Transcript
Phil Kirby (PK): We’re joined for this podcast by Klaus Dodds, Professor of
Geopolitics here at Royal Holloway, thanks for joining us Klaus.
Klaus Dodds (KD): Pleasure.
PK: I think it might be interesting and useful for our listeners if we just start off
by getting a few reflections on your own undergrad experience.
KD: Well I studied at the University of Bristol and I was an undergraduate in
the late 1980s. And the kind of people I was taught by included, for example,
Peter Haggett, who had written ‘Geography: A Modern Synthesis’ and literally,
I think, for about twenty odd years every school boy or school girl studying
geography had to engage with Peter Haggett. Beyond that I was very
influenced by a number of geographers including a very young Nigel Thrift
who was a very dynamic presence in the department and in those days was
working on finance in the City of London. In terms of political geography I was
taught by Leslie Hepple, who didn’t actually publish very much but was very,
very interested in Latin American geopolitics and political geography and
theory. One thing I didn’t do anything at all on was popular culture.
PK: Yeah I think that’s one of the interesting things, because you were kind of
emerging just before critical geopolitics was becoming a sub-discipline, if we
want to call it that, partly because you were implicated in the creation of that
sub-discipline.
KD: Yeah and I stayed on at Bristol University to do my PhD there and I came
into contact with a lot of very talented individuals including the political theorist
Nick Rengger, who’s now at St. Andrews University. And Nick, in particular,
encouraged me to think about political geography in a way that for example
took popular culture, visual media seriously.
PK: But what exactly do we mean, in 2010, by geopolitics?
KD: Well I think that’s a very interesting question because when I was
finishing my PhD I was lucky enough to meet Gerard Toal and Simon Dalby
and this was sort of 1992/1993. And I think through our conversations what
became clear was one didn’t have to uncritically accept this sort of hundred
year legacy of geopolitics as exemplified by people like Halford Mackinder.
And that you could still think about territory, resources, place, location, but
perhaps arguably in more creative ways which saw these items if you like not
as static entities but as dynamically interacting with one another. I think
Gerard probably deserves credit for actually inventing the term ‘critical
geopolitics’. It all started with a paper that he and John Agnew wrote in the
late 80s and circulated for many years until it was finally published in Political
Geography in 1992. The point being, of course, that it was the critical bit that
mattered. It was saying ‘look, geopolitics has something interesting to offer, in
terms of how we make sense of the world, but we don’t have to uncritically
accept the kind of intellectual infrastructure associated with that term’.
PK: Yeah, and I think part of that ‘intellectual infrastructure’ was often
predicated on kinds of esoteric knowledge: formal, academic, large tomes,
these kinds of resources. And as you’ve been hinting at already part of the
power, part of the interest in modern geopolitical approaches is that it
engages with popular culture in such a fashion, which I think might be useful
for an undergrad coming in who thinks they’re going to have to sit there and
read endless texts. But actually, and this feeds into kind of the everyday
theme that we’ve got here, the newspapers they’re reading, the films they’re
watching, the music they’re listening to, all feeds into modern geopolitics.
Focus Group
-
I wrote an essay on this… It’s like how popular geopolitics is
represented through film, so you can see there are ideas that are
brought up that are representative of what’s happening in real life, you
know, like if somebody was like ‘oh you’re watching James Bond in a
lecture, why?’, and then you can throw out, you can be like, ‘well you
can look at all of these relationships between different things’, and
they’re like, ‘oh ok I see, that makes sense’.
KD: You know it’s perfectly true that it’s sometimes very difficult to trace how
academic ideas, for example, filter into social, cultural, political worlds or
practices, but I think one of the things that I’ve tried to do through my writing
and teaching is to kind of talk to people about, ‘look, you’re bombarded every
day with countless stories, images about the world around you. How are they
framed? What kinds of geographical imaginations are at play here?’ So I’m
really trying to ask my students, who do my courses, ‘stop, think, reflect, how
is the world being organised, how is the world being presented to you, and,
critically, are there alternatives?’
PK: I know that elsewhere you’ve written on the importance of everyday
practice in allowing people to construct certain imaginations and certain
geopolitical imaginations. So I was wondering, precisely, what ways would
you say that everyday practice plays out? What kinds of things are people
doing that are forming their geopolitical imaginations more generally?
KD: Well I’ll give you an example from my work on film. Probably one of the
most popular generic categories of film is the action-thriller and if you think in
terms of how the action-thriller is often organised or how it works, and
included in that of course I’m thinking of spy thrillers like James Bond or Jason
Bourne, perhaps in a more contemporary example, so often they’re involving,
for example, an individual agent heroically struggling against some kind of evil
force or network, usually masterminded by some evil genius. There’s usually a
race against time element and, more often than not, the world is a stage in
which global domination appears to be a key feature. Well you think of the
way in which, for example, in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 was
presented to us, followed the script of an action thriller. You know, we had the
evil genius, Saddam Hussein; we had the race against time, weapons of mass
destruction; we had dreams or fantasies of regional or global domination; we
had heroic force being offered or proffered to us by Bush and Blair; we had
Colin Powell doing an extraordinary performance in the United Nations, also
trying to sell us a particular kind of narrative. In a curious sort of way, what I
try to suggest is that these things actually begin to blur. In that how we try to
make sense of things is derived as much from the serious world of high
politics as it is from popular culture.
PK: But how is this working out? Is it simply that the audience are watching
these films and then they’re interpreting world events because of what they’ve
seen in the movies? Or is it because of tactics such as ‘shock and awe’ that
the powers that be are contriving these things to look filmic in a way and to
play into narratives that a populous might understand?
