Subject: Star Trek Seduction Strategies
EJBGermany@aol.com
Date: Fri Jan 21 2000 - 14:19:43 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
Excerpts of excerpts from my Star Trek writing project (see first message).
Encouraged by enthusiastic responses which I received to the three published
pieces, I decided to go on to develop a book-length manuscript about this
on-again-off-again biographical fervor which I appear to share with
viewer-readers of more than one generation. Originally a history major, I
have gone over fully to the side of futurity (and the software codes and
anti-codes of 'our time'), carrying all those theoretical questions about
literary narrative and the status of Enlightenment knowledge in its
self-devouring, reclining phase (Kroker and Weinstein, 1994 <A
HREF="http://www.ctheory.concordia.ca/krokers/dtrash.html">Data Trash</A>)
with me. No one could have said it better than those Star Trek
hyperreality-information specialists Michael and Denise Okuda, who so
brilliantly subtitled their 350-page coffee table book (1996), which is also
the Paramount Pictures-authorized and -sanctioned chronology: The History of
the Future. This exhaustive and meticulous database recounts in all
particulars how we got from 'where we are now' to Captain Jean-Luc Picard's
twenty-fourth century of bold excitement and unification.
Against the celebrated, Gene Roddenberry-inspired view that Star Trek is
essentially about its optimistic portrayal of the multi-species United
Federation of Planets and the harmonious future of glorious interstellar
outer space travel, my deconstructive writing effort is to tilt this icon of
middle-of-the-road, mainstream science fiction over towards the parallel
universes of cyborg studies, the reversibility of the 'investigated' object,
and the destabilization or agony of 'the real.' I seduce this famous
virtuousness into the cyberpunk, dystopian, extreme, film noir, apocalyptic
Blade Runner-Videodrome-Brazil-Total Recall-Twelve Monkeys-Crash-The Matrix
fold. In my dissertation-book, I examine the technologies and the stories of
Star Trek. Cybernetic technologies do not leave our modernist reality and
existence intact, as the official dualistic thinking which strictly separates
'business' and 'life' would have it. They propel us rather into the
vicissitudes, creeping exterminisms, and code-mutating renaissance
potentialities of posthuman conditions. (Re)writing canonical science fiction
television episodes, according to the rules of a certain (dis)passionate
game, instead of 'summarizing' them, as many other Trekkers have done,
warp-jumps me into the red zone of philosophical dialogue with
non-philosophical readers. I wish to write philosophy (especially the
'philosophy of technology and media,' as our shared educational project is
called), but not in what is considered the language of philosophy. I write
mediately in the language of the hyper-detailed, fetishistic alternate
fantasy world of Star Trek fans. I write for that imperfect, non-existent
readership, to the possible margins of that impossible binary opposition
between installed cyber-consumers and culture-critical theorists.
"There is a Las Vegas Hilton Starbase casino <A
HREF="http://www.ds9promenade.com/startrek/index.html">Star Trek Experience</A
> (replicating the Deep Space Nine space station promenade and Quark's Bar,
and where service announcements are made in American English, Klingon, and
Ferengi), and a Star Trek World Tour <A
HREF="http://www.star-trek-world-tour.com">World Tour</A> portable theme park
traveling Europe, Asia, and Australia (replicating the starship Enterprise
NCC-1701-D and offering 'in-the-flesh,' multimedia- and motion
simulator-enhanced 'experiences' of turbolifts, the transporter, and warp
speed and time travel in 27-seat shuttlecrafts). There are
obsessive-compulsive Star Trek accuracy 'nitpickers,' and private
accumulators of trading cards, action figures, mint coin sets, and other
high-priced collectibles <A HREF="http://www.startrekstore.com">Star Trek
Store</A>. There are never ending general assembly conventions for
enthusiasts and niche gatherings for devotees, and an overabundance of Star
Trek web sites and home pages on the Internet which is one of the highest in
numbers after pornography itself (Flowers, 1999). There are alien language
instructional audio cassette tapes, CD-ROM strategy and adventure games, and
on-line and off-line role-playing ('simming') games where you can 'be'
Locutus of Borg (Patrick Stewart), Commander Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks) of
Deep Space Nine and the starship Defiant, Captain Kathryn Janeway (Kate
Mulgrew) of the starship Voyager, or 'yourself' as an ambitious junior cadet
struggling through Starfleet Academy." <A HREF="http://www.simming.org">Simmin
g</A> (excerpted from the Introduction)
Writing which inserts itself into - yet resamples, recombines, and runs in
reverse - three already extant genres known to the mammoth Star Trek book
industry. The well-established genres of The Episode Guide, The X of Star
Trek (where X is some certified branch of modernist-Enlightenment knowledge,
such as Physics or Meaning), and fan-authored fiction which, a la Michel de
Certeau's bricolage or the early Situationists' detournement, reinscribes the
consumer cultural text according to its 'hidden' (psychoanalytic or
homoerotic, for example) modulations.
