Volume 6, Issue 4, Summer 2003

"Service Guarantees Citizenship": The Generation of Criticism in a Postmodern Public Sphere
Michael Calvin McGee, Carol Corbin, Geoffrey Klinger

"This is your world now. Thought is real. Physical is the illusion. Ironic, huh?"

~Albert
What Dreams May Come

In his monumental Truth and Method, Hans-Georg Gadamer comments on the relationship between a "picture" and its "original." He writes, "The relation of the picture to the original is basically quite different from what it is to a copy. It is no longer a one-sided relationship" (124). The picture develops a life of its own which requires "an essential modification, almost a reversal of the ontological relationship of original and copy if the picture is an element of 'representation' and thus has its own ontological status. The picture then has an independence that also affects the original" (125).¹

We live in a world that is constantly mediated and driven by images. Such a world demands, as Gadamer observes, a newly configured understanding of reality and representation, of ontology and epistemology. Lyotard contends that since the nineteenth century, structural transformations have irrevocably altered "the game rules for science, literature, and the arts" (xxiii). These transformations have prompted Foucault to declare:

The space of order, which served as a common place for representation and for things, for empirical visibility and for the essential rules, which united the regularities of nature and the resemblances of imagination in the grid of identities and differences, which displayed the empirical sequence of representations in a simultaneous table, and made it possible to scan step by step, in accordance with logical sequence, the totality of nature's elements thus rendered contemporaneous with one another—this pace of order is from now on shattered. (239)

We believe that one of the consequences of this transformation is that it forces us to either change our notion of what is material, or admit that there is nothing material in history. When we take the former path, each narrative becomes an item of the past and we treat it as if it were a material phenomenon—an actual set of events and structurations that had the power of causation. If, on the other hand, we take the latter path, then history cannot be material at all, but is instead a fiction, and the attempt to collect all of the perspectives is an unfulfillable romantic, serendipitous dream.

We seek to reconfigure our understanding of materiality and, subsequently, social and critical agency, through a network of four terms—past, history, present, and genealogy. In the course of our investigation, we hope to outline critical and rhetorical space outside of history, outside of neoclassical ontology, and outside of traditional scholarship. We choose Robert A. Heinlein's, Starship Troopers as a text that illustrates our approach to these important issues.²

From History to Genealogy: A Theory of Generations

Foucault comments on the relationship between the historical method and modernity: "From the nineteenth century, History was to deploy, in a temporal series, the analogies that connect distinct organic structures to one another. This same History will also, progressively, impose its laws on the analysis of production, the analysis of organically structured beings, and, lastly, on the analysis of linguistic groups" (219). Historical understandings became the norm that ordered knowledge. To understand an issue, one had to first understand its history. Such a move seems benign enough, but we recognize, as does Foucault, that it involves significant consequences:

The difficulty of apprehending the network that is able to link together such diverse investigations as attempts to establish a taxonomy and microscopic observations; the necessity of recording as observed facts the conflicts between those who were fixists and those who were not, or between the experimentalists and the partisans of the system; the obligations to divide knowledge into two interwoven fabrics when in fact they were alien to one another . . . ; and above all the application of categories that are strictly anachronistic in relation to this knowledge. (127)

In his study of morals, Nietzsche arrives at the same point. He recognizes that "we need a critique of moral values, the value of these values themselves must first be called in question" (20). The presupposition that one finds historical evidence to justify the primacy of one value over another demonstrates the consequences of the historical method. When proceeding with this method, a critic attempts to make the past, imbued as it is with inherently dichotomous thinking, relevant to present circumstances. Significantly, this "democratic prejudice in the modern world toward all questions of origin" can create "mischief . . . especially to morality and history" (28).⁴ Further, such oppositional thinking "has permeated the realm of the spirit and disguised itself in the most spiritual forms to such a degree that today it has forced its way, has acquired the right to force its way into the strictest, apparently most objective sciences" (78).

We share with Nietzsche a skeptical approach to the historical method and advance a genealogical alternative.⁵ To elucidate our position, we first need to better understand the meaning and interplay among our primary network of terms—past, history, present, and genealogy. Importantly, we distinguish "the past" from "history." The former is more the sum total of that which has happened—the wars, the famines, the depressions, the babies, the praxis of the everyday. In contrast, we use the word "history" to refer to the narrativization of "the past" which means selecting those bits and pieces from the past that the historian finds significant. History is always a story of what happened from a particular perspective written in such a way as to accomplish some purpose. As Nietzsche recognizes, we are intentionally and consciously reproducing the past for the purpose of either simply entertaining ourselves, or guiding our actions.

