The Monstrosity of Materialism in the Alien Film Series
Abstract: In the Alien Film Series, the cosmos is dominated by the personification Materialism in the interstellar corporation. Materialism understands matter to be both intrinsically self-enclosed and extrinsically other-caused. This dual relation results in the paradox of Materialism, in which matter is both enclosed within itself and caused by what is other than itself. The paradox of Materialism is concretely embodied in the alien monster, which is the monstrosity of Materialism. The greatest of all monsters is that which profanes the sacred order of the cosmos by threatening to disintegrate its absolute self-identity. The disclosure of the monstrosity of Materialism causes consciousness to become alienated from and opposed to itself. The violent battle with the alien is thus a spiritual conflict for the absolute identity of self-conscious mind. The alien terrifies audiences because it threatens to negate, falsify, and annul this idea of an essential identity between man and God.
Self-Alienated Horror
In Ridley Scotts 1979 film Alien, the crew of the commercial salvage ship the Nostromo is directed by the Weyland Corporation to investigate a distress signal on an uninhabited world whereupon they discover a mysterious derelict craft of extraterrestrial origin. The cargo chamber of the wreckage contains thousands of mysterious leathery eggs. Each egg appears to hatch a spidery-limbed "face-hugger" that envelopes human faces, penetrates their oral cavities, and implants an alien zygote which, after a brief period of natal gestation, violently bursts forth from within the bodies of their unwilling hosts. The infant alien which emerges from within a human host rapidly matures into a murderous beast which indiscriminately assails, assimilates, and annihilates all advanced living organisms within its surrounding biosphere.
In David Fincher's 1992 film Alien, the alien is smuggled by the survivors of the events of Aliens aboard an escape pod to crash-land upon on the isolated penal colony Fiorina 161. The meteoric arrival of the alien within their midst leads them, in faith and ignorance, to understand the beast as an omen of the forthcoming apocalypse. Through the collective activity of the alien hive, the alien monstrosity assumes the overriding purpose to exponentially expand to contaminate, corrupt, and consume all life in an endless entropy of self-annihilation.
The alien monster assimilates the appearance of man without his essential reason: it shares a human figure yet expresses neither pity nor remorse. In the alien man's physiology and technology become indiscriminately conjoined. The alien appears as a vicarious embodiment of the technical constructed-ness of human nature. Through this indissoluble fusion of mans naturality and artificiality, the violent exterior battle with the alien dramatizes an interior conflict over the essential nature of man between the opposed notions of necessarily inherited naturality with contingently produced artificiality. Yet the conclusion of the Alien film series appears to leave this conflict unresolved in a dramatic aporia. Neither the nature of man, nor the alien, nor even the relation of man and alien are conclusively elucidated. The alien thus haunts our essential self-understanding as a monstrous living paradox that symbolically dismembers the integral coherency of life, nature, and the human spirit.
"The Titan Prometheus wanted to give man equal footing with the gods. For this purpose he was cast out of Olympus. Well, my friends, the time has finally come for his return."
The expedition of the eponymously named space-ship Prometheus embodies this same mythic quest to wrest forbidden knowledge from what is absolutely other-than mankind. The events which transpire prior to human history have important consequences for the relationship between man and aliens, as the seeding of the Earth by the Engineers announces a wholly new relation between this alien race of supermen and man that, once discovered, transforms our collective idea of human nature, the essence of life on Earth, and the ultimate purpose of human life.
In our space-faring future, we discover a sub-human alien contagion that attaches to a human host, assimilates the essence of man, and is birthed with the cancerous potential to destroy all life. In the pre-historical past, the natures of man and alien have been designed by the superhuman Engineers. The continuity and coherence of human nature is thus doubly threatened by negation at both its original beginning and its final end: the essence of man is designed as a monstrous material artifact, just as man's future purpose is consumed by material monsters. The beginning and end of man is thus altogether enveloped in matter and determined by Materialism. Materialism suppresses form within matter, and then negatively individuates material atoms from one another and within themselves. The consequence is the paradox of Materialism in which all beings are thought to be negated, divided, and annulled. The furthermost negativity of this paradox terminates in the absolute annihilation of being and the logic of nihilism. The horror of the alien is the result of this furthermost alienation of the human nature from itself through the absolute negation of its original nature and final purpose.
