Aliens in America author discusses theory supporting her book.
2/29/2000
Written by Wiggz...also known as the AlienZoo prohibitor of dullness.
Mainstream academics have made few attempts to map the historic, spiritual, and psychological landscape of ufology. As far as books go, rare exceptions to the rule are Carl Jung.s Flying Saucers : A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies, Jacques Vallee.s Passport to Magonia, and, most recently, Michael Lieb.s Children of Ezekiel: Aliens, UFOs, the Crisis of Race and the Advent of Time.
But Jodi Dean.s 1998 opus Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace was the first survey of the UFO mindset to appear in years. In her book, Dean, an assistant professor of political science and specialist in feminist theory at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, leaves no cultural arena unexplored in her examination the sociopolitical underpinnings of UFO studies. She weaves history and pop culture with political theory, weighing tabloid and TV treatment of against the Lacanian psychoanalytic theory of Slavoj Zizek (where the unconscious is viewed as having deep structures that create meaning through certain patterns of repetition and exchange). The structure of Dean.s thought lends welcome clarity to a subject that.s heavily demonized in popular culture. Because ufology is scoffed at, ufology is a political subject. At the same time, the alien question confounds the criteria for judgments of the reasonable; consensus reality, Dean argues, has been replaced with virtual reality; democracy must be rethought; truth is up for grabs.
Outside of its introduction, Dean.s book is organized into five chapters. The chapter titled .Fugitive Alien Truth. discusses how, over the last five decades, the alien .icon. has forced us to confront our certainty of the truth. We try to map concepts of reality onto this unknowable .other,. but the notion of alien beings resist our quest for definition. In the early years of the Cold War, Dean explains, the Air Force maintained control over UFO investigations, but at the cost of disavowing the reality of UFOs. In the decades that followed, UFO researchers challenged conventional truth by employing the languages of law and science in their work. Meantime, the early contactees concentrated on the spiritual and mystical elements of UFO experience. Today, alien abduction is approached with the language and practice of therapy . and abductees are viewed as credible witnesses with exceptional personal experiences. Regardless, any approach to ufology and alien encounters leads to the same result: UFOs are laden with stigma. .Clicking on the alien icon opens a window to contemporary confusion,. Dean writes. .The alien marks the way rational procedures produce irrational results. It marks a dissolution of the boundaries of the intelligible so complete that any exclusion seems arbitrary, repressive..
Dean asks serious questions. In the chapter .Virtually Credible,. reviewing the abduction stories of Beth Collings, Anna Jamerson, Katharina Wilson, and Karla Turner, the author exemplifies how abductees are treated as victims, and ogled at. But they, too, must fight for credibility, as their experiences fly in the face of consensus reality. Here, Dean writes, .Abduction replicates our suspicious acceptance and, indeed, enjoyment of technology and our allegedly scientific ways of interpreting the world: What is evidence? Why are there no sensible explanations for abduction? What does sensible mean? It reinscribes our critical attitude toward experts: Do we trust someone from Harvard? Do we trust experts who are funded by large corporations or the government?. In the end, Dean argues, nothing is safe, not even truth. Abductees are victimized, bravely share their experiences in writing, and are embraced by a .marginalized,. or so-called .fringe. community.
This is a book that reviews UFO and alien history in a way that even a casual observer can understand. The professor received some derision for her work, though. Demonstrating a lack of understanding, a New York Times Book Review writer wrote of Aliens in America, .It is frequently said that the current movement known as cultural studies is poisoning the academy with its toxic combination of vulgar philistinism, anything-goes relativism and a bizarre belief in the radical political effects of watching The Ricki Lake Show. In most cases, these charges are exaggerated or unjust. But they would not be too far off the mark if they were applied to the latest work by Jodi Dean..
In this interview, which took place in November, Dean discussed the reaction she provoked by her work, the media.s treatment of UFOs, conspiracy theories, and the writings of Harvard psychiatrist John Mack.
