If all goes well, I’ll be presenting the following in Boston this November, as part of a panel about Doctor Who’s relationship with the field of international relations:
Rats in the Sewers: Doctor Who and the Underbelly of the Nation-State
Doctor Who’s fascination with interplanetary diplomacy and conflict, and also for repeated alien invasions of Earth, initially suggests that it might neatly allegorise the theatre of nation-state actors that classical international relations attempts to describe. The 1970 story “The Curse of Peladon” is a perfect example, focusing on the intrigue around a planet’s imminent incorporation into the Galactic Federation — an allegory of Britain’s entry into the European Union. However, even in the middle of its most state-centric phase — the Third Doctor’s official association with the British arm of the United Nations Intelligence Taskforce — Doctor Who nevertheless touched on lines of conflict that exist transversally to the supposedly organic and naturalised interests of nation-states, thus suggesting a molecular critique of international relations. Disruptive contestations of sovereignty appear from below the established IR topography, most notably from the reptillian Silurians and Sea Devils — indigenous, prehistoric claimants to the Earth who rise from the depths.
In fact, many of classic Doctor Who’s more gothic and less obviously IR-related concerns nevertheless trace the uncanny flows of power that cross the nation-state. For example, against a vivid background of Victorian London’s sewers in “The Talons of Weng-Chiang”, racial panic dramatises an obvious displacement of all that is rendered underground by the state: class war, for example. So in the wake of debates about Fredric Jameson’s remarks on Third World literature, national allegory and world systems theory, it might be suggested that Doctor Who is indeed an allegory of “international relations”, but a leaky and troublesome one, whose uncanny tranversality to the nation-state renders IR problematic.
Since my trip to the States is contingent on funding for something else, it’ll be a relatively inexpensive lark. Note that despite my use of the term “molecular”, my take on “transversality” is a completely literal one, rather than Guattarian as such. But as long as somebody can convince me of it (and explain it to me!), I’m still open to a geophilosophical or schizoanalytic approach. Oh, and I’ll be sure to pop Ben Aaronovitch’s poco revisionist take on Doctor Who history, too.
[ tags: doctor-who, international-relations ]
Hey Ben
Sounds good - Dr Who - can you swing by Airstrip One on the way and deliver it here too. Perhaps it won’t work with your schedule, but we are doing this thing on sci fi with Greg Tate and Kodwo Eshun et al:
Cultural Fictions II
Starts:15 June 2006 Ends: 16 June 2006
Location: Cinema, Goldsmiths Main Building. London. Times tbc
Cost: There is no charge for this event, but please register your attendance by emailing culturalfictions@gold.ac.uk.
Cultural Fictions II
The Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College (London) is hosting a conference on the significance of science fiction for disciplines and practices associated with cultural studies, to be held on 15-16th June, 2006. In particular, we will be asking whether sci-fi’s privileged relationship to alterity – e.g. in the forms of the alien, the non-human and above all the future – is what makes it so attractive to politically and philosophically oriented research and other contemporary artistic practices.
Main speakers:
Greg Tate, journalist, cultural critic and filmmaker, regular contributor to Village Voice, founder of the band Burnt Sugar; publications include Flyboy in the Buttermilk: Essays on Contemporary America (Simon and Schuster, 1992) and Everything But the Burden (Broadway, 2003).
Roger Luckhurst, Senior Lecturer, Birkbeck College; publications include “The Angle Between Two Walls”: The Fiction of J G Ballard (Liverpool UP, 1997), The Invention of Telepathy (Oxford UP, 2002), Science Fiction (Polity Press, 2005).
Anthony Joseph, poet, musician, novelist and lecturer; publications include Desafinado (poisonenginepress, 1994), Teragaton (poisonenginepress, 1997) and The African Origins of UFOs (forthcoming, Salt, autumn 2006).
be well Johnx
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‘transversality’ has a literal meaning? you speak of the word as if it were something more than a conceptual tool.
mmm… maybe you should write more of the literal, instead of the figurative. And avoid the pitfall of figurative disavowels as an attempt to reach the literal. It might make your writing a bit less - academic-ly opaque.
cookies & milk puppet
Sorry John, I’d love to, but my travel schedule doesn’t permit. Haven’t bloody written the paper yet, either!
Puppet: when writing for an academic audience, I use a special computer application. This application has a bunch of palettes with which to control various parameters of my discourse. For instance, there’s a slider with which one can control “opacity”. I always write with that slider set at 100%.
And yes, “transversality” has a “literal”, mundane meaning: the way something is intersected by a line. I meant “literal” to oppose it to some even more bloody arcane and fancy theory of schizoanalytic transversality that I don’t fucking understand. Meanwhile, sentences like “avoid the pitfall of figurative disavowels as an attempt to reach the literal” are pretty damn opaque to me. Thanks for the advice, though.
a tranversal is a line that intersects other lines. I dont think this is what you literally ment. Then again i’d tend to think that adding the suffix -ity tends to limit the ability to accurately apply the original definition.
