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It's articles like Fulton's that make me exceedingly uncomfortable with some of the ways in which cultural studies scholars approach popular culture. Star Trek, like virtually all television drama, is a laughably easy target for Foucauldian analys is and Derridian deconstruction. Killing a fly with a sledgehammer is not merely an abuse of the fly; it is a ludicrous misuse of the hammer. Surely, Foucault and Derrida were meant for tougher things! More disturbing, Fulton's article provides the cri tical establishment with even more ammunition against postmodernist cultural studies. For the article can be deployed as "proof" that postmodernist analysis offers nothing but a convoluted and jargon-ridden way of saying what traditional "high-culture" s cholars have always known--namely, that popular culture is a simple-minded and contemptible form unfit for academic decency.
What Fulton sidesteps completely is the possibility that Star Trek: The Next Generation may well have been conceived as a legitimate response to certain varieties of postmodernism itself--namely those ahistorical, apolitical, and relativistic va rieties that used to trickle down from the lofty academy and into popular magazine articles, self-help literature, and advertising--in short, those varieties of postmodernism which, purporting to critique contemporary culture, actually helped to construct it. Here is what Peter McLaren has written about that emergent postmodernist culture and its subjects:
The rapture of dislocation, disruption and displacement of the citizen/subject brought on by what has been called the postmodern condition has ushered in a view of de-objectified identity in which the secure, autonomous agent of history . . . has be en sheared away from its former originating anchor points to be revealed as perpetually in composition. We are living at a time of moment-to-moment apocalypse; we are in the future anterior where we feel nostalgia for a time that has not yet arrived and whose realization is structurally impossible. . . . [T]he new postmodern self is patterned on the cathedral of capitalism, that sanctuary of consumption where we find a strange convergence of our fragmented identities in the signifying structure of globa l amusement culture which we know as the shopping mall. The shopping mall self (the self as the rhetorical effect of image value) has become the quitessential model of panic identity . . . .
Given this construction of the postmodern subject, trapped as she is between a history that's up for grabs and future that's structurally impossible, is it any wonder that Star Trek, with its post-consumerist, post-postmodernist vision of a future that cherishes the supposed best of the past, while rising above the worst, enjoys such unprecedented popularity?
The Next Generation was conceived in the mid-1980s. This was a period characterized by a postmodernist critique which, although it dismantled the master narratives of our culture, its institutions, and its codes, still ended up being complicit wit h them because it had no program for change. Indeed, in its celebration of moral and ethical relativism, it often refused to take a stand on issues of human oppression and social injustice, and hence played right into the hands of the Reagans, the Thatch ers, and the Mulroneys--not to mention all the bank presidents and corporate executives for whom we did not have the opportunity of mistakenly voting. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry lept into this intellectual vacuum with an alternative to tha t past-less, future-less, and malaise-ridden postmodernist present. Whatever the limitations of his vision, it seems to me grossly unfair that it should now be shat upon by the very intellectuals whose own lack of vision probably contributed to its creat ion in the first place.
I do not exclude feminism from my indictment of the postmodernism of the 'eighties. The women's movement of the late 'sixties and 'seventies had left many of us in search of new ways of being women and men, but by about 1982, just as we were beginning to take the women's movement seriously as a possible source of answers to this search, feminist scholars in large numbers began abandoning the search as naively and hopelessly essentialist. These feminist postmodernists were so busy producing esoteric deco nstructions of terms such as "patriarchy," "gender," and even "feminism" itself that they forgot about actual, embodied women and men. They swooned over Lacan, the Ladies' Man who awarded tenure to the penis as the universal signifier, and they listened r aptly when Derrida, in his deconstruction of women and men as merely linguistic categories, proclaimed: "I am a woman." In the wake of this abandonment, the search for gender alternatives fell in part to popular culture, including television, which took up that task as best it could. And so I find it unsurprising that it's not really "new worlds" and "new civilizations" which Mister Roddenberry's star ship Enterprise has been commissioned to "seek out," but rather, new forms of masculinity. If t hese new forms are a bit too reminiscent of the old forms, postmodernism may have no one to blame but itself.
