HIGH POLITICS AND LOW DATA 183
pervasive “democratic deficits” (Scholte 2001, 28), so again there is a parallel with neoliberal
globalization discourse, in which democracy is increasingly attenuated and in which, as
with its modernization predecessor, stability and order are valued over democratic participa-
tion (e.g., Huntington 1965; Kirkpatrick 1979). Low data, then, can illustrate not only the
construction of common sense—how and why some images seem familiar and thus sensible—
but also the constitutive problematic of dominant discourses.^17
- Novels revisited: With different intertextual relations, globalization could be rendered dif-
ferently meaningful. Dystopic “futures” such as William Gibson’s Sprawl series,^18 for ex-
ample, might well leave us with a different vision of globalization. Rooted in the image,
common beginning in the 1980s, of the state as declining at the expense of multi- or
transnational corporations (MNCs), the Sprawl series portrays a globalized future in which
states have been eclipsed by cyberspace, global corporations, and global organized crime.
The global market is dominated by the Yakuza and MNCs: “Power... meant corporate
power. The zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history, had tran-
scended old barriers. Viewed as organisms, they had attained a kind of immortality” (Gibson
1984, 242). Both Yakuza and MNCs are “hives with cybernetic memories, vast single organ-
isms, their DNA coded in silicon” (1984, 242). Technology has run amok: This is a world of
body and mind “invasion” (Sterling 1986, xii); a world of prosthetic limbs (Gibson 1984, 9)
and eyes—“sea-green Nikon transplants”—that are “vatgrown” (33). But SF is never just
about the future: “It is about us and the world in which we live” (Lipschutz 2003, 96).
Gibson agrees: “What’s most important to me,” he has explained, “is that it’s about the
present” (quoted in Kitchin and Kneale 2001, 31). Through such dystopic “futures,” then,
the neoliberal vision of globalization can be challenged.
- Film is increasingly a source of data, at least for discourse analysts. One might, as Michael
Shapiro does (1999, 82–86), read the Hollywood feature film Father of the Bride II (1995)
as a “domestic allegory” for the “identity anxieties” produced by globalization. In his analy-
sis, Shapiro contends that “global space” is “explored obliquely” through the juxtaposition
of various characters, including Mr. Habib, a wealthy Arab businessman and shrewd “eco-
nomic predator”—the cultural Other—who threatens “the West,” represented by Mr. Banks,
an insecure middle-aged family man who just wants his home back. As Shapiro notes, a
“remarkable repression” underlies this representation, one that fails utterly to problematize
the wealthy lifestyle of Mr. Banks himself and its complicity in global inequalities. This
ostensibly “domestic comedy” can be read as allegory to “an increasingly complex set of
relations between local and global dynamics.”
- Television fiction (as well as nonfiction) can also provide substantial evidence of mean-
ing construction and the constitution of world politics. For instance, the Star Trek uni-
verse^19 depicts a utopian global future, one redolent with themes of neoliberal globalization.
It is a bright future of intergalactic trade and exploration, in which, within the United
Federation of Planets (housed in San Francisco), liberal multicultural values have triumphed,
tolerance has overcome discrimination, and poverty has been eradicated. Space has be-
come the “final frontier” in an individualistic and innovative era of “exploration and dis-
covery” (Whitfield and Roddenberry 1968, 203). Development is inevitable, but best
accomplished on the model of liberal individualism. Again, a critical analysis of Star
Trek’s liberal future reveals an unsavory problematic reminiscent of neoliberal globaliza-
tion, one of rampant militarized intervention, based on a hierarchy of societies. As James
Kirk, Captain of the first starship Enterprise, infamously asserted: “We owe it to them to
interfere” (e.g., Lagon 1993).
