Bloggrokker (Scott) 10/24

Derrida or Foucault? I can't remember.
Y'know, when the Notorious Dr. R. O. G. spoke of the ways in which the hegemonic superstructure zeroes in on a specific word, a word perceived as culturally negative, and re-processes the word 'til it's, well, if not culturally positive, then culturally not-so-negative, depending upon your POV--the example being the word "patriot," a word that's evolved from meaning tea-dumping anarchists to flag-flyin' ideologues. And let's not forget the current military-industrial "complexification" in brand-tagging the word "patriot," the Patriot missiles we've been freewheelingly lobbing into Baghdad on-and-off since the '91 Gulf WAr--ah, if only for the days when we could see The Light at the End of the Snafu.
Anyway, yes, where was I? Oh yeah, Derrida, had to be Derrida. If it concerns THE WORD, it's gotta be Derrida.
And, as Stephen Colbert announces each evening, AND NOW FOR TONIGHT'S WORD.
And TONIGHT'S WORD is TWO WORDS, hyphenated, no less--SCIENCE-FICTION.
As I see things, the superstructure of the hegemony has re-processed the often-derided, somewhat feared, cultural phenomenon wrapped up in the term SCIENCE-FICTION and turned it into a big-buck, entertainment-based economic spectaco-juggernaut.
Hop into a theoretical time machine, set the controls for atemporal backwarding, and, lo and behold, there's the man who created not only the conceptualized idea of a literary time machine, but the genre of SCIENCE-FICTION itself as we know it, H. G. Wells. Wells, a--don't be too scared, kids, just pull the blankets up around your ears--Socialist. Holy Martian death-machines, Batman, y'know the State Department got its hairs all up in a paranoid sheep-shank when Wells visited the States way back in the '30s, perhaps they even had a G-man follow him around, this potential Red peddling potentially Red ideas rolled up in tales of scientific extrapolations and utopianism.
(And, as an aside, isn't Wells's The Invisible Man the epitome of the postmodern absent center. A technological ghost story of madness and science-gone-awry revolving around a central plot element that just isn't empirically there? Just a thought, a thought perhaps for another blog entry.)
Then there were the Futurians, a group of SCIENCE-FICTION authors that included such future luminaries of the field as Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, and Damon Knight. During the '30s, too, Secret Service agents mistakenly raided and falsely accused these SCIENCE-FICTION writers of printing and mimeographing revolutionary manifestos. Look out, kids, more Commies to Brainwash your Mommies!
Do I really need to say anything regarding Jack Finney writing Invasion of the Body Snatchers in the early '50s? I didn't think so.
Skip up to the late '80s and early '90s, and the hacker busts, wherein the Feds' computer hardware raids saw the SCIENCE-FICTION writers of the cyberpunk mould as potential cyber-agitators--William Gibson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, John Shirley, and their ilk were seen as radicals ready to crash the hegemony.
(For anyone interested in all of this dizzying info, leaf through Sterling's The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier. It's required enlightenment.)
If the perceived scariness of SCIENCE-FICTION is an unknown variable for the general public, that's 'cuz the hegemonic superstructure has done a bang-up job removing the culturally acceptable elements of SCIENCE-FICTION from SCIENCE-FICTION and, beginning slowly back before '33 when Wells's The Invisible Man got the film treatment, has worked its way up into an ever-accelerating "Age of Blastravaganzas," an age of mega-buck, decibel-endangering, cgi-sugarcoated hyper-cinema meant to lull Joe Moviegoer into the Pyrotechnical Wonderland of the Megaplex Electrical Parade.
(!!!andtheghostsofadornoandhorkheimerstalktheboxoffice!!!)
Gee whiz, didja ever wonder why the blockbusterin'est blockbusters are almost always some bastardized form of SCIENCE-FICTION--Star Wars, Men In Black, The Matrix, Independence Day, X-Men, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, ALIEN, Lord of the Rings, The Terminator, Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, Armageddon, The Fifth Element, Tron (hey, who put that in here?!?), War of the Worlds, RoboCop, Total Recall, Minority Report, etc., etc.
(Yes, yes, I know, I know, LOTR isn't SCIENCE-FICTION, it's fantasy, but they're often lumped into a singular genre for reasons forever unfathomable and eternally unforgivable, so it'll benefit my argument here.)
Television? There's the Sci-Fi Channel's highest-rated program, the rehashed Battlestar Galactica. Yep, I watch it. I dig it. I also know the hegemonic superstructure wants everyone to know that Habermas-esque "experts" like Matt Rausch or one of those other TV Guide pundits thinks it's the cat's pajamas and, to borrow a term from the NBC Propaganda Mill, it's "Must-See TV."
And the Sci-Fi Channel itself? It's a Corporate Media Ideology of Shot Expectations. Bring back The Outer Limits, guys, the black-and-white one, the old one, the non-sucktacular one. What's the matter? Not enough pyrotechnics and damage-to-decibel ratios for ya?
As for reading SCIENCE-FICTION? I believe the superstructure of the hegemony--the American one, anyway--might ask: Read? Who the hell reads anymore?