Tag: First Contact

Ground Zero of the Real: a note on “ontological shock”

Featured ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 2 Comments

In my most recent “Sightings” post, I remark Ed Simon’s “We’re About to Find Out What We Really Know About UFOs,” which repeats a well-worn thesis about “First Contact” between humankind and a (more) technologically-advanced, extraterrestrial civilization:

The moment of “first contact” between humans and extraterrestrials has been extensively imagined in science fiction and in entertainment (and, of course, among UFO enthusiasts who claim such events have already occurred). Central to the depiction of an auspicious meeting between two radically different cultures or species is the sense of mass disorientation, collective anxiety, and “ontological shock” (a term coined by philosopher and theologian Paul Tillich to describe what happens when one’s entire sense of reality is disrupted)….

This ontological shock would be different from mere discovery or invention; it’s not even synonymous with what the philosopher Thomas Kuhn called a “paradigm shift,” when scientific consensus is amended by some revolutionary new theory. Rather it’s an apocalypse—in the sense of the word’s original Greek meaning of “unveiling”—whereby the true nature of reality is radically altered. 

I noted the not-unproblematic, too-easy conflation at work in depictions “of an auspicious meeting between two radically different cultures or species,” a disjunction that calls for circumspection. “A meeting of two, radically-different cultures” describes well that between, e.g., Europeans and the indigenous peoples of what the former termed the “New World;” the science-fictional First Encounter scenario would be between two, radically-different species (however much the alien species might be imagined to possess a culture—and it would have to (however much the notion of “culture” here occludes the material formations of the society at the foundation of that alien species’ technological sophistication…)).

Simon’s too-easy conflation passes over the problem of mutual recognition I note in my previous post and elsewhere: one can as easily imagine that even if the alien Other is “technological” it may well fail to perceive Homo Sapiens as its alien Other. To say too much too quickly (though I have argued this point extensively), what underwrites the believability of the science-fictional, First Contact scenario, what makes it easy for us to entertain, is that the alien Other is a fun-house mirror-image of ourselves, and not even, strictly, of Homo Sapiens, but one, recent and far-from-global societal inflection of Homo Sapiens….

But what I want to probe here is the notion of “ontological shock” invoked by Simon and most others with regard to the First Contact scenario. First, I would recast if not update Tillich’s “ontological shock”. Philosopher Slavoj Žižek is instructive in this regard, in his work on the 9/11 attacks and related matters, Welcome to the Desert of the Real. There, he contrasts “everyday social [lower-case ‘r’] reality” with that “Real” that explodes our expectations concerning that “average everydayness”, such as the 9/11 attacks or Ernst Jünger’s experience as a storm trooper in the Great War of “face-to-face combat as the authentic intersubjective encounter.” In general, the irruption or intrusion of the Real recasts, redefines, and reconfigures what we had taken for normal or possible or “real”.

There is a small but growing bookshelf of works concerned with the sociocultural implications of the unquestioned discovery of extraterrestrial life, among them Steven J. Dick’s edited collections The Impact of Discovering Life beyond Earth and Astrobiology, Discovery, and Societal Impact, as well as Extraterrestrial Intelligence: Academic and Societal Implications edited by Andresen and Torres. That being said, one wonders just how much of an “ontological shock” such a real discovery or encounter would be, the putative Reality of such an event’s being, as noted above, merely (“mirrorly”) a distorted real. That is, the condition of possibility of our recognizing this Other as an Other is not its Otherness but its resemblance to ourselves. There is thus an ineluctable dialectic if not paradox in the very possibility of such an encounter: to encounter the alien is possible ony insofar as the alien is familiar or recognizable.

Moreover, the possible alienness of the Other is, at this point, somewhat worn and, imaginably if not arguably, blunted. The Eurocentric cultures have lived in a context of First Contact in their imaginary for millennia. The idea and problematic of the Plurality of Worlds is perennial, from Lucian’s A True Story (Second Century CE) to the astral travels of Swedenborg down to our own science fiction and the ubiquitious image of the Grey. Indeed, this thematic is so much part of the cultural air we breathe, ufologists have long suspected in the modern, post-1947 era, that such science-fictional material, especially the tele-cinematic, has been part of a program of slow Disclosure. More generally, nearly if not all cultures have stories about our cohabitating with nonhuman others. We need not take these stories literally, but, in light of the prevalence of this thematic, as History’s Ancient Aliens says, it’s not too far off the mark to admit that, in a very real sense (i.e., in our everyday reality…) “We have never been alone.” In light of the logic of First Contact (the Other’s needing to be recognizable) and the empirical fact that, at least in the Symbolic order, we have already undergone First Contact long ago, it seems not illegitimate to wonder how “Real” the news of First Contact would turn out to be. The recent film Don’t Look Up is instructive: if humankind is nonplussed about the very real, unprecedented threat of climate change to organized society if not human survival (in the most pessimistic scenarios), how much less would be the shock of learning “we are not alone”, an idea which has been in the air for as good as forever?

