Abstract
Abstract Popular culture could be understood as a political battleground where conflicting meanings are inscribed into the “ordinary objects” that constitute that public sphere. This is also true for science fiction television series. This article critically examines how political matters and ethical agencies are represented within The Expanse, a series that takes place within a speculative twenty-fourth century milky way. Firstly, I will situate The Expanse within its generic “system of reference.” Then, I will illustrate how political matters are represented as conjoined with the ethical. While the ethical refers to actions of persons, politics refers to fictional conceptions of what Tristan Garcia’s terms we-ourselves, understood as conflicting and overlapping conceptions of “we.” The conjunction between the political and the ethical in The Expanse is spatiotemporal: the characters, the events they are entangled in, and the spaces that connect discrete events develop through fictional and literal time. I argue that the science fictional representations of “we-ourselves,” and the specific spatiotemporal representational capacities of the television series format, can be understood through the application of Mikhail Bakhtin’s concepts of the chronotope and the dialogic. That is, The Expanse’s we-representations are chronotopic and the refractive rhetoric of television is dialogic.
Highlights
Popular culture could be understood as a political battleground where conflicting meanings are inscribed into the “ordinary objects” that constitute that public sphere
I situated the series within its space operatic generic system of reference
I argued that the generic elements of space opera are well suited to televisual adaptation, televisual forms of representation that utilize cinematic modes of address
Summary
Popular culture could be understood as a political battleground where conflicting meanings are inscribed into the “ordinary objects” that constitute that public sphere.[1]. Before discussing The Expanse’s textual content, I will situate the series within the generic context of “space opera” SF television.[14] This sub-genre of SF represents both ethical agency and political action in a particular fashion (through the mobilization of specific chronotopic figures), so it makes sense to detail the relevant qualities of this subgenre This follows from a broader discussion of the “aboutness” of science fictional modes of storytelling. The dialogically refractive content of The Expanse occurs in relation to specific chronotopic sites, pertaining to the generic system of reference that the series can be positioned within The latter part of the article concerns Tristan Garcia’s conception of “we” (the first-person singular plural). I argue that the fictional representations of the conflicting and overlapping chronotopic we-conceptions in The Expanse have the capacity to alter one’s framing (comprehension) of the politics of we-ourselves
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