Lioi, Anthony. "Introduction: Reading Like a Thermian." Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture
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Lioi, Anthony. "Introduction: Reading Like a Thermian." Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016. 1–20. Environmental Cultures. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 26 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474219730.ch-001>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 26 September 2021, 00:43 UTC. Copyright © Anthony Lioi 2016. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. Introduction Reading Like a Thermian In all the sacred books, we should consider the eternal truths that are taught, the facts that are narrated, the future events that are predicted, and the precepts or counsels that are given. In the case of a narrative of events, the question arises as to whether everything must be taken according to the figurative sense only, or whether it must be expounded and defended also as a faithful record of what happened. No Christian will dare say that the narrative must not be taken in a figurative sense. —Augustine of Hippo, The Literal Meaning of Genesis Anthony, you’re such a nice guy, too bad your head is full of junk. —a professor in graduate school, to the author By Grabthar’s Hammer, by the suns of Worvan, you shall be avenged! —Dr. Lazarus to dying space nerd Quellik, in Galaxy Quest In the 1999 film Galaxy Quest, a group of television actors—survivors of a thinly veiled version of Star Trek—meets a cadre of fans that takes science fiction very seriously. Dressed in silver spandex, sporting identical bowl-cuts, the same earnest expression on their faces, the fans approach Jason Nesmith, the William Shatner of the tale, to beg his help in dealing with an interstellar warlord. Though the fans actually are aliens from another planet, they have appeared at a Galaxy Quest convention, where everyone dresses as an alien, and the Thermians, as they are called, blend right in. Though Nesmith dismisses them at first, he and his crew discover that the Thermians are not faking it. Having studied the show after errant radio waves reached their planet, the Thermians have built a faster-than- light ship, transporter technology, and an entire civilization based on Galaxy 2 Nerd Ecology Quest. As Mathesar, the Thermian leader, explains: “All you see around you has been taken from the lessons garnered from the Historical Documents,” revealing the central gag of the film. The Thermians have misread a television show with mediocre production values as a chronicle of actual events. The plot devolves from the ironic consequences of this mistake, but the fictional nature of the show does not detract from its ability to shape a civilization. In Mathezar’s words, the tale of the crew’s “courage and teamwork and friendship through adversity” saves the Thermians and their actor friends from themselves. The charm ofGalaxy Quest lies in its allegory of the audience, both inside and outside the film. The Thermians stand for Star Trek fans who invest enormous amounts of intellectual, emotional, and material effort in inhabiting the world of the show, so much so that fan culture becomes a subcreation, a counterculture. This phenomenon has been described by anthropologists and new media scholars at length, and there will be no attempt to duplicate it here (Jenkins 2006; Jenkins et al. 2013). Instead, I focus on the Thermian gambit, which illuminates the “relevant conundrum” of the reader who takes popular culture unironically as a way of thinking about modernity, social justice, and the nature of the good life. By mistaking fiction for documentary, the Thermians make a mistake that nearly kills them. Then, they discover a greater fact, that the show can be figuratively true, a storehouse of questions, values, heuristics, visions, and ethics. This is what scholars mean when we call such stories myths: not false accounts of natural phenomena or misrepresentations of reality, but narratives that figure a culture’s ideals and its methods for dealing with the most important existential problems. Since classical antiquity, a school of thought called euhemerism has interpreted myths as historical material transformed into story for the sake of memory. While there are, no doubt, important ways of understanding Galaxy Quest as memory, it is not a memory of the past, but a memory of a better future, an instrument for making that future real. The utopian projects of popular culture need to be treated with respect. Though countless modern stories, from Peter Pan to Beetlejuice, emphasize the power of belief in making a story real, it is not that the narrative otherworld takes the place of the primary world, but that readerly investment is an instrument of self-transformation. If wielded communally, it becomes an instrument of environmental transformation as well. This strategy of inhabitation as a method of transformation is