The next time that a starship Enterprise Captain is involuntarily whisked away from the bridge to join a counterpart spaceship commander in a pragmatically dangerous situation on a desolate planet is in The Next Generation episode Darmok (where the problem of linguistic communication also uncannily plays a major role). Captain Picard is forcibly beamed down by the Tamarians, along with their Captain Dathon, played by Paul Winfield, to the uninhabited class-M planet El-Adrel Four. The Children of Tama from the planet Shantil Three are a peaceful yet enigmatic alien race with whom Federation vessels have already had seven unsuccessful tries at communicative First Contact. Captain Silvestri of the Shiku Maru called the Tamarians “incomprehensible.” Picard and the Enterprise-D crew are sent by the Federation to make one more attempt to come to terms with them. The Universal Translator renders the Tamarian Language into broken English, with the result being a lot of static and occasional bizarre sentences like “Shaka, when the walls fell,” which sound vaguely like narrative descriptions of individuals or places, and appear to signify nothing.
In the episode The Ensigns of Command, the Enterprise-D officers and crew already had dealings with the language of an alien race, the arrogant Sheliak Membership, which the Universal Translator software is not able to handle. The Sheliak, which menace the Federation colony on radiation-soaked Tau Cygna Five, speak decent Federation Standard. Their colonizing Director, played by Mart McChesney, says contemptuously to Captain Picard: “You do not converse. You jibber.” In a mood of technological pessimism and repentance, Ship’s Counselor Deanna Troi, who also serves as Ship’s Language Advisor in The Ensigns of Command and Darmok, says to Picard: “The fact that any alien race communicates with another is quite remarkable.” Failure to achieve mutual linguistic respect led to total silence between the Federation and the Sheliak for more than a century.
The Tamarian ship arrives at El-Aldrel Four three weeks before the Enterprise-D. Its crew broadcasts a continuous signal towards Federation space in the medium of a standard mathematical progression without a message. Through the medium of the bridge’s main viewscreen, Captain Dathon addresses his first words to the baffled Enterprise-D senior officers: “Rai and Jiri at Lungha. Rai of Lowani. Lowani under two moons. Jiri of Ubaya. Ubaya of crossed roads at Lungha. Lungha, her sky grey.” Captain Picard, Commander Riker, Lt. Commander Data, Lt. Worf, and Counselor Troi stare blankly at the screen. Data offers his opinion that the Tamarian Captain is stating the “proper names of individuals and locations.” Picard rises from his chair and speaks in a formal diplomatic English that the Tamarians cannot fathom: “I invite you to consider the creation of a mutual non-aggression pact, possibly leading to a trade agreement and cultural interchange.” The Tamarian First Officer, played by Richard James, turns to his Captain in frustration. “Kadir beneath Mo Moteh,” he says. “The river Temarc, in winter,” replies Dathon with authority. “Darmok.” The First Officer asks skeptically, “Darmok?” then proposes as alternative, “Rai and Jiri at Lungha.” “Shaka, when the walls fell,” asserts the Captain. “Zima at Anzo,” suggests the First Officer. “Zima and Bakor.” But the Tamarian Captain is adamant. “Darmok at Tanagra,” he articulates slowly. “Darmok, the river Temarc.” The Second-In-Command falls silent. He accepts the decision of his superior officer with a bow. Dathon lifts two daggers in the air and turns towards Picard. “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” he declares conclusively. The two Captains disappear in transport beams from their respective bridges.
After Captains Picard and Dathon are transported to the isolated world’s surface, the Tamarians use an ionospheric particle scattering field to block all attempts by Enterprise-D technicians to beam Picard back from the planet, and to make any communication with the two men impossible. They are intent on providing the two Captains with enough time “alone together” to finally attain a breakthrough in linguistic communication. The Tamarians’ actions are not well understood by the Enterprise-D crew. Relations between Commander Will Riker and the Tamarian First Officer, each in temporary command of his vessel, become increasingly tense. After their first night of miscommunication on the planet, Picard and Dathon are physically attacked by a dark, glowing, shape-shifting electromagnetic energy creature adorned with “melting” special effects, played by Rex Pierson. From his station on the bridge, Lt. Worf reads through sensors that the amorphous “monster” is an erratic induction field, perpetually changing its location, coming into and out of view, and “appearing and disappearing.” Cut off from their crews and their technologies (just as in The Original Series episode Arena), the two Captains’ only recourse is to forge a personal bond with each other to fight the common enemy. But simple verbal communication remains difficult. Dathon says repeatedly, with only slight variations: “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.” Sometimes he adds a phrase like: “Temba, his arms wide,” “Shaka, when the walls fell,” “Darmok of Kanza,” or “Jalad of the Kituay.”
