The title of this post takes its cue from a famous—and notoriously misconstrued—sentence in Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology. Even the translator must offer two versions (“There is nothing outside of the text”, “there is no outside-text”) neither of which quite successfully communicates the sense of the French original, which is as much determined as complicated (as is the wont of Derrida’s style) by its context, namely the sentences that precede it:
Yet if reading must not be content with doubling the text, it cannot legitimately transgress the text toward something other than it, toward a referent (a reality that is metaphysical, historical, psychobiographical, etc.) or toward a signified outside the text whose content would take place, could have taken place outside of language, that is to say, in the sense that we give here to that word, outside of writing in general. That is why the methodological considerations that we risk applying here to an example are closely dependent on general propositions that we have elaborated above; as regards the absence of the referent or the transcendal signifier. There is nothing outside of the text…. (158)
It is not my intent to double this excerpt of Derrida’s text in the form of a commentary or exegesis, but to place it here, partially in its context, as evidence of its complexity and to suggest that the use I propose to make of it, the work I want to put it to, is likewise not so simple (and hence not so simply dismissed).
In my previous post I distinguished the UFO mythology (all that is said or written about the UFO, including artworks) from the Unidentified Flying Object itself, that cause of the stimulus of the experience that is consequently reported, a distinction that invokes that common sense one between word and thing, between, what Derrida terms above, text and referent. I know some (and here I use the logical sense of ‘some’, one of a set or all but one of a set…) would set aside all that is said about the object all the better to seize the object itself, to grasp the referent apart from, i.e., outside, the text (i.e., and this is key, independent of textuality). If we cut to the quick, turning our back on all that “talk”—the UFO books, articles, blogs, movies, television, etc.—and attend to those texts nearest the experience of the object they are about, namely the witness report, how close to the object can we get? Can we get outside of the text, free of textuality?
On the one hand, it is not unwarranted to begin with the witness report. As is well-known in ufological circles, it was in the opening pages of Jacques Vallée’s first book, Anatomy of a Phenomenon (1965), that an important first principle was laid down: “The phenomenon under study is not the UFO, which is not reproducible at will in the laboratory, but the report written by the witness” (vii). Of course, one wants to interject here that the story is not so simple: the witness report is perhaps more often than not dictated by the witness to an investigator, an investigator who themself is no mere passive recording instrument, but often asking questions, guiding or directing the witness’ report, moreover, at times, in their doubling of the text of the witness’ story—in their recording of it, in their “taking it down”—, condensing, extrapolating, paraphrasing, etc. There would have been no “flying saucer flap” if a journalist listening to Kenneth Arnold’s “witness report” hadn’t spontaneously coined the expression “flying saucer” to catch and communicate more vividly than Arnolds’ own words an element of his witness testimony. On the other hand, of course, less patient readers will already have accused me of loading the dice, starting with an instance of text: what’s important is the object, the cause of the stimulus that gave rise to the report, what the report refers to….
So, if we approach that object yet closer, leaving behind the words of the witness report, whether more or less those of the witness or not, to the experience of the object, do we get “outside the text”, free of textuality? The typical experience is of an anomalous object, something unrecognizable. I make what might seem a pointlessly obvious claim here; however, not all witness reports are of anomalous objects: “I saw a Pleiadian beamship silently hovering over the valley,” or “a Bob Lazar ‘sports model’ zipped straight up and out of sight.” Such reports are of, as it were, recognizable objects; indeed, much the same could be said for any identification of a strange light or unusual flying object immediately as “a UFO” or “flying saucer” however much more general such an identification is. Where such sightings operate by seeing the object as an instance of a more general, existing category, the experience of an anomalous object demands the witness search for concepts to make sense of it; the anomalous object is not re-cognized but demands that it be cognized. Arnold’s experience is instructive: the sighting was an extended struggle to identify, then, failing that, to describe the objects observed. Are they experimental jet aircraft? The echelon moves like the tail of a kite. The craft move like a saucer skipped over water….The process to make sense of what is seen is characterized by questions, statements (guesses), comparisons, etc., i.e., instances of language. After the objects disappear, the witness, in dwelling on what was seen, in the continued effort to wrap their mind around it, frames the experience as a narrative: I was doing this, then I noticed that, then…, finally… The experience of an anomalous object, during and after, is, in its linguistic articulation, to turn a phrase, “textured.”
