A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

It is in this desire for dissolution—the centrifugal force that runs throughout the cases
discussed in the preceding chapters—that we find the utopian thread running through the gray’s
labyrinth, for the impulse behind this will to dissolve the subject is fundamentally utopian. But
unlike the Theseus of old, the way out is in. The movement is not toward the destruction of the
monster, but rather its embrace. For to move beyond the present order of things, to move toward
some future radically different from the present, requires the courage to imagine and then inhabit
a state of being that from our current perspective seems monstrous. This is Frederic Jameson’s
point when he asserts in The Seeds of Time that the utopian impulse is itself monstrous. 293
The
figure of the Alien looms large in the landscape of the “post-human.” In the context of the Cold
War, the alien functioned as exemplar of the soulless collapse of individuality associated with
the communist menace. The pod people of the Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and the much
later post-Cold War figure of Star Trek’s “’borg” instantiate the collapse of the individual and
the movement toward a broader shared identity. Notions of the sovereign subject and a free will
geared toward self-fulfillment and aggrandizement are utterly destroyed with the collapse of the
individual. Clearly, in the context of Cold-War discourse, this collapse is the bête noir of the
battle between “free-market capitalism” and communism. The ostensibly universal goods of
self-determination and free-will depend upon the fiction of the subject. In the absence of such a
fiction, those universal goods become impossible if not meaningless. I argue that it is this
subject, which according to the critique discussed above is the central barrier to the realization of
utopian potentialities and the key fetish in individualist understandings of freedom, which is the
target of abduction. In the broader logic of the abduction narrative, it is not so much a series of
individuals who are abducted as it is the very idea of the modern subject.
293 Frederic Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University, 1994).
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