In tracing the logic of the fictive strategies Star Trek employs, we find ourselves somehow in a Baudrillardian netherworld where the logic of scientific representationalism of which television is part and parcel leads to "The desert of the real itself"29 --precisely, it seems, where Star Trek unconsciously, at least, wanted us to be. In our insatiable desire for an image of ourselves which is somehow true, or at least better than true, we represent and re-present30 and finally reach the moment at which the world is papered with so many versions of reality that the fictional loses its distinction from the real. In TV-land, the simulacrum --the copy, the reproduction--the fantastic--reigns. Our role is, then, merely to consume.
Ironically, it is on a practical level--as a solution to a disintegrating sense of nation in America in the 1960s--that Star Trek, insofar as it is a product that sustains and is sustained by the economy of the United States of America, hopes that we continue representing. In this logic, the injunction to represent is merely a move of self-preservation of the show through preservation of the nation. Yet within the larger logic of representation, Star Trek becomes but a mere blip on the screen and mocks the fiction of nation while employing it. Like a good worker, the fictions of national autonomy and self-determination bring profits through the appeal of their quaint anachronism.
According to Fredric Jameson and Baudrillard, our domination through representation exists more in the post-industrial age than ever before. In the land of the seven-hour-a day average diet of television we are hard pressed to disagree. If the new agora is indeed 'virtual', or media space as they would have it, then we can take televisual representation and the establishment of knowledge/ power/political consciousness in the postmodern age as rough equivalents. What is on television becomes ever more closely linked to the constitution of ourselves as political subjects. Since we come to take ourselves as these representations and not as beings-in-the-world with an ability to interpret ourselves, embodied sites of representation (ourselves) and the representation of humans on a television show--what is on the screen, become the moment in the postmodern age where power is defied or disseminated with relative disregard for the politics of self-identity (the fiction of nationalism) except insofar as it might provide fodder for spectacle. The site of representation becomes the spacewhere the concealing of domination takes place and where the re-cycling of that concealment is re-played--in Star Trek at least-- with campy glee.
It seems that there would remain few possibilities for reflective or meaningful action in a media-swamped age. But (as Richard Rorty has said) "'We' must start from where 'We' are."31 We therefore, as engage social critics, must engage in the productions of our culture and unmask their presuppositions and insidious recommendations. We must be careful, seated in our virtual-reality setups; our VDTs and in front of our television screens (CRTs/cathode ray tubes), not to succumb to the illusory representations of science, of authority, of nationhood, the latter only a nostalgic re-cycling of earlier ages.Taking Star Trek as an example of Jamesonian "cognitive mapping"32 of our real interests via a fictive/narrative dramatization, we learn that we must tend carefully our freedom to exist as beings-in-the-world; for what is at stake is the last repository of possibility and/or any authentic political action remaining to us. We must reclaim that space in which we might be able to act out a new political utopia.