Indeed, one could go further: the object as an object is textured in this way or “textualized”. Following Kant, the object is first and foremost a synthesis—of shape, colour, motion, sound, etc. If we are persuaded by the thesis that thought depends on language (as argued, first, by Hamann and Herder) and that perception is formed by it (as in the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis), then the categories by which we make sense of the specific sensuous qualities of the object are given by language: the object was crescent-shaped, it appeared metallic, it was soundless, it gave off a sulphurous odour, etc. Even if one disagrees with this strain of thought, the object-as-synthesis is still textured: its characteristics are determinate (it is oval, not circular or triangular or…; it was unilluminated; it moved quickly not slowly, irregularly not smoothly,…) only because these determinations are themselves structured like a language (roughly, what Derrida above refers to as writing or text in general).
It is the failure to understand this insight that breeds so much confused misunderstanding. Derrida famously draws on the structural linguistics of Saussure, for whom the structure of language is constructed diacritically, i.e., on the basis of difference. No term in a language, no phoneme, grapheme, morpheme, etc. is what it is by being self-identical but by virtue of its being not any of all the other elements of the language system. This notion of a differential (diacritical) structure finds its original formulation in Spinoza: omnes determinatio est negatio: all determination is negation, a thesis with fateful consequences. It is in this sense that even if the empirical qualities of the object are not first supplied and organized by a natural language (American English, French, etc.), for them to be determinate at all they are so by dint of their being distinguished from what they are not. The object, even if uncategorizable, unrecognizable, anomalous is, in an important sense, a text, text being just such a weave of diacritically distinguished elements. There is nothing of the object apart from (outside) the text (in general), nothing consciousness can grasp.
The consequences of this line of thought are all the more grave when applied to any possible knowledge of the Unidentified Flying Object, for any knowledge worthy of the name will be articulate, determinate, i.e., textual. Those who want to or think they can get outside the text to get a hold of the object in itself fail to understand that such a reaching after knowledge (if that’s what it is) exceeds its grasp: outside the text there is no knowledge. Just like those who view the UFO as an object of gnosis, an object of mystical, ineffable experience, our ufological “realist” (who wants the thing not the word, the referent not the text, the unidentified flying object itself) must in the end agree with the final proposition of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darübuer muss man schweigen; roughly, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”
Coming soon: “Rumour, myth, text—and metamaterials!”
Skunkworks 
Have you ever come across Derrida and Indian Philosophy by Harold Coward by any chance? Well worth the read in my view, particularly for the comparison between Derridean and early Mahayana/Madhyamaka “deconstruction”.
https://sunypress.edu/Books/D/Derrida-and-Indian-Philosophy2
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Can’t say that book has crossed my browing path, no. You wouldn’t believe what’s on my reading and writing list these days, so forgive me if I don’t get to it anytime soon, however important in itself such crosscultural philosophical work in fact is…
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I only bring it up because this passage in your post: “The object, even if uncategorizable, unrecognizable, anomalous is, in an important sense, a text, text being just such a weave of diacritically distinguished elements. There is nothing of the object apart from (outside) the text (in general), nothing consciousness can grasp.”…. reminded me of the fact that not all schools of thought which see reality as constructed through language agree on the actual relationship between reality and language. If I may include here a brief excerpt from the book in question:
“Nagarjuna… [sees] language expressing vikalpa or imaginary constructions that play over the surface of the real without giving access to it. According to this interpretation … language does not participate in or point to reality but only obscures it. For spiritual realization to occur overt and inner language use must be silenced through the practices of philosophical reductum ad absurdum argument and meditation. Derrida … disagrees with this view and sees the dynamic difference that characterizes reality as composing the nature of language itself … for Derrida, language participates in the reality it manifests and is therefore able to function as a means of realization. This disagreement over the function of language is the more significant since both Derrida and Nagarjuna view the nature of the real in terms of difference. … But whereas Derrida finds this difference that is constantly changing, constantly deconstructing itself, to be the very essence of language, Nagarjuna … places the locus of that difference outside of language … [and in his] view the names and concepts of language that we give to objects are merely conventional yet, due to our uncritical ordinary mental function, we take them to be real.”
