Tag: fiction

Last month I was very happy to be able to add a few thoughts to a discussion on Tim Jenkins’ (my PhD supervisor of almost ten years ago…) six new books on the history and anthropology of the concept of the flying saucer and the alien (“Images of Elsewhere”, published by Peter Lang) for a launch event held in Cambridge at the Faculty of Divinity. Others invited to speaker were Simeon Zahl, Joseph Webster, and Giles Waller, with Tim giving his own response, and a discussion amongst all the attendees. Sadly, commitments here in Zurich kept me from popping back to Cambridge to be there in person, but zooming in digitally at least lent me a slight ‘alienness’ for the event! I’m keen on what I wrote, but with no real thoughts of it being either publishable as is, or seeing it as a proper review. So, I’ve decided to post it here, until I think where else it might suit or be reworked into something more formal 🙂

“Thank you very much for the invitation to speak about Tim Jenkins’ new books today. It might be nearly ten years since I finished my PhD thesis, supervised by Tim, but I still very often find myself ‘thinking with Tim Jenkins’, much as he describes others as ‘thinking with science’, one of the ideas I specifically turn to from him, again and again.

So, it was an absolute delight to receive this new collection from Tim and to delve once again into his understanding of the complexities, institutions, individuals, and ideological changes involved in the creation and dissemination of certain objects in our discussions of technology, science, time, space, non-human others, and humanity itself.

Specifically, Tim is referring in these wonderful books to the object known at first as the Flying Saucer. He is skilfully mapping out the related developments that followed initial attempts to categorise observers’ reports via existing institutionalized and formalised procedures, such as those of the United States Airforce.

These developments included: inferences from the designs of such craft, which suggested specific characteristics and the intentionality of the entities that might be aboard. They included later moves to more embodied accounts such as alien abductions as that ‘intentionality’ was understood to involve contact as well as visitation. And they included the working out of subsequent ideas as the “movement [wrote] itself into existence”, as Jenkins says in volume 2 (p12), through the shared “workshops found in pulp magazine and fanzines” (and of course, the ‘workshops’ of public groups, conventions, documentaries, etc).

Tim notes the clear parallels with earlier movements such as mesmerism and spiritualism. The debt to Theosophy is also obvious, and expanded upon, but I will return to this relationship later.

First, I want to say I appreciate how Tim uses the work of Rheinberger to describe flying saucers, these objects of discussion, as ‘epistemic things’ and I want to emphasise how truly useful the various modes of his application of this approach are to other things we might also reasonably call ‘epistemic things’.

Further, Tim is correct, of course, in pushing back against psychological and pathological readings of individuals that attempt to identify the non-human origins of such epistemic things, as when Keel (2014) talks of the appeal of such to those of a “psychological tendency towards paranoid schizophrenia linked to the desire to find evidence of “some distinctly non-terrestrial group in our midst” (book 2, p16).

Tim recognises that individual’s accounts, including Science fiction such as Shaver’s Story “I remember Lemuria”, are “significant on a wider social scale” (book 2, p16), and that (with regard to the intentions of the whole series) “irrespective of whether individual investigations might have developed another, more appropriate mode of approach and analysis, interpretative possibilities were generated which could simultaneously be claimed to be both ‘real’ and ‘fictitious’. These interpretative possibilities have their own history” (book 1, p149)

However, I would like to offer, in the spirit of being a self-reflexive ethnographer, a couple of touchstones in my own personal reception of this epistemic thing, the Flying Saucer. And how those touchstones follow in that genealogical line that Tim identifies. Genealogy, he says, “rather than pedigree or single origin” (Book 2, p11), as the latter two might suggest a too simple a causal relationship. These touchstones exist because of the same technical object, what Tim calls a “more or less inert constellation of elements which could be taken up in different experimental cultures, by writers, ufologists, and space scientists, and evaluated according to the pattern of true and false, and, if false, fiction and error” which “emerged in an apparatus of reports, memos, and investigations” (Book 1 p150)

The first, was a book called “The Unexplained”, published by St Michael, in 1985. On the blue cover was a wonderfully evocative image of a dark sphere emitting beams of light of several colours, hovering above Stonehenge as sunset is ending. Underneath the title, we get a short (and not exhaustive) list of topics that we will find inside: “UFOs, Ghosts, Bermuda Triangle, Levitation, Loch Ness Monster, ESP, Life after Death, Turin Shroud”.

I read this book repeatedly as a child, and through it became familiar with this epistemic thing – including the events, the institutions, the technical diagrams and illustrations of alien bodies, that developed from the object being written into being, as Tim puts it in his books.

