The Topic


A Meditation on the Identification of Legitimacy


Prologue


The following essay will seem a poor answer to the basic question of 'What is this painting about?'  For what you are about to read is very complex, and unlike the last essay, is written in a dry language that would most likely be classified as philosophical.  And I suppose that is true, for what is philosophy but an attempt to use language to pry open the closed doors of perception in order to awaken one to a greater reality?  With thousands of years of precedents, how are we to philosophize except by extremely complicated means.  So, this essay will seem detached, much more so than my last essay, where I spoke from a more personal, emotional perspective.  This work is an exploration of the exact opposite thing, the social or political perspective, and how that sociopolitical reality relates to certain marginalized forms of experience.  That is what this painting is about, and therefore, if you wish to enrich your viewing experience with some of the ideological motivations that gave birth to it, then you will have to enter into a form of language that it is intensely self-reflective and layered, and might leave you with more questions than answers.


Some of you, no doubt, will be accustomed to the rhythm of philosophical prose, and will understand the need for some preliminary suggestions for those who are not.  Such works challenge our expectations causing a particular kind of intellectual tension meant to arouse the reader's capacity for concentrating on the mechanics of language.  Once this is achieved, the collaborative synchronization of reader and author, an argument is presented and in the better philosophical works the argument will disturb an idea that the reader has taken for granted.  What we will be discussing in this essay is indicated by some of the more prominent symbols in the painting, and no doubt the reader will already have opinions about those symbols.  Here is the clue, the key I give you to understanding the ultimate aim of this essay, and therefore, the artist's intentions in the painting; that the nature of these symbols is unique because they point to mysteries.  These are a set of symbols that represent various forms of uncertainty and this makes them philosophically exciting.  Contradicting prejudices concerning these phenomena, that have direct political consequences, center upon many of these so-called 'marginal' experiences, and this makes robust philosophy or political science more difficult for those unique individuals unwilling to disregard them for the sake of systematic convenience.  The argument you will encounter makes no claims concerning the true nature of these symbols.  Rather, this is an essay about legitimacy in the largest sense, and how this concept relates to shared assumptions about our universe, and most importantly how all this equates to a political reality within which we experience our social lives.  It is the extremity of these symbols that make them philosophically valid to this end, for they point to areas where human beings seem willing to make judgments that fall outside the cold rationalism that we use to define the modern era.  Secrecy, history, political expression of power, science, and religion, how does one do philosophy, or art for that matter, without confronting these pillars of our 21st century life?  These divergent perspectives and the tensions caused by the relationships between them are seen in their most acute forms when discussing the symbols in the painting, and help us to understand why 'sensible' people are so quick to dismiss them.  Unidentified flying objects, nuclear weaponry, the space race, the great pyramids, division of labor and economic philosophies, gender politics, the concept of 'alien', miracles, ghosts, genetics, physics, classification of information and the secrecy of governments and the elite, all ideas that hold a particular position in our culture.  How might such things be related?  The aim of this essay is to argue that some relationship does exist, and that whatever its nature, it is an exciting and revolutionary way of engaging in the art of seeking truth.  Common sense tells us that behind all of these mysteries there is a material reality.  Why is it so difficult to gain access to this particular material picture?  And why does the attempt subject a person to a unique kind of ridicule?  Taken individually, most of these phenomena dissolve in the rationality of our mental environment, but in the connections between them we find interesting puzzles.


In many ways philosophers of our time are in a situation comparable to that of Darwin, who saw that relationships between geology, biology and time intersected in ways that revealed a new logical interpretation of his world, one however that undermined the governing principles of his society, and he struggled with sharing these ideas for that reason.  Thinkers willing to exercise what I call 'inclusive skepticism', that form of skepticism that does not dismiss reports of phenomena without due evidence, are coerced into simplicity by a culture of 'exclusive skepticism' that form of empirical awareness that disallows curiosity in those subjects where the scientific method fails to extend its field of vision.  Let me be clear, I am talking critically about a form of the scientific method simplified through institutional ubiquity, turned into a methodological version of science that expects consistent and reliable results and is driven by yield over insight.  Just as Darwin understood that his 'science' was challenging to the religious worldview, those of us interested in unveiling particular mysteries find ourselves at odds with a politicized form of applied technology, and are thus labeled as unscientific.  This has political and social implications for those interested in the relationship between power and the legitimization of information, and how that relates to claims made in contradiction of official reports of the state of nature.


Both the subjective/personal and objective/material aspects of this search combine to form what a friend of mine calls The Topic, and I owe all these ideas to him and his work.  The painting and essay are tributes to his passionate pursuit of a philosophy worthy of our time.  I hope that my meditation will aid him in building a language to navigate through this cloud of uncertainty and that it will leave you with the same unsettling curiosity that I now live with as a result of his unique way of seeing our social experience.


