A Genealogy of the Extraterrestrial in American Culture

"elsewhere." The figure of the gray and its paths of circulation are both reflective and
constitutive of a fundamental question: What does it mean to be human at a moment when the
human-technology interface is moving perceptibly toward a zero point in which the "natural" and
the "engineered" are indistinguishable? Part of the promise of the gray is the cultural opportunity
to fantasize about moving beyond the boundaries set by "humanity" as it is currently construed.
This opportunity is both welcomed and shunned in the context of emergent terrestrial
technologies (witness both the boosterism and suspicion around genetic mapping and new nanoand
biotechnologies). The alien functions as a repository and generator of cultural fears and
desires concerning the potential futures of humankind. Shifts over time in the ways the alien is
represented and shifts in the ways alien-human contact is structured and construed correlate with
changes in American culture's imagination of both its own future and the future of humanity
itself. In short, the gray functions as both condensation and elaboration of some of the deepest
fears and desires of the present cultural moment, and cultural responses to the gray constitute a
"trying on" of various potential modes of response to those fears and desires.
The ongoing erasure of the space between human and machine is only one example of a
broader contemporary tendency toward the collapse of key socio-cultural boundaries. Much of
what has been carried out under the banners of various "post" theories is centrally concerned
with this sense of collapse. This theoretical work positions itself both as a response to perceived
historical shifts (post-modernism and post-colonialism) and as a response to the sense that earlier
theoretical projects had reached a point of stasis (post-structuralism). All of this work proceeds
with the operative understanding that earlier conceptual models and modes of thought are
insufficiently keyed to the needs of the moment. For the purposes of the present work, none of
these earlier models are so problematic as the model of communication that depends on the ideal
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