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Jen Seifert, "Ex Post Facto: Progress Through Repetition and Remembering in Star Trek: Voyager" As both a television text and a science fiction narrative, the Star Trek series inhabits and subverts its place in space and time that both encapsulates western constructs of the creation of spaces (through the television screen) and the imposition of linearity of time (a progressive movement forward). A sense of being and meaning is constructed through a relationship with these two structures. What then happens when the illusion of the separateness of these two structures are condensed into the postmodern spacetime? As a linear, progressive narrative, Star Trek: Voyager is unusual in its position within the Star Trek universe. The ship and the crew have been taken out of their own spacetime and placed in alien territory. The linearity and progressiveness of their narrative becomes problematic. The ambiguity of their position is encapsulated in Captain Janeway's constant refrain: "Resume Course". Unlike previous captains, her relationship to space and time fold in upon one another in a profusion of texts that displace anxiety and longing for a past into repetitive structures. Remembering becomes paradoxical as timelines fade and distort. The question remains, which of the many confused timelines, and the spaces they pass through, is privileged? Where does extrapolation end? The "truth" of evolution in postmodernist science fiction is not the progressive movement forward along a certain path; it is a movement out of the slime of creation back into the slime. In a moment of great clarity and confusion, a member of Voyager's crew states: "The present, the past, they're both in the future. The future is the past." In doing so he collapses the concept of the linearity of time into fragments, which require the imposition of a constructing narrative, and broadens the sense of space to encompass all spaces (past, present, and future). Both existence and meaning lose their solid foundation. This both empties the notion of progress of its symptom of tragedy and simultaneously fills it with something else, something horrific that continually slips into the narrative--its very emptiness. Biography: Jen Seifert is a Masters student at Flinders University, Adelaide. Areas of interest incorporate Lacanian psychoanalysis as it relates to film theory and practice. At the moment she is working on her thesis, "Science Fiction ... does not exist: A Lacanian analysis of a genre." |
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