him from the
character Eastwood portrays in _High Plains Drifter_. The
drifter, a ghost who has returned for the most personal of
reasons--to avenge his death--can never transcend the
limitations of this condition to join the citizens with whom
he has organized; the spectre from some existential spirit
world, he must remain adrift and solitary. The android's
limitations, on the other hand, guarantee that he reacts
impersonally even to his own death. In fact, far from
sensing a need to vindicate himself, Data considers his
disembodied head to suggest a point of commonality between
him and the humans he emulates; he "seems to take solace in
the fact that he is now mortal" (6). The obvious point is
that androids cannot feel for themselves. It is also worth
noting, however, that Data has been cast in the role of
Hollywood outlaw not so much because of his facile
resemblance to this figure, but because he is the character
least able to carry the role to its logical conclusions.
Just as Data can do no more than approximate the actions of
his human counterparts, so can he do no more than signify an
image of radical individualism already contained and
commodified by American consumer culture.
IV. The Viewer "Sitting in Darkness"^14^
[18] Data is not the only figure in "Time's Arrow" to occupy
a commodified position. The two-part episode also features
a representation of Samuel Clemens that relies heavily on
the writer as a familiar cultural icon. Despite the fact
that Clemens left San Franscisco in 1866, at the age of
thirty-one, the show depicts him in the guise of the
white-haired, white-suited curmudgeon whom Americans readily
recognize--in large part because a white-haired,
white-suited automaton "Mark Twain"^15^ greets millions of
visitors each year to Disney's Frontierland.
Representations like Disney's serve to foster an image of
the writer as presiding over and to some extent creating our
frontier past; that Clemens has come for so many Americans
to signify this past may account for _Star Trek_'s
willingness to make him--rather than a sheriff, mayor or
other politician--the proper authority to negotiate
between the time travelers and their nineteenth-century
ancestors. However, _Star Trek_ grants this position of
unprecedented power to a literary figure only on the
condition that Clemens remain a commodified cultural object.
The program's underlying message is that oppositional
thought, like radical individualism, must either be
suppressed or contained within the dominant ideological
structure.
[19] Interestingly, Clemens enters the program's narrative
as an oppositional and potentially disruptive force. After
eavesdropping on a conversation in which he discovers that
Data is an "invader" from the future, Clemens explains to a
San Franscisco reporter that he "wrote a book about" time
travel which "chronicles the tale of a man of our era who
fouls Sixth Century by introducing newfangled gadgets and
weapons, all in the name of progress" (9). This frankly
anti-imperialist gloss of _A Connecticut Yankee in King
Arthur's Court_^16^ typifies Clemens's initial response to
the Federation, whose motives he compares to those of the
Spanish, Dutch, and Portugese (11). Skeptical about whether
the U.S.S. Enterprise can really be a "ship of peace," the
writer objects that this is "what all conquerors say"
(11); he also resists Star Fleet operations by stealing into
Data's hotel room, sabotaging the android's "time-shift
detection device," threatening members of the crew's "away
team" at gun point, and thwarting Picard's entry back
through the time portal.
[20] Insofar as Clemens works to undermine what he perceives
as a threat to "all humanity" (9), his actions are not
unlike the patriotic resistance efforts of General
Washington, Joan of Arc, and deposed Phillippine leader
Emilio Aquinaldo, whose ideals Clemens thought should be
"held in reverence by the best men and women of all
civilizations."^17^ Far from seeming heroic, however,
Clemens's solitary efforts to save his race are made to
appear intrusive and wrong-headed. His chief mistake, the
episode makes clear, lies in an inability to see the "real
menace" (9). "Newfangled gadgets and weapons" are not the
problem; as one of the Enterprise crew explains to
Clemens, technological advances have led to "the end of
poverty and the cooperative ways of the United Federation of
Planets" (11). The problem is instead the Devidians, who
have used advanced technology for the purpose of harvesting,
storing, and consuming human energy. The Devidians--not
members of the U.S.S. Enterprise--are the "real"
imperialists; even the fact that the deaths for which they
are responsible have been attributed to cholera suggests a
comparison with North America's first European colonists,
who spread this and other communicable diseases to the
native population. That the aliens have traveled to
nineteenth-century San Francisco in order to obtain their
"only source of nourishment" (11), moreoever, suggests that
imperialist activity is somehow particular to America's
frontier past. Certainly, this is the lesson Samuel Clemens
learns. "Slightly less cynical" by the program's end, the
writer not only claims that his discovery of the twenty-
fourth-century time travelers constitutes his "greatest
adventure"; he thanks Data "for helping a bitter old man to
open his eyes and see that the future turned out pretty
well" (12).
