A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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fantastic into everyday life constitute a series of waking dreams. The utopian imaginary is in and of itself already society dreaming of its future. With the spectral personae that populate Spiritualism et al., the sense of waking dream is even more pronounced. The utopian ideal is displaced social desire in that it reads its desired state of affairs onto the future. In that the term itself, means literally “no place,” it communicates a sense of its own impossibility. The mythic utopian is trebly displaced in that it shares the aforementioned traits of the utopian and imagines social transformation as carried out by agents who are radically outside the society that is to be reformed. Those agents exist not only outside society, but outside the very plane of reality in which that society resides. Dreams at the level of the social might best be understood as myth. Northrop Frye defines myth as constituting a realm “near or at the conceivable limits of desire.” 20 Freud shows his beard again here in that myth functions, like dream, as wish fulfillment. Frye further suggests in The Anatomy of Criticism that myth is generally pre-occupied with the “apocalyptic” and the “demonic”. These terms respectively correspond to a given culture’s vision of heaven and hell. Thus we have a form that consistently addresses that which a given culture most strongly desires both in the positive sense (the apocalyptic mode) and negative (the demonic). In more secular terms, or in those terms favored by Jameson and Haraway, one could readily argue that visions of heaven and hell are read as terrestrial utopia and dystopia. Thus myth tells a tale of the limits of human desire vis-à-vis the lived environment. Mythic discourses communicate idealized visions of the future both good and bad. Northrop Frye’s co-presence with Haraway and Jameson might appear incongruous, but his analysis of myth is quite useful for the purpose of this project. The sense of the monstrous conveyed by Haraway indicates a kind of impossibility. The monstrous is that which defies 20 Frye, 36. 17
estful comprehension. It straddles understood categories in ways that move out the logic of either/or and into the logic of both/and. Jameson points out particular links between utopian discourse and the monstrous and suggests that visions of the monstrous are visions of humanity transformed. Frye focuses the sense of impossibility indicated by Haraway. For Frye, the mythic constitutes a space that allows for and even invites the co-presence of opposing forms. The apocalyptic and the demonic both reside in the same narrative fold. Throughout the articulations treated herein this violation of the law of non-contradiction, a thing cannot be both itself and its opposite, appears repeatedly. Returning to our earlier discussion of the desire implicit in traditional historiography, we should pause here and compare the desire implicit in the utopian impulse. Following Foucault, the desire driving the sense of history articulated by such writers as Fukuyama is the desire for the stable and recognizable self. The utopian impulse is informed instead by a desire for the Real, a desire that aligns with Foucault’s proposed genealogical dynamic, in which “the purpose of history, guided by genealogy, is not to discover the roots of our identity, but to commit itself to its dissipation.” 21 The state out of which the infant emerges to take on the characteristics of the individual is the Real. It is a state of non-differentiation, of primary narcissism. In Lacan’s estimation, the world of the infant is ruled by need and the whole of that world exists to meet that need in all its various forms. The Lacanian understanding of desire holds that all desire is ultimately a desire to return to this state of undifferentiated bliss. 22 All utopian imaginings speak to the desire for the endless fulfillment of need. Tales of a bygone Golden Age, tales of the Land 21 Foucault, 95. 22 Klages, Mary, “Jacques Lacan,” University of Colorado, http://www.colorado.edu/English/ENGL2012Klages/lacan.html (accessed June 1, 2005); Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage” in Critical Theory Since 1965, ed. Hazard Adams and Leroy Searle (Tallahassee; University of Florida, 1986) 734-737; Jacques-Alain Miller, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan: Book II : The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954-1955 (New York: Norton, 1991) 18
Page 1 and 2: The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
Page 3 and 4: The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
Page 5 and 6: III. Chapter 2: Contact…………
Page 7 and 8: oth in their rich and bizarre detai
Page 9 and 10: Fukuyama also describes the histori
Page 11 and 12: and belonging that are native to th
Page 13 and 14: modernity, Weber stressed over and
Page 15 and 16: While positivism would emerge as th
Page 17 and 18: figure that serves as a medium betw
Page 19 and 20: sources of Spiritualism, Swedenborg
Page 21: The series of moments and discourse
Page 25 and 26: The second chapter examines the eme
Page 27 and 28: Ch.1 The Dead INTRODUCTION Since th
Page 29 and 30: sense this dream of perfected commu
Page 31 and 32: political registers as well. This c
Page 33 and 34: In the late eighteenth century, Mes
Page 35 and 36: inverted form) along which the unde
Page 37 and 38: consciousness that is highly mobile
Page 39 and 40: up the process of thinking”. 38 S
Page 41 and 42: umor - and irony - would have it, w
Page 43 and 44: sense that Swedenborg’s researche
Page 45 and 46: Spiritualist movement, whose medium
Page 47 and 48: minded, loves to roam in the woods
Page 49 and 50: etween humans and God as unthinkabl
Page 51 and 52: esearches was a tailor by the name
Page 53 and 54: concerns and from the fact that the
Page 55 and 56: simultaneously in the world of the
Page 57 and 58: which God has revealed to them and
Page 59 and 60: assessed the Fox sisters as the “
Page 61 and 62: each in turn Lockwood elaborated hi
Page 63 and 64: as miraculous or supernatural? 85 T
Page 65 and 66: hearts of men to help their brother
Page 67 and 68: the corrupting influence of the wor
Page 69 and 70: All manner of proscribed activities
Page 71 and 72: 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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science. 256 The Hill case was the
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abduction scenario in a variety of
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In September of 1963, some two year
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car and gone into a field with bino
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The cadences of Barney’s recollec
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And he said it was a pregnancy test
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motif also speaks to a relationship
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on a human is smooth and rounded. S
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seems to have suggested that humans
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The mesmerist and hypnotherapist bo
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communiqués emerge not from the la
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David E. Mack, a Harvard trained an
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dystopian, or in the language of No
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In the space brother scenario, the
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Everything is now. The past is now;
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effectively cut off from that possi
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eaching our innate potential. The h
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It is in this desire for dissolutio
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abductees feeling like guinea pigs.
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attack. Nietzsche writes of the blo
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Hill. Barney recalled his first gli
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The Gaze as philosophical and psych
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constituted modes of visuality. To
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traum or dream further indicates th
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educed not in the relatively benign
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will of the abductee—all speak to
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esultant exposure to the Real. The
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understood moorings, left to drift
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desired utopian state. The Others c
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were, more or less, ascended master
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Reports back from the spirit realm
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generally silent, but when they do
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to narrative structural positionali
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sensibilities, though one that woul
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of full transparency between interl
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BIBLIOGRAPHY Aber, W.W. “A Guide
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_____. “Adamski, George (1891-196
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_____. Discipline and Punish: the B
Page 251 and 252:
_____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
Page 253 and 254:
_____. Something about Soulcraft. N
Page 255:
Streiber, Whitley and Anne, ed. The
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A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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