omg alienz!1!!

I only posted the introduction on Monday...here's the whole shebang.
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From the Fringe: Ufology as Critique

Introduction

The study of UFOs has occupied an unprivileged position in the scientific community for over half a century, having been alternately ridiculed and ignored by mainstream researchers since at least the early 1950's. From the very beginning of the modern UFO era in 1947, UFO sightings have been associated with the possibility of extraterrestrial visitation—which would imply the existence of otherworldly technologies allowing for super-luminal, interstellar travel. Since neither astronomers nor physicists have yet conceived of how such a technology might work—and because the majority of sightings have consistently been explained away by professional scientists as misidentified natural phenomena—the bulk of accepted scientific knowledge has always been weighted against there being anything to the UFO phenomenon that can be considered worthy of serious investigation.

Meanwhile, the UFO phenomenon itself has stubbornly refused to disappear. Thousands upon thousands of sightings continue to be reported each year. While most can still be accounted for by skeptics under the traditional categories of natural phenomena or unusual, sometimes secret aircraft, there remain a "hard core" of truly baffling incidents involving what appear to be solid (often "metallic") airborne objects, conducting maneuvers no known terrestrial craft can replicate, and which are often reported by sober, trained, highly credible witnesses from the private sector or military. It is the study of these incidents that concerns the most highly respected researchers in the field of Ufology.

Despite the merits of any individual case or sighting—despite even these unknown objects being tracked on radar by the military itself—mainstream science cannot account for the existence of these “craft.” The entirety of the UFO phenomenon has therefore been relegated to the scientific "fringe," its study paraded about as a prime example of "pseudoscience," and its researchers portrayed as being more akin to religious believers than scientists. At the same time, polls consistently show that an overwhelming majority of Americans believe the government to be actively engaged in the practice of hiding information concerning UFOs and/or extraterrestrials from the public (the number has hovered around 70-80% since the late 1990's; as recently as 2002, a poll conducted by the Roper organization in conjunction with the Sci-Fi television network found that 48% of respondents believed UFOs had visited the earth).[1]

The disparity between public and academic interest in UFOs leads to the question: how much and what form of attention does the subject truly merit? Is it the American public or our scientific community whose beliefs are out of line with reality?

The answer is not as simple as these options suggest. The latter 20^th century is filled with examples of pressure being exerted by official bodies upon the public and scientific communities alike to create the impression that one takes the subject of UFOs seriously at one's own risk, both personally and professionally. As early as 1953, the Air Force reported that its investigation of UFOs had resulted in nothing “defying explanation in terms of present-day science and technology,” and that its best scientific efforts had gone into the study.[2] The signal received by the civilian world from this and other such pronouncements has been unequivocal, and its intended effects long-since cemented in the public mind: there is nothing to see here, and you must either be a scientifically illiterate citizen or a bad scientist to continue looking. For as long as there has been a UFO “problem,” then, it has been the case that in order to proceed as a UFO investigator, one has had to take these official statements as less than definitive. For those who have, science has by-and-large remained the model for such investigations.

Efforts to engage in the so-called "scientific" study of UFOs have traditionally had as their goal a certain rigor in analysis, a sharpness in classification, and an adherence to scientific standards that, taken together, attempt to convey the discipline with which the study has been conducted. The focus of this desire on the part of the UFO researcher is clear: the researcher wants to show to the respected scientist that their research has been in accordance with accepted scientific methods and that an appropriate skepticism has guided the work. Whatever results are left over should, in the mind of the Ufologist, constitute a scientifically sanitary group of phenomena that are worthy, by virtue of their anomalous nature, of further scientific inquiry and experimentation.

The desire to be taken seriously by the mainstream scientific community runs through the majority of significant publications on the topic of UFOs. At times, it has been expressed blatantly as a plea for recognition. Rarely has Ufology intentionally cast itself as the Other to mainstream science; it is taken for granted that nothing need be done by Ufologists to marginalize themselves in the minds of their institutionally sanctioned counterparts. However, to do so presents an interesting opportunity for the field of Ufology. This opportunity arises from the fact that the possibility of critiquing mainstream science is inherent in the study of UFOs. To engage in such a study—to take seriously a topic that has little possibility of garnering the attention of the "serious"—is, in fact, to engage in such a critique.

Michel Foucault once described critique as "a means for a future or truth that it will not know nor happen to be...it oversees a domain it would not want to police and is unable to regulate" (“What is Critique?” 25). Judith Butler expounded upon this conception by saying, "One asks about the limits of ways of knowing because one has already run up against a crisis within the epistemological field in which one lives...it is from this condition, the tear in the fabric of our epistemological web, that the practice of critique emerges, with the awareness that no discourse is adequate here or that our reigning discourses have produced an impasse" (Butler, 5).

In this paper, I will argue that Ufology--as a field of extra-institutional research that deals with the study of unknown objects that defy the explanatory scope of the institutionalized sciences—meets both Foucault and Butler's definitions of the project of critique. The object of Ufology's critique is what we might call "mainstream science," but a more precise target can be identified: the modern, Scientific Subject. In his most extreme formulations of the concepts of discourse and discipline, Foucault held that human subjectivity was wholly constituted by discourse(s), by productive mechanisms of Power/Knowledge, and that the Subject was incapable of acting in ways not already possible according to the imperceptible contours of these discursive mechanisms. Judith Butler took up this generalized problem, first in her discussions of the performativity of gender, and later in a variety of analyses of "normativity" and "marginalization," in an attempt to theorize in what ways a socially-constituted Subject might enact their discursive constitution differently, thus allowing for the exercise of agency.

Using Foucault and Butler, I will show that the study of UFOs can be characterized as a practice of critique, the ultimate goal of which is this exercise of agency with respect to the role of institutionalized academic knowledge in constituting an ideologically-Scientific Subject. For a Scientific Subject so constituted, I will argue, the serious investigation of the UFO phenomenon is a radical act of critique which pits the Subject against his or her own sense of what is intellectually rational and socially prudent, and that agency is exercised at the point at which institutional, academic knowledge itself comes to be seen as suspect.