KD: Yeah I think this is one of the arguments that James der Derian has
played with for quite a long time now, which is the notion that there is a kind of
increasingly military-industrial-media-entertainment complex. The difficulty
however we have, in part, is also trying to connect that to audiences and
reactions and I think it would be utterly foolish to suggest that just because
certain images are mobilized in particular ways, audiences respond. What we
do know is that audiences respond in very different ways; their emotional
investments, their political and ideological commitments vary and I think,
therefore, the job of the academic is, in part, to critically interrogate for
example, those images.
PK: But not just fan culture, but fan culture in that way is important to the
object you’ve chosen today, which is a video cassette of the James Bond film
The World is Not Enough, from 1999?
KD: From 1999, yes.
PK: So the basic question would be, why would we say that this is a
geopolitical object?
KD: I think one of the reasons I chose it is partly of course that James Bond,
as a kind of cinematic phenomena, can hardly be doubted in the sense of, it’s
a very long running, established series of films, massively popular. I think the
film itself is interesting partly because, if you put it in the wider James Bond
context, the series revolves around two fundamentals. First of all there are
certain generic characteristics of James Bond that don’t change, typically, for
example, gadgets, ‘exotic places’ in inverted commas, in another inverted
commas ‘Bond girls’, there are certain things that James Bond, certainly
repeat viewers, let alone fans, want and expect to see.
PK: What would you say about the fact that DVDs proliferate across the
place, they’re in everyone’s homes, and you get the little blurb, the shorthand
visual on the outside, and that kind of legitimates what it’s saying within it?
KD: Yeah, I think the packaging of James Bond and we’ve been looking at
The World is Not Enough which is, of course, a video box, one of my older
examples, but they’ve always a certain kind of quality, so in a sense the
marketing and the promotional aspect of James Bond matters greatly. As an
aside I think increasingly for many, many films, Bourne is another good
example of this, its actually game development that’s becoming increasingly
lucrative. But back to James Bond, I think that those videos and DVDs are in
many cases, of course, collectors’ items, just as, for example, some of the first
editions of Ian Fleming’s novels now are, so I think that the importance about
this is in part that these are highly mobile objects. It is the humble video, often
pirated, that has enabled James Bond to go global, so when you see
attendance figures of X in North America and Europe, the two major markets,
in a sense that doesn’t do justice to how in subsequent years Africa, Asia,
other parts of the world, will also get to see James Bond both in the cinema
and beyond. So I think there’s that element in terms of an almost Latourian
mobility in terms of the material object. But also think, you know, think about
these objects and their relationship to fandom. They’re desirable, they’re
collectable, people horde James Bond things. I’m extremely proud of the fact
that I have every DVD and video of James Bond along with countless books
about James Bond, posters about James Bond, cartoons about James Bond; I
write about James Bond both as an academic but also as a fan, and in a
sense, through my own work, I’ve not tried to necessarily disguise that terribly
strongly. People care about these things.
PK: But would you say to some extent that kind of collectorship, and the
cultures of fandom that go with it, obfuscate more critical thinking about what
it’s saying, because it’s a pretty object in and of itself, and also because the
film itself, its cinematography is appealing, that kind of precludes
consideration of the politics that it’s trying to get across.
KD: I think it can do, for example when I wrote about James Bond initially, and
I’ve certainly tried to do this more powerfully with Jason Bourne, I probably
didn’t reflect strongly enough on the highly gendered elements of James Bond
and the kind of misogynistic undercurrents that are so obvious when one
thinks about it in the films, particularly the 1960s and 70s films. So I would say
that my engagement with James Bond has been in a sense greatly influenced
by conversations I’ve had not only with fellow fans, but also through reading
literatures on feminist geography, or, for example, the kind of literature on
masculinity. So the other thing to bear in mind, I would stress, is that one’s
engagement with these kinds of popular cultural items is not static, it can
change.
KD: If I was reflecting at the end of my career, which thank goodness is
another twenty plus years away, in terms of what I want to achieve in over 30,
40 years of reflection, writing and teaching it is to absolutely stop students and
general readers from taking the world for granted. I want to, in a sense, make
them almost deeply frustrated with life because they won’t take anything for
granted, they will continue to critically question and not assume that the kinds
of views, the images, the narratives that are offered by the powerful are not
the only ones there. If we’re still talking about neoliberalism in 25 years, that’s
the kind of thing, not taking for granted militarization. It’s those kinds of things,
without necessarily making life miserable, boring...
PK: Mentally exhausting.
KD: Mentally exhausting, but nonetheless, I always say to my students who
take my third year course, I will have succeeded if you go to the cinema and
you think a little bit harder about what this film might be doing and how might
we contextualise it within a broader context that thinks of film, popular media
as incredibly powerful sources of information and framing about the world.
Focus Group
-
-
My favourite lecture so far this year’s been our Geopolitics one, with
Klaus Dodds, which has been pretty amazing; it was a very, very good
course.
Yeah Klaus Dodd’s lectures were the best ones…
He has a really good way of presenting things, it’s almost like when
you’re sitting in there, you’re watching a television programme, like a
documentary but live. And he always has finishing statements which I
really like; he always ends the lecture on a ‘thought’, and he uses, I
really like his work on films as well, the use of Geopolitics in films, I
think it’s really interesting. You can’t watch films normally now, because
you keep looking for the Geopolitics in them.