Nixon's decisive beads of sweat signify a new era in which media and image dictate power and vice versa and merely pave the way for figures like Ronald Reagan, Max Headroom, and Ross Perot. Here I define representationalism as the colonization by images and representations of reality in the service of a global accumulation of capital. It is in this context that we must consider Star Trek's omnipresent references to two-dimensional 'screenings', like the screen in the bridge towards which crew members, if not looking at their scanner screens or their 'tricorder' screens, direct their gaze to see where they're going and what is 'coming up'. While we look at our screens, Star Trek urges us to keep looking. The logic of representation in Star Trek implies a kind of domination as well, yet one marked by an increased abstraction.
Representation involves a higher level of mediation than the direct management of corporeality.
In the represntational world system, representation, like a virus and with little regard for purity of form, dominates through colonization and conceals its parasitic nature by asserting older forms of domination and replaying them over and over, welding them together, creating fantastic, contradictory hybrids. The logic of representation invites us to substitute 'thought- transmissions' or representations for concrete existence.