Valerie Fulton

Department of English
Colorado State University

 

“In the twenty-fourth century, there will be no hunger, and there will be no greed.”

 

–Gene Roddenberry, to actor Jonathan Frakes

 

Following in the footsteps of another primetime television drama, Northern Exposure, which has featured both Franz Kafka and Federico Fellini in recent programming, Star Trek: The Next Generation bridged its 1992 and ’93 seasons with a cliffhanger that meshed the cast of fictional Star Fleet officers with another “real-life” historical figure, Samuel Clemens. This trend of having writers and avant-garde film makers appear in popular t.v. series suggests not so much an acceptance of the sort of cultural criticism going on in academia today as it does an appropriation of high cultural figures by the corporate television industry. The industry “sells” Kafka and Fellini to the viewer, complete with the signifying props that have come to denote intellectualism–dark clothing, moodiness, an aura of mystery–all of which serve to take the place of any real attempt to engage the potentially subversive ideas expressed either in Kafka’s fiction or in Fellini’s films. Such strategies of appropriation are particularly important to a show like Northern Exposure, whose success depends less on the images of alternative living it presents than on the standard t.v. equation of thriving capitalism–its main characters include an ambitious doctor, a millionaire entrepreneur, and a restaurant owner–with Kantian altruism, here reenforced by the program’s background cast of righteous but predominantly voiceless Native Americans.

 

This process by which commodification finally stifles alternative discourse is described well in Susan Willis’s study, A Primer for Daily Life. Willis uses the California school system’s promotion of “earthquake kits” to demonstrate how consumer packaging can result in a series of items’ “complete condensation to the commodity form” (165). She differentiates between camping out, which relies on articles developed for military use yet can also be used to stage anti-military protests, and the earthquake kit itself, the contents of which merely “embody the simulated remembrance of how they might have been used if purchased for a camping trip, but . . . do not give access to social practice or its guerrilla theatre reversal” (168). The process by which high cultural figures become reduced to t.v.’s commodity form differs only in the sense that few Americans are aware of the originary ideas behind a signifying figure. When a friend once defended Northern Exposure to me on the ground that “a show that quotes Nietzsche can’t be all bad,” she hit on the central problem. We live in a culture where “Nietzsche” is a metonym for intellectual thought much in the way that “Kleenex” is a metonym for something to wipe one’s nose on: to appreciate, even identify with, the t.v. character who quotes from Beyond Good and Evil, one hardly needs to have read or even to know of the text. Networks can thus extend their appeal to (and in the process help define) the “thinking American,” whose pleasure comes from seeing the metonymic association in this unfamiliar context, while at the same time risking neither their mainstream audience nor their corporate sponsorship.

 

The appearance of Samuel Clemens on Star Trek: The Next Generation confirms the idea that intellectual thought can be reduced to the least common denominator of the commodity form. Moreover, Clemens’s appearance on the show underscores the extent to which t.v. programs themselves may unintentionally reproduce ideological assumptions that we consume, store, and later regurgitate. Star Trek: The Next Generation, a show about the future’s altruistic exploration of life on other planets, tacitly helps to perpetuate the conventional U.S. wisdom that acts of imperialism by our government against third world nations are benevolent rather than self-serving, benign rather than aggressive. Clemens’s appearance on the episode in question as an inquisitive and bothersome fixture of the western American frontier situates him firmly in a past where the imperial self was a fixture both dominant and heroic. This portrayal does more than belie the strong anti-imperialist tenor of Clemens’s later work. In being asked to consume the writer as a frontier artifact we are not only encouraged to believe that Star Fleet Command–and, by extension, the television viewer–has progressed beyond the sort of “frontier mentality”² Americans have come to associate with acts of wrongful acquisition; we are simultaneously discouraged from practicing the kind of intellectual self-scrutiny that might produce alternative modes of discourse and lead toward social change.

 

I. to boldly go where no one has gone before

 

Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s U.S.S. Enterprise, the flagship for an entire fleet of Federation vessels, has as its “continuing mission” a duty to “explore strange new worlds” and to “seek out new life forms.” Since it also has the weapons capacity to annihilate a small planet, crew members sometimes find themselves obliged to reassure species from less technologically advanced worlds that, remarkable as it may seem, the arsenal is for defensive purposes only. Unlike the incredulous life form who believes weapons are made to be used, American t.v. viewers have little trouble accepting the show’s nonviolent premise–in large part because we are accustomed to the routine stockpiling of nuclear and other advanced weapons for the protection of our country’s “national security.” Yet the program itself, which pretends to see through twentieth-century self-deceptions by presenting our time in retrospect as avidly militaristic, provides its viewers with still another rationale. The Federation’s Star Fleet officers are not inclined to act aggressively, Star Trek tells us, because everything they need is already at their disposal. In other words, the show relies on Marx’s early notion that human nature is bound to the mode of production to explain how future generations have become more “civilized” and “humane.” The material substances used to reenforce this notion are, not coincidentally, food and energy.³ Here human agency has been removed from the mode of production altogether: “food replicators” provide all crew members with abundant, effortless, computer-generated meals, while the “warp coil” draws on a fictitious energy source to power the Enterprise through space. When not burdened by the exigencies of frontier travel, Star Trek‘s crew is free–with some help, of course, from the Holodeck’s simulated landscapes–“to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner, . . . without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic” (Marx, 53). Nor is this multiplicity of roles limited to recreational practice. Although there is an ostensible division of labor among the program’s main characters, Star Fleet commanders not only manage to avoid disaster by employing the critical methodologies or expertise of absent crew members, they also pool information to discover unified solutions to most of the emergencies that threaten their ship.