I’m glad you liked my joke though, even if your response was tinged with anger. Like many jokes this one comes from underlying emotions of embarassment, upset(ness?) & frustration. In my case from reading theory that is a little difficult to grasp.
When i see references to certian words, to authors, to concepts, i expect them to be a foot hold into understanding the meaning of the text. I expect to use these footholds into reaching an understanding of the authors opinion on a topic. This is not always what happens though. References can also act to obscure the authors intent. References can become the practice of name dropping, of applying codes to make writing sound academic. I’m sure you’ve noticed it - its the dreadfull writing out there in libraries that makes you want to throw up.
I like your blog alot. I come here & read it quite a bit, but i’ve been upset that your writing has begun to take onboard some of these traits. Its strange to read something & feel upset, stupid & frustrated cause I just dont get it. But that fades as you get a little angry - its the authors fault too! You could make it a little easier to read you know. Your use of the word ‘transversality’ made it really clear to me.
‘Right…’ I thought to myself, after finishing reading the post. ‘So why is this boy bothering to use a word that the knows is going to be missinterpreted with such certianty that he provides a disclaimer - asking the reader not to interperet the word in the way he thinks it will be interpereted?’
It seems like a lot of work to use the T word, when other simpler ones would have sufficed & increased the strength of your arguement. In my opinion anyway.
cheers with chard’ in plastic cups puppet
Well, it’s still a matter of interpretation, and sorry to harp on about this, but as far as I’m concerned, the word is really what I literally meant. Classic International Relations theories present the nation-state as a unitary thing that has certain internal interests. Sure, the nation-state obviously exists and exerts influence, but there are in fact a bunch of lines of force, like global class conflicts, that intersect and therefore cross it from outside at a range of different angles. There really are definitions in the dictionary for “transverse”, like “situated or extending across something”, which fit my meaning exactly. The thesaurus suggests words like “cross”, “diagonal”, “oblique” and “slanted”, which also fit my intended meaning exactly. Your turn of calling bullshit on my jargon really isn’t warranted, from a technical point of view, at least.
I’d say the problem you have is more with the word “literal” in the disclaimer, which I guess was used in a slightly nonconventional way — to distinguish the rather ordinary, real-world use of “transverse” from a weirder, fancier, more highly theoretical meaning. So not “literally” in the sense of technically geometric, but “literally” in the sense of “the word as it stands, without the extra figurative, theoretical baggage”.
Also, I admit it wasn’t clear, but my disclaimer was an in-joke that was aimed at like, two people — people like Glen who might think I’m applying an incredibly obscure concept that they themselves are into, but which I don’t really understand, and which (unless I’ve guessed wrong) almost nobody else would register. I assumed plain sailing for everyone else, who would take it as what the word actually means in general usage. Obviously, I assumed wrong. Anyway, I’m sorry my use of that word makes you angry. In retrospect, I’m sure that simpler words would have sufficed, and I’m sorry that my penchant for posting my conference abstracts (i.e. the biggest shift in my posting style of late, and the cause of the increased academic verbiage) is giving you the shits, but hey, that’s a bit part of my everyday life right now.
And for fuck’s sake (and I don’t think it’s an insult to the organisers of the panel to suggest this): although I meant every word of it, the spirit of my admittedly slapdash abstract was also humorous — designed to elicit a smile by being knowingly outlandish. Oh, there’s a panel about Doctor Who and international relations theory, with abstracts due tomorrow. How crazy! What silly stuff can I come up with in twenty minutes, that will also make sense in the light of day? Ha! That’s why it was a “lark” for me — not because I don’t believe what I’ve written (if you’ve read my blog for a while you’d have noticed that I’ve been thinking about critical approaches to Doctor Who for a while) or because I don’t respect the intelligence of everyone else involved, but because it sounds too fun to be true, and so I’ve had a bit of fun with it. Obviously I’ve failed, and in retrospect the mixed “across”/”below” concepts I’ve used are confusing, but can you detect at least a sliver of the spirit behind it?
LOL about right. I dont like disclaimers at the end of things. Maybe if you had written “Doctor Who nevertheless touched on conflicts that transverse the supposedly organic and naturalised interests of nation-states” without the italics & -ity i never would have posted a reply, you never would have responded & we would have lived out our hapless bliss in silence.But maybe even this adjustment alters what you want to say. Language babe, cant live with it… cant live without. smirks
mmm… this argument about the literal & transversal does remind me though of the Lefebvre’s comments in the ‘Production of Space’ about the spatial metaphor in philosophy. mmm… im hungry