It's easy for us as academics, with all our sophisticated training, to take cheap shots at Star Trek, but if you teach a course in popular culture, you will take those shots at your own peril. There are more Trekkies among our students than you mi ght imagine, and so it's far more rewarding to help them toward a more complex understanding of why they watch it. For me, getting students to help me figure out why I watch it is even more rewarding. I find that the best approach to Star Trek, a s to all mainstream popular culture, is to begin with the simple observation that if popular culture told us things about ourselves that we didn't want to know, popular culture would not be popular for long. If Star Trek were to overturn all the myths of gender by which we live our lives, we would not tune into it, and corporate sponsors would withdraw their support.
In other words, even had Gene Roddenberry been the most radical of feminist television writers, he would still have been obliged to remain within the severe limits placed on television by both its audience and its sponsors. Perhaps this is why, whether m ale or female, masculine or feminine, all ships in the Star Trek universe are referred to as "she," while all Starfleet officers are addressed as "Sir." Yet, the pilot episode of the original Trek in 1966 featured a highly rational woman as second in command on the Enterprise. Roddenberry created her to balance out his passionate and impulsive starship Captain. But he was coerced by the network into scrapping that pilot and creating a new one, in which the logical Mr. Spock of the planet Vulcan replaced the Earth-woman as Executive Officer. The network's excuse was that acceptance of a woman of intelligence and authority was too much to ask of the American public; an extraterrestrial was supposedly more believable. I am reminded of that Victorian male critic who in reference to Charlotte Bronte found the idea of a bipedal dog no less credible than the idea of a female writer.
What Roddenberry did succeed in retaining in his second pilot was a communications officer who was not only female but also Black. Back then, in those pre-feminist days, I was no fan of television, and had even less interest in the silly genre of science fiction, yet I can distinctly remember sitting up and taking notice. This was an important first for television in an era when we had little in the way of an understanding of the relationship between racism and representation, and had not yet invented t he word "sexism."
The point I'm trying to make here is that no matter how limited Roddenberry's depiction of gender equality was in the original Trek and continued to be in The Next Generation, it was his instincts about the inevitability of women's professionalism and authority that earned Star Trek a substantial female following. In the context of this alone, it's easier for female Trekkers to forgive Roddenberry for The Next Generation's three regular female characters--all of whom are caretakers and good listeners, and thus function as a feminine context within which masculinity can be more strikingly showcased. Unlike other action-adventure series, most of which exclude women as important central characters, there is no need in Star Trek to femi nize one or two male characters in order to underscore the exemplary masculinity of its heroes.
It's a simple matter to see Dr. Crusher, Counsellor Troi, and bartender Guynan as all measuring up to the long-standing stereotype of women as exclusively nurturant. This gives us an excellent excuse to dismiss The Next Generation as hopelessly se xist. It's an equally simple matter to dismiss it on the grounds of racism, for Star Trek can be seen merely to translate racial issues to the level of humanoid species, so that, for example, the odious, profit-mongering, physically diminutive rac e known as the Ferengi is no longer a critique of the excesses of Western capitalism, but rather, is analogous to the Japanese. Undoubtedly, Star Trek fans who worry about the globalization of unfettered capitalism will lean toward the former read ing, while fans who resent Japan's unrivalled economic prosperity will favour the latter. However, it seems to me that there is more racism in the latter interpretation than there is in the Ferengi themselves. Thus, it's more interesting and perhaps a b it more challenging to get The Next Generation to yield more useful and congenial meanings.
To return to the question of feminine caretaking, it's not caretaking per se, but rather, the feminization of it that's the problem. Thirty years of feminist scholarship has by no means convinced everyone that caretaking is not genetically encoded in women. It could be useful to keep this in mind when looking at the three Star Trek women. Of the three, only Crusher is human, and one could argue that she comes by her caretaking skills largely through medical training, not genetics. Troi's exaggerated feminine intuition--that is to say, her empathic power--is attributed to her non-human genetic inheritance, as is Guynan's facility for listening to the troubles of her customers at the bar, for she's described as a member of a mysterious rac e of listeners. For all we know, Roddenberry and his team were on some level aware that if men in the 24th century still long atavistically for a genetic guarantee of these stereotypically feminine qualities in their women, they're going to have to leave home to find it.
