A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

one of the central desires of the displaced utopian imaginary—the dream of perfect
communication. It should be noted that in the context of the nineteenth century, such a collapse
was not always understood as salutary. It was also read as a sign of impending disaster. There is
a clear tension within the dream of perfect communication. The integration of disparate times
and places feeds the desire for the integration of self just as it feeds the desire for coherence and
continuity so prevalent in traditional historiography. Such integration operates from a position of
mastery, invoking the scholar with the whole of the world at his fingertips and the all-seeing god.
Yet the tendency toward collapse—not merely putting past and present, here and there, into
communication, but moving them toward or into a state of co-presence—contains the seeds of
disintegration, speaking more to Foucault’s understanding of genealogy’s function—the
dissipation of self. The promised collapse of time and space greatly troubled the consistency of
selfhood. After all, the individual is located in time and space and it is this situatedness that
allows for the clear demarcation between self and other. The threatened collapse of these two
primary coordinates lends itself to the dissolution of clear boundaries of self. In turn, a vision of
the self scattered into the broader context of the cosmos speaks to the heart of Lacanian desire,
the return to the undifferentiated.
SPIRITUALISM, SUPERSTITION AND MOLECULAR TRUTHS
The displaced utopian imaginary is prophetic in the sense that discourses centered on mythic
figures constitute imaginary spaces in which a given culture might “try on” potential futures.
The attentive reader will recall that the central hallmark of the mythic is the co-presence of
supposedly irreconcilable opposites. Recall Fryes’s gloss on myth, where he describes it as “a
world of total metaphor, in which everything is potentially identical with everything else, as
though it were all inside a single infinite body.” In the case of Spiritualism there were multiple
instances of the co-presence of supposedly irreconcilable states. The medium existed
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