A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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.
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