“Sheer Fucking Hubris”: Star Trek, Profanity, and the Blue Language of the Future
There’s a moment during the second act of “Maps and Legends” — the second episode of Star Trek: Picard, the latest web series in the long-running franchise available for streaming through CBS All Access — where things get a little blue.
During a meeting at Starfleet Headquarters in 23rd century San Francisco, a weary and desperate Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) asks Fleet Admiral Kirsten Clancy (Ann Magnuson) for help. Now, this is Star Trek, so a lot is going on here contextually, but the general gist is this:
After having witnessed the murder of Dahj Asha (Isa Briones) — a female organic synthetic android and the potential daughter of Picard’s friend and colleague, the late Lt. Commander Data (Brent Spiner) — by masked assassins, Picard suspects a nefarious plot involving between Data’s creator Bruce Maddox (John Ales), the Romulans and other possibly shady actors. In his conversation with Clancy, Picard asks to be reinstated as a Starfleet officer with the command of a small reconnaissance vessel and crew for a one-time special mission. He also concedes that being reinstated to his former rank of admiral could be considered too on the nose, so just receiving the lowly rank of captain once again would be acceptable. Directly following this exchange, Clancy stares icily at Picard before blasting him with the following remark:
“Sheer fucking hubris!”
Now admittedly, watching a character as revered as Picard display a wilful level of pride and arrogance unbeholden to his previous career exploits is a little jarring. Still, it’s the sudden f-bomb curveball that really made my head spin. And while it’s certainly not the first “colourful metaphor” uttered in the world of Trek writ large, I continue to feel a niggling sense of unease when presented with this blue language of the future.
So, to better understand why this use of edgy expletives is so profoundly dislocating within creator Gene Roddenberry’s utopian sci-fi vision, we need to run through a few questions. What does it mean to offend the sensibilities of a media consumer? And, in turn, is it then possible for works of media deemed to be offensive to a person or group/s of persons to have value? If so, how does the use of vulgarity and profanity in media relate to concepts of aesthetic taste and cultural capital? And lastly, how do transgressive works help to define the relevance of contemporary media such as the Trek franchise?
“Damn it, Jim!”
But first, here’s a quick survey of swearing in Trek. As Danette Chavez writes for The AV Club, Trek has often towed the cultural line with its use of profanity, matching changes in mood and tone reflected by the dynamics of syndicated network television.
During the run of The Original Series in the ’60s, characters like the morose Dr Leonard “Bones” McCoy (DeForest Kelley) would frequently drop the occasional “damn” or “hell” or “goddamnit” in the face of crisis. Moving into the late ’80s and ’90s, The Next Generation had instances of Picard swearing in battle conveniently dressed up in alien languages that would remain forever unknown to the viewer.
With the release of feature films, the Trek franchise would also take advantage of less restrictive content guidelines and classifications. Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home (1986) hilariously played up the use of “dumbass” through some time-travel shenanigans in 80’s San Francisco. Meanwhile, the first feature outing of the TNG cast in Star Trek: Generations (1994) allowed Data — now with the added benefit of the full spectrum of human emotions — to sneak in a cheeky “shit!” on the bridge of the Enterprise-D.
Towards the end of the 00s, director J.J. Abrams rebooted the film franchise with a wild action-fuelled romp through an alternate timeline in Star Trek (2009), which saw a younger Kirk (Chris Pine) call “bullshit” on an elder version of Spock (the late Leonard Nimoy). However, it wasn’t until the franchise returned to the television format with CBS All Access’ Star Trek: Discovery in 2017 which saw the franchise’s first-ever use of an f-bomb-as-verb — “fucking” — as part of a silly and innocuous shuttle conversation between colleagues.
What’s in a Word?
According to Merriam Webster, to ‘offend’ (in the transitive sense), is to “violate, transgress; to cause pain, to hurt; to cause (a person or group) to feel hurt, angry, or upset by something said or done.” A ‘sensibility’ is a “peculiar susceptibility to a pleasurable or painful impression; awareness of and responsiveness toward something; refined or excessive sensitiveness in emotion and taste.” From this, we can surmise that to offend the sensibilities of a media consumer, that work of media must cause distress to the consumer through a painful response to their emotions and tastes. How then does a work of offensive media relate to contemporary value?
In “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste,” French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu theorised that within “the socially recognised hierarchy of the arts, and within each of them, of genres, schools or periods, corresponds a social hierarchy of the consumers… [which] predisposes tastes to function as markers of ‘class’” (1664). For Bourdieu, ‘taste’ is used to legitimate works of art, the act of which becomes a form of social classification: “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” (1670). The interpretation of vulgarity and profanity in works of media is directly related to the social standing of the consumer, their position within the social hierarchy versus the creator’s position in the same social hierarchy, and the consumer’s expectation of what that media should be.
