Here are excerpts from three reviews of my book “Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance,” beginning with the long review-essay in Science Fiction Studies, and some other quotations about the book.
At the end are some passages from Evelise de Carvalho’s Masters Thesis called “Star Trek: Going Beyond All Frontiers,” where she has a lengthy discussion of my work on Star Trek.
Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, “Review-Essay” in Science Fiction Studies, November 2005.
Shapiro’s study of Star Trek is one of the most original works of sf-theory since Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity.
“Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance is an audacious, eccentric, supremely confident set of readings, claiming the rights of fan commentary, media analysis, literary criticism, and postmodernist theory, synthesized by sheer intellectual bravado and critical passion.
The book opens with the claim that Star Trek has been misunderstood by its previous commentators, who treat it as the coherent myth of an intensely desired future world made concrete in its hyperreal virtuality. This concreteness is paradoxically intensified by commentaries that incessantly test the shows’ ideas against established knowledge (the various “Sciences” and “Philosophies” of Star Trek, like Lawrence Krauss’s The Physics of Star Trek (1995) or Richard Hanley’s The Metaphysics of Star Trek (1997). Though often acknowledging that the ideas are entirely fanciful, the writers also validate them by reverently entertaining them. In this way, Shapiro argues, the “science of Star Trek” has helped to create a culture of self-enclosing hyperreality, which is no longer able to distinguish science from sf.
For Shapiro, previous approaches eliminate in advance “the possibility that Star Trek is a lively innovator of a ‘new real,’” a “creator of a reality-shaping ‘science fiction’ that formatively influences culture, ideas, technologies, and even ‘hard sciences’ like physics.” Shapiro draws on Virilio, Deleuze-Guattari, Haraway, Hayles, and Arthur Kroker for his critical strategies, but his governing concepts are Baudrillard’s simulation, seduction, and symbolic exchange. Star Trek is a privileged text, in Shapiro’s eyes, because it demonstrates how the technoscientific and entertainment systems strive together to absorb literary fictions — the individual Star Trek stories whose power is in their imaginative challenge and open-endedness — into simulations.
In the individual stories — Star Trek‘s fiction per se — Shapiro locates profound philosophical challenges that resist being assimilated into the media mythology. In this way, Shapiro builds up a sophiticated contest between existentially estranging science fiction and recuperative sci-fi that Roddenberry’s and Paramount’s Grand Narrative attempts to smooth over.
In addition to combining Baudrillard with Virilio…, Shapiro uses Haraway’s cyborg discourse, turning technologies into “wily” agents and radical Others ambivalently linked to humans in a quest for liberation from technoscientific determination. And underlying all is the unstated Critical Theory premise that art is able to liberate consciousness from the enchantments of the capitalist culture industry. That these ideas seem to fit naturally together is a testament to Shapiro’s ambition and originality.
Shapiro’s chapter on The Universal Translator is one of the best recent discussions on language in sf, and also the clearest exposition of the difference between simulation and symbolic exchange.
It is in the chapters on the central cyborgs that Shapiro develops his most consistent argument against the conventional wisdom of the Star Trek mediaverse… In the Star Trek myth, each cyborg strengthens the reality of human identity, the not-cyborg condition, which is used as the norm both diegetically and extra-diegetically; in the same move, each cyborg actively examines – and ultimately honors – its own internal abysses, as the human protagonist cannot.
Technologies of Disappearance is a very exciting book — especially so for readers who are interested in the difference between fiction and simulation, between the freedom of the imaginary which does not coerce commitment and the compulsion of consensus and administered “realities.”
Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance is an immensely valuable contribution to sf-theory…”
Pier Luigi Capucci, review of Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance at NoemaLab.org:
The saga of Star Trek, which has been called a “great modern mythology,” has developed over the course of more than thirty-five years in television series, films, animated episodes, video games, print publications of various genres, memorabilia and collectibles, etc. Over time, Star Trek has permeated our collective mores. Its status as a cultural phenomenon is unrivaled. It has not been surpassed even by the cinematographic success of the Star Wars series. Star Trek has attained an extensive and deeply rooted popularity among the mass media public. But there is also a huge number of academics, scientists and researchers – belonging to a plethora of disciplines ranging from physics to sociology – who, along with technologists, fiction writers, and journalists, dedicate books, essays, conferences and articles in the continuing tribute they pay to Star Trek.
