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Subject: <nettime> NASA / TREK From: McKenzie Wark <mwark@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au> Date: 26 Feb 1998 00:40:27 +0100 * * * * * Sender: owner-nettime-l@basis.Desk.nl Precedence: bulk __________________________________________ "We no longer have roots, we have aerials." http://www.mcs.mq.edu.au/~mwark -- McKenzie Wark Not in front of the Klingons McKenzie Wark Wednesday, 23 July 1997 Seeing that plucky little Sojourner in the foreground of those sublime pictures from Mars reminds me of just how exciting this whole space exploration thing can be -- and how much its connected in my mind with images from television. When Armstrong made his "small step for a man, a great step for mankind" on the surface of the moon, I was about 8 years old. I watched it on TV in a hospital ward. While Armstrong bounded across the surface of the moon, I was immobilised with both legs in plaster. Even the most far flung images can be deeply personal. Constance Penley's new book NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America (Verso) explores this strange conjunction of outer space and inner life, hi tech science and pop culture, by looking at the connections between NASA and the StarTrek TV show in the American imagination. Penley is best known for her pioneering work in feminist screen theory. This new book also has a Freudian basis, in that Penley believes in "carrying out the search for what really happened while acknowledging the work of fantasy." While the recent Mars mission boosted NASA's stocks among American policy makers, its still the case that in Washington, NASA stands for Never A Straight Answer. The space shuttle program in particular is plagued by claims of bureaucratic waste and bill padding by the aerospace contractors who built it. The delays and cost overruns involved in the joint projects with the Russians and the recent accident on the MIR space station don't help much, either. Penley argues that in its attempts to touch down in American popular culture, NASA has often been its own worst enemy. Popular movies like The Right Stuff and Apollo 13, while celebrating the macho heroics of astronauts, raise questions about the pop politics of space that NASA cannot ignore. Penley presents herself as a fan of NASA. Growing up in Florida, her father would drive through the early hours of the morning to show his kids the rocket launches on the cape. "There is no better critic than a fan," she writes. "Science is popular in America," and hence the need for research on the popular culture of science. The object under investigation in this book what Penley calls NASA/TREK, "a collectively elaborated story that weaves together science and science fiction to help write, think, and launch us into space." While it may at first sight seem strange to bracket these things together, consider the evidence: A female astronaut who commences her tranmissions from the shuttle with Lieutenant Uhura's famous line from StarTrek, "hailing frequencies open." Or, the Pentagon exhorting legislators to "set your weapons to stun" to get funding for "non-lethal" firepower. Or NASA giving in to a huge letter writing campaign from Tek fans and naming the first shuttle the Enterprise. And yet NASA doesn't always get it right, and sometimes fails to work as a utopian vision of social and technical engineering. Penley's key example was the selection of Christa McAuliffe to fly on the Challenger space shuttle. NASA could have had one of the top school teachers in America, even some with Phds in technical fields, but instead they chose McAuliffe. She "was selected for her representative mediocrity and knew it." NASA promoted McAuliffe to the public as its idea of a woman in space, in spite of the fact that Judith Resnick, an electrical engineer with mission critical tasks to perform, was also aboard Challenger. What Penley finds galling is the way the most conventional domestic stereotypes were put in orbit. Stereotypes so obvious that even the TV show The Simpsons turned it into a joke. The fallout from the Challenger disaster was a setback for NASA. Penley provides a few interesting clues as to how traumatic this moment was for American culture. Arlington National Cemetery, where America's "unknown soldiers" lie buried, is the last resting place for the unidentified remains of the astronauts. The guides, she says, are rather coy about exactly what is buried there. Then there's the Building Blaster kits marketed by one toy company. Kids can work through the trauma of the event by building the shuttle, blowing it up -- and putting it back together again. Like NASA, the original StarTrek TV show was comfortable with a few prominent women, but didn't want to address their structural absence. Like NASA, it was built around the American myth of the frontier. "To boldly go where no man has gone before", as