Leaving aside the specificities and name dropping, this “differing on difference” strikes me as extrapolatable to any number of contexts and potentially relevant to what you were talking about since it is possible – for a given observer, including one who has experienced an “encounter” of some sort – to envision and factor in the role that language plays in determining “their” version of the real without necessarily agreeing that “there is nothing of the object apart from (outside) the text (in general), nothing consciousness can grasp.” Hence, perhaps, the existence of a radical skepticism that does not completely discount a transcendental reality-beyond-language even as it doesn’t hold back in pulling at the seams of constructed accounts of the “unexplainable”. Which perhaps goes some way into explaining why people of a decidedly rationalistic and agnostic bent still find themselves so viscerally fascinated by the supra-linguistic “mystery” that UFOs typically conjure up.
“Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” indeed, but can one ever be truly silent? I doubt it.
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First, by ‘object’, I do not refer to a real thing, but a synthesis of qualia in space and time performed by the subject, transcendental or otherwise. So it’s not a question of text and referent–as the referent is always already “present” only as an effect: of the spontaneity of the subject and what the subject has to work with formally and materially (e.g., the empty forms of intuition space and time and the empirical sensuous concepts of colours, shapes, motion, sound, etc. The referent here thought as some real thing is a thing-in-itself, by which I denote _only_ that consciousness need something given to it not of its own making to form into an perception and knowledge. So it’s not a question of word and world (is not the word part of the world?) but only of articulating the conditions of possibility of perception and knowledge strictly _immanently_.
That is to put it all too roughly and forcefully, in my note, at least, there is no relation between language on one side and some pre-existing language independent “reality” on the other, as we could never have access to this latter and after all ‘reality’ is itself only another diacritically determined sign in various language games…
I do concur with the last sentence of the cited passage (an observation Saussure makes, too) that the conventional sign is taken for something natural. But note how the clause “names and concepts of language that we give to objects” casts the matter as if there were on one side a world of self-sufficient things while on the other a word hoard of nouns; language is surely not the latter…
My note here adopts a Kantian inflection of Derrida’s famous statement to argue there is nothing we can know aside from or outside the conditions of knowledge. There is a very subtle satirical tack, here, too, directed at those all too eager to pursue and grasp the thing itself, forgetting that to grasp it they have to have hands, fingers, etc….
All that being said, Derrida’s ontology (his being a realist or anti-realist) is up for debate. That terrifyingly various and copious scholar Michael Marder has written on this question: _The Event of the Thing: Derrida’s Post-Deconstructive Realism_ (https://utorontopress.com/9781442612655/the-event-of-the-thing/)
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Nothing to disagree with in the above; my only point was that there is perhaps a way to justify a scepticism that lives alongside a notion of “some pre-existing language-independent “reality””. This is not my view, but it likely is (even if not formulated and argued as such) the view of some “who view the UFO as an object of gnosis, an object of mystical, ineffable experience” without engaging in mystical/religious practices. Which is why Derrida may not really hit home with them (assuming that is, inter alia, what you were aiming at with this post), because they may already consider themselves sceptical enough, and view any attempt to “fold” language in on itself as uninteresting sophistry. So I’m not in disagreement with what you are saying, just trying to work out how some of these UFO “gnostics” (or agnostics for that matter) might interpret your argument.
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First, a skepticism with regards to what?
Second, when I write of those who grasp the UFO as an object of gnosis, I write of folks who very much _do_ view it in religious, spiritual, or even magical terms! There are _some_ (Jacques Vallée?) who might be touched by references to some “theses” of Derrida’s, but most would either shrug their shoulders or point to that reception of Derrida that sees him as a latter day traveller on the via negativa.
