...or maybe they just have the same degree of power as the United Nations here on Earth? They can pass as many resolutions as they want, but nobody really has to listen if they don't want to...?
I say this because these links immediately brought to mind what I had introduced to you all as the "new school" of Ufology, which goes by the name of Exopolitics. Exopolitics presumes to be the study of the political dimensions of an extraterrestrial presence on our planet. It seeks first of all to answer the question, "Who are the significant actors/what are the significant organizations?" involved on both sides of whatever interactions have occurred or are occurring between humans and ETs--be they military, diplomatic, technological, or otherwise in nature. Why are we placing weapons in space, and is it wise to do so? Have any intergalactic "treaties" been signed by any official bodies? Has technology been exchanged? Who is representing the earth and in what manner? When did this begin? Are there multiple ET civilizations visiting our atmosphere or our planet, and what are their relationships to one another? What are their intentions?
Exopolitics goes further than this, however. It also attempts to theorize about how these interactions should be taking place and what the rules should be for all participators. In a sense, it attempts to theorize an Intergalactic Declaration of (Non-)Human Rights. And one of the reasons given for the importance of Exopolitics in this regard is the unethical treatment of humans by ETs demonstrated in the abduction phenomenon. I kid you not: there have been attempts to get legislation before congress that would acknowledge the fact of alien abduction, provide support and compensation to its victims, and provide for the prosecution of any government official who either knows of OR allowed for the phenomenon to take place (as with a treaty or unofficial endorsement of the practice).
One of Ufology's richest pieces of folklore centers around a 1954 meeting between delegates of at least one ET race and President Eisenhower. Legend has it that just such a treaty was signed at this meeting, one that allowed for a limited number of non-intrusive medical evaluations to be performed on temporarily abducted human beings in exchange for advanced technological knowledge from the ETs. The story goes that this "treaty" stood for a few years, but that the ETs eventually began exceeding the number of abductions and scope of "research" they'd signed up for, and there was literally nothing we could do about it. One of Exopolitics' goals is to rein in this abusive and unethical extraterrestrial research project.
Here's some extra text I knocked out trying to get my abstract finalized...it might work as part of an introduction to the paper. ------------------------------ 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. The existence of UFOs is almost always taken to imply the reality of extraterrestrial visitation--which would imply the existence of otherworldly technologies allowing for super-luminal, interstellar travel. Since neither astronomers nor physicists have been able to conceive of how such a technology might actually work, 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 be explained away by conventional means as mis-identifications 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 most prominently concerns 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.
For a working title and a preliminary abstract, let's go with: ------------------------------ From the Fringe: Ufology as Critique
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 this 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 investigation.
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 bubbles up from beneath an author's words and surfaces, in the author's tone, almost 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" (Foucault, 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 which 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 an ideologically-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 rationality, and that agency is exercised at the point at which institutional, academic knowledge itself comes to be seen as suspect.
(shorthand bibliography for quotes used)
Butler, Judith. "What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault's Virtue."
Foucault, Michel. "What is Critique?" ----------------------------------
649 words, and I think it's a fair initial crack at what I've decided I'd like to do with this. My main problem was trying to keep from going too far in depth into how this analysis will be valid, which was getting me stuck hashing out Foucault and Butler all over again in my mind. I might need to pare down some spots and beef up others...matter of fact, I know I will. For one thing, I also want to use Paul Feyerabend's "Against Method," in which Feyerabend went after the failure of science to acknowledge that its prevailing ideological dominance had not come about due merely to its self-evident superiority over other ways of knowing.
On the To-Post list for the blog are a 1) review of my experience going to see Dr. Steven Greer, head of the Disclosure Project, speak at UNCA on September 11th, and 2) an introductory post on this thing called synchromysticism, which is one of the four sub-fields of Ufology I had previously mentioned.
