To Seek Out New Worlds, as explored by Jutta Weldes

Jutta Weldes presents world politics as defined by O Tuathail and Agnew, as world of difficult policy choices, "hard truths, material realities, and irrepressible natural facts" (Weldes 1), which encompasses war and peace, ethnic cleansing, genocide, natural disasters, terrorism, trafficking of arms, drugs, and human beings, etc.

The world of science fiction, however, is all of this... and a little bit more. Whereas the factual world makes sense (or not), fictional worlds create rules on their own to follow. Science fiction takes a fictional truth, makes it factual, and then expands on what the world would accordingly appear as. Weldes describes these worlds as being "imagined futures, the make-believe, alien landscapes, bizarre cityscapes, and space and time travel" (Ibid. 1). In this sense, science fiction is a blend of our present world, other worlds, and speculation on what our future may look like. It is an amalgamation of material realities and natural facts with fictional worlds and imagined possibilities. One needs to look only at the correlations between NASA and Star Trek, the Strategic Defense Initiative and Star Wars, and the Revolution in Military Affairs and future war fiction to realize that these correlations, and thus the future, are very carefully laid out in the works of science fiction authors.

Weldes spends some time going over the differences between high and low politics, a discussion which I won't go over here (but one that can be found here). I highly recommend that everyone at least check out the first chapter of To Seek Out New Worlds. It is an invaluable introduction to PTJ's course, and will most likely speak to many of the discussions that we will have this semester.

According to Weldes, a struggle for power can define the relationship between humans and alien others (even alien human others). Power can be produced and reproduced many ways, but Weldes speaks to the cultural production of power. Culture, as defined by Tomlinson, is "the context within which people give meaning to their actions and experiences and make sense of their lives", and according to Hall, representations, languages, customs... all of these are "concerned with the production and exchange of meanings - giving and taking - between members or groups within a society" (Ibid. 6). Popular culture, primarily what we will be studying through science fiction in its literary and cinematic form this semester, is a battleground where meaning is contested and contrasted against the factual world as we know it. In an interesting statement, Shapiro explains that popular culture endorses previous power structures "by reproducing beliefs and allegiances necessary for uncontested function" (Ibid. 6) This speaks to the silenced and marginalized voices that Hall proclaims should be studied as possible sites for politics to occur.

Science fiction, therefore, involves the realm of the political... ideology, discourse, and politics. And by analyzing popular culture, we can access the realm of the political because these elements are a part of science fiction. In a sense, according to Bartter, science fiction provides an excellent "vehicle for disclosing assumptions", and this especially includes assumptions about world politics (Ibid. 8). Why does is science fiction great at disclosing assumptions? Because science fiction itself, and its subject, culture, are both contested grounds. In this continually-contested battleground then, there is no set standard from which one may judge assumptions about culture or politics.

In her introductory chapter, Weldes follows a discourse started by Darko Suvin regarding "novums" - a Latin term that Suvin uses to describe the "new" or "new things". These "novums" can be picked up on as indicators of the world of science fiction, setting it apart from the mundane (Ibid. 9). Science fiction tells us about the present through futuristic utopias and dystopias that combine the real, factual world with the present. At this juncture lies a point of discontinuity from the known world, and through use of language - especially metaphor and metonymy - these "novum" are rendered plausible in their own terms. This process of authorial creation and readerly acceptance or refutation creates the if accept/then and if refute/then dichotomy which informs science fiction discourses. The difference between science fiction, therefore, is not only material, but also conceptual, even if it is grounded in these self-substantiating worlds that provide a different medium from which to view things.

These totalizing metaphors allow us to explain contemporary society in more or less estranged settings from our own, and because of this focus on alternative worlds, skepticism can be accomodated through metaphoric and metonymic justification. By so doing, science fiction authors create a sort of space in which they can examine contemporary politics more fully than when they are fully encased in present structures.

This "reflectionist" approach, however, is interpretationally limited because: (1) it assumes that world politics exists apart from the practices of popular culture, and (2) that representations and the "real world" are distinct from one another and that the representations reflect "the real" more or less transparently, in an unmediated fashion (Ibid. 12), thereby creating a weakness in the interpretation in that we begin to believe that we can read "the real" off of representations. Accordingly, such interpretations would produce a version of world politics, theory, and practice all for granted, directly accessible, and unproblematic. Weldes, therefore, argues that such a balance of power would then just be... unquestioned, and thusly remain, unquestionable.

"Reality" and its meanings, according to Shapiro, are discursive products: "because the real is never wholly present to us - how it is real for us is always mediated through some representational practice - we lose something when we think of representation as mimetic", and science fiction is more than just a "window" from which to view the world (Ibid. 14). Science fiction texts are a part of the processes of world politics in that they are implicated in the producing and reproducing a body of thought which skeptics might describe as "mere" reflections. Instead, it is possible to read "the real" - world politics - as a social and cultural product in itself.

And thus, world politics is a cultural product.