Theoretical Basis

The academic perspective from which this analysis emerges is equal parts historical, philosophical, and sociological. Placing the discussion of UFOs within the framework of Foucault's conception of discourse and Butler's conceptions of normativity and marginalization allows for an examination of the historical forces responsible for creating the proponent of UFO research—what I will call the “Ufological Subject”—as one who is marked, socially, as abnormal or deviant. The Ufological Subject is thus cast in a clinical-minority relation to the “Scientific Subject,” whose disbelief in the UFO phenomenon in general is the prevailing norm from which the Ufological Subject deviates. Foucault's emphasis on the causal role of discourse(s) in the constitution of the Subject can be applied to the academic treatment of UFOs, with the result that the Ufological Subject will be seen to have emerged from a set of Power/Knowledge structures concerned with a decades-long effort to marginalize the UFO phenomenon entirely.

From this foundation grows the argument that Ufology can be understood as a form of critique. Butler's work on the Subject's capacity for critique focuses around what she terms “the question of social transformation,”[3] the idea that the Subject can change the way in which she is constituted by discourses that are external and prior to her being. In its simplest form, critique might be characterized as the actions of a historically-constituted Subject that seek to affect the conditions responsible for constructing the Subject in a certain way. The twin goals of critique are therefore 1) to alter oneself, and 2) to alter the world.

Little agreement exists between theorists and students of Foucault about how exactly the project of critique can be enacted by the historically-constituted Subject with which Foucault famously did away. To address this problem, and to show how Ufology can be seen as such a project, I propose the introduction of the concept of intersubjectivity to the discussion. My contention is that intersubjectivity is the “space” of social relations, and that the focus of the Ufological Subject's project of critique aims most fundamentally at changing the way in which the Ufological Subject and the Scientific Subject are related to one another by the professional, state-supported academic discourses that have grown up around the UFO phenomenon since 1947. The result of Ufology, when successful, is not simply to advance the amount of data or the scope of research available on the UFO phenomenon; it is also to shift the locus of legitimacy-provision from its contemporary home in the academic university, to someplace between mainstream science's largely unchallenged role as our ultimate Knowledge-arbiter, and the fringe amateur research community of Ufologists, who question the fitness of mainstream science to play such a role in the first place.

In sum, critique can be achieved by the Ufological Subject by reenacting discursively-available forms of subjectivity in ways that draw attention to the Scientific Subject's inadequacy at understanding or explaining even the basic physical and historical facts of the UFO phenomenon, which scientific and academic discourses of power/knowledge have successfully obscured in the public sphere.

Foucault: Discourse and the Subject

Michel Foucault was a philosopher, a “historian of ideas,” and a public intellectual of profound cultural significance. To summarize his work, or to express it as a coherent body of thought that builds linearly upon itself in a clear path of development, would not quite suffice, for the things Foucault thought and wrote about shifted as even he gained a greater understanding of what exactly his “project” was. What can be said without much controversy or confusion is that he wrote influential histories of a variety fields of knowledge, paying detailed attention to the ways in which knowledge itself came to be attainable about things. At the same time, Foucault attempted to show that having knowledge about a thing is intimately related to, if not responsible for bringing that thing into existence as something it is possible to know about.

The subjects he chose for this kind of research speak to the nature of the mechanisms of historical and cultural production he was interested in elucidating. Foucault describes his goal in writing The Birth of the Clinic as “the analysis of a type of discourse—that of medical experience—at a period when, before the great discoveries of the nineteenth century, it had changed its materials more than its systematic form” (xvii-xviii). Foucault wants to focus our attention on the fact that at this time in history, medical knowledge was in a state between what it had previously called knowledge and what would come to be accepted as knowledge later, once the “discoveries” made possible by its new materials (tools and examination techniques) were capable of being organized into a new form (a comprehensive understanding of disease's relationship to the body).

Here, as is characteristic of Foucault's major works, the focus is on a set of events, objects, individuals, and relationships that intersect at a particular historical moment and result in a transformation of what is recognized as knowledge or taken to be true in some area of life (often, the sciences or social sciences). For illustrative purposes: in Birth of the Clinic, we have a technology or practice (in this case, the development of the clinic along with the method of “opening up” corpses, dissecting and investigating the internal organs, making disease and the body itself subject to a physician's “gaze”); its appearance in a more-or-less defined sphere of human activity or inquiry, commonly referred to as a “discourse” (the treatment of illness, “medicine”); some manner of transformation in the discourse (visualization becomes an important medical concept, tools/technology are developed to extend the sense of vision into previously unreachable and/or unknown spaces in the body); the creation of new knowledge and new things to have knowledge about (diseases, layers of tissue and the composition of internal organs); the emergence of orders or structures in which to organize objects of study (a taxonomy of disease, achieved through the spatial arrangement of patients); the accumulation of teachable scientific regularities in the discourse and amenability of this knowledge to systematization (the clinic as a training/teaching space); and a set of corresponding historical effects from all of this on the manner in which the Subject can be said to have a socially comprehensible existence (disease places the Subject under the concern of the physician, the Subject learns to understand himself in relation to the physician's knowledge of the Subject's body and power in protecting the health of the population).

This kind of analysis is typical of Foucault's approach to understanding the history of knowledge, the mechanisms of its production, and its role in constructing the subjective experience of human beings according to the discourses that accumulate (create, more accurately) and organize knowledge about them. In Discipline and Punish, he focuses on the disappearance of public displays of torture and execution as the preferred means for dealing with criminals, and their replacement by a system of confinement and supervision that concerns itself more with producing self-surveillance and routinized behaviors in the Subject than with inflicting pain upon the physical body. In The Order of Things, Foucault's goal is to explore what makes recognizable epochs in the history of thought and ideas appear to us as such; he is investigating the phenomenon of “order” as it is imposed on the world by the appearance of naturalness and sensibility that any particular, historical form of order possesses to those who live in its time. Furthermore, and perhaps most significantly, he suggests that we do not have epistemic access to the rules and forces that most fundamentally shape the contours of our own practices of ordering. In other words, the possibility of thought reaches its end at the point of trying to discover why it is possible for us to think what we do in the present.

