Anijar, Karen. (2000). Teaching Toward the 24th Century: "Star Trek" as Social Curriculum. Reviewed by Peter Appelbaum, Arcadia University

Anijar, Karen. (2000). Teaching Toward the 24th Century: Star Trek as Social Curriculum. NY: Falmer Press. Pp. xiv + 265 $45 (Cloth)     ISBN 0-8153-2524X $22.95 (Paper)     ISBN 0-8153-2523 Reviewed by Peter Appelbaum Arcadia University July 13, 2001 Karen Anijar spent a long time talking to educators who are Trekkers—serious fans of Star Trek, and this provided her initial foray into the social curriculum of Trek in general. The result is a superb interrogation of curriculum without the baggage of assumptions about what is “in” or “out” of the school curriculum, and without the messy screens of contemporary curriculum theorizing. Her work is centered in important questions about identity politics, post-colonialism, race, class and ethnicity in education. We might look at a mass culture phenomenon in one of two common ways: the first would ask what Star Trek “does” to people; the second would ask what people do with Star Trek. Anijar does not allow herself to be caught up in either of these two narrowing options. By moving in and out of both and beyond, she helps us to understand how any cultural phenomenon as gigantic as Trek is a keystone to the comprehension of our ideologies and desires, our fears and routines. Yes, we can see how Trek has led to many things in society – a common belief that we can imagine what space travel “is like,” a “need” for cell phones, and so on. But it is also the case that Trek is a lens for how liberal ideals and beliefs have meandered and metamorphosed into a codification of understandings that many people take as “common sense.” Thus it is not so much worthwhile to ask if Trek is a cause of something, or if Trek demonstrates that thing, or if Trek is the result of that thing; in the end, by studying Trekdom as a social curriculum Anijar has interrogated our social curriculum in North America. There have been a number of excellent ethnographic and academic studies of fandom and popular myths with Star Trek as their main focus (Bacon-Smith 1992; Barrett & Barrett 2000; Jenkins 1992; Penley 1991; Penley 1997); but this is the first effort to situate such an analysis within educational studies. In doing so Anijar takes us in very different directions from the already existent work. I would have expected this new contribution to be situated more fully within this literature; but I am not totally surprised to find few of these previous works cited because the purposes are so clearly different. Readers should understand that this book is indeed a work of curriculum studies. Trekdom is the ostensible topic. The construct, “teaching for the future,” and all that it drags along with it, is unpacked and deconstructed more generally, and provides much for educators to consider. If we allow ourselves to be trapped analytically in a binary that includes Trek as commodities and as cultural resources, then we would be bound to find people who either embrace the commodification and its hegemonic tactics, or other people who poach Trekdom for what it can offer in terms of new forms of meaning for reinterpreting social possibilities. One of the underlying messages of Anijar's book, consistent with other studies of the (conservative) politics of education, is that educators who embrace the vision of Trekdom fall mostly into the first category: there are few examples of poachers (Jenkins 1992) and slash fans (Penley 1991; 1997) in Anijar's work because there are so few educator Trekkies who are poachers and slashers. The implications for education are clear: mostly the hegemonic role of Trekdom is what we find in talking with Trekkie teachers. This work does not force such an analytic template on the ethnography, and avoids the pitfalls. However, Anijar lumps all of Trekdom into one category where others have suggested a turn from the original colonialist rhetoric of the first series to a more contemporary modernism in the Next Generation, and finally a potentially post-modern critique of the earlier Trek messages in Deep Space Nine and Voyager (Barrett & Barrett 2000). As educator-Trekkies increasingly become people who grew up with these latter series, they may identify their fandom more closely with such post-modern critiques. So we can look forward to continued updates, I hope. If Trekdom works through the issues of contemporary social questions, then, as Anijar argues, Trekdom can be a key to comprehending curriculum as “teaching toward the future.” The first half of the monograph introduces three significant concepts to curriculum work: Gnosticism; recall performed as prediction; and the racial, colonialist anxieties of whiteness. Anijar quotes Robert Jewett and John Shelton Lawrence: Star Trek is a religion, one that … may have changed its theater and neglected to place its name on the marquee. The move from cathedral to the tube, screen, or stereo offers the faithful many of the values sought in traditional religion. (1977: 23) Trekdom is indeed one of many cultural sites where Gnosticism and hyper image-ology converge. People fetishize symbols as holders of secret meanings about their beliefs—Trek symbols abound as bumper stickers, pins on clothes, computer screensavers, logos on personal checks, much like the sign of the fisherman in early Christianity. Because of the overwhelming permeation of mediated culture and globalized capitalism, fandom of anything plays out through consumption rather than in production; as the mode of production gets