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CHAPTER TWO

“MAKING IT SO”: STAR TREK AND IDEOLOGY

STEVEN D. SCOTT There has been a great deal of critical work done on and around

popular science fiction that stresses its social awareness and its critical stances that run against prevailing social mores. The criticism often discusses in glowing terms the aggressively “alternative” and socially critical nature of the fiction, television, and film. One of the series that routinely earns positive reviews in this vein is Star Trek1: the original (“classic”) series, of course, portrayed the first inter-racial kiss on American popular television (between Kirk and Uhura, 22 November 19682). Other progressive portrayals of race include the man who is Kirk’s commanding officer in Star Trek’s first season: he is an imposing and authoritative man of colour, an inspired piece of progressive racial casting for a 1960s television show.3 It is true: thematically, the show frequently reflects a racial awareness and a stance that, especially for its time and place, are laudable.4 However, the deliberate and explicit social/racial conscience of Star Trek is not what I find most interesting or useful about the series.5 I use Star Trek in my critical theory classes to teach conceptions of ideology, as defined by theorists such as Antonio Gramsci, Louis Althusser, Roland Barthes, Slavoj Žižek, and Michel Foucault. In this paper I will argue that ideologically, Star Trek displays exactly the kinds of tendencies that one would expect to find in hit American television shows: that, in short, a core ideology that is both racist and sexist is an integral part of the five Star Trek series. My approach is first to define ideology in popular culture, using the work of the critical theorists I have named. I will then focus on the captains of the various Star Trek series in terms of their missions, their erotic love interests, and their cultural capital. I will argue that despite the socially progressive themes, casting, and so on of the various series, there is a fundamentally conservative, racist, and sexist ideology at work in all of the series.

The Everyday Fantasic : Essays on Science Fiction and Human Being, edited by Michael Berman, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/utah/detail.action?docID=1114297. Created from utah on 2018-05-10 14:01:57.

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At the beginning of his book Mythologies, a book of reflections, sketches, and short essays about culture, history, and “daily life,” Roland Barthes writes,

The starting point of these reflections was usually a feeling of impatience at the sight of the “naturalness” with which newspapers, art and common sense constantly dress up a reality which, even though it is the one we live in, is undoubtedly determined by history. In short, in the account given of our contemporary circumstances, I resented seeing Nature and history confused at every turn, and I wanted to track down, in the decorative display of what-goes-without-saying, the ideological abuse which, in my view, is hidden there.6 In this concise definition, Barthes has pinpointed the essence of

ideology as I wish to discuss it. Barthes claims that ideology is presented as “natural”; it is expressed in “common sense”; it is “what-goes-without- saying.” It is, in short, the system of codes by and through which a society operates. The more transparent, the more “artless,” the more “natural” that “reality” is presented in newspapers or other forms of mass media and popular culture, the more potentially damaging is the ideological abuse that “is hidden there.” Barthes maintains that there is nothing “natural” about reality; it is constructed according to the prevailing ideologies of a given culture, and according to the history of those prevailing ideologies.

Louis Althusser agrees that there is nothing “natural” about what Barthes disparagingly calls “common sense.” He maintains that schools, in particular, as repositories of cultural knowledge, are important not so much because of what they teach explicitly, but rather because of what they teach implicitly. He writes,

besides … techniques and knowledges … children at school also learn the “rules” of good behaviour, i.e. the attitude that should be observed by every agent in the division of labour, according to the job he is destined for: rules of morality, civic and professional conscience, which actually means rules of respect for the socio-technical division of labour and ultimately the rules of the order established by class domination…. To put this more scientifically, I shall say that the reproduction of labour power requires not only a reproduction of its skills, but also, at the same time, a reproduction of its submission to the rules of established order.7 For Althusser, the “‘rules’ of good behaviour,” the right “attitude,” and

strict obedience to the (“natural” and “common-sensical”) way things simply are, is what schools are really intent on teaching. In other words, schools exist to make ideologically compliant citizens. This compliance

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Chapter Two

must be learned early, and well. The compliance must not be something added on to existing behaviour; it must not be some sort of behavioural afterthought. The compliance must instead become what Barthes calls common sense. Althusser’s conception of the “right attitude” must be literally “just the way things are.” The result is that the historical circumstances, the constructedness of the behaviour and the attitude and the compliance, must be hidden under their own naturalness, or else the lower and working classes will recognise the system as a system, and possibly begin to object and rebel. For Althusser, the culture exists to replicate itself, and to reproduce “acceptable” behaviour.