It is against this conceptual background that the “problem” of the Subject becomes apparent. Foucault often entertained attempts to unify his work under a central theme—for the benefit of his audience and himself alike, one would imagine. In one interview, he says, “If I wanted to pose or drape myself in a slightly fictive coherence, I would tell you that this has always been my problem: effects of power and the production of truth” (“Foucault Live”)[4]. In an essay called, “The Subject and Power,” Foucault takes a more definitive stance: “My objective...has been to create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects” (“The Subject and Power” 326).[5]

These concepts—power, the production of truth, and the modes by which human beings are made subjects—combine to produce a social matrix of information, categories, and relationships that define and determine the Subject from positions of epistemic authority that are prior even to the practitioners of or experts in the relevant fields of knowledge at a given time. One of Foucault's simplest examples of this comes from his History of Sexuality: once sexuality becomes an object of psychiatric and medical study, it is simply not possible for a person not to have one (see Foucault, “History of Sexuality Vol. 1” for this discussion). Likewise, when Foucault says that the “homosexual” was an invention of the 19^th century, he does not mean that the behaviors we would now recognize as or call “homosexual” never happened before the term's invention; on the contrary, it was that the behavior was not that of a homosexual Subject before such a thing came into being via psychiatric discourse.

These examples demonstrate the extent of discourse's power to produce Subjects. The categories of human existence socially available to us are not ours to choose or control, and changing the categories is something that happens on the level of society itself, gradually, as a result of subtle, silent, invisible forces slowly interacting, providing us a navigable social world that necessarily resists the Subject's efforts to fully investigate its own production:

"I don’t believe the problem [of accounting for the subject's being constituted by social institutions, etc.] can be solved by historicizing the subject as posited by the phenomenologists, fabricating a subject that evolves through the course of history. One has to dispense with the constituent subject, to get rid of the subject itself, that’s to say, to arrive at an analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical framework...a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc., without having to make reference to a subject which is either transcendental in relation to the field of events or runs in its empty sameness throughout the course of history” (“Foucault Live”).

Near the end of his life, Foucault identified three “modes of objectification that transform human beings into subjects” (“Power” 326) that he saw as having been central to his work. The first of these were “the modes of inquiry that try to give themselves the status of sciences,” by which he meant what we call social-scientific discourses such as grammar and economics, whose attempts to fit their analyses of human activity into rigidly “scientific” disciplinary formations have the effect of freezing the Subject's historically contingent state and treating it as a natural object that obeys natural laws. Foucault called the second mode of objectification “dividing practices.” This refers to the principle of differentiation between categories that underlies a given discourse's production of the possibility for a Subject to deviate from the norm defined by the discourse—madness as the Other to sanity, sickness as the Other to health, criminality as the Other to compliance with the law. Lastly, Foucault identified “the way a human being turns him- or herself into a subject” as the mode of objectification by which the Subject internalizes his own discursive constitution and actively constructs himself by finding recognition of his being in the forms that discourse has provided him. “Thus,” says Foucault, “it is not power, but the subject, that is the general theme of my research” (327).

The Ufological Subject

What I am calling the Ufological Subject has been given many names over the course of the past sixty years, which in and of itself attests to the amount of “discourse” that has gone into creating such a Subject. Indeed, one of the primary functions of social reality is the use of language to solidify the ways in which we will agree that things are to be understood. In the context of UFOs and the people who deign to publicly opine on the plausibility of their reality, this practice has most frequently applied a set of already familiar terms to its target population, conveniently lifted from other situations in which one refers to an individual who is not to be taken seriously. Examples include: crackpot, wingnut, true believer, crank, fool, conspiracy theorist, whack job, loony, etc. These are among the more polite.

By introducing the term “Ufological Subject,” I mean to draw attention to the fact that these labels are historical artifacts, temporally contingent products of a wide range of discourses on the subject of UFOs. When the Air Force was conducting its study [6] of the UFO phenomenon between 1952 and 1969 (Project Bluebook), for example, the scientists and military officers collecting and investigating reports of UFO activity in the United States were not generally referred to as “whack jobs,” as are the people who continue to investigate such activity today. The completion of Project Bluebook, on the other hand—and the conclusion it issued, that the Air Force had found nothing of scientific value in its investigation of UFOs and would henceforth cease to take an interest in them—is widely identified by modern UFO researchers as the historical dividing line in the public identity of UFO research (Denzler 1).

Prior to 1969, the UFO phenomenon was by no means a difficult thing to take seriously; obviously, quite a few very serious people were involved in trying to figure out what it represented. But once the military publicly washed its hands of UFOs, excusing itself from their study with the confident-sounding conclusion that it had all been a product of simple perceptual errors on the part of lay observers, it became virtually impossible to find oneself recognized socially as both a “very serious person” and a proponent of continued research into the UFO phenomenon. The lines had been drawn—politically, epistemically, socially, and professionally. Beginning in the early 1970's, UFOs were transformed into an object of “popular belief,” similar in status to a child's belief in monsters, an uneducated person's belief in Bigfoot, or a religious person's belief in God (2). This transformation in status, and the corresponding discursive construction of the Ufological Subject as something to be considered in contrast to what had simultaneously become the Scientific Subject (who, properly from this point on, did not believe in UFOs or support their investigation), occurred largely at the hands of academic discourse.

By no means is this to say that belief in UFOs was treated only with kindness and enthusiasm prior to the year 1970—nothing could be further from the truth. Writing in 1975 in the foreward to historian David Jacobs'[7] landmark book The UFO Controversy in America, astrophysicist and scientific consultant to Project Bluebook Dr. J. Allen Hynek already says, “The need of a sober non-partisan compilation and documentation of the [UFO] controversy itself arises precisely because the UFO phenomenon has elicited as strong an emotional and partisan response as any scientific controversy in history,” (vii) and Jacobs himself describes the study of UFOs as “steeped in ridicule and existing on the fringes of scholarly pursuit” (1). I should not hope to lessen the importance of this fact: the “giggle factor,” as it is sometimes referred to, had been with UFOs from the moment the extraterrestrial hypothesis (ETH) was proposed as a possible explanation for them in 1947. Without question, early pop culture and media depictions of the idea that “space aliens” were visiting us were alternately mocking and dismissive—certainly not doing anything to help the phenomenon gain legitimacy, anyway—but at this point it was still mostly seen as the scientific community's problem if UFOs were really doing the things people claimed to be seeing them do, and if they weren't, in fact, “ours.”[8] The difference is that at least some unarguably serious research was being conducted by precisely the group of people whose qualifications the phenomenon appeared most immediately to require—our scientific experts (astronomers and physicists), who would account for the feat of interstellar travel any visiting alien would have to have achieved, and our government and military, who were most likely to have both the resources to investigate the matter and the motivation (i.e., national security, control of airspace) to figure it out. That this period ended with Project Bluebook's “unscientific” verdict being declared on the UFO question is what paved the way for other academic discourses to step into the debate(s); when they did, they turned what had previously been a popularly-derided cultural position on a mysterious phenomenon into a full-blown, institutionalized, authoritative analysis of a new set of psycho-social abnormalities, not entirely unlike mental illness or social maladjustment.

