Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace - Review

Reason, March, 1999 by Mark Goldblatt

by Jodi Dean, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 242 pages, $15.95 paper

The author of Aliens in America, Jodi Dean, is a professor at Hobart and William Smith Colleges; the publisher is a respected university press. With a cursory glance at the title, therefore, an unwary reader might anticipate a learned inquiry into extraterrestrial phenomena. But in Dean's poststructuralist take on UFO sightings and alien abductions, E.T. takes a back seat to politics. From the first page to the last, in fact, the author remains doggedly agnostic with regard to the reality of what she is describing. Reality itself (a word she prefers to put inside quotation marks) is pretty much beside the point for Dean, whose academic field is not astronomy but political science and whose previous work concerned the rather more earthbound subjects of feminism and identity politics.

Dean's thesis in this book, insofar as it can be encapsulated, is that "to claim to have seen a UFO, to have been abducted by aliens, or even to believe those who say they have" constitutes "a political act" because it "contests the status quo" - a status quo that is both political and epistemological. On the political front, she rounds up and slimes the usual betes noires of the left: white guys, big corporations, the military-industrial complex. On the epistemological front, Dean's case is far more radical, arguing that the popularity of ufology "marks the widespread conviction that previously clear and just languages and logics...are now alien, now inseparable from their irrational others." Alien narratives, in short, "challenge us to face head-on...the dissolution of notions of truth, rationality, and credibility" in the information age.

Before continuing, I should note that already I have misrepresented Dean's enterprise. To refer to her thesis as a "thesis" is to belie the book's critical method and, ultimately, its raison d'etre. For thesis implies a logical structure, an argument developed according to principles of inductive and deductive reasoning. By contrast, Dean's book is based on a technique of pseudo-analysis that amounts to a verbal Rorschach test. Rather than argue points, she links - her favorite word - disparate ideas by mere juxtaposition, forging connections that range from mildly intriguing (UFO sightings are linked with apocalyptic anxieties in our era and in the last fin de siecle) to bizarre (astronauts are linked with mainframe computers, witnesses to alien abductions with networked PCs) to obscene (the death of Christa McAuliffe in the Challenger explosion is linked with the perception of outer space as menacing and, finally, with the supposed sexual violation of female abductees).

What you get, in effect, is a performance, a routine of synaptic somersaults in which Dean free-associates on the themes of aliens and UFOs. Mostly, it's by-the-numbers stuff: The space race, she notes, was more about politics than science; the seven original Mercury astronauts were all white, male, and married - and thus did not represent a true cross section of America; and the Internet has enabled people who would once have been deemed harmless kooks to connect and form a growing subculture.

But the performance veers toward unintended farce in moments of wildly misplaced smugness, the philosophical equivalent of Wile E. Coyote's triumphant snickering as he lights the fuse of his Acme rocket skates: "It is hardly surprising," Dean writes, "that a new skepticism toward religious thinking - this time that which masks itself as science - has emerged." Or: "I guess he [a writer who stresses the importance of fact checking] is reassured by the vagueness of categories such as 'facts' and 'reality' and the nostalgia they invoke." Or: "The fact that abduction accesses the stresses and excesses of millennial technoculture doesn't get to the truth of abduction (as if getting to truth were still a possibility)."

Considered in itself, Dean's is a profoundly silly book on a numbingly pathetic subject - a parade of the duped and the deluded marshaled in support of highbrow posturing by which the duped and the deluded would themselves be appalled. After all, if you spend your life insisting on the reality of your alien encounter, you do not want to hear that "reality" is itself an illusion.

Considered as a scholarly work, written by a college professor and published by a university press, Dean's book is symptomatic of a much deeper problem in American intellectual life. The problem is that a growing number of highly credentialed academics simply do not know how to think. Not what to think - the reason colleges exist is to haggle out what to think - but how to think. Rational argument is no longer the sine qua non of the advancement of propositions among educated people; indeed, rationality is seen in certain circles not as a method of getting at truth but as an instrument of oppression. As Dean writes: "Argument, thought by some to be an important part of the process of democracy, is futile, perhaps because democracy can bring about Holocaust."