The Topic


Thesis:  There is an intersection of ideas whose geneses are so intrinsically essential to a basic understanding of the human condition that this network of relations acts as an embodiment of all that may be called philosophically or historically relevant in the 21st century.  This set of relationships is represented by the term The Topic.  Furthermore, the importance of this particular phenomenological structure is contraindicated by a set of social taboos that surround the borders of this neighborhood of ideas.  These bizarre social prejudices, with distinct versions of the idea of evidence, reveal a social bias that, due to its proximity to existential issues, equates to a surprising and paradoxical political relevancy.



How Work Relates to the Existential:


In order to understand how The Topic becomes relevant to political or philosophical thinkers, we must first clarify what is meant by existential, and how this term defines those institutions that human beings create to address their needs.


Human beings typically do work that is specialized and exchange that work for the products necessary for survival.  As our societies become more complex the level of specialization gets narrower and more distant from the primary means of that survival.  Also, the hyper-specialization distances the individual from the ultimate aims of civilization.  This constricting scope of influence makes more acute the innate existential awareness of human experience.  Under ideal conditions human beings are born to a struggle for understanding that can compel a fruitful search for personal meaning.  This is innate, and if that natural tension and the person's labor is explicitly linked then this leads to something we call culture.  But, if the meaning of our efforts becomes unknown or morally obscure this can add to the natural existential challenge the burden of terrifying powerlessness, and this is what human beings are usually referring to when they say the word slavery.


Political activity is the collaborative creative response to the existential call of existence, the means whereby the goals of society, represented by a logical division of labor, are constructed.  Political conflict is the expression of divergent responses to the human condition, as perceived by the political actor.  Such responses are always, due to the finite nature of man, value judgments based upon visions of preferable states of social order, and the projected means of achieving those goals.


To propose the means whereby we might collectively respond to whatever problem the political process is addressing, the political actor requires data that is dependable in order to adequately agree upon the basic description.  When we are asked as members of a democratic society to support those means most likely to secure our preferred outcomes, and we wish to make a case for our judgments, our rational calculations are only possible given an environment of foreclosure.  As threats to public welfare become more systematic we feel the need for informational fidelity more intensely.


To summarize, the democratic ideal, dependant as it is on rational exchange, can only be achieved as a result of a shared process of legitimizing information.  Secrecy and ambiguity always erode our ability to participate as rational creatures and makes inevitable the kind of emotional supplication to power that most people would publicly denounce.  The symbols in this painting reference a recent political history that addresses issues of cosmic importance in ways that are completely avoidant of the political process, and therefore are consequential to all our current social concerns, because they point to differences in scientific assumptions that are foundational to every field of intellectual study.


The relationship of ambiguous phenomena, secret military research, space exploration and how this relates to international political tensions and conflict is fascinating precisely because of the great pains that are taken to inculcate a near consensus that such relationships are inconsequential to intellectual life, when in fact, these relationships are the primary ends to which all our social means are directed.  Those of us with an interest in democracy, history, philosophy, sociology, economic theory, genetics, technology, etc.; those of us interested in building a worldview out of which political relevancy is possible are forced to make the following political choice.  One, we can choose to ignore the presence of marginal groups who claim to share in anomalous experiences, theories, or forms of social critique, and thereby make explicit our support of those institutions that govern our society, whether or not we believe we understand fully its motives.  Or, we can pursue answers to questions that are classified in a way that reveal a class relationship with knowledge, that is anything but democratic, and by so doing invite persecution from those who mean to ignore these symbols, and thus be labeled as radical.



The Argument


Why does the symbol of a flying saucer figure so prominently in this work?  There are two distinct ways to answer this question, and by so doing justify the use of this symbol as necessary to the present philosophical condition.


One, the flying saucer, or U.F.O., and how one interprets such a thing creates a strong social division that corresponds to how we relate to the scientific substrate of our culture and in various ways to religion, history and cosmology, and therefore it is uniquely suited to act as a nexus for a surprisingly high number of ideological connections.  Regardless of the material reality, the social presence of this symbol is real, and therefore one makes a choice when one constructs a sociological or historical worldview about how to interpret those who believe in extraterrestrial events, and those who do not.  And further, there is a long history of this divergence, and one is compelled to wonder how such things figure in the interpretations of sanctioned cosmological cultural activities like the space race, nuclear technology, genetics, and world power.


