A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

eaching our innate potential. The humanist vision of progress was so convinced of the
inevitability of human perfection that even the seemingly impossible presence of ghosts and
spacemen didn’t trouble it. They merely constituted further evidence of the ever-expanding
range and capacity of human endeavor. Communication with the dead was the first step toward
conquering death and thus time, communion with beings from other planets a further step toward
conquering space.
The gray however is a different story. The figure and its connotations speak more to a
declensionist narrative than one of progress. The figure itself with its ashen pallor and its name
is suggestive of ill health, old age and thus death. Its resemblance to the human form is strictly
vestigial, consisting of the basic layout of its facial features (though with mouth and nose all but
gone) and bipedalism (though grays seem to float as much as walk). The operative narrative in
which the creatures have exhausted their bloodline and must draw upon human genetics to
survive further suggests a sense of withering demise. So, in that the gray stands in as a
projection of the future of the human, perhaps, like the writing in the sand at the close of
Foucault’s The Order of Things, it signals the end of the Human as we know it. 291
While this
would be disastrous from a Modern perspective, the Postmodern, or perhaps more accurately
Poststructural, perspective invites such an end as desirable.
The fundamental problem with the Human from the poststructuralist perspective is the
operative notions of the subject that reside within that construct. The impulse to problematize
the “subject” has been a key problem in philosophy for over a century. The bourgeois subject in
particular has come under extended scrutiny in a line of thought that extends from Nietzsche
through Bataille and into the more recent work of poststructuralist theory. The operative
291 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: an Archaeology of Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994).
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