(STAR TREK)² AND THE END OF THE FUTURE
In Philosophy of New Music—a work that discusses the paths taken by European music at the turn from the nineteenth to the twentieth century—Theodor Adorno, in reference to Stravinsky’s compositions, uses the expression “music squared.” He means music that prefers to manipulate historically established forms through procedures such as quotation, parody, and pastiche.
Something similar has been happening to Star Trek in its transition from the twentieth to the twenty-first century. A growing part of contemporary Star Trek is no longer simply fiction projecting a future, but fiction recombining the historical forms of Star Trek itself. The musical, black-and-white noir, animation, puppets, the deliberate recreation of 1960s television: all of this suggests a franchise increasingly conscious of itself as an aesthetic repertoire.
The problem—at least as many fans of the series perceive it—is that all these self-references are somehow merely concealing the show’s declining relevance. Studios, producers, writers, and actors are blamed. But here I would like to explore a different hypothesis: that the crisis of Star Trek is not necessarily artistic or creative, but the result of the disappearance of the historical conditions that once made its utopia believable.
For decades, the series dramatized a relatively clear idea of progress. Humanity would overcome nationalism, poverty, racism, intolerance, and war through science, pluralism, and rational institutions. In a certain sense, the Federation never ceased to be the United States projected into space, but it universalized many of the values postwar America liked to present as its own: individual freedom, equality before the law, diversity, confidence in science, and a regulated international order. The United States is rarely mentioned in the future depicted by Star Trek precisely because it has won so completely: its idealized values have ceased to be merely American and are instead presented as belonging to all humanity—or even as coinciding with those of the Federation and its many intelligent species.
Paradoxically, this confidence in the future allowed for enormous critical freedom. Star Trek could show deranged admirals, violations of rights, immoral decisions by the Federation, or breaches of the Prime Directive without destroying its own utopia. Criticism presupposed a secure normative horizon, a firm Federation consensus around a core of non-negotiable principles.
The Arrow of History
TNG occupies an especially revealing historical position. It began in 1987, passed through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, and ended in 1994, precisely when the idea was gaining strength in the West that liberal democracy, economic integration, and institutional rationality represented the general direction of history. The Federation provided the popular imagination with the endpoint of that arrow.
Even when the Picard of this era does not know exactly what to do, he is very sure of the kind of civilization he represents. Aboard the Enterprise there is research, concerts, meetings, medical examinations, equipment maintenance, and poker games. An atmosphere of collaboration and purpose prevails. Not every week does someone have to save the galaxy. And this is not merely narrative filler. Part of the utopia consists precisely in competent people working within institutions worthy of their trust.
But who, in the twenty-first century, still believes in institutions—or in the arrow? And Star Trek, after all, is a dramatization of the future of the United States, a nation that increasingly seems to feel that it has lost its former greatness. It is fair to say that belief in the future of the world as an improved version of the American liberal order is far less secure today.
The arrow has disappeared. And Star Trek was, to a considerable extent, fiction about that arrow. Deep Space Nine still subjected Federation values to extreme tests. Its question was: will these values survive when they become too costly? Today the question has changed: what if the institutions themselves are fraudulent? In twentieth-century Star Trek, if the Federation was betrayed, there was moral tension. But if the Federation is merely another structure of domination, we can almost applaud those who betray it. Deconstruction may end up eliminating the very point of reference that once made criticism meaningful.
Let us consider how the weakening of historical teleology in Star Trek has affected some of its recent productions.
Picard: From Philosopher-King to Postmodern Subject
The Picard of TNG is almost a Platonic philosopher-king in liberal form: cultivated, rational, self-controlled, morally confident, and invested with authority by an institution that, in principle, deserves trust. His personality seems to be the result of education, discipline, and conviction. He is a representation of future humanity.
In Picard, this figure is reinterpreted. The character is explained less through his principles than through an intimate genealogy of trauma, guilt, and repression. His emotional reserve, once easily understood as choice, temperament, or dedication to a vocation, is now rooted in a difficult childhood—of a kind that would once have seemed almost impossible in a more mature era of human civilization. Picard is no longer entirely transparent to himself: he must discover why he became the person he is.
The Enlightenment subject exits the stage; the postmodern subject enters. In the former, reason, identity, and will tend to coincide. In the latter, the self appears as the result of forces that consciousness cannot fully grasp. The character ceases to be master of himself and becomes, in part, the effect of his own history.