As to how my various readers with their various onto-spiritual investments might receive what I write, I have long ago accepted that “the text is fatherless”… Happily, there are some who twig with some posts and with whom I am lucky enough to converse…
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Hi Bryan – I was revisiting your comments re Vallee’s TRINITY and “Il n’y a rien en dehors du texte”, but I noticed that online discussions of Derrida’s meaning give the quotation as “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte”, using a metaphor about unnumbered pages in a manuscript and translating it as “there is no ‘outside-text’ “. Possible mistranslations aside, does this affect your use of the quotation? Thanks.
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Scott–I’ll have to check my wife’s copy of _De la Grammatologie_, but you’re probably correct that Derrida’s words are “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” rather than “Il n’y a rien en dehors du texte” and if so I’ll have to fix that!–The clause is question is in reference to Derrida’s reading of Rousseau in his _De la Grammatologie_; I don’t know what someone might mean relating it to “a metaphor about unnumbered pages in a manuscript”: see the quotation that begins this post.
I must wonder how I misquoted that important expression! At any rate, I wouldn’t say the misquotation affects the argument, no.
Good eye!
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Hi Bryan. I’m guessing through my weak French (eight years…) that the page metaphor might–or might not–help lead to insights about language mediation of ‘reality’. In my work studying alien abduction stories, identifiable linguistic slippages manipulate time, space, images, and personae. For example, it is hardly accidental that Barney Hill initially identified his ‘captors’ as “Irish Nazis”. It is likely that he had met them in the U.S. Army.
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Scott, as I wrote, I can’t for the life of my imagine why someone might invoke a metaphor about a manuscript with unnumbered pages. The expression occurs on p. 226 in the French original in the context of Derrida’s reading of Rousseau. Spinning the expression to matters of how language mediates reality is to spin it out of the orbit of Derrida’s early studies of and investments in phenomenology, however much such spin is part of the rececption of Derrida’s ouevre. Nevertheless, I’d be the first to endorse a study of “linguistic slippages” in alien abduction accounts!
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I must apologize, as I had misplaced your 7/23/2022 column, which discussed fully all your text distinctions. If I had to do my 2003 dissertation over again–and I probably should–that column breaks down the ontological issues better than I did at the time. I did recognize the text-object distinction by bracketing UFO ‘forensics’ to concentrate on narratives, and I separated the Storyteller and Narrator roles–and proposed the transmission model–to account for continuous changes.
Next we’ll attempt to undercut ‘strange’ narratives by seeing past (the illusion of?) a personal reality. We’ll see where that leads. Starting early next year.
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It sounds all very intriguing. It’d be good to read that column if you should be able to dig it up. Where was it published?
My own little foray here has its eye as much on certain parties obsessed with the object-in-itself and their failure to understand Derrida’ famous expression as the more general problematics of ufological phenomenology (I really gotta reread my Husserl, Heidegger, and likely Merleau Ponty!)…
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I have made a sandwich for lunch. I understand all that you have written. Or at least, I think I do. When I have performed all of the textualizations that you write about…it seems that there is, at best, only a hologram on my plate, and nothing to nourish my body or satisfy my gut.
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A strange take on the argument. I do not deny sensation or perception, only their _immediacy_. Following Heidegger, that you grasp the plate _as_ a plate, the ingredients of your sandwich _as_ ingredients (_as_ tomato, mayonnaise, etc,), the butter knife _as_ a butterknife, etc. is all indicative of the interpretive act that underwrites our pragmatic engagement with the world, an understanding sedimented in language, an engagement that itself is undewritten by a prior illumination (Lichtung) that reveals the world as this world. There is no idealism in my account or thesis…Ironically, it’s the empirical “realist” who would have nothing, nothing recognizable and therefore nothing perceivable, on their plate; they would suffer a kind of perceptual aphasia, where no percepts as percepts would be present.