Why is Star Trek so popular? What accounts for its mass appeal and extraordinary success? What are we to make of the technologies used by Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock, by Data and Captain Picard? These are, in essence, the questions that Alan N. Shapiro tries to answer in his Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance, published in English by the Berlin-based AVINUS Press. Shapiro is an American expatriate who has lived in Germany since 1991. He studied at MIT and Cornell University, and is a software developer and former New York University sociology instructor.
The book considers in great depth an impressive collection of Star Trek episodes, both televisual and cinematic, grouping them into eleven thematic chapters. It is structured in multiple layers to which different typographies correspond. The episodes are retold and described, establishing the context to initiate a vast array of reflections, principles, anecdotes and references, ranging from philosophy to physics, from sociology to history, from technology to communication. This prolific feat of writing contributes to placing the Star Trek phenomenon in the framework of the culture of the last thirty years.
Star Trek has produced icons that have taken root in the popular imagination. But it has also outstripped, and anticipated through extrapolation, scientific and technological events, philosophical insights, and social and cultural transformations in ways that are frequently at odds with dominant or received ideas. It is an outstanding example of a technological mythology that goes beyond the eclecticism, cliched repetition and superficiality of many other instances of science fiction and fantasy. It insists more on the brain than on muscles or special effects. And it achieves all of this by taking on the challenge of inventing a popular yet high-concept media series.
Shapiro’s thesis is that the true originality of Star Trek and the reason for its success reside in its creation of a reality-shaping science fiction capable of formatively influencing “culture, ideas, technologies, and even ‘hard sciences’ like physics.” To compare Star Trek to techno-scientific and techno-cultural developments in order to judge the practicability or correctness of its so-called “representations” is a weak and reductionist approach. This is unfortunately what the vast majority of books and essays on Star Trek has done. It is a mistake committed in common by scientists and “leftist” cultural critics.
Star Trek‘s futuristic technologies – including the cultural, moral, aesthetic, and philosophical imagination that stands behind them – are our own twenty-first century technologies in development. They are the material-semiotic “embodied metaphor” of our current technologies. Taken as a whole, they belong to our “anthropological desire” (to use Roland Barthes’ phrase). And only this explains the mass success of Star Trek. “Our society dreams of making Star Trek‘s technologies real,” Shapiro says: the transporter, the Holodeck / virtual reality, the “universal communicator,” interstellar space travel with faster-than-light speed, time travel with fabricated wormholes, cyborgs and androids with artificial intelligence, contact with aliens. These are “technologies of disappearance” because they enable their users to become ubiquitous, allowing them to “disappear” and “reappear” in different places and times. But they are also technologies of disappearance because the virtual and symbolic dimension that informs them makes “human subjectivity and perception disappear into the organ-substituting imaging apparatuses of television, cinema, virtual reality, and real-time telecommunications. Classical time and space disappear into the compression of audiovisual memory implants and designer spacetimes. Human indivisibility disappears into cloning and genetic sequencing systems. The modernist pledge of scientific objectivity and the high valuation of ‘truth’disappear into incessant techno-scientific pursuit of techno-culture’s ends.” The theoretical physics of the transporter, warp speed, time travel, and parallel universes is driven by the demands of hyperreal science fictional culture.
