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labingiOh world, I was going to embed this excellent video for y'all, but between my watching it and looking it up just now, it apparently got tossed (is that still a term?) from YouTube for copyright infringement, which is absurd: it's commentary; it's protected. Anyway, I can only link to her post about the dispute.
This is the comment I made on Jessie’s (now effectively censored) video. (Yeah, I bombed YouTube with a whole essay. I know Jessie has better things to do than read it, but I addressed it to her anyway, as it’s a response to her arguments and observations.)
The Comment
This video is amazing: research, argument, production, emotional range are all fantastic, and I think you correctly diagnose the cowardice of season 2 of SNW. Your video clarified for me why I found this season “meh.” I’ll offer a somewhat different take below, and please know that while I may not always agree with every point you make, I always respect and admire your work. (tl;dr: allegory is a limited and insufficient tool.)
I think our current SF&F publishing ecosystem relies too much on allegory. As a reader, I fall on the Tolkien side of applicability vs. allegory debate (I prefer applicability). Star Trek gets an exception from me because, as you explained, it has always been allegorical; that’s part of what it does. But it has been only part of what it does.
I agree with a lot of your points about how certain episodes could have been more courageous with a sharper allegorical connection to our present situations. But I want to be careful about implying that Star Trek is only doing positive social work when it’s allegorical. (You didn’t say that, but I felt the video sometimes implied it by its emphasis on shortcomings in allegory.)
There are other ways SF&F can work to improve our world besides allegory, and Star Trek has used several. The most obvious is future speculation. For example, when Star Trek tells us the Federation no longer uses money, that’s not an allegory for something in our present world; that’s an aspiration for the future.
Another is imagining difference, not in the sense of “these two different races have a conflict, just like in our world,” but in the sense of “this is different from anything we’ve seen on Earth; it is a strange new world,” like the Vulcans’ culture of logic. Imagining difference is socially valuable for a couple of reasons: 1) it exercises our ability to perceive and be open to new things, and 2) by way of contrast, it helps us reflect on why we are the way we are. It helps us understand ourselves.
Allegory has good uses, but it also has limitations. One limitation is that it tends toward ethnocentrism. An allegory functions by having A (ex. those non-binary aliens in TNG) represent B (ex. gay people), and it only works if a large proportion of the audience knows B well enough to understand the allegory. That means B has to come out of the audience’s cultural experience (ex. an understanding of homophobia in the 1980s United States). Therefore, allegory usually takes the form of us looking back at our own cultural concepts. In centering the audience’s culture, it necessarily decenters (or erases) exploration of concepts we don’t already understand fairly well (ex. other cultures’).
Within your video, I felt a bit of that erasure in the commentary on Spock as an allegory for being biracial. To be clear, that’s a valid reading; any reading that gives value to a text for a reader is valid; it’s just not the sum total. Spock has always represented biracial experience, but in-universe, he isn’t biracial; he’s bi-species, and that’s not equivalent. Your contributor (sorry, I didn’t catch their name) talked about the episode “Charades” falling into DNA determinism, to which I enthusiastically say yes! It was horribly ignorant about how acculturation works. But in a broader sense, Spock’s bi-species status does carry biological difference in ways being a biracial human does not.
We know different races of humans have no overall biological (DNA) difference; they differ in superficial appearance, susceptibility to some diseases, etc., not in emotional makeup, intelligence, or anything that makes us human. But Vulcans and humans do differ: in life expectancy, physical strength, emotional response (Vulcans having a stronger one), and sexual biology, for example.
So if an exploration of Spock-as-human said that only cultural difference matters (ex. how others treat him, how he sees himself) because that matches a biracial allegory, it would do so at the cost of erasing Vulcan-human biological differences. Is that a problem, beyond conserving canon? I would argue yes, because it erases the “imagine difference” dimension of storytelling, which is socially useful in itself. Spock can be a partial racial allegory, but not a perfect one, not while being Spock.
Storytelling strategies that explore speculative futures and imagine new cultures, species, etc. help us to move outside the confines of our own cultural assumptions. Fredric Jameson said something like the real work of utopian writing is not to determine what an ideal society would be but to expose the ideological blinders of our own (not just the rightwing, but all of us). I agree that shining light on the problems in our society by depicting problems in the Federation is useful work and profoundly Star Trekkian. Yet one thing I have missed from new Trek is genuine speculation, the kind that imagines a society that meets everyone’s needs without money, the kind that imagines “progress/discovery” arising from joy in learning about the universe, not from greed or political power plays. TOS did those things. I’m not wholly sure what new Trek has added beyond much improved representation—which is hugely important but not the entirety of human endeavor.
You mentioned, rightly, that Star Trek in its roots is a utopian-ish extrapolation of the United States. There’s so much to unpack there! So many interesting stories to be told that engage with that fundamental Western/anthropocentric/scientistic/progressionist/competitive/etc. ideology, what its strengths and limits are and how it might evolve by learning from other cultures. But that’s not the realm of allegory; it’s the realm of imagination, of speculation.