Back on the Enterprise-D, Counselor Troi and Lt. Commander Data do some crack investigative research into the intricacies of the Tamarian Language. They discover that it is structured, on the level of detail of every sentence, on allusions to Tamarian mytho- historical legends and folkloric tales. Down on El-Adrel Four, Captain Picard has a similar linguistic insight. By saying “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” Captain Dathon refers to the venerable legend of Darmok, a story about a mythical hunter joining forces with a foreign warrior on the island continent of Tanagra to defeat a frightful “beast” which endangered them both. Dathon seeks to establish a friendship with Picard by ritualistically reenacting a narrative legend belonging to the traditions of Tamarian culture. That is the reason why the Tamarians transported Dathon and Picard to the desolate planet, inserting them into the circumstance of facing a mortal threat from the vicious “pure energy” being. Troi, Data, and Picard all arrive at the apprehension that each phrase in the Tamarian Language is a micro-allegory suggesting or alluding to a specific story.
Each phrase invokes, but is not equivalent to, a concrete, translatable denotation. The statement “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” suggests “becoming friends by defeating a common enemy;” “Shaka, when the walls fell” alludes to failure, inability, disaster, or death; “the river Temarc” means “be quiet!” or make a change in approach; “in winter” expresses sadness or solemnity; and “Zinda, his face black, his eyes red” indicates anger. “His arms open” promises a willingness to negotiate; “Sokath, his eyes uncovered” denotes “to understand;” “Kiteo, his eyes closed” hints at a refusal to understand; and “Temba, his arms wide” offers generosity or the giving of a gift. “Darmok, on the ocean” intimates “to be alone;” “Chenza, at the court of silence” implies a “lack of dialogue;” and “Mirab, his sails unfurled” signifies “it’s time to leave” or “engage, warp factor one.”
The finally accomplished linguistic breakthrough tragically comes at the cost of a life. Before communicative understanding is reached, the Enterprise-Dcrew continues its efforts to overcome the Tamarians’ technical interference with the transporter. Lt. Commander Geordi La Forge tries to reestablish an annular confinement beam of sufficiently high resolution to bring Captain Picard back to the ship. Just at the most critical moment of the enactment of the ritual of I and Thou, as Picard is reciprocally bonding with Dathon and grasping the Tamarian Language-In-Action, Commander Riker orders La Forge to make an experimental attempt to get the Captain “out of there now.” While Picard is dematerialized and locked in a fledgling transport beam, the growling energy creature savagely attacks Dathon and fatally injures him. “No, no!” a helpless Picard screams. With its sharp claws, electrical impulses, and slugging brute force, the beast beats the Tamarian Captain to a pulp. Picard reappears briefly on the Enterprise-D Transporter Room One platform before resolidifying on the planet.
As Dathon lays dying from burns and internal wounds, Picard demonstrates to him that he has at last grasped something of the Tamarian Language. The two Captains genuinely converse for the first and last time. “Shaka,” says Dathon. “When the walls fell,” adds Picard, completing the phrase. “Temba, his arms wide. Darmok and Jalad,” says Captain Picard, supplicating the expiring Tamarian warrior to tell him more of the story of Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra. “Darmok on the ocean,” retells Dathon. “Kiazi’s children, their faces wet. Tanagra on the ocean. Darmok at Tanagra. Jalad on the ocean. Jalad at Tanagra. The beast at Tanagra. Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.” The heroes arrived separately at the same island. They struggled against a common foe, a creature on the island. They left the island together.
As a counter-gift, Captain Picard tells Captain Dathon the epic story from Earth (Sumerian) mythology of Gilgamesh and Enkidu at Uruk. “Gilgamesh was a king at Uruk,” Picard begins. “He tormented his subjects. He drove them to anger. They cried out: ‘Give our king a companion. Spare us his madness.’” Picard’s cadence starts to match that of Dathon’s own storytelling: “Endiku, a wild man. From the forest. Entered the city. They fought in the temple. In the street. Gilgamesh defeated Endiku. They became great friends.” As Dathon draws his final breaths, Picard comes back to a more usual oral style: “The new friends went out into the desert together, where the Great Bull of Heaven was killing men by the hundreds. Enkidu caught it by the tail. Gilgamesh struck it with his sword. They were victorious. But Enkidu fell to the ground, struck down by the gods.” Captain Dathon convulses and dies. “And Gilgamesh wept bitter tears. He who was my companion through adventure and hardship is gone forever.”
The Tamarian commander has made a sacrifice for something that meant more to him than his own life. With Captain Picard still in danger and all other options exhausted, Commander Riker decides to shoot pinpoint phaser beams at the Tamarian ship, disabling the emitters generating the particle scattering field in the planet’s upper atmosphere. Transporter Chief O’Brien beams Picard aboard just as the predatory life-form entity, returned from hiding, is about to grab him. The Captain walks onto the bridge as war is breaking out. Volleys of phaser fire are exchanged, and the starship is at red alert. Its shields are partially damaged, and the warp engines are offline.
