A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

endered less permanent, more dynamic?” 322
Abduction is most certainly a theory (and practice)
of contingency. To accept the reality of abduction is to accept the dramatically partial nature of
our understanding of reality. As to the relative permanence or flexibility of abject material, all of
the moments of the nexus of alien-human communication discussed herein argue for the
inclusion in public discourse of the constitutive outside. Abduction argues that the individual
can engage in a full encounter with the abject and return to the socially constituted world—not
with the je reinforced but dramatically altered.
As a final key difference between abduction and its predecessors, let us return briefly to
its relation to a positivist vision of rational order. Spiritualism and Theosophy and to a lesser
extent the space brother religions imagined themselves as compatible with the science of their
day. They functioned as an extension of scientific mastery into new realms—realms hitherto
consigned to the vagaries of faith and superstition. The abduction scenario doesn’t acknowledge
the hegemony of a positivist science so much as present a series of phenomena that are
impossible in the context of a reality predicated on the principles of that hegemony. One could
argue, in concert with my earlier assertion that abduction differs from earlier iterations of the
displaced utopian imaginary as the post-modern differs from the modern, that this difference is in
part a function of the fact that positivism’s hegemony has been far from untroubled in the
decades since the Hill abduction. Perhaps the abduction scenario does not recognize positivism’s
hegemony because of that hegemony’s erosion. Abduction presents a reality where the basic
laws of physics (which alongside the fiction of the subject constitute the bedrock of “reality”) are
suspended or altogether absent. Levitation and the passage of bodies through solid objects are
commonplaces. Time is expanded, contracted and looped. Identity is sundered from its
322 Butler, 189.
223