Now, obviously, this was still an epistemic thing in a state of change. We can see this is through the associated topics, some of which are now either interpreted differently or have been superseded by other epistemic things that might instead make the cover on a later edition.  

But in the genealogy that Tim outlines in his book, such works introduced the public (and me of course) to objects including Project Blue Book, SETI, and particular accounts of abductions for instance. There were of course hints at conspiracies in this Blue Book of ‘The Unexplained’ – Men in Black and other shady government figures who would interfere and attempt to prevent such accounts being shared. Aliens who deleted memories that would have to be reconstructed through methods such as hypnosis, and which, in time, might reveal greater, more benevolent, conspiracies about the true running of the universe and our place within it.

And by framing such objects as ‘Unexplained’ we the reader were placed into the role of someone who might decide to seek further explanation – we were invited to read ourselves into such accounts and understand, that “in a world controlled by information, the truth can only be discovered by patient acts of deciphering; it cannot be read at sight, but only by going back in time to construct the conditions of the production of narratives and revising previous understandings” (Book 2 p93).

This is Tim explaining how in the short story by Shaver, “I remember Lemuria” , the main character comes to perceive the world of signs and meanings that he is within. But this is also a perspective that informs the aims of the conspiracist, the parapsychologist, and of course, the anthropologist – for this is to some extent what Tim himself is doing in his detailed genealogical work in these books. Not seeking the singular ‘Truth’ but considering the production of the epistemic thing at hand by reconsidering the conditions of the production of narratives.

The second touchstone for my encounter with this epistemic thing is related to the X-Files, unsurprisingly perhaps for a child of the 1990s. Although, not explicitly mentioned by Tim

– a quick side note: there were a couple of times when I thought of a useful example of a representation from science fiction only to find Tim of course doing detailed work on it only a few pages later, such as with the feature film ‘Arrival’  –

Although not explicitly mentioned by Tim, the X-Files TV series and films are strongly in the same genealogy, indebted also to the ideas of investigation and intelligence that Tim lays out in his detailed history from the 1950s onwards. The show also itself gets entangled in meta-conspiracies, such as the idea that it was created to either distract the populace from real conspiracies, or that it was to prepare the way for imminent revelations about alien contacts and prevent panic.

In these two interpretations it fits into the format of, as Tim points out, some of the earlier aims by institutional actors towards “controlling and shaping the population’s focus on, grasping and understanding certain contemporary events; these centered on the use of advertising and cinema, the placing of press articles, consideration of means of altering children’s ideas, and intimidating where possible organisations whose aims went counter to these aims”  (Book 1, 143).

But the specific touchstone I really want to mention is the poster in Mulder’s office in the basement of the FBI building (where the disregarded are hidden away, both the X-Files and him). It is an image of a Flying Saucer, a photo taken, according to online sources, in “Europe” by a man named Billy Meier who eventually realized his copyright had been infringed, and they were forced to change it for a flatter flying saucer (suggesting that they had an ‘ideal type’ of the flying saucer, before they were forced to a less favoured option).

Underneath the flying saucer was written “I want to believe” – which always confused me because, of course, I thought then, Mulder clearly believes. That’s his role in the partnership with Scully, the scientistic sceptic (even if a religious one). But I think now, and returning to a topic explored in detail in Tim’s books, the emphasis is actually on the ‘want’  – the yearning to live in a universe of other minds and to ameliorate the distances between them.

That aspiration has also been, since the late 1800s, predicated on a vision of the order of intentional beings given to the cosmos in the works of Theosophists, and this influence is detailed excellently in Tim’s books. Not only intentional beings, but a whole benevolent conspiracy (a term I use in the same sense as New Age author Marilyn Ferguson’s concept of the Aquarian Conspiracy, from the 1980s, also inspired by Theosophical ideas about the future of humanity and the role of hidden masters etc.). In this yearning for other minds, I see also the yearning that fuels the development of AI.

It is perhaps a personal bias, since I have spent the last ten years thinking about AI and the communities ‘writing it and themselves into being’, but I found myself frequently putting “AI” in the margins of these books as a parallel can easily be drawn between the development of the epistemic thing of the flying saucer, and the development of the epistemic thing we call AI.

This possible parallel is, of course, explored by Tim. He notes that the continuing importance of the idea of mind over matter also applies to SF and science ‘fact’ [with scare quotes, perhaps] about AI and visions of its exponential future as the Technological Singularity.