I want to go ahead and get a start on that post here. Synchromysticism is going to take the most work to explain, in no small part because of the fact that I still fail to really "get it" myself. But it's also extremely valuable because of just how far it goes in its anti-academicism--while, as is common in the study of UFOs, borrowing heavily from and relying upon well-established disciplinary work. Synchromystics see their own minds and experiences as the spaces where the universe's objects of study are produced. Those objects of study are the statistically near-impossible constellations of synchronicities--coincidences that appear meaningful despite being causally unrelated--that pop up in day-to-day life, in the news, in Hollywood productions, in the thematic relations between significant persons, etc. As "syncs" build up around certain themes, persons, concepts, or events, it begins to feel to the experiencer that a larger force or framework is at work, that "something" is responsible for organizing these random occurrences into seemingly non-random patterns of meaning.
Here's an example from my own life: two or three weeks ago, the titular line from that awful 80's anthem by Europe, "The Final Countdown" popped into my head. You know, the one that goes, "...it's the fiiiinaaal cooouuntdooowwn!" I sang it to myself, but then realized that I wasn't familiar enough with the song to know how the line actually went, what its melody was, and how to sing it as it occurred in the song. So I looked it up on Youtube:
Come to find out, the song is about blasting off from Earth and "heading for Venus...'cause maybe they've seen us..." !!! I'd never known what the song was about before. So, first sync.
A couple of days later, I took up a task I'd been sitting on for a few months and began re-watching the T.V. series "Arrested Development." (I sincerely hope you're all familiar with it, because it's hilarious.) On the show, Gob (pronounced like the biblical character Job) is a magician whose act begins with flashes of light and smoke machines and...the introductory keyboard riff from "The Final Countdown." That makes sense; it's anthemic, cheesy, and good for a laugh in association with an astoundingly silly magician's deluded image of himself.
The next day, I was stopped in my tracks when, walking down King Street, a car rolled past me blasting "The Final Countdown."
Several days later, watching the Pittsburgh Steelers play the opening game of the NFL season, I hear "The Final Countdown" played along with the animation and graphics announcing the start of the game.
Then, Dr. Steven Greer uses the phrase "the final countdown" at least twice during his presentation, speaking about how close we supposedly are to achieving worldwide disclosure of the UFO phenomenon by major governments.
Then, playing pool at Boone Saloon the other night, I hear someone whistling that same anthemic opening keyboard riff to "The Final Countdown" from the other end of the bar.
Now, these events ARE unrelated. No one is watching me from surveillance cameras and satellites, making sure to pump this tune into my ears at auspicious moments, hoping I'll pick up on the "message." But it's in their very unrelatedness that the weirdness is most clear. That's where the mysticism of synchromysticism comes in: a synchromystic in my shoes would read some manner of cosmic intelligence into the picture. However, WHAT the synchronicity means is not as important to explore as is the fact THAT it means.
That's a way of describing synchromysticism on an individual level. The more exciting--and bizarre--dimension of it involves attempting to divine a narrative of the planet's history (and future) not only from constellations of synchronous events, but also from 1) the emergence of classic motifs from the realm of mythology onto the world stage, and 2) the intersection of so-called "esoteric" and/or occult symbolism with present-day events. It's like watching what Hollywood produces movies about and instead of thinking, "They're responding to the interests of movie-goers," thinking something along the lines of, "The collective unconscious is manifesting possibilities for the human future in the form of a string of alien-themed blockbusters." Or looking at Barack Obama's visit to the mystery-ridden (and occult-history rich...see Hitler, e.g.) Giza plateau as symbolic of an ancient power or knowledge returning to its source in the form of a New World Order-like political personality, while Egyptians make a buck off of these little plaques:
That's pretty far out, I know. But you'll be shocked when I show you some examples of how methodically this has been done. Anyway, more to come on it for sure. Next will be a talk with Derek about my attempts to reacquaint myself with Foucault and in what way I can most effectively use him to describe these fields and the significance of their development outside of the boundaries of mainstream research.
