Seventeenth International Conference on New Directions in the Humanities

Abstract

Ridley Scott’s Alien (Director’s Cut: 2010) joins together a revolutionary reflection on the form of film, on the transformation of culture and society by technology, and of the emergence of a new consciousness which is the effect of both the camera and of technology. Alien foregrounds film as technology: the camera is a machine which produces human subjectivity as an illusion, as a mechanical effect which creates point-of-view. In so doing, Alien predicts how, in the age of the machine, not just human subjectivity but also human consciousness will be accorded a secondary status to that of the machine. It does so to suggest the terrors of technological advancements. Humans are dependent upon the camera to navigate a perceptual world transformed by technology. But more to the point, a human point of view and human beings have been compromised by an increasingly autonomous techno/corporate sphere. In its representation of technological advancement, Alien preserves the human point of view of its subject/heroine, but it does only to witness and mourn the loss of the human as the center of vision and knowledge; to project the rise of a techno-corporation for which the human body exists only as a convenience; and to criticize a machine ethics which emerges when the body is superannuated.