precisely Reading Like a Thermian 3 what I mean by reading like a Thermian, and Nerd Ecology depends on it as a foundational premise. At this point, one might reasonably ask, after Dr. Lazarus, the ersatz Mr. Spock: By Grabthar’s Hammer, why all the fuss? Popular culture has received a good deal of attention from the social sciences, philosophy, cultural studies, and media studies. What is at stake in these efforts, however, is not the meaning of pop culture, but the significance of human behavior surrounding that meaning. Ethnographies of fandom tend to take such an approach. (When fans want to believe the myth, when Australians claim to be Jedi, the academy does not know what to say.) Sociology engages fan cultures because fan behavior tells us something important about the nature of social groups and the production of meaning. Likewise, cultural studies of pop culture reveal important truths about the construction of gender, class, and race in contemporary society. Academics also use pop culture to communicate issues in their own disciplines to a wider audience. Open Court’s Pop Culture and Philosophy series examines The Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, South Park, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and other artifacts of pop culture in order to introduce problems in philosophy itself. The object of study provides exempla that teach us about the Black Monoliths, such as Kant, Hegel, and Aristotle. While there is much to recommend these approaches, they remain instrumentalist, treating pop culture as a means to an end. (Studies of Buffy the Vampire Slayer tend to be the exception to this rule—more on this in Chapter 5.) If my approach here betrays a vital interest in results—what pop culture allows us to understand and to do—that interest is embedded in the art itself, which, in the case of Star Trek, has always believed that styrofoam rocks and bad special effects are a gateway to eternal verities. This is the crux of the matter, the place where the ridiculous fosters the sublime. Opponents of popular culture as a kind of thinking have objected to the quality of the material itself. They deny the possibility that cheap materials are capable of shouldering the heavy burdens of meaning. Like theologians debating the capacity of the elements to mediate divine grace, such critics dispute the claim that popular matter fuels stellar results. To use the formal language of philosophy, they approach popular culture with a hermeneutics of suspicion, an a priori distrust in its substance. If one wishes to apply a hermeneutics of trust—to read like a Thermian—one must first recognize the objections to such a method. 4 Nerd Ecology Debates about the value of vernacular culture date at least as far back as Dante’s treatise De vulgari eloquentia, in which the author of a Comedy, later called divine, was obliged to argue that an Italian possessed powers equal to spiritual epic. The ambition of the Comedy was to fashion a peer of Vergil’s Aeneid, which was an attempt to fashion a peer of Homer’s Iliad. Six centuries after Dante, the British poet Matthew Arnold wrote Culture & Anarchy to support the idea that literature in English could produce “sweetness and light,” reason and insight, in contemporary readers (42). In the twentieth century, the argument about popular materials took an economic turn, as Marxist critics such as Walter Benjamin, Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer warned that “mass culture” was becoming a tool of fascist propaganda. These arguments are storied, and cannot be rendered here in detail. However, sociologist Herbert Gans summarizes them as four “negatives” of popular culture: 1. The negative character of popular culture creation. Popular culture is undesirable because, unlike high culture, it is mass-produced by profit- minded entrepreneurs solely for the gratification of the paying audience. 2. The negative effects on high culture. Popular culture borrows from high culture, thus debasing it, and also lures away many potential creators of high culture, this depleting its reservoir of talent. 3. The negative effects on the popular culture audience. The consumption of popular culture content at best produces spurious gratifications, and at worst is emotionally harmful to the audience. 4. The negative effects on the society. The wide distribution of popular culture not only reduces the level of cultural quality—or civilization— of the society, but also encourages totalitarianism by creating a passive audience peculiarly responsive to the techniques of mass persuasion used by demogogues bent on dictatorship. (Gans 29) These objections are not easily dismissed. The first objection, about the profit motive, is repeated with the advent of the summer blockbuster at the movies. With every mass shooting in a schoolyard comes the fear that violent media produce violent behavior in viewers too young, undisciplined, or unsophisticated to resist the lure of imitation.