*That's not really all I have to go on. But it's a funny thought, and if laughing at myself can help sustain me through this project, I'll take it. Feel free to laugh at me too.
Hello all. Please forgive me yesterday's absence and the lateness of this post. I was temporarily derailed by some family news, but am back on target today.
Reading back through my old papers is a bit surreal. My official "senior" year was 2006-2007, and by that time I was playing in up to five bands at once in and around Boone. The number of classes I took each semester grew smaller and smaller until I decided to just focus on paying rent and bills with music money and stopped taking classes altogether. As a result of this time lapse, it's a task in and of itself to reacquaint myself with my own concentration.
This is what my detective work has yielded so far:
I called my concentration "Philosophy and(/of) Education." Basically, in my first four years at Appalachian, I took it upon myself to become as immersed in Watauga College and the Interdisciplinary Studies department as the faculty would allow. Interdisciplinarity (which I see Blogger STILL fails to recognize as a real word!) seemed so naturally superior a concept/framework/approach to knowledge than that of the traditional disciplines, I wanted it to be the launchpad for the academic career I was then dreaming of pursuing.
Everything I studied centered around the concept of critique. Interdisciplinary Studies--perpetually hung up on exactly what sort of "field," if any, it actually constitutes--offers a position from which to pursue not only new knowledge, but new knowledge-formations. It is an ideal, in a sense, which meets the ground primarily by 1) offering an approach to problem-solving that integrates established discplinary perspectives in hopes of producing more comprehensive perspectives and better solutions (its pragmatic advantage), and 2) standing in critical relation to other knowledges (its philosophical dimension). I took Watauga College to be a critique of everything non-Watauga College at ASU; this was what led me to the study of the Learning Community movement. Learning communities and interdisciplinarity were the two pillars upon which my Serious and Practical Training for the World of Employment were going to be based. This was the "...and(/of) Education" part of my concentration.
Then, there were the...well, I suppose you could politely call them "professors." I preferred to call them Existential Crisis-Inducers, myself. These were the Jay Wentworths, Bud Gerbers, and Richard Carps (::shudder::) of IDS; the Kim Halls of P&R; the James Ivorys of English; the Diane Mines-s of anthropology, etc. And you, Derek Stanovsky: you and your goon Karl Marx played a huge part as well. These people would not let the philosophy student in me die. Nay, they encouraged him to grow, to read, to write, and to become more and more enchanted by the day with all of those hypnotizing Ism-s: feminism, existentialism, historical materialism, structuralism, post-structuralism, post-colonialism, etc.
This was the Doug that never slept, that wrote final papers ten pages too long and turned them in two months too late. This Doug became fixated on Foucault and the problem of discourse and agency; he wrote about it in every class he could for at least two years. When this Doug finally took a few semesters' worth of regular (read: Anglo- or "analytic") philosophy classes--on metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language--he labored to collapse the whole edifice around the feet of the fools who continued to publish in the field. He was, shall we say, less than successful in meeting his goal (though he made a few very good points along the way). This Doug believed that meanings are unstable, that language, culture, and history determine what it is possible to think at a given moment, and that Mind is a social phenomenon we are "in" rather than a thing each of us "has."
I found it self-evident that these two Dougs shared common ground with respect to their perhaps apparently unrelated interests. The University is where Knowledge's ultimate arbiters call home--they are the Ph.D.s whose expertise is sought, whose pronouncements are gospel, and whose bickering (okay, "journal publications and conference debates") actually constitute their respective fields. On the other hand, this Knowledge is believed to be but momentary crystallizations of rhetoric and temporary conceptual alliances amid much larger historical-epistemic forces, the ultimate natures of which are simply not available to us in the present. The form of the University, then, is by definition mutable over time. It is in light of this that Academia can be seen to be one of the most conservative of society's institutions, since its constant dissolution and reorganization is least appealing to those whose job it is to know things professionally.
