Television is not only this drab kaleidoscope, but also a teacher, and occasionally a teacher of philosophy. Its lessons, if anything, have a greater veracity than those of certificated teachers. For example, the idea proposed by George Berkeley and Gorgias of Leontini, that the world is illusion, seems to affect us more when proposed through the sad history of Captain Pike in the original Star Trek:
(Captain Pike, captured by neurasthenic martians, is subjected to the vexations of a hallucinatory world. Later on, mutilated and restricted to a life support machine, he represents the manifest correlate of this: a body fit only for hallucination.)
We are faced with alternate scenarios, in which a proposition is presented in two different ways according to the sole differentiating factor: the context within which the proposition is disseminated. The proposition is persuasive when its context is a banal television programme, less so when its context is the spectacle of western philosophy. In this sense the validity of the proposition varies inversely with respect to the authority with which it is asserted. In both cases, however, the context is itself abstracted along with the proposition, and can only be imaginatively reconstructed. The tendency of the ideological mechanism constructed by the market economy is to prompt the contextualisation of the material it disseminates according to the distinct contexts of material already formally understood and material formally unintelligible, since this intuitive allocation of contexts most expediently rationalises the abstraction that the market economy passively constructs. This proposition: that the world is illusion, presented via the context of this banal television programme, contradicts this formal prior comprehension. The rationalisation of this contradiction invariably presents, albeit fleetingly, the proposition contextless and existing in itself. Equally contradictory, actually if not apparently, is the complementary deduction that the spectacle of western philosophy qua spectacle formally negates the propositions it formally subsumes.
This apparent paradox has perhaps not been previously formulated (its social preconditions being of relatively recent origin), but a number of advertising techniques are nevertheless constructed around it. Consequently I think it would be worthwhile to present in outline the anatomy of a socio-ideological system like Star Trek, how it works, and how the sale of goods can be made to depend on it, even though none of this can be adequately proven. I don’t believe there is any harm in explaining this, since it’s already done, as it were, unconsciously, and probably couldn’t be effectively reconstructed from first principles.
- The banalised worldview of teevee is itself accepted as a banal fact. Teevee is accepted as a kind of folk culture.
Since anyone with a teevee can validate or reject this assertion I propose to restrict myself to a few comments concerning the set up and reception of teevee:
The reproduction of the premises of teevee (buildings, machines, staff employed) subsumes the reproduction of its content. Consequently teevee dispenses with whatever superfluous content would adversely affect this reproduction. So teevee is effectively banalised in respect of what it could be (in different circumstances) and perpetuates an artificial timeless present comparable to that of pre industrial folk culture. This repetitive quality of teevee, while it tends to cancel historical knowledge within its own content, also reinforces the supposition that there is this historical knowledge, though it remains exterior and unexamined.
The content of teevee can only be understood, let alone enjoyed, as the background noise of everyday life: as the folk culture of some other people, a little worse than we are. The minimum comfort of teevee is its persuasive appeal that other people really do take its stupid worldview for granted. With respect to the supposed overall culture, teevee a priori represents everything you are meant to have already understood. The alternative, heretical view, that teevee is always and everywhere simply a tool of industrial capitalism, is likewise technically incorrect; is depressing rather than reassuring; and is virtually socially irreproducible. The existence of a number of sectors of industry (for instance that selling videos of teevee programmes), testifies to the fact that people really do accept teevee at face value, but its persuasive appeal is of course more or less temporary, and also operates within a generalised boredom.
Star Trek admirably reproduces all these conceits: in no way do its makers depart from b movie standards in terms of the quality of acting, plot or scenery they present. The various episodes are also virtually unrelated to one-another such that they can be understood in any order or independently.
Star Trek also cleverly exteriorises the historical knowledge it supposes, for instance in the control panels that merely interface the unworkable, or the transporters that only materialise the programme’s immaterialiseable suppositions.
2. Two ostensibly contradictory operations are carried out within teevee that simultaneously disturb and reassure the viewer. Teevee thus proposes a disturbing folk culture.
So, half of the economy of Star Trek consists of tactics that teevee employs routinely, if not unconsciously, and which the makers of Star Trek merely refrain from contradicting. The real art in Star Trek consists in its separation of character and context, such that the characters are reassuring (because they clearly belong to the banalised world of teevee), while their context is made disturbing (i.e. simultaneously strange and banal): an art of separation that prevents the programme itself collapsing into “art” proper. In many ways the programme is predicated on remaining unintelligible. The disturbing aspects of Star Trek have to be allocated to folk culture rather than supposed high culture for the economy to work.
In establishing strange contexts, the makers of Star Trek are not deterred from employing almost everything that its viewers might find disturbing in the 1960s: not only the world of hippies and communists, but also “high culture” art and philosophy. These discrete alternatives are routinely put together piecemeal. So, in the Menagerie episode, the unfortunate Captain Pike, captured by this race of effete technocrats, is subjected to a kind of Berkeleyan reverie; within this reverie he fights a barbarian to a soundtrack of Sun Ra type instrumental jazz. This episode concisely encapsulates the methodology of Star Trek: what ought to be disturbing (the generic violence) serves to reassure, while what ought to reassure (art music) serves to disturb.
One reason that Star Trek can be described as typifying “compassionate fascism” is that the characters are exaggeratedly straight: they strictly refrain from employing the language associated with the milieux these disturbing ideas are presumably taken from. Kirk never talks like Sun Ra or Spinoza; the prototype “hip” Spock of the pilot episode is soon abandoned in favour of his classic incarnation.
This inverted logic gets around the real contradiction in the economy of Star Trek: that makers of Star Trek could quite easily pay for experts to transpose these disturbing ideas from a dictionary of philosophy
So it isn’t so much the case that Star Trek represents the conquest by the ideology of teevee of everything disturbing outside teevee, Star Trek rather accentuates and perpetuates the unlocaliseable terror that teevee supposes.
- The unresolved contradiction of a disturbing folk culture is rationalised as a contradiction between the viewer and the folk culture to which he/she supposedly already relates. This contradiction can then be resolved by the viewer refamiliarising himself/herself with the material, to the point where boredom supplants disquietude.
If we accept that Star Trek proposes a disturbing folk culture, we are accepting something contradictory, since folk culture shouldn’t really be disturbing, nor for that matter should it have “viewers”. But this whole paradoxical economy can, from the viewer’s perspective, be swiftly rationalised by simply buying into teevee to a greater extent. Provided the initial premises of teevee are intuitively accepted, as they must be, however provisionally, the introduction of whatever disturbing content is able to retain the status of something a priori comprehended will necessarily coerce the viewer into striving to comprehend what he/she is meant to have already comprehended, up to the point where boredom supplants disquietude. This contrived need to understand something that is abstracted, owned and branded can be simply and profitably displaced into a willingness to buy products that are likewise owned and branded. If you understand all this you are no doubt well on the way to understanding how “space energy comes from sugar smacks”.
Star Trek is notable because it achieves its disquieting effect through philosophy. It isn’t straightforward to disquiet people with philosophy but relatively easy to disquiet them with sex. Consequently it would be worthwhile demonstrating how the same techniques can be employed using sexual content.
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