We are the crisis

I have been an absent one on the blog lately, in favor of more pressing issues. September 24th, the start of the University of California school year (except for perennial early-starter Berkeley), is this year a day of mass protest and mobilization of students, workers, and faculty against being forced to shoulder the costs of the university's blundering ineptitude and, more broadly, of the inevitable fallout of privatization. Hence the planning and preparations for this that all of us are doing have been swallowing time that otherwise might go a-zombieing. I'll be back writing in a week.

But from all of the long conversations engendered by this situation, a set of thoughts I've been having, perhaps worth spinning out here.

This entire situation is not "about" the university per se, and even less so the administrators. (The last thing we want is just a kinder, more liberal-seeming UC President who will continue the same doomed trendline, albeit with language more amenable to an "ethical/democratic" capitalism.) It is "about" the financial crisis. And none have been more insistent about this fact than those very administrators being blamed for this unfolding collapse. Their open letters, press statements, funding decisions, etc, etc, make very clear that we need a couple years of "strategic cuts", all around belt tightening (to the point where the belt becomes the noose that will finish off the public-ness of the whole system), and individual sacrifice: just some lean times, folks, so everybody hunker in and take your furloughs, if you really care about education, that is... All this is so many ways of saying: this is not our fault, this is a crisis that affects us all, it is beyond any of us, it is a deep tectonic shift in the architecture of capital and the consequent waves, battering us down equally.

It perhaps goes without saying, but this is the rankest of all bullshit. For a number of immediate reasons: the particular inflection and severity of this crisis is a consequence of the kind of decisions made by the ruling class and their finance capital whiz kids, it is a false choice between education and labor, the logic of sacrifice is the deep cynicism of our moment, and the actions of these particular administrators have little to do with the crisis but rather with the long term sweep toward the restructuring of public education into a privatized husk. None of this is very surprising, simply the surface story of the past decade, with long narrative roots reaching back through the 20th century.

However, what of the core of this, the core on which the radical left itself, from Marx on and for good reason, insists, namely, that capitalism is crisis? And this should be conceived of in two senses: both the manifestation of those infamous internal contradictions - hence crisis as the laying bare of the untenability of the economic regime as a whole - and as the necessary, cyclical event that allows for creative destruction and restructuring of labor relations and production/circulation patterns - hence crisis as necessity for the continued expansion of capital. Clearly, both the analyses and the descriptive/prescriptive power of this tradition are not things to be given up.

That said...

At a moment in which no one will accept blame for the crisis, we see that no "one" can: those who have been profiting off the system have shown themselves incapable, on any level, of thinking differently, and the asubjective ghost ship drive heart of capital clearly has no time or space for the moral register. Neither should we. Questions of moral responsibility have nothing to do with this.

But there is someone to blame, although not morally. It is our fault, the working classes and those who don't get access to work. All of us under the yoke of this system, it is our fault. We are the crisis.


We are crisis because we are at once the motor of the system and the wrenches and sand tossed into those gears. Capitalism innovates and progresses because we are not pure calculation and extraction of surplus value (thereby provoking the economic regime to find new ways of expanding, accumulating, territorializing), and capitalism shudders to near-halts for the same reason. We are at once the excess of a system that needs us and the material provocation that produces the dizzying heights of financial speculation, because we globally keep multiplying and demanding work, making it cheaper, making it not profitable.

We are to blame for this crisis. And we need to start taking this position as our point of departure, recognizing that this didn't happen because of either greed or an opaque current in patterns of finance. It happened because in spite of all of our concessions to the system, all of our hamstringing of our more radical possibilities, there remains the basic fact of us as things that want in the game and that always want more - i.e. just a decent life, in all the radicality of calling for that in a time when little of the world's population has it - than what we are given.

The move to make, then, is to take on the responsibility for this crisis, the responsibility that none will or can accept, to be the damned of the system that already thinks us as such, and recognize that capitalism is crisis because, internally and infernally, we are the crisis, always have been and always will be.

Along with the unseen

I do not care
For the earthly pleasures
Of humanity
I couldn't care less
I couldn't care less
Couldn't fucking care

The human morals
Abandoned since ages
The surge within
Left nothing behind

Along with the unseen
I shall rise
From ruins to victorious triumph
My time is yet to come

No crew, no cargo, no destination

Capitalism again produces not just internal contradictions and systemic alienation, but the startled, haunting configurations - and prefigurations - of its own terminal flatlines, those perfect synechdochic captures of the crumbling financial system and its fallouts. In this case, "the ghost fleet of the recession." Anchored off the coast of Singapore, the empty hulls wait unmanned for commerce that doesn't come. The local fear of them as cursed is perhaps more right than we can fathom. Bad spirits, indeed.

(thanks to Laura for the link)

Splashdown

Back from LA, where I made the requisite pilgrimage to the Bonaventure for some disorientation. A video I made of the elevator descent to share a sense of the deep weirdness of the place that quite exceeds its infamous descriptions. Here manifested in the elevator descent which is an odd bastard combination of the Barbican and Splash Mountain, if that combination can include the sudden transition from mirrored distortion to an interior that includes concrete pod outcroppings with individual exercise machines and a surprising number of vacancies.

Gloria satanae

Surplus-life

[a more full explanation of the concept of surplus-life first raised in my original apocalyptic notes]


We shouldn't disavow the critique – of race, class, nation, gender, etc – embedded in much of the zombie genre, Romero first and foremost. Indeed, the vague, and often misleading, Leftism of its perspective constitutes the texture and tone perhaps as much as the relations between interior/exterior, fixity/flight, and care/brutality. And it remains, from its incipient moments on, capable of real moments of vitriol and shock: the sinking stomach feeling drops in freefall in the total horror of Ben’s death (when redneck zombie hunters "mistake" him for a zombie). But, as raised earlier, the on-the-surface social critique is the least interesting part of the films, particularly from a political perspective. If there is a sharper turn of critique and thought, one not caught in the abortive passage bound to the personal trauma, it can only lie in the zombies themselves, the real protagonists of the films.

Not since Eisenstein’s films have we witnessed such a startling construction of the mass subject: the slow pained birth of the new group from the wreckage of the everyday. Not class consciousness per se, but the wracking formation of something that, like all revolutionary movements, starts from the universal – not what is common across individuals but what is the universal principle under which those of a historical period exist – and lurches, however ineptly, toward its negation. Stumbling and swarming, single minded and mindless, they are the unhalting drive toward toward the destruction of the world that exists and all it stands for.

That said, they might be rather surprised to learn of this role of eschaton made flesh. In the Romero films, they are surprised to learn, period. And so before considering what it means for the “irrational” to develop a sense of what they have been doing all along and of the advanced tactics of how to do it better, we return to that dual core of what they do without “meaning to”: they consume, and they do not die.

What do they consume? Despite the endless LOL-zombie level jokes, it wasn’t always about “Brains…”. That particular iteration, with all its monotonous staying power, comes from Dan O’Bannon’s Return of the Living Dead (1985), (which I'll write on shortly). No, for Romero and the meat glee of his SFX man Tom Savini, it is flesh, ripped from the bone, and it is entrails, the sickly wet thup of the unraveling guts.



