So you think the events of Destiny and the repercussions of that level of destruction should be what, glossed over never to be mentioned?
How about a Borg series?
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So you think the events of Destiny and the repercussions of that level of destruction should be what, glossed over never to be mentioned?
But talking about things and not showing them was a hallmark of TNG, because of their budgetary constraints. They talked a big game about the Battle of Wolf 359 in BoBW, as well, but didn't show it.
The word 'assimilation' is extremely loaded, particularly here in the southern hemisphere, where it was literally the word for the policy regarding the incorporation of the cultures that British rule sought to replace. To quote:
I find it difficult to believe that this term was used by the author unknowingly (as in, I believe the Borg are meant to be an analogue for British colonialism- a large, unthinking set of rules and structures that does not care about your individuality or your culture, it will take what you have and make you fit in with it), but even if it was, that does not change the power of the metaphor.
Under that metaphor, Seven is the child who was taken away from her natural parents to be raised by parents who were not her own. This is, again, a policy that was enacted repeatedly here in Australia- indigenous children were removed from their families to be raised by white families so that they would be more like white people.
http://www.australianstogether.org.au/stories/detail/the-stolen-generations
But some children did not remember their parents. Some were taken as babies and only ever thought of themselves as white, until they learned later that they were not. Under the metaphor, this would be Hugh/the baby from 'Q Who?'/the drones who were so quick to follow Lore.
If the Borg were a metaphor for colonialism, which I think they were, and 'assimilation' was a metaphor for assimilation, which I think it was, then you don't need to 'show' Borg forcibly converting people beyond Picard. You just need to set up the connection and let the imagination horribly play itself out. TNG did this all the time. I don't think you need to run circles explaining that sometimes the Borg 'grew' babies naturally and sometimes they stole them. The far easier continuity explanation is that the baby the crew saw in Q Who had just been stolen. But presupposing that Riker's supposition in Q Who was correct and the Borg do grow babies from scratch, then you have 'natural born' British people and 'assimilated' British people. And then you've got those Borg who started a revolt against the crown, I wonder who they were a metaphor for?
As a history major, I'm well aware of the impact of the term "assimilation" to people in colonized parts of the world. But that meaning wouldn't necessarily be perceived by an American television writer, since we Americans tend to exist in our own culturally insular bubble and often don't have a clue how the rest of humanity perceives things.
It's easy to look back on something that's already complete and project an after-the-fact understanding on it, to try to read the entire thing through that same perspective. But in series television, concepts are invented and evolved as they go. You can't assume that the form they ultimately took is the same as what the original creators intended.
And the concept of the Borg was obviously in flux throughout TNG. Originally, in "Q Who," Q stated explicitly that the Borg had zero interest in living beings, that they only cared about technology. The drones in that episode completely ignored the crew until the crew obstructed their examination of the ship's systems. But that was too impersonal to generate plots for later episodes, since drama is intrinsically about people. So the very next time the Borg appeared, in "The Best of Both Worlds," they now had a different MO -- they took Picard and turned him into one of them, as a "spokesman" to interface with the authority-driven society they planned to absorb. Which never made a damn bit of sense to me, even from the start -- why should they care about the society or the authority structure, when they have the power to just take what they want? It wasn't about any kind of colonization metaphor. It was about needing an excuse to put the star of the show in personal danger, because that's how you write action-adventure stories. They needed to have Picard taken by the Borg, but they also needed him to survive it, and so they needed an excuse for why the Borg would take him alive. The whole "You are an authority-oriented race so we took your authority figure to convince you to accept assimilation" justification was just a clumsy excuse for that dramatic contrivance -- and indeed a self-contradictory one, given that the same episode also portrayed Picard's assimilation as something that needed a specific justification and was therefore not routine.
