Works Cited

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, et al. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983.

Burke, Kenneth. Language as Symbolic Action. Berkeley: U of California P, 1966.

Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books, 1994

Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method. Cambridge: Cambridge U P, 1962.

Heinlein, Robert A. Starship Troopers. 1959. New York: Ace Books, 1987.

Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. 1651. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1958.

Hyde, Michael and Craig Smith. “Hermeneutics and Rhetoric: A Seen but Unobserved Relationship.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 65 (1979): 347-363.

Isocrates. “Against the Sophists.” Isocrates. Vol. II. Trans. George Norlin. Cambridge: Harvard U P, 1982. 162-177.

Isocrates. “Antidosis.” Isocrates. Vol. II. Trans. George Norlin. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U P, 1982: 184-365.

Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell U P, 1981.

Lyotard, Jean François. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1984.

Machiavelli, Niccolo. The Prince. Trans. George Bull. London: Penguin, 1961.

McLuhan, Marshall and Quentin Fiore. The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects. New York: Bantam Books, 1967.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale. Cambride: Cambridge U P, 1986.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. W. Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage, 1967.

Ortega y Gasset, José. Man and Crisis. Trans. Mildred Adams. New York: W W Norton, 1958.

Polanyi, Michael and Harry Prosch. Meaning. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1975.

Schrag, Calvin O. Communicative Praxis and the Space of Subjectivity. Bloomington: Indiana U P, 1986.

Starship Troopers. Dir. Paul Verhoeven. Culver City, CA: Tristar Pictures, 1997.

Endnotes

¹ While Gadamer rejects using the picture metaphor as an example of "aesthetic consciousness," his discussion of the hermeneutic ontology of the picture creates an important theoretical space for the argument that we advance here.

² We use the recent film version of the 1959 Heinlein story as the primary text for the purposes of our investigation. There are significant differences between Heinlein's story and this more recent reinterpretation of his work. We draw especially from the film because we believe that this text was the primary vehicle of consumption for what reviewers call "a new generation of thrill-seekers."

³ Nietzsche writes, "The existence on the earth of an animal soul turned against itself, taking sides against itself, was something so new, profound, unheard of, enigmatic, contradictory, and pregnant with a future that the aspect of the earth was essentially altered" (85).

⁴ In Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes, "Our current morality has grown on the soil of the ruling tribes and castes" (45). We act from a biased set of assumptions that tend to reinforce existing power relations.

⁵ Importantly, we rely more heavily upon Nietzsche's understanding of genealogy rather than that of Foucault.

⁶ Understanding the ontological connection within generations is critical for the argument that we advance here, we will return to better explain our position on this below.

⁷ As Ortega observes, "History . . . is not primarily the psychology of man, but the refashioning of the structure of drama which flares between man and the world" (28).

⁸ Ortega contends, "Every historic present, every 'today' involves three distinct times, three different 'todays.'" For some "'today' is the state of being twenty, for others, forty, and for still another group, sixty; and this, the fact that three such very different ways of life have the same 'today,' creates the dynamic drama, the conflict, and the collision which form the background of historic material" (42).

⁹ We note here, as does Ortega, that differences between generations also create alchemic possibilities: "Thanks to that disequilibrium, [history] moves, changes, wheels, and flows. If all of us who are contemporaries were also coevals, history would be stopped in a state of paralysis, petrified, having only one face, with no possibility of radical innovation" (43).

¹⁰ From this perspective, matter itself is an illusion, it is energy, or "spirit" in the Hegelian sense. We will return to this subject below when we outline our approach to ontological inquiry.

¹¹ Baudrillard offers an example to illustrate his claim: "All hold-ups, hijacks and the like are now as it were simulation hold-ups, in the sense that they are inscribed in advance in the decoding and orchestration rituals of the media, anticipated in their mode of presentation and possible consequences. In brief, where they function as a set of signs dedicated exclusively to their recurrence as signs, and no longer to their 'real' goal at all. But this does not make them inoffensive" (41).

¹² McLuhan and Fiore write, "The medium, or process, of our time—electric technology—is reshaping and restructuring patterns of social interdependence and every aspect of our personal life. It is forcing us to reconsider and reevaluate practically every thought, every action, and every institution formerly taken for granted" (8).

¹³ Importantly, Baudrillard makes the deference to and representation of the real a function of power: "The only weapon of power . . . is to reinject realness and referentiality everywhere, in order to convince us of the reality of the social, of the gravity of the economy and finalities of production. For that purpose it prefers the discourse of crisis" (42).

¹⁴ See, e.g., the Antidosis, or Against the Sophists.

¹⁵ We find remarkable similarities in the writing of Machiavelli and the discourses of Isocrates, especially concerning the representation of political power. See, e.g., Machiavelli's The Prince.

¹⁶ C.S. Peirce attributes much of his understanding regarding the theory of representation to Thomas Hobbes. See, e.g., Hobbes' Leviathan.

¹⁷ Kenneth Burke, of course, recognized many of the points that we make here. See, e.g., Language as Symbolic Action. See, also, Fredric Jameson's, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act.

¹⁸ One of the better accounts of the relationship between rhetoric, mythic reconstruction, and meaning is Michael Polanyi and Harry Prosch's, Meaning. See, especially, their analysis of art and myth in Chapters Five through Nine.

¹⁹ Of course, the Arachnids are a metaphor for a generalized enemy, as well, not just a Communist enemy.

²⁰ Fascism is the representation that we resist in this text. The same observation assuredly applies to most any situation, or representation.

²¹ There are two scenes in the film that demonstrate the early inculcation of civic and military values. The first scene is a recruitment advertisement on the Federal Network. It claims that everyone is doing their part with a line of soldiers verifying their commitment to the cause; the last "soldier" in line, of course, is a young boy, who proudly proclaims, "I'm doing my part, too." The more general claim in this youth-oriented propaganda is that "every schoolkid knows that arachnids are dangerous" The second scene, which seems more a "public service" announcement, shows young schoolchildren squashing bugs on the ground with a similar edifying claim: "everyone is doing their part."

²² This, of course, is a rhetorical reconstruction of modern citizenship, which teases the relation with military service, but does not make citizenship dependant on the same. Such a conflation, we believe, is fascistic.

²³ The Federation is presented as a society that is driven by violence. Claims throughout the film maintain "we're gonna fight and we're gonna win." After his hometown, Buenos Aeries, is destroyed, Rico offers a similar soundbyte on the Federal Network: "I am from Buenos Aeries and I say kill 'em all." Rasczak's simple principle for military action, which Rico later repeats to his troops when he assumes command, is "everyone fights, no one quits. If you don't do the job, I'll kill you myself." The driven militaristic attitude is prevalent throughout the film. Indeed, the final line claims, "They'll keep fighting . . . and they'll win!" And one of the first comments to the newly discovered arachnid brains was "someday, someone like me is going to kill you and your whole fucking race." The "Death" tattoos obtained by Rico and others in his company demonstrate the fascination of this culture with violence.

²⁴ One of the ironic scenes in the film is the scene that we highlight above when Rasczak discovers that the arachnids could get inside human brains and make their victims do almost anything. The General, the sole survivor of the attack, observed that the arachnids are "just like us, they want to know what makes us tick."

²⁵ One of the interesting differences between the novel and the film is the historical example used in the opening History and Moral Philosophy class to demonstrate the premise that violence is the only way to resolve conflict. In the film Hiroshima is substituted for Carthage, perhaps because the latter was deemed too obscure for its primary consumers, teenage America.

²⁶ Foucault warns, "There is in this hatred of the present or the immediate past a dangerous tendency to invoke a completely mythical past" (248).