But even aside from the fact that consumption does not answer hunger, the very eating and hunting practices were never about filling bellies, of persistently butchering the living to get every last bit of protein from them. Instead, they absent-mindedly snack and, more crucially, they are distracted by the fresher living, the not yet touched by zombies. Pragmatically, they should stick with the kill they’ve already made, not waste energy chasing new prey that will very likely turn out to kill the hunter. Of course, none of this matters or applies here, for there is that odd doubling: they don’t need to eat, yet it is just what they do. And not yet to turn the living to their side, not a quick bite to convert the uninitiated and add to the ranks. (It can’t be good for the effectiveness of your zombie horde to have a significant number of them missing large chunks of muscle and connective tissue.) They are consumers, pure and simple, the unaware manifestation of consumption compulsion hitting its joking stride in the mall wandering slack-jaws of Dawn of the Dead.

No moment so captures this bare anti-hunger and shameless consumption as that when, in Night of the Living Dead, the basement door opens to reveal “zombified” Karen – one of those holed up in the farmhouse - munching away on her father. The shot is remarkable, an entire case-study of familial tension and libidinal investment in a single moment: her mother opens the door, a crack of light reveals Karen, and she freezes, mouth full of Daddy. Not in knowing shame at the act, but with, at most, the minor embarassment and sudden stillness of one caught midnight snacking in the harsh glow of the open refrigerator. To hijack a Freudian moment, this is something approximate to, Mother, can’t you see I’m eating?

But the absence of her shame is compensated for by our revulsion, that knowing laughter and shudder. However, we should insist, our laughter/horror is not a response to the “body horror” (the tasteful black and white gore details are restrained, even for Romero), but at her fundamental misrecognition. This is not the misrecognition of eating your father by accident, not even of being unaware of how awkward a situation appears to one who stumbles into it. It is the fundamental misrecognition of zombies and of our attachment to them.

This is the misrecognition of one who has risen without reason, compelled to rise for no purpose beyond the mere repetition, consumption, and imitation of life. For the basic fact of the true zombie gesture, in its occluded form, is not the animation of the dead body but the over-animation of the living body.

To make this less cryptic, we might ask: how do the dead “rise”/“walk” in these films? And which dead?

As explained, these are not movies about transmission, at least in the explicit sense. You don’t become a zombie by coming into contact with one. Being bitten may hasten the process (an unbrushed, rank, rotten meat reeking mouth plus a jagged bite will likely lead to a nasty infection), but it isn’t the cause. The cause is an irrevocable change, something that, echoing Joyce, descends upon all the living and the dead.


Indeed, we should stress the living aspect of this. In the graphic novel The Walking Dead, which gets to expand the moves, tropes, and themes of a Romero film into a long, unfolding narrative, the central character Rick realizes, upon discovering that the “roamers” include those who happened to die without being bitten, that if “they revived without a bite – that means we’re all infected. Or could be. That means we’re just waiting to die before we come back as one of those things.” Later in the series, as the death toll mounts and the survivors turn more and more ferociously against each other, he delivers the titular line, pointing out that “WE are the walking dead”: it isn’t us the living against the animated dead, but the remapping of the entire world into the fields and enclosures of the already dead, the apparently living just biding their time before becoming what cannot be avoided.

In other words, it is not dying that makes you a zombie. It is not-dying that does, already present in you as you fight off the hordes you will someday join. It is the fact that you don’t, can’t or won’t – in the varied inflections of will and non-agency of each option – stay down. All that is know, the one certainty after the tectonic shift that can’t be repaired, the “world revolution”, is that the dead will rise, because they never really die. Hence while the effects are personal (the pathos of the family consuming itself, the existential angst at the certainty of becoming a zombie), the cause is not.


Romero’s own comments about this, and the relation of his film to Matheson’s I Am Legend, are instructive:

"I thought I Am Legend was about revolution. I said if you’re going to do something about revolution, you should start at the beginning. I mean, Richard starts his book with one man left; everybody in the world has become a vampire. I said we got to start at the beginning and tweak it up a little bit. I couldn’t use vampires because he did, so I wanted something that would be an earth-shaking change. Something that was forever, something that was really at the heart of it. I said, so what if the dead stop staying dead? ... And the stories are about how people respond or fail to respond to this. That’s really all [the zombies] ever represented to me. In Richard’s book, in the original I Am Legend, that’s what I thought that book was about. There’s this global change and there’s one guy holding out saying, wait a minute, I’m still a human. He’s wrong. Go ahead. Join them. You’ll live forever! In a certain sense he’s wrong but on the other hand, you’ve got to respect him for taking that position."

One could say much about how Romero articulates the origins and trajectory of his project here, but for the moment, three comments. First, the sense that it was never really about the zombies: they are representations – more precisely, the external embodiment – of how people respond to a global shift. In a strange doubling back, they are nothing but the registration of the response to them, an echo chamber with a hollow void at its center (you are just our response to what you are). Second, the slippery question of at what point you are still human. The Matheson schematic of obstinance and refusal to adapt, for which we all do have some respect indeed, is perhaps less aon the level of his unwillingness to become something other and more the problem of one who doesn’t realize that he is already a consequence and product of that change.

Or, we should insist, at least the Romero reload of Matheson achieves this: if the zombies are a projection of how we respond to “earth-shaking change,” such a projection is needed because we lack the ability – or willingness – to read ourselves for the signs of such changes, to grasp what has befallen us all. Third, and most crucially, is just that sense of tectonic shift, of that “global change,” which provides the injunction to start from the beginning. However, to show the “beginning” of this revolution is not to locate a false origin or precise cause. The radiation loosed from the exploded probe may be “to blame,” but what is never explained, through any of the series, is how it is to blame. Like all evental shifts, there is a gathering storm of overdetermination, a blur of intersecting influences and pressures. All that we can witness is the emergent, the point of no return.


And indeed it is a point of no return. For what is the world condition that occurs? It is clearly not that all the dead who ever died rise. It is not even just those dead with enough connective tissue and meat on their bones to stand and shamble. It is those who died after the new set of rules came to be, after the radiation has spread, the evental shift that only becomes evident in its after-effects. In this way, zombie films are not about the living dead, at least not in any direct way. They are about the undying living. They are about surplus-life, the new logic of excessive existence: something has given us all too-much-life, an inability to properly die, a system that no longer knows how or when to quit.

If there is an infection or viral model here, it is of a systemic change that infects all, demands of you that you not die, just the continuation and modification of the human animal in its furious and unnatural perseverance. The instinct to survive turned against itself in parody, the conatus gone haywire. And more than that, the end of the sovereignty of not just the subject but the working body, now given a task that you can’t finish, a job from which you don’t get to punch out. In this way, both on the micro scale of the world of each body and mind compelled to stop minding and just keep going, and on the global scale, the zombie apocalypse is not the end of the world: it is the “end of the end”, the world never ending.

That's what is so horrifying. Not the possibility of it ending this way, in plague and rot and terror, but in the drawn out sigh of the thought, my god, what if it never ends... And worse, the possibility that this may be so central to the dominant logic of our age that it no longer is capable of horrifying, the soft whimper of protest drowned out in the roar of the self-same.