The most cursory of library searches demonstrates that the preponderance of academic literature on UFOs comes from the social sciences and, to some extent, the humanities. Because the termination of Project Bluebook officially displaced the UFO phenomenon from the realm of physical science, what was left over for academic analysis fit squarely into such disciplines as sociology, psychology, and anthropology, whose explanatory powers with respect to UFOs afforded the opportunity to account for the fact that people had not stopped believing they were real.

The disciplinary fragmentation of the UFO phenomenon is essential to understanding the role of its post-1969 academic study in constructing the Ufological Subject as a deviant or abnormal individual. While psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists all focused on explaining away belief in UFOs or the persistence of the phenomenon in popular culture, the distinct disciplinary frameworks within which each operated forced researchers to isolate certain aspects of the larger phenomenon, or to portray it in very specific terms, in order for the disciplinary appropriation of UFOs to make sense. In other words, there had to be justification for proposing a psychological or sociological perspective on UFOs, and this was achieved by the creation of just such a set of disciplinary perspectives.

Understandably, the fields in question found belief in UFOs to parallel other, already well-established topics of research [9]. In psychology, for instance, the UFO abduction meme—which was exploding onto the public scene in the early 1970's—provided a way to cast the UFO phenomenon in terms of longstanding psychological studies of everything from hallucination to early childhood sexual trauma. Sociologists found the history of the UFO phenomenon to be an interesting exercise in studying the growth and dispersion of information and/or belief within society, with the phrase “mass hysteria” becoming something of a favorite term in association with the subject. The comparison of private, civilian UFO research groups with the notion of an anti-social, conspiratorial mindset was also to be prevalent in sociological analyses, as was a fascination with so-called UFO cults that periodically sprung up around individuals known as “contactees,” who claimed to have been in contact with extraterrestrials and who set about spreading messages of intergalactic peace and love to those who would listen. This path would eventually lead to an entire sub-genre of sociological interest as the notion of “UFO religions” became popularized (due, admittedly, to the rate at which such things began appearing). For its part, anthropology found in the UFO phenomenon a new mode of meaning-making and sharing among human beings who were dealing with classic anthropological tropes—difference, conflict, the unknown—by dressing them up in modern, technological apparel.

It is not that these bodies of disciplinary literature have been developed that is in and of itself problematic. One can write from a sociological perspective about Pittsburgh Steelers fans, and to do so would not render the subjects of inquiry illegitimate for participation in serious public discourse. The problem these academic perspectives create for the Ufological Subject is that the forms they have taken are such that they could not have come into being at all were it not for their implicit acceptance of the general epistemological stance that there is no tangible, existent reality to the UFO phenomenon. They are all, quite simply, exercises in describing mental error, abnormality, social deviance, or the fictional. The academic study of UFOs has become the academic study of the human beings who “believe in” them.

What I have called the Ufological Subject is one whose beliefs about UFOs—that they represent a real phenomenon, one both worthy and capable of being afforded serious attention—leaves him susceptible to being described in these terms by established bodies of academic literature. And not merely susceptible to such description, but necessarily described in such terms. That the terms are each specific to particular disciplinary perspectives leaves the Ufological Subject in a state of fragmentation; not even a single, unitary account of his deficiency can be given. The “knowledge” we have of the Ufological Subject, therefore, basically amounts to a toolbox of approaches to dismissing his beliefs as unworthy of consideration, and a Rolodex of professionals to call if his aberrations cross the critical point at which an individual moves from being harmlessly irrelevant to the prevailing social, political, and cultural dialogues, to being seen as constituting a threat to the social fabric. But it is unusual, and might even be called difficult, for UFO research to be afforded this level of seriousness; the legacy of the “giggle factor” has only grown stronger with time, aided by the arsenal of technical language academics have provided to explain away those who persist in studying the UFO phenomenon. One does not have to go through the effort to silence that which will only be laughed at anyway.

Critique: Foucault and Butler

Foucault is often credited for having brought about “the death of the Subject.” His analysis of discourse seemed to many to leave no room for the Subject to mount a meaningful resistance, or to struggle in any way, against the terms of its constitution, and Foucault had made it clear that the construction of the Subject always served political ends (even if the effects of discourse were only put to political use after the fact).

Above, critique was loosely defined as “the actions of a historically-constituted Subject that seek to affect the conditions responsible for constructing the Subject in a certain way.” Whatever political dimensions of subjectivity and social recognition the Subject may have in mind to change—however the fear of violence or social unintelligibility may threaten a person for whom discourse has not provided what Judith Butler calls a viable or “livable” life—the very capacity to engage in transformative action is itself the primary component of political agency.

Foucault addresses the problem directly in “What is Critique?” To begin with, he places the question of critique within the tradition of a “multiplication of all the arts of governing—the art of pedagogy, the art of politics, the art of economics, if you will...” and says, “How to govern was, I believe, one of the fundamental questions about what was happening in the 15^th and 16^th centuries” (27). It is against this historical backdrop that he sees “what we would call the critical attitude” emerge. Critique, then, can be understood as the attitude that reacts to this increase in governmentalization by asking “how not to be governed like that, by that, in the name of those principles, with such and such an objective in mind and by means of such procedures, not like that, not for that, not by them” (28).

