A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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positive version), the call is for humanity to literally and metaphorically lay down its arms. Duplication is not the “goal” so much as simultaneous transcendence and embrace of difference. CONCLUSION Whereas the utopian currents of the nineteenth century invoked a set of material transformations as the response to human suffering, those of the later twentieth respond to what has been understood as the pre-eminent disease of the latter century—alienation. Herein lies one of the fundamental ironies of the displaced utopian imaginary in the late twentieth century—it is through sundering one’s understood relation to self and embracing the alien that alienation is escaped. Each of the moments discussed in this document have involved an effort to bring the abject back into circulation. The abject is that “exorbitant outside or inside ejected beyond the scope of the possible, tolerable, thinkable... It lies there quite close, but it cannot be assimilated.” 318 The abject is a “constitutive outside—the unspeakable, the unviable, the nonnarrativizable” 319 The world of spirit, the power of the feminine, surrender and dissolution as modes of practice—all banished to the margins as potentially disruptive of a dominant worldview that values masculine virtues above all. Positivism and its cognate forms valorized visibility, clarity, vigor and mastery and thus depended upon the abjection of the very content and modes of practice that Spiritualism and its offspring introduced back into public discourse. This set of practices and content is the constitutive outside of rational order. Abduction also re-introduced the abject—both at the level of the abduction narrative and at the level of experience. Abduction marked a departure from those earlier moments, all of which stopped short of the disintegration promised by the contemplation of the abject and the 318 Julia Kristeva, The Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982) 1. 319 Judith Butler, “Arguing with the Real” in Bodies That Matter: on the Discursive limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993) 188. 221
esultant exposure to the Real. The earlier visions articulated contemplatable futures, ones that maintained a linear relation to the understood present. The occupants of those futures were recognizably human, albeit more luminous, perfected. The consistent offering of evidence for the survivability of human personality spoke to a desire for the achievement of utopia without the violence of substantial change at the level of the human subject. Abduction not only denies that promise of survivability, it denies the stability of personality on this side of the veil. Abduction allows for a thoroughgoing encounter with the abject, an encounter Kristeva famously described as fraught with “the weight of meaninglessness, about which there is nothing insignificant and which crushes me on the edge of non-existence and hallucination of a reality that, if I acknowledge it, annihilates me.” 320 While the moments that precede abduction pull up short of the precipice of self-immolation, abduction plunges ahead, offering no comforting vision of the future, only a vision of the unspeakably different. Just as at the level of the subject, abduction moves beyond the type of scenario from which “the je reemerges reinforced in its position as the center of experience,” at the level of its broader dissemination as narrative, abduction moves beyond its predecessors as well. Spiritualism and the moments that follow from it all spoke to dramatic transformation yet papered over or abjected the very change that might potentiate or accompany that transformation—change at the level of the subject. Spiritualism offered an explanation of death, yet its argument for the survivability of personality and the sameness of the afterworld covers over the very thing it sought to explain. Judith Butler has asked whether “there can be a theory of contingency that is not compelled to refuse or to cover over that which it seeks to explain?” 321 In a related fashion, she asks of the abject “how might these ostensibly constitutive exclusions be 320 Kristeva, 2. 321 Butler, 195. 222
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The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
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The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
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III. Chapter 2: Contact…………
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oth in their rich and bizarre detai
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Fukuyama also describes the histori
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and belonging that are native to th
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modernity, Weber stressed over and
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While positivism would emerge as th
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figure that serves as a medium betw
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sources of Spiritualism, Swedenborg
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The series of moments and discourse
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estful comprehension. It straddles
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The second chapter examines the eme
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Ch.1 The Dead INTRODUCTION Since th
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sense this dream of perfected commu
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political registers as well. This c
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In the late eighteenth century, Mes
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inverted form) along which the unde
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consciousness that is highly mobile
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up the process of thinking”. 38 S
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umor - and irony - would have it, w
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sense that Swedenborg’s researche
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Spiritualist movement, whose medium
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minded, loves to roam in the woods
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etween humans and God as unthinkabl
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esearches was a tailor by the name
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concerns and from the fact that the
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simultaneously in the world of the
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which God has revealed to them and
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assessed the Fox sisters as the “
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each in turn Lockwood elaborated hi
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as miraculous or supernatural? 85 T
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hearts of men to help their brother
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the corrupting influence of the wor
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All manner of proscribed activities
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dawn of a new era, and you must not
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qualities the coarser and heavier t
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full of mischief as any child in th
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keynote in public (and much of the
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masculine traits), the figure of th
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The first was that all world religi
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space brother religion, The Great I
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and the menopauses.” 141 A genera
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Ch.2 Contact INTRODUCTION Contact w
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as spiritual aspirations embodied.
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magazine, the latter edited by icon
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featured female characters who were
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keeping with the recurring integrat
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harmony with the universe (“if yo
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world were still struggling to asce
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hermetic credo as above, so below,
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insistence on the survival of the i
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evolutionary nomenclature of the co
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Pelley exhibited a variety of trait
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Chelas, which in the Hindu traditio
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the Theosophical Society along with
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Ballard was told during his initial
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Masters. Members of the I Am Ascend
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operative in most later “space-br
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promises of evolutionary progress h
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such as St. Germain could make thei
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Ch. 3 The Saucer INTRODUCTION The t
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The arrival of the saucer promised
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salvation through the union of oppo
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potential public responses to the f
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as rationally comprehensible and a
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attached to cultivating a following
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percentage of unidentifieds to the
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extraterrestrial communicant suppli
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perpetrators of willful deception i
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signing.” 210 Gill’s amused res
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practicing theoretical astrophysici
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DOROTHY MARTIN While ufology began
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attention. Without knowing why, I p
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One message from an assistant of Sa
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Dr. Laughead first encountered Doro
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In the case of Dorothy Martin and h
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II space brother religions to large
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he could think of to obtain permiss
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other myth. You will recall that in
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and a Saturnian named “Ramu.” 2
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ecome small, self-sufficient commun
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paranoia in another context but in
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the space brother narrative further
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Adamski—the UFO was effortlessly
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communism. The connection between t
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The shift from contact to abduction
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Page 245 and 246: BIBLIOGRAPHY Aber, W.W. “A Guide
Page 247 and 248: _____. “Adamski, George (1891-196
Page 249 and 250: _____. Discipline and Punish: the B
Page 251 and 252: _____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
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Page 255: Streiber, Whitley and Anne, ed. The
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