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Does sensation or perception being non-immediate (an idea I have no problem with, in and of itself) lessen or even just change the experience of the thing? Even if you KNOW that your perceptions are once- (or more)- removed from the thing-in-itself, when I see a rose, I do not enjoy my perception as a perception-of-a-thing and then walk away telling myself how much I enjoyed having that lovely perception that I mediated to myself via interpretation, etc. I walk away enjoying the thing-in-itself, without which I would have had no opportunity to have the perception in the first place.
In other words, I do not make the experience all about me. Me. Me. Me. My perception (step 1). My interpretation of the perception (step 2). My pragmatic grounding of that interpretation (step 3) in language (step 4)…(which, in and of itself, is also something mediated to me…arguably much more so than the original perception of the rose). I grant to the object of my perception an ontological reality of its own which, even though I may not be able to know it 100%, I can, via my perceptions (mediated and partial though they are) understand much about.
So I ate a sandwich. Not my perception, interpretation, and linguistically grounded construction of some “thing” in front of me. But a sandwich. And when it is broken down into the parts that constitute its ontological character, those parts will have their own ontological status (which can also be perceived by another, with the same caveats about perception et al.) that will have nothing at all to do with me and how/whether/why I perceive them or not. They were at work before human beings knew anything about amino acids and carbohydrates and proteins. And those parts will be “perceived” and processed by a GI system that does not perceive, interpret and linguistically ground what it perceives…. And yet, it there is something there for it to process.
Deconstruction is demdna good to think with, up to a point. However, it is a perfect set-up for infinite regress, to my way of perceiving (little joke, there!). In the process of perceiving, and then perceiving at a finer level of abstraction, and then perceiving THAT at a finer level of abstraction…. it’s like falling down into a rabbit hole that has no end and, to boot, gives at best a mere passing nod to any kind of ontological status of anything other than me. Me. Me. And my perceptions, which are what constitute the whole world for me.
Or maybe I’m just one of those folks who don’t get it, after all?
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Now the conversation is getting very involved, and one wants to reply as directly and simply as possible, very difficult given the complexities of the matter.
You seem to take me to be maintaining a kind of solipsism, that all that can be said to be known are my sensations/perceptions (“me, me, me”). This is not my position. I am a historical materialist, an epistemic and ontological realist. At the same time, being familiar with the tradition that comes down from Kant through to phenomenology at the same time I deny the “natural standpoint” (Husserl) that posits a “ready made world,” a system (cosmos) of self-identical objects that precede and transcend consciousness and that _is absolute_ (I know this must prima facie seem contradictory). Consciousness, however necessary to take into account in concretely describing experience (!), is in a sense “empty”; however, without consciousness, human consciousness, finite and variously and abyssally determined (embodied, temporal and temporary (historical), cultured, etc.) there in such thing as “experience” and by extension no-thing experienced. (Sartre is very instructive on this point…).
Our conversation has come a long way from the discussion of the reception of texts–historical or more temporally immediate (UAP sighting reports or the accounts of “Experiencers”). Surely, in this regard there is “nothing outside the text,” in the sense of no getting around the linguistic constitution of a report or account let alone a temporally, culturally distant “myth”. Discussions concerning the conditions of experience (the transcendental standpoint) are surely more involved, as Kimberly Engels would be the first to affirm…
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True. I don’t mean to make you sound like something you don’t identify with. My bad. And I never meant to suggest by my “me, me, me” that I meant, specifically, “you, you, you.” I more meant “humanity, humanity, humanity.” As if we are the measure of all things.
I never studied Kant. Nor Sartre. And Lord help me no Derrida, the saints preserve us! But I am signed up for Kimberley’s Part II phenomenology course through SUAPS, so perhaps that will inform my thinking a bit?
