Notes toward a Blog Post: Star Trek, Lefebvre, and The Cage

My goal for my next blog post on Star Trek will be to establish that the program is both an example of an Althusserian Ideological State Apparatus and a kind of Lefebvrian Representational Space. I also want to demonstrate how Star Trek is a means to understand these theoretical abstractions. I’ll want to explain how it could be that Star Trek is both ideological in so much as it reproduces the ruling ideology of its time while being self-reflexive, or how it is that the ruling ideology not only includes a critique of itself but how these abstractions can be shown to be concrete because they are generated by or contained within ISAs or representational spaces. I may have to turn to Hegelian dialectic or the cheat of producing the affect of dissolution with yet another moment where I write about what a snake thinks about when eating his own tail. What I’d rather do, however, is end up seducing and then convincing the reader of the concreteness of the abstractions I find by courting the reader’s own desire.

Star Trek as The Sign

Yesterday I posted about how Star Trek can best be understood through Star Trek. That is, while it is tempting to set about deconstructing the series, to take it apart and examine each piece of it using various theoretical critical tools that we might have at our disposal (for instance we might turn to Freud or Marx and apply their thought to any given episode or film in the franchise) the better approach is a more passive or receptive approach. Rather than impose various ideas onto Kirk or Picard, rather than place a grid over the Enterprise or on Vulcan in order to dissect the program, we should instead turn to the program itself and simply observe what we find there without the hope that any true understanding will be immediately revealed, but rather just so that we can see what the phenomena of Star Trek is and what happens on the show.

Yesterday I suggested that we could be assured that it was Star Trek and not Doctor Who that was the true television show. I said that Star Trek unfolded through history and ultimately divulged real understanding, but I gave no real basis for this assertion other than a circular argument about how Spock never had to borrow Doctor Who’s TARDIS and could time travel on his own.

The truth is, however, is that Star Trek is merely another television show like all the others. It came onto the scene, appearing on our TV sets for the first time on September 8th, 1966.

Still, this observation is significant in itself and maybe gets us closer to Understanding. If Star Trek was a television show, that means it was made up of images and sounds that presented themselves to a television audience. It appeared as a television spectacle in a culture wherein these spectacles were common. Star Trek appeared, as the philosopher Rick Roderick once said, inside a culture based on spectacle and images.

“And a culture based on spectacle and images has a peculiar non-systematic character. It’s like the Fall TV schedule. All you really know about it, right, is that it is going to appear on a kind of grid. But culture in general, we are not even sure about the grid let alone, you know, which dumb new sitcom goes in it, but we are not sure about the grid.
So, when you discuss cultural phenomena today, you almost have to go phenomena by phenomena to see how they fit.” -Rick Roderick, Philosophy and Post-Modern Culture, The Teaching Company, 1990

The grid that Roderick is referring to is the TV schedule, sure, but it is also a system of hierarchy and privilege, a means of establishing significance, and as we start to watch Star Trek the first thing we notice is that this system isn’t working very well. Sure, we can open our TV Guide and see that Star Trek is up against The Tammy Grimes show, but we can’t tell just by looking at the grid which show it is that we should watch or anything else of importance. So in order to figure out what to watch, in order to know what is significant for us in our lives, we have to just go through the schedule show by show. And, in order to understand what’s significant about any given show, even to understand how we understand what’s significant about a show, or how it is that a television show could be significant, we have to turn the television on and start to watch.

How to Understand Star Trek through Star Trek

Many years back I purchased a book about Doctor Who entitled “Doctor Who the Unfolding Text,” a work of cultural studies written by John Tulloch which examines the BBC series from multiple points of view and using various theoretical approaches in order to expose the mechanisms and ideas, the meanings and symbols, that emerged from the series over its then twenty year history. This approach to the Doctor treats him as a contingent artifact of an historical process without arriving at any stance on what that historical process was and what IT might mean.

An Amazon review of the book explains the problem:

Tulloch and Alvarado set out to demonstrate that ‘Doctor Who’ is a series which gradually ‘unfolds’, growing in sophistication and laying bare its inner workings. They also claim that it does so in stages corresponding to different eras in the show’s ‘production history.’ Their main problem is that in order to establish [this] it is necessary to examine these different eras according to the same criteria – otherwise the comparisons are as meaningless as comparing the *color* of an orange with the *shape* of a banana. But this book examines each era according to a different theoretical model.

Here’s the problem taken from a different perspective. In order for Tulloch to treat Doctor Who empirically or as an object on its own he has to be willing to change his theory based on what he finds in the text. However, it isn’t enough to look around for the prefabricated theory that seems to cast some light on the science fiction, but rather, if it’s true that Doctor Who unfolded through its history creating greater and and more complex meanings as it progressed, then rather than applying theories to the show one should be able to use the show in order to develop and refine, perhaps even to negate or invalidate, one’s theories.

Now, it turns out that Doctor Who did not unfold through history creating greater and greater meanings as it progressed, but rather the science fiction series that accomplished this feat was Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek. One way we can know this is by turning to Star Trek for verification. Does the Doctor ever appear on the show? When the characters on Star Trek time travel do they need to borrow the TARDIS? Is there a single episode wherein Leonard Nimoy is reduced to asking to borrow Tom Baker’s key? No.