Finally, Star Trek technologies are “technologies of disappearance” because they offer a glimpse of the reign of artifice and illusion (in Jean Baudrillard’s sense), of the reversibility between disappearance and reappearance, a little like the subatomic “virtual” particles of quantum physics that permanently pop into and out of existence. In this case, disappearance can become a strategy of resistance and transformation that turns aside the canonical mainstream uses of technologies and unpacks their alternative and creative “secondary effects.” Perhaps even capable of changing the world…
Karim Remtulla, “Where few have gone before…,” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, July 2005:
In Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance, Alan Shapiro fulfills three primary objectives. Firstly, Shapiro explores Star Trek’s popularity as, “a great modern mythology”, posing vital questions about the role of Star Trek’s culture industry, creativity, and fandom in developing and subsequently sustaining this “mythology”. Then Shapiro hones in on the technologies of Star Trek and discusses how television and other entertainment conglomerates appropriate these technologies to construct this massive, cultural industry. Finally, Shapiro applies varying, postmodern perspectives on notions of “disappearance” to interrogate both Star Trek’s culture industry and its technologies, in effect raising to the surface the contradictions and tensions that exist around these technologies. By intricately interconnecting each of these three overarching themes, Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance represents a complex and quintessentially postmodern analysis of the technologies of Star Trek and their socio-cultural significance.
To authenticate this relationship, Shapiro takes the originality and creativity involved in the Star Trek television series and movies as separate and distinct from their culture industry, and then contrasts them with the culture industry surrounding them, to illustrate how this tension influences the subjective experiences of Star Trek fans. Shapiro posits some twenty basic, Star Trek principles such as, Recognition of Otherness, Ambivalence Towards Virtual Reality, Symbolic Exchange, The Accident of Technology, as well as, Reversible Power, to bring about, what he declares is, “the basis for the ‘invitation to argument’ issued to what we have called the Star Trek hyper-reality industry”. To this end, Shapiro’s approach is decidedly phenomenological presenting some twenty-four examples from Star Trek comprising both television and movie episodes.
Shapiro’s distinctively postmodern enquiry of socio-cultural “disappearance” is further brought to bear in his questioning of Star Trek’s culture industry and its technologies. The crux of Shapiro’s argument comes about largely through a discourse of “disappearance” between Jean Baudrillard’s notion of “simulacra” as it signifies the machinations of Star Trek’s culture industry and Paul Virilio’s notion of “accident” as it problematizes Star Trek’s technologies, although, Shapiro also expresses “intellectual debt” to Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida, Theodor Adorno, Victoria Grace, Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, and Katherine Hayles. As a result, when speaking of “technologies of disappearance” three, possible conditions emerge: 1) technologies that literally bring about corporeal, spatial, and/or temporal disappearance or displacement; 2) a critical perspective on how, “Human subjectivity and perception disappear into the organ-substituting imaging apparatuses of television, cinema, virtual reality, and real-time telecommunications”; and, more subversively, 3) “disappearance” as resistance to the intended uses of technology and the, “endless signification and one-way economic accumulation”, of the “hyper-real” Star Trek culture industry.
To fully appreciate Shapiro’s passion for technology, though, what must be better explicated is Shapiro’s unique point of view. For Shapiro, technology is the “object” of absorption in the classic Baudrillardian tradition, and Baudrillard’s own words best capture this sentiment: “The object is, admittedly, mediatory, but at the same time, because it is immediate, immanent, it shatters that mediation. It is on both sides of the line, and it both gratifies and disappoints”. Shapiro viscerally immerses himself in technology, anticipates and participates actively in its inception and evolution, and witnesses its nascent creativity and potential uncertainty and reversibility. When it comes to technology, his outlook is innately that of an “insider’s”, and, from “the inside out”.
Moreover, Shapiro is an accomplished software developer with a deep proficiency in sociology and postmodernist thinking. He thinks, “like a programmer”. Having internalized technology’s creativity and reversibility, Shapiro understands its coexistent tendencies towards “simulacra” and “accident”. Shapiro’s firsthand, subjective, experiential knowledge of this most basic duel/dual antagonism between the zero’s and ones that comprise genetic sequencing of all computer-mediated technologies affords him the awareness that behind every “simulacra” of one hides the (un)anticipated “accident” of zero. No doubt invisible to most others, the “symbolic exchange” between the zero’s and ones that transpires on a moment by moment basis, as witnessed by many a computer programmer, forms a foundational component of Shapiro’s perspective in this book and should not be dismissed in the reading of this work.
