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The deep-rooted accident of the duplicate [Captain] Kirk turns a questioning spotlight on the "essence" of the transporter, which is the absolutist phantasmagoria of total knowledge of a person captured in a digital pattern or "quantum physics" snapshot of [his or her] subatomic particles. ["Evil Kirk's"] appearance brings into relief a deep-seated anxiety about the philosophy of cloning and the "too perfect" operational system of quantum information science and the coming digital-quantum teleporter. Techno-culture's "vision" or fanciful goal of the transporter is the contemporary project of a wholly self-contained scientific system and hyperbolic construction of a fully self-referential human subject without real others. It is the dream of a human being understandable entirely through her formation, identical to herself, and leading a completely knowable existence. "The Enemy Within," as literature, questions this totalizing edifice through the tropes of the accident and the double.
More from Alan N. Shapiro on the overt and covert agendas of Star Trek and the "Star Trek industry," this time from his excellent book Star Trek: Technologies of Disappearance. It's a wised-up, culture-crit antidote to all those Physics of Star Trek type books. An earlier post on Shapiro is here. I hadn't really considered it before: Richard Matheson, writer of I Am Legend, The Shrinking Man, and other scary fables of modernity is asked to pen a Star Trek episode, early, early in the series. His dark, sardonic mind begins sifting through the relatively new TV show's available story hooks. "Aha, the transporter," he thinks, going right for the hot button anxiety viewers can't help but feel about this miraculous device, which disassembles the body and forces users to put their trust in some unknown techy in their most ultimately vulnerable, unwhole state. All this assumes Matheson didn't just take over someone else's script treatment, but in any case, what emerges is the Jekyll and Hyde tale of Captain Kirk split into "Evil Kirk and Weak Kirk," each unable to function without being reintegrated with the other. Citing Paul Virilio, Shapiro frames the ingenious tale in terms of what it reveals about technology's "built-in accidents waiting to happen."

- tom moody 12-25-2005 11:02 am [link] [5 comments]