Anthropocentrism and UFO Ignorance

Governmentality, Sovereignty, and the Exception

In thinking about the problem of rule, political scientists have traditionally focused on either individual agents or institutional structures, in both cases treating government as a given object. In contrast, Foucault’s concept of governmentality is focused on the “art of governing,” understood as the biopolitical “conduct of conduct” for a population of subjects s1Foucault, “Governmentality,” 11. . Thus, governmentality concerns the specific regime of practices through which the population is constituted and (self-)regularized. “Modern” governmentality marks a shift in discourses of rule away from the state’s sovereign power— its ability to take life and/or render it bare—and toward its fostering and regularizing of life in biopolitics. The object of government is no longer simply obedience to the king, but regulating the conditions of life for subjects. To this end biopolitics requires that the conditions of life of the population be made visible and assayed, and practical knowledge be made available to improve them. As a result, with modern governmentality we see the emergence of both panoptic surveillance and numerous specialized discourses—of education, political economy, demography, health, morality, and others—the effect of which is to make populations knowable and subject to the regularization that will make for the “happy life.”

A constitutive feature of modern governmentality is that its discourses are scientific, which means that science and the state are today deeply intermeshed. Through science the state makes its subjects and objects known, lending them a facticity that facilitates their regularization, and through the state science acquires institutional support and prestige. Despite this symbiosis, however, there is also an important epistemological difference between the two. Science seeks, but knows it can never fully achieve, “the” truth, defined as an apolitical, objective representation of the world. To this end it relies on norms and practices that produce an evolving, always potentially contested body of knowledge. The state, in contrast, seeks a regime of truth to which its population will reliably adhere. Standards for knowledge in that context privilege stability and normalization over the uncertain path of scientific truth. Although science and the state are allied in the modern UFO regime, we suggest in conclusion that this difference opens space for critical theory and resistance.

Modern governmentality directs attention away from sovereign power and toward the socially diffuse practices by which it is sustained. Yet as Agamben reminds us s2See also Foucault, Society Must Be Defended., sovereignty remains important, because every regime of governmentality has outsides, even while exceeding the capacity for regularization. This outside is both external, in the form of actors not subject to normalization, and internal, in the form of people’s capacity to do otherwise (hence their need to be “governed”). Ordinarily these limits do not severely threaten modern rule, but some exceed the capacity for regularization.

Schmitt calls such situations “states of exception”: “any severe economic or political disturbance requiring the application of extraordinary measures,” including abrogation of law by those who govern in its name s3Translator’s note in Schmitt, Political Theology, 5, footnote 1.. Extending and modifying Schmitt’s analysis, Agamben emphasizes a “zone of indistinction” between the juridical order and the state of exception, which is neither fully in nor outside the law. Thus, while sometimes con- stitutionally recognized, the state of exception is “not a special kind of law,” but necessarily transcends the law s4Agamben, State of Exception, 4. . In Sergei Prozorov’s terms, the state of exception is a “constitutive outside” or “excess” to law that is the latter’s condition of possibility s5Sergei Prozorov, “X/Xs: Toward a General Theory of the Exception,” Alternatives 30 (2005): 81-112.. As such, for Agamben (if not for Schmitt) a state of exception is always potentially there, even when not actually in force, permanently contaminating the law. On the other hand, the state of exception also belongs to the law, since it is by the latter’s limits and/or failure that it is known. States of exception cannot be declared willy-nilly, but must make sense within the regime of truth they would uphold. Thus, law and the exception are co-constitutive rather than mutually exclusive.

Sovereign is he who decides the exception s6Schmitt, Political Theology, 5.. Like the state of exception it decides, sovereignty is both outside and inside law. On the one hand, it is the ability to found and suspend a juridical order. To that extent sovereignty transcends the law, its decisions seeming to come out of nowhere, like a miracle s7Ibid.. In saying this Schmitt emphasizes sovereignty’s omnipotence, if not to realize its intentions then at least to decide them. However, even Schmitt recognizes that sovereign decision is not literally a miracle, but has conditions of possibility. Among Agamben’s contributions is in showing that those conditions include the very corpus of law that is to be suspended in the decision of the exception. In this way sovereignty is also inside and limited by law.