From that orientation, I want to tentatively end on Omelas. The idea of staying and fighting is important and necessary. In addition to often being the most moral choice, it is also increasingly inevitable: we have literally nowhere to walk away from climate apocalypse, which is a social justice, racial, power, etc. issue. But I think there are reasons that Le Guin’s original story ends with walking away. One is undoubtedly her privilege: to be able to walk away is a privileged position. But I suspect another is her grounding in anthropology, which always saw cultures as multiple. Cultures are very hard to change from the inside, and while we often need to do that work, in some cases, the most powerful way to do it may not be through direct opposition but through building something else, somewhere else (physically, mentally), not by overthrowing but by multiplying. Not always. But sometimes. As I’m often reminded in my studies of degrowth economics, we need both: the big structural repair we have to wrest from power and the thousand tiny ways we build new ways of living outside those power structures. The latter, especially, requires imagination; it requires speculation about truly new worlds.
I share your concern that SNW season 2 shows the fingerprints of executives wanting to steer clear of “controversy” by robbing Star Trek of much of its progressive politics. I find the abrupt cancellation of Discovery appalling. That does smack of backlash, as does the disappearance of Prodigy. Thank you for shining a spotlight on this disturbing movement.
Further Thought I Didn’t Include in the Original Comment
(I didn’t post this on YouTube, so I won’t directly address Jessie.)
The video makes some references to the system needing to fit around the individual, not the individual around the system. In broad strokes, I agree, but I’d also note that this kind of formulation comes out of a highly individualistic ideology (which is not surprising when the speaker is a person from the most individualistic society on Earth: the USA).
It’s entirely legitimate to ask how much should the system conform to the individual and vice versa? We’d probably all agree there should be some of both. Ex. As students, we generally sit at desks and raise hands if we wish to speak: that’s conforming to a system we didn’t invent. And while it can be good to shake that up sometimes, generally it’s helpful to have those common expectations. In other words, having to reinvent all school conventions to fit each individual’s particular preferences for each class would exhausting and unworkable.
Making a highly individualistic statement is not necessarily bad. But the fact that it is pronounced as a universal moral truth suggests to me a lack of awareness of its culturally construction and the questions it raises. And that (seeming) lack of awareness—in anyone, in any context—is concerning to me, because it suggests a lack of perspective on one’s own ideological positioning.
And that lack of awareness is a hazard, I’d argue, of seeing speculative storytelling as primary allegorical. Reading it can become an exercise in cracking how the code relates to our own experiences and culture rather than projecting outside our own experiences and culture to learn about what other possibilities exist, thereby being better placed to perceive and counter our own biases.
This is the comment I made on Jessie’s (now effectively censored) video. (Yeah, I bombed YouTube with a whole essay. I know Jessie has better things to do than read it, but I addressed it to her anyway, as it’s a response to her arguments and observations.)
The Comment
This video is amazing: research, argument, production, emotional range are all fantastic, and I think you correctly diagnose the cowardice of season 2 of SNW. Your video clarified for me why I found this season “meh.” I’ll offer a somewhat different take below, and please know that while I may not always agree with every point you make, I always respect and admire your work. (tl;dr: allegory is a limited and insufficient tool.)
I think our current SF&F publishing ecosystem relies too much on allegory. As a reader, I fall on the Tolkien side of applicability vs. allegory debate (I prefer applicability). Star Trek gets an exception from me because, as you explained, it has always been allegorical; that’s part of what it does. But it has been only part of what it does.
I agree with a lot of your points about how certain episodes could have been more courageous with a sharper allegorical connection to our present situations. But I want to be careful about implying that Star Trek is only doing positive social work when it’s allegorical. (You didn’t say that, but I felt the video sometimes implied it by its emphasis on shortcomings in allegory.)
There are other ways SF&F can work to improve our world besides allegory, and Star Trek has used several. The most obvious is future speculation. For example, when Star Trek tells us the Federation no longer uses money, that’s not an allegory for something in our present world; that’s an aspiration for the future.
Another is imagining difference, not in the sense of “these two different races have a conflict, just like in our world,” but in the sense of “this is different from anything we’ve seen on Earth; it is a strange new world,” like the Vulcans’ culture of logic. Imagining difference is socially valuable for a couple of reasons: 1) it exercises our ability to perceive and be open to new things, and 2) by way of contrast, it helps us reflect on why we are the way we are. It helps us understand ourselves.
Allegory has good uses, but it also has limitations. One limitation is that it tends toward ethnocentrism. An allegory functions by having A (ex. those non-binary aliens in TNG) represent B (ex. gay people), and it only works if a large proportion of the audience knows B well enough to understand the allegory. That means B has to come out of the audience’s cultural experience (ex. an understanding of homophobia in the 1980s United States). Therefore, allegory usually takes the form of us looking back at our own cultural concepts. In centering the audience’s culture, it necessarily decenters (or erases) exploration of concepts we don’t already understand fairly well (ex. other cultures’).