 

But if Star Trek implies that the future will liberate us from alienating modes of production, the program is finally unable to conceive a community based on Marx’s notion of mutual ownership rather than on the principles of state control. Star Fleet is, after all, a military organization, and like all military organizations its order of command follows a strict hierarchy. The crew members’ willingness to obey their superiors is so routine, in fact, that Star Trek‘s writers appear to have become bored with it; their invention of the renegade “Q,” a representative from a “nearly omnipotent” life form, allows for the intrusion of Byronic skepticism without the threat of a specific challenge to the status quo. For instance, “Q” mocks the egalitarianism which prompts Captain Jean-Luc Picard to call his first officer “number one” by reminding Commander Riker that he is, in the established order, no better than “number two.” Yet “Q” himself, who wields seemingly infinite power for personal rather than altruistic reasons, does not present a more attractive alternative to Star Fleet’s hierarchical model. In fact, his character suggests that to be freed from the controlling mechanisms of an “illusory community” (Marx, 83) is to become capricious, childlike, and unresponsive to the rights of others.

 

That Star Trek portrays an ideal future community in which humans have surpassed twentieth-century greed and aggression while at the same time relying on recursive models of the state apparatus is an unavoidable paradox; the show can, after all, do no more than pretend to know a future we have yet to live. For that reason, I will not question its least probable expedients–that all aliens converse in perfect English, that humans can interbreed with alien life forms, that most planets seem atmospherically conducive to human life, etc…⁴ Rather, I concentrate on the show’s central paradox, the fact that its future orientation coincides with the exploration of “strange new worlds,” something Americans perceive as a completed historical task. As I have already suggested, the erasure of the present moment from this formulation helps to direct viewer attention away from the fact that exploration, conquest, and colonization continue to be routinized parts of twentieth-century American economic policy. Just as important, however, is the extent to which this erasure reveals the future’s dependence on and connection with the past. Frontier travel can never signify an absolute departure, since not only does this idea imply that our invention of new experience or of new means of socialization is possible; it suggests that we are able to describe otherness without reverting to the language and ideological constructions of the same. As Derrida argues in “Psyche: The Invention of the Other,” “invention does not create an existence or a world as a set of existents”; it “discovers for the first time . . . what was already found there” (338, original emphasis). Moreover, while invention “presupposes originality,” it will “only receive its status of invention” when it is “protected by a system of conventions that will ensure . . . its belonging to a culture: to a heritage, a lineage, a pedagogical tradition, a discipline, a chain of generations” (316, original emphasis).

 

Tzvetan Todorov, writing about Columbus’s voyage to the Caribbean, provides a means to address these ideas in relation to a logic of frontier exploration. Because guided by a system of absolute conventions and beliefs, Columbus “knows in advance what he will find; the concrete experience is there to illustrate a truth already possessed” (17). Thus, confronted by natives who tell him that Cuba is an island rather than part of the Asian continent, “he decides to eliminate” this information and “challenges the quality of his informants” (21) instead of altering his initial hypothesis. He is likewise unable to register diversity in language; the “only two possible” ways he can behave when forced to communicate with Indians are “to acknowledge [their foreign tongue] as a language but to refuse to believe it is different; or to acknowledge its difference but to refuse to admit it is a language” (30). As Todorov argues, Columbus’s inability to perceive otherness stems from his belief that Spanish language and culture do not constitute “one convention among others, but [are] rather the natural state of things” (29). Such foundational thinking is central to most notions of frontier exploration and conquest.⁵ Consider, for instance, the statement of purpose used to introduce Star Trek: The Next Generation. The Federation’s goals are both “to seek out new civilizations” and “to boldly go where no one has gone before”–missions that clearly contradict each other unless read through the lens of frontier ideology, which grants new civilizations existence only to the extent that the originary culture has “found” them.

 

II. “Prime” Surveillance

 

In carrying out their mission of frontier exploration, Star Fleet officers are at all times bound to obey the “Prime Directive,” a policy designed by Star Trek‘s writers to underscore the future’s first commitment to justice and humanity. The ordinance, which prohibits all Federation personnel from interfering with the cultural development of less advanced worlds, bears a striking resemblance to the mandate now issued at federal parks and wilderness areas throughout the U.S., usually in the form of a sign cautioning against the destruction of a “fragile ecosystem” and requesting that visitors leave everything as they found it. Because the Federation takes an anthropological interest in developing cultures, but is prevented by the Prime Directive from openly engaging in their study, research teams descend to the planet under investigation and conceal themselves either behind an electronic blind or within surgically altered bodies; like the twentieth-century field biologist, their objective is to collect observable data without disturbing subjects or taking them outside their natural habitat.