Anthropocentrism and the Undecidability of the UFO

If the limits of the governmental regime are exposed, the sovereign generally can be counted on to survey and to securitize the threat; that is after all what its sovereignty is for. In this light the UFO is the proverbial dog that didn’t bark, a potential threat not only un-securitized but never even properly surveyed. About the UFO, in short, there has been no decision as to its status as exception, only an ignoring. The reason, we argue, lies in the triple threat that the UFO poses to modern rule, at once physical, ontological, and metaphysical.

Exceptions presuppose an exterior. Because modern rule is grounded in a scientific worldview that does not recognize the existence of supernatural phenomena, this exterior is normally understood today in purely spatio- temporal terms s8Agamben, State of Exception.. Threats can then take two forms, physical threats to life and ontological threats to identity or social being s9On ontological security, see Jennifer Mitzen,“Ontological Security in World Politics,” European Journal of International Relations 12 (2006): 341-70.. Given sovereignty’s need to transform the contingency of decision into taken-for-granted authority, it is only by reference to the intrusion of such threats into its field of visibility that the state of exception can be justified. Importantly, the sovereign cannot decide the terms of its encounters with these intrusions, only their status as exception.

On one level the UFO is a traditional spatio-temporal threat, because one of the possibilities that we must countenance if we accept that the UFO is truly unidentified is that its occupants are ETs—and that threatens both the physical and ontological security of modern rule. The physical threat, of course, is that ET presence in “our” solar system would indicate a vastly superior technology to human beings’, raising the possibility of conquest and even extermination. (In this respect it matters greatly that They might be Here, rather than far away as in the SETI scenario.) The ontological threat is that even if the ETs were benign, their confirmed presence would create tremendous pressure for a unified human response, or world government. The sovereign identity of the modern state is partly constituted in and through its difference from other such states, which gives modern sovereignty its plural character. Any exteriority that required subsuming this difference into a global sovereignty would threaten what the modern state is, quite apart from the risk of physical destruction.

It might be argued that these spatio-temporal threats alone can explain the UFO taboo. On this view, by virtue of the possibility that UFOs are ETs, the UFO calls into question the state’s claim to protect its citizens, which it would be unwilling to admit. Because the threat is so grave, the only rational response is to ignore the UFO. States are enabled in this policy by the fact that UFOs do not (yet) interfere with the conditions of life of human populations, and as such have not compelled recognition.

However, at least two considerations militate against reducing the UFO threat to spatio-temporal terms. First, states show little reluctance to ignore other existential threats; if immigrants, pandemics, and terrorists are readily securitized, despite states’ inability to secure their populations from them, then why are not UFOs? Second, given that UFOs do not interfere with modern governance, and with no indication that states actually believe the ETH, the UFO would seem cynically to be an ideal securitization issue. Because it leaves physical traces it can be represented as if it were real, justifying the growth of state power, even as states know the threat is imaginary. To be sure states may have other worries—but then all the more reason to stage a UFO threat to bolster their capacities. Thus, Hollywood notwithstanding, in our view the threat of the UFO is not primarily alien invasion or the black helicopters of world government. Challenges to the “physics” of modern sovereignty are necessary conditions for the UFO taboo, but they are not sufficient.

The UFO threat is different in the challenge it poses to the metaphysics of modern sovereignty, which are fundamentally anthropocentric n1In ufology, this is known as the “ontological shock” argument; we prefer “metaphys- ical” to highlight the ways in which the UFO is presented within modern discourse as an almost supernatural phenomenon.. Because the contemporary capacity to command political loyalty and resources depends upon it, the assumption of anthropocentrism must be unquestioned if modern rule is to be sustained as a political project. As a condition of their own sovereignty, therefore, before modern states can deal with threats to their physical and ontological security, they must first secure this metaphysic.

How is this done? Sovereign decision is no help, since modern sovereignty can only instantiate an anthropocentric metaphysic, not step outside to decide the exception to it. So here modern sovereignty must give way to governmentality, or authoritative procedures to make anthropocentrism “known” as fact. In contrast to past processes of normalization in which the visions of shamans or seers were taken to be authoritative, the standards of knowledge in modern governmentality are primarily scientific. Thus, since there is no scientific evidence for miracles, it is known that God does not intervene in the material world. Similarly, since there is no evidence Nature has subjectivity, it is known not to. Anthropocentrism will be secure until scientific evidence to the contrary comes along.