Aesthetic taste acts as a recursive social theory that allows a social subject or group of subjects to distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make between beauty, ugliness, vulgarity, etc. A person’s use of vulgar or profane language makes it possible to define their position within the established social hierarchy. Ultimately, Bourdieu’s theory of aesthetic taste is fundamentally hierarchical and requires social standing and access to cultural capital or competence as necessary for the understanding of secondary meaning beyond, or transcendent of, a ‘pure aesthetic’.
In the realm of Trek, this becomes particularly interesting, considering that — within the Federation at least — it’s heavily implied that an equivalence of social standing and elimination of class struggle exists, as evidenced by the post-scarcity utopian future the franchise presents. Sure, there are different jobs, roles and social positions available to all citizens of the Federation; however, the effective mobility between social strata in the Trek universe has always been portrayed as entirely fluid. Movement between strata appears to be discretionary at the level of the individual and not impeded by a person’s access to cultural capital. This is to say that, in the 24th century, dropping an f-bomb is no longer a signifier of one’s social status or upbringing. But if this is, in fact, the case, why then would anyone swear in Trek at all?
The Prime Directive of Galactic Taboo
Typically, and especially within the English language, expressions of vulgarity and profanity fall under the categorical use of ‘taboo’ words which have been “banned on the grounds of morality or taste”; that is, concerning Bourdieu’s theory of aesthetic taste and social hierarchy, language which is considered ‘illegitimate’.
In Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language (2006), Keith Allan and Kate Burridge discuss the origin of taboo words, where “the censoring of language naturally leads to a consideration of politeness and impoliteness, and their interaction with euphemism (sweet-talking), dysphemism (speaking offensively) and orthophemism (straight-talking)” (26).
When comparing written language to spoken or verbal language (which relies on direct, ‘face-to-face’ social interaction between the speaker and receiver), the balancing act between politeness and impoliteness is often situationally ambiguous. For Allan and Burridge, politeness is sensitive to social standing and, therefore, the reception of dysphemism in media is entirely contextual:
Whether or not language behaviour counts as good manners will depend on a number of factors. These include: the relationship between speakers, their audience, and anyone within earshot; the subject matter; the situation (setting); and whether a spoken or written medium is used. In other words: politeness is wedded to context, place and time. That which is polite is at least inoffensive and at best pleasing to an audience. That which is offensive is impolite. (31)
It’s clear then that the use of vulgarity and profanity in media may result in a text being dismissed or derided for not conforming to current aesthetic tastes. However, as Allan and Burridge argue, the use of dysphemism and offensive language still has relevance within contemporary society: “taboos strengthen group identity and social fabric through feelings of distinctiveness, while the rites and rituals that accompany them give us a sense of control in a chaotic and hostile environment” (252).
And in the case of the Discovery f-bomb, this view checks out. A shared acknowledgement of a scientific experience between two nerdy colleagues as being “fucking cool” would help to strengthen their shared group identity as Starfleet officers, bringing a sense of unity and control to the entropic disorder of the cosmos. Why then does it feel so wrong?
Space, the Transgressive Frontier
The very act of offending someone’s sensibilities is intrinsically bound to notions of violation and transgression. On the act of censorship, Allan and Burridge write that:
Forbidden words flourish all the more vigorously on a diet of individual censoring and public disapproval. Linguistic prohibition, like other kinds of prohibition and censorship, is doomed to failure in the longer term. Like the worm in the bud, forbidden words feed on censoring imposed by hypocritical decorum. (252–53)
In Transgression (2006), British sociologist Christopher Jenks defines the act of ‘transgression’ as “conduct which breaks rules or exceeds boundaries”; a “deeply reflexive act of denial and affirmation,” which “serves as an extremely sensitive vector in assessing the scope, direction and compass of any social theory” (2–3). Similarly, Bourdieu argues that:
The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile — in a word, natural — enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences. (1670)
This phenomenon of rejection highlights the reciprocal nature between contemporary value and aesthetic taste and how these relate directly to transgressive media. A person’s aesthetic tastes will determine the amount of value they place within a text, while the contemporary values of the dominant social paradigm will, in turn, influence a person’s overall aesthetic tastes.