more and more obscured, material transformation becomes metaphysical transmogrification. Erik Davis has written that Gnosticism is the logical result of the technological revolution. Anijar says even the idea of logically following is part of the arrogance of Gnosticism – the enlightened “I” makes a hyper-real knowledge that arises from some “thing” (as in Trek, or anything else). Fans congregate at conventions, described in the literature as analogous to revival meetings. Indeed, the word fan comes from fanatic, which has origins in religious followers. Star Fleet, an international fan organization, uses local “ships” that meet and actively recruit members (proselytize). Fans use shows like a “bible” to help make decisions in life. Gnosticism, according to Anijar, “diverts our attention away from boring and difficult questions, such as social justice, civic responsibility, the meaning of citizenry, and globalized multinational capital. It is much easier to have faith that something will provide us with answers than to do anything to ameliorate sticky little problems like hunger, homelessness, and poverty.” (Anijar, p. 36) “Star Trek is [also] recall performed as prediction. It disguises the past, repackaging it in the future. In other words, future prognostication literally becomes a thing of the past. We have already seen the future. We have seen the future prescribed, inscribed, and etched into our memory on Star Trek. We know how it will all turn out.” (pp. 194-95) In the meta-narrative, technology saves the world – it is progressive, and there are few if any worries about potentially harmful effects of technology. Gene Roddenberry, the original creator of the series, is held up as having a vision that should be shared. Fans describe this “prophet” as contemporary satirist, social visionary, and futuristic philosopher. He himself nurtured that vision as a marketing tool, writes Anijar. Any inconsistencies in the programs or philosophies are blamed on others who did not get Gene's vision “right.” Finally, Trekdom overlaps with a certain brand of humanism. (In fact the symbols are very alike.) Roddenberry was a secular humanist and contributor to humanist magazines. Still, much of his “vision” grows out of his (fundamentalist) Baptist childhood. Trek “shows that we made it,” past Armageddon and all the problems of society, toward paradise, on earth and beyond. To fulfill the mission and bring Gene's vision to reality, followers profess a “do-good mission,” to spread the news of Trek, and to devote part of their efforts to charity/children's projects. Trek provides a vision of a world of goodness – a vision of hope, combining a morality and a redemption from the prosaic problems embedded in our earth-bound terrain. Trekkie teachers use Trek. They start clubs, assign Trek projects, decorate their classrooms… They ground their beliefs in the recall performed as prediction. Often this is intergenerational – families Trek together. But Trekkers hold a feeling of difference from others, associated with their Gnostic membership: We are normal, we're like everybody else – trekkers feel like others don't see them as normal. For Trekkie teachers, this means only a firmer commitment to recruiting more students and acquaintances to the beauty of the message. For ideology, it means that the normativity of Trek is all-encompassing as the cultural norm and as the constructed outcast abnormal of Trekdom. Here I would have liked more analysis of how the “vision” of Trek is mediated by teachers and the social context of teaching; this may be a separate project, but it would be interesting to use Trek as a vehicle for comprehending more fully the ways in which school cultures and organizational constraints refract and diffract the potential interpretations of a hegemonic discourse. But the power of Anijar's book evolves in its scope beyond the seclusion of Trekkie educators and a textual analysis of Trek media as curriculum. Treknology, Trek cultural norms, and the vision of Trek are found in most of the common assumptions of North American cultural practices. “Treknology” refers to the many forms of technology we now embrace that were imagined first in Trekdom—e.g., cellular phones, and also to the expectations we hold for what technology can do in service of social ills and the eradication of medical illness. The military has gone beyond just being the military. We now have a fusion of Treknology, entertainment, media and military techniques that defy any sense of boundaries. And the curriculum of popular culture supersedes any sense of school curriculum: Bill Clinton [could] tell us we need a bridge to the next millennium, but it's Gene Roddenberry who made us believe without a doubt that we're going to cross that bridge and love it on the other side. And, notably, there aren't any government incentive programs driving Roddenberry's future space nerds. Federation geeks go to Starfleet Academy and sign up for deep-space duty for the most compelling reason of all: because they really want to learn. (Boutin, 1997) Modern warfare is the same discourse as the Trek discourse – a failproof technology with no glitches makes it all about electronic interface. Connections between the department of defense and the entertainment industry are deep and longstanding. Trek made people love technology and space travel. It is NASA's best marketing tool – no wonder there's a Trek wing at the Smithsonian … Roddenberry got awards from NASA…Trek/NASA are fused in so many ways, that so many people see the point of NASA as striving to