Nations on the Enterprise

Star Trek (Enterprise) isn't a show I had previoulsy thought of doing, but it is an example of a show that fared less sucesfully in a post 9/11 world. It did try a Battlestar Galactica 'end of world' act of babarism, but in particulaly Star Trek way (i.e. nothing too violent, at a time when Americans had become accustomed to death).

The logic of representation in Star Trek implies a kind of domination as well,
yet one marked by an increased abstraction. Representation involves a higher
level of mediation than the direct management of corporeality. In the
represntational world system, representation, like a virus and with little
regard for purity of form, dominates through colonization and conceals its
parasitic nature by asserting older forms of domination and replaying them over
and over, welding them together, creating fantastic, contradictory hybrids.
Captain Kirk's bravado, then, his aforementioned regression, might be taken,
then, as a feature of the concealing logic of representationalism itself: a
re-telling, an attempt to hold what is decayed and gone--a sense of a unified
nation in America in the 1960s-- and the barbarism that presupposes it in the
face of the internationalizing, levelling impulse of the universal broadcast.
The logic of representation invites us to substitute 'thought-
transmissions' or representations for concrete existence. In practical terms,
the moment at which we accept 'thought-transmissions' in the form of the
televisual is the moment at which identity as such-- both national and
individual--becomes unimportant and simply a moment in the unfolding of Western
representationalism/capitalism and the moment, therefore, in which nationalism
becomes merely an anachronism and therfore itself a fiction.

- Concerning Star Treks ideas of no nations, and no racial differences, and whether that by watching we invariably accept these ideas.

-harry

[link:http://cinemaspace.berkeley.edu/Papers/Walden/walden.toc.html]