Althusser and Barthes are not alone; Michel Foucault is also fascinated by the workings of popular culture and ideology. In an interview conducted in 1974, Foucault remarks, concerning history in popular film,

Today, cheap books aren’t enough. There are much more effective means like television and the cinema. And I believe this was one way of reprogramming popular memory, which existed but had no way of expressing itself. So people are shown not what they were, but what they must remember having been…. This has always been the aim of history taught in schools: to teach ordinary people that they got killed and that this was very heroic.8 So, for Foucault, popular culture comprises an education that exists

precisely for ideological purposes: to tell people, specifically people of the lower and working classes, what they should remember, know, and believe about themselves. Ideology coincides with a given culture’s “common sense.” “Ideology” is an invisible shaping force that derives a considerable amount of its power from being invisible: one can fight what one can identify as an enemy; if one cannot see it, however, because it is disguised as “mere” common sense, it becomes very powerful, and is, in fact, ubiquitous.

Antonio Gramsci agrees that ideology functions as common sense. He argues, further, that ideology is a powerful method of social control, exercised implicitly through culture, which ultimately shapes the controlled group’s “common sense.” He writes,

The intellectuals are the dominant group’s “deputies” exercising the subaltern functions of social hegemony and political government. These comprise … the “spontaneous” consent given by the great masses of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the dominant fundamental group.9

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Star Trek and Ideology

In the case of Star Trek, part of what one should look for, then, is not so much the explicit themes (particular shows that explore racism, say) as the assumed “deep” structures, the ways things “simply” (or, for Barthes, “naturally”) are. According to these theorists, what is vitally important to examine is the link that is simply there in Star Trek between science and the military, for instance, or the assumed legitimacy of a rigidly hierarchical social structure, modelled on the military.

On the role of ideology, Slavoj Žižek is eloquent. He writes,

This is probably the fundamental dimension of “ideology”: ideology is not simply a “false consciousness”, an illusory representation of reality, it is rather this reality itself which is already to be conceived as “ideological”— ”ideological” is a social reality whose very existence implies the non- knowledge of its participants as to its essence—that is, the social effectivity, the very reproduction of which implies that the individuals “do not know what they are doing”. “Ideological” is not the “false consciousness” of a (social) being but this being itself in so far as it is supported by “false consciousness”. Thus we have finally reached the dimension of the symptom, because one of its possible definitions would also be “a formation whose very consistency implies a certain non- knowledge on the part of the subject”: the subject can “enjoy his symptom” only in so far as its logic escapes him—the measure of the success of its interpretation is precisely its dissolution.10 For Žižek, ideology is fundamental. It is social reality. It is not, in fact,

a false consciousness; it is, rather supported and masked, hidden, by a false consciousness. In the case of Star Trek, the explicit thematic “content” of a given episode becomes, then, not itself what the show is about, but the false consciousness that masks the deeper ideology and the social structure upon which the show is based. Elsewhere, Žižek writes that ideology is a “discourse.” It is “an enchainment of elements the meaning of which is overdetermined by their specific articulation.”11 In order to examine a given ideology, “we do not add the dialectical mediation, the context bestowing meaning on the phenomenon, instead we subtract it.”12 In other words, for Žižek, in discussions of ideology it is not enough to know that ideology is working the way I have already described it: it is not enough to know that ideology is a discourse, that it is artificial, that it is not natural. Instead, for Žižek, the “meaning” of a piece of popular culture is exactly the mechanism that hides what he calls “the dialectical meditation, the context bestowing meaning on the phenomenon.”13 The context, the ideology, the “overlooked margins” become the only “real point”14; ideology itself is the real point, and must

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be examined because it is by its nature invisible, transparent, and necessarily not-known.