Nevertheless, a complete appreciation of Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance also invites some conversation around Shapiro’s style of writing. Attesting to Shapiro’s sociotechnical adeptness, his writing makes frequent usage of terminology commonly found in software programming rhetoric and interestingly juxtaposes and intersperses it with terminology more common to sociological and cultural expression.
His description of episodes demonstrates equally a meticulous attention to detail complemented by a continuous aspiration towards generalized, meta-theorizing.
In fact, Shapiro’s thorough attention to detail, and his penchant for inductive compilation of such minutiae into a grand schema for Star Trek, may further shed light on the visual impact of his work. Shapiro’s profuse use of paratextuality is very reminiscent here of Hutcheon’s (1989) conception of paratextuality in postmodern non-fictional novels in the form of numerous sidebars and frequent use of bold formatting, scare quotes, varying font sizes, and subtitles.
The shear depth of effort and extent of this work obliges some thought to Shapiro’s motivation in undertaking this book. For this reason, the final chapter of the book, Chapter 11: “The Founding of Futurity”, does warrant some elaboration and may suggest a befitting message upon which to conclude this review. Here, Shapiro presents the true frailty of Star Trek’s culture industry and the supposed inevitability of Star Trek’s “technologies of disappearance”. Shapiro deftly demonstrates how the culture industry, using the movie Star Trek: First Contact (1996) as a “reverse grand narrative”, “forcefully presents a powerful, mythic narrative of the prehistory or origin of the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries Star Trek universe”. However, what is cleverly not relayed in this narrative, Shapiro goes on to share, is that, “The participants or actors in these events had existential or psychobiographical choice. There were free agents. They might have opted to do something other than what they did”. As maintained by Shapiro, Star Trek can be an inspirational source for agency and creativity. With a prime directive of the “reappearance” of hope and the search for other possible futures, Shapiro boldly opted to go “where few have gone before” and embark on a journey to seek out the “reversibility” of “disappearance”, and ultimately, its “opening onto subjecthood”.
Mark Bould, “On the Boundary between Oneself and the Other: Aliens and Language,” The Yearbook of English Studies, Volume 37, Issue 2, 2007
“This essay explores a key SF scenario — the encounter with the alien — in four ‘postfuturist’ SF films, “AVP: Alien vs. Predator”, “Dark City”, “The Brother from Another Planet”, and “Possible Worlds”, through a perspective informed by the materialist critique of idealist linguistics found in the work of Mikhail Bakhtin, David McNally, and Alan N. Shapiro. It argues that the critical theory derived from Saussurean linguistics strips language of its materiality in a manner homologous to capital’s abstraction of social products from the labouring bodies that produce them, and traces the active and permeable borderline between Self and Other in these films’ alien encounters.”
Evelise de Carvalho, “Star Trek: Going Beyond All Frontiers”:
As a science fiction and media theorist, a lecturer and essayist in the fields of science fiction studies, media theory, posthumanism, French philosophy, artificial intelligence, among others, and also as a genuine connoisseur of Star Trek, Shapiro points out that scientists, academics, and journalists who write about Roddenberry’s creation, do not exactly do justice to its originality and magnitude of influence on numerous spheres, such as culture, technology, and even physics.
Shapiro claims that new knowledge that comes from intuition will substitute previous knowledge obtained through erudition and academic studies. Among so many others, this is one of reasons why Shapiro has been referred to as an unconventional mind, willing to go beyond all frontiers. He is, first and foremost, a scholar, but he has developed a singular approach to science and every other field he is involved with. He believes that certain objects of investigation should not be compared to any pre-existing knowledge, and that this is the manner by which Star Trek should be approached as well, based on its own terms and unique universe. Since this represents new grounds, he says that these terms are not known as of yet.
Shapiro makes a correspondence between principles and values that make him and other technologists love Star Trek and the technology that has been applied, as well as the one which will keep being created. According to him, when they are able to discover why they believe in Star Trek, they will become better professionals by performing their roles more adequately.
Shapiro describes all the possibilities of disappearance that are shown on the series and says that the idea and the development of living within an android or an avatar figure, instead of a human body, has been increasing in the twenty first century. Many other films, comic books, and games explore this alternate reality environment. Some of the episodes of Star Trek showed machines living inside “copies” of what once had been a human being. Such machines were flawless images of humans.
