Story Views
Now:
Last Hour:
Last 24 Hours:
Total:

% of readers think this story is Fact. Add your two cents.

A commentary in the Times Literary Supplement[TLS] issue of October 21^st, 2016 about Postmodernism [Page 17 ff.] is relevant to the “history” of flying saucers and UFOs, under the rubric, ufology.

I won’t bore you with a lengthy post about postmodernism; no one I know is interested in the topic, but it’s pertinent to what ufology was and is.

Wikipedia on postmodernism: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism

The term postmodernism came to prominence with Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, published twenty-five years ago but still one of Duke University Press’s best-selling title. [TLS, Page 17]

(I insert that “best-selling” note to show some UFO quidnuncs that older-dated books are not to be dismissed as irrelevant, as they often imply here.)

“The term ‘postmodernism’ was first used by Jameson to identify an ironic playfulness expressed in different media … when the divide between high and low culture dissolved.” [ibid, Page 17]

Commentator Eric Bulson, in an interview with Jameson, was told that Jameson “would … substitute the term ‘postmodernity’ for ‘the postmodern’, precisely to reinforce … that it was ‘not a style but a historical period, one in which all kinds of things, from economics to politics, from the arts to technology, from daily life to international relations, had changed for good.” [ibid, Page 17]

My point, at the moment, is that ufology – the interest and study of UFOs – has remained static and marmorean since the late 1940s up to now, 2016, accenting that old saw “the more things change, the more they remain the same.”

Ufology is just as creepy, loopy, and fixated now as was way back when.

Nothing has changed. The “voices” are the same. The research is the same. The skepticism is the same. The ET fixation is the same.

This is why ufology, UFOs, and their addicts are shunned by the general public, media, and everything else that is postmodern.

Ufology is “old news.” It reeks of mold and has an antique odor about it.

Few newbies (millennials) are interested. Even the current self-serving effort(s) by former Blink-182 guitarist Tom DeLonge hasn’t raised UFOs or ufology to a spot in mainstream conversation, despite some items in wayward media outlets.

Ufology is “old-hat” – a topic for geezers and seekers of antiquated subject matter.

UFOs will not make a come-back in current societies as it is not postmodernity but a period of stasis from an era long past and no longer relevant in a postmodern world.

RR