In other words, the thematic “content” of the various Star Trek series operates like the inverse of what Barthes calls an “inoculation.” Barthes writes, “To instil into the Established Order the complacent portrayal of its drawbacks has nowadays become a paradoxical but incontrovertible means of exalting it. Here is the pattern of this new-style demonstration: take the established value which you want to restore or develop, and first lavishly display its pettiness, the injustices which it produces, the vexations to which it gives rise, and plunge it into its natural imperfection; then, at the last moment, save it, in spite of, or rather by the heavy curse of its blemishes.”15 The examples Barthes gives are the Church and the Army: “It is a kind of homeopathy: one cures doubts about the Church or the Army by the very ills of the Church and the Army. One inoculates the public with a contingent evil to prevent or cure an essential one.”16 For Barthes, it is talking about the evils of the Army that then allows one to point to the Army’s ills: “a little ‘confessed’ evil saves one from acknowledging a lot of hidden evil.”17 This process is what has happened in North America in the wake of September 11, 2001: while it is admittedly wrong to remove numerous social and civic rights, it is worth removing them for the sake of civic peace and a sense of social safety. Barthes notes, “and thus common sense makes its reckoning: what is this trifling dross of Order, compared to its advantages?”18

The first interracial kiss on prime time television, then, masks, and so operates as a kind of reverse inoculation for the deeper ideology of that series. That deeper ideology appears, for example, in the plot-line of the Plato’s Stepchildren episode: Kirk and Uhura are forced to kiss by Parman, the leader of a people called “Platonians,” after the ancient Earthly Greek philosopher. That is, the kiss between Kirk and Uhura is not part of an ongoing or even short-lived but straightforward erotic relationship between the two. Interracial relationships are not a norm. In addition, at a deeper level, the series configures Kirk as a questing intergalactic lover, for whom numberless alien females have a weakness; following from this, it is assumed that Kirk will kiss quite a lot in the series. The interracial kiss is but one instance in a series that reinforces the cultural myth of the sexually active male. Third, most of the females on the show, human and alien alike, dress as though they were visiting Hugh Hefner’s Playboy mansion, virtually always in short dresses with plunging necklines.19 The assumption—the ideology—is that all females, human and “alien” alike, are what Laura Mulvey calls the “(passive) raw material for the (active) gaze of man.”20 Finally, and not exhaustively, Star Trek

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assumes a basic heteronormativity: Kirk is not pictured kissing McCoy or Spock. For all the positive work that is done by the general plot line of the episode, at a masked ideological level, numerous questionable or even damaging trends emerge. The reverse inoculation operates, in fact, precisely because of the progressive plot-lines: it is easier to think well of something that is offering an enlightened racial message, even when that positive thinking is actually not entirely deserved.

With those numerous cautions in place, I would like to turn now to the series themselves, examining them in the order in which they were produced. I shall be paying particular attention to the various commanding officers of the missions in each series, at least in part because the commanding officers tend to set the tone for the rest of the series. In some significant ways, the commanding officers embody the series, so that what is true of the commanders is true of the series.

James T. Kirk, the captain of the first Star Trek (“Classic” Star Trek, or Star Trek: The Original Series, or more simply, TOS) is very much a product of his times. The series was first broadcast from September 1966 to June 1969. Kirk is the prototypical American cold warrior: we are told that he is a scientist first, and that he fundamentally heads a mission of exploration, not expansion21; but he is also clearly a willing and capable warrior. In addition, he practises the “free love” of his culture and times at an intergalactic level: his sexual interests and erotic objects abound, almost always wearing short skirts, and almost always willing and able to fulfil Kirk’s desires. More generally, the mission of the Starship Enterprise is, very famously, “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” In short, Kirk suits the cold war, and his series suits the times, specifically the American vision of the times. It has some very interesting and progressive things to say about race, but sexual equality is vexed, at best.