Accordingly, transgressive media will conform to the aesthetic taste of a small, maligned minority of persons or groups, and seek to subvert or oppose the traditional elements of the dominant social paradigm. For Robin Mookerjee, transgressive fiction is anti-absolutist, as it allows for a multiplicity of interpretative lenses:
Transgressive fiction sets out to reject beliefs considered assumptive for any member of the culture, subculture, or group of which one is a presumed member. This rejection of membership is an assertion of the novelist’s perception of reality, or at least a subjectivism that allows for the plausibility of a given (proscribed) viewpoint. (102; emphasis added)
Transgressive media helps to subvert and destabilise the established social order by countering the prevailing paradigm of aesthetic taste and value. In “Postmodernism And Consumer Society,” Fredric Jameson classifies this counter-cultural project in opposition to “good taste and to common sense” and by representing “a provocative challenge to the reigning reality” (292–93). In this way, works of transgressive media already have an established precedent in overturning and reshaping the traditions upheld by the dominant social paradigm and social hierarchy throughout the twentieth century. As Jameson notes:
This is perhaps the most distressing development of all from an academic standpoint, which has traditionally had a vested interest in preserving a realm of high or elite culture against the surrounding environment of philistinism, of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Reader’s Digest culture, and in transmitting difficult and complex skills of reading, listening and seeing to its initiates. (282–83)
However, within the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, factors like technological progress and access to information have significantly eroded and subsumed these perceived barriers of aesthetic taste and ‘high culture’. We see this in the rise of emergent sub-culture phenomena (e.g. punk music, graffiti art, memes), alongside the de-centralisation and supplantation of traditional media distribution (e.g. self-publishing, illegal downloads, Internet streaming). And as Discovery co-executive producer Aaron Harberts explained to The AV Club, the decision to drop an f-bomb into the Trek universe for the first time was made because, well, they could:
“Because we are streaming, so we could do whatever we want. It doesn’t all look good on Star Trek. Violence is violence. You know, okay, maybe we can show a Klingon bat’leth going into somebody, couldn’t do that on network. Sex on Star Trek, to a degree. Nudity on Star Trek, not really, it just doesn’t feel right. Language, there are a couple moments where we got a little creative with language, but again it was in the context of like three scientists having a victory and celebrating in a way that’s a little colorful. Which I loved, because it was sort of like nerds unite, they kicked ass, and dropped a few F-bombs, fine.”
Grim Reality vs. Reward
In the end, I think what truly gets to me about this new frisson of Trek and f-bombs isn’t so much that I’m offended by it, or that using the f-word is particularly taboo in Western culture, or even that a television show featuring swearing actors is a transgressive act in the context of modern media. Trust me: as a thirty-something-year-old Australian man, I’ve encountered my fair share of blue language. No, the real issue for me is how utterly futile and unnecessary it feels within the larger Trek universe.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter, director and fellow Trek alum Jonathan Frakes describes the purpose behind Picard’s darker subversions of character expectations:
“As we know, conflict is what creates drama. So, on Next Gen, it was a very challenging set of rules — primarily for the writers — to find ways to create drama. In this new version of Star Trek, which honors what Roddenberry laid out — in terms of the optimism and respect toward themes like racism — all of those elements are sort of strongly rooted in this show. But the notion of self-doubt, the vulnerability — especially for a [character] like Picard — the damage of past experiences, are so much more compelling to watch … It’s a denser show than Next Gen, I think that’s fair to say. Pushing Picard to these places, watching Patrick act that out — and he was in the writer’s room as they developed this story — it’s all so rewarding to see.”
Sure, in the worlds of Altered Carbon or The Expanse, people might need to blow off some steam and curse freely. That’s fine. Those are grim fictional realities of black, white and infinite shades of grey, where a little blue here and there brightens up the screen. But Trek? The world of Roddenberry’s vision was one where humanity had moved beyond the hierarchical social trappings of our tortured existence, where we overcame adversity through interstellar diplomacy, curiosity and the spirit of adventure before boldly venturing out into the stars beyond.
Or perhaps not. What do I know? It’s 2020, and I guess people just want to see old man Picard get cussed out. Maybe I got it wrong as a fan after all. And as Clancy puts it so bluntly in the eighth episode of Star Trek: Picard, “Broken Pieces”:
“Admiral Picard, with all due respect, and at long last, shut the fuck up!”
Works Cited
Allan, Keith, and Kate Burridge. Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Bourdieu, Pierre. “Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste”. In The Norton Anthology Of Theory And Criticism, 1664–1670. Edited by Vincent B. Leitch, et al., 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001.
Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism And Consumer Society”. In The Continental Aesthetics Reader, 282–295. Clive Cazeaux. Routledge, 2000.
Jenks, Chris. Transgression. London: Routledge, 2006.
Leitch, Vincent B, William E Cain, Laurie A Finke, Barbara E Johnson, John McGowan, and Jeffrey J Williams. The Norton Anthology Of Theory And Criticism. 1st ed. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001.
Mookerjee, Robin. Transgressive Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
