The philosopher Alfred North Whitehead held that some things actually "undergo the formality of occurring." For instance, in this actual phenomenological world, people either are, or are not, being abducted by space aliens. People either are, or are not, being subjected to sexual abuse by satanic cults. Lee Harvey Oswald either did, or did not, assassinate JFK.
It's not clear if Jodi Dean, author of Aliens In America: Conspiracy Cultures from Outerspace to Cyberspace (Cornell University Press, 1998), would agree. What is clear is that Dean is far more interested in deconstructing the context of our extraterrestrial- and conspiracy theory-obsessed culture than in adding her thoughts to the extraterrestrial-question mix.
Focusing largely on alien-abduction stories, Dean doesn't merely refuse to pass judgment on the claimants, she argues against the very possibility of judgment itself in a thoroughly democratized mediated communications culture. In doing this, Dean doesn't merely provide her readers with insight into how an "alien nation" arises out of the uncertainty of a rapidly changing and complex world that's strung out on info-overload, she seduces the readers into experiencing that alienating uncertainty within themselves.
Dean abducts readers into a kind of alien universe: one where nothing is true, but anything is possible except an effective political response to whomever or whatever it is that conspires to make us feel powerless, helpless, and conspired against.
This is not to say that Dean finds the popular eruption of tabloidesque beliefs a source of despair. On the contrary, she celebrates the wresting of consensus reality away from the elites and the experts: "In the 1950s and 1960s, Ufology linked outerspace to possibility. It established a space from which to resist expert culture ... and assert the authority of amateur and civilian opinion and research."
To the degree that there is a narrative structure to Aliens In America, it revolves around this battle between the presumptive supremacy of the expert culture – represented by government, established science, and mainstream media – and the amateurs and civilians who examine a different stream of evidence, and, in some cases, experience.
This narrative climaxes in the 1990s when the Internet explodes into mass culture and the consensus reality of the experts collapses. "America at the millennium is cyberia. Television is a tabloid. Sixty Minutes bleeds in with Sightings. The New York Times puts flying saucers on its front page, above the fold. Of course, a significant number of people, presumably those older than the wired Generation X, still won't admit that the distinctions have collapsed. They still want to appeal to authoritative sources, to get their news from reliable media. These people don't recognize that they've already lost key ground in the early wars of the information age. They don't get it: Many of us reject their so-called reliable sources. We rely on networks of truths, on multiple sites of information."
Driving her point home with a rare display of argumentative exuberance, Dean adds, "There might have been a time when it was important to defend democracy on the basis of reason or to appeal to the somehow general will of a somehow unified public. That time has passed. Welcome to the 21st century. Stories of rational persons making decisions freely and equally as they talk together in a public sphere no longer command much mindshare."
Aliens In America is not flawless. While more plain-spoken than most in the postmodern deconstructionist theory game, Dean sometimes slips into that genre's peculiar and alienating language. "The field of intelligibility, the terrain in which witnessing was situated changed," she writes.
Finally, there's this sticky problem that Dean, in her opposition to the power of expert elites in defining consensus, never acknowledges an objective phenomenological world in which conspiracies and alien abductions either do, or do not, happen. This flaw is an outgrowth of the culture theory/deconstructionist methodology she uses. The theory crowd tends to deny the possibility of knowing anything, since the "knower" reaches all conclusions while embedded within the assumptions of their particular culture and class.
This makes culture theory a very useful tool for breaking tunnel vision, but frequently leads to absurd denials of basic biological realities. Theory practitioners occasionally need to be reminded that the universe is not entirely constructed of power relations between humans. And even if our view of it is, we still stumble upon basic truths that are undeniable.
Thus scentific experts discovered and exploited the secrets of electricity that today allow us to question authority and challenge expertise via electronic media, and children learn not to touch a hot stove. Throughout Aliens In America, Dean advocates and celebrates the democratic remaking of reality by the subjective storytelling of alien abductees as amplified by public access to the Internet's means of communications.
But wouldn't her advocacy of empowering individuals to ignore the experts and advocate their own truths apply equally to advocates of creation science and Holocaust revisionism? Dean never deals with this obvious question.
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It's ironic that Robert Anton Wilson, author of Everything Is Under Control: Conspiracies, Cults, and Cover-ups (HarperPerennial, 1998) emerges as the moderate on the question of whether there's a bottom-line reality.
Like Dean, Wilson is a cultural relativist. Yet it seems that the psychedelic/cosmic prankster school of cultural relativism that Wilson is associated with is nowhere near as "out there" as the deconstructionist academics. Wilson's book, an A-to-Z compendium of conspiracy theory and high weirdness, manages to advocate real skepticism – as opposed to automatic acceptance or dismissal of all that is weird and outside expert consensus. But unlike Dean, Wilson doesn't throw the objective physical baby out with the conceptual bath water.
While the primary thrust of his book is simply conveying most of these various theories while humorously intimating that he just doesn't know whether they're valid or not, Wilson doesn't hesitate on occasion to clearly identify political and economic injustices (including murder) when the prevailing evidence is overwhelming or – as is frequently the case – the facts have been established but forgotten thanks to a lack of emphasis by the mainstream media. Thus, Wilson reminds us that Air America, an airline owned by the CIA, flew raw opium out of Laos, that the US military tested chemical-warfare agents in six US and Canadian cities, and that various American police agencies have killed numerous innocent American citizens in "oops-wrong-address" drug raids.
Like Dean, Wilson mixes the absurd with the very likely in a mind-melting mix that is intended as an assault on our consensus assumptions and those who benefit from them. But unlike Dean, he occasionally locates a bottom line, as he does when he comments on the ZOG (Zionist Occupied Government) conspiracy theory: "I would like to live in a world where all the conspiracy theories are as absurd as this one."
His message being that even though governments usually lie, experts usually make narrow-minded errors, and most conspiracy freaks are out to lunch, occasionally something is actually true or palpably false. In a world where so many people are willing to believe any conspiracy theory or alien-abduction story that slithers across the Net while so many others dismiss all conspiracy theories as worthy only of ridicule, Dean's culture theory is a valuable contextualization, but Wilson's open-minded skepticism is the needed antidote.
