[Reader-list] Gary Farnell on our age of Zombies ...

[Patrice Riemens]

(bwo Nettime, on Haloween Day)
(original formatting was a disaster, sorry if glitches remain...)



For a Symposium on Zombies 
by Gary Farnell (University of Winchester)


The zombie is the official monster of our Great Recession. So says Time 
magazine. "[Zombies] seem to be telling us something about the 
zeitgeist". We might expect Time magazine to know a thing or two about 
the Zeitgeist.[1] But in this short article by Lev Grossman, "Zombies 
Are the New Vampires", relatively little is said about what indeed 
zombies are telling us about the Zeitgeist. At the same time, however, 
for socio-historical transformations to be registered in the language of 
monstrosity is nothing new. At the time of the Great Depression, for 
example, Antonio Gramsci in his prison cell wrote "The crisis consists 
precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; 
in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear."[2]

"Now is the time of monsters", Gramsci says, noting the configuration of 
the Zeitgeist and thus outlining how terror springs from torpor (a 
situation of dead-lock, if ever there was one) in the early 1930s. 
Gramsci's remark concerning monsters, terror and torpor acquires a new 
currency in the current crisis of the Great Recession. A new teratology 
"more plainly, a new monsterology" is emergent, witness, for example, 
the publication of the late Chris Harman's Zombie Capitalism in 2009, 
Evan Calder Williams's Combined and Uneven Apocalypse in 2011 and David 
McNally's Monsters of the Market also in 2011. As well as this, there 
has been since late 2009 a concerted theoretical effort to conceive of 
the present as a "conjuncture" in the pages of the journal Soundings.[3]

This initiative marks the return of a Gramsci-inspired conjunctural 
analysis of the early neo-liberal era formulated by writers in Marxism 
Today in the 1970s and 1980s. The point about the conjunctural analysis 
as such is that it enjoins consideration of the coming together of 
structural contradictions "as economically, politically and 
ideologically inflected" into a social crisis situation (a ruptural 
fusion, as Louis Althusser would denote it). Moreover, it prioritizes 
the issue of "representing the crisis" the better to find an exit from 
it. In light of this, this paper argues for the value of the zombie myth 
as an interpretative motif in relation to the Hegelian "Night of the 
World" that is the present crisis of our Great Recession. The zombie 
should indeed be seen as the official monster of the moment.

There has been a striking proliferation of images of monsters and of the 
apocalypse in the financial press starting with the sub-prime crisis of 
2006 that mutated into the credit-crunch crisis of 2007 that mutated 
into the financial crisis of 2008 that mutated into the global economic 
crisis we know of today. Thus, "What created this monster"? asked the 
New York Times in March 2008.[4] In April 2009 the Financial Times 
warned that "Curse of the zombies rises in Europe amid an eerie 
calm".[5] We have been warned that we face "Acropalypse now" by the 
Sunday Times in September 2011.[6] But it can be argued that it is 
specifically the figure of the zombie, at once spectacular and toxic, 
that traverses (intersects, negates) this problem of the representation 
of the present crisis. For from its origins in the culture of Haitian 
Vodou and from a time when the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 lay, as 
Susan Buck-Morss has said, "at the crossroads of multiple discourses as 
a defining moment in world history"[7] the image of the zombie has 
signified the end of civilization itself: it is the eschaton-made-flesh. 
It represents (in Hegelian terms) an image of the truth of the current 
conjunctural crisis of global capitalism. (Or put differently, "What if 
truth were monstrous"? as the Heideggerian philosopher John Sallis once 
asked.[8])

Therefore we should seize on the zombie"s image in all its sublime 
ugliness, itself a variation of Slavoj Zizek's "sublime object of 
ideology". This obscene-deformative figure of the zombie speaks to 
power. Recall how Occupy Wall Street protestors dressed as zombies, 
allowing Wall Street employees to "see us reflecting the metaphor of 
their actions". (Likewise, as Arthur Schopenhauer once joked, where else 
did the horrors of Dante's Inferno come from if not the horrors of the 
present real world itself?) Hence it's time to love the living dead, a 
race of monsters for the age of deterritorialized, new ethnicities 
crossed with the politics of speed. (No wonder Gilles Deleuze and Felix 
Guattari should have suggested quite so boldly in the first part of 
Capitalism and Schizophrenia 'Anti-Oedipus' that "The only modern myth 
is the myth of zombies".[9])