 

These measures bear a less obvious but important resemblance to current naturalist strategies in the extent to which both justify surveillance as the necessary precondition for scientific research and, ultimately, the greater good of humanity. I do not wish to suggest that the surveillance of wilderness areas or game preserves is in itself problematic, but simply to point out how readily a logic of “stewardship” translates into a logic of imperialism.⁶ On a recent episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled “First Contact,” Commander Riker has been disguised and sent on a recognizance mission to determine whether a species about to attain warp drive is ready to assume to the sort of responsibilities Federation officials deem necessary in using such advanced technology. Unfortunately, Riker is hospitalized on the planet’s surface; the surgeons who operate notice his strange internal structure and conclude that he is a different species from themselves. Although this series of events might easily have led to a critique of Star Fleet surveillance practice, the episode focuses instead on the threat these aliens’ recognition of Commander Riker poses to the Prime Directive, which Picard must violate if he wishes to save his first officer’s life. The show encourages us to identify with Picard’s “human” dilemma before we consider the inconsistency presented by his “away team”‘s surveillance procedures, in large part because it portrays the aliens themselves as xenophobic–so much so that they resolve to postpone warp drive testing until they can face a universe in which their culture is neither dominant nor central. This resolve, culminating in a refusal to join the Federation alliance, reconstitutes the marginal and particularly non-human status of the alien race; unlike their leading scientist, who prefers to accompany the crew of the Enterprise rather than live among outmoded ideas and technology, the others are content to remain behind. That Picard’s largesse permits them this freedom, moreoever, obscures a more pressing issue–the impossibility of their ever regaining the cultural autonomy they seek. Like the earth’s remaining predators, which roam our wilderness parks while human advocates tag them, keep track of their procreative habits, and lobby for their protection, the aliens have already been inscribed within Star Fleet’s cultural heritage. They have been seen, regardless of whether they choose to see.

 

In “The Eye of Power,” Michel Foucault evokes the “Panopticon” as a conceptual model for the Enlightenment’s more general goal, first to erradicate “any zones of darkness . . . established by the privileges of royal power or the prerogatives of some corporation,” and then to realize “the dream that each individual, whatever position he occupied, might be able to see the whole of society, that men’s hearts should communicate, their vision be unobstructed by obstacles, and that opinion of all reign over each” (152). Instead of the social attainment of this goal, however, what emerges is a disciplinary system in which authority becomes “a machinery that no one owns” and “class domination can be exercised just to the extent that power is dissasociated from individual might” (156). Foucault’s rejection of “ownership” as the primary means of attaining and inscribing power is especially pertinent to a discussion of Star Trek: The Next Generation, since most property on board the Enterprise is collective, and money no longer exists as a form of exchange within the Federation’s economic system. In fact, one might argue that the bodies of the crew members themselves have become the abstract property (in Deleuze’s sense of “abstract machinic” arrangements)⁷ of the moral capital established at the interface between Federation members and the all- encompassing surveillance mechanism within which they live and work. This device, the ship’s computer network, no longer represents the strictly visual surveillance that Foucault theorized, but is instead a kind of “infosensorium” internalized in the body-as-computer, with the result that the frontier of the body itself becomes “colonized” as a self-monitoring machine.⁸

 

Not surprisingly, and despite the fact that the computer is used as frequently to obtain information about Federation staff as it is to investigate other, possibly hostile life forms, Star Trek viewers are discouraged from making an overt connection between the constitution of power relations and the surveillance of crew members. Instead, they are asked to see the computer as a direct extension of benign human agency, a tool no better than the individuals responsible for its use. Potential anxiety about the dangers of surveillance technology is further minimized– while, ironically, the process by which the body becomes machinic is advanced–by giving the computer a human counterpart. Ship’s counselor Deanna Troi, a genetic mixture of the human and Betazoid races, has inherited powers of mental telepathy that enable her to bring others’ hidden emotions to light much in the same way that a computer probe can determine their physical structure.⁹ However, the counselor escapes becoming the mere agent of surveillance practice in large part because, as she is also portrayed, she is a feminine woman who loves chocolate, gossip, and romantic settings. Channelled through this familiar and nonthreatening human personality, Troi’s telepathic powers emerge as little more than a refined form of “female intuition.” Thus, while the television viewer may be able to trivialize her role as a Federation officer, it is almost impossible to imagine Troi as an alien endowed with the potential to “access” human minds.

 

As these examples suggest, surveillance technology intersects frontier ideology at the level of the distinction between self and other. The concept of an “imperial self” is especially important: regardless of a given Star Fleet officer’s race, that officer’s success as a member of the Federation is contingent on how closely his or her actions correspond to the specifically human ideals of hard work, loyalty, and compassion; aliens, on the other hand, are those who do not willingly subordinate their cultural impulses to the dominant model. For the American television viewer, this ought to be a familiar concept, since it is directly analogous to the commonly held belief that marginalized peoples should be accepted only to the extent that they assimilate white, middle-class notions of culture and value. Dissent among Star Fleet officers, when it occurs, is thus an effect not of bad Federation policy, but rather of covert intrusions from the outside which conspire to make Federation personnel “other”–much in the same way that rising suburban crime rates are thought to result not from discriminatory U.S. economic policies, but instead from the immigration of ethnic minorities into predominantly white neighborhoods. Likewise, aliens who serve as members of Star Fleet Command must continually prove their allegiance to the Federation, usually through confrontations with their native cultures that are designed to reconfirm the superior ideological position they have adopted. For instance, the program’s Klingon Security Officer, Lieutenant Commander Worf, has not merely chosen to join the Federation; his father has been wrongly denounced as a traitor by the Klingon High Council, a mistake that makes Worf “alien” to his own people while at the same time showcasing the autocratic, rash, and narrow-minded impulses of the Klingon race.