[21] By priviledging an image of Clemens as the teller of
"great adventures" and displacing his anti-imperialist
sentiments with expressions of vaguely patriotic optimism,
_Star Trek_ encourages its viewers to contextualize his work
in a way that undermines the full complexity even of those
aspects it engages. And insofar as the process by which
Clemens evolves from "bitter old man" to advocate for an
enlightened future relies on the substitution of one
discrete ideological position for another--insofar as it
relies, that is, on the substitution of a "mistaken"
position for the "truthful" one--the program actually
neglects to engage one of the most salient features of his
late work, its Nietzschean skepticism. According to
Clemens, no one group or civilization may claim the right to
dominate another on the ground that it occupies a superior
ethical position; each is instead alike in "knowing it has
the only true religion and the only sane system of
government," and "each [is] proud of its fancied
supremacy."^18^ He also dismisses outright the concept of
altruism, one of those qualities to which we have attached a
"misleading meaning." Charity, benevolence, and self-
sacrifice exist for Clemens only to the extent that they
serve to gratify individual "self-approval"; a man must
content "his own spirit first--the other person's benefit
has to always take _second_ place."^19^
[22] These ideas go far toward explaining Clemen's specific
objections to imperialist policy. Consider, for instance,
the following passage from his essay "To the Person Sitting
in Darkness":
The Blessings-of-Civilization trust, wisely and
cautiously administered, is a Daisy. . . . But
Christendom . . . has been so eager to get at
every stake . . . that the People who Sit in
Darkness . . . have become suspicious of the
Blessing of Civilization. More, they have begun
to examine them. This is not well. The Blessing
of Civilization are all right, and a good
commercial property; there could not be better, in
a dim light. (286)
He continues by noting that this package of exported
"blessings"
is merely an outside cover, gay and pretty and
attractive, displaying the special patterns of our
Civilization which we reserve for Home
Consumption, while _inside_ the bale is the
Actual Thing that the Customer Sitting in Darkness
buys with his blood and tears and land and
liberty. (287)
Clemens not only shows how imperialists commodify values
like "Love," "Gentleness," and "Mercy" (286) in order to
manufacture a fair business exchange out of what might
otherwise be seen as the exploitation of another culture; he
also suggests that for the "Person in Darkness" to accept
the "Blessings-of-Civilization" package, she must learn to
value "mere outside covers" more than "actual things." Thus
Clemens considers ideology--not "progress" or "newfangled
gadgets"^20^--the imperialist's most powerful tool of
oppression. That is why, at the conclusion of _A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court_, all Hank
Morgan's firepower and "civilizing" inventions together
cannot undermine the foundations of Catholicism; that is
why, at the end of "The War Prayer" (1904-5), the "aged
stranger" who asks those around him to reconsider their use
of Christianity as a justification for violence is dismissed
as a "lunatic" by the rest of the congregation (682).
Clemens would have been especially wary of a society like
the United Federation of Planets, which claims that advanced
weapons and technology have enabled altruism, since for him
all "material advantage" amounts to "the same thing"; it
cannot change the fact that human beings "seek the
contentment of [a] spirit" which is "indifferent to . . .
