As we have learned from Machiavelli, Weber, Foucault, and other theorists of the administered state, Nation requires a centralized authority and a sophisticated administrative system and therefore a degree of uniformity and rationalization to work. Thus the subject, as with the American citizen in the nineteen fifties (which the nineteen sixties to some extent challenged), as on board the enterprise, is encouraged to blend in, to efface its individuality in the name of a harmonious totality--an invisible, Foucauldian one. The Enterprise's loyal subject must don the requisite Federation uniform and respond only through coded replies and responses: "Aye, aye, Captain." "Warp speed ahead." And: "He's dead, Jim". So while the labor aboard the Enterprise remains in some aspects regressively feudal-- valued not for its sheer utility but instead through its proofs of loyalty or abstract devotion towards captain and ship, the ship also embodies the strategy of mass modern rationalization. The bodies of the Enterprise's member-citizens are well-groomed, ready-to-hand, upright. Their loyalty, in this sense, is abstract.
The well-oiled mechanism of the enterprise thus forms a background against which "individual opposition cannot but appear irrational". 13 We may see, then, in the insistence of the Commodore, in the Menagerie episode, that Spock's subversivity is indication that he is "mad", an instance of the nationalistic/rationalistic calculus employing the rhetoric of regression and containment--the confinement of 'the irrational' towards acts which do not coincide with its own goals. As in a well-run state, a break from order aboard the Enterprise becomes "an act of hostility, the first sign of rebellion". 14 Such a break becomes always subject to subsequent reinterpretation as a reversion to a prescientific era, as in another of Spock's acts of subversion in Amok Time for 'family reasons' (a lapse, due to 'primitive', human impulses relating to Vulcan "blood"; a 'seasonal' ailment, (like menstruation), which causes Spock to crave his homeland, ceremony, and the Vulcan mating ritual and over which Spock has no 'rational' control). In the Menagerie, the possibility that Spock, due to his violations of the intergalactic order, may have gone "mad", contextualized within the hyperrational calculus of the social system of the USS Enterprise, is 1. evidence of an even 'higher', 'more complex' paradigm of rational order: that is, because Spock's logic is Vulcan, it is of an order more rational than rational.Hence the revelation, at the end of this particular episode, that Spock's subversion, though it seemed 'crazy', was "entirely logical". 2. We find Spock's subversion explainable in the name of an even greater (regressive) loyalty: an older, more primal one, i.e., in the episode in question, Spock transgresses the highest oath of loyalty to Captain Kirk in the name of an overriding commitment to his former captain, Christopher Pike. 3 Spock's subversion is explainable as reactive, a defense function such as (and here we see how a rationalized system of authority employs the rhetoric of humanism) when a life integral to the order is on the line, in an emergency, endangered. Spock's action is then re-presented as an instinctive act of preservation of the rational order which is only natural . Spock's madness , like the coded 'otherness', thus serves to legitimate and sustain a rational order. The order is 'naturalized'.