 

Ultimately, characters like Worf allow Star Trek‘s writers a convenient means of circumventing the Prime Directive, since all such characters engage in a continual conversion to the Federation’s higher goals and principles. Moreover, as the figure of one-of-a-kind android Data suggests, the conversion must take place even when there are no originary cultural impulses to challenge those of the Federation. Lieutenant Commander Data’s ambition to become “more human” in particular belies the facile multiculturalism implied both by ordinances like the Prime Directive and by Star Fleet’s ready tolerance of other cultures’ cursory habits of mind–their holidays, foods, ornamental objects, etc.. Designed to resemble an anatomically correct Caucasian male, Data is a perpetual human drag show whose attempts at imitation result in a series of comedic postures. Despite the fact that they may initially suggest multiplicity or play,¹⁰ Data’s approximations reaffirm, in the long run, the forces of social hegemony on board the Enterprise, since, of course, these gestures signify each time the dominant rather than suggest an alternative ideological commitment. Data’s choice to become the same thus points once again to the surveillance mechanisms that, in a Foucauldian sense, constitute disciplinary power: by watching, acting, imitating, Data demonstrates how “the effects of power” circulate “through progressively finer channels, gaining access to individuals themselves, to their bodies, their gestures and all their daily actions” (Foucault, 151-2).

 

III. High Plains Data

 

In all the ideological assumptions that Star Trek: The Next Generation and its American television viewers share, a complex and contradictory notion of individualism predominates. Just as we are encouraged to “be ourselves” and are at the same time bombarded by stimuli that ensure dominant forms of mimetic desire, just as we are trained to believe that “all people are created equal” while at the same time asked to compete in an economy that routinely discriminates against women and minorities, so does Star Trek‘s position contend that individualism is both desired and improbable. I have already suggested the extent to which the program’s tacit imperialism complicates notions of autonomy and difference. Here, I would like to comment on Star Trek‘s attitude toward radical individualism. On the one hand, the program advocates personal achievement and self-determination, two individualistic qualities necessary for movement within the Federation’s ranks. Captain Picard, for instance, has achieved his dominant status precisely because he is willing to take risks and work outside the strict parameters of the law. It is important to realize, however, that Picard’s autonomy is contingent on an ideological commitment to and ideal understanding of the status quo so strong that even his insubordination constitutes obedience to the Federation’s larger goals and principles; in attaining the highest position of power, Picard has become synonymous with power and its agencies alike. By constrast, the radicial individual invariably poses a threat to both ship operations and the cooperative efforts of Star Fleet Command. Frequent episodes demonstrate that individual crew members who have succumbed to the invasive influence of some alien culture or identity must be subdued, brought back in line; moreover, given the extent to which Federation culture is meant to exemplify the most advanced stage in a strict teleological progression, individuals who evince revolutionary or renegade tendencies often come to be associated with the past.¹¹

 

“Time’s Arrow,” the two-part episode which features Samuel Clemens, is readily able to engage this process by which radical individualism is marginalized and suppressed, since the story’s premise involves travel to a time which most U.S. citizens recognize as one of vigilantes and solitary gunmen. The first episode in particular draws on the American frontier’s symbolic resonance to construct a contrast between past and future habits of mind. It begins with the discovery that archaeologists have unearthed android Data’s decapitated head from a cavern beneath twenty-fourth century San Francisco alongside “several artifacts from the 1800s–a watch, eyeglasses, a gun.”¹² That Data’s positronic circuitry should be placed alongside items which Federation technology has rendered obsolete makes immediately clear the juncture between past and future. But the decision to focus on Data is also more subtly significant. Data’s state of Deleuzian “human- becoming”¹³ places the android in a perfect position to confront the frontier past, since not only do self- fashioning and a lack of feeling define both the android’s and the Hollywood outlaw’s %modus operandi%; Data’s unique status as a life form makes him the ideal candidate to assume a guise of radical otherness.

 

In fact, the first part of “Time’s Arrow” features Data as a type of the “man with no name” persona Clint Eastwood has popularized in westerns like High Plains Drifter. Having unwittingly followed a group of aliens through the time portal that connects the planet Devidia Two with nineteenth-century Earth, Data finds himself on the streets of frontier San Franscisco armed with nothing but his clothing and Star Fleet communicator badge. He immediately uses the latter as collateral in a poker game, earning him both the means to continue researching the mystery of his anachronistic “death” and the admiration of bellboy Jack London, who becomes his faithful sidekick. Data’s success in manipulating the economic resources around him to serve his own interests and his ability to command respect despite the fact that he occupies a position of complete anonymity are only two features he shares with Eastwood’s nameless drifter. Though motivated by a sense of urgency ostensibly unrelated to the concerns of those around them, both figures form a temporary alliance with certain of these others in order to overpower a common enemy. Thus, Data’s search for the cause of his own destruction becomes inextricably bound with Star Fleet’s investigation into a series of deaths on nineteenth-century earth; these deaths, attributed to cholera but really the work of aliens from the planet Devidia Two, give common, humanitarian cause to Data’s mission while at the same time displacing the role of radical otherness from the android to the parasitic Devidians, who have travelled back in time to feed on human energy.

