by Justine Walden, UC Berkeley, Dept. of Philosophy
To illustrate the Jamesonian maxim that "objective effects have their consequence in in the aesthetic realm" or his claim that in the logic of late capitalism, the political deviously reconfigures itself as the cultural, one might consider a televisual text such as that regressive, post-colonial chimera known as Star Trek.
Let me explain. By the political I mean what is commensensically held as political: the notions that a populace or a people holds of itself and whatever rules by which it constructs and governs itself. Discourses such as the political ally themselves with what Bill Nichols has called "Discourses of Sobriety", or those 'serious' discourses which do not admit, at least ostensibly, of creativity or a wide range of alternatives. By aesthetic I mean those discourses generally slotted as activities constructed and maintained 'for sheer enjoyment'--for pleasure's or beauty's sake. These latter discourses are, it is said, not political; they are instead considered specifically cultural in the traditional (bourgeois) taxonomy of disciplines. The distinction between political and aesthetic runs parallel to the distinction between fact and fiction. I wish to challenge that distinction here. Part of what I will show here is that for a bit of seemingly apolitical cultural detritus produced only during the yearspan 1966-68 and syndicated in 1969, Star Trek's remarkable appeal, both in its repeated broadcast and in its incarnation in various pop artifacts and popular knowledge, is due precisely to the aestheticized political qualities it continually reproduces, and that the qualities 'political' and 'aesthetic' are at some levels useless distinctions to employ when discussing it since ultimately, as television, it is an object of political economy. What I will show in this paper is how the narrative cycle's various constants--its crewmembers, the structure and purpose of life on board the Star Ship Enterprise, its narrative devices and styles-- tell a story about political fictions (specifically, nationalism-as-fiction and fiction-as-national) and thus conflate the 'strictly political' and the 'strictly cultural, aesthetic, or fictional'.
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