So does genetically encoding caretaking exclusively in non-human races, thereby feminizing them, make The Next Generation racist? As with the capitalist Ferengi, it depends on who's doing the interpreting.
If, as I do, you eavesdrop on the many Internet newsgroups devoted to Star Trek, you can get a pretty good idea of what appeals to women viewers. To them, as to many of my students, Beverly Crusher is the superwoman of popular feminism: a single m other, a career officer, and a scientist in her own right; the fact that actress Gates McFadden's face harkens back to Hollywood goddess Greta Garbo doesn't hurt either. As for Counsellor Cleavage, as male Trekkers like to call Deanna Troi, viewers had l ittle respect for this character until the show's last season, when she finally donned a regular Starfleet uniform, passed the bridge-officer's exam, and was promoted to the rank of Commander. Actress Marina Sirtis, who plays this character, said that th ese long-overdue changes had a miraculous effect on the writers of subsequent episodes, who suddenly began putting intelligent lines in her mouth. As for Whoopie Goldberg's Guynan, even Captain Jean-Luc Picard defers to her superior wisdom. Moreover, th e fact that Goldberg has gone public with her belief in The Next Generation as transcending dysfunctional attitudes toward gender and race has encouraged women viewers to overlook the way in which Guynan reinforces the antique stereotype of women a s the possessors of darkly mysterious superhuman (or subhuman) powers.
What's important to point out to students is that while women in the Star Trek universe have freedoms not enjoyed by the show's female audience, these characters are permitted to exercise that freedom only in the service of Starfleet's hierarchical , almost priestly order. In this way, they are reminiscent of medieval nuns, who escaped the oppression of marriages of convenience and multiple life-threatening pregnancies by opting for the celibate life. So long as they remained in the service of the patriarchal church and its male priesthood, these women could learn to read and write, pursue scholarly interests, and even rise to relatively powerful positions within their religious orders. Marriage to a mortal man is hardly a sacrifice when you're m arried to Christ, the Bridegroom who never disappoints. Many of these religias must have regarded themselves as among the most liberated and fortunate of women. And given the alternatives, they probably were. Similarly, when we compare Crusher, Troi, a nd Guynan with some of the females we encounter among alien civilizations scattered throughout Star Trek's galaxy, females whose status is more like that of 20th century women, these Starfleet nuns appear remarkably liberated and fulfilled.
For many female Trekkers, Starfleet is still the patriarchal order, but minus its abuses and excesses, just as the United Federation of Planets was, for Roddenberry, the United States of America, minus its excessive militarism, its xenophobia, and its eco nomic injustice. Here is how science fiction author and Star Trek fan Ursula LeGuin describes it:
The Next Generation never had a simplistic concept of Us/Nice/Real People vs. Them/Ugly/Villains. Of course, there are bad guys out there. When the Klingons turned into real people, the Romulans and Cardassians were waiting; but they keep turning int o real people too. . . . Violence, on The Next Generation, is shown as a problem, or the failure to solve a problem, never as the true solution. This is surely one reason why the show has such a following. . . . On the Enterprise, we see the difference of racial and alien types, gender difference, handicaps, apparent deformities, all accepted simply as different ways of being human. In this, The Next Generation has been light-years ahead of its predecessors, its imitators, and practically everything e lse on TV.
Indeed, seen in this way Star Trek becomes a highly refined interpretation of the American Dream fulfilled. But Roddenberry was no different than the vast majority of Americans, who did not--and still do not--recognize that, like patriarchy, it's the American Dream itself that's the problem. This is why LeGuin's positive reading of The Next Generation can be countered by equally convincing negative readings.