The significance of Star Trek can be discerned simply. Just watch the show, all of the shows, in sequence, every day. That is perhaps the best way to Understand. However, I’ll also be writing here with some various observations to help you out along the way.

Tomorrow I’ll be explaining a bit more about how to Understand the show and how the show explains itself, and after that we’ll take a look at what the major themes of Star Trek really are.

For now, Live Long and Prosper for thine is the Enterprise and the Strange New World, Amen.

Philosophy Workshop Lecture: Hegel’s Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Bishop Berkeley, and Philip K. Dick’s Electric Ant

“The problem which Hegel sought to answer is the problem of man’s destiny, the problem of the meaning of his existence. It is a problem arising from the disintegration of Christian faith, as manifested in the French Revolution,” -Carl J. Friedrich, The Philosophy of Hegel

I recently wrote a blog post entitled “Star Trek and the Death of God” for a science fiction website and received word that the essay was too hot to handle and had to be rejected. The editor told me that “grand sweeping statements about religion that don’t apply across the board” weren’t really welcome at the website, and while I understood the logic I also was struck by the irony. It seemed to me that the editor was confirming my thesis, the idea that God was dead, by rejecting the writing in the way that she did. Only somebody who believes that God is dead would argue against my claim that God is dead based on an appeal to pluralism. That is, if the truth about God can’t be universalized then God is, ipso facto, dead. If God was alive then perhaps I ought to have been published and then burned at the stake?

I like to think that this observation that her rejection refuted itself isn’t merely a reflection of my own pettiness, but that maybe this it is a Hegelian observation. Hegel’s method seems to involve pointing to self-contradictions that are tucked away in arguments, and in his introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit he spends some time exposing the philosophers that preceded him (Descarte, Locke, Berkeley and Kant for instance) to what is unintended in their philosophy.

Hegel is notorious for addressing many different philosophers in his writings. His Phenomenology of Spirit is often spoken of as a kind of history of philosophy. Hegel encapsulates one philosophical position after another (without explicitly saying so) and then knocks each one aside, but what I want to do in my reading of Hegel is pretend that Hegel was talking to Philip K. Dick, or if not PKD then maybe Bishop Berkeley. I like these two philosophers because nobody takes them seriously. Berkeley, who really was a philosopher, concluded that the world outside the senses doesn’t exist and that everything is in God’s mind. How ridiculous is that? My hope is that by starting with the ridiculous I might free myself up to engage more fully with the ideas in Hegel.

So, let’s start with a little story that illustrates how Berkeley’s argument against matter might be more pervasive today than we think it is. A childhood friend of mine, a man named Gerald White who works as a film professor at the University of Alberta, made a mistake when he was first starting out teaching. He told his class that the only way we can know the world is empirically, and when one of his students objected he cut them short. One of his students tried to object by pointing out that there were two ways to know something. That we had both empirical knowledge and a priori knowledge, but at the time Jerry was having none of this. It was only later on, well after the class, that he called me up and asked me if he might’ve made a mistake.

Berkeley argued against this second kind of knowledge, against a priori knowledge, as something that could be taken as a real kind of knowledge.

But what is this a priori knowledge? It is often a tautology. An example would be the word Bachelor. A bachelor is an unmarried man and we don’t have to go out in the world to confirm this with our senses because being an unmarried man is simply what it means to be a bachelor. With the word bachelor we simply let X=X.

But what Berkeley points out is that there is no such thing as a bachelor as bachelor in the world. That is, we can never find a bachelor that isn’t contingently a bachelor. There is nothing intrinsic to any given bachelor that makes him a bachelor. He doesn’t partake of any formal substance that makes him a bachelor, but rather he just happens to meet the definition. We speak of him as such a thing. Berkeley says the same thing about apples. There is no apple that is what it is to be an apple, but just objects that appear as apples by exhibiting certain qualities: (redness, roundness, sweetness, etc…)

This is the set-up to Berkeley’s argument for immaterialism. Matter is another tautological a priori category, but with matter we have we have a special case.

Matter is the substance in every object–there is, in fact, an infinite number of qualities that can be attached to matter, and strangely also none of the qualities that we associate with matter really stick to it. For example, if we say matter is solid then we are denying the material nature of steam. Matter, according to Berkeley, is an empty concept. If never appears to us, it’s an abstraction that doesn’t do any work for us. It is an empty concept.

Now, when my friend Jerry said to his student that there was only one true knowledge and that the only true knowledge was empirical knowledge he was opening up a can of worms, maggots maybe, that will slowly eating away at the corpse of the material world. My friend didn’t know what he was saying. Berkeley, on the other hand, saw full well what the implications of his immaterialism were, and so he had to find something to prop up the half eaten corpse. In a world without matter it simply couldn’t be the case that God was dead. Bishop Berkeley ended up grasping after God (another empty or meaningless word) to fill the void that his argument against matter had created.

Hegel’s Introduction walks the circle that emerges from this argument from Berkley.

