![]() ![]() It is as if the reader of the manifesto cannot after all rely on the “sober senses,” but needs a little extra rhetorical something to compel her to face her “real conditions in life.” 6 How did the excess of counter-enlightenment tropes come to prominence in processes of political subjectivation? As Derrida writes in Specters of Marx, “Marx does not like ghosts any more than his adversaries do. Thus it is puzzling (or populist, agitational) that Marx and Engels employ Gothic metaphor related to the middle ages “that reactionists so much admire.” 5 The Gothic contraband in progressive politics is the notion that fear can be sublime. The power of class struggle is famously likened to a ghost that is haunting Europe-the “specter of Communism” we are also told that with the proletariat, the bourgeoisie has produced “its own gravediggers,” and that modern bourgeois society “has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of exchange” that it is like “the sorcerer, who is no longer able to control the powers of the netherworld whom he has called up by his spells.” 4 The Gothic, understood as the revival of medieval styles in the seventeenth century and since, is the theatrical representation of negative affect that emanates from a drama staged around power a pessimistic dialectic of enlightenment that shows how rationality flips into barbarism and human bondage. However, leafing through The Communist Manifesto of 1848 one finds rousing Gothic metaphor. ![]() It is doubtful, of course, that Marx would have endorsed the zombie as a figure of alienation, inasmuch as it incarnates a collapsed dialectics (between life and death, productivity and apathy, etc.) that can only be recaptured with great difficulty. When Adam Smith invoked the moral operations of the “invisible hand of the market”, he had something else in mind than an integrated world economy that recalls Freud’s unheimlich: “Severed limbs, a severed head, a hand detached from the arm, feet that dance by themselves-all of those have something highly uncanny about them, especially when they are credited with independent activity.” 3 Under the globalized reinforcement of capital, the independent activity of ghost limbs is increasingly only apparent, yet no less gratuitous and unsettling.Įconomy and production have in this way often been dressed up in Gothic styles just think of William Blake’s “dark satanic mills” of industrialization. It is Guy Debord’s description of Brigitte Bardot as a rotten corpse and Frederic Jameson’s “death of affect” and of course what media utopianist Marshall McLuhan called “the zombie stance of the technological idiot.” 2 Thus zombification is easily applied to the notion that capital eats up the body and mind of the worker, and that the living are exploited through dead labor. The zombie as a figure of alienation is the entranced consumer suggested by Marxian theory. Still from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, 1978. But it is also the inevitable subversion of the conclusions of such an analysis, as we begin to return to artistic thinking. Thus the following is an attempt at a sociological reading of the zombie that draws its necessity from the pressure that the capitalization of creativity has exerted on artistic practice and spectatorship in the recent decade. In this way we may proceed to address contemporary relations of cultural production, at the same time as we reflect on the analytical tools we have for doing so. Abject monstrosity is naturally impossible to render transparent, but abjectness itself harbors a defined function that promises instrumentality (of a blunt and limited kind, admittedly). The zombie is pure need without morality, hence it promises a measure of objectivity we know exactly what it wants-brains, flesh-because this is what it always wants. Such an analysis is necessarily double-edged. ![]() My proposal, perverse or braindead as it may be, is that the zombie begs a materialist analysis with a view to contemporary culture. So why does it lend itself so easily as a metaphor for alienation, rolling readily off our tongues? Resorting to the zombie as a sign for mindless persistence is unfair to this particular monster, to be sure, but also apathetic and facile in the perspective of the historical space we inhabit. It follows that if the zombie is defined by ambiguity, it cannot be reduced to a negative presence. 1 Slouching across the earth, restlessly but with hallucinatory slowness, it is a thing with a soul, a body that is rotten but reactive, oblivious to itself yet driven by unforgiving instinct. Undead and abject, the zombie is uncontrollable ambiguity. ![]()
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