The pejorative understanding of terms like past, present, or future, usually involves the assumption of temporality. We maintain, however, that terms like "the present" are not merely temporal, but material states. The present of an 80-year old man is different than the present of a teenager. Different experiences and memories create two remarkably different "presents." So what makes "a present" is not the same for all of us, it is not fixed, and it is not certain. Generations are bound through their shared presents, which involve the recollection of shared experiences through collective memory.⁶ To facilitate communication between generations, and we do believe that communication is the key to draw generations together, each group must come to contextualize problems in the same structurational set, or what Lyotard called the "collective imaginary." We focus on the place where imagination becomes "real," where it achieves the ontological state of being that marks it as something material.

Genealogy is a unique way of approaching the past, one that differs significantly from the historical approach. One key difference between the two approaches is the starting point of the procedure in each. With history, critics always jump back to some imaginary point of origin, and from that point of origin they trace causes and effects back toward the present position. With genealogy, on the other hand, critics start with themselves, and trace their genealogical roots backwards. Genealogy starts in the present and organizes materials of the past in a more disciplined way than history. The starting point of history is always variable. It depends on the interests and the inclinations of the particular historian who writes the narrative, and it tends to reinforce the claim that the historian advances.⁷ Instead of starting in the past and working to the point of present action, the genealogist begins with the present and works back. The genealogical approach changes the approach to the past. The past no longer becomes constraining, but a trope—and nothing more—that can be used in approaching present day problems.

We believe that the genealogical approach helps us understand the living matter, the living memory, the living person and that within the living there is a need for cross-generational communication, and persuasion, and identification. As we note above, genealogy cannot be understood as a temporal phenomenon. Living in "a present" involves not merely growing older, but freezing your psychological mindset, freezing your take on the ideology, freezing your take on society and culture in a particular portion or fragment of your life.⁸ For us, the ballyhoo surrounding the "generation gap" is a very real problem--and possibility—rooted in a radical reinterpretation of traditional approaches to ontological inquiry.⁹

The boundaries of a generation are created not from shared time, but shared experience. As Ortega notes, "Age, then, is not a date, but a 'zone of dates'" (470. Now assuredly there are significant differences between individuals within generations, but insofar as individual identity is the product of social construction, individuals within generations share experience within similar structural and symbolic systems. Thus, even seeing a generation as a biological entity misses the point. As Ortega notes, "A generation is an integrated manner of existence, or, if you prefer, a fashion in living" (45). Thus, "at any given moment a generation is one and the same thing as human life" (67). Moreover, the "'spirit of the times' has a peculiar character not possessed by the world of individual beliefs" (39).¹⁰ As such, a generation is not a collective of individuals, but a marker for human experience. The "greatest influence which the spirit of the times . . . exerts on each individual life is exercised not by the simple fact of being there . . . but because the greater portion of my world, of my beliefs, arises out of that collective repertory, and coincides with its contents" (39-40).

In the historical approach, the key to trans-generational communication lies in telling a history and imposing that history on younger generations, feeding it to them as part of their schooling, giving it to them as a premise that cannot be denied, giving it to them as a certainty that is irrefutable. A genealogical approach involves the regeneration of a living testament, a recuperation of a "presence" through someone with direct experience. Genealogy seeks explanation of present circumstances rather than relying on fictional historical accounts to do the same. Humans have to understand their present plight, their present circumstance well enough in order to make a wise decision among a universe of possible actions. Genealogy works backwards, it is concerned with an urgency, an exigency, a need to act in some way, a problem to be solved. It is concerned less with fictional possibility, per se, but with possibility that immediately can be resolved into political praxis.

Hermeneutic Ontology, Representation, and Rhetorical Praxis

We return to an issue that we touch on above. The turn to genealogy and generations involves a far more fundamental question than simply a choice of method. It requires that we address the dilemma regarding the status of the real and the material. That issue takes us back to Gadamer and his explanation of a hermeneutic ontology. Significantly, Gadamer discusses language as a horizon in developing his theory of the same (397-447). Gadamer earlier demonstrates that shifting structural forces in our world demand a refashioning of traditional ontology. As the material of our world changes, so must our approach to understanding this material.

