180 ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA
dominant constructions of world politics, that provide alternative visions of the world, and that
offer possibilities for transformation. The film Dr. Strangelove (1964) is a classic example, ridi-
culing, among other things, U.S. anticommunist paranoia and the convolutions of nuclear deter-
rence; Canadian Bacon (1995) is another, hilariously deriding jingoism and warmongering.
Feminist SF utopias also offer themes critical of, and alternative to, dominant representations of
the social and political order, including societies without formal, central government; the rejec-
tion of private ownership; concern for sustainable relations with nature; and the peripheral nature
of war and violence (e.g., Crawford 2003). They allow us to imagine how we might better orga-
nize and structure local and global politics.
Often, popular culture both supports and undermines the common sense of both IR and world
politics. The film Starship Troopers (1997), for instance, subverts conventional narratives of
security by showing how knowledge of the enemy and the self is created and secured while also
reproducing the very self/other distinction on which contemporary world politics is based (Whitehall
2003). Whether a particular popular cultural text supports or subverts existing relations of power,
or both at once, examining such texts helps us to unravel the workings of power, even in the “high
politics” of IR. Popular culture, in expressing, enacting, and producing competing and contesting
discourses and their various ideological effects^10 and implicit power relations, is expressly and
essentially political.
The concept of intertextuality^11 is useful here. This notion draws our attention to the fact that
texts, whether official or popular, high or low, are never read in isolation. Instead, “any one text
is necessarily read in relationship to others and... a range of textual knowledges is brought to
bear upon it” (Fiske 1987, 108). In Bakhtin’s more poetic phrasing, each text “tastes of the...
contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (1981, 293).^12 Intertextuality allows us to
illustrate and explain the often striking similarities in the way world politics are officially nar-
rated, the way academics represent world politics, and the way stories are told in popular media.
Intertextual knowledges—a culture’s popular “image bank”—“pre-orient” readers, guiding them
to make meanings in some ways rather than others (Fiske 1987, 108). High data and low data, that
is, are linked through multifaceted intertextual relations. Both the WTO’s and The Economist’s
discourses of globalization, for instance, read in light of techno-utopian SF, might look not only
plausible—we are entering a glorious high-tech future—but benign or downright praiseworthy—
this future promises benefits for everyone; it is only by embracing globalization that the poor can
benefit. But like all signs, “globalization” is multi-accentual (Vološinov 1986 [1929], 23). The
same pro-globalization texts, read in light of techno-dystopian SF, might yield an oppositional
reading, one in which globalization brings with it undemocratic rule by transnational corpora-
tions, along with organized crime, rampant violence, shocking squalor, and vast inequalities in
wealth and life chances. In either case, “studying a text’s intertextual relations can provide us
with valuable clues to the readings that a particular culture or subculture is likely to produce from
it” (Fiske 1987, 108), which readings are likely to be considered plausible, and even which politi-
cal contestations are likely to arise. By examining the relations between popular and official texts,
we can thus unravel some of the conventions—such as images of “spaceship Earth” or the trope
of the “global village”—through which world politics are made meaningful.
It is important methodologically to highlight here the (sometimes) serendipitous nature of the
discovery of intertextual relations. I have been asked many times why I chose Isaac Asimov’s
series of Foundation novels as my “sample” for the argument that globalization is SF. But this
question mistakes what was a matter of the “logic of discovery” for the “logic of justification”
(Popper 1959). I did not search for SF or any other popular cultural artifact paralleling neoliberal
globalization discourse. Rather, I happened to be reading the Asimov series and was struck by