A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

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eing that the experience calls her toward. In any event, whether as a function of the abductee’s desire to regain some of the agency lost via the abduction scenario (you will recall the current nomenclature has shifted from abductee to experiencer) or as function of the overarching logic of the abduction narrative (read as our own desires viewed through the scrim of a fantastic encounter with the Other), the point seems to be that in order to confront that which is wholly Other without disappearing, one must surrender the desire for the cohesive self. More accurately, one must forgo the logic via which the self and Other are incommensurable. This sense of moving toward a space in which the self and the Other can be fully copresent, jettisoning the logic of the Gaze, under which one is cast into the darkness of objectification by becoming the seen, is what drives the utopian reading of the abduction narrative. The wholly overwhelming strangeness of encounters with the grays is that which most distinguishes the abduction scenario from the earlier encounters discussed in this dissertation. The gray departs from the comforting contours of the human so richly embodied by those earlier Others. To address the question of why encountering such a figure as the gray without surrendering to either of the paired impulses of subsumption or eradication (a binary that parallels a series of like tensions discussed herein: centrifugal/centripetal, the desire for maintenance of self v. the desire for the return to the Real, the desire to enter into a dramatically altered set of social relations without giving up anything of the self) might be considered a worthy goal, let us turn to the final argument of this dissertation, an argument that recalls our ongoing discussion of identification and the abject. The postmodern condition implies a highly mobile subject, one that encompasses, as Kaja Silverman has it, “an infinitude of contradictory identifications.” 323 Silverman argues in The Threshold of the Visible World that “while most of us are in fact quite peripatetic when it comes 323 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York: Routledge, 1996) 1-2. 233
to narrative structural positionalities, we are considerably less tractable when confronted with the possibility of bodily reconfiguration, especially when it would involve an indentificatory alignment with what is socially disprized.” 324 This sense of a mobility open to a variety of “narrative structural positionalities” but wary of bodily reconfiguration was prefigured by the displaced utopian imaginary preceding World War II. Beginning with Spiritualism, and mesmerism before it, the movements discussed in this dissertation prized a highly mobile subject. Spiritualism favored most prominently a fluidity of gender. The medium was characterized by an indeterminate gender identity—women acting in mannish ways and men surrendering to their intuitive selves. Spiritualism as public phenomenon promoted the transit of women through the public sphere, making the virtues of domestic Victorian womanhood the basis of a public movement. The political stance with which Spiritualism aligned itself favored women’s suffrage, free love and a loosening of the bonds of matrimony—all causes that would free women from the constraints of a strictly foreshortened range of movement and action. The expansion of women’s potential field of action of course would in turn muddy the clear and rigid contours of masculinity. Spiritualism also supported the abolition of slavery—an action that would markedly increase the mobility of a massive population previously consigned to a highly restricted set of roles (house slave/field slave, uncle tom/buck—binaries as seamless as those confining women—Madonna/whore, married/spinster, fruitful/barren). And of course mediumship itself allowed for a kind of super-mobile subject, granting potential identities ranging from Aunt Minnie to Ben Franklin to Indian Chief. All of the moments of the displaced utopian imaginary discussed herein were marked by fluidities of gender and class and thus an increasingly mobile subject. Even the retrograde politics of Pelley allowed for some loosening of gender and class demarcations—-especially the 324 Silverman, 2. 234
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The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
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The Extraterrestrial in US Culture
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III. Chapter 2: Contact…………
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oth in their rich and bizarre detai
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Fukuyama also describes the histori
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and belonging that are native to th
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modernity, Weber stressed over and
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While positivism would emerge as th
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figure that serves as a medium betw
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sources of Spiritualism, Swedenborg
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The series of moments and discourse
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estful comprehension. It straddles
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The second chapter examines the eme
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Ch.1 The Dead INTRODUCTION Since th
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sense this dream of perfected commu
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political registers as well. This c
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In the late eighteenth century, Mes
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inverted form) along which the unde
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consciousness that is highly mobile
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up the process of thinking”. 38 S
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umor - and irony - would have it, w
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sense that Swedenborg’s researche
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Spiritualist movement, whose medium
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minded, loves to roam in the woods
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etween humans and God as unthinkabl
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esearches was a tailor by the name
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concerns and from the fact that the
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simultaneously in the world of the
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which God has revealed to them and
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assessed the Fox sisters as the “
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each in turn Lockwood elaborated hi
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as miraculous or supernatural? 85 T
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hearts of men to help their brother
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the corrupting influence of the wor
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All manner of proscribed activities
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dawn of a new era, and you must not
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qualities the coarser and heavier t
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full of mischief as any child in th
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keynote in public (and much of the
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masculine traits), the figure of th
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The first was that all world religi
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space brother religion, The Great I
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and the menopauses.” 141 A genera
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Ch.2 Contact INTRODUCTION Contact w
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as spiritual aspirations embodied.
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magazine, the latter edited by icon
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featured female characters who were
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keeping with the recurring integrat
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harmony with the universe (“if yo
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world were still struggling to asce
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hermetic credo as above, so below,
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insistence on the survival of the i
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evolutionary nomenclature of the co
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Pelley exhibited a variety of trait
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Chelas, which in the Hindu traditio
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the Theosophical Society along with
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Ballard was told during his initial
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Masters. Members of the I Am Ascend
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operative in most later “space-br
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promises of evolutionary progress h
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such as St. Germain could make thei
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Ch. 3 The Saucer INTRODUCTION The t
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The arrival of the saucer promised
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salvation through the union of oppo
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potential public responses to the f
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as rationally comprehensible and a
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attached to cultivating a following
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percentage of unidentifieds to the
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extraterrestrial communicant suppli
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perpetrators of willful deception i
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signing.” 210 Gill’s amused res
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practicing theoretical astrophysici
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DOROTHY MARTIN While ufology began
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attention. Without knowing why, I p
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One message from an assistant of Sa
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Dr. Laughead first encountered Doro
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In the case of Dorothy Martin and h
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II space brother religions to large
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he could think of to obtain permiss
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other myth. You will recall that in
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and a Saturnian named “Ramu.” 2
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ecome small, self-sufficient commun
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paranoia in another context but in
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the space brother narrative further
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Adamski—the UFO was effortlessly
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communism. The connection between t
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The shift from contact to abduction
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science. 256 The Hill case was the
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abduction scenario in a variety of
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In September of 1963, some two year
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car and gone into a field with bino
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The cadences of Barney’s recollec
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And he said it was a pregnancy test
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Page 197 and 198: David E. Mack, a Harvard trained an
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Page 237: generally silent, but when they do
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Page 245 and 246: BIBLIOGRAPHY Aber, W.W. “A Guide
Page 247 and 248: _____. “Adamski, George (1891-196
Page 249 and 250: _____. Discipline and Punish: the B
Page 251 and 252: _____. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
Page 253 and 254: _____. Something about Soulcraft. N
Page 255: Streiber, Whitley and Anne, ed. The
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