A recent, actual “ontological shock” was supplied by the theory of evolution, for which Homo Sapiens are only one species among others. Darwin’s work, preceded by the geological discoveries that suggested earth was much older than 6,000 years, deeply disrupted the real of Nineteenth Century societies, in a way which seems now remarkably forgotten, at least for the most part. The shockwaves, however, continue, in research into animal and plant intelligence and the consequent call for animal rights (from the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals founded in 1824 to the work of philosopher Peter Singer) and the granting of legal rights to rivers and lakes, for example. These developments in real interspecies relations constitute arguably an irruption of the Reality of other species into the real, wherein they are presently brutalized instrumentalized. It is no accident that this re-orientation is one from Eurocentric (Abrahamicapitalist) worldviews to values present in more traditional, indigenous ones, this latter too-often no less repressed, oppressed, and murderously abused than the Nature with which they were often identified (as, for example, in the doctrine of Terrus Nullius).

Despite the recent journalistic and governmental surge of interest in UAP and nonhuman intelligences, the UFO/UAP is possessed of a relevance to culture and society more profound than the cynical, deceptive ploys at work since, most notably, 2017. The very idea of these technologically-advanced, nonhuman intelligences, whether in the fevered comments, posts, and podcasts of the ufomaniacal or the more rational research protocols of the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, rises from the unconscious (ideology) of earth’s “advanced” societies. An analysis of these societies’ imaginary unmasks a narcissistic, self-serving (-preserving) idolatry that blinds their members to the possibility of a Real, progressively real encounter with those Other lives that have always lived with us, those species of life whose Reality we have perverted and domesticated into a comfortable, abusive reality.

Sightings: Saturday 29 July 2023

Featured ~ Bryan Sentes ~ 1 Comment

The one story that took up all the air in the room this past week was surely that of the U.S. National Security Subcommittee’s hearing on UAP. To anyone familiar with UFOs before the latest watershed moment of 2017 what was presented was of little interest (a “Nothing Burger” in the words of Luis Cayetano…). The ignorant (West and Greenstreet have some words on that….), believers, and world media, nevertheless, gobbled it up. Those a little more informed were less than impressed, Jason Colavito in his deliciously derisory manner, Mick West and Steven Greenstreet delving into what is left out of the story, and veteran Kevin Randle weighing in….

Some commentators have thought a bit more deeply, probing past the tiresome question of the factual truth of these latest, post-2017 UFO/UAP stories, taking into account their historical context and possible social function. Like myself, Caitlin Johnstone is unpersuaded, for example, that the “securitization” of the UAP in recent months is part of a ploy by the defence establishment to secure even more funding. As Johnson goes on to observe:

what really stinks about all this UFO stuff is the timing. Here we are in the early stages of a new cold war which features a race to militarize space, and we’re hearing congressional testimony about mysterious vehicles posing a threat to US airspace which have the ability to go up and down between earth and space very quickly. That smells off.

I mean, does it really sound like a coincidence that we’re seeing all these news stories about UFOs and aliens at the same time we’re seeing news stories about a race between the US and China and Russia to dominate space militarily?

Johnson remarks that the U.S. Space Force was inaugurated the same year that UAP reappeared on the radar of the journalistic, public consciousness, 2017. As Johnstone says,

it just seems mighty suspicious… how we’re being slowly paced into this UFO narrative (or UAP narrative for those hip to the current jargon) right when there’s a mad rush to get weapons into space. I can’t actually think of any other point in history when the timing of something like this would have looked more suspicious.

These suspicions prompt Johnstone to wonder “Are we being manipulated at mass scale about aliens and UFOs to help grease the wheels for the movement of war machinery into space?”

