The Duck of Minerva

Friday Nerd Blogging: Galactica (Not) Actual and the Sci-Fi / Sci-Fact / Globalization Intertext

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by Charli Carpenter

30 August 2013, 1419 EDT

bsg

The Chinese state media could perhaps be forgiven for mistaking  fictional Battlestar Galactica blueprints for future US fleet schematics this week, given this.

This incident has me thinking about Nexon/Neumann’s argument regarding the fuzzy relationship between science fiction and “”reality.”” (Yes, you did just read scare quotes in scare quotes.) In their Harry Potter and International Relations introduction, they point out that the “reality” we distinguish from “fiction” is itself expressed and accessed through representations that themselves include elements of fiction and narrative. They distinguish these variously fictionalized “first order representations” like news coverage and political speeches, which are assumed to be talking about the “real world,” from “second order representations” which are assumed to be describing a fictional reality (but perhaps with metaphorical implications for the real world).

I have sometimes heard this kind theoretical discussion used to defend that claim that there is no meaningful analytical distinction between political fact and political fiction since political fiction is part of the set of social facts that make up our political reality. But I think the mocking that the Chinese media got this week over the Battlestar blueprints proves that the distinction is not only “real,” (in the way other social facts are real) but that it is politically significant in ways that I’ll be taking up in my killer robot working paper this fall at the ISSS/ISAC conference in Washington, DC.

So say we all.

Charli Carpenter is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. She is the author of 'Innocent Women and Children': Gender, Norms and the Protection of Civilians (Ashgate, 2006), Forgetting Children Born of War: Setting the Human Rights
Agenda in Bosnia and Beyond (Columbia, 2010), and ‘Lost’ Causes: Agenda-Setting in Global Issue Networks and the Shaping of Human Security (Cornell, 2014). Her main research interests include national security ethics, the protection of civilians, the laws of war, global agenda-setting, gender and political violence, humanitarian affairs, the role of information technology in human security, and the gap between intentions and outcomes among advocates of human security.

1 Comment

  1. BlairDav
    BlairDav on 30 August 2013 at 19.18 EDT

    You and Dan might enjoy how often Sci Fi references/ideas shows up in tactics / acquisitions development discussions. Incidentally, F-16 pilots refer to themselves as ‘Viper Drivers’ because of BSG (the old one, not the new one.) Apparently an F-16 refueling behind a KC-10 looks like a Viper coming up to the Galactica. However, that connection happened in the early 80s, so not a few present-day Viper drivers are unaware of how they got that name. (Im curious how many would enjoy the etymology, and how many wouldn’t – I think most would, given the popularity of the series with flyers, as it gets pilot culture almost exactly right.)

    (Now that I think of it, very few aircraft actually go by their ‘approved’ name. Nobody calls the F-16 a ‘Falcon.’ Maybe there’s something to the way the operators socially construct a platform is different from the way the engineers and the acquisitions people do. Almost like a new identity emerges for the engineered construct when its exposed to a logic of practice out of its original formal design and procurement identity. Shall ponder.)