In TNG, subject, institution, and history formed a unity: Picard was rational, the Enterprise was functional, and the Federation represented a recognizable direction of human progress. In Picard, all three become uncertain. The subject is traumatized, the institution is morally suspect, and the future no longer appears to possess a secure direction. Twentieth-century Picard was explained by the collective future. The new Picard is explained by his individual past.
Jean-Luc Picard changed because our culture could no longer conceive of him as he once was. When we can no longer explain the subject through the world we hope to build, we are left to explain him through what happened to him. The philosopher-king now needs therapy too.
Discovery and the New Middle Ages
There is something medieval about the distant future presented in Star Trek: Discovery. Not because the thirty-second century is technologically backward, but because its historical imagination is that of a world existing after the collapse of a great order. The Federation appears diminished, fragmented, and almost transformed into a memory. Former members have departed, routes have been severed, local powers have occupied abandoned spaces, and Federation symbols are preserved like relics of a better age. The character Sahil is a kind of monk who spends decades waiting for the Federation to return.
The very historical concept of the Middle Ages was constructed retrospectively as an interval between Antiquity and a modernity that believed itself to be recovering and surpassing the past. Discovery’s thirty-second century seems to occupy a similar position: it exists between the memory of a lost Federation and the hope of its reconstruction. Discovery complicates the elementary progressivism of Star Trek, because progress and regression no longer coincide neatly with future and past. The thirty-second century possesses vastly superior technology, yet its political organization has regressed. It falls to the crew of the Discovery, arriving from almost a thousand years earlier, to remind the future of what it has forgotten. The direction of the arrow is reversed. The very idea of progress thus becomes restorationist. To advance is to recover: a characteristic of religious feeling.
Federation principles cease to emerge as the rational result of historical development and begin to function instead as a tradition that must be preserved through an age of dispersal. Characters from the past become bearers of a forgotten orthodoxy. Even science participates in this re-enchantment. Discovery retains the scientific vocabulary of the franchise, but frequently brings science, emotion, and cosmic forces together in an almost magical fashion. Mycelial networks connect reality; emotional states can have galactic consequences; connection and empathy acquire an almost ontological dimension.
Discovery is commonly perceived—and often attacked—as the most “woke” version of Star Trek, because of its emphasis on diversity, identity, inclusion, and representation. Yet its historical imagination is less progressive than it first appears. The thirty-second century does not present a social order qualitatively superior to the old Federation, but rather a civilization living through the glorification of a lost past. The result is a combination of identitarian progressivism and historical conservatism: a series that expands who may belong to the Federation ideal, but can no longer imagine a political ideal beyond the one inherited from the past.
Prodigy: Utopia or Fairy Tale?
In *Prodigy*, the old confidence in the Federation has not disappeared. But its intended audience has changed. What *TNG* presented to adults as a possible future form of society is now explicitly presented as formative material for children. This can generously be understood as an attempt at cultural reconstruction. But there is another, less comfortable possibility. Perhaps contemporary culture can still tell children that science, cooperation, and institutions are good, while no longer being able to tell adults, with the same confidence, that these principles constitute the destiny of History.
Utopia has been infantilized, displaced into a space where it can continue to be affirmed without fully confronting the cynicism and suspicion now demanded of contemporary adult fiction. When utopia no longer seems like a serious description of the future of adults, it may survive as a fairy tale.
The End of the Future
The nostalgia provoked by Star Trek may not be merely nostalgia for older series or for the viewer’s own youth. It is also nostalgia for an era in which it seemed possible to imagine the twenty-fourth century. Today, the United States seems less certain that its model represents the future of the world and, perhaps even more decisively, less certain of its own future. This places Star Trek in a difficult position.
Naively reaffirming the old Federation no longer seems viable for an adult audience. Yet to deconstruct it completely would mean abandoning what made the franchise distinctive in the first place. A third possibility remains: to transform Star Trek into repertoire. It is at this point that Adorno’s expression ceases to be merely a witty analogy. "Star Trek squared" may be the cultural form assumed by a utopia after the society that produced it has lost confidence in the direction of history.
In the twentieth century, Star Trek asked how we would live once we reached the future. Today, it asks what we can still do with the images produced when we believed that such a future existed. This is not merely the end of Star Trek as we knew it, but the end of the future that made Star Trek possible.
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