Foucault then provides what he calls historical “anchoring points” to the critical attitude, citing them as properties inherent to the traditional exercise of critique as he understands it. In this conception, to “not want to be governed like that” meant 1) taking an attitude towards the Scriptures that refused and/or sought to challenge ecclesiastical authority with respect to the “truth” they might contain, 2) questioning the limits of the “right to govern” and proposing that certain “indefeasible rights” must take precedent over an authority's desire to restrict them, and 3) the refusal to accept that authority naturally or necessarily confers the right to say or determine what is true (30-31).

Already, we can see that critique is about placing oneself in a certain mode of political relation to institutions of government (in the broader sense of the word). Foucault summarizes his conception as follows:

“...the core of critique is basically made of the bundle of relationships that are tied to one another, or one to the two others, power, truth, and the subject. And if governmentalization is indeed this movement through which individuals are subjugated in the reality of a social practice through mechanisms of power that adhere to a truth, well, then! I will say that critique is the movement by which the subject gives himself the right to question truth on its effects of power and question power on its effects of truth...Critique would essentially insure the desubjugation of the subject in the context of what we would call, in a word, the politics of truth” (32) [emphasis added].

This is the crucial point of Foucault's account: it is precisely the “mechanisms of power that adhere to a truth” that are the intended target of critique. They are what cause the truth in question to operate on and in the individual human beings responsible for their enactment in social reality, and it is through their enactment by subjects that truths exercise their authority.

Just how a subject is supposed to achieve this “movement” which allows him to actually critique the mechanisms of power and truth that subjugate him is, however, still relatively unclear. Now that we know what critique is and what it does, how do we determine whether or not a given subject is actually doing it? On what level do we assess the achievement of what I earlier called the twin goals of critique—changing both oneself (becoming a different kind of subject) and the world (affecting power itself, creating new or different possibilities with respect to the kind of subject it is socially viable, even possible, for one to become)?

It is apparent that the tension we need to resolve arises from the fact that discourses are responsible for constituting the subject “from the outside” and without the subject's willful acceptance of or agreement to the fact of being so constituted, while to engage in critique seems to require a willfulness and intentionality on the part of the subject's relationship to discourse that is implied by the definition of discourse to be unrealizable. Judith Butler addresses this problem in a way that I think allows us to bridge the theoretical gap between the idea of critique and its lived application by a discursively-constituted subject.

Taking up the issue in the context of gender, Butler points out that in order for the subject to realize the desire to claim one's gender as one's own, it is necessary for this act of self-determination to be discursively existent. In other words, without a social structure that supports the possibility of autonomy or self-determination in this way, neither autonomy nor self-determination could occur. “One is dependent on this 'outside' to lay claim to what is one's own. The self must, in this way, be dispossessed in sociality in order to take possession of itself” [emphasis added] (Butler 7). Here we see discourse doing something that we have not yet considered. It is all-too-easy to read Foucault in such a way as to conceive of discourse as the Outside, the Other which is determinant of me against myself, the infusion of a foreign system of order in me, and of me in it, where I am inevitably compelled to enact and reproduce myself in this state of discursive constitution, since my opportunities for resistance are unsure at best. Butler, on the other hand, raises the point of “dependency on the outside” in a different light. If discourse is the field of possibility from which I am capable of acting, speaking, or even being a body, then it is of no use to me to conceive of myself as being “against” it in this way. If I am to acknowledge that I am constituted as a subject according to the limited range of forms that subjectivity can take within my particular discursive context, then I cannot reasonably conceive of discourse as that which must consistently thwart any effort I make towards realizing an action or a form of identity that I have intentionally chosen for myself. For myself is not something that can actually exist without discourse, without the possibility of the social being of myself.

Butler quotes Foucault's “What is Critique,” saying that, according to his definition of the term, “...one of the first tasks of critique is to discern the relation 'between mechanisms of coercion and elements of knowledge'” (Butler 215). Once we have a bearing on the truths that constitute us as subjects, and we have identified some way in which these truths are discursively produced and reproduced in the subjects we become—how “power dissimulates as ontology,” (27) to use an excellent phrase of Butler's—we finally have a sense of where, or upon what, to focus the act of critique. And with Butler's notion of the self as being “dispossessed in sociality” by its very definition, the “act” that our critique will be has finally taken usable form: although we cannot act outside of or completely against the knowledge or truth that we depend on for a socially recognizable existence as subjects in the first place, we can assume the terms of our constitution as the tools available for the re-enactment of discourse in different ways.

This is how the Ufological Subject's being excluded from participation in mainstream scientific discourse can be seen as providing the opportunity for mounting a critique of the very discourse that disallows it from serious consideration. It also explains why the myriad attempts over the years to make the study of UFOs more “scientific,” in hopes that the sheer rationality of its researchers and the brutally scientific methodology they may have brought to bear on the topic will earn UFOs a spot at science's table, have repeatedly failed to make significant headway in affecting either the academic or the popular understanding of the UFO phenomenon. Trying to portray the study of UFOs as having scientific merit is doomed to perpetuate the Ufological Subject's being perceived as unfit to consider scientific issues, because the Ufological Subject is already discursively constructed as one who fails to grasp the unscientific nature of UFOs as established by the most relevant institutions of government and academia alike. In other words, it is a foregone conclusion that the scientific study of UFOs cannot be. To argue otherwise is to play by mainstream science's rules and ensure one's continued marginalization.

To argue instead that the discourses responsible for marginalizing the issue are unfit to assert what is true—to call them out in the manner of Foucault's conception of critique—changes the way in which the Ufological Subject is related to the forces of power that constitute him and determine his views to be illegitimate. This is essentially the argument made by Richard Dolan in his address to the 2002 International MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) Symposium, the theme of which was, “Unity in Ufology: Connecting with the Scientific Community.”[10]

Dolan acknowledges that the theme of “unity” is well-intentioned, but points out that, as a goal, it may not serve Ufology well in the end. Moreover, he is highly skeptical of the value of continuing to address the scientific community when it is unclear that “so-called scientific Ufology—organized especially within the halls of academia—has accomplished anything more substantial than the so-called amateurs.” Dolan quotes independent researcher Val German on the difficulties of approaching Ufology from an institutionally recognizable scientific perspective, who wrote:

“…our concept of proof requires that there is a human agency able to determine with authority what is happening in the world. When our scientists are dealing with things like sulphur dioxide or chimpanzees that’s no problem. But it UFOs are the products of a superior technology then where is the authority to determine what is really going on?” [emphasis added]

To this, Dolan comments, “Indeed.” His own emergence onto the scene of Ufology occurred recently, with the publication in 2000 of UFOs and the National Security State. Dolan’s background as a historian led to the production of a meticulously researched analysis of the behind-the-scenes government and military interest in UFOs from 1947 to 1971, based mostly on documents recovered through years of Freedom of Information Act requests; it was immediately embraced as a serious and significant contribution to UFO research. But beyond establishing Dolan’s position within contemporary Ufology, the book also lent powerful support to a hypothesis whose implications few in the world of UFO research had paused to fully account for—namely, that every effort to study UFOs from a “scientific” perspective, or even based simply on what has been allowed to enter into the public domain, is bound to be limited and incomplete, because UFOs have always been first and foremost a matter of national security for world governments and, thus, of the highest possible levels of secrecy.