man's good" and is intent only on "satisfying its own
desires."^21^
[23] In "To the Person Sitting in Darkness," Clemens
acknowledges not only that successful strategies for
marketing a benevolent American identity are necessary "for
the sake of Business," but that it is the skillful
communicator's duty to "arrange [the other culture's]
opinions for [it]" (291). What was once the imperialist's
imperative is now, in today's "global economy," the duty of
those corporate agencies that manufacture televisual and
other mass-produced representations for the purpose of
securing control over the world's consumer marketplace. A
recent trend in cultural studies has been to suggest that
such representations can produce a wide spectrum of possible
responses, including those conducive to the exploration and
transformation of our routinized selves. This assumption,
formulated in part to counter the belief that film,
television, and popular fiction are "low" media, the
opiate of an easily manipulated mass audience, has yielded a
great deal of useful material.^22^ Nonetheless, I think it
is possible to overstate the progressive impact televised
subject matter has on individuals, regardless of their
socio-economic status or educational background. The danger
lies in focussing too much on the cultural critic's attempt
to rescript an isolated representation or set of
representations for the purpose of empowering marginal
discourse, while at the same time downplaying the economic
dominance of those managerial forces responsible for placing
the representation in its original televised context. For
instance, Constance Penley's article "Feminism,
Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture"
demonstrates how fanzine versions of the relationship
between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock reconceptualize ways of
looking at gendered and sexual identity in order to serve
interests not addressed by the _Star Trek_ series.^23^
However, the fact that certain fans have rescripted the
show's intended parameters by no means changes _Star Trek_'s
patriarchal treatment of women or its dismissal of romantic
relationships in favor of such male gendered themes as
aggression and conflict. Nor does Penley's article explain
why the same fans whose stories transform Kirk from a
womanizer into Spock's willing sex partner feel that the
feminist agenda implicit in the transformation is one they
must repudiate. One might in fact argue, as Penley herself
suggests,^24^ that the tension between these two marginal
discourses--"slash lit" and feminism--effectively reveals
the power of hegemonic ideological representations not only
to dominate the mainstream, but also to make difficult any
form of sustained collective resistance to it.
[24] But it is also important to realize the extent to which
dominant managerial positions can retain their power even
though they learn to "sell" marginal representations, a
point that becomes apparent when the discussion moves from
naturalized gender roles on the first _Star Trek_ series to
naturalized versions of the imperial self on _Star Trek: The
Next Generation_. The product of two distinct historical
periods--one in which the Women's Movement had not yet begun
to gain a popular American audience, the other in which
"Reaganomics" owed its success to arms' proliferation and
U.S. intervention in third-world countries such as Panama
and Nicaragua--each television series may be said to contain
ideological concerns that reflect and generate contemporary
anxieties about the infiltration of a potentially disruptive
"other" into the mainstream.^25^ Where the two differ is in
the degree to which they see both the marginalization of
women and the colonization of consumer subjects as necessary
for corporate capitalism's growth and perpetuation. While
it is possible to coopt women into the system as producers,
and therefore to enfranchise interests like feminism, women
as a group are just one target in corporate capitalism's
ongoing need to colonize *a* subject, whatever its
provisional "frontier." _Star Trek: The Next Generation_'s
reconstitution of an imperialist ideology thus mirrors the
more general process by which television programs work to
colonize, represent, and even produce consumer interests.
The containment and commodification of alternative
discourse--especially that which, like Clemens's, questions
the nature of capitalism itself--is a necessary part of the
process. Given this conundrum, one thing is certain:
although cultural critics must continue to examine the
progressive possibilities that exist in popular social texts
such as _Star Trek_, we must also align our analyses of
diverse cultural representations with an examination of the
monolithic cultural capital that commodifies diversity for
profit, while threatening to manage our critical attention
as well.
-----------------------------------------------------------------
NOTES
^1^ Many thanks to the readers at _Postmodern
Culture_, and to Paul Trembath, for helping with the
revision of this essay.
^2^ The latest Gene Roddenberry spin-off, _Star Trek:
Deep Space Nine_, suggests a resurgence of interest in the
frontier as a place both of infinite possibility and of
violence, hardship, and continual strife; this change from
_Star Trek: The Next Generation_'s view of space as
predominantly colonized, ordered, and governed may reflect
the U.S.'s recent swing from years of Reagan prosperity to
the current economic recession and a renewed interest in
libertarian politics.
^3^ The threat of world hunger and the depletion of
our natural resources pose two of the greatest challenges to
the environmental, economic, and humanitarian policy of our
century.
