SUMMARY:

Alaina Lemon finds Lipovetsky’s argument compelling and provocative. She confirms that the tropes of exceptional personalities that Lipovetsky describes are present; whether or not they are directly performative, they have had and still have effects. Lemon attempts to apply Lipovetsky’s deconstruction of the ITR-culture to the U.S. context and sees the effects of similar techniques in the Anglophone media for creating representations of “stupid masses” and “ironic” elites. There is no shortage of science-fiction texts and movies in the United States that have lionized “the one,” “the genius,” “the enlightened.” Lemon starts with examining some of the reasons that Americans might have trouble seeing this affinity, and continues with analyzing the narrative of elitism and progressorship in the popular TV series Star Trek (1966 onward). She concludes with the following suggestions: “perhaps the linkages that Lipovetsky sees between long-standing tropes of elite progressors of evolution and recent failures of social protest have drawn force as they have shuttled through transnational circuits of translation and practice? It matters less where they first emerged (if one can even argue such a thing), but rather, what they do.”