At its most superficial level, Star Trek serves to promote a version of progressivity through its dependence on scientific trappings: William Shatner's voice rings out robustly, just before the appreciative ooo-ing accompanying images of the Star Ship Enterprise streaking and swishing throughout deep space, that he and his ship The U.S.S. Enterprise plan to go "where no man has gone before". Aside from this statement's signification of a merely picaresque, exploratory journey founded on the quite literal premise of taking trips to places no human has ever been, epistemologically it connotes a certain faith in the establishment of knowledge-through-exploratory-research and through that knowledge, getting there (as in the space race) first. Thus going where no man has gone before is played out epistemically and scientifically, with citizen- crewmembers of the USS Enterprise dutifully gathering scientific 'data' with fictional technical equipment. The leadership triumvirate aboard the Enterprise is clearly a sanction of scientific authority, with the halves of the subsidiary Bones (DeForrest Kelley)/Spock (Leonard Nimoy) dyad (playing the reliable doctor and the implacable first officer) corresponding, respectively, to the Aristotelian-organic/medical and the Pythagorean/mathematico-logical halves of scientific tradition 2 . Progress in the form of a harmonious scientific community is trumpeted with the quizzical camaraderie that these three offer one another, the always-surmountable plot obstacle, and Captain Kirk's pale joke at the end of each episode .
Yet if the five year "mission" of the Enterprise is painfully representative of a merely epistemologically exploratory discourse (the gathering of samples, the using of equipment to test, assess, and gather information), its more barbaric element dictates that boldly going "where no man has gone before" also means an exploitative imperialism--not necessarily through the means of overt colonization but rather a silent infiltration via the vehicle of culture, the broadcasting of American television shows in home, hovel, and hut. American televisual culture, the statement seems to say, is going where no man has gone before.
Specifically postwar and post cold-war developments of nation that we might want to keep in mind in a discussion of how Star Trek reflects and distorts its cultural and historical position might include 1) the United States' need to shore up a national identity in response to a (still-) perceived Soviet threat and an equally probable construction of the fiction of a Soviet threat used as excuse to shore up national identity; 2) the emergence of a the United States as a dominant player in a world system of economically interdependent/competitive nations supported by the emergence of distance-spanning communications technologies and television's supercession of cinema as the dominant form of mass cultural entertainment; 3) what historian Peter Novick has termed an 'objectivity crisis' in intellectual and mainstream culture 3 during the late fifties, sixties, and seventies--the dissolution of the paradigm of the possibility of an authoritative, absolute knowledge and a corresponding uncertainty concerning what had been long been taken, epistemologically speaking, for granted, 4) a generalized crisis in social authority manifested first in postwar pop art (e.g. Jasper Johns' spattered flags, various representations of packaged goods criticizing commodity culture) manifesting overt critiques of national self-assertion and the results of Wilsonian diplomacy in the fifties, and then, later, the US occuapation of Vietnam, 5) student demonstrations over the debacle of Vietnam and the formation of a 'counter-culture' critiquing patriarchal authority and concerned with the promotion of marginality and lastly, 6) the civil rights movement and 7) the (re-) emergence of feminism.
It would appear from this list that Star Trek emerged from a matrix of concern over national identity, knowledge, power, security, and the structure of authority--both within the United States and abroad. These concerns are echoed in other televisual narrative cycles preceding and within this era, e.g. Father Knows Best, Ozzie and Harriet, Get Smart, The Outer Limits, The Twilight Zone, My Three Sons, The Brady Bunch, some of which tinkered with epistemological and political notions of power and its relations with scientific technology and all of which represented a strong patriarchal authority and a virtually inalterable social structure that, though often tested, remained, at the end of each episode (as if fearfully attempting to maintain order in a changing world) static. Star Trek is but one happy example of this type of fiction.
It is worth emphasizing that the American national, whatever that may be, is defined not only through foreign relations but also as a paradigm of an enclosed, homogeneous unity and in this respect it makes sense that though the ostensible purpose the Starship Enterprise is to convey man upon a potentially endless adventure, it and all its technical gadgetry function at the same time to reduce the world, as Barthes says of Jules Verne's ship, "to a known and enclosed space, where man (can) subsequently live in comfort..." 4 'Going where no man has gone before' is at the same time an effort at exploration, colonization, and at the very least, cultural intervention, while also an effort to create an ordered social body. A peaceful social utopia is literally 'a place where no man has gone before'. The ship represents both a scientific utopia and a political, national one. It serves as the perfect domus for a utopic nation state: a unique, culturally distinct but harmonious political community that travels to distant lands, imposes its will, and suffers retribution infrequently save in the figures of the implacable Klingons clearly modeled as Soviet 'others'. The ship reads like a dream-ad or a circus side-show call for a nation-state: stable, yet mobile, peaceful, yet warlike. Isolationism and interventionism all in one. Or: watch as the internally harmonious community brings order to the intergalactic federation through force, persuasion, and example!
Having merely scratched the surface of this narrative, we find not the machinations of science fiction but of nation-fiction. What are the mechanisms of such a fiction?