Two, the presence of a symbol such as this, with acknowledged uncertain origin creates a social dynamic that affects every class of people, and is thus politically interesting.  In a society that swings between two opposing forms of dogma, the material and the spiritual, the presence of this symbol points to a third variable in the equation of our worldview and therefore tends to threaten the security of our binary form of compromise.  In our exchanges, whether it is at church, the university, the press, or in any professional environment, this symbol is a taboo, of sorts, and being so, it is available for sociologically curious people to wonder about.



The New Polarities


By juxtaposing the flying saucer image with images of weaponry, pyramids, the human form, the alien face, atomic diagrams, etc. I am attempting to illustrate how addressing the presence of this symbol in our philosophical work is a means of seeing the encoded nature of the intellectual practice, seeing how our versions of history have within them political agendas that might be questionable, given we are fully conscious of how that relates to other public values.  History, as an intellectual pursuit, utilizes a rather politicized lens when addressing groups of people for whom such a way of seeing life was inconceivable, and further, subtracts from its interpretive logic that which was most poignant for the vast majority of its subjects, the miraculous.  As we enter into an age, where anybody with a layman's understanding of the current state of technology can easily extrapolate that we are on the cusp of radical changes to the state of human nature, we may be surprised to discover possible scientific breakthroughs that make retroactive interpretation more complex.


In other words, much of human history can be read in terms of the relationship between the terrestrial forms of knowledge and the extra-terrestrial forms of knowledge.  By taking these words and transforming them into a logical tool to separate things that are worldly or material from the cosmic or spiritual, we can add another dimension to our reading of history.  Gods, demons, miracles, divine visitations and revelations etc. can be understood as other-worldly or spiritual aspects of existence, and these are aspects of history that many assume are the result of primitive modes of thought.  It is possible this is right, but science only tells us that we cannot verify these aspects of history.  But nonetheless, most of the history we safeguard is deeply rooted in a tradition of the magical, the non-scientific.  This is problematic for historians who wish to reduce their study to its core, because the core of their subject is a place where the very laws they use to practice dissolve as they reach the event horizon.


Why is this important?  Well, most people utilize the principle of Occam's razor to interpret phenomena that are documented and accepted as outside the normal range of activities we might see in the sky.  Occam's razor is the idea that the simplest explanation is the best one to consider, and so, when people are confronted with strange lights in the sky that exhibit qualities incongruous with current technology, as in the case of the Phoenix Lights, phenomena that are witnessed and verified by large numbers of people, they often assume, and I sympathize with this perspective, that the lights represent secret military technology.  And this is what we will call the terrestrial mode of interpretation.


Given the totality of this exchange, the lights, the public experience, and the assumption of governmental involvement, we have everything we need to claim an event of high philosophical, ethical, sociological, and political value.  In fact, I say it would be hard to find something else so deeply tied up with all those issues of existential value out of which any meaningful philosophy can emerge.  Regardless of the actuality or truth of the events, the given facts point to a relationship with knowledge that is bound up in class dynamics, and more importantly, this obscurity is related to technology, and as such complicates our ability to engage confidently in any form of public debate, and therefore works in the same way as propaganda, whether accidentally or by design.


The new polarities for political radicals in the 21st century arise out of a desire to understand just such a political exchange, one where the public has an experience and requires a governmental form of scientific dogma to produce a shared interpretation.  One may choose to open up to the extra-terrestrial forms of history, and wonder about the true nature of miraculous documentation, because such written histories gave way to political realities that are undeniably powerful and are often revered as miracles in themselves; a view that is not lost on most intellectuals who love their objects of study.  Terrestrial materialism, however, will become harder for creatures who now take it for granted that they have members currently living in orbit, and this terrestrial materialism makes necessary the following question.  If the military has exercised experimental technology why would they do so to explicitly confuse the citizens, when it is obviously within their power to maintain secrecy?  This is the most provocative question I can pose for those who wish to dismiss The Topic.  The exercise of technology meant to arouse the mysterious and the organized political response is an area of study toward which only the bravest philosopher should move, because no other field promises such proximity to the highest levels of human power.



Speculation


The presence of mysteries today and in history drives inquiry.  The only difference in the character of these inquiries is the expectation of the physical range of possibilities to explain them.  In fact, a case can be made for the purely spiritual interpretation of reality, as the widest range of inquiry; that behind the mechanics of physical substance there is a type of intelligence that transcends its manifestation and therefore cannot be easily pointed to by sentences such as this.  Most of the fields of study, regardless of their theses, are struggling to maintain the clarity of boundaries within which they are practiced, and out of which their expressions perform an easily understood function.  Currently the pursuit of knowledge mirrors our social global landscape in that all the nations of study are beginning to experience mass migration across previously protected borders.  Biology, mathematics, genetics, robotics, statistics, political science, ethics, philosophy, spirituality, history, cultural anthropology, environmental studies, atomic physics, economic theory, the list goes on and on.  Every one of these fields overlaps some other field, usually many, and these translations of technique are the metaphorical equivalent of string theory, a complex multi-dimensional attempt to tie together all the divergent forces we use to explain the human condition.


