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The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny Paperback – March 3, 2016

by Susan Lepselter (Author)
4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 16 ratings
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The Resonance of Unseen Things offers an ethnographic meditation on the “uncanny” persistence and cultural freight of conspiracy theory. The project is a reading of conspiracy theory as an index of a certain strain of late 20th-century American despondency and malaise, especially as understood by people experiencing downward social mobility. Written by a cultural anthropologist with a literary background, this deeply interdisciplinary book focuses on the enduring American preoccupation with captivity in a rapidly transforming world. Captivity is a trope that appears in both ordinary and fantastic iterations here, and Susan Lepselter shows how multiple troubled histories—of race, class, gender, and power—become compressed into stories of uncanny memory.

“We really don’t have anything like this in terms of a focused, sympathetic, open-minded ethnographic study of UFO experiencers. . . . The author’s semiotic approach to the paranormal is immensely productive, positive, and, above all, resonant with what actually happens in history.”
—Jeffrey J. Kripal, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Religion, Rice University

“Lepselter relates a weave of intimate alien sensibilities in out-off-the-way places which are surprisingly, profoundly, close to home. Readers can expect to share her experience of contact with complex logics of feeling, and to do so in a contemporary America they may have thought they understood.”
—Debbora Battaglia, Mount Holyoke College

“An original and beautifully written study of contemporary American cultural poetics. . . . The book convincingly brings into relief the anxieties of those at the margins of American economic and civic life, their perceptions of state power, and the narrative continuities that bond them to histories of violence and expansion in the American West.”
—Deirdre de la Cruz, University of Michigan
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  1. Print length
    192 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    University of Michigan Press
  4. Publication date
    March 3, 2016
  5. Dimensions
    6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0472052942
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0472052943
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author


Susan Lepselter is an Associate Professor in the Departments of Anthropology and American Studies at Indiana University.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ University of Michigan Press (March 3, 2016)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 192 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0472052942
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0472052943
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.8 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 0.7 x 9 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.4 4.4 out of 5 stars 16 ratings