Dolan’s argument reorganizes the relationships between UFOs, their research, science, universities, and the individuals who exist on all sides of this complex set of issues. “What I have tried to do in my own approach,” he says, “is not to resolve the issue of UFOs directly. I looked at the ‘human side’ of the equation, mainly by studying it as a national security issue.” Previously, to study the human side of UFOs was what academics in the social sciences did; the result has been the construction, through a proliferation of academic discourse, of the Ufological Subject as we have described. By focusing instead on the enormous degree of interest those same official bodies (the ones who publicly killed the UFO phenomenon with the end of Project Bluebook in 1969) can be proven, through documentation, to have shown in UFOs over the years—and in direct contrast to their stated positions of disinterest—Dolan calls the entire foundation of the institutionally-supported and academically-extended ridicule of UFO research into question. The recognized authorities on the subject turn out to have no authority whatsoever—they can literally be said to have no idea what they are talking about.

Conclusion

Skeptics have often been dismayed to learn that there is no direct, uncomplicated correlation between level of science education and belief in UFOs. That is, there is no evidence from studies or polls to suggest that the percentage of the U.S. population that believes UFOs may be interplanetary craft actually decreases as “science education” increases, either over time generally or within an individual's educational career (where science education is taken to mean exposure to science classes in high school or college).[11] The idea that pseudoscientific beliefs persist even in the face of scientific facts or training is a serious problem for promoters of science education, who see the persistence of such beliefs as evidence that the population is not being sufficiently prepared to avoid the pitfalls of pseudoscientific claims. To these individuals, and the institutions they often represent, pseudoscience is dangerous; it poses serious threats to the social fabric, the wellbeing of individuals, or both. If homeopathic remedies are believed to be superior to Western medicine, a parent may endanger the life of their child by choosing to treat serious ailments, such as cancer, with herbal concoctions rather than chemotherapy; if a person buys into the claims of astrologers or psychics, they can waste large amounts of money attempting to predict or control the course of their life by purchasing the services of charlatans; if enough people subscribe to Young-Earth Creationism, their participation in important political matters may be detrimental to the freedoms of others, being fueled by strict religious doctrine as opposed to the Enlightenment principles of rationalism and secular democracy.

Were the Ufological Subject merely a statistically insignificant aberration—a scientific deviant who refused to listen to the experts, and who therefore held false beliefs—the charge of pseudoscience would be similarly superficial, and no great amount of energy would need to be expended debunking the Subject's beliefs. Rather, it is in the threat posed by the relationship of these beliefs to those of the Scientific Subject that the issue acquires significance.

This is why the academic study of the UFO phenomenon has proceeded as it has: because no satisfactory account of the phenomenon can be given by those in positions of (actual) power, it has been necessary to marginalize the issue of UFOs in the minds of researchers and the public alike. Thus the production, through the discourses of psychology, sociology, and government-influenced media coverage, of the Ufological Subject as a harmlessly irrelevant, hopelessly misguided, pseudoscientific conspiracy theorist. The Ufological Subject must be made unserious because the threat he poses is total, at least in potential: that not only does the emperor (academia) have no clothes, even the advisor responsible for keeping secrets from the emperor (the government) is nude.

The Ufological Subject engages in critique insofar as he seeks to draw attention to these facts in the intersubjective space of dialogue with the Scientific Subject. Ultimately, it is the visceral reaction of alienated disapproval to the Ufological Subject’s ideas—to the very possibility of ever thinking that, to paraphrase Foucault—that is the site of power’s dissimulation in the social world. The Ufological Subject cannot directly confront the entire machinery through which that mode of relation has become established, and we have seen what happens when he tries to appeal to the authority responsible for dismissing him. But he can attempt to resituate the relation of the Scientific Subject both to himself and to the Ufological Subject by bringing attention to the uncomfortable facts surrounding the shaky historical-factual ground on which the Scientific Subject’s supposed “knowledge” uneasily rests. Once the Scientific Subject sees the institutional-academic framework responsible for constructing his estimation of the Ufological Subject’s deviance as suspect…then, the question of social transformation finds the answer of critique it has been looking for.

Addendum: Psychology—Explaining the Memory of Abduction

To illustrate in some detail the process by which discourse is capable of appropriating the UFO phenomenon for its own discursive ends, we will look at a 1996 article from Psychological Inquiry entitled, “Toward an Explanation of the UFO Abduction Phenomenon: Hypnotic Elaboration, Extraterrestrial Sadomasochism, and Spurious Memories.” The authors of the article—Leonard Newman of the University of Illinois at Chicago and Roy Baumeister of Case Western University—aim to place their explanation of the memory of abduction in line with the apparently then-fashionable topic of “the fallibility of autobiographical memory” (100). For Newman and Baumeister, memories of abductions are a kind of fantasy akin to that of sadomasochism, both of which arise from a desire to escape the stresses of self-construction in the modern world. Unlike masochistic fantasies, however, the fantasy of abduction is strongly believed to have actually occurred by the individual who experiences it; this, they claim, is attributable to the creation of “spurious” (literally—bastard spawn) memories during the process of hypnosis under which the memory of abduction is often first recovered or elaborated in detail, and with which the entire phenomenon of abduction memories is associated (99-100; 105).