Turning a blind ear (NSNSBM)

A comment discussion from an older post is worth posting in full here, as it's a gesture toward explaining a bit about - and raising perhaps more fully the deep problems of - what it means to listen to and really love a cultural mode (black metal, i.e. BM) with a frequently fascistic politics, ranging from implicit to very, very explicit. Any thoughts on any this are seriously welcome, as any explanation I might give doesn't take away my persistent uneasiness. I know some of you also have my same combination of far left politics with a cultural taste that includes some seriously fascistic (with the caveat that we again need a better conception of the gap between fascist aesthetics per se and culture that espouses fascist politics) culture, some misconstrued as such (I think here of certain attacks on Brutalism), some rightfully designated as so.

The anonymous commenter asked:
This is indeed a great album [the album in question is Peste Noire's Ballade Cuntre lo Anemi Francor, about which I've written a bit - S a/o B], and I am also having a difficult time wrapping my head around it. It is especially perplexing to be faced with such a masterpiece when one considers the imbecile (I commented on the interview with Famine elsewhere) who created it. I'm having a harder time enjoying the likes of Akista, Peste Noire, Malveillance, Kult Ofenzivy, Drudkh etc. as of late in light of the increasingly absurd blending of racialism and nationalism with what at first glance seemed to be a clumsy albeit genuine reaction to neoliberal integration. I can imagine someone like Zizek having something Lacanian to say which would help me rationalize listening to Dolentia and Goatmoon while reading Deleuze and Guattari, although I can't help but wonder if there may never be a method for "cheating" my way out of this one. Anyway, I'm very interested in more of your thoughts on the matter.

My very short answer is four-fold, aside from saying that the Goatmoon/Deleuze combo sounds awful for more than a few reasons. (What I say below also leaves out my real interest in the politics of misanthropy itself, and the ways in which certain misanthropic aesthetics have tended to marshal the signifiers of the 20th century's nastiest modes and moments.)

First, the vast majority of the culture we consume is ideologically contemptible, although rarely does it bare its colors so visibly as black metal. To go the Zizek route you invoked, isn't this analogous to that much cited Brecht line ("what is breaking into a bank compared with founding a bank")? The idiotic posturing - and genuinely disturbing politics - of some BM is a quiet fart against the not-so-hidden din of the dangerous ideological constructions of our era and the way in which they prop up systemic and structural violence against massive portions of the global population. Yet we rarely tend to agonize if we listen to a bit of pop fluff, now and then, however ironically. This isn't to excuse the stated politics of BM whatsoever, simply to question the investment of our anxiety. (And I write this as someone who has a great deal of love for some pop music genres, particularly certain hip hop and old Memphis soul, and who has little interest in attacking pop for being pop. That said, almost none of it can "move" me like BM can.)

Two, the gap between the sonic qualities of black metal and its avowed politics. Even if you don't go as far as I do (of seeing within the music itself a anarchistic, dialectically self-consuming relationship between inherited forms of the past and the networks of the present), the fact remains that barring a good deal of time spent with the lyrics sheet and interviews, you'd be hard pressed to tell apart NSBM (National Socialist black metal) from what we might call NSNSBM (not so National Socialist black metal). However, this perhaps only attenuates the sense of listening to something that bristles with the wrong kind of hate. And hence, perhaps, is all the worse, letting us turn a blind ear to what we suspect, correctly, is going on just below the buzzing surface.

Third and this I delay for a far longer post, much of black metal that is secessionist, telluric, and insistent on the autonomy of local zones (things behind which many of us could get, at least in a non right wing militia or intelligent design teaching school district form) gets lumped in with the real NSBM, or at least the muddled and murky pond of ethnic/racial nationalisms on which a large amount of BM depends for its lyrical content. There is a major difference between a simple hailing - or heiling - of your proud white frosty nation and attempting to preserve local cultural traditions and historical figures of anti-imperial rebellion. (This is not to assume that there is a very messy hinterland between these two tendencies.)

Fourth, it is because that gesture - the reaction toward neoliberal integration - is abortive/aborted that it needs to be brought forth. A deep listening, one that goes past the irresponsible and ultimately banal national-racism, and a concern for the unrealized kernel that happens against the intentions of its creators is at stake. A perhaps translatable model, an apparatus of reading and willful reuse/misuse (the echoes of my salvagepunk thinking intended here).

Of course, in separating the wheat from the chaff, you need to know when all you have is a bundle of shit to be cast away and burned. Some things are, and should be, beyond recuperation.

Report non-humans

Down in LA for the week, after giving my Contra Mundum talk on Sunday. (Thanks to all who came and thanks to Mark, Alex, and the Mandrake having me down here.) Car-less in Westwood and trying to not be overly bilious at this organization of space, bodies, and lots and lots of capital.

I'll try to write something proper on return, analogous to an older post on Knoxville. In this case, when I travel somewhere and feel spatially ill at ease and find myself becoming, perhaps unfairly, a stereotypical hater of an LA ethos that I don't remotely know. In the meantime...

This image, unfortunately shit quality from my phone, and the horror of viral marketing snarkiness. In an era of city planning in which benches are rendered nearly unusable f0r any and all due to "anti-homeless" devices (various partitions, dividers, odd sweeping plastic contours, all designed to make sure that you sit upright and for god's sake don't sleep or slump, with the added effect of making public displays of bench affection quite difficult, something like the hysteria of anti-skateboarding measures, the "skate stoppers" that make it so handrails can't be used by those who might actually need them because of a worry that someone might "misuse" it), a jokey advertising campaign (seen here on just such a molded bench) for District 9 saying what it all really means and has meant from the start. And a man designated by the city for all intents and purposes as non-human, somehow interpellated in the worst way, sleeping next to the bench. The corrosive effects of supposed political critique on a landscape already scrubbed clean and stuccoed to hell.

"To intervene as workers"

Spread the word on the UC Faculty walkout and actions in solidarity. A first day in what will be a hot autumn of our making. Moving from simmering discontent to articulated resistance, calculated disruption, and antagonism against all those who have gotten rich off from gutting access to education and living wages.

Nothing personal

[Thoughts on the zombie apocalypse template kicked off by Night of the Living Dead, the construction of the tropes and clichés that show us what it looks like for the world to end at the hands and mouths of the stumbling dead.]

The orgy and the ecstasy

First and foremost is a spatial opposition that visually orients the zombie genre as a whole, between the domestic interior – or interiors that become sites of cobbled together domestic living – and the wilds of the outside, always trying to burst through the doors and windows. This produces, almost inevitably, the great money shot of the zombie film: the horror and ecstasy of one of the survivors getting dragged across the divide, screaming as he or she is welcomed into the arms and mouths of the waiting horde. Hence we get one of our era’s greatest fantasmatic images, of just giving up on the entire domestic sphere of responsibility and family values, just getting pulled “against my will” into the orgy of irrationality and swarm collectivity.

But no, in these films, a man’s house – or any house secure enough to hole up in – is indeed a castle, and a castle exists for protection and siege, for shoring up the splintered remains of a distinction between private spaces and public spaces, between zones for family bickering and zones for all-out war.

