A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

of full transparency between interlocutors. In the near future, the world will be a place where
one is confronted with humans who seem increasingly like machines and machines that seem
uncannily human - a place where racial and gender distinctions are fluid to the point of nearuselessness
- a place where corporate cultures and identities trump nationality and ethnicity. The
very boundary between organic and inorganic threatens to collapse with nano-technological
advances toward "intelligent" matter.
Clearly, this scenario of the near future is fraught with categorical crises. To face the
world described above as it is, rather than struggling to map it with untenable distinctions, the
development of modes of understanding that cognize difference without the promise of full
transparency is centrally important. Critical engagement with a world of hybrid identities, smart
molecules and practical telekinesis requires a "pragmatism open to both the uncanny and the
practical.” 327
Such a world calls for a mode of engagement that allows for strangeness, a
thinking that lets the Other remain separate. Confrontations with the Other based on the desire
for full and final disclosure are fundamentally narcissistic and lend themselves to a violence
aimed alternately toward eradication or subsumption. To engage the world that is opening
before us with the desire for full transparency intact promises nothing short of disaster.
Spiritualism and its kith and kin all struggled both to imagine potential human futures and
to articulate some rapprochement between a spiritual and a scientific world view. They did so by
spinning out a series of narratives and practices that centered on engagements with the Other.
While all of these narratives privileged dramatic change at both individual and cultural levels,
they did so in a way that left underlying assumptions of the human intact, with the Other
ultimately functioning less as a centrifugal figure than as one that flattered terrestrial
327 John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication. (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1999) 22.
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