Customer reviews

4.4 out of 5 stars
4.4 out of 5
16 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Marina
5.0 out of 5 stars So beautiful and it lingers on for a long time
Reviewed in the United States on August 17, 2017
Very much enjoyable and theoretically inspiring writing. So beautiful and it lingers on for a long time. If you are interested in affect, the affective dimension we live through, then the book will be extremely helpful since it shows how you can bring the affective world the writer passed through to reader-writer continuum.
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Bill Weaver
3.0 out of 5 stars There is a lot of money invested in keeping this UFO disinformation psyop rolling.
Reviewed in the United States on December 24, 2023
I admit I didn’t like this book all that much, but one thing made it worthwhile and that’s the ending. I won’t spoil it for you. I will say if you are into UFOs and to the left politically then you might enjoy this book. If you even lean right a little (as I do) this is a bit tiresome in places. Still again I must admit she nailed the landing. Regarding UFOs, my theory is that people see what they want to see, and that includes academics who may view this subject through the lens of anthropology and ‘American studies’. She can’t help but mention ‘slavery’ and ‘colonialism’ over and over again. I find her analysis of the folklore highly suspect in that regard, even if it holds up as ‘ethnography’. I’m only a beginner it’s true, an amateur folklorist at best, but still my current working theory is that a more thorough study of the related folklore (including ‘the night hag’ and earlier tales of ‘visitation’) might prove some of her connections to be invented or perhaps overhyped. I take this as a sign of the continuing feud, or so I’ve read, between folklorists and anthropologists. Thus, to my mind some of her claims and connections, though perhaps ‘poetic’, remain unsupported by the data. I would even go so far as to say there is something paternalistic about how she describes the people here at times, the way she italicizes certain phrases as if a nod and a wink to the reader ‘oh I know how this sounds but just bear with me’. Academics too fear being lumped together with “the tabloids”. (p 9) She gets at Luhmann’s ‘unity of the paradox’ describing militia handbooks next to Noam Chomsky. (p. 10) However she does not seriously discuss how easily “uncanny storytellers” can be understood as within a tradition of folklore. (also p. 10) So is there traditional (oral) folklore about ‘genocide’? Or is ‘genocide’ a modern invention? (The term is bandied about a lot these days in regards to certain international conflicts so one might begin to question its usage, at least outside of the International Criminal Court.) The author rather casually suggests that UFO and abduction narratives are tied to ‘genocide’. She doesn’t care to comment so directly on stories of white children murdered by native abductors. This certainly appears to have occurred based on data she presents. Could it be that the story of the United States is more complicated than ‘slavery’, ‘colonization’ and ‘genocide’? To read this book you wouldn’t think so. Perhaps it is because she’s an anthropologist and not a historian. Finally by the middle of the book we get the idea that she understands a bit about this complexity, but only the barest hint: “The federal government—ambiguously mythologized in the nineteenth century West as omnipotent in genocidal campaigns and invisible in daily anarchies of a ‘Wild West’—still retains that magic duality here.” (p. 101) That is the extent of complexity that she cares to mention, aside from a few snide comments about ‘freedom’. I confess that my own biases intrude here. I have no problem with bias so long as it is acknowledged. Yes, moments of beauty punctuate her academic editorializing, where we catch a glimpse of ‘drifters’ floating through life… the beatnik in me cannot help but think of Kerouac… ‘drifters’ vs ‘homesteaders’ I imagine. (p. 10) Later ‘savages’ vs the ‘civilized’ occurs to me. Nomads (‘barbarians’) versus the wall-builders too. Kerouac was truly a poet and found a beauty in the meandering decay (life) of America. Kerouac also was none too fond of communists and other left-wing ideologues. (Will I ever publish a book?! Or am I only drifting… through my notes … notebooks become tumbleweeds passing through the ghost town of my mind… I’m a nomadic scholar without any real credentials in my chosen area of research. I’m a ‘folk’ scholar, haha. So take my critique with a grain of forgiveness. I almost adopt her style for a moment it seems.) She gets Area 51 right as “an enormous open secret” aka “Dreamland . . . a dream of the Cold War come to life in the desert”. (p. 11) She uses ‘uncanny/ordinary’ like I use ‘esoteric/mundane’. “The inextricability of the uncanny and the ordinary expressed a particular blend of desire and nostalgia—a mix of otherworldly displacement and the deep specificity of a heavily entextualized, lived-in place in the American West. The ways these discourses came together suggested other kinds of anxiety about colonization and the earth, secrecy and theft, nature and loss, and the vulnerable boundaries of the human body. These were themes—about strange, amorphous power and the vulnerability of unsuspecting subjects—I’d also heard in the UFO groups . . .” (p. 11) This is a tale of “ghosts”, (p. 16) “a space that slides between ‘memory’ and ‘dream’, subverting the discrete borders of the real.” ( p. 17) America is ‘haunted’ she is saying. This is mostly folklore but she won’t say it. The Unmarked Space too I see here from systems theory. All communication creates a space unmarked or ‘excluded’ by necessity, saying in effect ‘we are talking about this’ (‘and not that’). This is sociology: “the stories here are the real