Dear comrades at the University of California,
We wish to express our support for your endeavor. As the current crisis of capitalism attempts to reconfigure its ability to impose its social forms upon our varying situations, we cannot help but recognize that its utilization and manipulation of educational systems is no exception. Such an attack, whereby the stable reproduction of capital remains the incentive for developing education, is ipso facto of an international character, and thus our response to these assaults must also be fortified with an international character.
It must be recognized however, that the quality and maneuvering of our responses will always be contingent upon the specified manner in which we find ourselves deprived of an adequate and active relationship with knowledge, and of the social organizations which might cultivate such a relation. Thus, while our struggles might resonate differently with one another, and the strategies utilized therein of a diverse arsenal, they simultaneously find common voice as the practical negation of a society dominated by commodity production.
Our point of departure remains this resonance, this ability to recognize one another as subject to the same global processes of transforming education into a system producing mere conduits of unrealized exchange value. With the impotence of a singular strategy out of our way, it is the construction and development of our global and diffuse networks of resistance that offer a defense to the imposition of capitalist normalization. Our plurality remains our strength, if for only its promise and potential trajectory of coalescence.
As our own occupation at the Universitat de Barcelona, and of course others across the globe demonstrates, eviction, whether externally or internally inflicted, always remains a possibility. The recent arrests in Santa Cruz are exemplary of this risk. But it is from our common solidarity that we are able to wage war against these attempts to derail our efforts.
We also wish to express our understanding of the limited capacities of this letter of support. Solidarity cannot exist within the circumscription of spectatorship and while we write now to demonstrate our affinity with your struggle, and of course while understanding the importance of such a correspondence, our real solidarity, that is, a solidarity which acts as a material force against our common enemies, resides in our determination to continue with our own struggle. It is from your own actions however, that our perseverance gathers a strength, which in turn makes our mangled era tremble.
In solidarity,
La Rimaia
Postscript
“La Rimaia” is a social project in a squatted building in the centre of Barcelona. This so-called “free university” is an endeavor by a group of activists to create an alternative teaching-learning environment.
The activists behind the project previously squatted the historic building of the University of Barcelona as part of the student movement fighting the implementation of the Bologna Process in Catalonia. The students’ international commission has superseded its previous form and has risen, much like a phoenix, to set fire to everything and build an international network of people willing to fight for an emancipating education.
They are not extensions of the capitalist injunction to consume. Or if they are, not because “purchasing unnecessary shit to bolster your social capital is like becoming part of a roving horde of undead cannibals.” To be sure, the real linkage is that of non-necessity. In the Romero vision of zombies, they physiologically need to eat like we physiologically need a certain brand of jeans: not at all. But the analogy ends here. For their consumption is not the will to possess, the momentary grasp of the New in the form of the passing fashion. It is a mode of consuming that is against all ownership, against exchange value, against reification, against representation itself. [1]
Allegorically, they are both the dream and nightmare of the ruling class, the motor that turns the gears of the system and the rotting wrench forced into those gears. In an era of overproduction and overcapacity, when they are both too many workers and too many factories, what are zombies if not the total fantasy of “creative destruction”, of clearing the ground of the dead weight of outmoded industry? Provided, of course, that the living eventually rid themselves of the pesky undead, the opportunities for growth, for rebuilding! As a character in the oddball Italian zombie film Nightmare City puts it, “It’s part of the vital cycle of the human race. Create and obliterate until we destroy ourselves.” Well, perhaps not “the human race,” but we know for certain that this economic regime cannot function without the cyclical destruction of whole swathes of productive capacity. Recalling our earlier discussion of the sadism of false necessity, the zombies serve another crucial function: they are the crisis which allows for powers that be to declare a “state of emergency,” to suspend the normal channels of legislation and to bring about drastic changes (the barricading of cities to “foreigners,” forms of martial law, etc). And as with the false necessity of but I had to, she was going to turn…, we should ask here: sure, but for how long were you waiting for the excuse to do these things?
And yet… even in that vision of creative destruction, of being the accidental tool of the order against which you rage, helping them do a bit of necessary clearing to allow growth and being the excuse to restructure the social order, the center on which the fantasy of the zombie hinges is the horror of that which cannot quit. For what has been trailing along but missing, hinted at but rarely brought forth, in our analysis should be obvious by now: it’s about labor. It’s never been about consumerism gone bad, but the lost heritage of the zombie film to be necromanced, the horror from the Haitian origins, of being forced to work, of the obscene truth of the “free labor” contract of capitalism, of knowing that I’ve never had a choice, that “choosing” to see one’s labor is a particularly nasty illusion of free will. If the surplus-life nightmare of zombies sticks with us, fascinates, and disturbs, it is because what has been brought to its logical conclusion isn’t the vapid barbarism of the consuming classes but the buried antagonism of the labor relation, of a world order dragging us from our rest incessantly, to do what “must be done” yet for which we will be blamed. The infernal position of workers, cursed for doing wrong what can never be right.
To be clear, if recent zombie films have involved a certain betrayal of the Romero trajectory and its ability to think how the abstractions of totality messily affect the local, the Romero trajectory – and with it, the dominant line of zombie thought – is itself a betrayal of a history that could have been. This is the lost heritage of those forced to work, raised from the dead to do the compulsory bidding of a master, to labor indefinitely. Yet in this “betrayal,” a word that should perhaps be cast out, we can register a powerful shift, one that ultimately has fidelity to the core of the voodoo inflected zombie model. The particularity of that nightmare form is distinctly postcolonial, the deep existential horror of being a slave still or once more, even after death, and the recognition that relations of domination and subordination have distinct faces: someone is doing this to me, particular actions had to be taken by that individual in order to control me as the hollow remnant of an individual. Power is personal, and so too the antagonism on which it uncertainly rests.