it said in every episode, in what must be the world's most famous split infinitive. StarTrek is "an uncanny mixture of suburbia and space travel". The bridge of the Enterprise looks remarkably like a family living room, with all the seating facing the TV. Its impossible to watch the show now without thinking of the fantasy of Kennedy era optimism that it so brilliantly articulated. The peaceful use of technology, the global outlook, the "Prime Directive" of not interfering in developing cultures -- all these features are Kennedy legacies. But so too are the military overtones and fantasies of unlimited American power. There's a rare moment of irony in one of the Trek movies, where Captain Kirk makes an emotional gesture towards Spock, and Spock restrains him by saying No sir, not in front of the Klingons." Its one of the rare details upon which a particular subculture within the broad church of StarTrek fans build their own curious interpretation of the series -- on premised on an underlying homosexual relationship between the Captain and the First Officer. StarTrek has one of the most dedicated and elaborate fan cultures of any pop culture artefact. Another example of how deeply strange Trek stuff gets is the Klingon Language institute. There are folks out there who can actually speak this totally artificial language, created for the series, and elaborated since by professional linguists. There is even a translation of Romeo and Juliet. The 'slash' fans, as they are known, invent their own mix of romance, porn and science fiction. And strangely enough, most slash fans are heterosexual women. Penley uses the slash fans as an exemplars of the creative work that popular culture performs, rereading and rewriting mainstream media artefacts. Over the 25 years of its existence, slash fandom has created a whole other universe of characters and stories, based on their creator's shared experience of StarTrek. The literary critics Leslie Fiedler once famously claimed that Mark Twain's Huck and Jim were as "queer as three dollar bills". So perhaps there's a precedent for this homoerotic reading of heroic American narrative. What's curious is why women would find it interesting to read StarTrek along those lines. Penley sees it as part of a "project of retooling masculinity itself." Spock and Kirk have evolved beyond the men of this world and these times. Penley also thinks that the fans use the gay male couple as an image of sexual and professional equality. The slash women are proud of having created a space where women can reimagine and recreate images from pop culture. Penley also shows that they are active in rethinking the technology of popular culture. There are detailed discussions about what printing and video dubbing techniques to use, and how to deploy such processes without creating an impossible threshold for new writers and video makers to join the culture as creators as well as consumers. The slashers rewrite Startrek, and so Penley slashes NASA. She rewrites its project as she imagines it should be, as part of an American tradition of utopian experiments using technology to reinvent the possibities of the social. As such, she sees cultural studies as performing, in a more knowing way, the same process of creative imagining that popular culture itself performs whenever people seize hold of it as a technology for making their own kinds of space. Penley and I were both in London for a conference at the Institute of Contemporary Art when Mars mission started sending back those pictures, so I was able to ask her what she thought they meant for the future of NASA. She remarked that its success with the public seemed to contradict the old NASA assumption that only 'manned' missions could be popular. That the NASA web site took one hundred million hits the week after the first pictures went up should put that old saw to rest. The Mars mission is the work mostly of university based engineers, rather than aerospace contractors. In part at least its a return to a certain creative engineering tradition. What remains unresolved is NASA's troubled relationship to the dream of space as the final frontier for social as well as technical change. McKenzie Wark is the author of the forthcomg book The Virtual Republic: Australia's Culture Wars of the 1990s, to be published in October by Allen & Unwin. nnnn - # distributed via :::recode::: no commercial use without permission # :::recode::: a mailing list for digital interrogation. # more info: majordomo@autonomous.org & "info recode" in the msg body # URL: http://systemx.autonomous.org/recode/ # contact: owner-recode@autonomous.org --- # distributed via nettime-l : no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a closed moderated mailinglist for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@icf.de and "info nettime" in the msg body # URL: http://www.desk.nl/~nettime/ contact: nettime-owner@icf.de