In the introduction we start by doubting sense certainty–we turn to the question of how it is that we come to know the world. That is, Hegel starts us off turning away from the objects of perception and to perception itself because we want to know what the best way to know something might be before we start making claims about what is.

“There might be various kinds of knowledge, among which one might be better adapted for the attainment of our purpose –the wrong choice is possible.”

Or so it seems. However, we quickly see that this attainment of the right way of knowing is impossible. Hegel has us think of knowledge as an instrument first and then as a medium, and neither approach helps us. If knowledge is an instrument it will act upon the object of knowledge and change it, and if it is a medium then we are always looking at knowledge rather than the actual thing in itself.

In Hegel’s introduction we arrive at Berkeley’s position right at the start.

Berkeley quote–”When you conceive knowledge of real qualities you do withal conceive something which you cannot conceive?” Translation: “When you think of the real qualities you’ve experienced do you also think of something that you can’t experience?”

In Berkeley’s dialogue when Philonous asks Hylas the above question he asks it rhetorically. He’s pointing to the absurdity of the materialist position. However, Hegel might answer Berkeley’s question in the affirmative, and Hegel would do this because he takes knowledge as its own object. What he is pointing out, or one simple way to understand what he is pointing out, is how knowledge itself appears to require an ontological ground if it is to be taken as the truth. Berkeley has to turn to God to ground his theory of immaterialism. Perception is the ground, and in order to avoid solipsism and the incoherence that would come along with it Berkeley had to suggest that these perceptions aren’t ours but belong to God. But why is this a necessary?

Hegel answers this question when he talks about science coming on the scene.

“Science cannot simply reject a form of knowledge which is not true, and treat this as a common view of things, and then assure us that it itself is an entirely different kind of knowledge. It would declare its force and value to lie in its bare existence, but untrue knowledge appeals likewise to the fact that it is, and assures us that to it science is nothing.”

If we have no recourse to the thing in itself then any damned illusion (a dream, optical trick, religious story, or plain lie) would have the same claim to truth as science. Berkeley needs God if he’s going to hold onto truth, or so it seems, but Hegel goes on–and this is the tricky part. In fact, I’ll step away from Hegel and talk about PKD’s story the Electric Ant.

In PKD’s story an android comes to know that he is not a real boy and attempts to free himself from his programming. He consults his computer and asks for instructions on tracking down the control mechanism inside him and the computer instructs him to open his chest and look for a punch card reader located above his artificial heart.

“This is BBB-307DR recontacting you in response to your query. The punch tape roll above your heart mechanism is not a programming turret, but is in fact a reality supply construct,” the computer tells the robot, and so the protagonist in PKD’s story is able to look at what it is that gives him reality or knowing, and he’s devastated by this because he realizes that everything he thinks he sees is really an image stored on a punch card.

“He thought, ‘If I control that, I control reality. My subjective reality…but that’s all there is. Objective reality is a synthetic construct, dealing with a hypothetical universalization of multitude of subjective realities.’” -PKD, the Electric Ant

We’ll see how this applies to Hegel and Berkeley. At this point in the Philip K Dick story we’ve arrived at Berkeley’s immaterialism and we think its solipsistic, after all those other subjectivities are synthetic and hypothetical, but, then we realize that the subjectivity of the robot is no more real than any of the others.

At the end of this PKD story, when the robot cuts the tape, the universe winks out. It’s a story told in the third person, so not just the robot’s subjective universe but the “true universe” beyond his perception evaporates…

Why should this be? Why should there be a third person perspective in a solipsistic story? Either there is a real world out there beyond our perception or the world is just perception

But Hegel says maybe not. In this introduction he doesn’t really say what is, he doesn’t claim that knowledge or perception is the basis of what is, nor does he explain how we might perceive the thing out there beyond knowledge. He just points out what happens when we take knowledge as its own object. We start to notice that this relationship between a subject and an object is built into the subject. Knowledge seems to require this split.

Hegel calls this realization despair. He also calls it a determinate nothing.

That is, on one side we have the magnetic tape (perception) and on the other side we have the world it produces. And the void, the nothingness, is create by this relationship. It is not that there is magnetic tape only because, after all, the magnetic tape appears in the subjective experience of the robot. And its not that there is no magnetic tape because, well there it is inside him.

Addendum on the Subject of The Thirteenth Floor:

Not a great film, but if watched against itself it is actually revealing. The movie provides a hint at the political implications of all Hegel’s consciousness stuff. It tells the story of a scientist who builds a reality simulation and then discovers that he is already in a reality simulation. He falls in love with a woman from the third level (the real). There are all sorts of interesting political metaphors in the movie. For instance, when the woman from the 3rd reality enters his simulation she takes over the consciousness of a checkout girl at the supermarket. Once she has a real consciousness she becomes rich and can stay in 4 stars hotels and play politics with major corporations.

The point is that the movie falls down when it reaches the 3rd level. Once the film reaches the real it fails. And I think the filmmakers ought to have read Hegel because if they had then they would’ve populated the third level with simulations who know that they are unreal rather than with yet another false paradise, or another beach beneath the street.