Sublime ugliness The zombie"s sublime ugliness, as pressed into relief 
by the force of conjunctural analysis of the neo-liberal era from the 
1970s to the present, looks like this. It is now clear that the origins 
of the present financial and economic crisis lie in the resolution of 
the social-democratic "Keynesian" crisis that marked the end of the 
historic post-war settlement in the seventies. In other words, the 
neo-liberal solution to that earlier crisis has now become the problem 
of the present crisis. For if credit, deployed within an expanding 
deregulatory regime (a gloriously immaterial space of flows), was once 
the principal instrument of a great transformation, redressing the 
various ills of "stagflation", a disgruntled working class and big 
government, it has subsequently folded back on itself and crumbled to 
dust in the neo-liberals' own hands. A credit boom, bringing into play 
the circulation of vast amounts of virtual money, has at length become 
the generator not of general prosperity but of acute inequality 
(crystallized, above all, in terms of the sub-prime mortgages scandal).

Then confirmation that the crisis situation of the late 1970s/early 
1980s was in fact being repeated (but in reverse!) in the late 
2000s/early 2010s came in August 2011. Whereas forms of industrial 
unrest and street violence precipitated a credit boom (centring on 
London's "big bang" of deregulation in the City in 1986) as capital's 
means of expanding its way out of a crisis, so, as the bubble of a 
hyperinflated economy has finally burst in 2008, the credit boom has in 
fact been causal vis-a-vis the recent rioting in English cities. The 
fires, the scenes of violence in the first half of August have been 
frightening indeed. But at the same time, like true "possessive 
individualist" subjects of neo-liberal ideology the urban rioters and 
looters have acted, curiously, like shoppers who want to go shopping 
without paying for anything with real money. This explains why the 
violence of the bad old days of the eighties has returned, but no longer 
in the form of that of politically conscious collectives rather than 
that of post-credit boom consumers or pure neo-liberal shoppers. The 
general situation of the implosion of not just the financial sector but 
also the market system more generally is, ironically, precisely what 
credit qua fetish object was meant to forestall. Prescient indeed is 
Karl Marx's comment in the third volume of Capital (Marx's Crisis Book) 
that "At first glance ... the entire crisis presents itself as simply a 
credit and monetary crisis."[10] This analysis of the neo-liberal 
conjuncture presses into relief the zombie's sublime ugliness (the 
beautiful excrementalism, the shitty sublime of the zombie) as portrayed 
in press coverage of the August riots of 2011: see, in particular, the 
well-known Sun front page of August 10th that led with the headline 
"Shop a Moron".

"Shop a Moron" This Sun front page belongs in the category of the 
"public image". Using pictures taken by closed-circuit television 
cameras, it presents a spread of photographs of rioters and looters, 
laid out under the headline "Shop a Moron", accompanied by the 
encouragement to readers to "name and shame" those photographed by 
contacting the police " the page as constructed is a virtual 
identification parade.[11] Public images in this sense are as they have 
been described by Stuart Hall and his co-authors in Policing the Crisis, 
now a canonical reference regarding conjunctural analysis, dating from 
1978. Here a "public image" as articulated in media discourse is "a 
cluster of impressions, themes and quasi-explanations, gathered or fused 
together".[12] It is added: "These are sometimes the outcome of the 
[news] features process itself; where hard, difficult, social, cultural 
or economic analysis breaks down or is cut short .[13]

A "public image", then, is a form of ideological mechanism used as a 
means to foreclose and hence "resolve" difficult issues articulated in 
media discourse, through a process of rhetorical closure. The "Shop a 
Moron" front page constitutes a public image in the above sense. The 
pictures as arranged allow the Sun to display its customary wit via the 
pun on "shop" and "shopping". This forms the basis of another of the 
paper's "public-interest" campaigns, promoting the cause of law and 
order, here against the stupid, idiotic, jouissant behaviour of the 
"morons". At the same time, usage of the word moron in the context of 
this front page is the means of cutting-short of analysis and hence of 
achieving rhetorical closure regarding issues "the story behind the 
news" arising from the rioting. The other main news story of the day 
(and indeed of that week) was of "turmoil in the markets", as fears 
spread about a return to the stormy climate (or the forms of moronic 
behaviour!) of the credit boom. Yet it was not seen as necessary to draw 
any connections between the two (or follow the "chain of equivalences" 
in the style of Laclau and Mouffe's discourse analysis). Even so, what 
appears the pressure in the Sun to portray the rioters and looters as 
zombie-like figures may be the most important thing of all about the 
"Shop a Moron" case. For the fact that the "moronic" rioters and looters 
represented in the Sun are made to look like zombies who have shuffled 
out of George A. Romero's (later Zack Snyder's) Dawn of the Dead, a film 
classic of consumerist alienation, is striking indeed. This "will to 
zombify" is what gives the game away.

