August 1, 2008
post-modern ufos
Modern sovereignty is anthropocentric, constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone. Although a metaphysical assumption, anthropocentrism is of immense practical import, enabling modern states to command loyalty and resources from their subjects in pursuit of political projects. It has limits, however, which are brought clearly into view by the authoritative taboo on taking UFOs seriously. UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state, because it is assumed to be known that none are extraterrestrial. Yet in fact this is not known, which makes the UFO taboo puzzling given the ET possibility. Drawing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida, the puzzle is explained by the functional imperatives of anthropocentric sovereignty, which cannot decide a UFO exception to anthropocentrism while preserving the ability to make such a decision. The UFO can be “known” only by not asking what it is.
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6 Responses to “post-modern ufos”
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UFOS *have* been systematically investigated by both scientists and the state. See Richard Dolan’s seminal book on the subject: UFOs and the National Security State. The book documents, extensively, and from primary sources, the decades of military and scientific interest in the phenomena.
The taboo is self-enforced by the mainstream media, who regularly append silly “wink wink” jokes about little green men to any account of UFO activity. But a study of the historical record, which is well referenced in Dolan’s book, clearly shows a serious interest in UFOs from all levels of government and the military.
Well anthropocentrism even seems to go as far as the pretense that the speed of light is the cosmic speed limit to which which information can travel. It seems to me If that were actually the case stars couldn’t be observed to rotate in periods shorter than their distance away measured in light years (which they can). That alone would prove the information of one star rotation phase (or star day) is propagated on a circumference of 2 pi r where if r is a distance in light years and there are many frames of reference in the universe. Even the laws of physics as interpreted in the 20th century appear to be a conspiracy which leaves out a whole dimension of time. There’s more to time than Space-Time, The Universe is not Terra-centric. If things didn’t rotate and time was entirely linear it wouldn’t bend and we wouldn’t have gravity.
observable ‘reality’ is by nature consensual (though consensus will vary from region to region and language to language; a tree might be imbued with connotations outside of ‘our’ experience elsewhere.)
consider the apocryphal contention concerning Columbus’s first landfall, wherein the natives could not initially ‘see’ his ships because the concept of large ships did not exist for them. while that may be hyperbole, it is certainly not out of the realm of possibility that the natives ‘saw’ the ships but simply had no idea what they might be – as Clark contends, “Any sufficiently advanced technology will be indistinguishable from magic.”
that being the case, it bears noting that Wendt and Duvall are probably in error when stating “UFOs have never been systematically investigated by science or the state…” Not because that is so – as ably demonstrated by Professor Pan above, - but because of their initial statement: “Modern sovereignty is anthropocentric…”
it was, perhaps, the consensual reality among the natives viewing Columbus’s arrival that boats were only one thing and not the thing they saw coming in over the seas. That would not be true today; one would be hard pressed to find the tiniest population anywhere in the world who had not seen or heard described The Love Boat.
the same holds true, at least from the 1950s onward, for UFOs; any and everyone reading these words could and probably would describe a basic UFO and a basic alien generally the same way.
ours is a species that can barely mend itself, has little or no understanding of the physical interaction of our own brains –much less our motivations- and is given to voluntary irrational action and belief without question: religions, Powerball, television and royalty, to name but a few.
what makes any one think that we’ve been investigating the right thing? what makes any one think we could ‘see’ a UFO if it were right before us?
Omsbuddy–I like your thinking on this. It speaks to a problem often noted by science fiction writers: If we encounter something entirely alien to our experience, we can’t know it. When we are faced with something unique, our natural impulse is to start the process of forming analogies. Memebers of a “lost” tribe in the Amazon jungle, seeing a helicopter for the first time, probably start with–”That’s the biggest fucking dragonfly I ever saw.
And–just to throw more gasoline on the conspiracy impulse–if beings with a technology so advanced as to be able to cross such vast spaces arrived, might they not know at least as much about camouflage as many dumb insects on Earth? Might they not know that the best way to be invisible is to not even let us get the analogy game going in the first place? Maybe some of those clouds up there aren’t clouds…. It seems that even when we imagine the great powers of an alien race–they are still just the powers that we can imagine as being great.
Re. Science, scientists and the UFO problem
What do scientists say in public ? (orthodox responses)
What do scientists say in private ?
What have scientific review panels concluded ?
Summary: http://www.freedomofinfo.org/science/USymp021114.pdf
And the details: http://www.scientificexploration.org/jse/articles/ufo_reports/sturrock/toc.html
Physical Evidence Related to UFO Reports
The Proceedings of a Workshop Held at the Pocantico Conference Center, Tarrytown, New York
September 29 - October 4, 1997
Re: The natives not being able to see the ships: When I was 13 years old, I took my first trip to the west by train. While I knew what mountains were, I was raised in a flat state with tall buildings. As we came upon Pikes Peak in Colorado, the friend with whom I was traveling by train, pointed at it excitedly. While I could see that something big was there, I had no point of reference for it. To my eyes, it looked like a photograph. The closer we came to the mountain, the more I was able to see it 3 dimensionally. I’ve never forgotten the feeling I had during this experience, as if my senses were deceiving me. I had to work at seeing the mountain, which felt very odd to me. Some years later, while reading about the natives referenced above, I knew precisely what was being described, for in a small way, I had experienced it myself.
More to the point, I had a very dramatic UFO experience with several friends. Most of the people with whom I shared this experience were able to say that they saw something, but strangely, couldn’t accept it. While I was determined to make sense of what I saw, most were reluctant even to speak about it, and would, over time, become quite agitated when confronted with any reminder of the event. I often wonder if there are many other people out there who simply, for whatever reason, are unable to integrate such experiences, and therefore, block them. Or if you are correct in your supposition that they simply cannot see them. Could it be that such experiences create a cognitive disconnect in some?