achieve the vision of Trek. Some Trekkers see NASA as their only hope for the vision. It is in the second half of the book that Anijar's interrogation gets interesting. While others have celebrated Trekdom as resources for political work (Penley 1991; Penley 1997; Jenkins 1992) Anijar dwells importantly on the commodifying elements. Her studies of Klingon as curriculum, the metaphorical link between extraterrestrial (as alien) and noncitizen (as alien), and the all-encompassing machine of assimilation crescendo to a fundamental indictment of a culture that colonizes others, plays out the fears and anxieties of whiteness and domination through othering, and universalizes its narrow vision of liberal equity. Each chapter is a story that uncoils the most blatantly ideological function of trekdom. And Anijar is not afraid to ask us or her informants to phrase multiple and self-skeptical critiques. When creating a new language, Klingon, no one ever brings up a critical perspective on bilingualism or multilingualism. Anijar: “Given the opportunity to act, to speak out, to use Klingon to highlight assumptions concerning language, and surrounding language acquisition, nothing was said … When given the venue to speak, a teacher, a linguist, as an active agent can act in a responsible manner in challenging unjust social practices, but all was quiet on the final frontier. Why bring up bilingualism without connecting it to bilingual issues?” (p. 142) Performing Klingon – role-playing in costume, speaking the language – is a way for people to put themselves in another world, to escape from the everyday. Anijar: Not everyone has the material means to escape into the world of Klingon. Not everyone has the material assets or the leisure time to escape the world of role-playing (in the virtual or hyperreal sense, not in the Goffman-like dramaturgy of roles) or language games expressed in artificial language as an artifice of desire. People are too busy dealing with the politics and materiality in the politics in natural language. For many people, learning English means survival. For many people, second-language acquisition is not a luxury, not an escape, but a necessity in an inhospitable world. (pp. 142-43) Anijar carries us through interesting parallels between how Klingons as “savage others” in Trekdom, and racial and ethnic groups in North America, are received, codified and constructed by the common discourses. The brutal truth is that there is a colonial language hierarchy that works in much the same way as the racial hierarchy. It is not only the uncontested nature of Klingon that is problematic but also the words that Klingon seeks to describe. It is not only the acquisition of Klingon … but also a question of the cultural capital of those who have the time and money to acquire it.” (p. 143) “Klingon gatherings are no different than minstrel shows.” (p. 150) These gatherings are an entry into the whiteness in America: just like minstrel shows were white people “performing” blackness, and thus bonded various “white groups” by their common perception of “not being black,” “performing Klingon (in bodies that are clearly marked) gives politically correct humanists a way to act out their racial anxieties in the face of the other without naming the other, without reverting to overt racism.” (p. 151) In Star Trek, 'species' becomes a signifier for race (in much the same manner as the power of whiteness and the ethno-racial pentagram obscures and confuses ethnicity, race, and social class). So while disclaiming the scientific or social validity of race, Trek and Trekkers reify the construct and the terminology, by transferring the term race into the term species – species whoa re either able to evolve or not able to evolve (indeed, on occasion devolving) to become more like us. Although there are a multiplicity of “races” and “culture” on Earth, in Trek, other planets have only singular species. On the rare occasion that a planet may have more than one species of articulate animal life (usually humanoid), the differing species fight over the planet's resources. Furthermore, the biologically determined view of other “species” in Star Trek reinscribes specific learned attitudes, sterotypes, and behaviors that have developed out of particular historical, economic, and cultural milieus right here on planet Earth.” (p. 154) I have suggested in other contexts that this is all part of the efforts of writers to make things “believable” and “understandable.” Plot necessities and scripted forms of entertainment expectations ideologically constrain the possibilities of commercial entertainment. For it to be “believable” that a girl is interested in mathematics and science, writers create plot lines about her concerns for her appearance and the social problems with her friends. Likewise, Trek plots and character development, even if we take the “vision” of Trek seriously as one to achieve, hold within them their own contradictions as needing to satisfy the expectations and entertainment constraints of their own times. As a product of its historical/social/cultural time, Star Trek reproduces Gene Roddenberry's at-that-time liberal view of multiculturalism, reinscribing colonizing discourses of desire, and mid-twentieth century constructs of pluralism and wisdom. This is the most critical aspect of Anijar's work, in helping us to articulate for many of our students – young people, future teachers, current teachers and others working in education – the creeping imbrications of the metaphorical link between extraterrestrial (as alien) and