Within your video, I felt a bit of that erasure in the commentary on Spock as an allegory for being biracial. To be clear, that’s a valid reading; any reading that gives value to a text for a reader is valid; it’s just not the sum total. Spock has always represented biracial experience, but in-universe, he isn’t biracial; he’s bi-species, and that’s not equivalent. Your contributor (sorry, I didn’t catch their name) talked about the episode “Charades” falling into DNA determinism, to which I enthusiastically say yes! It was horribly ignorant about how acculturation works. But in a broader sense, Spock’s bi-species status does carry biological difference in ways being a biracial human does not.
We know different races of humans have no overall biological (DNA) difference; they differ in superficial appearance, susceptibility to some diseases, etc., not in emotional makeup, intelligence, or anything that makes us human. But Vulcans and humans do differ: in life expectancy, physical strength, emotional response (Vulcans having a stronger one), and sexual biology, for example.
So if an exploration of Spock-as-human said that only cultural difference matters (ex. how others treat him, how he sees himself) because that matches a biracial allegory, it would do so at the cost of erasing Vulcan-human biological differences. Is that a problem, beyond conserving canon? I would argue yes, because it erases the “imagine difference” dimension of storytelling, which is socially useful in itself. Spock can be a partial racial allegory, but not a perfect one, not while being Spock.
Storytelling strategies that explore speculative futures and imagine new cultures, species, etc. help us to move outside the confines of our own cultural assumptions. Fredric Jameson said something like the real work of utopian writing is not to determine what an ideal society would be but to expose the ideological blinders of our own (not just the rightwing, but all of us). I agree that shining light on the problems in our society by depicting problems in the Federation is useful work and profoundly Star Trekkian. Yet one thing I have missed from new Trek is genuine speculation, the kind that imagines a society that meets everyone’s needs without money, the kind that imagines “progress/discovery” arising from joy in learning about the universe, not from greed or political power plays. TOS did those things. I’m not wholly sure what new Trek has added beyond much improved representation—which is hugely important but not the entirety of human endeavor.
You mentioned, rightly, that Star Trek in its roots is a utopian-ish extrapolation of the United States. There’s so much to unpack there! So many interesting stories to be told that engage with that fundamental Western/anthropocentric/scientistic/progressionist/competitive/etc. ideology, what its strengths and limits are and how it might evolve by learning from other cultures. But that’s not the realm of allegory; it’s the realm of imagination, of speculation.
From that orientation, I want to tentatively end on Omelas. The idea of staying and fighting is important and necessary. In addition to often being the most moral choice, it is also increasingly inevitable: we have literally nowhere to walk away from climate apocalypse, which is a social justice, racial, power, etc. issue. But I think there are reasons that Le Guin’s original story ends with walking away. One is undoubtedly her privilege: to be able to walk away is a privileged position. But I suspect another is her grounding in anthropology, which always saw cultures as multiple. Cultures are very hard to change from the inside, and while we often need to do that work, in some cases, the most powerful way to do it may not be through direct opposition but through building something else, somewhere else (physically, mentally), not by overthrowing but by multiplying. Not always. But sometimes. As I’m often reminded in my studies of degrowth economics, we need both: the big structural repair we have to wrest from power and the thousand tiny ways we build new ways of living outside those power structures. The latter, especially, requires imagination; it requires speculation about truly new worlds.
I share your concern that SNW season 2 shows the fingerprints of executives wanting to steer clear of “controversy” by robbing Star Trek of much of its progressive politics. I find the abrupt cancellation of Discovery appalling. That does smack of backlash, as does the disappearance of Prodigy. Thank you for shining a spotlight on this disturbing movement.
Further Thought I Didn’t Include in the Original Comment
(I didn’t post this on YouTube, so I won’t directly address Jessie.)
The video makes some references to the system needing to fit around the individual, not the individual around the system. In broad strokes, I agree, but I’d also note that this kind of formulation comes out of a highly individualistic ideology (which is not surprising when the speaker is a person from the most individualistic society on Earth: the USA).
It’s entirely legitimate to ask how much should the system conform to the individual and vice versa? We’d probably all agree there should be some of both. Ex. As students, we generally sit at desks and raise hands if we wish to speak: that’s conforming to a system we didn’t invent. And while it can be good to shake that up sometimes, generally it’s helpful to have those common expectations. In other words, having to reinvent all school conventions to fit each individual’s particular preferences for each class would exhausting and unworkable.
Making a highly individualistic statement is not necessarily bad. But the fact that it is pronounced as a universal moral truth suggests to me a lack of awareness of its culturally construction and the questions it raises. And that (seeming) lack of awareness—in anyone, in any context—is concerning to me, because it suggests a lack of perspective on one’s own ideological positioning.
And that lack of awareness is a hazard, I’d argue, of seeing speculative storytelling as primary allegorical. Reading it can become an exercise in cracking how the code relates to our own experiences and culture rather than projecting outside our own experiences and culture to learn about what other possibilities exist, thereby being better placed to perceive and counter our own biases.
