Subject: Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance
EJBGermany@aol.com
Date: Thu Jan 20 2000 - 06:23:51 CST
Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance
six chapters
the holodeck
the transporter
time travel
warp (faster-than-light) speed
universal klingon language
cyborgs
Alan Shapiro
My manuscript is already quite far along, so I will risk a somewhat different
format. I will start here with five excerpts from five different
chapters-in-progress. Then I will post separately a brief discussion of my
overall methodology and goals for the project.
"It is not easy to be a humble, truth-seeking theoretical physicist when
every viewer of Star Trek, Quantum Leap, or Sliders has terms like closed
time-like curves, phase transitions, and colliding antiparticles flowing from
his or her lips... The languages and themes of science, digital technology,
and futurology have passed into our culture’s interstitial cracks and
intricate, constitutive circuitry. The extrapolated or narrative future has
replaced the historical past (which has receded behind museum piece layers of
simulation) as our most fundamental and decisive reference. But this
homecoming of science fiction culture has resulted in the criteria for
scientific truth being set adrift. Since it is viewer ratings which determine
what is shown on television, and sales which determine what is printed in
magazines, what is disseminated today has become more of an eagerly consumed
Jarryesque pataphysics (rhetoric of imaginary scientific solutions) than a
genuine physics. Although astrophysicists, for example, conclude that the
probability that we will ever have direct contact with intelligent
extraterrestrial life is near zero (although it is just as certain that the
universe is teeming with intelligent life), this does not prevent the media
from saturating themselves with stories of alien abductions and X-Files,
because there is a deep cultural yearning in our time for (virtual) contact
with the extraterrestrial Other which transcends all other parameters. Along
with the triumph of globalized capitalist-consumerist technoculture, and its
concomitant annihilation, absorption, or retro-simulation of so many real
local and regional radical others on this planet, comes also the desperate
search for the ultimate self-confirming mirrored interlocutor in Deep Space.
The discovery of this smooth-surfaced monolith will instantly compensate our
privations of alterity and allegedly reinstate us to a non-solipsistic
original or 'first contact' situation of dialogue and mutual recognition." (<A
HREF="http://www.ctheory.com/a52.html">The Star Trekking of Physics</A>,
excerpted from the transporter chapter)
"The exalted status in technoculture of the mythical moment of allegedly
transcendent creativity, establishing the prototype model for a sequelized
succession of media products, must also be placed into question. It is only
the circularity or continuous exchange between the model and the series which
makes either of them possible. The unceasing serial commodification, or viral
self-replication to infinity, of Star Trek episodes or cultural software
objects has always sustained itself through future-nostalgic, reverent
reference to the original referent -- the pantheonic first generation of
Captain James Tiberius Kirk of Riverside, Iowa, Earth, Sector 001, United
Federation of Planets; First and Science Officer Mr. $@&# (unpronounceable by
humans) Spock (Leonard Nimoy); Chief Medical Officer Dr. Leonard Horatio
'Bones' McCoy, M.D. (DeForest Kelley); chief engineer Lt. Commander
Montgomery 'Scotty' or 'the Miracle Worker' Scott (James Doohan);
communications officer Lieutenant Nyota Uhura (Nichelle Nichols); navigator
Ensign Pavel Andreievich Chekov (Walter Koenig); chief helmsman Lieutenant
Hikaru Sulu (George Takei); Captain's Yeoman Janice Rand (Grace Lee Whitney);
and Nurse Christine Chapel and computer voice (Majel Barrett). But Captain
Kirk was never the original. Warning.. red alert.. general quarters.. all
hands to battle stations.. picking up a signal.. auto-destruct will detonate
in five seconds.. all hailing channels being jammed.. switching to sub-space
frequencies, and repeating: William Shatner / James T. Kirk, born on March
22, 2233, and found guilty by Temporal Investigations (in the November 1996 De
ep Space Nine episode 'Trials and Tribble-ations,' stardate 4523.7) of
seventeen separate timeline violations, was not the original Captain of the
starship Enterprise. Given the importance of the primordial cultural