AlienZoo: As I was reading your book, Jodi, I wondered why a respected professor at a respected university writing about a topic that is often dismissed as .tabloid. by the mainstream media. You had to know what you were getting into. Did you experience a lot of criticism from other professors?
Jodi Dean: One thing that.s kind of weird about the whole thing is that I didn.t expect I.d get all of that criticism. I didn.t know what I was getting into. That was probably naïve and relatively stupid on my part. I already wrote a very philosophical first book, and edited a philosophical collection, so I didn.t feel like I had anything to prove. I wasn.t expecting people to think what I was doing was wacky. I was using an academic language and academic concepts to talk about alien abduction and the history of UFOs, and how they.re configured in contemporary culture. And I thought of this as a really legitimate academic project. So I wasn.t prepared for the kind of criticism that I got: I had colleagues who said what I was doing was a white-trash study, they would make constant jokes in their classes. They would deride me to their students, and I.d have students come to my classes expecting me to be some kind of freak show. And the media attention ended up being really critical.
The absolute worst criticism came in The New York Review of Books, from Frederick Crews, who is an anti-Freudian insider in The New York Review of Books Club. In fact, some people from the magazine Mondo 2000 told me he was a former CIA operative. He attacked me viciously; he said I was the worst example of academia since 1968. It was unbelievably mean. But, luckily, one of my colleagues at Amherst College was nice enough to write him a letter defending me. I.ve been getting really good reviews in the alternative press: in Hotwired Online and Fate, and the UFO community was really supportive. That let me know that I was writing a book that was bringing political theory to everyday people. And who are everyday people? Are they people in the UFO community, reading Fate, or more likely to read The New York Review of Books? I think they.re more likely to be in the UFO community, rather than the New York elite.
AlienZoo: In your research, in terms of the UFO community, who did you work with most?
Dean: I interviewed, in informal ways, a number of different abductees, some in person and some on the phone. And in the UFO community, I talked with Budd Hopkins, John Mack, and David Jacobs. The person who I think affected me the most was Budd Hopkins, who has the line that he.s more skeptical than Carl Sagan, that Carl Sagan stops in his skepticism, because he believes in the laws of science. Hopkins is more skeptical because he doesn.t know what to believe.
AlienZoo: How did you get interested in aliens in the first place?
Dean: My mom had been a huge Star Trek fan, and I started watching Star Trek before I even understood what it was about. And in the 70s, I was really into ancient astronaut stuff . Erich Von Danniken.s Chariots of the Gods. I remember seeing that movie and reading that book, and feeling blown away. In my book, I don.t deal with ancient astronaut material, because I needed more grounding in history, archeology, and anthropology to be able to say anything intelligent about that.
AlienZoo: If the U.S. is supposedly a democracy, why are the voices of alien researchers and their fans pushed to the side . marginalized? Why are they treated with so much skepticism? Last week, a segment on CNN/Time introduced a segment on the Asian longhorn beetle, and all of the damage it was doing to trees on the East Coast, as an alien invader coming to the United States. Once the segment ran, Jeff Greenfield, the anchor, reassured his audience that the show wasn.t .going tabloid.. They were just playing on people.s xenophobia, their fear of foreigners. The mainstream was dipping into a fringe discourse with skepticism. Why?
Dean: I think that we both realize that, whatever it is, it.s not convincing. We think what we.re doing is wrong.
First of all, democracy in the United States doesn.t mean that everybody is involved and included. It.s a shame, but that.s the case. In American political science and sociology in the 1940s and 50s, there developed a theory of democracy called pluralism, which said there are competing interest groups that compete for political power, by forming classes or parties. What pluralism needed to survive as theory was the exclusion of anybody who counted as an extreme. This became the dominant understanding of democracy in the United States in the second half of the 20th century. It meant that everybody is included as long as everybody is reasonable, not an extremist, like a communist or a right-wing militia group. Irrational nuts started to mean folks who contested Vietnam, folks who were hippies, folks who thought there might be bad things going on in Tuskeegee, or folks who thought African-Americans were being discriminated against. Anybody who didn.t fit into the 1950s version of mainstream politics would count as an extremist. So this idea that we.re all included is a myth. And it.s a myth that relies on the creation of an extreme.