With modernity, reality was something that one turned to for verification. Reality was not something that was subject to critique, deconstruction, or negotiation. Something was real or it was not. In the postmodern condition reality is not precisely up for a vote, but it is assuredly negotiable. Lyotard concurs: "Modernity, in whatever age it appears, cannot exist without a shattering of belief and without discovery of the 'lack of reality' of reality, together with the invention of other realities" (77). Indeed, Baudrillard contends that "it is now impossible to isolate the process of the real, or to prove the real" and, subsequently, "every principle of meaning is absorbed, every deployment of the real is impossible" (41, 65).¹¹ Foucault discusses the consequences of this transformation in an extended passage:

What came into being with Adam Smith, with the first philologists, with Jussieu, Vicq d'Azyr, or Lamarck, is a minuscule but absolutely essential displacement, which toppled the whole of Western thought: representation has lost the power to provide a foundation—with its own being, its own deployment and its power of doubling over on itself—for the links that can join its various elements together. No composition, no decomposition, no analysis into identities and differences can now justify the connection of representations one to another. (238-39)

Industrial photography and cinema will be superior to painting and the novel whenever the objective is to stabilize the referent, to arrange it according to a point of view which endows it with recognizable meaning, to reproduce the syntax and vocabulary which enable the addressee to decipher images and sequences quickly, and so to arrive easily at the consciousness of his own identity as well as the approval which he therefore receives from others--since the structures of images and sequences constitute a communication code among all of them. (Lyotard 74)

The traditional critique of this position maintains that illusions are tantamount to anarchy, moral relativism, or solipsism. Indeed, this historical critique is over two millennia old. We must consider the possibility that illusions might take us to places good places, and that illusions have in many ways become our reality. We understand that this is not an entirely contemporary observation. One finds similar articulations regarding the confluence of representation, image, and power in the discourses of Isocrates, ¹⁴ in the writing of Machiavelli, ¹⁵ and in the modern political theory of Hobbes. ¹⁶ As McLuhan notes above, however, recent changes in media technology have substantially changed these relationships. The postmodern condition, which Lyotard hesitatingly calls nascent modernity, creates an unusual and unique combination of structure, image, discourse, and power (79).

To better understand the issues embedded in our analysis above, we turn to the theory of representation. Representation not only means that advocates re-present something semiotically as a sign, it also means that they are representing as in a representative assembly. So representation, especially in a liberal state, always already has a political cast to it. You do not simply make a film, or tell a story, you make a representation, and in so doing, you represent someone, some group, some cause, or some history. Now Foucault claims above that we live in a situation, overrun with representation, where there is no way to justify the connection between representations. Given their inextricable relations with politics and power, however, representations can and should be connected to one another. To leave this space unchallenged, to cede this ground, runs the risk of permanent unpopular control of our primary storytelling, and reality making mechanisms. Representation is inextricably linked, we believe, to political praxis, which can best be understood from a rhetorical perspective.

Our focus on praxis, on present and everyday action, shifts critical attention from history to contemporary circumstance. Our focus on praxis also reinvigorates connections with rhetoric, given its emphasis on the intentional use of language as symbolic action.¹⁷ Thus, our quest is hermeneutic, as we suggest above, which is linked to the very issues of representation, rhetoric, and understanding. In his book Communicative Praxis and The Space of Subjectivity, Calvin Schrag turns to rhetoric explicitly to address the issue of critical agency (179-196). Michael Hyde and Craig Smith recognize the same point: "From the hermeneutical situation originates the primordial function of rhetoric . . . [which is] to 'make-known' meaning both to oneself and to others. Meaning is derived by a human being in and through the interpretive understanding of reality. Rhetoric is the process of making-known that meaning" (347-48). ¹⁸

With the necessary connections in hand, we turn now to our text to illustrate our approach and, we hope, to recapture critical agency through the stimulation of rhetorical praxis.