Shapiro criticizes the way technologies are conceived and designed. He does not think human subjectivity and perception should be lost within image and communication devices. He also thinks that scientific objectivity and the valuation of truth should not be compromised by the needs and interests of
techno-culture.
According to Shapiro, much has been done to satisfy the techno-cultural public wishes of making Star Trek’s technologies real, including bending scientific theories. Even a set of immutable laws become subject to a peculiar set of rules which consider the futuristic technology possible.
According to Shapiro, in order to be successful, a media product has to present “a mythical moment of transcendent creativity which clears the way for the emergence of a new spectacle object,” which can be a celebrity, a consumer gadget or media property. He explains that “the fully achieved simulacra of virtual reality threaten the stability and profitability” of the system of differences found “in our efforts to find an identity ‘niche’ and dubiously distinguish ourselves from others.” This is the reason why Captain Pike (in the episodes “The Cage” and “The Menagerie”) could not go on performing his role; he had already learned too much, causing him to be way far ahead of his time.
As Shapiro went on retelling the episode, he said that, at first, Captain Pike was seduced by the virtual reality presented by the Talosians but that did not last since his freedom and presence in reality, which required him to go back to his ship and duties, were more valuable than illusions and memories from the past. As he could not bear being kept a prisoner, he managed to discover a flaw in the system, which was not prepared to deal with intense emotions, notably hatred.
Once again, similarly to William Shatner’s interview, the content of these findings could not be more intriguing or relevant to the astonishing happenings of 2020. First of all, if “human species’ aversion to confinement” is true, what has taken place in almost every nation in the past few months must have been extremely compelling. Initially, most part of the world population followed the isolation instructions, mostly due to fear of COVID-19’s infection and lack of any other safe, reliable information. The mainstream media has been one the most influential institutions in implementing the global lockdown. So much has been stated and done by both political and medical authorities; so much confusion and chaos have affected so many people all around the world. Shapiro could never imagine that his retelling and explanation of the first episode of Star Trek would acquire such relevance ten years afterwards.
According to Shapiro, “Star Trek has never been considered by science fiction critics for its ‘secondary current’ of virtual reality themes.” He cannot agree with that since numerous episodes are “replete with polysemous ‘texts’ about the last stage of simulacra and virtuality.” He strongly disagrees with some media critics who consider Star Trek “too heroically individualist to be much valued as a ‘text,’ and it fails to address or extol the terminal identity, body electronic, fractal geography, subject decentering, ontology-shattering themes and transmigrations of the digital age.”
In Captain Pike’s case, he just chose to “live” in the virtual world, when he had lost his body. As long as he was healthy, he was perfectly happy with his physical life. Today, even before the pandemic, so many people, notably children and teenagers, have been living in their own isolated virtual world, just like Bill Gates had foreseen. This deep immersion has been intensified due to the critical situation represented by the quarantines, lockdowns, and confinement established in 2020. Once again, Shapiro has predicted the future well, regarding the extensive dependence on “the interactive network.”
In the case of the episode “All Our Yesterdays,” the inhabitants of Sarpeidon had no other choice of survival besides leaving their planet before the supernova struck. Due to their highly advanced technology, they managed to have a second, cloned reality which became their new life. In comparison, some of us, nowadays, become immersed in the virtual world to the point of losing track of time, depriving oneself of eating, sleeping, and leading a “real” life. This is another type of dependence which has been happening especially among children and teenagers in the last few years. More and more people have become dependent and addicted to gadgets and the virtual world where they live in. There are, undoubtedly, numerous advantages provided by the interactive network, however, will face to face interaction eventually disappear; will outdoor activities be totally replaced by the indoor virtual world?
The answers to those questions may change the way that we live forever by causing devastating effects on social interaction, physical and mental health, numerous professionals and activities, all of which would eventually most likely to disappear. We are living peculiar times; we have been going through radical changes. Man is about to cross some brand new frontiers.
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