An unknown that incorporates the possibility of ETs confounds this metaphysical certainty, creating a situation in which its status as exception cannot be decided. We develop this suggestion using Derrida’s concept of undecidability s10Jacques Derrida, “Plato’s Pharmacy,” in Dissemination, trans. B. Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 63-171., while arguing that the particular form undecidability takes in the UFO case disrupts its usual operation.

Something is undecidable when it does not conform to either polarity of a dichotomy, (for example, present/absent, cure/poison, and inside/outside), but is both at once s11Jack Reynolds,“Habituality and Undecidability: A Comparison of Merleau-Pontyand Derrida on the Decision,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10 (2002): 449-66, at 450.. Perhaps confusingly, undecidability does not mean a decision cannot be made, but that a decision on which side of the binary an undecidable belongs is compelled. Undecidability is a condition from which no course of action necessarily follows s12Aletta Norval, “Hegemony after Deconstruction: The Consequences of Undecidability,” Journal of Political Ideologies 9 (2004): 139-57, at 143, quoting Ernesto Laclau. , yet which requires a decision to resolve oscillation between dichotomous poles. The UFO is undecidable in this sense, and thus compels decision.

However, to “decide” an exception it would seem necessary for the sovereign first to acknowledge the existence of a disturbance in its field of visibility and try to determine what the disturbance is. “Decision,” in other words, suggests an effort to know potential threats rather than merely reenact the norm, if only to make better decisions—yet states have made no meaningful effort to know the UFO. Disturbances may be acknowledged, but then states have mostly abjured a scientific standpoint in favor of public relations on behalf of the established regime of truth, re-affirming that We already know what these (unidentified) objects are (not). The effect is to constitute the UFO as un-exceptional, but not by deciding s13Here there is a direct contrast with conspiracy theories, which assume that a decision has been made. If so, then this part of our argument is wrong, although one might then fairly ask why the decision was kept secret..

This suggests that we need to look more closely at the moment of transition from undecidability to the decision, or what Derrida calls the logic of the palisade s14 Ibid., 147., which in this case does not seem to be automatic. More specifically, we propose that the UFO compels a decision that, by the modern sovereign at least, cannot be made. The reason is the particular character of the UFO’s undecidability, at once potentially objective and subjective, each pole of which poses a metaphysical challenge to anthropocentric rule.

On the one hand, UFOs appear indeed to be objects, not necessarily in the narrow sense of something hard and tangible, but in the broader sense of natural processes that produce physical effects. The effects are subtle and elusive, which means that UFOs are not unambiguously objects, but radar anomalies and other physical traces suggest something objective is going on.

As unidentified object the UFO poses a threat of unknowability to science, upon which modern sovereignty depends. Of course, there are many things science does not know, like the cure for cancer, but its authority rests on the assumption that nothing in Nature is in principle unknowable. UFOs challenge modern science in two ways: (1) they appear random and unsystematic, making them difficult to grasp objectively; and (2) some appear to violate the laws of physics (like the 40g turns in the Belgian F-16 case). This does not mean that UFOs are in fact humanly unknowable, but they might be, and in that respect they haunt modern sovereignty with the possibility of epistemic failure. To see how this might be uniquely threatening it is useful to compare the UFO to three other cases of what might be seen as unknowability.

One is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle in quantum theory, which acknowledges inherent limits on the ability to know sub-atomic reality. Since the Uncertainty Principle has not stopped physicists from doing physics, this might seem to undermine our claim that potential unknowability precludes a decision on the UFO as object. Yet, there are known unknowns and unknown unknowns, and here the two cases differ. Quantum mechanics emerged in a highly structured context of extant theory and established experimental results, and is a systematic body of knowledge that enables physicists to manipulate reality with extraordinary precision. With quantum theory we know exactly what we cannot know, enabling it to be safely incorporated into modern science. The UFO, in contrast, emerges in a context free of extant theory and empirical research, and raises fundamental questions about the place of human beings in the universe. That we might never know what we cannot know about UFOs makes their potential objectivity more problematic for the modern project.