Starship Troopers as Ideological Reconstruction

One reviewer of Paul Verhoeven's cinematic reinterpretation of Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers commented, "Like Star Wars, it's ground zero for a new generation of thrill seekers." Perhaps unwittingly, this reviewer broadly summarizes our theoretical approach to this film. Starship Troopers is a story that recreates traditional ideological conflict. The Federation represents an interesting hybrid of liberal and fascist ideologies, while the Arachnids, a hive-like, alien collective, represent communism.¹⁹ The story, driven by historical reinterpretation while making use of the narrative flexibility afforded the future-oriented science fiction genre, quite literally is ground zero, ontologically and otherwise, for a new generation insofar as they have no direct experience with the fascism of World War II. This creates, we believe, a troublesome situation because there are no "truth" or "validity" principles, rooted in generational experience, that can check dangerous representations of fascism.²⁰

We believe that Starship Troopers is a dangerous text insofar as it presents key elements of fascism as palatable, even desirable. There is no attempt to disguise the reference to fascism in terms of the uniforms that are the uniforms of WWII Germany—they are gray in colour, their military emblems that designate rank are pretty clearly reminiscent of the SS symbols, the ever present logo of the Federation is very reminiscent of the swastika. We are especially interested in the ways that the four main characters, whom we believe represent teenage consciousness, become invested in the state, like Hitler's Youth.²¹ We are also interested in the ways that these characters are inculcated to fascist ideology, such as the prerequisite of military service for citizenship. This film allows us to understand the militaristic component of fascism.

One of the more interesting conflations in the film is the relationship between the military and the educational system. Rasczak, originally the teacher in the film, returns to the story as the military lieutenant leading the corps of "roughnecks" into battle. In his History and Moral Philosophy course, he essentially works though an elaborate persuasive campaign for military service, which guarantees citizenship.²² Indeed, later in his lecture he equates the right to vote, which only citizens can exercise, with political authority, force, and violence. He concludes, "naked force has resolved more issues throughout history than any other factor."²³ Significantly, it seems, the Federal government is conflated with the military, whose political authority seems assumed in all aspects of life.

A related fascistic element of the film is the way in which civilians are compared to citizens. Civilians seem indifferent, bloated, and parasitic, whereas citizens are self-sacrificing and worthy of rewards, such as the right to vote. When questioned about the moral difference between a citizen and a civilian in Rasczak's course, Rico replies, "the citizen accepts personal responsibility for the safety of the body politic defending it with his life." The conclusion, of course, is that military life is preferable to civilian life since military "service guarantees citizenship."

In the film, the director uses the arachnids as a representation of a metaphor that humans have always invoked during times of war. In this case the representation is used to dehumanize an alien collective, which we note above is a metaphor for Communist ideology. It is an expanding metaphor that folds back upon itself. The insect collective, about which we receive only imagological glimpses, seems careless of an individualistic human society, it employs a variety of fantastical weapons, it respects only nuclear threats, and it is organized by its "brains," which are surreptitiously hidden. There are claims throughout the film that dehumanize the arachnids. After the attack on Buenos Aeries, the Federal Network claimed, "The only good bug is a dead bug." In a later scene, upon finding a dead soldier with his brain manipulated then devoured by arachnids, Rasczak decried the "dirty bugs." And when the military finally discovered an arachnid "brain," the first contact with this creature was, "you are one of those big, fat, smart bugs."

The possibility of negotiation, of rhetoric, only occurs near the end of the film when we learn that the arachnids are, in fact, sentient. Earlier, humans only knew the arachnids directly through their fighter drones, which simply blindly attack, overwhelming the humans with their size, number, and resilience. When the humans learn that they have the ability to communicate with the arachnids, at least telepathically, the celebration is not about the possibility of communication, but the realization of a new power to intimidate. When asked what the brain bug was thinking, Carl, who was then working for military intelligence, replied, "Its afraid." This response led to wild cheers from the Troopers. The arachnids' twin weaknesses were that they could think, and that they could feel fear. Indeed, that was the premise of the newly appointed skymarshal's strategic plan: "to fight the bug, we must understand the bug." To that end, once the Federation captured a brain bug, the Federal Network proudly proclaimed: "Federal scientists work around the clock to probe its secrets. Once we understand it, we will defeat it."²⁴

