Aliens in America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace [Paperback]

Jodi Dean (Author)

Book Description

Release date: March 26, 1998

In a provocative analysis of public culture and popular concerns, Jodi Dean examines how serious UFO-logists and their pop-culture counterparts tap into fears, phobias, and conspiracy theories with a deep past and a vivid present in American society. Aliens, the author shows, provide cultural icons through which to access the new conditions of democratic politics at the millennium. Because of the technological complexity of our age, political choices and decisions have become virtually meaningless, practically impossible. How do we judge what is real, believable, trustworthy, or authoritative? When the truth is out there, but we can trust no one, Dean argues, paranoia is indeed the most sensible response. Aliens have invaded the United States. No longer confined to science fiction and tabloids, aliens appear in the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal, at candy counters (in chocolate-covered flying saucers and Martian melon-flavored lollipops), and on Internet web sites. Aliens are at the center of a faculty battle at Harvard. They have been used to market AT&T cellular phones, Milky Way candy bars, Kodak film, Diet Coke, Stove-Top Stuffing, skateboard accessories, and abduction insurance. A Gallup poll reports that 27 percent of Americans believe space aliens have visited Earth. A Time/CNN poll finds 80 percent of its respondents believe the U.S. government is covering up knowledge of the existence of aliens. What does the widespread American belief in extraterrestrials say about the public sphere? How common are our assumptions about what is real? Is there any such thing as "common" sense? Aliens, the author shows, provide cultural icons through which to access the new conditions of democratic politics at the millennium. Because of the technological complexity of our age, political choices and decisions have become virtually meaningless, practically impossible. How do we judge what is real, believable, trustworthy, or authoritative? When the truth is out there, but we can trust no one, Dean argues, paranoia is indeed the most sensible response.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Is paranoia the defining feature of American life at the close of the 20th century? Jodi Dean thinks so, and she doesn't think we should be too worried about it. Aliens in America is her attempt to map the role of conspiracy theories in society, and although the book sometimes has problems negotiating the fine line between academic and popular discourse, it provides some fascinating insights. Dean suggests that paranoia is the only possible response to a fragmented culture. Multiplying TV channels and the publishing free-for-all of the Internet provide so many points of view, so many opportunities for contradictory meanings to coexist that "there isn't enough common reality to justify judgement." In the face of this info-maelstrom, conspiracy theorists and alien abductees are actively creating their own meanings, piecing together an ideology from the mass of unverifiable "facts." For Dean, these creative acts are powerful, positive engagements with the world as it has become, contrasting sharply with the attitudes of those who are trying to hang on to a vanished consensus. By bringing the apparatus of cultural theory to bear on this subject, Dean gives a provocative new interpretation of our premillennium tension. --Simon Leake

From Publishers Weekly

If you believe what you read on the Internet, aliens surround us these days?and 65% of the respondents in one poll agreed that the government had hidden a crashed UFO since 1947. But political scientist Dean (The Solidarity of Strangers) is less interested in the credibility of such stories than in their embodiment of a contemporary political culture (networked, televisual, cyber-linked) in which the problem is "that if the knowledge we need to make a judgment stems from shared experiences, what do we do when experiences are reconstituted so radically that we can't tell if we, or anyone else, actually has them or not?" Do words like "truth" and "authority" mean anything when no one agrees how, much less whom, to believe? Writing spry, acerbic prose that only rarely stumbles into jargon, Dean guides her readers soberly through strange terrain in which rationality itself gets upended: in view of radiation experiments on developmentally disabled patients and the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, is it more sensible to credit a government in cahoots with alien beings, or not to? While the book grows somewhat repetitive toward its conclusion, Dean compellingly traces our national loss of faith in formerly attractive notions like outer space and the "Final Frontier." The author offers no answers, but no reader will leave this intriguing book without pondering the unavoidable question she raises: "What happens to our everyday approaches to truth when reality isn't?"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Cornell University Press (March 26, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801484685
• ISBN-13: 978-0801484681
• Product Dimensions: 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #926,271 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

12 of 17 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best and most original treatments of this topic. March 5, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Excellent! Possibly the only book on the subject to seriously examine what popular interest in this subject actually says about our world. This book is not about arcana; if you're looking for new tales of crashed saucers or big-eyed Pleadians, look elsewhere. Instead, the author sheds light on questions of evidence, real government conspiracies, "plausible denial", perceptions of reality, witness veracity, televisuality, UFOs, etc., and challenges the reader to define exactly what is the "consensus reality". The chapter on the role of women during the U.S. space program and the "citizen witness" is by itself worth the price of admission. The freshest look at this topic in years.

14 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Dean achieves cultural analysis without dismissal January 15, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

As 1 of only 2 books on UFOs ever published by an academic press (the other being David Jacobs' UFO Controversy in America), this work brings the topic into the Ivy League: to the Cornell Univ. Press. Driven seekers of "THE UFO TRUTH" beware, this is not yet another book attempting to research and reveal the truth of UFOs, but a scholarly, critical analysis of the topic within the context of modern American sociology, psychology, political science and media (particularly Internet) studies. What most distinguishes it from other "cultural context" efforts is Ms. Dean's (QUITE solitary) respectful, non-dismissive treatment of her fellow citizen-observers, and the sharp comparision of the generally-private abduction experience to the televised theatrics of the space race. WHY she doesn't join the dismissive academic/media/"expert" mob is not revealed. Readers without personal exposure to the phenomena (who are ignorant of their ignorance) may simply join the mob by dismissing Ms. Dean analysis because it is devoid of judgementalism or the media's desperate search for the freakish at whom we can self-assuredly laugh.

The language is academic & the sentences long, but the complex concepts are expressed with clarity. The background UFO data is invisible (as other Amazon.com reviewers comment), but to readers fully educated in this topic, that would obviously multiply the book's size by a factor of 100 and repeat material available elsewhere. The last third of the book drags a bit and the illustrations are irrelevant and poorly chosen.

However, this has made my short list of "must read" UFO books, alongside those by Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs, Tim Good, Nick Pope, Stan Friedman, and the hilarious Out There by Pulitzer prize nominee and former NY Times reporter Howard Blum.

9 of 15 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars An Important and Provocative Book November 30, 1998

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

This book analyses critically the implications of mediated America for democracy in America. Dean complements her earlier work on the theory of discursive democracy by starting with contemporary society, rather than theory, and then considering the theoretical implications for democracy in light of her survey of media culture. Dean finds that contemporary conditions of proliferating standards of value make it difficult to come to democratic agreement. Thus, while liberal and democratic thinkers value rational inquiry as the foundation for truth, Dean finds faith, force, and prejudice the predominant basis for accepting some claims rather than others under these current conditions. In light of some rather unfair and indeed highly ideological reviews of her work recently (the NY Rev of Books comes to mind), I am left wondering, upon completion of the book,whether such reviewers have sought to kill the messenger for daring to utter her (critical) message.