A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

understanding is roughly that what we conceive of as the individual subject is largely the
accretion of social convention—a carapace of attitudes, beliefs, behaviors and practices that
originate “outside” the individual but are reproduced and lived by the individual in such a way
that the individual imagines the traits, behaviors etc. that follow from this internalization as
somehow originating from the self. In other words, what I think of as the “I” is in fact an
assemblage of intersecting external forces. All this talk of inside and outside is merely a
convenient metaphor in so far as the distinction collapses under the poststructuralist critique.
This basic conception is operative in such theoretical constructs as Foucault’s understanding of
the capillary nature of power and especially in his study of penality, as well as in Deleuze and
Guattari’s body without organs. 292
Both of these constructs function to radically bring into
question the notions of interiority so central to understandings of the stable subject. The basic
argument is that the subject as such is an enabling fiction—a fiction that underwrites status quo
property relations, modes of production and distributions of power. In short, the poststructuralist
critique isolates the subject as a linchpin in the system of late capitalism. It should be no surprise
then, that those who espouse such a critique would welcome the demise of the “Human.” The
goal of the poststructuralist critique is, in many ways, the dissolution of the subject (a goal,
which like the general philosophical critique of the subject, has precedents that run back to at
least the mid-nineteenth century—in this case, to the efforts of the English Romantics and the
French Symbolists). The gray exemplifies a certain shift in understandings of subjectivity that
emerged over the latter half of the twentieth century.
292 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995); Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983);
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987).
203