 

That Lieutenant Commander Data’s presence in frontier America can be justified only when the android undermines his claim to individuality finally separates him from the character Eastwood portrays in High Plains Drifter. The drifter, a ghost who has returned for the most personal of reasons–to avenge his death–can never transcend the limitations of this condition to join the citizens with whom he has organized; the spectre from some existential spirit world, he must remain adrift and solitary. The android’s limitations, on the other hand, guarantee that he reacts impersonally even to his own death. In fact, far from sensing a need to vindicate himself, Data considers his disembodied head to suggest a point of commonality between him and the humans he emulates; he “seems to take solace in the fact that he is now mortal” (6). The obvious point is that androids cannot feel for themselves. It is also worth noting, however, that Data has been cast in the role of Hollywood outlaw not so much because of his facile resemblance to this figure, but because he is the character least able to carry the role to its logical conclusions. Just as Data can do no more than approximate the actions of his human counterparts, so can he do no more than signify an image of radical individualism already contained and commodified by American consumer culture.

 

IV. The Viewer “Sitting in Darkness”¹⁴

 

Data is not the only figure in “Time’s Arrow” to occupy a commodified position. The two-part episode also features a representation of Samuel Clemens that relies heavily on the writer as a familiar cultural icon. Despite the fact that Clemens left San Franscisco in 1866, at the age of thirty-one, the show depicts him in the guise of the white-haired, white-suited curmudgeon whom Americans readily recognize–in large part because a white-haired, white-suited automaton “Mark Twain”¹⁵ greets millions of visitors each year to Disney’s Frontierland. Representations like Disney’s serve to foster an image of the writer as presiding over and to some extent creating our frontier past; that Clemens has come for so many Americans to signify this past may account for Star Trek‘s willingness to make him–rather than a sheriff, mayor or other politician–the proper authority to negotiate between the time travelers and their nineteenth-century ancestors. However, Star Trek grants this position of unprecedented power to a literary figure only on the condition that Clemens remain a commodified cultural object. The program’s underlying message is that oppositional thought, like radical individualism, must either be suppressed or contained within the dominant ideological structure.

 

Interestingly, Clemens enters the program’s narrative as an oppositional and potentially disruptive force. After eavesdropping on a conversation in which he discovers that Data is an “invader” from the future, Clemens explains to a San Franscisco reporter that he “wrote a book about” time travel which “chronicles the tale of a man of our era who fouls Sixth Century by introducing newfangled gadgets and weapons, all in the name of progress” (9). This frankly anti-imperialist gloss of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court¹⁶ typifies Clemens’s initial response to the Federation, whose motives he compares to those of the Spanish, Dutch, and Portugese (11). Skeptical about whether the U.S.S. Enterprise can really be a “ship of peace,” the writer objects that this is “what all conquerors say” (11); he also resists Star Fleet operations by stealing into Data’s hotel room, sabotaging the android’s “time-shift detection device,” threatening members of the crew’s “away team” at gun point, and thwarting Picard’s entry back through the time portal.

 

Insofar as Clemens works to undermine what he perceives as a threat to “all humanity” (9), his actions are not unlike the patriotic resistance efforts of General Washington, Joan of Arc, and deposed Phillippine leader Emilio Aquinaldo, whose ideals Clemens thought should be “held in reverence by the best men and women of all civilizations.”¹⁷ Far from seeming heroic, however, Clemens’s solitary efforts to save his race are made to appear intrusive and wrong-headed. His chief mistake, the episode makes clear, lies in an inability to see the “real menace” (9). “Newfangled gadgets and weapons” are not the problem; as one of the Enterprise crew explains to Clemens, technological advances have led to “the end of poverty and the cooperative ways of the United Federation of Planets” (11). The problem is instead the Devidians, who have used advanced technology for the purpose of harvesting, storing, and consuming human energy. The Devidians–not members of the U.S.S. Enterprise–are the “real” imperialists; even the fact that the deaths for which they are responsible have been attributed to cholera suggests a comparison with North America’s first European colonists, who spread this and other communicable diseases to the native population. That the aliens have traveled to nineteenth-century San Francisco in order to obtain their “only source of nourishment” (11), moreoever, suggests that imperialist activity is somehow particular to America’s frontier past. Certainly, this is the lesson Samuel Clemens learns. “Slightly less cynical” by the program’s end, the writer not only claims that his discovery of the twenty- fourth-century time travelers constitutes his “greatest adventure”; he thanks Data “for helping a bitter old man to open his eyes and see that the future turned out pretty well” (12).