But if the United Federation of Planets were merely America writ large, there would not be such pronounced international interest in it. For that reason, I find it more useful to view the Star Trek universe as the fulfilment of the goals of Wester n humanism. Despite the plot's utter dependence on space technology and the quantities of technobabble written into every episode, scientific knowledge in The Next Generation is merely technical; science serves the practical necessities of everyda y life and work aboard the Enterprise, and basic technological literacy within the Federation is taken for granted. The humanities, on the other hand, are represented as a higher form of knowledge and the real avenue to truth and wisdom. Picard i s the embodiment of this higher, more valuable knowledge, and he is often contrasted to the rest of his bridge crew who, while they all possess scientific and technological expertise, pale in comparison to Picard, who knows his history, his Shakespeare, h is Mozart, his archaeology, and his Plato. Like spread-eagled man in the famous Leonardo sketch that serves as the emblem of humanism, Picard is the measure of all things. Indeed, he is the image of man in his ideal form.
Picard represents Soul, which appears on the middle rung of early humanism's five-rung universal hierarchy as translated from Plato by Renaissance humanist Marsilio Ficino. Above Soul, Ficino put God in first place and the Angels in second; below it, he put Quality in fourth place and the Body in fifth. Quality gave man the dignity that differentiated him from lower forms of matter, and I use the term "man" advisedly, for Ficino defined dignity in part as masculine beauty. The soul in its Western human ist incarnation may have been what inspired this quotation from Ursula LeGuin: "The Borg [a race of cyborgs in The Next Generation] was a great embodiment of Evil--mechanical evil, absence of soul. Hence the power of the episode where Picard, the very soul of the Enterprise, became a Borg: anybody, even the best man, can lose his soul. This is a genuinely scary idea, a mature concept."
Again with reference to the humanist fondness for hierarchy, the Starfleet chain of command, which draws on Anglo-American naval tradition, is only the most obvious hierarchical structure. Masculinity in The Next Generation is also constructed hierarchic ally and is measured on a reason-emotion scale that mimics Ficino's five-rung model. Again, Picard is half-way between top and bottom because he is central and most ideally human; he represents the near-perfect integration of reason, which is highly valu ed, and emotion, which is also valued but only when under the control of the "higher" faculty of reason. Lieutenant Commander Data, the totally unemotional android, is the perfect embodiment of reason and reason's highest achievement, while Lieutenant Wo rf, the Klingon warrior, takes up his position at the bottom, where he represents volatile emotion. In the spaces between the three we can slot Commander Riker, who is next to Picard in human perfection, but who is also a stud with a girl in every spacep ort; and Lieutenant Geordie LaForge, who is a genius in quantum mechanics but can't get a date.
If we turn the hierarchy on its side, it becomes a spectrum along which the five masculine ways of being run from superhuman at one end to subhuman at the other. I find it significant that hyper-rationality and violence are represented as remote from the human ideal at the centre: Data flatters us with his desire to be more like us in our spiritual and emotional complexity, while Worf earns our respect largely in direct proportion to his success in curbing his warlike impulses. Despite the glaring absen ce of homosexuality in this five-category spectrum, as an orderly representation of multiple masculine subjectivities it might be precisely what many male viewers of Star Trek find attractive, as it provides them with a simple, if over-simplified, tool for measuring what it is to be a heterosexual man in our gender-obsessed contemporary humanist culture.
Women fit into the Star Trek universe in the same way that women fit into humanism. But where do they fit? We find a clue in humanist Lorenzo Valla's Renaissance tract entitled De Voluptate, which redeems from medieval christian con demnation the value of earthly pleasure:
Only pleasure is the authentic good of man. All the other goods can be reduced to pleasure. It is the end that nature herself has indicated to man, furnishing him also with the means of obtaining it. Courtesans and harlots are more deserving of huma nkind than holy and chaste virgins.
Clearly, in Lorenzo's view, courtesans, harlots, and virgins are the objects, rather than the subjects of pleasure. They are not the deserving; they are what man deserves--or, more accurately in the case of withholding virgins, what he does not deserve. Similarly, the excellent medical and psychotherapeutic services of the nurturant Crusher, the empathic Troi, and the commiserating Guynan are no less than the men on the Enterprise deserve. Female Admirals, of which there are many in The Next Generation, get to remain on Earth and keep the home fires burning.