On one level, Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance is merely a
provocative Episode Guide, with 'cybertheory' descriptions of a number of
seminal-symptomatic (these two 'history of ideas' concepts are inseparable
for me) episodes selected from The Original Series (TOS), The Next Generation
(TNG), Deep Space Nine (DS9), Voyager (VOY), the animated series (TAS), and
the movie series (TMS). I focus on episodes which are highly regarded by
Trekker community consensus, and which emphasize the six 'technologies of
disappearance' (or combinations thereof) which are the objects of inquiry of
my thought-experimental chapters (as opposed to episodes which emphasize
characterization or political-diplomatic intrigue). The chapter on model and
series, virtual reality, and the holodeck treats episodes like "The Cage"
(TOS pilot, never aired <A
HREF="http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Rampart/1630/stevbkg.htm">The Cage</A>),
"Shore Leave" (TOS), "The Big Goodbye" (TNG), "Ship in a Bottle" (TNG), and
"Caretaker" (VOY two-part pilot). The chapter on quantum teleportation, the
transporter cloning system, and 'the double' treats episodes like "The Enemy
Within" (TOS), "Mirror, Mirror" (TOS), "Realm of Fear" (TNG), <A
HREF="http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Academy/7072/">Dwight Schultz</A>
"Second Chances" (TNG), "Through the Looking Glass" (DS9), and "Faces" (VOY).
The chapter on time travel, temporal turbulence, and the discontinuity of
'historical time' treats episodes like "City on the Edge of Forever" <A
HREF="http://www.white-wolf.com/products/fiction/cityonedge.html">City on the
Edge of Forever</A> (TOS), "Yesteryear" (TAS), "The Inner Light" (TNG), "All
Good Things..." (TNG two-part final episode), and "Trials and Tribble-ations"
(DS9 special thirtieth anniversary digital tech remake episode <A
HREF="http://www.skotophile.com/StarTrek/Tribbles.html">Trials and
Tribble-ations</A>). The chapter on warp speed, general relativity, and
Virilio's dromology treats episodes like "Where No One Has Gone Before"
(TNG), "Force of Nature" (TNG), "Star Trek VIII: First Contact" (TMS),
"Threshold" (VOY), and "Message in a Bottle" (VOY). The chapter on the
Universal Translator and artificial languages <A HREF="http://www.kli.org">Kli
ngon Language Institute</A> treats episodes like "Arena" (TOS), "Errand of
Mercy" <A HREF="http://www.klingon.org/Colicos/pages">Colicos</A> (TOS),
"Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country" (TMS), "Darmok" (TNG), and "Blood
Oath" (DS9). The chapter on androids, cyborgs, the Borg, and the
Spock-Data-Odo-Holodoc-Seven of Nine <A HREF="http://alienvoices.com">Nimoy</A
> <A HREF="http://www.spiner.org/funstuff/techno.htm">Data</A> <A
HREF="http://www.theborgcollective.com">Borg</A> character series treats
episodes like "Devil in the Dark" (TOS), "The Measure of a Man" (TNG), "Best
of Both Worlds" (TNG two-parter), "Scorpion" (VOY two-parter), and "Dark
Frontier" (VOY two-parter).