Unfortunately, things aren’t much safer inside. The consistent lesson across Romero’s films seems to be: what divides us from the them, the rational humans trying to survive from the zombie hordes? At least zombies won’t stab you in the back or constantly pull guns on you during an argument. Toward the later films, Land of the Dead in particular, they will learn how to pull guns, but there it is in the service of a developing solidarity the petty and hysterical living can only envy. (Not to mention the amazing moment when Bub, the semi-domesticated zombie of Day of the Dead, learns to wield a gun and looks like nothing so much as John Wayne, in the halting bowlegged shuffle gait: the zombie as honorable stoic old West hero, the undead last bastion of noble American masculinity.)

The humans, though, prove to be your real enemies, unpredictable, stressed, and cowardly, who, again and again, get everyone killed in trying to save their own skin. Romero’s films, like those of fellow social critic horror director John Carpenter, have been from the start about the clusterfuck that is group dynamics and a deep, lingering awareness of the damage we remain uniquely capable of inflicting on one another. It may be the zombies who we are supposed to shoot in the head, but that won’t be nearly so satisfying as blowing away the jerks who have been making the apocalypse so unpleasant and dangerous.

Family drama

Therein lies the darkest, and simultaneously most joyous, heart of the zombie film: the consummate bad faith of the savagery you’ve been wanting to inflict all along. It is bad faith because it veils the basic desire under the sign of necessity: I had to kill her, she was going to “turn”. It is the flowering misanthropy of everyday life, the common desire to just stop talking things through, to stop biting your tongue, to unload on your friends, neighbors, siblings, and parents. And even more, on the stranger, on the human body we don’t know.

This is analogous to the response to Columbine and other “random” public massacres: so much of the horror and shock was due to the eruption in “real life” of what was supposed to remain a secret communal fantasy of nastiness toward our fellow human. The point here is not that there are certain pathological populations who are the bearers of this wrong urge. The pathology is structural, shared by all social beings, or by all those who have successfully become good citizens and people, all who have learned that conflict and urges are mediated by and disseminated throughout all language and discourse, that massive horizontal net of rules and conventions. In this way, the zombie film lets us bares our open secret and celebrate in it, watch an endless sequence of strangers shot in the head, the audience cheering at particularly “good” kills.

However, it keeps this bloodlust on a tight leash, via that blind of necessity, and thereby replicating all the more the structures of what is and is not allowed. In a line repeated across the genre with minor variation, “that was before… nothing is the same anymore.” This is marshaled most often before or after killing a comrade/mother/friend who has been bit and may “turn.” The question it raises, obliquely, is how long you’ve been waiting to do this, before the zombie apocalypse gave you an excuse.

And apocalypse should be stressed here in its proper sense, as the revelation of the hidden. Namely, what is apocalyptic about the walking dead is what they reveals about the conditions of the living, the deep, rutted grooves of antagonism and violence, the seething undercurrents of anger and repression. The open secrets of an economic totality, at once the violence of abstraction (the brutal consequences of shifting patterns of valuation) and the abstraction of violence (this is just business, folks, nothing personal).

However, the zombie apocalyptic fantasy is that of a world in which just such abstraction is destroyed, producing all the utopian possibilities and ideological pitfalls of a world beyond value. In a desperate echo of salvagepunk, the world of zombie hordes is a radical contraction of what is desirable to possess: if it can’t kill, heal, feed, help escape, burn, or barricade, then it only slows you down. Exchange-value rots even faster than the bodies, leaving behind objects in their naked utility and hardness.

Yet the vision of the zombie apocalypse is never a post-apocalyptic vision, not a single event and revelation out of which we regroup and attempt to rebuild. Rather, they are the mapping and figuring of apocalyptic duration, the crisis that will not quit and the ceaseless work of slaughter, partition, burying, and moving on. So too the content of the revelation, the hidden re-revealed again and again, from the deep inheritances of racial and class prejudice to lingering models of erotic possession and familial structure, from the deep and cathartic pleasures of corporal savagery to the sinking realization it was never the zombies who made this world unlivable. They just give the subjectless catastrophe of this century a necrotic, yearning form.

And on and on and on

In the fundamental non-progression of this apocalypse, stuck and skipping like a record, doomed – like the genre itself – to mutely repeat what we have known all along against our intended ignorance, the full recognition and mobilization of what has been revealed remains impossible. This is both on the level of the diagetic content of the films – what’s going on in their worlds – and the films themselves: in neither case can anyone get past the personal. The trauma is of the species itself, but the survivors – and the supposed critique internal to the films – cut themselves off at the knees by their resolute inability to think anything close to totality. To hearken back to the “missing question” of transmission, they lack the capacity – or, more frequently, refuse the consequences of such a thought – to fathom how the global transmits to the local.

As such, one faces two options. You can abandon whatever community to which you temporarily belong and get the hell out of town, preferably to the wilds of Canada (the deeply reactionary end of Land of the Dead) or a Carribean island (the oddly unconvincing end of Day of the Dead). Or you refuse to keep moving and establish your stronghold, whether mall, house, bunker, farm, prison, or factory. (A zombie apocalypse scenario set in a factory doesn’t exist, to my knowledge. But it really should: something like a Meyerhold gasworks drama meets The Grapes of Death.) Which essentially means, given the less than rosy view of what we do to each other, staying in one place long enough for the worst tendencies of the human animal, post-capitalism, to come out. Therein the deep social nihilism of the genre: stay with a group of other survivors, and soon you won’t be a survivor, falling victim to what inevitably happens when you’re trapped in one house with too many guns and an entire social order worth of antagonism.

Above all, the films institute a cycle of passages between these visions of fixity and flight. Their texture and tempo is precisely this gap: one gets to rest, but only uncertainly, with the awareness that the idyll is a calm before a storm that never stops. And just as these passages are stunted, thrown off course and kilter, rendered hectic and abortive, the passages of thought from base to superstructure are themselves messy and precise in their failure.

Recognition

It is because we don’t get a proper realism or cognitive mapping that zombie films better capture the logic of the times, that same almost-thought to be elevated over the closure of facile critique. The work of sharper critique and understanding, of making sense of what has been revealed and what is still hidden in plain sight, is forced into this position of the itinerant, the unwelcome guest forever pulling up stakes at gunpoint. The gun, here, is the inertia of the past, the savage insistence of the old roles and rules. That constant refusal to admit that things have changed, No, the government will come, there must be a rational explanation for this, we aren’t the kind of people who do this, coupled with the permanent flight, both in thought and action: we need to keep moving. All those forms of resistance that foreclose the possibility of real resistance, all the mental and social immobility that ends where it starts, back in the arms of the dead.

The autonomy of the apolitical

Creative destruction, in its distinctly non-Bakunin version

A few related comments of autonomous zones, ecological concerns, and the aesthetics of occupation.

First, a discussion over at Frugal Me that my attacks on pseudo-salvage ideology provoked, at least in part. And more so given that the owner of a company I singled out (mostly for its typicality and its laying bare of the trumpeting eco-pretensions underpinning much of the "green" commodity market, not for being particularly green-evil) got involved. He seems like a thoughtful guy, albeit one I disagree with on many things. You can read the back and forth in the comments there.