To my mind the most successful female character in The Next Generation is K'Ehleyr, the half-human, half-Klingon mate of Lieutenant Worf and the mother of his son. She is an accomplished and respected Federation ambassador to the Klingon Empire, a nd she harbours no illusions regarding the Klingon propensity to cloak their violent practises in claims of honour, glory, and duty. She is as fierce as she is tender, as intelligent as she is beautiful, as autonomous as she is relational. Thus she embo dies the best of both genders. Consequently, there is no continuing place for her within the humanist structure that gives the Star Trek universe its gender coherence, and thus she appears in only two episodes. In response to her brutal murder by the treacherous Klingon Duras, we are so swept away by our admiration for her that unlike Captain Picard we are in complete accord with Worf as he crosses the thin line of his restraint, gives in to his Klingon rage, and kills Duras in a violent duel. I n other words, K'Ehleyr is one of those female figures whose primary function is to render justifiable the ultimate expression of traditional masculine power.
At the opposite end of the feminine spectrum is the character of the telepathic extraterrestrial Lwaxana Troi, the hormonally crazed, menopausal mother of Deanna. Whereas characterization in The Next Generation is encoded and hence decoded accordi ng to the conventions of realism, Lwaxana's character is rendered in the exaggerated conventions of burlesque comedy and hence comes across as a tasteless sexist joke. Not only is she the bane of her daughter's existence, she is also a sexual predator wh o functions as justification for the latent misogyny of the scripts she inhabits. In addition, as she repeatedly reminds us in her imperious way, she is the daughter of the Fifth House, Holder of the Sacred Challice of Rixx, and Heir to the Holy Rings of Betazed. She is also notorious for her rude and dismissive remarks about other humanoid species. Thus, as the exaggerated focus of elitism and racism, she draws our attention away from these qualities as they exist in their normative form in the other characters. Indeed, in one episode Captain Picard and the other officers, whose male protection she seeks, can abandon her with impugnity to a repulsive and lecherous Ferengi kidnapper.
While many father-son relationships are explored throughout the series with dignity, sensitivity, and compassion, the crudely comedic conflict between Lwaxana and Deanna represents the only mother-daughter interchange to receive sustained treatment in The Next Generation. Thus, in striking contrast to the multiplicity of diverse father-son interchanges, the Troi burlesque becomes by default the implicit paradigm case for all mother-daughter relationships. However, in fairness to the Trek writers, as the series progressed the burlesque was muted, Lwaxana's character was rendered less misogynistically, and her relationship with Deanna was given more complexity. However, she never entirely rose above her initial depiction as an embarras sment to the feminine gender. Perhaps this is why, unlike K'Ehleyr, Lwaxana has to this day a continuing place in the Star Trek saga, where she has recently appeared in an episode of Deep Space Nine. However, some might claim that this has more to do with the fact that Majel Barrett, the actress who plays Lwaxana, just happens to be the wife of the late Gene Roddenberry and the custodian of his lucrative Star Trek empire.
The Next Generation is not merely a useful device for introducing into the classroom a critique of the gender-encoded discourse of Western humanism, it's more obviously useful for deconstructing the binary opposition of high versus popular culture, for Roddenberry and his team consciously created The Next Generation as the legitimate heir to both. Roddenberry sold the original Star Trek to the network by calling it "a wagontrain to the stars," and indeed The Next Generation co ntains multiple allusions to the Hollywood Western. Sixguns have become phasers, horses have become spaceships, and saloons proliferate along the final frontier. Gambling has evolved into the more civilized activity of the weekly poker game in Commander Riker's quarters where, while nothing so crass as money changes hands, the high-risk stakes of American frontier exploration are repeatedly evoked in the allusion to poker as analogous to the chancy adventure of space exploration. Cheek-by-jowl with the se elements of the Hollywood Western are elaborate allusions to Shakespeare, Dickens, Masefield, Mark Twain, Agatha Christie, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Picard's reverence for Shakespeare is rivalled only by his love of a pulp fiction novelist, whose Privat e Eye character Dixon Hill is Picard's holodeck alter-ego. While I cannot personally attest to it, a pair of American cultural studies scholars identify Dixon Hill as an allusion to the novels of Philip K. Dick.
