A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

I want to be particularly clear that I do not understand my project as a pure genealogy.
The relation between my approach and that articulated by Foucault is assuredly impure. Mine is
an approach that recognizes the importance of that model's critique and incorporates some of its
insights while recognizing its excesses. Whereas Foucault in his tendency toward hyperbole
wanted to jettison continuity in favor of discontinuity, I argue that effective historical narrative
must account for both. It must be both continuous and discontinuous, both serial and episodic.
The model that Foucault presented in response to the problematic nature of traditional
historiography in some ways fell into the primary trap of the controversialist—the obverse
imagined as solution to the problems of the model under attack. While I agree with much of
Foucault’s appropriation of Nietszchean genealogy, I feel the most effective response to the
problems of traditional historiography is more measured than the inversion he suggests. An
effective response must recognize the value of tracking continuities while not imagining that the
present state of affairs is somehow predestined. Let us simply say that this project is a history
informed by genealogical critique. With that said, let us move on to a discussion of the dialectic
that drives the continuous and discontinuous appearances of the Other that comprise the heart of
this dissertation, the dialectic of the material and the ethereal.
MATERIAL/ETHEREAL
One of the primary historical narratives attached to the rise of “Modernity” is the story of
rationalization and disenchantment. Most famously articulated by German sociologist Max
Weber, the process described by these paired terms is one in which the sacred is increasingly
systematized and/or displaced by rational systems. As Lewis Coser parsed it, “The world of
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