However, I think these issues are thought better in a wider context, one raised by Owen in his quite good account of the two fairs, the fun-fair and the Climate Camp. Furthermore, in a dark - or rather day-glo fur and neon body-paint - mirror of the bastard child of the Climate Camp and the fun camp, the Burning Man festival is going on in the States right now. Indeed, that might just be the bridge between that two of ethics and jouissance, of the community of the like-minded (the bonded group of the eco-minded) and the occasional group (the heterogeneous mish-mash of all those who come to the fair, whether to watch antiquated machines hurl tweens around or to smell funnel cake). Or, it might be that bridge if the way it is talked about wasn't such an unholy hybrid of messianic fervor and the fetid remnants of hippiedom.

Two men enter (with foam swords), two men probably leave

That is actually a shame, because taken on its own terms (and not as a scalable exercise in autonomous political/social zones), there is much to celebrate there, mostly, the real ingenuity, construction, and non-work time that goes into making the art works/bicycles made to look like titanium unicorns shooting confetti out of the horn. My neighbors are devoted Burning Man types, and I've been genuinely impressed by how much work they've done to make a giant human hamster wheel. And while my impulse is at times to say, fuck, you could have built housing for the homeless with that much effort, I'll support efforts toward the production of the frivolous as long as it escapes the logic of leisure time as the mere shadow of the working day, as Adorno claims, rather snarkily, about the D.I.Y. fad. And indeed, even the "creative destruction" of the objects - again, an odd mirror for the autophagic creative destruction of capital in crises of overproduction/underconsumption - is something I could get behind. Not the form that my Dionysian impulse takes, but go for it. Personally, I will never go. Living in Santa Cruz is already too much of the Burning Man ethos for me. I like my countercultural impulses with more black, grime, and bile, on one end, and the razor sweep of the modern, on the other. (And, lastly, they do have, at Burning Man, a very serious Thunderdome. Which I can get very much behind. Perhaps they will let Dominic bring a locally sourced lightsaber.)

However, it is the fetishization of a deep, utopian content that betrays all that, particularly taking the form of "it's an economy without money, mutual aid, just people sharing." No, it is the appearance of such, and not least because you have to buy a ticket (from about $200 on up, it seems) and because people bring supplies that they already purchased. (That's like saying that you and your friends live free of the money form because you all buy groceries separately, and then sometimes have a potluck.)

The point of all this is that we should consider two forms of appearance of TAZs (temporary autonomous zones) as a way of considering both their political usefulness and the harder question of: do they want the world to look like this? There is, first, the appearance that is concerned with a fantasmatic microcosm image of how the world should look, ranging from the powerfully collective (modes of group housing and eating, genuine forms of skill sharing and mutual aid) to the goofy and inane (naked dancing with feathers glued to your ass, pissing on hay bales to "rural it up a bit," the misrecognition of how money spent is money spent). Such a model should be rejected, not because some of things done are silly or a waste of time. Rather, because it inevitably falls into the problem of representation, of how you are perceived by those not involved (those fucking kooks), of how you perceive your own involvement (does the presence of such kooks necessarily invalidate the real radical work we are trying to do?), and of what such a zone "represents" in the face of a capitalist totality (a welcomed subtraction of those for whom the government must provide social services and, more than that, find jobs in the long downturn period of the general crisis of manufacturing and overproduction).

Ssangyong factory occupation

The second kind of appearance, the one crucial to our strategy, is that of appearance as tactic, as a weapon of negation, in which how one appears - as a TAZ - does not "represent" anything about how we think the world should look, at least in a direct micro to macro telescoping. The model here would be factory (or other) occupations that do not say, "camping out in our workplace and defending it against the police is a desired model of the world to come." (Although, in a unsettling sense, it is perhaps a far more accurate depiction of what the zones and spaces of resistance will continue to look like for quite a while.) The TAZ is propaganda, in the best form, a sort of spatial shock troops who might prove not that we could live like this but we could stop living like this. How to live otherwise, to live beyond capitalism, is to be determined elsewhere, in hard discussions and innovated practices of everyday life. But here is a way to hasten that end, through forcible, non-scalable autonomy that knows itself and its enemy better.

Or find drinking water by collecting morning dew in human skulls

Are Violent Video Games Adequately Preparing Children For The Apocalypse?

Slice of apocalyptic talking heads news show parody brilliance. Well, not an apocalyptic talk show, per se. That I would really pay to watch: an irradiated Glenn Beck taken down by shotgun wielding partisan survivors who have taken over the Fox studios as a stronghold.

For the sun or for tear gas

Like so much else of global importance, the Honduran "coup" was only able to hold American media and public attention for a fleeting flood of images and misinformation. The situation has not quietly gone away. Go read Joseph Shansky's account of conditions on the ground, of continued resistance and repression.

Gnawing at the air

It is now a commonplace for theorists and critics to elevate zombie films, along with their other gory brethen of splatter and dismemberment oriented film, for telling us something new about the "real." (Or, when those who read psychoanalysis get their/our hands on them, the "Real.") As in the following:

- The primal "real", some deep reptilian urges that get to return in all their anti-Rousseau fury, tearing away at living bodies like very ignoble savages.

- The thought of zombies as a kind of meta return of the repressed, the "Real" of contemporary life that cannot be included in the dominant symbolic order: a loopy perverted death drive whose cannibalism parodies the drives to excess consumption, thereby making the zombies mindless consumers or pitiless capitalists snatching up the weak, depending who you ask.

- What's "really" going on, the zombies as manifestations of racial, class, and gender conflict, as well as registering the anxieties and resistances to contemporary events.

- The forbidden, visceral, abject real of the body, the getting to see all the bloody bits brought to the surface, the abstract spirit of the mind rendered into just one more pile of succulent warm nutrition. Spirit is not a bone, it is the juicy bits encased within bone.

Fair enough. But our interest is in a different set of reals that map onto the particularity of what the figure of the zombie does and how it is positioned, uncertainly, in the mass culture of capitalism. Namely, it thinks how real abstractions work on real bodies, of the nastiest intersections of the law of value and the law of inevitable decay.*

And more specifically, it thinks this via two central concerns:

reanimation (transmission)

consumption (hunger)

In each pairing, the latter term is not the underlying cause, contrary to appearances. Romero-zombies are not reanimated because of infectious transmission of a "zombie disease" from the bite of a zombie, at least not until we get to the recent 28 Days Later model. They are reanimated because the world has changed in a way we can't determine. (How did the dead get the message to rise up? And why weren't we informed?) And they do not eat because of "hunger", in any physiological way: think here of the remarkable moment in Day of the Dead where Dr. Logan has removed all the vital organs of the vivisected zombie to watch it still strain to tear the flesh from his hands, its grashing teeth clamping down again and again on the air...

