Just as identity needs a referent, the creation of a real or fictive nation-state requires the establishment of alterity and a rationalization of that relation. Though this 'other' takes numerous forms, I will here mention primarily the human alterity upon which social grouping might depend. Slavoj Zizek offers an example of the primary dependence/domination relation wherein the other , in this case an ethnic other, structures and defines the very identity of a logic which relegates it to its subaltern position.
To give a most elementary example: in the anti-Semitic vision, the Jew is experienced as the embodiment of negativity, as the force disrupting stable social identity--but the 'truth' of anti-Semitism is, of course, that the very identity of our position is structured through a negative relationship to this traumatic figure of the Jew. Without the reference to the Jew who is corroding the social fabric, the social fabric itself would be dissolved. In other words, all my positive consistency is kind of 'reaction-formation' to a certain traumatic, antagonistic kernel: if I lose this 'impossible' point of reference, my very identity dissolves. 11
Zizek explains, "The subject is the void, the hole in the Other, and the object the inert content filling up this void; the subject's entire 'being' thus consists in the fantasy-object filling out his void."12 According to this formulation, we are what (or who) we desire, what we lack, what we wish to conquer, consume, and alter. We are inextricably bound up in the other that we wish to dominate-- docile ethnicities, women; even, in a broader sense, matter. The enterprise, then, that which pretends to be autonomous, self-determined; to float (literally) in space; is structured by its dependence upon its oppressed 'other' and, in all its glorified claims to self-determination, somehow contradicts its claims to self- sufficiency
As the feminist and civil rights movements in the 1960s were beginning to recognize, the 'nationalistic' unity in the United States and thus, in our reading, aboard the Enterprise is predicated on various other axes of difference. That is, the nation-state depends upon the existence of and/or the construction of the existence of the other of woman, docile ethnicities, and the working class, all locatable under the rubric of "Big Other", to borrow from Slavoj Zizek. Though Shatner's voice-over posits the final frontier as "Space" and though on the one hand this frontier is clearly explicated as "new life" and "new civilizations" embodied by the vast array of interplanetary 'others' found on the Enterprise's 'mission', we know what kind of frontiers he's talking about. All we need to solve problems of underproduction or under consumption, as Americans know by the time they have finished their conquest of the American West and their cultural and military expansion into Europe by the end of World War II, are new sources of labor and new markets.
Thus the consummate 'other' aboard the Starship Enterprise, flagship of male rationality, is woman. And yet though the role of the women on the Starship Enterprise is marginal at best, an ornament, at best, we might invert their role as structurer of the narrative. That is, on board the enterprise, it is women's job to beautify and redeem the 'male' rational impulse. Woman is in charge of the aesthetic sphere; like Nurse Chapel, she loves and suffers (is in love with Spock, but, infantilized, cannot speak), like the green, Orion slave girl in the Menagerie, she charms and excites through her exotic 'otherness' and is indeed carried away by that desire. Like 'Ruth' from the planet of recollection, she is of the realm of memory and desire. And, like Gem, the empath, she absorbs (like a maternal sponge) and neutralizes aggressivity and wounds. She is the complementary 'Yin' element to the ever-'neutral'' scientific impulse. However, like the Florence Nightingale figure 'Edith Keeler' who will save the world, she (while crossing the street) gets hit by a car (technology, conveniently masked in the form of an innocuous, if not charming 30's- style Model T) before she is able to. That is, she would have been (we know, since we are in the priveleged position of omniscient witness) the first female Ghandi figure, originating from a soup-kitchen angel of mercy, but is nipped in the bud by the ever-burgeoning forces of rationalization. So on the one hand, Woman becomes only a figure of the imagination; never real-ized, and always left behind (in the past, in the dust, in the heart).On the other, and following our logic of 'otherness', we might read the Star Trek narrative precisely as a display of bravado to the audience of the imagined other. That is, we must inquire who is the recipient of the displays of Kirk's prowess, his torn shirt, his eye make-up and blush. Perhaps it is the imagined other of woman.
The other, in various Star Trek episodes, takes some wonderfully explicit forms. For example, the monstrous (black!) feline (the gigantic, organic female), and, interestingly, a number of representations of fearsome children, e.g., 'Charlie', the mentally powerful but dangerous youth, reminiscent, perhaps, of student protesters at the time of the show's projection; a band of young children guided by a patriarchal angel--corrupt purveyor of religious authority; another band ('bonk bonk on the head'!) of children who assert power 'before their time', the child who wears a mask of authority, the child Napoleon figure, and so on.
But the ever-dependable workers aboard the enterprise, Uhura (African-American), Scotty (Scottish), Chekhov (Russian), and Sulu (Japanese), fall conveniently into various intersections of these axes of otherness. Their otherness is not distinct, pungent, or salutary, but merely banal. They are denied lapses as humor or emotionality, individuality or personality in any meaningful sense and are instead clearly defined stereotypes whose dangerous sides manifest themselves in times of rupture or disarray in predictable ethnic ways (Scotty quite Scottishly gets drunk on rum, Sulu, as Japeanese as they come, under the influence of the Psi 2000 virus hallucinates that he is a Samurai and in another episode that he is attacked by one). Ultimately such caricatures are not threatening to the rationality which seeks to whittle down one's rootedness in one's ontological position save the semblance of individuality in the figure of master. (The token black's threat, though her name means 'freedom', is trumped by making her a woman). The kind of power/individuality the 'underlings' are accorded is the "immediacy" promised by communication and control technologies operated by the electric signal or button--the pure performative. Yet as we all know, the activity of button-pushing is ultimately not very satisfying and effacing of the existence of individual differences.
The 'ethnic other' is then coded as different-but-the-same. He or she is part of the gang and yet not part of it, member-of-the-crew yet not-in- command. Separate, insofar as collective realization among crew members is unthinkable, but unified, insofar as everyone is ultimately bland, inert, and incapable of meaningful action. The crew members' predictable otherness, then, justifies that they are somehow in need of orders from above. They become really 'different' only when they are 'bad', and in this modality they are coded as fragments that occasionally but only temporarily subvert the restless advance of the Enterprise. Otherwise, they are merely subjectivity-less but friendly 'others'.