I came across this reference to Philip K. Dick in an unpublished conference paper by Sarah Hardy and Rebecca Kukla entitled "Staging Narrative and the Narrative Stage: Exploring Space on the Starship Enterprise." Unlike the Valerie Fulton article with which I began, this paper is completely free of postmodernist paranoia. Instead, Hardy and Kukla explore space within the Starship Enterprise in much the same spirit as its Starfleet crew explore the interstellar space outside of it. Hardy a nd Kukla begin by noting that "an episode in which the Enterprise becomes a sentient being makes explicit its ongoing role as a protagonist in the Star Trek saga." They then go on "to take the Enterprise as an example illustrating the thesis that fictional spaces can constitute and control the forms of subjectivity . . . they contain." They also note what I believe to be a most important observation for anyone trying to understand the phenomenal appeal of Star Trek:
The importance placed upon the purely physical character of both the old and the new Enterprise, by both the show's creators and the audience alike, is evident from the publication for fans of whole books of extraordinarily detailed "blueprints" for ea ch ship. Viewers know, and have proven that they want to know, a great deal about the technological capabilities, physical workings, and spatial and functional divisions of each Enterprise.
As someone who sleeps beneath a two-by-four-foot glazed and framed cutaway representation of the Enterprise-D, I exemplify audience fascination with this object as the most important protagonist in The Next Generation. Perhaps for the whole viewing audience, no less than for me, the Enterprise is analogous to the self in that it contains a multiplicity of interacting subjectivies. Male or female, there is no character on the bridge of the Enterprise who cannot be experienced as a projection of some aspect of the self, some fragment of subjectivity in a dynamic relationship of oscillating harmony-conflict-resolution with all other fragments. I think Carl Jung would have been well pleased with the Enterprise, and would have embraced it as yet more evidence in support of his theory of archetypes, just as many cultural critics denounce the Enterprise for its crew of stereotypes.
Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of this character called Enterprise is her vivid imagination expressed through that most wonderful of all 24th century technologies, the holodeck. Representative of her rich fantasy life, the holodeck is evidence of the Star Trek creators' belief that not even the galaxy is a large enough arena for the human imagination. The holodeck is an excellent metaphor for introducing into the classroom an analysis of the human propensity for discursively constructi ng reality, for that process is analogous to the transformation of energy into matter. One only has to speak to the voice-activated holodeck computer to create a simulation of any environment of any shape in perfect detail. The fact that no hologram can exist outside the holodeck in its material form can be used to suggest that reality as discursively constructed by any one individual or group is always subject to impingement by other realities.
Indeed, in their discussion of the holodeck as providing individual crew members with the opportunity to realize the kind of fantasies which most viewers feel constrained to keep under wraps, Hardy and Kukla note that "Although the holodeck doors are not kept locked and anyone can enter anyone else's fantasy at will, people's antics on the holodeck are clearly treated as personal business and beyond judgment." This leads them to the conclusion that "the holodeck challenges our distinction between the inc luded and the excluded, the contained and the out of bounds, at the physical, cultural, and normative levels.
In each case, the narrative presence of the holodeck makes the provocative claim that we can imaginatively extend our world into an open, accessible space, containing even those possibilities which must be excluded from everyday life and traditionally und erstood space-time. Yet at the same time, the holodeck is used in several episodes to problematize and reveal the limits of the myth of a radically inclusive space.
