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The Technomyth in Transition: Reading American Popular Culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 January 2009

Gaile McGregor
Affiliation:
Gaile McGregor is Post Doctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology atYork University, 4700 Keele St., Downsview 463, Ontario, Canada M3J IP3. For its analysis of trends in science fiction, this paper draws on Gaile McGregor, The Noble Savage in the New World Garden: Notes toward a Syntactics of Place (Bowling Green: The Popular Press, forthcoming).

Extract

In the opening pages of his 1971 study, Politics as Symbolic Action, Murray Edelman underlines his belief that “psychological characteristics, social interaction, and political acts are alternative expressions of the same phenomenon.” In the discussion that follows, however, he tacitly privileges the political aspect of the transaction to an extent that quite undermines his initial image of an interdependent network of reactive/responsive processes. The bias is an understandable one, given his anxiety to counter the naive view of “governmental acts as reflections of people's cognitions.” It is also, unfortunately, a problematic one, insofaras its implication of a self-consciously Machiavellian political leadership deliberately manipulating public affect to its own ends simply substitutes for one misapprehension another equally naive.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1987

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