archetype's authenticity for founding the subsequent success of a commercial
television series, and of its affiliated multiple-media industries, we would
already gravely misunderstand the cultural system of Star Trek virtuality if
we were to take the reign of the distinguished Captain Kirk as the point of
departure for our analysis. Regardless of what the verifying DNA or
quantum-molecular data banks say, Kirk was never 'identical to himself,' nor
reducible to his constitutive informational formula. Assimilate this! You
will comply! Resistance is futile!" <A HREF="http://www.ctheory.com/a48.html">
Captain Kirk Was Never the Original,</A> excerpted from the holodeck chapter)
"The ascendency of pan-English makes all languages (including, perhaps,
English itself) into endangered languages. What endangers a henceforth
'local' language like German is not a flat-out perdition of speakers, but
rather a rapidly intensifying implosion or erosion from within stemming from
the epidemic proliferation of pan-English terms in the interior of the German
language. When a German speaker talks about business management, computer
software, digital technology, telecommunications, financial markets or
services, fashion, 'avant-garde' music, televised sports, window shopping,
consumer appliances, home accessories, or 'personalized' emotions ( Ich habe
ein happy feeling ), she freely supplements her speech, in every sentence,
with substitute or designer words pulled down from the terminological
celestial sky, the ur-language of pan-English... At the same time that so
many of the world’s languages are either outright disappearing or imploding
into deepened meaninglessness, there is one new language which is currently
experiencing rapid exponential growth in its number of speakers, and is the
object of widespread captivation. This is the Klingon Language, first
developed in 1984 by Marc Okrand, an artificial linguist at the
California-based National Captioning Institute... In Star Trek VI: The
Undiscovered Country (1991), Chancellor Gorkon (David Warner) of the Klingon
Empire makes the fascinating comment that 'you have never experienced
Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.' Hence the
legions of Ph.D. Klingonists do not regard their work on Hamlet, Much Ado
About Nothing, Macbeth, or Anthony and Cleopatra ( antonI’ tlhI’yopatra’ je )
as translation projects... The most astute ciphering of Gorkon’s joke and
the frenzied 'restorative' activities which it has incited is that they are
indicative of a secret suspicion that the 'original language' version of
today’s typical media products, which are dubbed and synchronized into dozens
of 'local' languages, is merely a specialized kind of localized version which
has lost the aura of an original. Pan-English, which appears to the Germans,
for example, to be the master language of globalized technoculture, may
itself be giving way to a newer, more exalted ur-language, in an act of
intractable endo-colonization (Virilio) at the system’s vertex." (<A
HREF="http://www.fen.baynet.de/johannes.angermueller/pomo.files/pomo.text/pomo
98.papers/anshapir.htm">Klingon: In Search of a Cybernetic Ur-language</A>,
excerpted from the universal klingon language chapter)
"In 1963, a New Zealander higher mathematician named Roy Kerr revisited the
knotty problem of time travel to the past, parrying back at Einstein with a
new hypothesis which focused on a specialized rotational version of
self-collapsing black hole (no)-space-(no)-time regions in outer space. Kerr
postulated that a black hole singularity in Deep Space does not necessarily
have to implode into a point with extremely strong gravity and infinite
density, but might rather, if its origin were a spinning star, break down
into a circulating ring of neutrons covering an extended region. Since the
neutron ring would be turning around so quickly, and at a constant rate, its
centrifugal force would keep it in a permanent condition of being just on the
edge of caving in, without any final crush provoked by infinite curvature
ever actually being consummated. This steadfast state of revolving
'suspension' and outwards protrusion near the post-star's equator would then
permit a space traveler to enter the ring along its axis of rotation in a
technology-assisted manner, break on through to the other side, and exit in
either a faraway location in space, a different millennium in time, or an
alternate universe of his or her choosing... Kip Thorne, professor of physics
at the California Institute of Technology, and one of the world's leading