 

By priviledging an image of Clemens as the teller of “great adventures” and displacing his anti-imperialist sentiments with expressions of vaguely patriotic optimism, Star Trek encourages its viewers to contextualize his work in a way that undermines the full complexity even of those aspects it engages. And insofar as the process by which Clemens evolves from “bitter old man” to advocate for an enlightened future relies on the substitution of one discrete ideological position for another–insofar as it relies, that is, on the substitution of a “mistaken” position for the “truthful” one–the program actually neglects to engage one of the most salient features of his late work, its Nietzschean skepticism. According to Clemens, no one group or civilization may claim the right to dominate another on the ground that it occupies a superior ethical position; each is instead alike in “knowing it has the only true religion and the only sane system of government,” and “each [is] proud of its fancied supremacy.”¹⁸ He also dismisses outright the concept of altruism, one of those qualities to which we have attached a “misleading meaning.” Charity, benevolence, and self- sacrifice exist for Clemens only to the extent that they serve to gratify individual “self-approval”; a man must content “his own spirit first–the other person’s benefit has to always take second place.”¹⁹

 

These ideas go far toward explaining Clemen’s specific objections to imperialist policy. Consider, for instance, the following passage from his essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness”:

 

The Blessings-of-Civilization trust, wisely and cautiously administered, is a Daisy. . . . But Christendom . . . has been so eager to get at every stake . . . that the People who Sit in Darkness . . . have become suspicious of the Blessing of Civilization. More, they have begun to examine them. This is not well. The Blessing of Civilization are all right, and a good commercial property; there could not be better, in a dim light. (286)

 

He continues by noting that this package of exported “blessings”

 

is merely an outside cover, gay and pretty and attractive, displaying the special patterns of our Civilization which we reserve for Home Consumption, while inside the bale is the Actual Thing that the Customer Sitting in Darkness buys with his blood and tears and land and liberty. (287)

 

Clemens not only shows how imperialists commodify values like “Love,” “Gentleness,” and “Mercy” (286) in order to manufacture a fair business exchange out of what might otherwise be seen as the exploitation of another culture; he also suggests that for the “Person in Darkness” to accept the “Blessings-of-Civilization” package, she must learn to value “mere outside covers” more than “actual things.” Thus Clemens considers ideology–not “progress” or “newfangled gadgets”²⁰–the imperialist’s most powerful tool of oppression. That is why, at the conclusion of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, all Hank Morgan’s firepower and “civilizing” inventions together cannot undermine the foundations of Catholicism; that is why, at the end of “The War Prayer” (1904-5), the “aged stranger” who asks those around him to reconsider their use of Christianity as a justification for violence is dismissed as a “lunatic” by the rest of the congregation (682). Clemens would have been especially wary of a society like the United Federation of Planets, which claims that advanced weapons and technology have enabled altruism, since for him all “material advantage” amounts to “the same thing”; it cannot change the fact that human beings “seek the contentment of [a] spirit” which is “indifferent to . . . man’s good” and is intent only on “satisfying its own desires.”²¹

 

In “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” Clemens acknowledges not only that successful strategies for marketing a benevolent American identity are necessary “for the sake of Business,” but that it is the skillful communicator’s duty to “arrange [the other culture’s] opinions for [it]” (291). What was once the imperialist’s imperative is now, in today’s “global economy,” the duty of those corporate agencies that manufacture televisual and other mass-produced representations for the purpose of securing control over the world’s consumer marketplace. A recent trend in cultural studies has been to suggest that such representations can produce a wide spectrum of possible responses, including those conducive to the exploration and transformation of our routinized selves. This assumption, formulated in part to counter the belief that film, television, and popular fiction are “low” media, the opiate of an easily manipulated mass audience, has yielded a great deal of useful material.²² Nonetheless, I think it is possible to overstate the progressive impact televised subject matter has on individuals, regardless of their socio-economic status or educational background. The danger lies in focussing too much on the cultural critic’s attempt to rescript an isolated representation or set of representations for the purpose of empowering marginal discourse, while at the same time downplaying the economic dominance of those managerial forces responsible for placing the representation in its original televised context. For instance, Constance Penley’s article “Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture” demonstrates how fanzine versions of the relationship between Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock reconceptualize ways of looking at gendered and sexual identity in order to serve interests not addressed by the Star Trek series.²³ However, the fact that certain fans have rescripted the show’s intended parameters by no means changes Star Trek‘s patriarchal treatment of women or its dismissal of romantic relationships in favor of such male gendered themes as aggression and conflict. Nor does Penley’s article explain why the same fans whose stories transform Kirk from a womanizer into Spock’s willing sex partner feel that the feminist agenda implicit in the transformation is one they must repudiate. One might in fact argue, as Penley herself suggests,²⁴ that the tension between these two marginal discourses–“slash lit” and feminism–effectively reveals the power of hegemonic ideological representations not only to dominate the mainstream, but also to make difficult any form of sustained collective resistance to it.

 

But it is also important to realize the extent to which dominant managerial positions can retain their power even though they learn to “sell” marginal representations, a point that becomes apparent when the discussion moves from naturalized gender roles on the first Star Trek series to naturalized versions of the imperial self on Star Trek: The Next Generation. The product of two distinct historical periods–one in which the Women’s Movement had not yet begun to gain a popular American audience, the other in which “Reaganomics” owed its success to arms’ proliferation and U.S. intervention in third-world countries such as Panama and Nicaragua–each television series may be said to contain ideological concerns that reflect and generate contemporary anxieties about the infiltration of a potentially disruptive “other” into the mainstream.²⁵ Where the two differ is in the degree to which they see both the marginalization of women and the colonization of consumer subjects as necessary for corporate capitalism’s growth and perpetuation. While it is possible to coopt women into the system as producers, and therefore to enfranchise interests like feminism, women as a group are just one target in corporate capitalism’s ongoing need to colonize a subject, whatever its provisional “frontier.” Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s reconstitution of an imperialist ideology thus mirrors the more general process by which television programs work to colonize, represent, and even produce consumer interests. The containment and commodification of alternative discourse–especially that which, like Clemens’s, questions the nature of capitalism itself–is a necessary part of the process. Given this conundrum, one thing is certain: although cultural critics must continue to examine the progressive possibilities that exist in popular social texts such as Star Trek, we must also align our analyses of diverse cultural representations with an examination of the monolithic cultural capital that commodifies diversity for profit, while threatening to manage our critical attention as well.

