Generally, I do not believe that pulp fiction should be read as a bigoted assertion of power, whatever the trend in today’s academia. So, for instance, James Earl Jones’ performance of the evil Thulsa Doom in Conan the Barbarian (1982), is just a great performance, and rightly read by its mainly working class audience as encouraging the play of the imagination. Keeping this in mind, I am mostly interested in using pulp fiction—détournement as the situationists said—to help make plain the ongoing destructive, cybernetic and technocratic aspects of contemporary capitalism.

Even though semiotic analysis can sometimes prove illuminating, by unearthing the ways in which cultural commodities often reproduce the dominant ideas of the capitalist present, the practice of détournement is more immediately destructive of such oppressive ideas. By proposing the “the reuse of preexisting artistic elements in a new ensemble”, the practice of détournement makes it clear that the interpretation of the world is alone insufficient for changing it.