A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

exclude the Divine from allowable public discourse versus Spiritualism’s attempts to rearticulate
matters of spirit in material form is the version of the dialectic sketched in the introduction and
tracked throughout this chapter. This move to align matters of spirit with the materialist ethos
speaks to a desire for integration and clarity. Yet this very alignment injects instability into the
materialist vision, creating linkages between supposedly irreconcilable spheres that disrupt the
ontological verities of the materialist universe—illustrating a dynamic tension also of central
concern. Combined with Sword’s observations on the ghostly as incipiently postmodern, these
two approaches to the dynamics of Spiritualism in the nineteenth century—positivism v. neoenchantment
& integration v. disintegration—present a picture of the destabilization of History
sought by Foucault’s genealogy. Sword goes so far as to say that “communication with the dead
is always, on some level, a repudiation of history.” 77
Spiritualism was both a recrudescence and
re-articulation of magical thought, both an elaboration and deconstruction of an ascendant
positivism—simultaneously exemplary of a vestigial mode of thought and a modernist ethos,
simultaneously an exemplar of modernism and a harbinger of its disintegration.
Lockwood’s articulation of Spiritualism clearly positioned it as a force of integration and
clarity, aligning him with a positivist ethos. Lockwood placed himself and the cause of
Spiritualism in combat with superstition and any notions of the “supernatural.” Such things as
communication with the dead and the various “higher faculties” associated with mediumship
were to be understood as wholly consistent with natural law and thus explainable, denying
positivism of its other and maintaining a space for spiritual matters in allowable discourse. In his
attempts to explain the phenomena of Spiritualism he followed a path well trod by writers before
him – arguing that spiritualist phenomena are merely extensions of the principles utilized by then
current media: photography, telegraphy, phonography and telephony. Through the discussion of
77 Sword, 47.
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