I wonder, though, how our respective disciplinary bents shape how we are conceptualizing and talking about things. (I dare not inquire how our respective personal pasts might do so!) In specific, I was struck by this:
“At the same time, being familiar with the tradition that comes down from Kant through to phenomenology at the same time I deny the “natural standpoint” (Husserl) that posits a “ready made world,” a system (cosmos) of self-identical objects that precede and transcend consciousness and that _is absolute_ (I know this must prima facie seem contradictory). Consciousness, however necessary to take into account in concretely describing experience (!), is in a sense “empty”; however, without consciousness, human consciousness, finite and variously and abyssally determined (embodied, temporal and temporary (historical), cultured, etc.) there in such thing as “experience” and by extension no-thing experienced. (Sartre is very instructive on this point…).”
A ready-made world. Self-identical objects. Consciousness as empty. (Human consciousness, I presume?) I heartily subscribe to the idea of the social construction of reality (as we experience and understand it). The partiality of our knowing. The limitations of our perceptual apparatus, our cognitive categories, and our language…. But those ideas don’t seem to take me to the same place your ideas take you.
I feel like a Bob Larson cartoon. There’s this fat kid sitting in a classroom and he has raised his hand to get the teacher’s attention. He says, “Mrs. McKnight, can I go home? My brain is full.”
My taste buds have been sending unmistakable signals that they would enjoy having an experience of perceiving a 7-Up float. I think I’ll make my taste buds happy right now. I hope the rest of your weekend will be grand.
Brenda
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Just to let you know where I’m coming from: by vocation, I’m a poet, but a poet like Dante, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Hölderlin, all deeply invested in philosophy (especially the first and last). I was reading Sartre, Kierkegaard, and Wittgenstein in high school (not with much understanding, mind you) at the same time I was writing poetry under the instruction of John Newlove, one of our canonical poets. My undergraduate years were devoted to philosophy (my honours paper was on Wittgenstein’s private language argument) and my graduate studies to poetry, English literature, and literary theory (my university years spanned 1982-1990, the last years of the Theory Wars), where my Master’s thesis concerned the intersections of poetry and philosophy (if only my advisors were up on the Jena Romantics and the latest thinking…). I’ve been at work on a long poem about the UFO mythology since 1994 and I collaborated with the Religious Studies scholar Susan Palmer on a well-received paper on the Raelians for a conference here in 2000.
Now I have a joke for you about Daisetz Suzuki, the Zen teacher. He was at a party, where everyone wanted to talk to him about Zen and philosophical matters. At the end of the evening the host approached him and asked, “Dr Suzuki, how can you bear talking about abstruse philosophical matters all evening?” To which Suzuki, replied: “Ah! That’s what I like about metaphysics–nobody wins!”
I trust your float was a delight.
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Love the joke! LOL!
I was taken in by a fundamentalist religious cult at the age of 14. They taught faith healing, and given that I had (and still have) a morbid fear and mistrust of the medical profession and most especially those who practice it, that had great appeal for me. Of course, I’m speaking now with the benefit of hindsight. At the time, I hadn’t a clue about those motivations and the “why” behind them. That would take another 42 years to happen.
Though I graduated first in my rather sizable HS class and should have had counseling about further education…no one offered it. And I was so enamored of my little religious group that I didn’t seek it out because I knew what I wanted to do next: attend the non-accredited, fundamentalist Bible college the group ran. I wanted to study religion. Not just any religion, and not all religions, mind you. Just the “true” religion that I belonged to. <<insert eye-roll here>>
(Just FYI, if you’ve ever heard Danny Sheehan or Richard Dolan mention “Oscar”, an old man who gave a remarkable death-bed confession about UFOs and their occupants… Oscar [and apparently his boss in the army] was a member of the same fundamentalist religious cult that I belonged to. I know his daughter and son-in-law. Nobody [including Oscar’s family] knew about the experience that he wanted to get off his chest before he died.)
I learned a number of things in the religious college, but not what I had thought I’d learn. More like “life lessons” rather than any further religious education. One that seems to be generalizable is that those who predict an immanent worldwide apocalypse and base their lifestyles and actions around the expectation that this will occur in their lifetime usually have their literal expectations thwarted, but their beliefs come true in smaller but very profound and impactful ways they could not have anticipated.