UFOs present an impossible subject for today's universities, which are the embodiments of our present states of knowledge. To "study" UFOs is therefore to critique the institutions which continue to claim ultimate social legitimacy with respect to knowledge, but which are so clearly impotent to understand what is perhaps the most empirically-persistent nonexistent phenomenon in human history.
**UPDATE: These links are now on the right side of the page, in the same order as they appear here. If you do browse around on them and come away with some questions, don't hesitate to ask in a comment or an email--that'll help me to further clarify my own understanding of their content as well! -doug ------------------------------- I'm still working on a way to condense what I've said so far in class into a manageable thesis statement. Derek's suggestion of framing UFO research in terms of the history of skepticism has gotten a bit of a hold on me, so I'm trying to see if that's a possibility for grounding my idea in an academic tradition while also allowing me the maneuverability I need to be able to express the critique of "THE" academic tradition that these fields are consciously or unconsciously launching. In the meantime, here are four perfectly representative websites of the four main branches or sub-fields of UFOlogy I'm thinking of including in my study:
For "old-school" UFOlogy, Kevin Randle, a retired Army officer whose interest lies primarily in witness testimony from the infamous Roswell, NM case: http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/
The Disclosure Project is something that I think counts as its own sub-field, and I'll explain why in greater detail shortly. It's essentially a whistleblower-gathering effort--individuals from government, military, intelligence, and the private sector who have agreed to come forward with what they know: http://www.disclosureproject.org/
Exopolitics claims as its own definition "the study of the political implications of the extraterrestrial presence." This is the site of one of the primary gatekeepers in the field. As you can see if you browse around a bit, he even offers a structured educational program in Exopolitics which can earn you a sort of pseudo-degree (called a "certificate," which I'm pretty sure just means a sheet of paper) and get you called a...a...an Exopolitician? I'm not sure what they call themselves: http://exopolitics.org/
This next website has grown in popularity ENORMOUSLY over just the past year, and the name of the field it's associated with was only coined in the last three years: synchromysticism. This one is going to take some explaining, and it'll help if you just start clicking around to get a sense of what kind of "research" this actually is. This guy is just the most accessible member of the field/movement I've yet come across, and you'll see me commenting on his website every few days if you pay attention: http://secretsun.blogspot.com/
William James had "The Varieties of Religious Experience;" I give you "The Varieties of UFO Research," my own analysis forthcoming. Enjoy!
My individually-designed concentration is called, "Philosophy and Education." Here's an excerpt from my statement of purpose, which I find I still like quite a bit (despite having written it prior to my UFO research explosion):
"The concentration I have designed allows me to examine education from what I am calling a philosophical perspective. I take this perspective to be composed of a variety of analytic and interpretive tools gleaned from several disciplines--philosophy and education, for example, but also anthropology and English... As a result of designing my own IDS concentration, I have developed the ability to address two key sets of questions that emerge at the intersection of philosophy and education. The first concerns the institutionalization of knowledge itself in the form of academic disciplines: how does a field of knowledge come to be defined as such, and to whom does this privilege fall? How, when, and why did the body of knowledge that we encounter as students of a certain major or department come into being? In other words, why is this what you study as an English major, this as a physics major, this as a political science major? Perhaps most importantly, what is it about the "lines" that separate these disciplines that causes knowledge to fall, more or less neatly, on one side or another? The second major set of questions to which my course of study has led involves looking at the way these bodies of knowledge are taught (and learned). What is the nature of the relationship between teachers and students in a classroom? What is the nature of the relationship between individuals and the bodies of knowledge in which we deal? What is it to learn, or to teach? How do disciplinary formations impose upon us the methods by which we teach and learn them? These kinds of analyses are important for two interdependent reasons: first, because having the intellectual resources to examine and critique one's own educational experience and the system within which it occurs is a vital element in the larger project of social critique in general, which any citizen of a participatory democracy should find not only worthwhile but essential; and second, because the development of these skills with respect to education is precisely what most institutionalized knowledges--K-12 curricula, disciplinary "core" or methods classes--do not teach."