Rather, the latter term is the asubjective truth of the activity: it is the obscure center of a thought that exceeds what a zombie does or does not do, not verified by the reason why an individual subject, albeit necrotic and "without reason", acts a certain way. Hunger decoupled from the act of sating hunger, and transmission that we cannot trace. Each is the absent cause produced by the activity: precisely because it is not the reason for doing these things (the dead rising and the dead eating the living), it is raised in relief, the strange shadow undergirding and blackly illuminating the deeper workings of a totality. It is the point of the whole enterprise, from yawning graves to gnawing meat, precisely because it is missing from it. For what is hunger at its barest and most obscene if not a consumption that cannot end, for the very fact that it was never caused by hunger in the first place?



* I'm leaving out here a much longer, and rather theoretically dense, account of the relationship between cultural objects and real abstractions. It'll be in the much extended version of these thoughts in the book. If interested, search "real abstraction" on the blog to find my other discussions of it - there are far more than there need be.

Through the motions, wrongly

Unsettled beginnings

Romero's Night of the Living Dead (1968), the real launching point of zombies in mass culture, is one of those odd "foundational" films. It has its antecedents, to be sure, in three major strands. First, the voodoo inflected zombies of Victor Halperin's White Zombie (1932), Jacques Torneurs's I Walked with a Zombie (1943), and the shoddy knock-offs of both (i.e. the remarkable/awful Zombies on Broadway from 1945). Second, and more directly in terms of inspiring what Romero was "trying to do," Richard Matheson's 1954 novel I Am Legend. (This would also include Ubaldo Ragona's 1964 film adaptation, The Last Man on Earth, in which we watch a survivor defend a house against hordes of the invading undead, perhaps the most common image across zombie movies.) Third, a tangled mess of aesthetic influences that give the film its distinct look: film noir lighting, Psycho-era Hitchcock camera angles, news reel footage, art-house discontinuous cutting and spatial disorientation, and the basic fact of doing the whole thing for very, very little money, and hence having the look at times dictated by what was available. All that said, Night of the Living Dead represents a shot in the dark: excepting the third strand of all the formal and aesthetic elements cobbled together, it is a notable, singular film, in just how far it goes in leaving behind those antecedents.

But like other horror films that seemingly start a trope (Nosferatu, Frankenstein, etc), they are already weirder and more sharply knowing about their absent source material than they "should" be: they seem to play with and off of an established template that cannot be found.* In other words, they are the films that themselves establish the rules of the game, from the "look" of the film, the kinds of stock characters and settings, broad tones and set moves, and the effect they are aim to have on the audience. Yet at the same time, they are already screwing around with those very rules: they define a genre by the way that they "misread" source material that wasn't there, at least not in any immediately accessible direct lineage way.

In other words, like other films that inaugurate endless series of imitators, spin-offs, reloads, mash-ups, and sequels, the "original" is original largely because it nails something about "what we've seen before" and know very well. What is new it articulates via the inherited tropes and moves of the old: the inherited language of film conventions eases us in and makes even that which we've never seen before seem familiar, well-worn, and expected. Conversely, what seems recognizable immediately, the "ah, yes, here we go again", is precisely the point of immediate departure into the uncertain, where it turns and goes the wrong way. Fittingly for the film that starts "the zombie film" per se, the uncanny and unsettling happens because something "goes through the motions" wrongly, just like the zombie's obscene parody of the movements and habits of everyday life. What the zombie film in particular offers, both in its content and in its relation to other films, is that the minor gap between the inertia of expected behavior or patterns and the yearning pull - affective, physiological, or historical - in another direction is that very gap, that crack in the totality of a system, through which the unwanted pour in.

Outside, looking in

Think here of the beginning of Night of the Living Dead, where the first zombie we see - the first recognizable zombie of late capitalism - looks like nothing so much as a homeless drifter of sorts, a gaunt raggedy man. Tellingly, Barbara and Johnny, her soon-to-be-killed-and-zombified brother, hardly pay him a second glance: at worst, he'll ask them to spare some change. He is not marked as undead, at least not in the technical sense. Just as unwanted. Therein lies the explosion out of and against the accepted codes of who we recognize and who we don't: the zombie's furious attack, which here has nothing to do with trying to eat them, is the feral assertion of the right to be noticed. Even to the end of the encounter, we can practically read on Johnny's face the bourgeois frustration: funny, it's not usually this hard to kill the poor...



* This approach to genre-defining horror films is entirely indebted to Marsh Leicester, whose way of thinking about these odd lineages inflects my thinking throughout this project.

Grave lessons

May 68 poster

Where the Situationist International and zombies meet. Our trajectory through the buried politics of the undead might start here with the bloodied, one-eyed glare of the accusing, raised up to get beaten down again, the endless cycle of not being allowed to die and being blamed for that fact. Not the campy schlock of the mass moaning "brains..." but the quiet rage and planning of the group in formation. Bourgeois, you have understood nothing, and we have some things to teach you. The collective pedagogy of those beyond the pale.

Horrors: Day of the Dead

Given that I'm stuck in zombie writing mode, I'm hijacking the direction of the group for the next two weeks and derailing us off werewolves. Therefore...

Day of the Dead, from '85. Third in the Romero series. Sure many of you have seen it, but it's odder, sadder, and weirder than often remembered. The military industrial underground complex. Bub the pseudo-domesticated zombie. The apocalypse that doesn't ever quite transition to post-apocalyptic. Infighting, petty squabbles, "friendly" fire, and all the other things we do to help hasten the end of our days.

Wednesday, my house, 8:30.

The city of the dead in the city of quartz

It is time to move on toward zombies. The long trek through The Bed Sitting Room finished (and the salvagepunk chapter of which that reading is a part), the next uneven apocalypse in question is that incessant figure of recent years, the horde of the walking dead. The transition, as it were, from robbing history's graves to those who rob their own graves.

Perhaps appropriately, I'm quite sick of zombie culture in its total market saturation: as a particularly dominant form of the general obsession with all things undead, from the Twilight-and-Hot-Topic-ing of tweens to the phrase "zombie apocalypse" entering the broad conversational sphere, it stands as the supreme image of managed viral "underground" culture. The shambling crowd of unmentionables like so many tap-dancing LOL cats.

As such, and hopefully without the petty feeling of betrayal because "I was a fan from the beginning and now they've sold out," I'll try and draw out both the peculiar ideological formation underpinning this mass image, and the aspects of the zombie, as a recurrent image extending back toward the apex and subsequent collapse of Fordism, that resist this contemporary formation. Or, at the least, that remains capable of stripping the veil from the supreme nastiness, bad faith, and willful misconception of the world order on which undead-centered culture hinges without admitting it.

And, on a related note, I'll be heading down to LA to give a talk (and DJing a set of "related" post-apocalyptic music) on these very issues. Come join, or if you know anyone who lives in LA and would like to watch me try to explain the connections between the quivering wings of dead pinned butterflies and the fear of never being able to clock out from work, spread the word.

Knocked down without the option (The Bed Sitting Room notes, part 4)

[part 1 here, part 2 here, part 3 here]

The long trek

This possibility of becoming an object or animal and thereby escaping the shittiness of being human in this post-apocalyptic world, becomes desirable in response to two conditions.

