The structure of modern, technicized discipline in which the humanity of the subject no longer exists (which, by the late 1960s the United States had surely reached) is replaced on the Enterprise by a fantasy of earlier times--'before capitalism'--here, a Feudal and somehow Germanic fantasy-setting when the subject was still organic, opposed to nature and machinery--a time when (we like to think) death at the hands of a combatant carried a sense of dignity and gravity. Hence the feudal undertones aboard the Enterprise: uniforms vaguely reminiscent of Prince Valiant with stylized breastplates or spear-heads in the tiny symbol emblazoned over one's heart, episodic references to Germanic/Teutonic mythology in the form of castles, knights and damsels, fencing, hand-to- hand combat. (Or, to go even further backwards in time, the barbaric regression of a civilization to the stone age on the planet Sigma Draconis VI.) Kirk's technicized 'chair', known to affectionate Trekky trivia fans as the 'Con', in this fiction, is merely a stand-in for a monarchic throne. It is no accident that chess is the secret to the Enterprise's coordinate system, since the game unfolds upon a gridlike (Cartesian; reductive!) board yet at the same time represents, in its pieces, a feudal sovereignty. Of course, the crew members play chess for fun, thereby replicating the conditions of their submission, in good Adornian/Horkheimerian fashion, in their leisure time. The crew, in this fantasy, is the Mannerbund--the warlike band of males from Teutonic mythology. Women, in this calculus, are merely decorative prizes.
Nestled close to the conception of the barbaric/feudal subject represented in the figure of the leader in Star Trek is that of the charismatic Greek/Roman5. Aside from parallels between Kirk's and Odysseus'6 respective journeys and roles and notwithstanding recurrent Greek/Roman themes (e.g., Roman togas and a vengeful Apollo in the Who Mourns for Adonais? episode), the Greek-fantasy subject is in fact necessary for the Star Trek drama to continue. For the story to have meaning it requires a context in which a subject can be made intelligible, and for there to be meaningful action and indeed a show itself, the show needs a subject whose agency, given that he (for it is always a he) acts within a polis, a defined political community (here; the ship sets these social and territorial boundaries), matters.7 The authority of the leader who maintains and embodies the group must be founded not only rationally but mythically and primally, as if it were decreed, as Spock insists in Amok Time, 'from the time of the beginning'.
Captain James T. Kirk, marked by his ridiculous assertions of foolish bravado; smug self-satisfaction, split-second emotional decisions and his giving in to the 'primal' impulses of lust and compassion asserts a form of individuality somewhat at odds with the notion of an 'enlightened' or 'highly rational' leader in an age of the administered society. Following Horkheimer and Adorno--"Enlightenment returns to mythology, which it never really knew how to elude"8, Kirk's bravado is a reassertion of an older subject clearly marked as an individual, one whose (emotional, corporeal) actions and reactions somehow matter. Captain Kirk is styled as the charismatic-generic leader-character in a movement of regression to an earlier fantasy-time.
In other words, it is no accident the T. in James T. Kirk stands for Tiberius and that he is the Greek/Roman polis-actor par excellence; purveyor of a charismatic authority long-since extinguished in the age of the Starship Enterprise. A la Weber's charismatic individual Kirk possesses absolute power of agency, that which in the 'administered society' at the time of Star Trek's broadcast, complained social theorists like David Reisman in The Lonely Crowd and Marcuse in One Dimensional Man , had been lost since the 1950s. Weber writes that "pure charisma does not know any 'legitimacy' other than that flowing from personal strength, that is, one which is constantly being proved." But: "this kind of power does not work in a rational age."9 And: "The waning of charisma generally indicates the diminishing importance of individual action" 10. Kirk's torn-shirt bravado and self-satisfied seductive grins are a way of insisting that in an age wherein, given the logic of a society in which individuals are perhaps subject to a discipline of technicized origins and in which territoriality, national boundaries, and existentiality no longer seem necessary, that one can retain individual agency. The figure of Kirk is a way of insisting that we may have our cake (a technological rationality of Cartesian origins) and eat it too (have meaningful agency/the power, glory, and drama of ancient imperial empire).