(tr)experts on the general theory of relativity, began his black hole
research in the 1980s primarily with the goal of definitively disproving all
of the 'nonsensical' suppositions about time travel. Professor Thorne,
however, eventually transformed himself into one of the leading proponents of
time travel pataphysics. A significant catalyst in Thorne's transfiguration
was the spark of an event in the history of science fiction literature and
film. In the summer of 1985, the well-known Cornell University astronomer and
popular science writer Carl Sagan was working on a science fiction novel
called Contact (later to be made into a blockbuster Hollywood movie - about
the epic quest for 'first contact' with the extraterrestrial Other - directed
by and starring Jodie Foster). Sagan wanted some kind of plausible-sounding
scientific propositions to persuasively undergird his literary-technological
device offering instantaneous galactic travel through a technically-managed
black hole core from a departure point in our solar system to an immediate
arrival point near the star Vega in the constellation Lyra (26 light-years
from Earth). In an attempt to achieve maximum 'scientific accuracy and
comprehensibility,' Sagan hired Professor Kip Thorne as his 'amazing
phenomena' authentication adviser. This science fiction media consulting gig
was the opening for Thorne to scrupulously reexamine the Einsteinian general
relativity equations with an eye towards establishing the feasibility of the
stabilized black hole crossing of space-time." (excerpted from the time
travel chapter)
"In the post-nuclear holocaust environment, an eccentric physicist named
Zephram Cochrane (James Cromwell) pursues the anticipated high-velocity space
travel application of the superstring warp drive theory. Promised lucrative
financial rewards by the Indonesian Space Agency if successful, Cochrane
finds an abandoned Titan missile complex in Billings, Montana which houses
unlaunched ballistic missiles with attached ICBM nuclear warheads. Working in
a single silo with a single Titan missile, Cochrane disables the missile’s
warhead, attaches a cockpit to it, retrofits its booster capability with more
powerful fuel and oxidizer to attain escape velocity from terrestrial
gravity, and constructs a device to divert the flow of reactor fuel from the
nuclear core to a warp drive engine. Cochrane’s work progresses slowly, since
he is often distracted by his other main interests of drinking cheap booze
and listening to loud twentieth century rock'n'roll music. At 11:15 AM on
April 5, 2063, the spaceship Phoenix, with Zephram Cochrane at the helm,
lifts off from Billings and begins its historical first flight from Earth of
a warp speed-capable craft. Emboldened by the moonshine flowing through his
veins and the sounds of Steppenwolf’s 'Magic Carpet Ride' blasting in his
ears, Cochrane ascends towards the stars and his rendezvous with destiny.
Within minutes after achieving acceleration beyond the speed of light, the
Phoenix is detected by the monitoring sensors of an alien (Vulcan) survey
team’s spaceship, which happens to be passing close to our solar system at
the moment of warp engagement... In human historical events, participants or
actors are 'free agents' who might have opted to do something other than what
they did. But in Star Trek: First Contact, Zephram Cochrane has no choice.
His actions are frozen into the ossified museum of absolute necessity. His
deeds are canonized and reified by all the monuments, shrines,
commemorations, and mausoleums built in his honor. The event must play its
obligatory part in the teleological dramatics of a 'futuristic' grand
narrative, which insists so much on the event’s having taken place that it
begins to cause new, turbulent temporal phenomena like recurrence,
retroactivity, and reversal. After Zef runs aways into the woods in an
inebriated panic, the Enterprise-E crew members’ celebrity hero worship turns
into disappointed contempt for a common drunkard. They sedate Cochrane, sober
him up, and strap him down into his hero aviator’s pilot seat. Chief Engineer
Lieutenant Geordi LaForge and Commander William Riker go along as back-seat
drivers on the historic warp speed flight (while Counselor Deanna Troi
operates the control tower), to make sure that everything goes as planned.
After the flight, and back on the ground in Billings, Lieutenant LaForge and
Commander Riker prod Cochrane into stepping forward to meet the Vulcan
surveyors." (excerpted from the warp speed chapter)
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