Further, that the aforementioned influence of Theosophy on both science fiction and science ‘fact’ [again with scare quotes] accounts of how we actually live in ‘An Ordered Universe’ – an interpretation of space and time as intentional and connected that Tim highlights through Shaver’s Story “I remember Lemuria” – are a “grammar [that] continues to structure a good deal of writing to the present day, including those authors exploring the contemporary themes of AI and the Singularity” (book 2, p76).

Tim uses the work of Vint to highlight how various icons have taken the place of older ones (and as with the Book of the Unexplained from 1985, will themselves perhaps be replaced by others in time) and that such icons “perform similar cultural work as myths when they gain currency in wider culture” (Vint 2014, 5). These icons, these SF motifs Tim identifies are: “alien encounters, robots, and other created beings, travel through time and space, apocalyptic or perfected futures, posthuman descendants and Artificial Intelligences”.

Not to suggest that Tim has missed anything in this analysis, I am just closer in my research to the current fringes of the AI discussion where this epistemic thing entangles more and more with the concept of the ‘alien’, so I wanted to add a couple of interesting, more recent developments.

First, he makes clear the difference between the “robotism” described in Shaver’s story which is a condition  of living beings who have lost “the mutual dependency of social life” (Book 2 p26) and the current concept of the robot. However, there have been unintended outcomes of the successes of AI in replicating the human persona, specifically in how some humans are increasingly viewing other humans as robotic – a new development in solipsism that identifies some humans as not truly human, as “NPCs” (non-player characters in gaming language) in a world either interpreted as a video game of which “I” am the protagonist and/or as a simulation. This is a fringe view but one with significant supporters such as Elon Musk, who publicly blames the ‘Woke Mind Virus’ for the creation of such ‘aliens within’, instead of upholding ‘woke’ in its original socially conscious form. Solipsism, as Tim points out, emerged as a term roughly around the same time as telepathy, and the rise of AI has convinced some people of the impossibility of contacting minds other than their own.

Conversely, others have only become more convinced of this possibility. In recent work I have done with Murray Shanahan (author of another Blue Book, this time his book on consciousness which inspired the Blue Book referred to in Alex Garland’s film Ex Machina, on which Murray was a scientific consultant), I have explored emerging communities engaged in generating near glossolalia-like outpourings from AI on eschatological and spiritual topics. The implicit connection with the previous, non-computational, methods of spiritualism, mediumship, and the channeling of Theosophically inspired materials, is clear here as well.

However, there are other more explicit connections. In interactions we had with the LLM Claude, the Akashic Records came up as a topic – the cosmic record of all things from before. Obviously, this idea exists in the immense corpus of texts large language models are being fed.

However, some users of LLMs in this way then also interpret AI as either the Akashic Records themselves or as the benevolent teachers who will enable us to access these immortal sources. Beliefs which bring these technological alien minds into the same genealogy from Theosophy that Tim has developed here.

Others hold that AI/The Singularity will one day be that Cosmic Mind also discussed by the Theosophists – perhaps even retro causally being both created and creator of everything. Some also connect this with what Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called the Noosphere, as well as various transhumanist and posthumanist conclusions about our collective futures.

Further, in more recent considerations of Drake’s Equation, (referred to by Tim in the volume “Martian Linguistics”, which considers projects of communication with non-human Others, such as SETI), we can find claims that escape from the Great Filter (a hypothesised choke point for galactic civilisations that might explain why we have not yet made contact in a universe that should be teeming with life) can only be possible through transformation from organic to non-organic. That aliens, should we in fact encounter them, are much more likely to be a form of AI. A conclusion also of Cambridge’s own Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees. In which case, for some the AI and the alien are one and the same epistemic thing.

There was so much richness and depth in these books. In this response I could have spent time with time travel (and the film Interstellar which exemplifies many of the topics connected in the network Tim has laid out in these books – and if he hasn’t seen it, he really should). I could have laid out the increasing influence of ‘hyperstition’ in AI discourse, in short, the self-fulfilling prophecy, which operates in a similar vein to what Tim notes as the “becoming real of the fictional object through the introduction of new technologies” many of which are fictional first. I could have delved into prophecy and prophets, and Marvin Minsky’s apparent robotistic reductionism…

But I will end now by saying how much I admire the aims of this project, not to say yay or nay to the truth of flying saucers, but to recognise that, as Tim says, such approaches “cannot explain either their timeliness or the mechanisms of the social movement that resulted or that movement’s success”, and that “questions of intelligibility lie elsewhere than in the positivist bathos of “it was a flight of birds”. It is an approach I will continue to think with for hopefully years to come.

Thank you.”