On a second level, my book is an ironic response to and reversal of all of
those 'The X of Star Trek' books, which all drone on endlessly in the same
apparently commonsensical register, and which all 'apply' the same common and
marketable 'method' to their object. How 'accurately' [sic] or
'inaccurately' [sic] does the 'fiction' [sic] of Star Trek 'represent' [sic]
the 'reality' [sic] of our 'knowledge' [sic] of discipline X? I, the
certified expert both in this branch of 'real knowledge,' and in watching
Star Trek videos on my VCR, will inform you. The Physics of Star Trek
(Krauss, 1995) <A
HREF="http://www.newscientist.com/nsplus/insight/startrek/startrek.html">Physi
cs of Star Trek</A>, The Metaphysics of Star Trek (Hanley, 1997), The Meaning
of Star Trek (Richards, 1997), The Biology of Star Trek, clone #1 (Jenkins
and Jenkins, 1998), The Biology of Star Trek, clone #2 (Andreadis, 1998) <A
HREF="http://www.thebiologyofstartrek.com">To Seek Out New Life</A>, The
Computers of Star Trek (Gresh and Weinberg, 1999) <A
HREF="http://www.sff.net.people/R.Weinberg/trek.html">Computers of Star Trek</
A>. I engage in a running polemic with all of these books, which all ignore
the issue of hyperreality, and which are all really testimonies to the
current discursive bathos of each of their supposedly immovable, respective
knowledge fields. I take a sideways glance at "Top Infinite Reasons Why
Captain Kirk Is Better Than Captain Picard" <A
HREF="http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Rampart/4537/krkbest.html">Kirk-Picard</
A>, and then start to flip the questions around: Captain Kirk Was Never the
Original; the Star Trekking of Physics; the Star Trekking of Metaphysics; le
cyborg a deja eu lieu; the very concept of time travel is what causes the
coveted destination 'historical time period' to no longer be accessible; das
Jahr 2000 findet nicht statt; the very concept of warp speed is what destroys
the fabric of the space-time it was designed to 'traverse.' How is Star Trek
leading theoretical physics around by the nose, directing its aims, and
determining what are its 'truths'? How does the holodeck or holosuite
influence what gets researched and developed in the Silicon Valley virtual
reality industry?
According to the trojan horse rules of the game, however, I produce yet
another 'The X of Star Trek' book: The Technologies of Star Trek. This is
because the rules say that the broader 'fatal strategy' text must encompass
the consensually agreed upon text, not contradict it. Here I part company
from most of the venerable tradition of Star Trek montage fan fiction
rewriting. The feminist film scholar Constance Penley, in NASA / TREK (1997)
has written about underground Kirk / Spock 'slash' homoerotic soft
pornographic texts and graphics, written and drawn by female fans. MIT Gay
and Lesbian Studies professor Henry Jenkins, in Textual Poachers (1992) and
Science Fiction Audiences (1995), studied more widely the 'nomadic'
fan-initiated subversion or 'poaching' of the science fictional media text.
But my rules are different in two important respects. First, don't be an
academician writing about detournement texts; write a detournement text.
Second, the larger deconstructive text should be a superset of the Star Trek
canon, totally consistent with what is collectively believed to be the text
(of a Star Trek episode or technology), not the spinning out of some
personalized different tale which can be safely categorized and dismissed by
the Trekker masses as a cyber-customized consumerist fantasy's fantasy. For
example, I want to ironically point out that the transporter, which was
invented in the twenty-second century, is really a cloning system where you
'accept to die' each time you are 'beamed,' and that it was enabled by a
convergence of twenty-first century techno-scientific developments in the
areas of quantum teleportation (photons were already 'beamed' by experimental
physicists in the 1990s <A
HREF="http://www.research.ibm.com/quantuminfo/teleportation">IBM Quantum
Teleportation</A>), nano-robotic brain scanning from the inside <A
HREF="http://www.techreview.com/articles/jan00/qa.htm">Kurzweil</A>,
digitalized audio-visual formatting and storage of 'human' memories, and
instantaneous biotech manufacturing of physically living tissue. Note that
the Roddenberry-optimistic Star Trek canon, which promotes the idea that
technology leaves modernist reality unscathed, depicts a molecular
transporter which sends a conventional (modernist episteme) physical body of
a human individual through a dematerialization-rematerialization process in
an 'annular confinement beam.' But nothing in contemporary techno-scientific
trends indicates that this is even remotely in the cards. However, it
certainly won't accomplish very much to straightforwardly delineate an
alternative clone system where you are defined by your
genetic-quantum-digital information (and, at the very least, don't have a
soul anymore in any of the traditional ways this was conceptualized).
