176 ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA
176CHAPTER 9
HIGH POLITICS AND LOW DATA
Globalization Discourses and Popular Culture
JUTTA WELDES
At the core of my research interests is the question of ideology. My fascination started, I think,
when I was about eight. A nun at Sunday school insisted that even people who could not have
heard of Jesus—Buddhists and Hindus outside the West, for instance—were of course condemned
to hell. This made no sense to me—there could be no “of course” about it—and I didn’t believe it.
Nor could I understand why others did.
So I study things—the “of course” that Gramsci called “common sense” and Stuart Hall
called “the moment of extreme ideological closure”—that I fundamentally do not comprehend:
how U.S. national security of course requires the collateral slaughter of innocents abroad; how a
structural theory like Marxism of course requires individual-level micro-foundations; how Sep-
tember 11 of course led Americans to wonder, uncomprehendingly, “why do they hate us?”; how
neoliberal globalization, despite its catastrophic effects on life chances around the world, is of
course both beneficent and inevitable.
In graduate school I avidly explored social theory, from historical materialism, through
structuralism, to post-structuralism and feminisms. I initially tackled my questions about ideol-
ogy through conceptual analysis, challenging, for instance, analytical Marxism’s attempt to
reconstruct, and depoliticize, Marxism on rational choice’s individualist terms. With time, how-
ever, I reconceptualized my concerns in terms of a broadly Foucauldian notion of discourse—
a more useful tool, for me, than the overly meaning-laden concept of ideology, with its
connotations, on the right, of formal systems of thought or, on the left, of false consciousness.
In Stuart Hall’s post-Marxist cultural studies I found productive analytical tools for dissecting
the discourse of U.S. national interests, notably the concepts of articulation and interpellation.
More recently, in examining popular culture, I have found the notion of intertextuality both
compelling and fruitful.
Although my march through social theory followed a traditional and thus predictable intellec-
tual trajectory, generous lashings of serendipity have intervened as well. My interest in popular
culture and its role in the production of common sense resulted from the coincidence that my
immersion in cold war U.S. foreign policy discourse was paralleled by a Star Trek addiction [The
Original Series and The Next Generation]. Through often hilarious discussions with family and
friends, I came to see pervasive parallels between the two. Similarly, in making up, under the
tutelage of my partner, for a shocking adolescent deficiency in science fiction (SF), I discovered
striking parallels between Isaac Asimov’s 1950s techno-utopian SF and the discourse of neoliberal