Bringing Back Roswell

We witness a peculiar zealotry in the candidacy of Rick Santorum.  By ‘zealotry’,  I refer to the medieval dogmatism, the radical certitude, that seems to lie behind his assertions.  To be sure, they are archaic assertions—so pristinely archaic they suggest a technology of re-animation, an operation in which frozen Ice Age dogma is dug out of the tundra of extinct beliefs, its DNA extracted and re-animated, in much the same way that Japanese scientists hope to soon reanimate the extinct woolly mammoth.  

Certitude, at least in theory, and certainly within the operations of history, has passed into an extinction.  No event can be regarded as certain anymore.  The event is lost to us, or provoked to its illusory presence, by the very act of observing it.  And the semi-solid illusion of the event is haunted by the infinite question of what happens to the event when there is no observer.  Without an observer, according to quantum theory, the event recedes into a cloud of probability, this cloud being a space of non-events, a probabilistic continuum of unrealized possibility.

The event of war: “The gulf war did not take place.” (Baudrillard)

The event of the self:  The author of the text is no more.  The subject is no more.

The event of the deity:  God once lived.  But now he is dead.

The irony of fossilized certitude is itself an old story.  To our surprise the enigma of our existence did not depend on certitude, any more than it depended on reality, a twin concept that is now also departed.  Our existence is even lighter, and less consequential, if that is possible, than it was before the banishment of certainty and solidity, yet we continue to exist, as if subjects in an experimental condition of near weightlessness.

Indeed, we might regard the entire apparatus of global modernity as a diabolical anti-gravity machine.  Our work is weightless, our wealth is weightless.  Only our bodies retain a semblance of residual weight in their functions of mortality—and already we dream of divesting ourselves of them, to enter, or inflict upon ourselves, an even more radical experimental condition.  A machine-based incorporeal intelligence configured from a network of uploaded souls.

The Persian mystic Rumi often prayed to be relieved of his individual consciousness, which he regarded as wayward and tormenting and of minuscule importance.  Perhaps global weightlessness can be regarded as the achievement of this dream, as if to make all of us a type of whirling dervish, spinning electromagnetically like little motors as the global network inflicts its charge.

But modernity holds this paradox—while it demands the disappearance of history and meaning, it simultaneously enacts a project to resuscitate everything that is lost: wooly mammoths, ancient pollen and bacteria, the alien creature murdered and dissected at Roswell, even ghosts of the dead are pursued with pseudoscientific instruments in the hope of verifying their presence and speaking with them of their secrets.

The mark of any cultural superego function is its schizoid nature: Everything must disappear!  Everything must be recovered!  The mark of the superego is the impossibility of its demands.