Although this is clearly the direction in which both techno-science and
techno-culture are going, it apparently has nothing to do with the
'matter-energy' conversion technology that Star Trek canon talks about when
it explains the transporter. So I have to go even one step further. I explore
how the interactive matrix of virtual reality came, in the twenty-first
century, to be the primary corporeal location and substructure of animate
existence, and how molecular and biological terms (like 'bug,' 'virus,' and
'worm,' for starters) came to be used in the context of online computer
networks. I extrapolate this to a 'future' etymology of new word and new
usage coinages which eventually led to the situation where it is really
demonstrable (in glorious hyper-detail) that the Star Trek Technical Manual
(Sternbach and Okuda, 1991) is actually describing the quantum teleportation
or clone-system biodigital transporter, even though it has seemed to readers
up until now (uninformed about the evolution of the English language) to be
describing the physical-molecular transporter.
When I began working on Star Trek, I was a fan of The Original Series and The
Next Generation, because of childhood memories, monochrome reruns on Channel
11, the fact that Jean-Luc is French, and all that. As I watched more, I
became more of a fan of Voyager. In contrasting the episode-writing software
machineries of The Original Series and Voyager, I now try to do so without
judgments of superiority and inferiority. I try to appreciate the fascination
of Voyager's 1990s techno-recombinant aesthetic. The 'original' motivation
for the kind of writing I want to do was probably my attraction to works like
Barthes' The Fashion System (1983) or Baudrillard's The System of Objects
(1996) (whoa-oh, interrupts the shelf, I don't seem to recall ever seeing you
reading those books from cover to cover!). I wanted to write about a
sweepingly symbolic mega-consumerist system, especially one that I knew well
from the inside, and which had biographical resonance for me. At the
beginning of the new millennium, the technologies and stories of Star Trek
are perhaps symbolic of the cultural system of Western society itself (or so
I claim). Although the object under study stuck, it became increasingly clear
that I would employ an entirely other, and much more literal, methodology
from any of those practiced by these lofty theorists whom I admired, and of
which they would likely not approve. But I am constantly rereading for
inspiration an essay of Baudrillard's from the mid-1990s called "Radical
Thought" (in The Perfect Crime).
I am endeavoring to sort out, think through, or confront the diverse
influences of Baudrillard and Derrida on my thinking, especially with regard
to the questions of 'the original,' 'the end of history,' and the concepts of
alterity and differance. I am attempting a kind of reconciliation between
some positions of Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles and those of Arthur
and Marilouise Kroker. I am responding in a certain manner to Alan Sokal and
Jean Bricmont's Fashionable Nonsense (1998) Nonsense, by reversing the
questions about science and rhetoric which they pose. I am trying to improve
my organizational and work methods, hoping to continue to exercize and refine
them in my second non-moneymaking project, which will undertake a
technically-informed, non-technical reflection on (the cultural and posthuman
implications of) software objects. Can there be a cyber-Situationist
informatic 'art' which captures and rearranges the logic of software object
technology in its moment of appearance? Not in history, simulation, or the
fractal, are we not in the realm of the object-oriented code?