A different problem is presented by God, whose existence science also declaims ability to know. Once fiercely contested, the notion that God can be known only through faith not reason is today accepted by religious and secular authorities alike. Since God is not potentially a scientific object, science does not consider the question to be within its purview. Miracles are recognized by the Church, but the criteria by which they are made authoritative are not primarily scientific. UFOs, in contrast, leave unexplained physical traces and as such fall directly within the purview of modern science s15cf. Edward Berryman, “Taking Pictures of Jesus: Producing the Material Presence of a Divine Other,” Human Studies 28 (2006): 431-52.. It is one of the ironies of modern rule that it is far more acceptable today to affirm publicly one’s belief in God, for whose existence there is no scientific evidence, than UFOs, the existence of which—whatever they might be—is physically documented.

Perhaps the best analogue to the epistemic threat posed by UFO objectivity is extra-sensory perception or “psi.” Here we have a subtle and elusive phenomenon that might be objective, and which raises similar worries about unknowability for the modern episteme s16See Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne, “The PEAR Proposition,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 19 (2005): 195-245.. And here too we see tremendous resistance from the scientific community to taking it seriously. Nevertheless, and interestingly, psi research has been undertaken by states s17For purposes of espionage, by the United States and Soviet Union during the cold war; Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff, Mind-Reach (Charlottesville, VA: Hampton Roads, 2005)., suggesting that potential unknowability by itself does not preclude sovereign decision, if, were the phenomenon to become known, it could serve human purposes.

Indeed, were the UFO merely an object, it is hard to see that its potential unknowability would preclude a decision on its status as exception. Qua object, and only object, the UFO threatens neither the physical nor the ontological security of modern rule, which we have argued are necessary conditions for the metaphysical threat from UFOs to be realized (in this respect the UFO contrasts interestingly with the possibility of catastrophic asteroid impacts, which in fact has been recently constituted as a physical threat) s18Felicity Mellor, “Colliding Worlds: Asteroid Research and the Legitimization of War in Space,” Social Studies of Science 37 (2007): 499-531.. As with other anomalies there might be sociological resistance to seeing UFOs, but if science does its job properly, the resistance should break down and a serious effort to identify UFOs eventually undertaken.

Unlike some objects, however, the UFO might also have subjectivity (ETs). In itself non-human subjectivity need not be a problem for anthropocentric sovereignty. Although modernity is constituted by a general de-animation of Nature, debates about animal consciousness raise anew the possibility that subjectivity is not limited to humans s19Bernard Baars, “Subjective Experience is Probably Not Limited to Humans: The Evidence from Neurobiology and Behavior,” Consciousness and Cognition 14 (2005): 7-21.. However, while it may generate anxiety s20Raymond Corbey, The Metaphysics of Apes (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005). , animal subjectivity does not threaten modern rule either physically or ontologically. Superior intelligence enabled humans long ago to domesticate animals, ensuring that any subjectivity they might have will lie safely “beneath” human rule. By virtue of being in the solar system, in contrast, ETs might have vastly superior intelligence, literally “above” human rule, and thus be sovereign deciders in their own right. To our knowledge no ETs have shown themselves, which means the UFO is not unambiguously subjective (either), but the failure of science to justify ruling out the ETH leaves open the possibility, and that clearly does threaten anthropocentrism. As potential subject, then, the UFO radically relativizes modern sovereignty, disturbing its homologous character with the threat of unimagined heterogeneity, the sovereignty of the fully alien (non-human) Other.

In short, the UFO poses threats to modern rule on both poles of the object–subject dichotomy that constitutes its undecidability, making a decision in favor of one or the other intrinsically problematic. These threats are metaphysical in the sense of raising epistemological and ontological doubts about the whole anthropocentric idea of modern rule, not just its realizations in actually existing states—and it is the absolute taken-for- grantedness of that idea upon which the ability to mobilize modern power depends. From the standpoint of modern rule, therefore, the threat of the UFO is not unlike that of the Christian’s Second Coming, a potential mate- rialization of the metaphysical.

