182 ACCESSING AND GENERATING DATA
for instance, supports the official neoliberal vision of globalization, interestingly using sig-
nificant SF references. In particular, as Charlotte Hooper has shown, the magazine is awash
with images of “spaceship Earth.” This ubiquitous trope constructs the increasingly global-
ized world as, on the one hand, “a single totality, ‘the global village,’ making it appear easily
accessible” while, on the other, positioning it “out there” on “the final frontier” of space
(2000, 68). The Economist, says Hooper, renders globalization sensible “through imagery
which integrates science, technology, business and images of globalisation into a kind of
entrepreneurial frontier masculinity, in which capitalism meets science fiction” (65).- ••••Newspapers are important sites for the reproduction, and occasionally the contestation, of
official discourses, and especially those dominant discourses that circulate among elites.^14
Although newspaper sources were less important for my account of globalization discourse,
they were central to my analysis elsewhere of the cold war U.S. security imaginary and its
hegemonic representation of the Cuban missile crisis (e.g., Weldes 1999a). The New York
Times, for instance, provided many vivid examples of dominant constructions of the Mon-
roe Doctrine (“Monroe Doctrine Guards West” 1960), of Bolshevik despotism (in M. Hunt
1987, 115), and of Castro as Khrushchev’s “chief puppet in the Caribbean” (“Summary of
Editorial Content” 1961). - One can of course proliferate such high data sources: White Papers; reports from govern-
ment ministries, departments, and agencies; and official histories, such as those of the Inter-
national Monetary Fund (e.g., Broughton 2001; de Vries 1979, 1985, 1986), are additional
examples. And these can be supplemented with the vast and constantly expanding academic
literature on the discourses and practices of globalization.
“Low Data”: Accounting for Neoliberal Globalization DiscourseAlthough the analysis of “high data” allowed me to develop a portrait of neoliberal globalization
discourse, accounting both for the discourse itself and for its common-sense status required addi-
tional forms of evidence. If we are asking why this neoliberal discourse makes sense—what
renders this vision of globalization seemingly self-evident—we need to look at the broader cul-
tural resources, the cultural image bank, that provide the tropes and narratives out of which it is
constructed. This, in turn, required “low data”—the everyday, mundane representations that make
meaningful and commonsensical, and sometimes challenge, dominant representations.- My account of globalization as SF focused almost exclusively on a series of techno-utopian
SF novels. Asimov’s Foundation series (initially written between 1951 and 1953 and ex-
panded between 1982 and 1993) provides images strikingly similar to those of neoliberal
globalization discourse.^15 For example, in the Foundation universe, all planetary worlds—
on the model of “the global village”—are singular political and economic units. Central to
this universe are images of trade-driven, evolutionary progress and the beneficial effects—
indeed, the essential necessity—of technological development. Moreover, in this universe,
trade brings peace. These and other similarities help to render neoliberal globalization fa-
miliar, sensible, and seemingly “inexorable” (Gray 1998, 206).
Surprisingly—or perhaps not—underlying the Foundation universe lies a barely concealed
authoritarian politics, which helps to expose the ideological problematic of neoliberal glo-
balization.^16 Asimov’s utopia rests on an obsession with order, stability, and an accompany-
ing authoritarianism: Empire is hailed as the only viable political form; democracy, as neither
practical nor long lasting. Contemporary global governance has also been shown to suffer