And so they are: each week Kirk sets forth the limits of reflection, subversion, and self-interpretation 24 and therefore the boundaries of morality of the representational world-system while simultaneously instantiating a further extension of its logic: the suppression of depth. That is, at the end of each episode, invariably, Kirk makes a stupid joke. It is this tonic note, uttered (always) with Kirk in his Con25 and all the crewmembers in their slots, which constitutes the weekly "reactivation of the code"26: the moment in which the social order re-establishes itself and in which Kirk seals the contract with his joke--saying, symbolically, I am the only individual on board who is allowed to be subversive--to break from the order-- to the extent that I can make a joke. But watch what a stupid joke it will be! It will be bereft of any possibilities of real critique, and it, itself, will be a recapitulation of the social order. The possibility of which discord, of distantiation that irony and humor, critique and reflection are composed are here affirmed as impossible; impermissible.
That shallowness is a given; that appearances must be reality (and that what is real is simply the pictures in our heads or on the screen) is in keeping with the logic of scientific representationalism which assumes that observable appearances are reality and that manifest content ought to be the same as latent 27.We may (in our peculiarly American fashion) trust shallowness, two-dimensionality, appearances, screens. On the Enterprise it is grounds for fear when things (like the Talosian shape-changer whom Pike tries to strangle, like the treachery of Spock's calculated subversivity) are 'not what they seem'28; when they have any semblance of depth beyond mere 'world-pictures'. It is the gap between surface (appearance) and interpretation that proves to be dangerous, for such a gap would provide a space for imaginative reflection and the possibility of subversion; it is the gap wherein an evil genius or god could intervene.Again we find ourselves returning to the site of representation; the site of reflection, the scene of the crime.
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