As much as I appreciate Johnstone’s more down-to-earth conjectures, I don’t find her case very compelling. The American drive to “Full-Spectrum Dominance” begins before the turn of the century, and its role in American defence strategy, spending, and development has been well-noted by those attending to such matters for as long. Moreover, given the very real and palpable security threats of China, among others, I find it unpersuasive that the best-funded military on earth need restort to propaganda invoking far-fetched stories of aliens, crashed flyings saucers, and their reverse-engineering to legitimate its weaponization of space. More persuasive are the points brought forward by Luke Harrington in the article linked above and remarked here last week. As West and Greenstreet observe about the hearings, no one involved was very well-informed on UFOs; here, the U.S. government, at least, failed to be “critically-thinking.” This absence of intellectual vigilance opens the doors to an “infiltration of pseudoscience and conspiracy theory into the halls of American government,” which “unscrupulous defense contractors could seize [as an] opportunity to pilfer the national security budget,” a much smaller-scale scam than the one Johnson proposes, and one for which Harrington provides a real-world example…

Unsurprisingly, the “Grusch Affair” with its claims concerning nonhuman entities prompts reflections on “First Contact.” A characteristic line-of-thinking is that such an encounter between humankind and an extraterrestrial civilization would be profoundly disrupting and potentially even catastrophic for human culture. Ed Simon trods this well-worn path:

As Sagan wrote in his 1985 novel Contact, an awareness of extraterrestrial life would serve to inculcate the “power of the planetary perspective.” It would, as Sagan told Studs Terkel in 1985, “de-provincialize” humanity. In other words, we’d experience ontological shock.

This ontological shock would be different from mere discovery or invention; it’s not even synonymous with what the philosopher Thomas Kuhn called a “paradigm shift,” when scientific consensus is amended by some revolutionary new theory. Rather it’s an apocalypse—in the sense of the word’s original Greek meaning of “unveiling”—whereby the true nature of reality is radically altered. In light of the reporting in the Debrief and the steps toward disclosure being taken in Washington, it’s reasonable to say we should prepare ourselves for the possibility of that very experience.

“That very experience”, happily, is one that has been increasingly scrutinized, not from the perspective of the STEMcentric cultures of the “advanced societies” of the “First World,” but from that of the colonized, an example being a recent article in The Conversation by scholars Shorter, TallBear, and Lempert. Here, Shorter et al. take to task the colonialist unconscious (ideology) at work in SETI, unmasking the biasses and prejudices underwriting its “scientifically-objective” thinking about listening for alien life and managing First Contact and its fallout.

Both stances, however, make a number of assumptions, determined by the analogy that governs their reflections. Aside from the whole matter of the very idea of a technologically-advanced, extraterrestrial civilization (…), there is the assumption that human beings and the alien Other would immediately recognize each other as their respective Others. Such mutual recognition was already not so simple in the encounter of Europeans with the inhabitants of Turtle Island. In anthropological hindsight, surely, each culture recognized the other as “human” if foreign; however, Symbolically, we know, at least from the European side, those they encountered were quickly dehumanized and instrumentalized, e.g., in Columbus’ gold mines in the West Indies.

But what warrant is there to assume an analogous mutual recognition in the case of interspecies contact? On the one hand, the case of interspecies relations on earth does not hold out much promise; on the other, the science-fictional assumption of SETI is that that recognition would be underwritten by both species’ possessing mutually-recognizable technology. This is to assume a lot about “technology”: would the aliens recognize our artifices as technology, especially once the idea of linear, technological “progress” has been demystified? Could we recognize theirs? My favourite example is the Star Trek movie, The Voyage Home, wherein Cetacean aliens come to earth to search for their whale-kind long since left in earth’s oceans, utterly oblivious to all Homo Sapiens so proudly (and vainly) believes to be the marks and wonders of its technology on and off the surface of the earth.

The contribution of the perspective of scholars such as that of Shorter, et al. is its serving as a site of critique for the entire instrumental, technoscientic foundation of SETI, ufology, much of science fiction, and the ideology of the “advanced” societies. In harmony with the work that goes on here, the value-free neutrality of STEM, especially in its material institutions, is called into question, along with the ideas of being more-or-less technologically-advanced and those of “intelligence” and even life. As I have argued here at length, the alien Other is in reality an unconscious and impoverished reflection of the human being, but no less revelatory for all that….