Newman and Baumeister do state explicitly that, “the most straightforward account for UFO abductions would be that they actually occur” (103). They then detail some examples of what would have to be the case for this to be true—people being levitated through walls and abducted from urban areas without anyone else noticing, for instance—and follow these examples by observing that, “On strictly logical grounds...UFO abduction memories are difficult to accept. As with everyone else, though, our initial reaction to the stories people tell—including bizarre ones such as these—is to assume that they reflect some real experience and to believe them” (103). Amazingly, another page follows wherein it is considered what, if anything, would lend support to the “extraterrestrial hypothesis” (ETH). The authors entertain several possibilities, including corroborating testimony and physical evidence—but only of abductions, never with respect to the brute existence of the ETH—and conclude once and for all that the lack of evidence to support the ETH, coupled with the parsimony of dropping it as a contending explanation, forces them to look elsewhere for a more “subtle” account of the existence of false memories of extraterrestrial abduction (104).

Newman and Baumeister's paper is one of the most frequently cited treatments of the abduction phenomenon in the field of psychology. This paper tells us quite a bit, then, about how the UFO phenomenon can be seen to fall within the explanatory domain of a certain discipline and thereby to serve as the subject of scholarship. For one thing, it is clear from even the most preliminary review of that portion of the published psychological literature that deals in any substantive way with the UFO phenomenon that Newman and Baumeister's focus on abductions is highly representative of psychology as a whole. It is also clear that psychology's concern with the abduction phenomenon lies almost exclusively in attempting to discover the mechanism(s) whereby the belief in one's having been abducted—or the sometimes extremely vivid memory thereof—is established in the mind. Indeed, the strength of the belief and/or memory is perhaps its most puzzling quality, as the account of the experience is always told with such conviction that most researchers dismiss outright the possibility that these stories could be intentional fabrications on the part of the abductees. Newman and Baumeister are representative of their field in more ways as well, a few of which include: the prevalence given to the observation that abductees (or “contactees,” though this term has a more specific meaning and localized use in UFO history than these researchers seem to be aware of) are most often psychologically normal aside from their connections to UFOs; the attempt by researchers to establish a connection between the memory of abduction and some other, usually traumatic event in the abductee's life (especially those of a sexual or dissociative nature); and the attempt to discern a principled relationship between the mechanism responsible for creating the false memories and the discovery of particularly effective forms of treatment.

In order to approach the UFO phenomenon, then, psychology first conceives of it as having some set of causes other than that to which its literal appearance would attest; i.e., psychology takes a negative position on the ETH. The UFO phenomenon must then be whittled down in such a way as to enable the field to focus only on those aspects which are suitable for psychological analysis. This results in psychology being interested almost solely in the abduction phenomenon, which can be made to fit within the established conceptual boundaries of pre-existing research—such as that on the fallibility of autobiographical memory—and which appears to offer itself to investigation by many of the same methods already in use on those subjects. It is especially interesting that at this point, at least with Newman and Baumeister, we actually see the practitioners of the discipline entertaining the possibility of the ETH as a viable explanation for the phenomenon. Their consideration of the ETH is far from genuine, of course, and serves the dual purpose of signaling to others in the field that the ETH shall not be taken seriously in this arena while simultaneously establishing the case for psychology as an appropriate sphere within which to locate the phenomenon of true academic interest, since it is supposed by the authors that “the spaceships emerge from our minds” (104). Perhaps those NASA astronauts who have seen “the spaceships” while in orbit around the earth would benefit from reading Newman and Baumeister's paper; it would probably alleviate their vocal but underreported concerns on informing the public about the physical reality of UFOs, if not ET visitation itself. I'm sure such schoolbook space-race heroes as Gordon Cooper—who wrote a letter to the UN in the 1970's detailing his experiences—and Edgar Mitchell, for example, would rest easier knowing that spurious, hypnotically-elaborated memories deriving from traumatic dissociative childhood experiences and sadomasochistic desires, were the simplest explanation for what they “think” they saw.

A last note of interest concerning the authors' thoughts on the plausibility of the ETH: although their attention is focused strictly on the mental phenomenon of abduction memories, Newman and Baumeister do give the impression in these passages that it is the whole ETH whose possibility they are considering, of which the abduction phenomenon accounts for perhaps the most visible aspect, but which is by no means a central feature of the ETH as such. Their dismissal of the ETH is then premised on their inability to find supporting evidence for it, yet they only seek evidence of the the ETH in the context of abductions. They therefore fail to find anything constituting significant support for the ETH, such as third party witnesses or physical traces/effects. The fact that such evidence does exist, and in force, outside of the context of abductions demonstrates several things. First, Newman and Baumeister must not have looked very hard into the UFO phenomenon for evidence in support of the ETH when attempting to eliminate their explanatory options, or else they would have found plenty to puzzle them. Second, whether by choice or by training, they appear to equate the entirety of the phenomenon with the theme of alien abduction. This is a common association in the popular mind and owes itself to the fact that abductions only gained traction in the cultural scene in the relatively recent history of UFOs, at which time they were immediately seized upon and quickly became disproportionately representative of the UFO phenomenon in film and television. But for Newman and Baumeister to reduce the possibility of the ETH to the realm of physical evidence of abductions—and to then launch a psychological account of abductions based on the failure of the ETH—is for them to be subject to at least one of several charges. Either they are being grossly dishonest in the path they construct to establish the inevitability of psychology's annexation of the abduction phenomenon (which is true), or they are woefully yet innocently unaware of their subject matter (which is also true), or they embarrass themselves by being so foolish as to think that the “abduction reduction” is either logically or scientifically justifiable based on their reasoning (which is especially true).

It is with respect to these last few points that Newman and Baumeister are most helpful in demonstrating the disciplinary appropriation of the UFO phenomenon at work. In order to count as an object of psychological interest, the issue of UFOs must be made to exist as a psychological phenomenon. As we know, this is only possible by taking a negative position on the ETH, because even leaving the matter up for debate would prevent psychology from being able to unquestionably assert its explanatory role in relation to the particular aspect of the UFO phenomenon to which it addresses itself. But the explanatory role of the discipline is not strictly scholarly, nor is its function merely that of analysis or description.