The captain in the second Star Trek series, Star Trek: The Next Generation, is Jean-Luc Picard. TNG was produced for seven seasons, 1987-1994, and Picard is the prototypical post-cold war warrior. As smoothly as Kirk fit the 1960s, Picard suits the 1980s and early 90s. He is a poet; he is a philosopher; he is still an adventuring scientist; and he is a somewhat more reluctant, though still capable warrior. His indulgence is leather-bound books of poetry; he drinks Earl Grey tea, “hot.” In place of Kirk, the adventuring young hot head and intergalactic lover, Picard seems fatherly (indeed, he clearly becomes a father figure to Wesley Crusher), again suiting his times exactly. Picard’s major love interest is a female physician and single mother. The fact that Beverley Crusher is a physician and single mother stands as more evidence that this series, like the “classic” Star Trek, displays itself as socially responsible and forward-

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looking; female characters actually have some agency. In keeping with this stance, Picard’s series has updated its slogan to suit his times; his mission has become the more politically correct, “To boldly go where no one has gone before.” Yet counterbalancing the female agency of the show is the way Deanna Troi is dressed; further complicating any view of the series as progressive in gender terms is the fact that the counsellor, an “empath,” is (of course) female, since she is emotional, nurturing, caring, empathetic.

It is worth making the obvious point that in both of the first two series, the captains have been white and male, and their missions have taken them into the “unexplored” reaches of the galaxy. The captains have both headed active, questing missions that have ventured into the universe, expanding the “final frontier,” and taking Americana with them as they go. The ideological stance of these first two series is the same: the captains are active, decision-making leaders; the missions push actively into the unknown; and, ideologically the captains are, of necessity, white and male. Despite the inoculation of progressive plot lines and a politically correct slogan, not much has changed in the chain of command in the movement between these two worlds. Indeed, Gene Roddenberry’s vision of the series seems intact, as a “wagon train to the stars,” an example of a futuristic American manifest destiny.22

The third Star Trek series to be launched was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. It ran from 1993 to 1999. Deep Space Nine is a space station that has been placed at one end of a stable “wormhole” that reaches into the distant “Gamma Quadrant.” The wormhole is considered extremely valuable and strategic; it is potentially of use for exploration and colonisation. The authority figure in this third series is for the first time not a white male. Interestingly, he is also not (yet) a captain at the launch of the series. He is Commander Benjamin Sisko. Sisko is unusual in a number of ways in the world of Star Trek. To begin with, he is black, thereby serving as a figure who embodies the reverse inoculation that I have been discussing: the series has moved away from white male captains to a black male “commander.” Second, he is a single father who is actively mourning his dead wife (indeed, his erotic interests seem to be centred on her occasional returns in dream sequences). Third, while he is clearly the featured leader in the series, he was not promoted to the rank of captain until the series’ third season. Fourth, and most importantly, Sisko is a “commander” who is no longer an explorer/warrior/scientist. For the first time, Star Trek is not about trekking, exploring, actively questing into the far reaches of the galaxy: the focus of the series with the black commander is guarding and gate-keeping. Ideologically, Sisko has neatly been cut out of an active

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role. Black leadership has come at a price: the leader is chained, controlled, and circumscribed. He has become (merely) a guard. While the series no longer has a slogan like the first two, this one clearly could be, “To boldly go … nowhere at all.”

To name a black male as leader in a new Star Trek series seems, at first, to be a socially conscious move. However, the black male, though he is a commander, has lost his conquering scientist/warrior role as captain. He no longer ventures around the galaxy; his sole mission is to guard a gate to other “sectors” of the universe, to protect and ensure that only the appropriate adventurers get through. The single most threatening image in American popular culture is, I would maintain, the black male.23 And in DS9, the captain of Star Trek has been turned from the free-adventuring male warrior of the first Star Treks into a gatekeeper. While the captain figure is no longer a white male, he is a black male who has been chained to a post; and informatively, his most significant erotic interest is his dead wife, who is resurrected from time to time. In short, the black male who seems like a significant step in a positive, socially progressive direction is a black male removed from the previously active position, chained, neutered and reduced. The fact that Sisko becomes a warrior by the end of the series may speak to the series’ growth; it may, in an optimistic vein, speak to a growing racial tolerance; or it may be yet another example of reverse inoculation. In any case, Sisko is never the adventuring captain in the form of his white counterparts.

