Diplomacy in Star Trek Iver B

‘Grab a Phaser, Ambassador’: Diplomacy in Star Trek Iver B. Neumann The perfect Star Trek script begins with a great science fiction concept that allows you to tell an exciting adventure, while at the same time serving as a metaphor for contemporary humanity.1 Introduction: Representations of Diplomacy In the fourth Star Trek show, the starship Voyager finds itself stranded in an uncharted quadrant of the galaxy. The pilot details how they make new friends and new enemies immediately upon arrival. In a later episode, Captain Kathryn Janeway has an intimate conversation with one of these new friends, the Talaxian Neelix. The conversation ends with her making him the ship’s ambassador to the worlds that they are about to meet on their journey home to Earth. Immediately afterwards, they are hit by gunfire, and Janeway instructs Neelix with the curt command: ‘Grab a phaser, ambassador’. There is a time for diplomacy, and a time for war. Following some preliminary remarks about the place of second-order phenomena in the study of International Relations (IR), this article discusses the relationship between representation of Star Trek diplomacy, on the one hand, and American diplomacy, on the other. If the world does not present itself to us directly, but can only be grasped through its re-presentations, then they are constitutive of our social worlds. And if the work of social scientists is to investigate social worlds so that we can understand them better, then the starting point must be those re-presentations, which are constitutive of the social. A crucial question becomes which re-presentations to investigate. The division of labour inside the social sciences has established a situation where lines of inquiry have formed as a result of habit. Political scientists look at re-presentations of bargaining partners, anthropologists look at re-presentations of everyday life, A previous version of this article was read at the annual ISA conference, Chicago, 20-24 February 2001. I thank Halvard Leira, Dan Nexon, Patrick T. Jackson, Roberta E. Pearson, Cindy Weber, Jutta Weldes and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments. 1. Brannon Braga quoted in Jeff Greenwald, ‘Write for Star Trek’, Wired Archive 1996 [www. wired.com/wired/ archive/4.01/ trek.script] (1 December 2001). © Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2001. ISSN 0305-8298. Vol. 30, No. 3, pp. 603-624 603 Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at The University of Edinburgh on June 10, 2016 Millennium geographers look at re-presentations of space, etc. A common premise for these inquiries seems to be that, as representations of the physical world, they are ipso facto legitimate objects of social inquiry, or first-order representations. However, if social worlds are made up of re-presentations, there is no inherent reason why first order ones should be more constitutive than others.2 Indeed, to a number of the people who actually inhabit and make up those worlds, the distinction would not make any sense in the first place. In the philosophy of the social sciences, a famous debate turned on exactly this issue. The topic happened to be witchcraft, and the empirical issue (or, for some of the participants, the lack thereof) was whether witches existed or not. Being an epistemological debate rather than an ontological one, the key question was how to study societies where representations of witches and their purported actions played a key role in constituting the social matrix. Peter Winch, who opened the debate, held that the way to go about it was to defer the ontological question of whether witches existed or not as external to the case at hand, which was to understand the social.3 If representations of witches played a key role in constituting social life, then those representations should be among the starting points of any social inquiry into this particular social world. Furthermore, the fact that the entities in question happen to be the objects of religious fervour is no coincidence. The study of religion has historically been considered to be scientific, and it is definitely also a study of second-order phenomena. Here is a historical precedence, which lends some legitimacy to the study of other second-order phenomena which define social worlds as well. It seems to me that this insight transcends its subject matter. It has a bearing on our study of all social worlds. In the social settings where most International Relationists work, witches are not amongst the key topics. There does, however, exist a set of second-order phenomena, the consumption and discussion of which takes up an enormous amount of time and energy. These phenomena are reality- constituting, they are part of what Michel Foucault refers to as the archive, that is, the forms, mnemonics and techniques which make saying, writing and storing stuff possible. Indeed, the forms mentioned by Foucault by way of example are ritual recital, pedagogics, festivals, public