Theorising the Contemporary Zombie

Contextual Pasts, Presents, and Futures

Scott Hamilton, Conor Heffernan

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781786838599
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria

Zombies have become an increasingly popular object of research in academic studies and, of course, in popular media. Over the past decade, they have been employed to explain mathematical equations, vortex phenomena in astrophysics, the need for improved laws, issues within higher education, and even the structure of human societies. Despite the surge of interest in the zombie as a critical metaphor, no coherent theoretical framework for studying the zombie actually exists. Addressing this current gap in the literature, Theorising the Contemporary Zombie defines zombiism as a means of theorising and examining various issues of society in any given era by immersing those social issues within the destabilising context of apocalyptic crisis; and applying this definition, the volume considers issues including gender, sexuality, family, literature, health, popular culture and extinction.

PART ONE

ZOMBIFIED BODIES

1

Zombies, Deviance and the Right to Posthuman Life

Poppy Wilde

ZOMBIES HAVE BECOME increasingly prolific in popular culture. Films from Dawn of the Dead to Shaun of the Dead, novels such as the Mira Grant Newsflesh series, zombie games including Dying Light, are all excellent examples of affective zombie mediations.¹ Some fantastic zombie podcasts, including We’re Alive, and the audiobook of After the Cure, by Deirdre Gould, create wonderfully creepy atmospheres that should appeal to horror fans.² But why zombies? Societies and cultures are strangely overcome (or overrun) with morbid fascination. As Sarah Lauro asks, ‘Whence does our cultural fascination with zombies come?’³ The answer is both obvious and not obvious. Post-apocalyptic scenarios allow access to a world that is both similar-yet-strange. Audiences experience stories and journeys of survivors and victims and ask important self-reflexive questions – ‘what would I do, how long would I survive, where would I go?’, and this imaginative exploration allows the consideration of how humans would fare in this world, but not as it is presently known.

This chapter explores the cultural fascination with zombies through posthumanism. Through this critical perspective, the zombie apocalypse represents the cultural imperative to break with aspects of contemporary society that constrain people to conformity. Bound by the neo-liberal, capitalist expectations on society, there is a belief that everyone should always be producing, competing, innovating and consuming. The underlying expectation says that contributing members of society should embody ‘the good citizen’: active members of society, demonstrating personal responsibility and embodying the entrepreneurial self. However, against a backdrop of dystopian realities, a burgeoning scepticism exists within these societal expectations: the beginning of an understanding that the enterprising self and the good citizen are in fact capitalist traps, designed to keep people ‘in check’ and their behaviours managed. This realisation allows for wider understandings of society as a biased construction, with its own agendas and powers in place. By disrupting these normative tropes (which the zombie apocalypse forces), alternative possibilities emerge. Within the fascination with zombie narratives, then, there is evident a desire to escape the current capitalist, neo-liberal lifestyles, to deviate from the trend, and to therefore embody posthumanist values – rejecting the attributes ascribed by the liberal human subject. A zombie outbreak becomes almost romantically representative of a desire to ‘return to our roots’, to test one’s mettle against nature, and to embrace humanity’s most ‘animalistic’ sides.

Ultimately, in the zombie apocalypse scenario, the age-old ‘stand-off’ of human versus nature arises. Would contemporary Westernised humans be capable of killing monsters; foraging and hunting for food? How would they fare if removed from the daily comforts they know so well in the Western world?⁴ Somehow this return to a world without contemporary luxuries is both intriguing and appealing. The argument posed in this chapter is twofold. First, the current fascination with zombies should be considered a possible rejection of the ultimately humanistic contemporary society. Zombies and zombie stories have often been considered metaphors for consumerism amongst other things, an argument made particular valid with the aforementioned Dawn of the Dead, set in a shopping mall.⁵ Secondly, this chapter argues that the zombies are actually the ones who have been most successful in breaking free of the capitalist venture. From this perspective the zombie is not a virus, or a stand-in for the negatively ‘othered’ in society, but an exploration of alternative ways of living and life that might sit outside societal norms, but in ways that could be considered subversive and even progressive. This extends the current debates within the field of zombie studies, and allows access to the zombie figure as something, arguably, more revolutionary, rather than regressive.