There.s another way that this demonization of the extreme functions: Namely, it can let the mainstream tantalize people by making it seem more transgressive, or wild, or populist. So they can say, "We.re not extreme. We can speak the language of the masses. Ha, ha, ha. We.re going to talk the language of aliens." But it.s not true.
AlienZoo: It.s really confusing in a way, because there.s an enormous double standard going on. It seems, too, that U.S. media is not as willing to discuss sightings of UFOs as, perhaps, the Canadian or British media are.
Dean: I think that.s because of this legacy of the rise of flying saucer societies in the Cold War, and the systematic infiltration and demonization of UFO groups in the Cold War. I think that just established a pattern that UFO folks had to be nuts. There were Congressional hearings in the 60s . and I write about this in the book . where the Congressmen are saying, .They saw a UFO. They must be drug addicts. Or they must be in love with their mother. They must have some kind of problem.. That was part of a systematic government effort to demonize all of these folks.
As an example of how pervasive it is, I sometimes listen to Pacifica radio on National Public Radio. Amy Goodman, who usually is the leftest of the left, was interviewing a guy from Georgetown who.d been involved in wrongful lawsuits against Area 51 - where there are real deaths caused by toxic waste. The problem in the lawsuits is that the government kept denying the existence of the place where the crime was committed, so they denied the existence of the crime. What just killed me was that Miss Superliberal, Amy Goodman, was laughing throughout most of the interview. Here, she.s interviewing a law professor whose office has been called off-limits . if you go in there, you.re violating the law. The fact that UFOs, Area 51, and anything that seems extraterrestrial is demonized means that there.s a convenient little label that politicians and media can put on stuff, to keep folks from taking it seriously.
AlienZoo: What about the Internet itself, in terms of giving people a new outlet for explaining themselves, and posting up their positions? Will the proliferation of Internet sites in any way diminish the stature of traditional media outlets?
Dean: That.s a great point. I think so. I don.t think it.s the case that the Internet means that every Joe Schmo in America has a chance to influence politics and make everything wonderfully democratic, and free, and equal. I think that.s a myth. What I do think is true, though, as you suggested, is that it can deauthorize the official outlets. Even if not every single person now has a voice . we all know it.s hard to find stuff . the very fact that it.s hard to find stuff means that folks are not necessarily going to believe anything that they read out there. It puts out this thoroughgoing skepticism and doubt all the way through. And I think this can help challenge official authority, and make it the case where folks will be critical when mainstream media disses UFO believers. It deauthorizes some major locations, and that creates more opportunity for more stuff to come in, even if no specific item will end up influential.
AlienZoo: Why are there conspiracy theories? Even if the truth is out there, people don.t want to believe it. What kind of a commentary is this on so-called democratic discourse, when people don.t even believe traditional media?
Dean: I.m very interested in conspiracy theory, and some of my new research and projects are enabling me to look at it more. The first thing to keep in mind is to realize that conspiracy theory in the United States has a completely deep history. I just wrote an article where I argue that The Declaration of Independence is a wonderful conspiracy theory: After you have all of the wonderful emancipatory stuff at the beginning, the rest of the document is a list of grievances against the king, designed to show there was a plot afoot. According to commentators in the 18th century . there wasn.t a plot, there were just colonies wanting to be free. But, to argue for their freedom, they said there was a plot against them, even though there wasn.t. This sense of conspiracy goes all the way down. What does this mean for us? People in the U.S. are used to using a conspiracy for arguing their freedom. For example, remember when Hillary Clinton said all of this Lewinsky business, it was a right-wing conspiracy? Is she a nut? No. Was she being devious? No. I think what she was trying to do was create a little space for herself for a moment, to use a language that has a long history in the U.S.