The still-birth room

First, the end of the sexual reproduction, the No Future birth crisis resulting from both radioactive sterility/mutation and, more importantly, the refusal of the prospective mother, Penelope, to bring her baby into this "wicked world." She carries "little Rupert" around in her for 17th months rather than birth him to this life, and he is born still-born - or murdered - at the hands of the National Health Service. This issue of post-apocalyptic birth crisis is a huge one, both here (of the three women we see alive, two are post-menopausal, and the third isn't sure she wants to even be a mother) and throughout the scattered examples of the genre. For the moment, we defer the issue: it is better addressed elsewhere, in a different context (zombies and overproduction, posts on this to follow in the near), and it is arguably the least interesting aspect of The Bed Sitting Room's apocalyptic imaginings, functioning as the sort of non-option magically restored at the end.

The second condition, the one around which this investigation has been circling, is the constancy of movement and the inability to resettle. These are neither the hardy survivors clinging tooth and nail to a last outpost, nor hardscrabble settlers starting anew in a Mad Max outback. Scattered across the space of ex-London with as much care as the rest of the refuse and broken things, those who were situated leave those spaces (the traincar, the bunker) to join the rest of the permanently itinerant. It is only when Lord Fortnam becomes a bed sitting room that this changes.

The bed sitting room to be drags himself toward Paddington

It is not incidental that this transformation gives the film its title, for the bed sitting room itself is the center of its arc, the site of hope, and the casualty of ruling order's destruction of that hope. If salvagepunk represents an attempt to think lost social relations via relations to discarded objects, in this version, we witness this process in reverse, in a very particular way: the social parasite - the aristocratic Lord Fortnam who slept blissfully through the Bomb - becomes a site of ultimate use-value, shelter from the nuclear storm. In becoming object, he becomes the direct inversion of his social role (the one who stands above the poor and their need for temporary housing) in the material form of a site for collective social relations, for (in a bad and literal pun) post-nuclear families to take shape.

Not that he is happy about this in the least. We meet him far before his long march, when he visits the doctor to complain that he is worried of what he suspects is his imminent transformation.

"Get your hands out of my drawers!"

(In this he differs very much from the mother, who seems relieved to become a cabinet, insofar as it lets her rest for a minute, as well as becoming a sexually desirable "thing" again: the great "get your hands out of my drawers, I'm a mother" joke as well as the later sounds of pleasure as the long-suffering doctor steps inside of her.)

Lord Fortnam, on the other hand, is rather frightened and quite pissed-off by the prospect, as in the following exchange with the doctor on what he can "take" for his condition of becoming a place of lodging.

"What can I take for it?"
"Three guineas."
"Three guineas."
"Three guineas… for your rent."
"Rent! I… I don’t want rent! I want to be cured!"

Even after his transformation, he remains a bristly curmudgeon, reluctant to accept not only the fact that he is a lodging for the poor but that he stands in what would have been the Paddington borough ("That’s pretty bad news, I’m afraid. Paddington."), a zone not up to the aristocratic standards of the ex-lord. In response, he demands: "Put a card in the window. No coloreds. No children. And definitely no colored children."

Red sky at morning

But in spite of these protestations, these lingering poisons of the old social hierarchy, the bed sitting room is a constitutive break in the logic of this self-repeating, self-consuming world of the nearly dead. While the characters speculate that Lord Fortnam's disappearance might be the result of the "first act of post-war murder", what we see instead is the first act of settling. Echoing the Mao and PM treaty to fix the rent of the apartment, this is co-habitation beyond money, a dismantling of the structures of rentier capital that freeze wealth into a site for the constant bleeding of wages from the already destitute. The doctor's response to finding the lord as bed sitting room - "I’d recognize you anywhere, my lord. I must say it suits you” - is at once a jab at the idiotic pride of the lord and the mark of a genuine move forward: what suits the lord now is the total unmaking of what that would have meant, not via an act of purgative destruction but by an act of construction. Nuclear or magical it may be, but it is nevertheless an immobile outpost for life above ground, a solid point of resistance in the wind-swept open expanse, opposed to the pocket underworlds of bunkers and subways we've seen so far.

In other words, a new topology in its barest, shoddiest incarnation, a fixed node that can't "keep moving" and around which a community could crystallize. Or, at the very least, around which something like a community could even start to be thought again. The New, here, is far from utopian, or at least in its form of positing an other world. It is simply taking the world - and "taking the room" - as it is, settling for and settling down.

However, while this approximates a crucial sense of the salvagepunk aesthetic (taking the dead world as it is), it also cuts back against it, in a willful betrayal of this possibility that comes to fruition in the deep dystopian core of the "happy ending" that is anything but. For what we see here in the bed sitting room itself is a tendency caught between, on one hand, the idea of making do with what cannot be undone, colonizing better, and settling down, and, on the other, the fantasy of creation out of nothing, out of starting totally anew, a birth of life and light, the transformation of the species, the new in all its messianic eschatology of the world (and its occupants) becoming unlike itself.

The bomb, redux

The deep intelligence of the film lies in recognizing not just the hard work of salvage but the extreme difficulty of holding out one's right to the ruins of the old world against a political order quick to snatch up any advances, any new models, any new knowledge produced from below. It requires not just the innovations of those barely scraping by but the destruction of those innovations, their energy and kernels of new thought blasted apart and swallowed into the rhetoric and administration of the ruling class. Concretely, in The Bed Sitting Room, you wait for the wandering poor to learn how to settle down before destroying their settlement. And you wait for them remember the Bomb for you before you become the embodiment and inheritor of what the Bomb means.

In this case, it takes the form of following through on the doctor's warning to the lord/bed sitting room: “try not to look conspicuous or you’ll be knocked down without the option”. In a rather hectic sequence, our raving bunker pervert is talking about the salvational properties of "the rubber" before concluding, “that’s why He dropped the bomb!”. Immediately following the vocalization of "the bomb", those two unspeakable syllables, a flurry of shots, in which each character, tenuously or with a rising joy, repeats: the bomb?

At this very moment, the wrecking ball of the police bulldozer smashes through the wall of the bedsitting room. Panic ensues, as the Bomb (the memory of the total, anonymous destruction of the nation) becomes the willful Bomb (the fact of the conscious destruction of what was built without the sanction of those who claim to rule). And then this exchange, starting with the booming voice of Lord Fortnam, cutting through the melée.

LORD FORTNAM: "Stop. Stop. Stop in the name of the Lord."
POSTMAN: “It’s God. He’s come back on us. Good, good old mate. For he’s a jolly good fellow. He’s a socialist, you know.”
LORD FORTNAM: "Quiet, labor scum.”
POSTMAN: "Ah! He’s… he’s a bleeding conservative!”
DOCTOR: "Now hold on a minute, you don't sound like God, you sound like Lord Fortnam!"
LORD FORTNAM: “I also, I uh, I also do impressions”

This is followed by various pleas for God to save them from "the dreadful radiation", to give back her dead child, and to be saved generally, with the promise of giving up atheism. After further confusion, the "real" voice of God steps in: the floating police inspector, to whose first words the doctor responds, “That’s God. I recognize the voice.” (Of interest here, among other things, is that if anyone is to step in to the role of the new God, it will not be the icon of the old social order. It can only be the voice of the post-apocalyptic sadists we have heard from the start, waiting for the rest to remember so he, and the emergent biopolitical regime, can claim to be what everyone was waiting for all along.)

