A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

events that make up that process. The focus on the singularity of the event troubles the
coherence of history understood as linear and progressive and gestures instead at the messiness
of history as lived experience.
Foucault points to Paul Ree, famously the stepping off point for Nietzsche’s Genealogy
of Morals, as exemplifying the tendency to imagine historical origins as singular, as Ursprungen.
“[I]t is obvious that Paul Ree was wrong to follow the English tendency in describing the history
of morality in terms of linear development—in reducing its entire history and genesis to an
exclusive concern for utility.” 6
Here we see both the tendency toward singularity and the
tendency toward reading effect as cause. In terms of singularity, Ree’s hypothesis imagines
moral structures as emerging from a single cause—that of a concern and desire for utility.
Nietzsche, and Foucault after him, sees morality as emerging from a multiplicity of forces in
contention. Morality emerges not out of conscious decisions in aid of some concrete goal but
rather out of protracted struggle, shifts in power, mistakes and misunderstandings.
As to the conflation of cause and effect—this is a recurring tendency in traditional
historiography. Nietzsche launches his polemic in Genealogy of Morals by revisiting a critique
of his friend Paul Ree’s The Origin of Moral Emotion. Ree puts forward the argument—shared
by the Utilitarian tradition of Mill and Spencer—that “good” actions engender favorable
consequences, and thus morals are useful or utilitarian. This contemporary understanding of
morals is then in turn read back onto the past. If morals are currently understood as utilitarian
then their origins must lie in utility. Thus utility, an effect of interpretation and a long uneven
historical process, is read as cause. This fundamental anachronism, current understandings read
onto past events, is what underwrites traditional historiography’s search for a singular cause.
6 Foucault, 76.
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