The second axis of tension in Star Trek that I will mention is that as a specifically televisual artifact notwithstanding the medium's integral role in the national economy, Star Trek reworks the trope of the national and employs it as yet-another-fiction to exploit. One can hear the producers smirking, the fiction of social unity---great plot device --yet all the while remaining ignorant of the ways in which the show hints at a dystopic transnational--a strategy of representation independent of territorial distinctions that is profoundly permeated by commodity capitalism and whose mechanisms emphasize mere image- without-depth, passivity, and the impossibility of reflection. Through employing various strategies of representation, Star Trek transcends both its psuedo-progressivity and its regressivity and produces a new version of domination of a virtual body politic that its producers probably never imagined--virtual because of the independence of the communications technologies that enable it from cartographic reality, unimaginable because invisible to the naked eye. With the engagement of a discourse through and about domination through representation, we have come full circle, for the machinations of representation are part and parcel of a futuristic vision of science and technology and the 'progressive' science- fictiveness which Star Trek initially sets out, campiness notwithstanding, to represent. This 'second-level' historical and technological 'progressiveness' is ambiguous, threatening, and on the whole unplanned-for by Star Trek itself, one reason being that since the logic of a truly progressive (in the positivistic sense of further along in linear, irreversible time) strategy of narrative television would destine Star Trek (unless it could modify its tropes and conventions fast enough to keep up with historical change) to the historical dust-bin in a movement of the inevitable making-obsolete of commodities to provide for their supersession.
Ultimately, Star Trek, in its 'progressive' and 'regressive' and finally its unconsious prefigurings of a truly progressive mode, presents an uncannily coherent and flexible system of domination offers a kind of confirmation of the old 'conflict' formula of dramatic theory; a suggestion that there is perhaps no possibility of a dramatic, narrative fiction about (or in) a world without conflict--that oppression, original sin (in the form of self-assertion against an 'other'), and domination are the conditions of possibility for classical, intelligible narrative. Perhaps, as Star Trek suggests, a really progressive television show would be unrecognizable ten years from its inception and an authentically harmonious space-age utopia would leave us without a story to tell.
Coincident with Television's overtaking cinema in popularity as the new form of mass entertainment and with its rise as a competitor of print journalism as a source of information in the late 1950s and early 60s, the sophistication of American audiences vis-a-vis the power of imagery and the imagery of power jumps exponentially. Nixon's decisive beads of sweat signify a new era in which media and image dictate power and vice versa and merely pave the way for figures like Ronald Reagan, Max Headroom, and Ross Perot. As any culture predicated on the continual production of novelty requires that what is once new must slide into the commonplace and that more surprising (Benjamin might have called it 'shocking') phenomena must take over, American culture has become acclimated to bombardment on multiple levels. In light of such developments it is not surprising that despite Star Trek's furthering of a regressive version of the nation state, it also foreshadows a representational world-system and increasingly information-and image-dominated economy of America in the eighties and nineties.
Here I define representationalism as the colonization by images and representations of reality in the service of a global accumulation of capital. Representation effects this colonization by siphoning existential being/agency into 'representational space'--that colonized by representations, mere 'pictures of the world' and advocates, in so doing, a turn towards a (seemingly) benevolent dictatorship of two- dimensionality. It is in this context that we must consider Star Trek's omnipresent references to two-dimensional 'screenings', like the screen in the bridge towards which crew members, if not looking at their scanner screens or their 'tricorder' screens, direct their gaze to see where they're going and what is 'coming up'. While we look at our screens, Star Trek urges us to keeplooking.
As we saw earlier, the fiction of nationalism's strength derives from its domination (through fictions) over forms of non-human and human alterity that make possible its continuance and growth.
The logic of representation in Star Trek implies a kind of domination as well, yet one marked by an increased abstraction. Representation involves a higher level of mediation than the direct management of corporeality. In the represntational world system, representation, like a virus and with little regard for purity of form, dominates through colonization and conceals its parasitic nature by asserting older forms of domination and replaying them over and over, welding them together, creating fantastic, contradictory hybrids. Captain Kirk's bravado, then, his aforementioned regression, might be taken, then, as a feature of the concealing logic of representationalism itself: a re-telling, an attempt to hold what is decayed and gone--a sense of a unified nation in America in the 1960s-- and the barbarism that presupposes it in the face of the internationalizing, levelling impulse of the universal broadcast.
The logic of representation invites us to substitute 'thought- transmissions' or representations for concrete existence. In practical terms, the moment at which we accept 'thought-transmissions' in the form of the televisual is the moment at which identity as such-- both national and individual--becomes unimportant and simply a moment in the unfolding of Western representationalism/capitalism and the moment, therefore, in which nationalism becomes merely an anachronism and therfore itself a fiction.
The strategies that Star Trek uses to endorse this latter logic are the 1) re-presenting and through doing so legitimizing human activity as constituted by the thoughtless pushing of buttons and the staring at screens, 2) the insistence upon the unimportance of the corporeal --or, the making given, immaterial of concrete existence and of existence as such, (or, alternately, fetishizing the corporeal in a movement intending to efface embodied reflection) and 3) presentation of a smooth and shallow social surface where character and identity are unimportant and critique impossible.