Starship Troopers focuses on the interaction of three contrasting and yet unified characters who illustrate the appeal of the federal service. The young hero who is not good at math, who is a star football player with all the moves, whose strengths are of body, and who fights for and rises within the mobile infantry. We have another the young man whose strengths are extraordinary, most notably his telepathy, which he uses with drive and cunning. And the young woman whose strengths are of both mind and body. She has the technical capacity to fly a huge starship with confidence, and the physical dexterity to maneuver it through tight places. Driven like the others, she seems consistently focused on the action in front of her. Significantly, we believe that the confluence of these characteristics—of mind and body—are essential to the fascist system. Yet these characters and their relationships are humanized just enough to make them appealing, which is the dangerous aspect of the text insofar as its consumers are concerned. Their actions become ordinary, usual, expected, and banal. Killing the bugs, destroying the enemy, committing to war, these are presented as natural human reflexes, which history is used to verify.²⁵

The Nazi symbolism in the film is associated with the romantic human characters. Perhaps one of the reasons why we find and allow this narrative conflation is because younger generations do not remember fascism; they do not remember Hitler. The question for the critic becomes: why do younger generations not remember Hitler? Because Hitler has no relevance to their present. And the people for whom he has presence either are being ignored, or are being ineffective in their attempt to communicate the relevance of that presence for younger people today.

This creates, as we maintain above, a dangerous situation.²⁶ It opens the door for the possibility of a rearticulation of fascism. We must remember that fascism arose in the void created by economic collapse. Contemporary political and economic circumstances recreate the fascistic possibility by changing the contours of political and economic relations. Indeed, political and economic boundaries are largely becoming anachronistic and irrelevant. Power is becoming consolidated, and the possibility of controlling that power is increasing. Almost instantaneously and randomly, nationalism can become an important force in a community, it can reemerge like a boil. Indeed, fascism has already shown its ability to adapt to different conditions in spatial and historical ways. Fascism has arisen in cultures as different as Japan, Germany, Italy, Argentina, and Brazil. So fascism has shown its ability to deal with different nationalisms, different national histories, different racial and ethnic mixes.

Thomas Jefferson once wrote, "Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." We believe that films like Starship Troopers demonstrate the need for increasing critical vigilance. Specifically, critics should be more attentive to the banal methods through which the narrative reached its target audience—teenage America—namely, its marketing as an action-adventure film, an "action packed, thrill-ride," and as a science fiction film, the "next Star Wars." We believe that its political and ideological content, which is not made obvious on the surface, needs to be made manifest and we need to pay attention to how the technology and both the action-adventure and science fiction story lines integrate the ideological narrative, as well. And we also need to understand the connection between that articulation within the film and the articulation of politics in our everyday lives so that we understand in what sense this film is a representation of contemporary human experience. Importantly, we do not believe that the issue is whether or not film critics can and will take the film to task, but whether film critics can affect everyday praxis, the actual means of production, by becoming or advising a film maker to do a film that responds to Starship Troopers, that contests the space of its representation, that contests the story that it makes, that makes a political contest out of this reconstruction.

Our challenge, then, is not to deconstruct the fictional and historical accounts embedded in the narrative structure of the film, but to contest the narrative on its own terms, genealogically, through the use of different representations. Lyotard focuses our attention to this end: the question is not are we telling stories, the question is are we telling the right stories? We must contest this film on the level of representation because this is where our target audience lives. McLuhan and Fiore recognize this important point:

The young today live mythically and in depth. But they encounter instruction in situations organized by means of classified information—subjects are unrelated, they are visually conceived in terms of a blueprint. Many of our institutions suppress all the natural direct experience of youth, who respond with untaught delight to the poetry and the beauty of the new technological environment, the environment of popular culture. (100)

Since we frame our essay by considering the possibility of illusions and dreams, we choose to close on the same point. In The Wanderer and His Shadow, Friedrich Nietzsche writes:

On the rare occasions when our dreams succeed and achieve perfection—most dreams are bungled—they are symbolic chains of scenes and images in place of a narrative poetic language; they circumscribe our experiences or expectations or situations with such poetic boldness and decisiveness that in the morning we are always amazed at ourselves when we remember our dreams. We use up too much artistry in our dreams—and therefore often are impoverished during the day. (194)

We hope that this project has begun the long and arduous task of recovering critical agency and human artistry through an awareness of a genealogical alternative to contemporary criticism. And in so doing, we hope that we have been able to play a small part in shaping an ethical human community, one which boldly confronts critical issues that continue to burden the everyday human condition.

Works Cited & Endnotes

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