The fourth Star Trek series, Star Trek: Voyager, features a female captain for the first time. The series ran from 1995 to 2001. Like the black male who was a commander before her, Captain Kathryn Janeway seems at first to be a progressive step, a movement toward gender equality for the series and the franchise. The premise of the show is that Voyager, under the command of Kathryn Janeway, has been sent in search of a ship piloted by a cell of a terrorist organisation called the Maquis, formed to protest the signing of a treaty between the Federation and the Cardassians. There is an “accident” engineered by an ancient alien known as the Caretaker, and Voyager is propelled across the galaxy and stranded seventy thousand light years from Earth; under normal circumstances, it would take some seventy-five years to get back to Federation space. The show featured, as had become usual for Star Trek, individuals from a range of races, including Chakotay, the Maquis leader and clearly a Native American. There was also a good deal of speculation that the series would nurture a lesbian erotic attachment between Janeway and Seven of Nine, who was provocatively clothed, to say the least. However, that relationship never did materialise, becoming instead a nurturing maternal/daughter

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relationship. And instead of a lesbian relationship, the opening episode actually featured Janeway lamenting over a photograph of her lost fiancée and her dog, pictured in front of a picket fence. The ideological underpinnings that are masked by Voyager’s female captain include some distressing ones: once again, Star Trek is not about venturing into uncharted and unknown territory. It is not adventuring, expanding, outward-seeking; it is, instead, restorative and nurturing, having a female captain. The fundamental mission of the first female captain of Star Trek is “to boldly go … home.” Not only is Janeway charged with getting back home (one thinks, involuntarily, of a kind of space-age Dorothy figure), but also there are implications that she is essentially a bad female driver. She has little enough confidence in her own abilities that she destroys the Caretaker’s Array that would straightforwardly return her and her crew. She is a captain who not only second-guesses that early decision throughout the run of the show, but whose primary job is essentially to negotiate peaceful cooperation among her crew members.

The fifth Star Trek series, Enterprise, ran from 2001-2005. It begins some 150 years in the Earth’s future, or about 100 years before the beginning of Star Trek TOS. Notably, the opening title sequence has moved from the dreamy and abstract shots of space that characterised the first four series, to a much more realistic collage taken from the actual US space program. Thus a series that began as a utopian future beyond the notion of country, and only implicitly American, has become deliberately based in the American space program. The series begins with the first human-Klingon encounter, and a plot line that is oddly both reminiscent and prescient of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. Enterprise premiered in the US on September 26, 2001. The series’ mission is once again an adventurous and exploratory one, with humans going faster and farther than they have ever gone before with their newly discovered warp drive capabilities. And distressingly, but predictably, according to the ideology I have been tracing, we are back again to a white male captain, Jonathan Archer. Archer, the active, enterprising white leader was likely predictable, given the “hot” wars that America is currently involved in, worldwide.

Given this analysis, it is clear that the Star Trek “enterprise” comprises a franchise of television series that aggressively disseminates American ideologies of individualism (though it explicitly claims to have moved beyond such things as money to an egalitarian Utopia) and profoundly conservative values in terms of both race and sex (though it habitually “inoculates” readers, proffering socially progressive themes and plot lines like the famous kiss from the first show, a black male commander, a white

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female captain). It is not at all surprising, then, that the greatest “alien” threat in the history of the show, and in some significant ways the biggest threat to the values it represents, is the Borg, an unindividuated culture that operates entirely as a collective. It is also not surprising that the Borg should be revisited in Voyager as an individual, scantily clad female who is struggling to be accepted as an individual by the crew of Voyager and its nurturing, peacemaking female captain who is lost and yearning for home.