By allowing itself to be described in psychological language, the UFO phenomenon becomes an accessory to its own intellectual colonization. Strictly speaking, it is less in the interests of the phenomenon (and the prospects for serious research of it to be undertaken) to be granted entry into the world of academically-knowable subjects via the discipline of psychology than it would be to remain completely academically illegitimate. While there is a certain admission of the reality of a thing in consenting to the fact that it can be studied on an academic or scholarly level, the mode of reality bestowed is determined first by the ways in which it is most fundamentally possible for the thing to be studied, but more importantly by the ways in which it is interesting to those who wish to study it. In the context of academia, novels are interesting as fictional stories before they are interesting as history; historical documents are interesting as records of past events before they are interesting as literary works. To the Ufological Subject, it may be most interesting of all to study the UFO phenomenon in the context of an interdisciplinary “Center for UFO Studies” housed at a major research institution; to academia, and therefore to the Scientific Subject, however, it is most interesting to study UFOs in the contexts of false memories, cultural psyches, social deviance, and irrationalism—in other words, as the products of the flawed minds who take the idea of their reality seriously.

Works Cited

Baumeister, R. and L. Newman. “Toward an Explanation of the UFO Abduction Phenomenon: Hypnotic Elaboration, Extraterrestrial Sadomasochism, and Spurious Memories.” Psychological Inquiry. 7 (1996).

“Biography: David M. Jacobs.” International Center for Abduction Research. 15 Nov. 2009.

<http://www.ufoabduction.com/biography.htm>.

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Denzler, Brenda. The Lure of the Edge: Scientific Passions, Religious Beliefs, and the Pursuit

of UFOs. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Dolan, Richard. “The Limits of Science in UFO Research.” International MUFON Symposium. New York: July, 2002. Retrieved from

< http://keyholepublishing.com/The Limits of Science in UFO Research.htm> 5 Nov. 2009.

Foucault, Michel. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973.

---. Foucault Live. Ed. Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1996.

---. The History of Sexuality. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.

---. “The Subject and Power.” Power. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 2000.

---. “What Is Critique?” The Politics of Truth. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Lysa Hochroth. Semiotext(e): New York, 1997.

Jacobs, David M. The UFO Controversy in America. New York: New American Library, 1975.

LaGrange, Pierre. “UFO Hunters.” The Alien Files: UFOs Under Investigation. Prod. Madacy Home Video. DVD. Quebec, Canada: 2006.

McDonald, James E. “Science in Default: Twenty-Two Years of Inadequate UFO Investigations.” American Association for the Advancement of Science, 134^th^meeting;^{General Symposium, Unidentified Flying Objects.}^{Tuscon, AZ: December 27, 1969.}^{Retrieved from}^<^{http://dewoody.net/ufo/Science_in_Default.html> 20 Sept. 2009.}

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^{“UFO Evidence—Government Studies.”}^{UFOEvidence.org}^{. 22 Nov. 2009.}

^<^{http://www.ufoevidence.org/topics/GovernmentStudies.htm>.}

^{“What Does Education Really Do?”}^{Science News: RedOrbit}^{. 17 Oct. 2009.}

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^{^{Butler, Judith.}}^{^{Undoing Gender}}^{^{. New York: Routledge, 2004.}}

^{^{Foucault, Michel.}}^{^{The Archaeology of Knowledge}}^{^{. New York: Pantheon Books, 1972.}}

^{^---.}^{^The}^{^{Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception}}^{^{. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973.}}

^{^---.}^{^{Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison}}^{^{. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.}}

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^{^---.}^{^{The History of Sexuality}}^{^{. New York: Vintage Books, 1990.}}

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^{^{[1] http://www.freedomofinfo.org/national_poll.html}}

^{^{[2] McDonald, James E. “Science in Default: Twenty-Two Years of Inadequate UFO Investigations.” American Association for the Advancement of Science, 134^th^{meeting; General Symposium, Unidentified Flying Objects.}^{Tuscon, AZ: December 27, 1969.}}}

^{^{^{[3] Chapter 10, Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.}}}

^{^{^{[4] Foucault Live. Ed. Sylvere Lotringer. New York: Semiotext(e), 1996.}}}

^{^{^{[5] Foucault, Michel. “The Subject and Power.” Power. Ed. James D. Faubion. New York: The New Press, 2000. 326.}}}

^{^{^{[6] Many in the UFO community would scoff at Bluebook being referred to either as an actual “study” or as “the study conducted by the Air Force,” since Freedom of Information Act requests have turned up much evidence to support the Air Force's having had a much longer, deeper, and more substantial record of classified activity concerning the UFO phenomenon than their official position has ever suggested. Documentation of this activity (not to mention that of security agencies on the same topic) abounds at: http://www.ufoevidence.org/topics/GovernmentStudies.htm}}}

^{^{^{[7] Jacobs was one of the earliest recognized academic authorities on the UFO phenomenon outside of those few scientists (J. Allen Hynek being the prototype of this group) that had worked personally on the UFO issue, often in direct association with one of the governmental studies that had been undertaken. His first book, The UFO Controversy in America, is an adaptation of his 1973 doctoral dissertation, which marked only the second time in the United States that a Ph.D. was granted on the basis of UFO-related scholarship (personal website, http://www.ufoabduction.com/biography). He remains one of the most recognizable of the small class of American academics with significant involvement in UFO research.}}}

^{^{^{[8] Pierre Lagrange, French sociologist, quoted in video interview from “The UFO Files.”}}}

^{^{^{[9] See Watch The Skies! A Chronicle of the Flying Saucer Myth, historian Curtis Peebles’ classic skeptical work, for an oft-referenced discussion of the intellectual history of UFO research, both academic and otherwise.}}}

^{^{^{[10] Dolan, Richard. “The Limits of Science in UFO Research.” International MUFON Symposium. New York: July, 2002. Retrieved from < http://keyholepublishing.com/The Limits of Science in UFO Research.htm> 5 Nov 2009.}}}

^{^{^{[11] http://redorbit.com/news/science/17907/what_does_education_really_do/}}}

omg alienz!1!!

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Friday, December 11, 2009

An increase in critical distance...

Linus Pauling, UFO researcher

Thursday, December 10, 2009

sacred geometry, radioactive soil

From the Fringe: Ufology as Critique (complete)

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