So the idea of assimilation served a purpose in BOBW, to an extent -- but TNG never used the idea of assimilation again, not until First Contact. And that's because it wasn't the consistent, preplanned allegorical statement you suggest. They started out with a dramatically weak and limited idea -- a completely impersonal force of nature that it was hard to get more than one plot out of -- and then had to tweak and adjust it to find new ways to keep it viable. So the concept evolved over time as they tried different angles. At first, assimilation was just a roundabout excuse to put the star of the show in jeopardy, but once FC came along, they realized they could get more story and more drama out of it by turning the Borg into space zombies, into the kind of monster that could endanger everyone's identity, not just Picard's. That made them the kind of personal threat they hadn't been on TNG, and so that was when they achieved their mature form as a concept, the version of the Borg that was consistently used from then on and supplanted the TNG version as the standard in our minds.
As I said, the intention of the author is entirely secondary (see: Barthes). That's always been the power of metaphor in Star Trek- it doesn't have to 'mean' one thing. What was a metaphor for Vietnam in the 60s can become a metaphor for drone warfare in 2015- clearly not the intention of the author, but equally apt. I do not know, or consider it to be relevant, whether Michael Piller intended the Borg/assimilation to be a metaphor for colonialism. I do know that it is one. Some future generation may look back and see it as a metaphor for something else- that's up to them.
I think it can be very dangerous, and possibly both offensive and presumptuous, to take someone else's work and claim that it's a metaphor for something they never explicitly intended it to be a metaphor for.
It's one thing to say "One way one could look at this is..." It's another to say "This is clearly a metaphor for..."
It's one thing to say "One way one could look at this is..." It's another to say "This is clearly a metaphor for..."
I've honestly never heard this before. I always thought the author's intention was one of the most important things when it came to working out these kinds of metaphors. Like DonIago said, you can see different things in it if you want, but I wouldn't think that wouldn't mean that is what it is.
Well, I mean, it is heavily debated. But I think one of the cornerstones of postmodernism is the understanding that once an author has finished a work and released it into the world, they have lost control of it, and the audience interpretation takes over. I think Roddenberry must have known this, as an author, I think that is 'baked in' to Trek, the idea that the metaphors are flexible, multi-purpose, open to interpretation- I think that's why, with a couple of glaring exceptions, it feels timeless, and has stood the test of time, because each new generation brings a new reading to it.
So let's say someone saw, say, The Matrix, and saw it as a tale about empowerment, and breaking free from the system, and that understanding on their behalf spoke to them and caused them to change their life in some positive way, break out of a repetitive pattern they had found themselves in (I should say, this part is not even hypothetical- more than one person views The Matrix in precisely this way).
Now let's say that, many years later they met one of the creators and said: "I loved the message of empowerment behind The Matrix so much, it really changed my life." and the creator they spoke to said: "But that wasn't the message I intended. It was actually meant to be about the power of corporations and how we shouldn't buy coke."
Is the message the first person took away from the film 'offensive', 'dangerous' or 'presumptuous'? If you have to go to a creator and ask them to explain their work, didn't they fail?
Actually, just read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_the_Author
I did say can be.
I think reader interpretation is just that, and that readers should recognize that that's all it is, and that unless they know what the author's intentions were they may be wildly off in their analysis.
Why do you have to go to a creator? If you like your interpretation, rock on. If you want to know more about the piece, try to find out more. But if you don't know the creator's interpretation, don't make claims such as, "It's obviously a story about..."
Opinions should not be presented as facts.
I think reader interpretation is just that, and that readers should recognize that that's all it is, and that unless they know what the author's intentions were they may be wildly off in their analysis.
Why do you have to go to a creator? If you like your interpretation, rock on. If you want to know more about the piece, try to find out more. But if you don't know the creator's interpretation, don't make claims such as, "It's obviously a story about..."
Opinions should not be presented as facts.
The phrase "this is a metaphor about X", when used in literary criticism, isn't meant to mean "the creator meant this to be a metaphor about X", but rather "the text can be cogently read when taking this to be a metaphor about X". The fact that art is subjective is assumed.
And where did Destructor make any of the stronger phrasings you're talking about? Where did they say "it's clearly about" or "it's obviously about" or anything of that manner? I don't see anywhere where they did the thing you're telling them not to do in the first place.