noncitizen (as alien). Acceptance of Data and the Doctor as life forms: this draws a stark picture of how the alien other is maintained as “species” even as technological hybrids are embraced as “human.” But, more directly, the Borgs are … us! An all-encompassing machine of assimilation: that's what Trek is; but only, I would say, because Trek is part of our cultural moment. And that moment carries with it an anti-multicultural multiculturalism, and an assimilationist dominance of pluralism. “Marvin,” quoted by Anijar: The fact that Voyager and Trek point out that their crewmembers are multicultural is contrary to what Gene Roddenberry wanted. Gene wanted a society that didn't think about race as a factor. That is what we think of and dream of. I don't care if somebody has purple skin with green spots, I do not think about race as a factor in anything that I do or anything that I teach. I want my students to succeed. Nothing more or nothing less. I want them to excel. (p. 210) Anijar responds: Universalism is never universal. At best, it is a transparent fiction that re-produces and recolonizes. Race conflates into ethnicity and reessentializes itself into phenotypical overdetermination. In this social blindness, the categorical is reinscribed. Star Trek, is a pattern card of egalitarian homogeneity, a homogeneity that puts an American accent on universalism. (p. 210) So Marvin is an example of how entrenched the “old-fashioned” multiculturalism can be. Despite the potential of Deep Space Nine and Voyager to confront the earlier images with a post-modern challenge, the result is a strong fundamentalist effort to preserve the purity of Gene's message. Peter McClaren writes in his afterward, “Fed by Roddenberry's imperialist nostalgia, Star Trek became white noise for an entire generation who had been ordered by the United States government to 'go kill gooks' in the jungles of Southeast Asia.” (p. 231) He got Anijar's main point: fearing the diversity within its own population, faced with reconciling the demand of particular groups for the recognition of the equal worth of their own cultures, and forced by the civil rights movement to make democracy accountable to all of its citizens, the culture industry was called upon to intervene and revitalize the glory days of the past. And they did so by teleporting the “wild west” into the future. Joe Kincheloe picks this up in his introduction to the book: he notes the significance of “frontiers” in American ideologies. Kincheloe also notes the easy lesson of hegemony in Trek: Data and Spock are our cognitive models, the ancient Greeks our fount of canonical wisdom; the truncated modernist technicism so often called the “vision” of Star Trek is none other than a simple commentary on contemporary Western notions of human potential. We've heard the story of othering in many places before. But we rarely have a readable account of it that people can read and share. A charming aspect of the research is the author's willingness to “talk back” to her informants. It is important, of course, to respect one's research “subjects,” and it is evident here that Anijar does not disrespect them. But she challenges our envelope of comfort by not just giving voice to those interviewed but also to her own anxieties about what they are saying. She expresses her frustrations in interviews, and we get to share what happened in response. Thus I would recommend the work not only for its content but also for its study as a form of post-modern research. It is a daunting task to place one's curriculum work within a popular consumer context. Most all of us are familiar with Trek and can easily quibble with any particular point she makes. Did she get that episode title exactly right? Did she talk about the slash fans? It would be wrong to read this book as an analysis of Star Trek for teachers. It would be equally inappropriate to read it as journalistic reporting on Trekdom. It is instead a deeply serious contribution to curriculum theory. It situates this theory in a new place – a realm of the popular – in such a way that any reader will be ready to do important curriculum work in response. References Bacon-Smith, Camille. (1992). Enterprising Women: Television fandom and the creation of popular myth. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Barrett, Michelle, and Duncan Barrett. (2000). Star Trek: The human frontier. NY: Routledge. Boutin, Paul. (1997). Trekology – Non-boring technology. Wired. http://www.wired.com/news/technology/1,1282, 8757,00.html Davis, Erik. (1997). Techgnosis. NY: Harmony. Jenkins, Henry. (1992). Textual Poachers: Television fans and participatory culture. NY: Routledge. Jewett, Robert and John S. Lawrence. (1977). The American Monomyth. NY: Doubleday. Penley, Constance. (1991). Brownian Motion: Women, Tactics, and Technology. In Technoculture. Contance Penley and Andrew Ross (eds)., 135-164, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Penley, Constance. (1997). NASA/Trek: Popular Science and sex in America. London: Verso. About the Reviewer Peter Appelbaum Arcadia University Department of Education, 450 South Easton Road, Glenside, PA 19038-3295 Email: Appelbaum@arcadia.edu Peter Appelbaum is Associate Professor of Education at Arcadia University. He teaches mathematics/science/technology education, curriculum theory, and cultural studies. He is the author of Popular Culture, Educational Discourse and Mathematics (SUNY Press) and Multicultural and Diversity Education (ABC-CLIO), and coeditor of (Post) Modern (Science) Education (Peter Lang).