 

Notes

 

1. Many thanks to the readers at Postmodern Culture, and to Paul Trembath, for helping with the revision of this essay.

 

2.The latest Gene Roddenberry spin-off, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, suggests a resurgence of interest in the frontier as a place both of infinite possibility and of violence, hardship, and continual strife; this change from Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s view of space as predominantly colonized, ordered, and governed may reflect the U.S.’s recent swing from years of Reagan prosperity to the current economic recession and a renewed interest in libertarian politics.

 

3.The threat of world hunger and the depletion of our natural resources pose two of the greatest challenges to the environmental, economic, and humanitarian policy of our century.

 

4.Recent episodes have attempted to provide an explanation for some of these phenomena. For instance, the preponderance of humanoid life forms in the galaxy is the result of one ancient species’ having centuries ago seeded several planets with its own DNA; thus, there is a “real,” not merely coincidental, genetic kinship among the Cardassian, human, Klingon, and Romulan races. Similarly, the Enterprise computer’s “universal translator” is responsible for making sure that all communication on board the ship is conducted in English. These justifications are merely cosmetic, however, and do little to explain the show’s decidedly anglo-centric bias, a condition that is behind the program’s decision to designate English as the Federation’s official language in the first place. Other evidence for the bias includes our solar system’s designation as sector “001,” and the fact that the Federation’s prestigious Star Fleet Academy is housed not just on planet Earth, but in the city of San Francisco.

 

5. Thinking about the frontier remains foundational as long as one assumes that the progression from “here” to “there” is unilaterally one-dimensional. New writing on the frontier discards this belief, stressing instead what Gayatri Spivak calls the “interanimating relationship” between margin and center. In the forefront of such work is Gloria Anzaldua’s Borderlands/Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Spinsters-Aunt Lute, 1987). The Frontier Experience and the American Dream: Essays on American Literature, edited by David Mogen, Mark Busby, and Paul Bryant (Texas A & M University Press, 1989) also works to challenge traditional notions of the frontier by approaching the idea of “new territory” from a number of possible angles, including canon formation and ethnic studies.

 

6. Just a few of the many recently published books which consider the ethics of wildlife and resource management are Walter Truett Anderson’s To Govern Evolution (N.Y.: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987); Alfred W. Crosby’s Ecological Imperialism (N.Y.: Cambridge, 1986); Bill Devall’s and George Session’s Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith, 1985); and Rosemary Rodd’s Biology, Ethics, and Animals (N.Y.: Oxford, 1990). Views on the subject range from Anderson’s belief that it is lamentable but imperative that people act on the behalf of other species to Devall’s and Session’s call for human beings to assume a decentered subject position in relation to the world that both surrounds and encompasses us.

 

7. For an explanation of this sense of the word “machinic,” see Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti- Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1983), 36-41; for a discussion of “abstract” machines see Ronald Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari (New York: Routledge, 1989), 131-5 and 145-9. For a critique of Foucault’s “panoptic” view of power as it can apply to Star Trek‘s computerized re-centralization of power in Federation bodies, see Jean Baudrillard, Forget Foucault (New York: Semiotext(e), 1987), 11-12, and Arthur Kroker and David Kook, The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-Aesthetics (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986), 170-81. In the terms of this paper, Deleuze and Baudrillard are uncharacteristically compatible, since both Deleuze’s notion of “machinic arrangements” and Baudrillard’s notion of “dead power” theorize power as a field of immanence which is neither centrist nor diffuse, but rather effected in the collective attentions of bodies themselves. Such a view of power explains the absolute coextensivity of computer monitors to Federation bodies aboard the Enterprise–a coextensivity within which power is so all-pervasive it virtually disappears into the experience of “life” itself.

 

8. For a discussion of the body as a kind of “frontier” whose power to affect and be affected is always open to decoding and re-territorialization–particularly in the alluring presence of capital–see Gilles Deleuze, “Capitalism,” in The Deleuze Reader (New York: Columbia U Press, 1993), 241-44.

 

9. There is in fact some claim for describing Troi as the computer’s offspring–at least insofar as the same actress who plays Troi’s mother (Majel Barrett) also speaks the part of the Enterprise’s voice-activated computer.

 

10. Butler, for instance, suggests that “drag implicitly reveals the imitative structure of gender itself–as well as its contingency” (137).

 

11. For this reason, both Federation uniforms and Federation equipment are pictured as sleek, spare, and antiseptic. The self-willed Klingon “warrior,” by contrast, assumes a Beowulfian guise and inhabits a ship the contents of which are as dark and labrynthian as any medieval hall’s.

 

12. Quotations from “Time’s Arrow: Part One” (teleplay by Joe Menosky and Michael Piller) and “Time’s Arrow: Part Two” (teleplay by Jeri Taylor) are taken from John Sayer’s synopses of both episodes in Star Trek: The Next Generation: The Official Magazine 23 (’92-’93 season): 6-8; 9-12. The current citation comes from page six. All future references to either episode will appear parenthetically.