objects.” (p. 17) She admits that “the object of [her] study does not emerge in a single, unified place.” (p. 17) Or space, but this is true for all communication. Here be monsters, she tells us in effect—“the sinister, the traumatic, and the disintegrated”. (p. 17) She uses the term “screen memory” but doesn’t explain it at first. (p. 25) Or she expects us to just understand? Only later does she briefly mention what it means. I patiently waited for her to mention folklore (oral tradition) here when she describes ‘repetition’ but she does not. It seems the way these stories are told with repetition of key phrases and words epitomizes folk tradition, but she never touches folklore studies, as I’ve said. Marginal economic circumstances, ‘sex work’, and ‘addiction’ unite some of these folk and somehow she blames the American ideal of ‘freedom’ for this. Such an academic sensibility, blaming ‘the system’ and its ideals for individual woes. Isn’t that the real conspiracy theory here? Leftists and academics will never admit that they can easily succumb to such prophecies of doom. Yet academics can argue this idea of ‘the system’ as scapegoat over and over without anyone calling them on it. That people have no ability to make decisions to change their lives or improve them is the tragic narrative here, and a master narrative of left wing academics the world over. But I’m sorry, ‘the master narrative of freedom’ is clearly the true culprit, lurking unseen, just offstage. (pp. 32-34) It seems at times this book presents a variation on the ‘what’s wrong with Kansas?’ trope, i.e. if only the folk could see it is the system that is oppressing them and not aliens then we might get somewhere. Certainly she does not specifically attack her subjects, but this line of reasoning is implied throughout. Certainly she is sweet to her subjects and treats them with respect, perhaps too much respect in places, especially when discussing the Long Island native and MUFON raconteur who ineptly tried to poison local officials with radium and ended up in the madhouse. I had to google it but after reading the details it appears to be a tragic tale. A reasonably successful middle class professional destroys himself with this business about UFOs and is found incompetent to stand trial. If every story of middle class distress is connected to ‘slavery’ and ‘colonization’ should there be a lot more UFO believers out there turned middle class disaster stories? Many might admit to belief but do they all go so far down the rabbit hole as to destroy their own reasonably comfortable existence? This seems more about mental illness than ‘captivity’ narratives is what I’m saying, at least the bit about Long Island. Though perhaps the most extreme example, I found that her analysis overall strains against the material, and it seems to me only by glossing over certain details can she confine her analysis to the narrative she has decided upon. Thus she has crossed over the subsystem boundary of science and shares the same sensibilities (and techniques) as conspiracy theory and UFOs, which in most cases depend upon a lack of data to remain within the realm of possibility in the former case or ‘unidentified’ in the latter. In particular her ‘poetic license’ allows her to make objectively false claims such as that “UFO researchers” have found “empirical evidence”. The example she gives are perhaps claimed at times but in fact no “dried rings of grass . . . scraps of metal [or] mysterious scars” have been accepted by the scientific community as ‘empirical evidence’ of otherworldly visitors. (see p. 118) Don’t get me wrong I do admire her field work. Working as a waitress and living in a trailer out West to ‘go native’ as they say is legitimate anthropological work, but I often found myself wondering what other details she glosses over to make the material fit her analysis. The method she uses to tell her tale becomes somewhat syrupy and overly sweet in its application. And, as I am arguing, her vague narrative obscures the real value of her work when she somehow manages to turn a crazy UFO-related assassination plot on Long Island into a story about ‘slavery’ and ‘colonization’. (p. 43) Naturally this is about ‘dissociation’. (p. 37) Trauma is ‘marked off’ from ordinary existence. (p. 40) Perhaps this is why I’m reading all these UFO book (unconsciously despite my claims of sociological and folkloristic ‘research’)—am I really just hungry for these stories about trauma? I don’t want to be a part of this victimology but certainly I have my own (psychological) trauma. The poet vs the listener is perhaps a good point. Plato she mentions—and she too sides with poetry over Plato, as do I. Yet where does ‘poetry’ end and ‘science’ begin? She accuses MUFON members of engaging in “a kind of heightened scientistic style” but is her own ‘academic’ style also merely “mimetic of scientific discourse”? (p. 121) She wants to visit the “vernacular” realm, or as I would say the world of ‘folklore’, but I suppose my point is how well does this message actually translate when carried back to the ‘official’ realm aka the “unanimously agreed-upon real” of science? (p. 63) Ultimately, and this is where we seriously part ways, she veers into hardcore conspiracy territory when she suggests that the twin towers fell due to the “operations of power” rather than merely the mad schemes of terrorists. (p. 157) No matter my own research into the paradox of terrorism, the ever-evolving dance between terror and the state, I must admit finally to being disgusted by this book. Still as I said she nails the ending or the ‘landing’ if we want to use the metaphor of UFOs or (communicative) gymnastics. I don’t want to spoil it but what does she expect? There is a lot of money invested in keeping this UFO disinformation psyop rolling.
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