The Star Trek franchise of series serves as a fascinating episode in North American television and popular culture history. They are series that do in fact address gender, economic, and racial issues, often in illuminating and thoughtful ways. They do address those issues in what are often also socially progressive ways, but they are also always already products of, and inextricably embedded in, a culture that shows itself to be deeply troubled concerning race and gender and other social and economic issues. Despite appearances and what appear to be intentions, Star Trek never does rise above its role as a disseminator of a fundamentally conservative American ideology.

Notes 1 See, for instance, Porter, Jennier E. and Darcee L. McLaren, eds., Star Trek and Sacred Ground: Explorations of Star Trek, Religion, and American Culture, (Albany: SUNY P, 1999), who write, “it is … clear that Star Trek, like other television shows, has at various times been reflective, informative, and critical of American culture…. [It] has addressed a wide variety of issues, including war, capitalism, individualism, technology, race, gender, prejudice, and religion…. Since the series first premiered in the 1960s, Star Trek has reflected, informed, and often challenged prevailing social attitudes toward a wide variety of often controversial topics” (2-9). 2 Star Trek episode #67, Plato’s Stepchildren, 22 November 1968. 3 I owe this example to Robert J. Sawyer, who discussed the example eloquently and at length in his keynote address to the Uses of Science Fiction conference at Brock University, October 2005. The episode Sawyer is referring to is Star Trek episode #15, Court Martial, 2 February 1967; the actor who played Commodore Stone is Percy Rodriguez. 4 Gregory Peterson names Star Trek as “one of the few television series of its time to openly champion the wisdom of diversity and tolerance” (“Religion and Science in Star Trek: The Next Generation” in Star Trek and Sacred Ground: Explorations of Star Trek, Religion, and American Culture, 76); and Robert Asa claims that “Classic Star Trek has an almost unbounded confidence in the powers of human

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rationality and science” (“Classic Star Trek and the Death of God” in the same anthology, 48). 5 See Barrett, Michèle and Duncan Barrett, Star Trek: The Human Frontier, (New York: Routledge, 2001), who write, “‘race’ is confused, whether intentionally or not, in Star Trek; it is constantly replayed and its meanings re-negotiated. Star Trek is not afraid to confront the question of race” (88). Among other examples, they point out that Sisko in DS9 “is presented quite clearly in terms of his African heritage” (89), and conclude, “The question of race in Star Trek should be seen as one of several strategies used to try and identify the parameters of human nature” (90). 6 Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), Preface, 11. 7 Althusser, Louis, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Vincent B. Leitch, ed., The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2001), 1485. 8 Foucault, Michel, Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961-1984, Sylvère Lotringer, ed., (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 123-6. 9 Gramsci, Antonio. “The Formation of the Intellectuals” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 1143. 10 Žižek, Slavoj, The Sublime Object of Ideology, (London & New York: Verso, 1989), 21. 11 Žižek, Slavoj, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture, (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1991), 129. 12 Žižek, 129. 13 Žižek, 129. 14 Žižek, 129. 15 Barthes, 41. 16 Barthes, 41-2. 17 Barthes, 42. 18 Barthes, 42. 19 This tendency did not end with the first series: Marina Sirtis as Deanna Troi from The Next Generation dresses consistently in a skin-tight uniform; so does Jeri Ryan as Seven of Nine in Star Trek: Voyager. 20 Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, 2191. 21 And not interference: Star Trek crews are to be bound by the Federation’s “Prime Directive,” an order mandating non-interference in the evolution of societies. 22 I owe this point to Michael Berman. 23 See the non-fictional writings of Samuel R. Delaney, especially Longer Views (1996), Shorter Views (1999), and Black Gay Man (2001); or, in the context of the Star Trek franchise, the threatening nature of the Klingons; or the various racially- charged conversations in Paul Haggis’s brilliant film Crash.

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