Science fiction’s manifest content may disguise a deeper formal satisfaction

Evidence

And since I will speak of Susan Sontag shortly, let me take as a demonstration of this process her remarkable essay on science fiction, “The Imagination of Disaster,” in which she reconstructs the basic paradigm of the science fiction movie, seeing in it an expression of “the deepest anxieties about contemporary existence … about physical disaster, the prospect of universal mutilation and even annihilation … [but more particularly] about the condition of the individual psyche.” All of this is so, and her essay provides a thorough working through of the materials of science fiction taken on its own terms. But what if those terms were themselves but a disguise, but the “manifest content” that served to distract us from some more basic satisfaction at work in the form? — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 771

Categorization

• XREF: The manifest-content vs. latent-satisfaction distinction is the psychoanalytic (and ultimately Marxist) interpretive schema Jameson will deploy against phenomenological readings. — connects to: Postmodern science fiction implodes inward to revitalize fragments of simulation — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 406

Broader Connections

• Postmodern science fiction implodes inward to revitalize fragments of simulation #expands (0.75) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 406