If all discursive engagements with the world are inescapably metaphorical, perhaps the most interesting question is not, then, whether Muedan sorcerers’ imaginings […] are metaphors but rather whether metaphors (for that matter, all forms of…
Category: Florilegium
Jodi Dean on interconnectedness
Moreover, [artist and ufologist Budd] Hopkins discovers an intricate “cosmic micro-management” that brings Linda together with two other people, people that she didn’t realize she knew, people with whom she had been abducted all her…
Jodi Dean on Carl Sagan
Fabricated through the process of colonizing terrains of truth previously held by religion, science in the West used claims of skepticism to distinguish its approach to the real. Some scientists today collapse the distinction between…
Jodi Dean on Richard Hofstadter
In an influential essay from the mid-sixties, Richard Hofstadter tries to capture the essence of conspiracy and the “paranoid style” as they have appeared in American politics. I want to stress two of the characteristics…
Jodi Dean on Roswell & the CIA
Perhaps the Roswell anniversary occupies that site in the popular culture of American democracy that can’t be occupied by the anniversary of the CIA. Like Roswell, the Central Intelligence Agency pinpoints its origins to July…
Jodi Dean on the non-scepticism of debunkers
Some folks have responded to the rise of the virtual with irresponsible paranoia. That is to say, they fail to deal with contemporary indeterminacies and instead repetitively, compulsively, reassert their particular “truth.” Thus, some —…
Jodi Dean on 1947
Like the space program, the Internet has Cold War origins. Like the CIA, ufology considers 1947 an originary date. As the aliens came home – became personal – so did computers. – Aliens in America (1998), p.…
Jodi Dean on the familiarity of abduction
My reading asks why abduction is a familiar theme in popular culture. The answer, as I’ve been arguing, involves the theatrics of space produced by NASA, the shift from outerspace to cyberspace, and the widespread…
Jodi Dean on validization of abductees’ claims through therapeutic culture
The turn to abduction has reformatted the UFO discourse. Truth claims previously made in scientific and legal languages are expressed in a familiar hegemonic therapeutic discourse. The language and practice of therapy, moreover, have given…
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Jodi Dean on truth as credibility vs. truth as consensus
Similarly, an appendix to the 1968 symposium hearings on UFOs provided a scientific method for assessing the reliability of the perceptions of those who claimed to have seen a UFO. Included as an example of…
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