performance and ‘entertainment’.4 Not least due to the force lent to it by the amount of time, money and other resources which audiences bring to their consumption, this is a part of the archive, which is relevant to how the world we study as IR specialists is re-produced, but it is also one which has been rarely scrutinised. Neither does there exist an obvious extant literature to 2. One indication of an ensuing change is a newly published geopolitical reader, which includes a study of second-order representations, see Andrew Kirby, ‘The Construction of Geopolitical Images: The World According to Biggles (and Other Fictional Characters)’, in Geopolitical Traditions: A Century of Geopolitical Thought, eds. Klaus Dodds and David Atkinson (London: Routledge, 2000). 3. Peter Winch, The Idea of a Social Science and Its Relation to Philosophy (London: Routlegdge, 1990). 4. Michel Foucault, ‘Réponse à une question’, in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. I, 1954-1969 (Paris: Gallimard, [1968] 1994), 682-83. 604 Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at The University of Edinburgh on June 10, 2016 ‘Grab a Phaser, Ambassador’ turn to outside of IR. ‘Entertainment’ is part of the realm of what non- anthropologists refer to as ‘culture’. Over the last fifteen years or so, culture returned to IR as a key concern. However, most of the resulting studies maintain the prejudice of investigating culture as it pertains to representations of first-order phenomena. The most notable exception is the work of Michael Shapiro. He makes a point similar to the one I am trying to make here in the context of which textual genres we are supposed to study: Part of what must be rejected is that aspect of the terrain predicated on a radical distinction between what is thought of as fictional and scientific genres of writing. In the history of thought the distinction has been supported by the notion that the fictional text, e.g., the story, play, or novel, manufactures its own objects and events in acts of imagination, while the epistemologically respectable genres, such as the scientific text, have ‘real’ objects and events which provide a warrant for the knowledge-value of those of the text’s statements purporting to be about the objects and events.5 Among the ‘fictional and scientific genres of writing’, the most popular are, by definition, those which are classified as popular culture, and amongst these ‘science fiction’ holds a central place. Within this genre, for example, we find the largest cash cow of American network TV, Star Trek. Inasmuch as earnings come from commercials and their price of commercials is determined by viewer ratings, Star Trek is probably the most widely watched programme on American television. In as much as American television sets the global standard for what ‘good television’ is and indeed exports programmes all over the world, these representations play a role in constituting countless social worlds.6 When one adds that the interaction between different words is one of the key subjects of the original series and its three subsequent sister series, as well as of the ten feature films, animated series, novels, merchandise etc. etc., it is small wonder that Star 5. Michael J. Shapiro, The Politics of Representation: Writing Practices in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 7. 6. Surprisingly, this obvious point seems to be lost on a number of film students. One example, which is particularly striking reads as follows: ‘[r]ecently, a Norwegian exchange student attempted to explain to me her bewilderment regarding Star Trek: The Next Generation’s popularity in theUS. Norwegians, she claimed, generally find the television series ‘stupid’. Although she struggled to articulate exactly why she reached this conclusion, one argument she was able to express concerned the entire science fiction motif of TNG: ‘starships’ exploring the universe and technology eliminating basic human needs are conceptually as alien to her rural, pastoral native culture as a Cardassian might be to an Earth-bound human’. Steven F. Collins, ‘Trilateralism and Hegemony in Star Trek: The Next Generation’, in Enterprise Zones: Critical Positions on Star Trek, eds. Taylor Harrison, Sarah Pojansky, Kent A. Ono and Elyce Rae Helford (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 137. In order to reach more awareness of the role played by one’s own unproblematised hegemonic gaze in framing one’s research, a bit of Earth travel and familiarisation with Galton’s problem would perhaps be called for. 605 Downloaded from mil.sagepub.com at The University of Edinburgh on June 10, 2016 Millennium Trek has been the topic of one of the few IR investigations of popular culture.7 It will also be the topic of this one. I made the point that extant studies of cultural artefacts often focus on the representations themselves, rather than on their role in constituting the social.

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