Rather than making a bold claim about Star Trek as representing all of American history, 1 here I merely want to sketch out the ways that this particular show serves as fantastic allegory of what in itself cannot be said to be a whole: conflicting fragments of ideology, social configurations, thematics, dynamics, strategies. So my claim here is that while Star Trek locates itself firmly in the territory of sci fi fantasythrough stock references to (fictional) intergalactic travel, other worlds, and scary alien beings, it manages to dramatize very real dynamics of nation's, and most specifically, America's employment of myth, drama, and history to constitute itself. The narratives Star Trek uses are easily localizable in various periods of American history and, more interestingly, in various earlier periods with which the American imagination perhaps allies itself. So despite its overt 'fictiveness', the political/national/historical 'truths' that we may garner from Star Trek exist not in spite of but perhaps in commensurate proportion to the extent that Star Trek is able to pass itself off as 'mere' fiction.
I want to first mention three sorts of narrative fiction that inform the Star Trek narrative cycle. First, Star Trek is heir to the cinematic and literary genre of science fiction, a genre that imagines the future and is often characterized by a preoccupation with technology. Secondly Star Trek is indebted to what I call 'happy family' fiction--that fiction prominent in postwar cinema and television which served to repackage the patriarchal social body in various ways, the formula of which usually consists of social order, challenge, and a re-establishment of social order. The third kind of fiction which informs Star Trek is Television with all the narrative conventions which inform it (such as a half-hour show-length limit, a fixed cast of characters, and certain specific expectations--for example, that the show will be interrupted by television commercials). The conventions of narrative television might include, perhaps, Star Trek's penchant for the cheap-but-expressive: camp, kitschiness, the refusal to create realistic special effects. Thus we are able to make distinctions about which genres influence which facets of Star Trek. For example, we might say that it is television and not 'happy-family' fiction or the sci-fi genre that informs Star Trek's B-movie like style since television is the genre most clearly dictating the economic constraints and conventions about how much it is appropriate to spend to make a decent television show.
The last kind of fiction, television, makes the fact/fiction distinction obsolete quite clearly. That is, narrative television's subsidization by advertising affiliates television narratives intimately with the ideological positionings of the American political economy. That Star Trek is a product of television positions it precisely within the workings of an always-already ideological (and scarcely neutral) system. I will discuss this latter mode, television, in a later paper.
Thus Star Trek presents itself most openly as science fiction. Still less directly it presents itself as a patriarchal, or 'happy-family' narrative, and still less directly as a self-consciously televisual production. Yet there seems to be a contradiction between the first two of these narrative 'pulls'. The former suggests a progressiveness and an imagining of a different future while the latter frowns upon change or alteration of the present state of affairs. That is, science-fictiveness suggests, on the one hand, that the show ought to be progressive insofar as that genre marks its members as 'futuristic' and imagines a somewhere yet-to-be. Allusions to science and its trappings, in much of the popular mythology of the late fifties and early sixties and in particular in Star Trek itself, pepper narratives with allusions to digital information, test tubes, and data-gathering to present an optimistic mise-en-scene of a benevolent, absolute, rational knowledge. Though following the cold war and the worldwide fear of the atom bomb, science-as-worldview was perhaps just beginning to present itself as problematic, in the popular imagination science was still equated to a bright future, the promise of change, and epistemic advance.
Yet the 'happy-family' genre expressing a patriarchally led and homogeneous social structure--(in our case, Captain Kirk-as- father/captain at the helm, the militaristic trappings of discipline and order, and the permanent war economy waged by the Star Ship Enterprise) belies any proclivity towards a future utopia or anything resembling change. 'Happy-family' fictions tell a story about the maintenance of a (present-tense) homogeneous social order and imply a certain rigid desire to preserve that order. Such narratives reflect, perhaps, an anxiety in post-cold war, post sixties America about a fragmented national unity and increased recognition of diversity and sexual freedom.
What I'd like to focus on are the ways that 'happy-family' fiction tells a story about the national social order but at the same time conceals that it is telling such a story. Instead of presenting, for example, a reasoned account of the founding of the Enterprise, the choosing of the crew, the layout of the ship, or perhaps the country of the Enterprise's origin and how that country came to take itself as the policeman for the Interplanetary Federation, Star Trek rationalizes the position of the never mentioned, despite the initials U.S.S., country of the Star Ship Enterprise's origin by slathering it in connotations and allying it and the Enterprise with various mythologies. The calling up of older, mythological versions of a culture serve to evoke a sense of originary, primal, or longstanding historical, cultural and/or social unity. This is one strategy of a nationalizing fiction. Other strategies for maintaining the Enterprise's external advance and internal order include the the rationalization and naturalization of homogeneity and the 'irrationalization' of dissent among crew members--the sort Foucault spoke of in Discipline and Punish , and the construction of an inert and therefore exploitable alterity in the form of the ethnic other (or, the positioning of master as white male and labouring other as woman, Black, Asian.) These relations are concealed by subtle suggestions that the Star Trek community is a harmonious and happy one, that the crewmembers need discipline and that critical reflection on the structure of order on board the Enterprise is impossible. Such strategies are, I want to suggest, commonly used in the kinds of stories that groups in power create.
All told, 'happy-family' strategies are forms of radical re-gression insofar as they hearken toward historically earlier periods: feudalism, early industrial culture, pre-Civil war America. Star Trek's self- presentation as an enlightened, 'scientific' fiction and its clearly static and/or regressive strategies of social unity is the axis of tension and also the site of intersection between the aesthetic and the political that I will explore here.
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