^4^ Recent episodes have attempted to provide an
explanation for some of these phenomena. For instance, the
preponderance of humanoid life forms in the galaxy is the
result of one ancient species' having centuries ago seeded
several planets with its own DNA; thus, there is a "real,"
not merely coincidental, genetic kinship among the
Cardassian, human, Klingon, and Romulan races. Similarly,
the Enterprise computer's "universal translator" is
responsible for making sure that all communication on board
the ship is conducted in English. These justifications are
merely cosmetic, however, and do little to explain the
show's decidedly anglo-centric bias, a condition that is
behind the program's decision to designate English as the
Federation's official language in the first place. Other
evidence for the bias includes our solar system's
designation as sector "001," and the fact that the
Federation's prestigious Star Fleet Academy is housed not
just on planet Earth, but in the city of San Francisco.
^5^ Thinking about the frontier remains foundational as
long as one assumes that the progression from "here" to
"there" is unilaterally one-dimensional. New writing on the
frontier discards this belief, stressing instead what
Gayatri Spivak calls the "interanimating relationship"
between margin and center. In the forefront of such work is
Gloria Anzaldua's _Borderlands/Frontera: The New Mestiza_
(San Francisco: Spinsters-Aunt Lute, 1987). _The Frontier
Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American
Literature_, edited by David Mogen, Mark Busby, and Paul
Bryant (Texas A & M University Press, 1989) also works to
challenge traditional notions of the frontier by approaching
the idea of "new territory" from a number of possible
angles, including canon formation and ethnic studies.
^6^ Just a few of the many recently published books
which consider the ethics of wildlife and resource
management are Walter Truett Anderson's _To Govern
Evolution_ (N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987);
Alfred W. Crosby's _Ecological Imperialism_ (N.Y.:
Cambridge, 1986); Bill Devall's and George Session's _Deep
Ecology_ (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1985); and
Rosemary Rodd's _Biology, Ethics, and Animals_ (N.Y.:
Oxford, 1990). Views on the subject range from Anderson's
belief that it is lamentable but imperative that people act
on the behalf of other species to Devall's and Session's
call for human beings to assume a decentered subject
position in relation to the world that both surrounds and
encompasses us.
^7^ For an explanation of this sense of the word
"machinic," see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, _Anti-
Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia_, trans. Robert
Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: U of
Minnesota Press, 1983), 36-41; for a discussion of
"abstract" machines see Ronald Bogue, _Deleuze and Guattari_
(New York: Routledge, 1989), 131-5 and 145-9. For a
critique of Foucault's "panoptic" view of power as it can
apply to _Star Trek_'s computerized re-centralization of
power in Federation bodies, see Jean Baudrillard, _Forget
Foucault_ (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), 11-12, and Arthur
Kroker and David Kook, _The Postmodern Scene: Excremental
Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics_ (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1986), 170-81. In the terms of this paper, Deleuze and
Baudrillard are uncharacteristically compatible, since both
Deleuze's notion of "machinic arrangements" and
Baudrillard's notion of "dead power" theorize power as a
field of immanence which is neither centrist nor diffuse,
but rather effected in the collective attentions of
bodies themselves. Such a view of power explains the
absolute coextensivity of computer monitors to Federation
bodies aboard the Enterprise--a coextensivity within which
power is so all-pervasive it virtually disappears into the
experience of "life" itself.
^8^ For a discussion of the body as a kind of
"frontier" whose power to affect and be affected is always
open to decoding and re-territorialization--particularly in
the alluring presence of capital--see Gilles Deleuze,
"Capitalism," in _The Deleuze Reader_ (New York: Columbia U
Press, 1993), 241-44.
^9^ There is in fact some claim for describing Troi as
the computer's offspring--at least insofar as the same
actress who plays Troi's mother (Majel Barrett) also speaks
the part of the Enterprise's voice-activated computer.
^10^ Butler, for instance, suggests that "drag
implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender
itself--as well as its contingency" (137).
^11^ For this reason, both Federation uniforms and
Federation equipment are pictured as sleek, spare, and
antiseptic. The self-willed Klingon "warrior," by contrast,
assumes a Beowulfian guise and inhabits a ship the contents
of which are as dark and labrynthian as any medieval hall's.