I'll focus on one of the many arguments on "Death of the Author" here; there are other ways to put it forward such as recontextualization or art being a relationship between artist and audience, but this is one of the more straightforward ones. Bradbury insisted until the day he died that Fahrenheit 451 said nothing at all about censorship, that it was entirely about the way the rise of television would diminish the art of reading. And yet it is about censorship, in the sense that that reading is almost more clear than Bradbury's intended reading, that to many readers it's the first most obvious theme running through the book even without prompting. It is literally about the government destroying books and promoting a preferred form of media in order to pacify the population, after all. It's spelled out right on the page. It's there even if Bradbury didn't mean for it to be.
What an author means for a work to be is never the entirety of what their work is, unless you assume that all creative acts are purely conscious and intentional, that an author can put nothing into a creation but what they specifically chose through deliberate act to put into it. But no one has such a thorough understanding of their own self, of their underlying motives, of the impact of their society on their self and how the context of their environment, upbringing, and culture has biased their own perspective. And since no one, not even the author themselves, can speak to the entirety of what that author put into their creation, no one can honestly say with authority that something for which there is a valid argument of being presented by a text isn't actually in that text, even the author themselves. The only truly reliable evidence for whether an interpretation is present in a text is that text itself, irrespective of anything beyond it. And the same can be said for any creative product, because a creative product is so personal a creation.
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And that's not what I'm talking about. You're talking about how a viewer can read metaphorical meaning into a work after the fact. I'm speaking from a historical perspective about the mechanics of the creative process and the way the concept of the Borg developed over time. My angle of analysis is not "wrong" just because it's different from yours. Both approaches have value, but they're meant to apply to different things, and it's a mistake to think that one can be used in place of the other rather than as a complement to it. There's plenty of room for any creative work to be approached from multiple different perspectives, and it takes an openness to all those perspectives to really understand a thing.
Are we talking about cola-flavored soft drinks, cocaine, or coal that's had the volatiles distilled out of it?
Tolkien once wrote that he detested the idea of intentional allegory, and the insinuation that he'd intended his various Middle Earth works as allegory, and insisted that he instead sought -- I believe the exact word he used was "applicability."
Granted I may be being a bit pedantic here, but I think saying "this is a metaphor about X" when what you actually mean is "I believe this to be a metaphor about X" is a great way to confuse the situation. The former implies that you're speaking from a position of Authority, while the latter does not. To borrow a line from Babylon Five, if you can't say what you mean, how can you be expected to mean what you say?
But then, I'm astute and/or cynical enough that when I hear the former my de facto response is, "Where's that coming from?"
In other words, if something is your opinion, present it as such rather than couching it in objective wording.
The argument is where it's coming from, though. The existence of the argument following the claim is the answer to your astute/cynical question; if you follow a claim with an argument, then you are implicitly saying that the source of the claim is the argument, as clear facts or statements from authority wouldn't need arguments, just citations.
Now, if you make a claim and don't follow it up with anything, there I can agree with you that you should make it explicit. Or just refrain from not following up a claim with anything.
I don't think there is anything wrong with interpreting something differently than the author intended, but I also don't think the authors intention should be ignored. Sometimes an alternate interpretation can read a lot of things into the work at all, and can often see the book as promoting something bad, which goes completely against the author's intentions.
But 99% of the time you don't know the author's intentions, especially for non-contemporary works. In a conversation if you say something that's misinterpreted, then you can explain or elaborate, but for an artistic creation what's there is there. It's communication, but from author to audience, not between author to audience. The author puts something out there, and the audience takes it as they will. In most cases all that you know, and all that you can know, is what's in the work itself. You can't expect an audience to research beyond the work to determine what the work means, nor should you.
Besides, while it can be that people read something into the text that isn't there, it can also be that people read something into the text that is there but that the author didn't realize was there or didn't intend to be there. Just because the author didn't purposefully intend to put something into their work, that doesn't mean it's not in their work.
It would be interesting to know the origin of the Borg, was it simply an experiment gone wrong or was it intentional?
^ As far as TrekLit is concerned the Borg origin was covered in the Destiny Trilogy by @David Mack
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