The Dialogic Expansion of Garcia’s We: Chronotopes, Ethics, and Politics in The Expanse Series

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.