What is permissible and what is out of bounds is constantly being renegotiated where the holodeck is concerned. Just as Data, that other marvel of 24th century technology, gives his android offspring the chance to choose its own gender and racial identit y, so too does the holodeck imply this potential. Indeed, Data takes his offspring to the holodeck to "try on" several thousand available subjectivities before a holographic mirror. While with the exception of Data himself, no character has actually bee n transformed into the so-called opposite sex, many characters use the holodeck as a temporary escape from the restrictions--gender and otherwise--of real space-time, and the holodeck computer instantly adjusts and responds to these alternative subjectivi ties. Thus, the holodeck is useful for initiating a classroom discussion about the construction of subjectivity and the fluidity of representation.
In an episode called "Conundrum," contact with an alien probe leaves the Enterprise crew and the Enterprise computer with amnesia. The crew can only guess who they each are by interpreting external clues in the context of their emotional se lf-awareness, which is all they have left of their identities. Thus Data, who has no emotional awareness and just happens to be behind the bar in Ten-Forward when the probe strikes, assumes that he is the bartender and begins to act accordingly. Command er Riker and Ensign Ro, who under normal circumstances are constantly at odds with each other professionally, interpret the tension between them as sexual. Worf interprets the Klingon ceremonial sash he wears as signifying his status as ship's Captain. This seems to make sense in the context of his aggressive warrior's feelings, for the computer's reprogrammed memory tells them that the Federation is at war with a race called the Lysians, and their orders are to attack and destroy the Lysian Central Com mand. But more fragmentary evidence retrieved from the computer soon corrects them as to the proper chain of command. Picard resumes as Captain, and the crew proceeds to carry out its mission of destruction. In the end, it's a variation on the humanist balance of reason and emotion that saves the day. Picard's ethical instincts, working in tandem with his finely-honed logic, tips them all off: they are the victims of an insidious plot. An unscrupulous race called the Satarrans have inflicted this pas t-less and future-less condition upon them in an attempt to use the Enterprise as a weapon to destroy the Lysians, with whom the Satarrans are at war.
On the surface, this episode appears to be one of the sillier ones, yet it can be seen as an apt analogy for the postmodern condition. Like the Enterprise crew, we have been transformed from humanist to postmodern subjects: robbed of our past, and without a vision for the future, we are helpless and vulnerable to perpetual, moment-to-moment manipulation by the ideologies that circulate through and around us like some invasive, malevolent force. We have only this highly misinterpretable, malaise-r idden, discursively tangled present to guide our trajectory, which is just as likely to be toward destruction as toward preservation. Is it, then, any wonder that Roddenberry's vision of the future as not merely ensured but enhanced by the triumph of the humanist spirit has such phenomenal appeal?
Like all the other permutations of the Star Trek saga, The Next Generation was not conceived as a subversive text, as were for example All in the Family and M.A.S.H. Nor was it conceived in staunch support of the status quo. The humanist assumptions upon which it rests ensure that for every progressive idea that appears to inform it, there are at least two others that seem disappointingly conventional. What's important about Star Trek is the loyalty it inspires in its millions of active fans, who refuse to be marginalized for their textual preferences, either by the gatekeepers of high-cultural taste or by a postmodern present in which meaning is eternally deferred. As a key to what might be generalized as the domina nt Western psyche, Star Trek rivals the legends of King Arthur. Its translation into such languages as Hindi and Japanese suggests that, for better or worse, it may also rival Coca-Cola and McDonald's as a globalizing phenomenon. For that reason alone its potential for generating multiple readings needs to be exploited in our cultural studies classrooms. Not to do so would be to miss a powerful opportunity to deconstruct and reconstruct the cultural myths by which we as human beings are destined to live our lives.
Fulton, Valerie. "An Other Frontier: Voyaging West with Mark Twain and Star Trek's Imperial Subject." Postmodern Culture 4:3 (online, 1994).
Hardy, Sarah and Rebecca Kukla. "Staging Narrative and the Narrative Stage: Exploring Space on the Starship Enterprise." 1996 (unpublished).
LeGuin, Ursula. "My Appointment with The Enterprise." TV Guide (21 May 1994), p. 13.
McLaren, Peter. "Predatory Culture and the Politics of Education." The Cultural Studies Times (online, 1995).
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