Read more:
- Neurodiversity vs. Cognitive Liberty - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Link dump: 2009.10.13 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Limits to the biolibertarian impulse - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Link dump: 2009.10.15 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Neurodiversity vs. Cognitive Liberty, Round II - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Link dump: 2009.10.17 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Cognitive liberty and right to one's mind - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- TED Talks: Henry Markram builds a brain in a supercomputer - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- And Now, for Something Completely Different: Doomsday! - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Link dump: 2009.10.19 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Oklahoma and abortion - some fittingly harsh reflections - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Pigliucci on science and the scope of skeptical inquiry - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Remembering Mac Tonnies - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Link dump: 2009.10.24 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Link dump: 2009.10.26 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- The Bright Side of Nuclear Armament - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Grieving chimps - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Elephant prosthetic - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Mass produced artificial skin to replace animal testing - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Dog gets osseointegrated prosthetic - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- NASA Shuttle-derived Sidemount Heavy Launch Vehicle Concept - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Link dump for 2009.02.02 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Link dump for 2009.11.04 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Link dump for 2009.11.05 - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- IEET's Biopolitics of Popular Culture Seminar - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Einstein and Millikan should have done a Kurzweil - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Affective Death Spirals - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Cure aging or give a small number of disabled people jobs as janitors? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Would unary notation prevent scope insensitivity? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Cure aging or give a small number of disabled people jobs as janitors - unary version. - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- At SENS4, Cambridge, UK - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- SENS4 overview and review - how evolution complicates SENS, and why we must try harder - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- SENS4 top 10 photos - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My AI research for this year - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My AI research: Formal Logic - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My AI research: Category theory and institution theory - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My AI research: The Semantic Web - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My AI research: Features and Flaws of Logical representation - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- My AI research: Graphical models and probabilistic logics - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Hughes and More engage Italian Catholicism: Image caption competition - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Surprisingly good solutions, falling in love and life in a materialistic universe - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- What do you get when you cross slightly evolved, status seeking monkeys with the scientific method? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Seeking the optimal philanthropic strategy: Global Warming or AI risk? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Machine Learning - harbinger of the future of AI? - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- At the Singularity Summit in NYC - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Katja Grace: world-dominating superintelligence is "unlikely" - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Normal Human Heroes on "Nightmare futures" - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Anissimov on Intelligence Enhancement - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Yudkowsky on "Value is fragile" - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Response to Pearce - November 8th, 2009 [November 8th, 2009]
- Creative thinking lets you believe whatever you want - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Let’s get metaphysical: How our ongoing existence could appear increasingly absurd - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Linda MacDonald Glenn guest blogging in November and December - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Link dump for 2009.11.15 - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Call 1-800-New-Organ, by 2020? - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- IBM's claim to have simulated a cat's brain grossly overstated - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- John Hodgman pulls off Fermi Paradox schtick - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Deus Sex Machina - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- How Americans spent themselves into ruin... but saved the world - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- I am my own grandpa (or grandma)? - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Link dump for 2009.11.29 - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The art of Tomas Saraceno - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Link dump: 2009.12.05 - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The Harmonic Convergence of Science, Sight, & Sound - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Working on my website - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Transhumanism, personal immortality and the prospect of technologically enabled utopia - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- RokoMijic.com is up - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Why the Fuss About Intelligence? - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Initiation ceremony - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Birthing Gods - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- 11 core rationalist skills - from LessWrong - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The best of the guests - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- The best of Sentient Developments: 2009 - December 13th, 2009 [December 13th, 2009]
- Link dump: 2009.12.15 - December 15th, 2009 [December 15th, 2009]
- The Utopia Force - December 22nd, 2009 [December 22nd, 2009]
- Avatar: The good, the bad and ugly - December 23rd, 2009 [December 23rd, 2009]
- Singularity Institute launches "2010 Singularity Research Challenge" - December 24th, 2009 [December 24th, 2009]
- Transhumanism as a "nonissue" - December 24th, 2009 [December 24th, 2009]
- Hanson on "Meh, Transhumanism" - December 25th, 2009 [December 25th, 2009]
- Merry Newtonmas from Transhuman Goodness - December 25th, 2009 [December 25th, 2009]