In its most basic form, posthumanism can arise from the desire to critically investigate and redefine what exactly is meant by ‘human’ and what attributes it embodies. As such, the ‘posthuman’ signals ‘the end of a certain conception of the human’ – the liberal human subject, a rational and reasonable being.⁶ From this perspective, the zombified breakdown of civilisation signals an enforced ‘posthuman’ turn. However, this chapter demonstrates the ways that humanism, neo-liberalism and capitalism are deeply entrenched social values that do not take long to rise from the dead themselves – even whilst surrounded by reanimated corpses.

Capitalism, neo-liberalism, humanism

The model of capitalism has changed through mechanical capital, to industrial, to the current informational age of capitalism. However, within all of these models the same basic tenets arise: produce, compete, innovate and consume. Whilst capitalism promotes the privatisation of property and wealth, it also promotes a continuous spiral of innovation and productivity. Neo-liberalism transfers these same values to the self. Rather than only businesses producing, competing, innovating and consuming, personal value becomes inextricably linked to the material goods owned by individuals. Once again value is measured in terms of achievement, through material wealth – the money in the bank, the affordable holidays, the houses owned (or that are strived for), the latest smartphone, consumer gadgets, cars and ‘[c]onsumption thus becomes a vehicle for authenticating the self and/as product in a cyclical process that, once constructed, is used to validate its own manifestations’.⁷ However, the neo-liberal imperative is also evident through the ways in which individuals work on themselves, not just their possessions. The self is an enterprise – an entrepreneurial self – a project to be worked again. Nikolas Rose explains that, ‘[t]he enterprising self will make an enterprise of its life, seek to maximize its own human capital, project itself a future, and seek to shape itself in order to become that which it wishes to be’.⁸ Self-worth is built through qualifications, and self-branding helps craft a careful image of success and intelligence. As Ilana Gershon states ‘how one manages one’s self is a consistent, reflexive engagement … Now that you are a business, there is no break from being a business.’⁹

Society has shifted from industrial capitalism to cognitive capitalism, ‘which is founded on the accumulation of immaterial capital, the dissemination of knowledge and the driving role of the knowledge economy’.¹⁰ This move aims to capture value from things other than traditional forms of labour. Here, labour is about connectivity, responsiveness, autonomy, inventiveness. Citizens are motivated by the desire to know but also, crucially, to express their knowledge. Aesthetic labour becomes incorporated into daily routines to ensure the portrayal of the appropriate style as well as the right financial capital. An emphasis is placed on being presentable, making a statement, whether being ‘in fashion’ and well groomed or constructing an alternative statement or counter-commentary on aesthetic. Aesthetic labour is unavoidably linked to health and fitness, where ‘the responsibility for “global health” falls eventually on the individual’s shoulders in neoliberal logics of self-help’.¹¹ Social lives form the basis of social capital, wherein personal connections are resources to be mined for support, information and guidance. Social capital is not just forging social connections, but forming relationships with people from whom something valuable can be gleaned. Dong Liu, Sarah Ainsworth and Roy Baumesiter argue that this attitude means ‘[p]eople are therefore motivated to form, strengthen, and maintain connections with other people who can provide emotional support, information, and material help, and perhaps other benefits – and also motivated to sustain the other people’s willingness to provide those benefits’.¹² As such, individuals are conditioned to consider their relationships and how others contribute to their lives, as well as how these connections are displayed, because personal capital (including social) needs to be showcased to the world.