"Try to imagine what kind of relationship Fleet Captain Christopher Pike is
going to have to virtual reality after his return to Talos IV. At the end of
'The Menagerie, part two,' the Keeper famously says to Captain James T. Kirk,
telepathically and through the medium of a viewscreen: 'Captain Pike has
illusion, and you have reality. May you find your way as pleasant.' But it is
undoubtedly a mistake to so simplistically describe, as the Keeper does to
Captain Kirk, the new attitude that Pike intends to have towards the
menagerie's virtuality engine during his second stay on the forbidden planet,
and the Talosians have certainly been wrong before in their expectations
regarding the behavior of the noted twenty-third century outer space
explorer. Captain Pike did not accept the conventional, Disneyland-style
variant of VR before, and it is highly unlikely that Fleet Captain Pike, in
spite of his new honorary diplomatic designation as Advisory Federation
Ambassador to the Talos star group, is going to suddenly make an
unprincipled, trifling about-face to enthusiastically welcome what he
previously had only scorned. Pike's turnaround is instead going to be of
another, more reputable, sort: he will carry out his two-sided defense of
reality by switching over to creatively and subversively partake in a new
order of cybernetic, technology-mediated simulacra, while keeping his own
transformative goals uppermost in mind. Having tragically lost his biological
body, and having just intimately confronted the sobering fact of his own
death, Fleet Captain Christopher Pike is venturing back into 'cyberspace' as
someone who is acutely aware of the disappearance of the concrete
phenomenology of his immediate 'here and now,' and of the vanishing horizon
of his own physical reality. Such life circumstances are, in fact, very
analogous to the conditions of social existence which have spawned the
'interactive networks,' and which the latter, in their most mainstream forms,
also further catalyze. Fleet Captain Pike is going on-line and interactive,
not in order to conduct a commonplace search for the 'satisfaction of his
desires;' not to merely have good times, sex, and rock 'n roll; but rather,
in order to inventively regain and extend something of the severed
associations of his proximate lifeworld contexts and physical environs. He
goes back to the extravagant, metasymbolic Talosian cyber-matrix, not as an
eager consumer of techno-wares seeking cool experiences, but as a
hacker-philosopher or wetware recoder of the system; fully cognizant of the
realities of disappearance, absence, and death; looking for specific and
local ways to reconnect his dissipated orientation and unhinged materiality.
Pike is going to artistically undermine the virtuality engine of the
menagerie, to 'push 'til it gives,' as Captain James T. Kirk says to the
goateed, alternate universe double of First and Science Officer Spock at the
end of 'Mirror, Mirror' (October 1967, stardate uncertain). He is going to
employ Talosian prostheses, and to make diverting uses of their fantastical
technologies, in order to find his way to a certain acceptance of the reality
of his disability, and to the reclaiming of a certain practice of real
'embodiment.' " (excerpted from the section "Captain Pike's Two-Sided Defense
of Reality")
References
Anthena Andreadis, The Biology of Star Trek: To Seek Out New Life (New York:
Three Rivers Press, 1998).
Roland Barthes, The Fashion System (translated by Matthew Ward and Richard
Howard) (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1983).
Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (translated by James Benedict)
(London: Verso, 1996).
Jean Baudrillard, The Perfect Crime (translated by Chris Turner) (London:
Verso, 1996).
James R. Flowers, Jr., The Incredible Internet Guide for Trekkers (Tempe, AZ:
Facts on Demand Press, 1999).
Lois Gresh and Robert Weinberg, The Computers of Star Trek (New York:
BasicBooks, 1999).
Richard Hanley, The Metaphysics of Star Trek (New York: Basic Books, 1997).
Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture
(New York: Routledge, 1992).
Henry Jenkins and John Tulloch, Science Fiction Audiences: Watching Doctor
Who and Star Trek (London: Routledge, 1995).
Robert Jenkins and Susan Jenkins, The Biology of Star Trek (New York: Basic
Books, 1998).
Lawrence M. Krauss, The Physics of Star Trek (New York: BasicBooks, 1995).
Arthur Kroker and Michael A. Weinstein, Data Trash: The Theory of the Virtual
Class (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1994).
Michael Okuda and Denise Okuda, Star Trek Chronology: The History of the
Future (New York: Pocket Books, 1996).
Constance Penley, NASA / TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America (London:
Verso, 1997).
Thomas Richards, The Meaning of Star Trek (New York: Doubleday, 1997).
Alan Sokal and Jean Bricmont, Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals'
Abuse of Science (New York: Picador, 1998).
Rick Sternbach and Michael Okuda, Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical
Manual (New York: Pocket Books, 1991).
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