In the Internet Age, we can.t not be conspiracy theorists. We all are. Why? We go out there. We make links. We make wild connections between all sorts of different things. How do we do that? By clicking around, watching commercials, and consuming media. All of that means that we.re making connections. That.s what a conspiracy theorist does. A conspiracy goes out there looking for the truth and never finds it, by the way. The thing that gets my goat is that some people say conspiracy theorists have all of the answers. No! They don.t. Conspiracy theory tells us that things are not as they seem. Something else is going on. We make links. We.re all connected. There.s no way that we can function in contemporary life without being conspiracy theorists. Frankly, I am not convinced of how mainstream media disses all sorts of groups as conspiracy theorists, as if their claim that the public has a right to know is not the same claim that animates conspiracy theory.
AlienZoo: Doesn.t the longstanding war between competing, relative truths undermine the notion of truth? Is it getting more difficult to make decisions when we.re always getting bombarded by the opposite idea? Ultimately, we.re supposed to go the polls and vote on this stuff. But when we don.t know whom to believe, then how can we make the decisions we.re supposed to be making as
conscientious citizens?
Dean: I can.t answer that question! [Laughs] I didn.t answer it in my book! Here.s my dilemma. I don.t believe that we can make decisions based on truth anymore, if we ever could. As a political theorist, I don.t want to say it.s up for grabs, but I also don.t want to say that there.s only one answer. What I hope is that folks can find ways of making decisions based on possible outcomes, and the network of other ideas or sites in which a particular decision or idea is situated. I think that these claims about truth are used to beat other people over the head, and to trump them, rather than have a real search for truth. We need a different kind of politics. Maybe we could say it.s a politics of searching and questioning and linking. UFO people have had a whole politics based on a great big question mark. They.ve had a politics of Freedom of Information Act, challenging government officials, and trying to take pictures of a place that the government says doesn.t exist.
AlienZoo: You.re very familiar with John Mack.s latest book, Passport to the Cosmos, and his idea of questioning Western concepts of reality. His notions of competing realities are somehow outside of Western thought, undermining our idea of reality as we know it. Does his thinking draw up dangerous conclusions?
Dean: Budd Hopkins two years ago gave a wonderful paper at the MUFON annual meeting, where he said the John Mack position leads to Heaven.s Gate. He thinks that the position that aliens are good, helpful folks, and have an environmental future, ultimately is the kind of position that.s anti-human and life-denying . pretty much what Heaven.s Gate believed. I thought that Hopkins.s analysis was really good, though I think he probably goes further than I do on that point. I think that Mack gives an overemotional reading of shamen and native culture, which participates in the same .us, the West, versus them, the natives. idea that he.s critical of. I think his treatment of native peoples and shamen, from my perspective as a political theorist, is the worst part of a .we.re all connected. global ideology. I think he treats the shamen as the inverse of the extraterrestrial, like the extraterrestrial gives us a global perspective, and the shamen gives us the individual and transformative part. I.m just not convinced by that on any possible level. Politically, I think it.s dangerous. The subtle realm idea makes a lot of sense to me. Does it make sense to defend that kind of idea by having what I.d say is a fetishistic reading of indigenous culture? No. That, I think is bad.
Just because you had an intense experience . all that tells you is that you.ve had an intense experience. It doesn.t tell you anything outside of that. Mack raises the point really explicitly: He views the material by the intensity of the response of the abductee, through their affect, through their sincerity. Let me tell you, every abductee I.ve ever talked to was completely sincere. I believed everything I heard from them. But that does not mean that I can use all of this information to say anything strongly about extraterrestrials. All of the things I can do is talk about how they feel.
AlienZoo: And we will expect more of your writings to be published within the next year?
Dean: My next book, Political Theory and Cultural Studies, might not be of interest to everybody, except I.ve got a conspiracy theory article in it, and this wonderful anthropologist named Kathleen Stewart has another kind of conspiratorial piece. Then I.ll have another book that will look at conspiracy and culture, and that should be out in a couple of years. It will probably be called Publicly Secret.