This form of social conditioning creates a belief that one must keep accruing all of these different forms of capital; and yet, neo-liberalism operates on the basis that all of these forms of labour – from finance to cognitive to social – are believed to be within individual control. This conditioning is not based on an acknowledgement of the implications of the governing and surrounding societal structures, nor the many ways in which these impact on an ability to succeed. Instead, humans have traditionally been addressed and represented as a particular type,

suffused with an individualized subjectivity, motivated by anxieties and aspirations concerning their self-fulfilment, committed to finding their true identities and maximizing their authentic expression in their life-styles. The images of freedom and autonomy that inspire our political thinking equally operate in terms of an image of each human being as the unified psychological focus of his or her biography, as the locus of legitimate rights and demands, as an actor seeking to ‘enterprise’ his or her life and self through acts of choice.¹³

This standardised ‘norm’, so often taken for granted, actually assumes a great deal – individuality, motivation, commitment, maximisation, freedom, autonomy, unification and control. Yet, this norm is highly presumptuous and works to serve those in power in a variety of ways. For example, this individual, who is self-responsible, is the epitome of the ‘good citizen’. Citizenship itself is considered as, for example, ‘a set of norms of what people think they should do as good citizens’, or as Michael Schudson suggests ‘the political expectations and aspirations people inherit and internalize’.¹⁴ The good citizen therefore may be one who displays the ‘desired modes of participation’ (though, as Neta Kligler-Vilenchik notes, these modes are actually in flux, rather than fixed understandings).¹⁵ This model is again altogether a subjectivity that is collectively defined and designed: someone who behaves correctly, gives back to society, is the archetype of the correct way to be, to behave and to strive. Moreover, the veneer of standardised citizenship silences differences in race, gender, sexuality, class, etc. The message here is that everyone is equal; differences are levelled. But this is not the case.

These ever-expanding forms of labour related to the self have been noted previously. In their work from over a decade ago, Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt suggest that there has been a transformation in the consideration of workers’ subjectivities that moves the world of work outside the confines of the workplace to instead encompass all aspects of life.¹⁶ Gill and Pratt indicate that ‘creative labour, network labour, cognitive labour, affective labour and immaterial labour’ are examples that ‘point to the significance of contemporary transformations, and signals – at the very least – that “something” is going on’.¹⁷ This ‘something’ seems nothing less than the strengthening of the neo-liberal death grip, reducing human worth to the sum of its labour, and expanding those labour forms to encompass all aspects of life. Ultimately this makes the subject-as-citizen more manageable, predictable and controllable, as the monitoring of this citizenship is evident through neo-liberal governmentality; that is, rather than a central governing force being required to monitor everyone, citizens operate in a way wherein they each guide their own behaviours in line with a certain understanding of what is deemed ‘appropriate’. Michel Foucault used the example of the panopticon – subjects are all looking at each other, monitoring each other’s behaviour and measuring their own against that observed behaviour.¹⁸ Subjects intrinsically embody and inter-nalise the notion of some behaviours being ‘correct’ and ‘desirable’, while others are not. Citizens police themselves and others through comparison and critique. Once again, this places responsibility back on to the self – the central aim, and arguably the success, of neo-liberalism is precisely the targeting of fully autonomous citizens, charging individuals with their own responsibilities, and holding them accountable for their own actions.

Social media could be argued to exacerbate the pressure of neo-liberal governmentality, in a variety of ways. Not only does social capital extend to an online domain through a variety of platforms; social capital is also exemplified through accumulating ‘likes’ and friends and followers from further afield, and thus digital brands grows and digital capital amasses. Consequently, a constant imperative exists to update, check in, feedback, respond, upload and so forth, and thus the entrepreneurial self takes on another form, embarking upon self-commodification. Tobias Raun highlights the ways in which intimacy and authenticity are u...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Abstract
• Author Biographies
• List of Figures
• Introduction
• Part One: Zombified Bodies
• Part Two: Critical Environments
• Part Three: Undead Cultures
• Bibliography
• Notes