Knowledge and the Production of Non-Knowledge

This volume shows how alien stories represent and articulate issues of otherness in America's post-war technocratic society. Reading the texts that are constitutive of alien myth, the book explains how the political condition of post-war America is encoded at the level of popular culture. An analysis of America's consumer culture suggests that the consumption of alien myth is comparable with the technical and bureaucratic rationality of the American political order. By expanding this examination of the relationship between technology and myth, the study shows how during the age of technologocentrism the double-strategy constituted by the pursuit of consumption and the objectification of the alien other leads the dominant order toward a temporary communion with the technological system. As such, the commodity tranquilizes the centre's capital-anxiety (the panic caused by the machine's ability to both bestow being and cause non-being) and understand the permanent state of lack that is highlighted by both the form and content of the narratives described by alien myth.