The face of things to come

The speech he gives - arguably the high point of the film's already razor-edged writing - needs to be included here in full. The full brunt and cut of British late 60's satire - from Monty Python's Flying Circus to Steptoe and Son - deploys here, pitch perfect in both its nastiness and tone of the sort of things we hear all too often.

I expect you may be wondering why I’ve invited you all here this afternoon. I’ve just come from an audience with Her Majesty, Mrs Ethel Shroake, and I’m empowered by her to tell you that, in the future, clouds of poisonous nuclear fog will no longer be necessary. Mutations will cease sine die and, furthermore, I’m the bringer of glad tidings. A team of surgeons at the Woolwich hospital have just accomplished the world’s first successful complete body transplant. The donor was the entire population of South Wales, and the new body is functioning normally. I, myself, saw it sit up in bed, wink, and ask for a glass of beer.

All in all, I think we’re in for a time of peace, prosperity and stability, when the earth will burgeon forth anew, the lion will lie down with the lamb, and the goat will give suck to the tiny bee.

At times of great national emergency, you’ll often find that a new leader tends to emerge. Here I am - so watch it.

Keep moving, everybody, that’s the spirit! Keep moving!


There is more here than can be digested without somehow capturing just how it feels to hear these words at the end of watching the film, triumph, disgust, bile, and laughter. We can, nevertheless, draw out a couple points to situate this within, and largely against, the salvagepunk strain of post-apocalyptic thought. This speech itself is an apocalypse, the third of the film (the first and second being the nuclear war and the Bomb, respectively), for it is the revelation of the hidden, the laying bare of the not-so-covert violence of coercion with a more vicious sense of what had been out of view, namely, that this was managed from the start. The post-apocalyptic crisis as the willful creation of a condition to wear down the resistance of the last remnants of the old and the excuse to smash up the first remnants of a different new order, the gaping hole of the bed sitting room. The management of the "necessary," the declaration of a "national emergency", even when there is nothing of the nation left beyond that very emergency: is there no better vision of this state of exception, of claiming extrajuridical power, than this form of defending the nation against the already existent fact of the nation's total destruction?

On top of that, biopolitics removes its facade and show itself, the full horror of calculating the value of lives. Echoing Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal, here we find an entire population recombined into a single body, a fact calculated both to represent the moving forward of the world from here (if not birth, then Frankensteinean undead life out of the assemblage of corpses) and to make clear what kind of world it's going to be: if too conspicuous, you'll be knocked down, if not conspicuous enough to matter in the global order, you'll be hacked up to make one new post-apocalyptic citizen.

New birth, now with no waiting period

On top of that, the hyperfecundity of the new order, the hybrid laying with each other forming the backdrop for the sudden birth of a new child for Penelope and Alan. Foreshadowing where we'll go with zombies, this is a world both of the possibilities of overpopulation (the teeming spheres of the babies "out of nothing", in zones that cannot support them) and of the false necessity of total decimation. Whatever threads of salvagepunk that remain at the end of the film - which is the cynical tale of what we lose when we agree to let ourselves be told what the apocalypse means - are a resistance to, and deep suspicion, of this world. Salvagepunk is a kicking back against these visions of the rational management of life and death, of the industrial subcurrents hidden behind state care and humanitarian interventions. It is a different cartography of the already dead not even buried, surfaces we forget only if we stay below ground.

Walking off to walking off to the sunset

Cruellest of all: Keep moving, everybody, that’s the spirit! Keep moving! Where walking off toward the sunset means walking away from the only real hope for life. This is repetition compulsion not of the pathological individual but of History itself, the obscene brutality of doing it over and over: “Great Britain is a first-class nuclear power again.” And so, like the Mad Max trilogy and like so much of salvagepunk, the deep, wracking sadness of knowing what will be forgotten and who will die, a feedback loop of rotting waste piling high toward the sky, too often overwhelms the adversarial role of salvage we have been advocating, the productive, innate-venom-releasing work of organizing minds, bodies, and needs better through sharper relations to the past.

It is a problem, ultimately, of what mode of "the negative" we use. Salvagepunk is fundamentally a negative - thought here not in the affective sense but in its relationship to what is given - operation, even at its moment of construction, because it deals with non-wholes. The goal is never the restoration of a positive entity, but rather an assemblage of negatives: cast out by the system or, in the longer task of montage, cut out to be put together otherwise. To celebrate the given and inherited by doing necessary violence to it. It is always haunted, to be sure, by a bad negativity of grey sadness, just staring blankly at the piles refuse yet never refusing.

Yet that is a risk to be run, given that the affirmation of the positive is decisively the side of the enemy, the often asubjective structures giving shape to regimes and their historical moment. The positive, as we see it in The Bed Sitting Room and in the ruling ideologies of late capitalism, is at once a rejection of the New in favor of preserving (and restoring) an old social order that has seemingly been lost in the rubble , and a defense of the New (as the ongoing process of making new whole beings out of nothing) as the thing to be restored. In other words, the New as restoration itself (what is new is "new leader" emerging, the police inspector's face as the guarantor of going back to how things used to be), and the restoration of the New (the orders of domination are restored by a biopolitical and messianic language and practice of newness, from the earth burgeoning forth anew and babies created out of the air, to the era of new peace and new nuclear power status). "Progress" means making one whole positive body out of the severed corpses of an entire population, burying the work of negation under the fantasy of the "transplant", of the metamorphosis of the undifferentiated into a single positive entity. The body politic made singular and manageable.

Salvage turned against itself: the ruling order learns its aesthetic lessons

Even the sublime gag of Mrs. Ethel Shroake, the closest relative to the queen, awkwardly astride a horse beneath an arc de triomphe of debilitated washing machines cannot fully mitigate this sense of defeat. Our graveside smile is one thing, the prospect of halting the ceaseless graveyard march another. Salvagepunk knows damn well that the issue is not to stop repeating and to fall into the logic of the enemy, the logic of the New restoration. The question is, has been, and will be how to repeat differently, how to make from the broken same the livelier constructs of something other.

We do it again. And again. And again. (Or, how the porn industry describes a national strike)

Larry Flynt calls for a national strike in a surprisingly eloquent and bilious editorial, ranging from populist resentment toward "economic royalists", historically situated attacks on financial regulation, and lucid rejection of Obama-support. Who thought that the Hustler kingpin would be a voice in our corner, demanding we bring back the clarity of politics being about the struggle between the ruling class and the rest of us? Let alone calling for putting the "refresh the tree of liberty with the blood of patriots and tyrants" option back on the table.

"Let's set a date. No one goes to work. No one buys anything. And if that isn't effective -- if the politicians ignore us -- we do it again. And again. And again."

If the fact that he has moved from calling, somewhat jokingly, for a porn industry bailout to pushing this serious proposal is not an auspicious sign of more radical forms of solidarity to come in our time, I don't know what is. First time farce, second time anger and resolve.