Any proper unification of knowledge will, of necessity, have to address issues of the miraculous, the spiritual, and/or the extra-terrestrial, whether in regards to history, the exploration of the nature of consciousness, space, or the nature of matter.  These are the current frontiers of most scientific endeavors, and as such they have deep relationships with our economic choices.  In other words, developing intuitive hypotheses, the credibility of which relies upon a sharing of facts, is necessary for making democratic choices.  When science becomes a secret practice with questionable allegiances to political interests, any notion of informed public discourse is undermined.  It does not matter whether or not I believe U.F.O.s represent the visitation of alien life.  What matters is that regardless of the truth, that our social institutions are responsible for expressing our existential aspirations, and these anomalous social phenomena reveal a disjunction between the purpose of organizing human labor and the benefits therein.


The angst felt by many in the 21st century cannot be explained by the symbols I've used in this painting.  No, that is not the point.  The point is that human beings are quite capable of sacrifice when the benefits of that sacrifice are understood and when the wisdom of the organization of labor reflects shared human goals.  In fact, that is, in totality, the raison d'etre for culture, the means by which a society educates and transmits the present state of cosmology to its young, so that they may enter into political life with the tools necessary for the practical application of principles that provide progressive solutions for emerging problems.  The existence of multiple planes of scientific understanding is itself not rational, and can only be interpreted politically, that is painfully.  This painting is an attempt to point out phenomena where these ideas converge in a most ridiculous and marvelous way, so that one might see the philosophical opportunity it presents.


If such basic existential foundations, as the existence or non-existence of facts, are blurred by governments or corporations to achieve means that are themselves of unknown destination, then we must conclude that our democracy is an illusion, and that our process of self government will become increasingly aligned with the power of personality, and this alone could be a useful enough political motive for causing scientific confusion.  The growing knowledge about the complexity of the universe makes undeniable the profound range of possible explanations for such phenomena, and regardless of its origin, whether terrestrial or extra-terrestrial, whatever these events represent, it can certainly and unequivocally be called 'alien' to public discourse.  It is a means toward uncertain ends invading the public space.  Such things, for those of us seeking knowledge, reveal a hierarchy of disclosure, and this has profound political consequences.  For to maintain political legitimacy one must never submit to the idea that individuals can be sacrificed without consent to processes whose ends are unknown.



Summary



The painting and essay The Topic point to an area of interest understood as an intersection of technical processes that expose a relationship between political power and knowledge.  Nuclear arms and secret control of scientific investigation are palpable expressions of a kind of dogma to which there are various forms of blasphemy.  Conformity in a world driven by the manipulation of information requires us to intuitively grasp those areas of interest that are outside what our society deems legitimate, even though such phenomena might have, not only a factual reality, but point to discrepancies in the worldview out of which we collaboratively work.  In other words, in a society that represents itself as scientifically and rationally grounded citizens expect factual anomalies to be accounted for by the agencies tasked with securing our knowledge base.  Namely, universities, government and private entities engaged in science, are morally responsible to address phenomena that reveal disunity between government, defense and education.  And if these responsibilities are ignored, we are forced to conclude that our educational institutions are indoctrinating platforms for the subjugation of workers who fulfill the workload for a scientific engine trained on unknown goals and/or agendas.


This social reality contains a limitation on the freedom to engage in open-ended discussion in a way that is comparable to religious suppression.  Just as in the middle ages members of society had to create profound forms of mysticism to ameliorate the exploitation of spirituality, today we are called to find unique ways to expose the anti-scientific aspects of our mechanized world since, it is important to point out, the benefits of scientific discovery have material value and principles for how these goods are shared are not explicitly described by an ethical philosophy.


The presence of unidentified flying objects that point to technology beyond what is part of the public domain forces speculation.  If these phenomena are man made we have an ethical duty to seek their purpose, if only because of financial factors that currently call us to make decisions about sustainability.  If however, they are not terrestrial objects, the relationship between that fact and the historical dynamics of power and political agency becomes, as I have argued, the primary metaphysical and political concern for anybody who wishes to understand the human condition and how that relates to the timeless search for meaning in the universe.


The dividing line that separates two modes of relating to these phenomena point to political realities that are severe and therefore highly valuable as objects of philosophical knowledge.  In the end, an organized effort to confuse citizens, which would be the most minor material explanation, would alone transform historical analysis over at least the last 50 years.  I leave it to you to speculate and engage in discussing how we would view ourselves, our government, and our political or philosophical assumptions if the story were more complicated.