^12^ Quotations from "Time's Arrow: Part One"
(teleplay by Joe Menosky and Michael Piller) and "Time's
Arrow: Part Two" (teleplay by Jeri Taylor) are taken from
John Sayer's synopses of both episodes in _Star Trek: The
Next Generation: The Official Magazine_ 23 ('92-'93 season):
6-8; 9-12. The current citation comes from page six. All
future references to either episode will appear
parenthetically.
^13^ See Deleuze's and Parnet's chapter, "A
Conversation: What is it? What is it for?" (1-35), for a
discussion of "becomings." Although _Star Trek_ defines the
goal to become human as a goal to become the same--and as
such precludes the Deleuzian possibility of an invention of
"new forces" (5)--the program constantly exploits Data's
non-human status to produce multiple plots, multiple
variations on a theme, multiple encounters, so that there is
what might more productively be called *the constant
illusion of Data's becoming*.
^14^ Clemens's essay "To the Person Sitting in
Darkness" (1901) was a response to America's role in the
Boxer Rebellion.
^15^ To mention Clemens's famous pseudonym is
implicitly to acknowledge the extent to which the writer
commodified his own identity in order to facilitate the sale
of his work. Throughout this essay, however, I have not
only deliberately avoided noting the many, sometimes glaring
inconsistencies between the opinions Clemens expressed in
the form of political satire and the actions of his daily
life; I have also attempted to engage the writer only at the
level of his work. Not surprisingly, _Star Trek_ collapses
Clemens's ideas and life into a single "personality." At
their farewell meeting, Picard expresses a wish that "time
would have allowed [him] to know [Clemens] better," to
which the writer replies: "You'll just have to read my
books . . . . What I am is pretty much there" (12).
^16^ _Star Trek_'s reading of _A Connecticut Yankee in
King Arthur's Court_ again illustrates the program's
tendency to simplify Clemens's work. In fact, as Werner
Sollors points out, the novel is not easily reduced to a
clear or stable interpretation; it has been "embattled by
interpreters" who question whether it constitutes "light and
humorous praise of worthy progress" or is instead "a bitter
and gloomy anticipation of the century of nuclear holocausts
and mass genocides" (291).
^17^ Samuel Clemens, "Thirty Thousand Killed a
Million," 52.
^18^ Samuel Clemens, "What is Man," 399.
^19^ "What is Man," 352, 342.
^20^ Clemens, in fact, was fascinated by inventions
and "newfangled gadgets." As John Lauber notes in the
preface to his biography of the writer, he was even "an
inventor in a small way, patenting a self-pasting scrapbook
and a self-adjusting vest strap, copyrighting a game to
teach historical facts, even imagining microprint" (xi).
^21^ "What is Man," 394, 393.
^22^ For just a few of the many examples of work that
rescripts dominant representations in the service of a more
progressive agenda, see Patricia Mann's work on agency,
_Micro-politics: Agency in a Postfeminist Era_ (Minneapolis:
U of Minnesota Press, 1994), Jane Tompkins's _Sensational
Designs_ (New York: Oxford U Press, 1985), and John Ernest's
"Economies of Identity: Harriet E. Wilson's _Our Nig_,"
_PMLA_ (Vol. 109, No. 3: May 1994), 424-438.
^23^ Penley's argument focusses on the phenomenon of
"slash lit," or the reconceptualization of the platonic
friendship between a televisual "buddy" pair like Kirk and
Spock in the form of a sexually explicit gay relationship.
^24^ She comments: "We would indeed love to take this
fandom as an exemplary case of female appropriation of,
resistence to, and negotiation with mass-produced culture.
And we would also like to be able to use a discussion of K/S
[the "slash" relationship between Kirk and Spock] to help
dislodge the still rigid positions in the feminist sexuality
debates around fantasy, pornography, and S & M. But if we
are to do so it must be within the recognition that the
slashers do not feel they can express their desires for a
better, sexually liberated, and more egalitarian world
through feminism; they do not feel they can speak as
feminists, they do not feel that feminism speaks for them"
(492).
^25^ The shift from naturalized representations of
gender to naturalized representations of the imperial self
is announced even in each program's introductory remarks.
While the crew of _Star Trek_'s Enterprise embark on their
voyage of discovery "where no *man* has gone before," the
postfeminist members of _The Next Generation_ venture "where
no *one* has gone."
-----------------------------------------------------------------
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