Conclusion: the zombie as 'objet petit'. In short, there is at the level 
of representation a general reach for the zombie in the aspect of its 
sublime ugliness to show, as it were, the human face of the present 
crisis, the face of the moronic bankers on Wall Street as well as that 
of the moronic looters on Main Street. Gillian Tett's article in the 
Financial Times in 2009, "Curse of the zombies rises in Europe amid an 
eerie calm", warns of the threat of what happened to Japanese banks in 
the late 1990s that tipped over into crisis, a sort of "undead state", 
Tett says, "in the sense of being too weak to flourish, but too complex 
and costly for their lenders to shut down".[14] (The general "zombiness" 
of all this, incidentally, is summed up nicely in the title of Colin 
Crouch's recent book The Strange Non-Death of Neoliberalism.)

But if the Japanese experience of extended economic depression (the 
"lost decade") is, as Gillian Tett feared, now becoming a reality in the 
West, it is notable beyond that how "universal" now is the zombie 
image-repertoire in a universe that incorporates both the broadsheet 
Financial Times and the tabloid Sun. In this sense, both the high end 
and the low end of representation of the current crisis. We may 
conclude, then, that the zombie figures in all this as an embodiment of 
the Lacanian objet petit a, itself a forerunner of the Zizekian sublime 
object of ideology. Jacques Lacan has identified the objet a "the 
always-already other, reflexive, surplus object around which the drives 
circulate" as the object of psychoanalysis and, in the process, has 
paved the way for the retheorization of the Marxist concept of ideology 
pursued by Zizek. The zombie qua Lacanian objet petit a is what we are 
presented with as an obscure object of desire we seek in the other ("in 
you more than you") in the at once compulsive and repetitive turn to the 
zombie image-repertoire that structures our stories about the current 
conjuncture and its monsters.

The living dead, we may say, act out the death drive (the spectral 
"eternal life" of the undead) of the current global capitalist crisis. 
They are thus a valuable form of political resource in the Occupy Wall 
Street sense of finding a means of reflecting the metaphor of capitalist 
power. Analogous with this is Elaine Scarry's argument formulated in her 
extraordinary work The Body in Pain that physical pain represents "the 
destruction of language through the reversion it causes to the cries and 
groans in Ingmar Bergman, the cries and whispers of a pre-Oedipal, 
pre-verbal state". The point is that that pain (in extremis that of the 
living dead) is relieved in the moment when it takes an object, thereby 
"project[ing] the facts of sentience into speech ... at the birth of 
language itself".[15]

This clarifies how it is in the present moment that representing the 
present crisis is to find an exit from it "and the object-as-pivot in 
this respect is nothing other than the zombie qua objet petit". And so, 
in the end, if you have a T-shirt that says "We Zombies", then wear it 
with pride.


Notes
   1    Lev Grossman, "Zombies Are the New Vampires", Time, 9 April 
2009.
   2    Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and 
trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith, Lawrence and Wishart 
1971, p276.
   3    See John Clarke, "What Crisis Is This"? and Michael Rustin, 
"Reflections on the Present", Soundings 43, Winter 2009, pp7-17, 18-34.
   4    Nelson D. Schwartz and Julie Creswell, "What created this 
monster"? New York Times, 23 March 2008.
   5    Gillian Tett, "Curse of the zombies rises in Europe amid an 
eerie calm", Financial Times, 3 April 2009.
   6    Simon Tilford, "Acropalypse now for the euro", Sunday Times, 18 
September 2011.
   7    Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History, University 
of Pittsburgh Press 2009, p13.
   8    John Sallis, "Deformatives: Essentially Other Than Truth", in 
John Sallis, ed., Reading Heidegger: Commemorations, Indiana University 
Press 1993, p29.
   9    Gilles Deleuze and F??lix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and 
Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane, 
Continuum 1984, p335.
   10   Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 3, 
introd. Ernest Mandel, trans. David Fernbach, Penguin Books 1981, p621.
   11   See the electronic (expanded) version of this page at 
www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/ 3742163/SHOP-A-MORON.html.
   12   Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and 
Brian Roberts, Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and 
Order, Macmillan Education, 1978, p118.
   13   Loc. cit.
   14   Tett, "Curse of the zombies"
   15   Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the 
World, Oxford University Press 1985, p6.


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