I left the college after only 3 years (no degree, for what that would have been worth since the place was not accredited). Then did marriage. Motherhood. That whole thing. I don’t regret either one. But it’s hard to have a family (if you pay any kind of attention to it) and pursue a calling (or vocation) at the same time. I think Vallee has lived with that struggle. I entered upon my version of it at the age of 30. Long story short, parted ways with the fundie cult, divorced, and to my great surprise, decided I wanted to go back to school and get an accredited degree.
I tried hard to choose a major that would be “practical,” but that whole vocation/calling thing kept getting in the way of making a practical decision. I had a wonderful early Xn history/NT studies professor who opened up that one faith tradition to me in ways that I had been seeking for ages. Rotten Hebrew Bible professor, from whom I took only 1-2 classes. Ultimately chose religious studies, which meant I had to go all the way and get a Ph.D. Then became Mellon Fellow. Went to Duke University. Became an Episcopalian. (Now I’m just a Xn heretic. Another story.)
Let me interject here that if NT and early Xn history had been offered to me with the approach that you have absorbed and favored all your life, I’d probably be a low-level secretary somewhere today with a B.A. in something else, and if I had any ideas about UFOs, they would be even wilder and weirder than they are today. While I immediately understood and absorbed the whole “social construction of reality” thing, finding it very useful as a way to understand a lot of stuff, I have not been at all attracted to the “deep end” of the swimming hole that you paddle around and dive deep in. I’ll just stay in the kiddie pool end of the swimmin’ hole!
The man I went to Duke to study under sent me a letter 6 weeks before I was due to arrive in NC, telling me that he’d accepted a position elsewhere and wouldn’t be there when I arrived. So I got passed along to the only other person who could be my mentor in early Xn history. We were not a good fit. After I finished my prelims, I treated myself to some “fun” reading: Whitley Strieber’s *Communion*. Another long story short, I was able to ditch my “mentor” and go in a completely different direction, writing my dissertation on UFOs and alien abductions. Or, more appropriately stated, the UFO and alien abduction community.
I have a one-sentence riff in the book introduction on post-modernism and deconstruction and that whole scene. Then I drop it. Not my thing. That way of approaching all things had only begun to work its way into the fields of study I was interested in. I read some of it, but it held no interest for me.
The story of how I came to write that dissertation and its getting published is kinda curious. I had begun doing field work, becoming a part of my local UFO enthusiast community, much as an anthropologist might do. Met a woman there who said she’d been abducted by aliens and ever since then had been psychic — a not-uncommon afterefect of close contact. (Mary Beth Wrenn. She went on to become a professional psychic.) She read me, while we were all having supper together after the formal meeting. I thought she was nuts, because what she said was impossible. Things couldn’t happen the way she said they would. I’d investigated every possible “out” for the situation I was in, and there just wasn’t any. I figured she said what she did simply because she didn’t understand how the academic world worked. That night, when I got home, I wrote up the whole thing as a part of my field notes, filed it away, and forgot about it. Clearly just a part of the nutty side of the UFO world, right? Years continued to roll by. Got the Ph.D. and that all-important first book publication. Felt very lucky.
Five years or so after I’d finished the dissertation and the book was published, I was going through my UFO files and notes and ran across the notes I’d made about that first conversation with Mary Beth. I’d totally forgotten that it even happened. But everything she had said, had happened just as she said it would. I was stunned.
Now, it’s tempting to say that the reason her prediction came true was because I unconsciously manipulated things in order to make it happen. But that’s not so. By way of comparison: When I left my fundamentalist religious cult, it didn’t take me very long (a year, maybe?) to realize that I had worked HARD to put the local minister in a situation where he had no choice but to kick me out. (I was disfellowshipped AND marked! A double distinction of my badness!) I didn’t have the gumption to just walk out, so I unconsciously manipulated circumstances to make him kick me out, so I could leave without bearing the weight of guilt and uncertainty as to whether I was doing the right thing or not. If what I really wanted (in hindsight) was done TO me, then I wasn’t the one who made that decision to separate myself from “God’s one and only true, end-time Church.” I could assume the role of the innocent party. Again this is hindsight talking.
