Alien3: A Postmodern Encounter with the Abject

LOUISE SPEED Aliens : A Postmodern Encounter with the Abject I. RIPLEY: You have no weapons, is that correct? morse: We got no entertainment centers, no climate control, no viewscreens , no surveillance, no freezers, no fuckin' ice cream, no guns, no rubbers, no women, all we got here is shit. Aiien3 IN his aggressive response to Lt. Ripley's question, Morse sums up the abject of postmodernity in his description of life on Planet Fiorina "Fury" 161, the scene of the action in Alien3. A wasteland of rotting technology at the "ass end of space," Fury 161 offers an apocalyptic view of life on the underside ofthe postmodern condition. "Postmodernity ," says Baudrillard, "is the attempt to reach a point where one can live with what is left. It is more a survival among the remnants than anything else" (qtd. Denzin 31 ). No screens, no videos, no images or spectacles, the planet is "what is left" after technology has left town and turned off the postmodern lights. Worse than this, as Morse continues down the list, the community of men on Fury 161 has no guns, no rubbers, and no women. Without phallic signification, without protection against the enemy, and without identity through sexual differentiation , all they've got is "shit." All they have is a postmodern encounter with the abject. Arizona Quarterly Volume 54, Number 1, Spring 1998 Copyrighr © 1998 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 I2ÓLouise Speed The terms "postmodern" and "abjection" are not readily associable: the former, an umbrella term for the huge diversity of discursive positions in the human sciences and social theoty as well as the visual, literary and architectural arts, and the latter, a specific term, in the currently intended sense, from psychoanalysis and literary analysis explored by Julia Kristeva. What unites the two terms is a premise that explores and questions borders, boundaries and ambiguities of all kinds: spatial, temporal, imagistic, corporeal, sexual, representational, political , and personal. The connection between postmodernity and abjection is useful at the very least in accounting for the destabilizing, if not apocalyptic, vocabulary so frequently used to describe the "postmodern condition"—terms such as delirium, schizophrenia, nightmarish, crisis, negation , imitation, nihilistic, anarchic, obscene. The connection also provides a useful tool for an analysis ofAlien^, which can be described by any or all of the dystopian terms listed, and which also demonstrates several key processes of abjection. Further, while horror films by their very nature engage with the abject for specific spectatotial purposes, Aiien3 subverts those criteria that are the raison d'être of the horror genre. This subversion results in incomplete processes ofabjection in terms ofspectatorship , and a film of disturbingly indeterminate genre. Generic ambiguity , in turn, may account for the film's failure at the box office but its simultaneous critical success.1 Underlying a great deal of the discussion of postmodernity are the poststructural investigations positing the delegitimation of Western metanarratives such as the humanist belief in "progress," the West's belief in the "truth" of its history, and its mastery over nature—or over other peoples for that matter. In particular, these investigations have pointed to a generalized failure in the symbolic order, or "the Law," exposing instabilities in traditional modes ofsignification. Primary among these has been the instability of the subject, a re-evaluation of the humanist "I" which, in the postmodern condition, has lost its coherence, becoming "split, fragmented, schizophrenic" (Kuhn 180). That these crises refer at their ideological roots to the phallic Order and the patriarchal "I" seems self-evident inasmuch as there is no other "Order" or "Law" or "Symbolic." Further, by all (poststructural) accounts, "the feminine" encodes their collapse: distintegration, failure as lack, the symbolic given over to the semiotic, and Otherness prevailing over a unified, subjective "I." As phallocentric metanarratives of domination Aíien3127 and hierarchy fail, a range of alternative positionings becomes manifest. Central among these are alternative gender roles and positions as the previously clear-cut (albeit mythic) divisions between male and female become blurred and break down. While debate continues over the uneasy relationship between postmodernism and feminism in theoretical discussions, it seems clear that a position that argues each as a discrete issue and...