Galactica Actual?

The best event I attended at ISA this year wasn’t the panel on pirates, nor the panel on war law, nor the panel on blogging, nor the gender and security discussion group, but Saturday morning’s panel entitled “Galactica Actual: How Battlestar Galactica Explains World Politics.” A series of fascinating and witty papers detailed representations of genocide, heterosexuality, techno-determinism, and religion in the show.

Unfortunately the panel turned out to be misnamed however, for none of the papers really spoke to the question of whether BSG has an impact on actual world politics. (Iver Neumann’s paper I mentioned earlier on religion was really about the impact of Mormon doctrine on the show, not the other way around.)

Admittedly, the papers weren't really trying to do that kind of explanatory work - the panel really was misnamed - so this isn't a criticism as much as an observation. But reversing the independent variable does lead to some very interesting questions.

Consider this speech by Edward Olmos last year at a United Nations panel discussion on Battlestar Galactica:



Here, Olmos is critiquing and attempting to reconstitute the concept of “race” in United Nations discourse, and through the United Nations, in global discourse. And in so doing he was drawing directly on his identity as constituted by the show, and also invoking his authority as constituted by the show. But the question for social scientists is, to what extent did this speech have an impact on world politics? Can we identify an influence on reshaping the discourse of race at the UN? Are there other influences? How would we know?

Similarly, Dan Nexon prefaced his remarks as a discussant by pointing out that BSG is by far the most frequent topic of discussion around his DoD cubicle. To what extent does the salience of the show in defense circles influence our national conception of grand strategy, civil-military relations, assumptions about gender normativity in the military, dilemmas regarding the field of military robotics, the ethics of interrogations in detention, and other pressing security issues directly dealt with on the show?

Arguably, questions of this type – and a serious research agenda on Battlestar Galactica as a cultural artifact – needs to go beyond interpreting the show and begin studying the effects of those interpretations on national political institutions and global society as a whole.

This raises all kinds of interesting methodological questions to which I don’t have answers. Perhaps my colleague Patrick Jackson, who appeared on the panel and has a forthcoming book on how to do social science, will have some ideas. Over to you, Prof PTJ.

Read more...

And Now for Something Completely Different.

Few things are more entertaining to an academic than to watch two fellow academics go head to head over the meaning of "fellow academic." Will one of those few things be the first episode of post-pilot Season One Caprica?. If you're watching too an hour from now, leave your opinion below.

Read more...

In Space, No One Can Hear the Internationale

For some reason, I find this enormously fascinating:

Lenin told the British science fiction writer H.G. Wells, who interviewed him in the Kremlin in 1920, that if life were discovered on other planets, revolutionary violence would no longer be necessary: "Human ideas—he told Wells—are based on the scale of the planet we live in. They are based on the assumption that the technical potentialities, as they develop, will never overstep 'the earthly limit.' If we succeed in making contact with the other planets, all our philosophical, social and moral ideas will have to be revised, and in this event these potentialities will become limitless and will put an end to violence as a necessary means of progress."
—Susan Buck-Morss, Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (2002)

I suppose it would be even more interesting to here from Marx on the question. This doesn't seem all that materialist to me; how would the mere discovery of life on other planets transform the balance between classes, or shift ownership of the means of production? I think that Lenin is making an ideational argument, suggesting that the existence of other forms of life would change the landscape of ideas so completely that class warfare would become unnecessary. Or maybe there's an implicit assumption that any race sufficiently advanced to be discovered by us would already have proceeded beyond class struggle.

See also Gary. Via SEK.

Read more...