Captain Picard tells Lt. Worf to hail the adversarial ship. “Zinda, his face black, his eyes red,” bellows the irate Tamarian First Officer. “Temarc!” exclaims Picard authoritatively. “The river Temarc, in winter.” All the onlooking Tamarian bridge officers are stunned and positively impressed. The belligerent tension between the two ships is defused by the Captain’s newfound linguistic fluency. “Darmok,” says the Tamarian second-in-command. It is Picard’s sorrowful duty to inform the alien vessel’s highest-ranking surviving officer of Captain Dathon’s demise. “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra,” says Picard. “Darmok and Jalad on the ocean.” The First Officer is astounded by both the content and form of Picard’s presentation. “Sokath, his eyes open!” the Tamarian proclaims. “The beast of Tanagra,” Picard mournfully continues. “Uzani, his army. Shaka, when the walls fell.” Although filled with sadness over the passing of his senior officer, the First Officer is profoundly grateful to Picard for having reached understanding of their language. He climactically says “Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel,” signifying that a new permutation of the Darmok myth has been successfully consummated. In spite of Dathon’s death, the Tamarians have achieved their goal of participatory reenactment or new iteration of the folkloric legend under recurring yet different circumstances. First Contact with the Children of Tama is at long last realized. The crews of the two ships depart as at least “not new enemies.”
Economic exchange in capitalism is based on a logic of identity for objects of the same “kind,” and a monetary exchange standard for all objects that allows the measuring of their value on a “universal scale.” There is an implicit contract, or certain form of symbolic exchange, that precedes and underlies this quantitative reduction. The individual in consumerism is a “subject” who “uses” all these objects which serve his “needs.” The structural law of accumulation prescribes the amassing of value and meaning in an endless one-way positivity. “Non-signifying language” and “the duel relationship” areStar Trek basic principles that belong to the cultural ethics of Captain Dathon. They are processes of an alternative symbolic exchange which contest economic exchange and accumulation. The Tamarian self is not constituted as a rational actor of the behavorial sciences focused on the unambivalent satisfaction of linguistic meaning, economic achievement, or psychological drive. As Lt. Commander Data says, “The Tamarian ego structure does not seem to allow what we normally would think of as self-identity.”
“Symbolic” intimates a continuous and reversible exchange that transforms both counterparts, with no clear separation of subject and object. The advent of symbolic exchange is glimpsed in the circulation of gifts, reversible power, sports and gambling, cycles that accept loss or missed opportunities, metamorphosis, challenge, seduction, an altered relation to death, and all forms of ambivalence. Symbolic exchange involves disappearance and sacrifice. As Captain Picard says at the conclusion of Darmok, the Tamarian Captain’s commitment to connection and mutual recognition “meant more to him than his own life.”
In early capitalism, the law of accumulation is limited to the science of “political economy” and production. In late capitalism, it expands to wider instances of consumer culture, psychology (self and unconscious as psychic metaphors of capital), and linguistics (inexhaustible resource of “signification”). In Noam Chomsky’s “cybernetic” linguistics, the brain is a “universal language machine” making possible the translation of all grammars and signifying systems. In Ferdinand de Saussure’s linguistics, the playful gap between “signifier” and “signified” is barred by positing their equivalence in a linguistic sign that fixes a word’s identity. But language is sometimes other than a means of communication. In metaphor or poetry, or in the “mythical” speech of the Children of Tama in Darmok, language is not directly signifying. It is not related to the strengthening of an identity, because there is none. It is symbolic, ambivalent, evocative, and even destructive. “Meanings” are exchanged, subverted, enjoyed, and transformed in relationship and encounter. In the symbolic operation of language, the deconstruction of representation and the sign takes place. The beauty of the Tamarian Language is its ritualistic finitude. Its elegant restraint in seeking a precise consummation is the opposite of consumer culture’s 24/7 cranked up machine of limitless signifieds.
In the paradigm of multiple “selves” that has dominated critical cultural thinking about cyberspace, there is soft intermingling with simulated others. In the duel relationship, there is reciprocal seduction and transformation achieved through a real encounter with an agonistic other. For the standard Federation linguistic technology of the Universal Translator, language is a system of universal signification stretching to infinity, on the model of economic exchange. For Captains Picard and Dathon on the planet El-Adrel Four, restricted language is immanent to an active relation of mutual challenges, obligatory responses, and sincere encounter of I and Thou constituting afresh who they are. The Tamarian Language is a ritualized mise-en-scène that forms a bond between parties in common observance of its rules. The content of what is said is secondary to the conventional sequence of metaphors. The game continues even at the price of a sacrificial death.