 

13. See Deleuze’s and Parnet’s chapter, “A Conversation: What is it? What is it for?” (1-35), for a discussion of “becomings.” Although Star Trek defines the goal to become human as a goal to become the same–and as such precludes the Deleuzian possibility of an invention of “new forces” (5)–the program constantly exploits Data’s non-human status to produce multiple plots, multiple variations on a theme, multiple encounters, so that there is what might more productively be called the constant illusion of Data’s becoming.

 

14. Clemens’s essay “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901) was a response to America’s role in the Boxer Rebellion.

 

15. To mention Clemens’s famous pseudonym is implicitly to acknowledge the extent to which the writer commodified his own identity in order to facilitate the sale of his work. Throughout this essay, however, I have not only deliberately avoided noting the many, sometimes glaring inconsistencies between the opinions Clemens expressed in the form of political satire and the actions of his daily life; I have also attempted to engage the writer only at the level of his work. Not surprisingly, Star Trek collapses Clemens’s ideas and life into a single “personality.” At their farewell meeting, Picard expresses a wish that “time would have allowed [him] to know [Clemens] better,” to which the writer replies: “You’ll just have to read my books . . . . What I am is pretty much there” (12).

 

16. Star Trek‘s reading of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court again illustrates the program’s tendency to simplify Clemens’s work. In fact, as Werner Sollors points out, the novel is not easily reduced to a clear or stable interpretation; it has been “embattled by interpreters” who question whether it constitutes “light and humorous praise of worthy progress” or is instead “a bitter and gloomy anticipation of the century of nuclear holocausts and mass genocides” (291).

 

17. Samuel Clemens, “Thirty Thousand Killed a Million,” 52.

 

18. Samuel Clemens, “What is Man,” 399.

 

19. “What is Man,” 352, 342.

 

20. Clemens, in fact, was fascinated by inventions and “newfangled gadgets.” As John Lauber notes in the preface to his biography of the writer, he was even “an inventor in a small way, patenting a self-pasting scrapbook and a self-adjusting vest strap, copyrighting a game to teach historical facts, even imagining microprint” (xi).

 

21. “What is Man,” 394, 393.

 

22. For just a few of the many examples of work that rescripts dominant representations in the service of a more progressive agenda, see Patricia Mann’s work on agency, Micro-politics: Agency in a Postfeminist Era (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 1994), Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs (New York: Oxford U Press, 1985), and John Ernest’s “Economies of Identity: Harriet E. Wilson’s Our Nig,” PMLA (Vol. 109, No. 3: May 1994), 424-438.

 

23. Penley’s argument focusses on the phenomenon of “slash lit,” or the reconceptualization of the platonic friendship between a televisual “buddy” pair like Kirk and Spock in the form of a sexually explicit gay relationship.

 

24. She comments: “We would indeed love to take this fandom as an exemplary case of female appropriation of, resistence to, and negotiation with mass-produced culture. And we would also like to be able to use a discussion of K/S [the “slash” relationship between Kirk and Spock] to help dislodge the still rigid positions in the feminist sexuality debates around fantasy, pornography, and S & M. But if we are to do so it must be within the recognition that the slashers do not feel they can express their desires for a better, sexually liberated, and more egalitarian world through feminism; they do not feel they can speak as feminists, they do not feel that feminism speaks for them” (492).

 

25. The shift from naturalized representations of gender to naturalized representations of the imperial self is announced even in each program’s introductory remarks. While the crew of Star Trek‘s Enterprise embark on their voyage of discovery “where no man has gone before,” the postfeminist members of The Next Generation venture “where no one has gone.”

Works Cited

 

• Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. New York: Routledge, 1990.
• Clemens, Samuel. “Thirty Thousand Killed a Million.” The Atlantic Monthly 269 (April 1992): 52-65.
• —. “To the Person Sitting in Darkness.” The Complete Essays of Mark Twain. Ed. and with an introduction by Charles Neider. New York: Doubleday, 1963.
• —. “The War Prayer.” The Complete Essays of Mark Twain. Ed. Neider. Doubleday, 1963.
• —. “What is Man?” The Complete Essays of Mark Twain. Ed. Neider. Doubleday, 1963.
• Deleuze, Gilles, and Clair Parnet. Dialogues. Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Columbia, 1987.
• Derrida, Jacques. “Psyche: The Invention of the Other.” Acts of Literature. Ed. Derek Attridge. New York: Routledge, 1991.
• Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Gordon, Colin, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper. New York: Pantheon, 1980.
• Lauber, John. The Invention of Mark Twain. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990.
• Marx, Karl, and Frederick Engels. The German Ideology. Ed. and with and introduction by C.J. Arthur. New York: International Publishers, 1988.
• Penley, Constance. “Feminism, Psychoanalysis, and the Study of Popular Culture.” Cultural Studies. Ed. Grossberg, Lawrence, Cary Nelson, and Paula Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• Sollors, Werner. “Ethnicity.” Critical Terms for Literary Study. Eds. Lentriccia, Frank, and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: Chicago U P, 1990.
• Todorov, Tzvetan. The Conquest of America. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper, 1984.
• Willis, Susan. A Primer for Daily Life. New York: Routledge, 1991.