That’s not what happened years later when I was completing my Ph.D. Totally different set of circumstances. In order to change my situation with the inappropriate, ineffectual advisor in grad school, someone else at the university offered to help me make the necessary changes. They approached me about it; I didn’t approach them to ask for it. Had no idea they had any such power to help me make those changes. It certainly wasn’t advertised anywhere! Same with the book. Someone came to me at a conference where I’d presented preliminary research on the UFO stuff and expressed a strong interest in possibly publishing the full work. I sent the dissertation manuscript to them, when it was done, without making many changes. They unanimously accepted it for publication. Like I said. Lucky.
An academic career did not manifest for me, probably for a couple of reasons. It certainly didn’t help my job search to have written about UFOs, especially with David Jacobs giving his university agita, and John Mack having been called upon the carpet! I began working as a writer and editor, instead. I bought a house with 4.5 acres. Had multiple dogs. Got inflammatory breast cancer in 2009; close call; finally understood that I had a morbid fear of doctors…and why. Became a grandma. Cancer treatments destroyed my health. I retired on disability. No time, opportunity, or need to follow the UFO world. The only clue I had about the book was my royalty check, which usually was pretty darned modest.
It has come as a great surprise to me to learn that even all these years later, TLOTE is well-regarded. I was offered an opportunity to get re-involved with the UFO world about a year ago, which required some updating of my knowledge. I appear, now, to be in the process of destroying the good regard in which I and my work have heretofore been held, what with my wild hypotheses and all. (Ah, well. At least I’m being authentic and not trying to pose a lot.) Another deficit is my disinclination to, and indeed distaste for and doubtless inability to, write in the style that now seems to permeate much academic work. I have loved, LOVED getting back into the UFO scene. I’m humbled / honored / pleased / shocked that anyone wants to hear what I think.
I have been forced by these circumstances to think again, with more information and with more perspective, about the UFO “problem.” As has been the case from very early-on, my core orientation to life is a religious one. Including when I think about UFOs. But I no longer think (or feel or grok) religion in terms as limited as I did 40 years ago. Perhaps this is, in part, because the question of UFOs has forced me to push the boundaries of what constitutes “religion” further and further out. And the concept of deity. While the discipline of religious studies helped shape my ideas about religion, it’s only life experience that has shaped my ideas about deity. Of course, UFOs figure significantly in such ruminations.
And as for all the thinkers whose ideas I learned about, along the way, and who shaped my thoughts — both in terms of content and in terms of process — a few I remember in specific. Most I do not. Which of course is a further deficit in terms of how I present myself and my ideas. It’s not “the academic way” nowadays, for sure. Ah, well. I’m not an academic, anyway.
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Brenda, a lot there. Thanks for being so ready and forthright.
What catches my eye prima facie is your remark “if NT and early Xn history had been offered to [you] with the approach that [I] have absorbed and favored all [my] life, [you’d] probably be a low-level secretary somewhere…”–I was raised a post-Vatican II, suburban Roman Catholic, attending Catholic schools even the affiliated college I enrolled in in my undergraduate years, with a good dose of Liberation theology in high school (I was born and raised in Saskatchewan, “the only communist province in North America” according to _National Geographic_ in the 1970). I ceased practicing, mind you, at 19. Every Easter, however, I read through Dante’s Commedia…
I have heard of “Oscar”…
It’s funny how analogous in some regards are academic careers have been–‘career’ as in swerving wildly…
I’m sorry to hear about your cancer. I have Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia and underwent chemotherapy in 2016 and am only now back teaching full time eighteen months ago.
I might draw your attention to the post “Three ‘Occult’ Poems” at my poetry website, just to complement the view of a hard-headed PoMo paraphilosopher you may have developed of me. https://bryansentes.com/2024/05/05/crosspost-three-occult-poems/
If you’d like, it might be more tactful to move this more biographical conversation to email: bryan.sentes@sympatico.ca.
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BTW…as you can tell, one of my gifts is NOT brevity!
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