It is the triple threat of the UFO that explains states’ very different response to it compared to other disruptions of modern norms. By calling into question the very basis of the modern sovereign’s capacity to decide its status as exception, the UFO cannot be acknowledged as truly unidentified— which is to say potentially ET—without calling into question modern sovereignty itself. Thus, far from being a deus ex machina that, through the decision, intervenes miraculously to safeguard the norm, modern sovereignty is shown by the UFO to be itself a norm, of anthropocentrism—and behind this norm no further agency stands. In this way the UFO exhibits not the standard undecidability that compels a decision, but what might be called a “meta”-undecidability which precludes it. The UFO is both exceptional and not decidable as exception, and as a result with respect to it the modern sovereign is performatively insecure. The insecurity is not conscious, but operates at the deeper level of a taboo, in which certain possibilities are unthinkable because of their inherent danger. In this respect UFO skepticism is akin to denial in psychoanalysis: the sovereign represses the UFO out of fear of what it would reveal about itself s21Carl Jung, Flying Saucers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). This invites a Lacanian reading of the UFO as the Real.. There is therefore nothing for the sovereign to do but turn away its gaze from—to ignore, and hence be ignorant of—the UFO, making no decision at all. Just when needed most, on the palisades, the sovereign is nowhere to be found.

Governmentality and the UFO Taboo

To this point we have concentrated on the question of “why?” the UFO taboo, in response to which we have offered a structural answer about the logic of anthropocentric sovereignty. However, there is a separate question of “how?” the taboo is produced and reproduced, since structural necessity alone does not make it happen. It takes work—not the conscious work of a vast conspiracy seeking to suppress the truth about UFOs, but the work of countless undirected practices that in the modern world make the UFO “known” as not-ET. Bringing our argument full circle, this is the work of modern governmentality, upon which the normalization of the UFO is thrown back by the absent sovereign. Yet this work too is problematic, because modern governmentality usually proceeds by making objects visible so they can be known and regularized, which in the UFO case would be self-subverting. Thus, what are needed are techniques for making UFOs known without actually trying to find out what they are.

One might distinguish at least four such techniques: (1) authoritative representations, like the U.S. Air Force’s claim that UFOs are not a national security threat s22Dolan, UFOs and the National Security State, 193-203., the portrayal of ufology as pseudo-science, and the science fictionalization of UFOs in the media; (2) official inquiries, like the 1969 Condon Report, which have the appearance of being scientific but are essentially “show trials” systematically deformed by a priori rejection of the ETH s23The only nominally scientific study of UFOs in the United States was the politicized and methodologically flawed 1969 Condon Report; Edward Condon and Daniel Gillmor, eds., Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1969). For critiques of the Report see David Saunders and Roger Harkins, UFOs? Yes! Where the Condon Committee Went Wrong (New York: World Publishing, 1968); J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience (New York: Marlowe, 1972); James MacDonald, “Science in Default: Twenty-two Years of Inadequate UFO Investigations,” in UFOs—A Scientific Debate, ed. Carl Sagan and Thornton Page (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1972), 52-122; and Peter Sturrock, “An Analysis of the Condon Report on the Colorado UFO Project,” Journal of Scientific Exploration 1 (1987): 75-100. ; (3) official secrecy, which removes knowledge from the system s24Peter Galison, “Removing Knowledge,” Critical Inquiry 31 (2004): 229-43. On UFO secrecy, see especially Dolan, UFOs and the National Security State; and, for the official view, Gerald Haines, “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-1990,” Intelligence and National Security 14 (1999): 26-49; and Charles Ziegler, “UFOs and the US Intelligence Community,” National Security 14 (1999): 1-25. ; and finally (4) discipline in the Foucauldian sense, ranging from formal attacks on the “paranoid style” of UFO believers as a threat to modern rationality s25For introductions to this literature, see Dean, Aliens in America; and Jack Bratich, “Making Politics Reasonable: Conspiracism, Subjectification, and Governing Through Styles of Thought,” in Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality, ed. J. Bratich, J. Packer, and C. McCarthy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 67-100., to everyday dismissal of those who express public interest in UFOs, which generates a “spiral of silence” in which individuals engage in self-censorship instead s26 Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, The Spiral of Silence, 2nd ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993)..

Much could be said from a governmentality perspective about these techniques, which are amply documented in the ufological literature, but we lack the space to do so here. Instead, we have focused on explaining why all this anti-UFO work is necessary in the first place, which goes to the fundamental puzzle with which we began our argument: given the many reasons to study UFOs, why aren’t they taken seriously? To answer this question the specific techniques by which the UFO is normalized can be a distraction, since ignorance is multiply realizable at the micro-level. Notwithstanding the importance of governmentality to a critical theory of anthropocentric rule, it is to the performative insecurity of modern sovereignty that one must look first.