The zombie film, from Romero on, derails this particular emphasis on forced labor [2], and with it, the closer connection of the zombie and the laborer (in favor of the zombie and the consumer), yet in doing so, it nails something else. Not that class antagonism and its attendant anxieties are “about” consumption now: those fears are the underbelly of an older period, of postwar boom and new sectors of society getting to purchase in ways never before available to them. Rather, if the later films symptomatically capture something of the particular anxieties of the emergent post-Fordist/post-capitalism’s-golden-years period, it has to do with those relations of domination. For what it approaches, however darkly, is an awareness that the problem of the age is no longer the horror of being controlled by a discernible master but the indecipherability of those relations of domination, the lack of discernible masters at whom to aim. While the voodoo-inflected zombie film recoils at the thought of being forced to assume a direction dictated by your master, the Romero mode remains troubled by lack of direction: my God, what if I’m doomed to not get anything done, other than some reprehensible cannibalism, and worse, what if there’s no one I can blame for this? The powerful capacity of the zombie film to approximate totality is a consequence – if it is to be located historically at all – of 1) the violent foreclosure of organized resistance to global capitalism by counter-revolutionary state action, 2) the related dissolution of working class power and the very idea of working class identity, and 3) the emergent new planet-spanning structure of flows of finance, information, and goods. To be sure, these are trendlines that gain shape only in hindsight, but it is no stretch to see the torsion and tension of these massive shifts in the cinema of the long 70’s into the 80’s. And nowhere more so in the zombie film, particularly when we don’t simply mean films in which the undead eat the living. [3]
But to get a sense of that lost history that roils beneath the surface of the films from this period on, absently present in the ecstatic splatterfests and dystopian grim allegories alike, we should turn to a remarkable other beginning, the British 1966 Plague of the Zombies. If we imagine the openings and closures of different traditions and lineages, this is one that both continues and reworks the Carribean roots of earlier zombie productions (White Zombie, I Walked With a Zombie) while also blazing a path that was not to be followed, one of overlapping modes of production, the literal return of the postcolonial repressed “brought home” to solve labor shortages, and a peculiarly British awareness of decorum, class, and general nastiness towards others. We are speaking of a film, after all, in which zombies work as tin miners.
Released two years before Night of the Living Dead, it shares little with that genre forger. It’s a period piece in brilliant color, complete with cadmium paint blood, diabolical squires, and the other trappings of the Hammer Studios films in that period (recognizable actors, plenty of cleavage, an insistence on telling fully fleshed out narratives, even while they collapse under the weight of their own contradictions). It is not a “siege” film, thereby lacking the spatial ordering of inside barricading/outside threat. And most crucially, it features non-accidental zombies that require the active efforts of individuals: there is no zombie holocaust here, no threat of it spreading beyond the small town.
To summarize very briefly: Sir James, a retired professor of medicine, receives a letter from his ex-pupil, Peter, telling him that strange things are going on in his Cornish village. Sir James and his daughter Sylvia go to the town, it becomes increasingly apparent that the vague plague is in fact the work of voodoo, a skill picked in Haiti up by the local Squire Hamilton, who rules over the area with an occult-ring bedecked fist. Conditions in his tin mine had become too dangerous to convince laborers to work there, hence he started killing off and resurrecting members of the working class to employ as shambling corpses who require a lot of whipping to get any work done. Things go from bad to worse: Peter’s wife Alice is killed, Sylvia falls under the voodoo command of Hamilton only to be saved at the last moment from becoming a (presumably) virgin sacrifice by her father and Peter bursting in. They escape, the zombies catch on fire (their voodoo dolls were burned elsewhere), attack and kill their controllers, the tin mine explodes.
From the start, Plague develops a world of barbed pleasures, of getting to respond to your daughter’s exhortations with, “I don’t know why I put up with you at all. I should have drowned you at birth.” Unlike the sadism of false necessity, this is a world in which antagonisms remain conversational, with each character hell-bent on not giving others the satisfaction of feeling as if their satisfaction or happiness matters. That is, of course, with the exception of the class hatred on which the film turns, posing a striated world of landed aristocracy, non-landed but quite comfortable aristocracy, upper middle class educated doctors trying their hand at village life, the various government and police functionaries of the town, the farmers and working class, colonial exports brought to serve as butlers and “voodoo drummers”, and the tin miner zombies. (One should ask, in all seriousness, how the film positions the last two categories, the black servants and the zombies, in terms of who is afforded more respect.) Yet while the film makes very apparent this hierarchy, it cannot – at least on the surface – deal with its implications without fleeing into a certain language of transhistorical human nature and of evil. Consider the early exchange between Sir James and Sylvia, after Sylvia has witnessed, with great displeasure, the goons of Hamilton hunting a fox.
SIR JAMES: “Men have always hunted.”
SYLVIA: “For food, yes, not for bloodlust.”
At that point in the film [4], we are intended to side with Sylvia, in supposing that there is indeed something qualitatively different here. Yet this difference is not that of new historical forms of cruelty and micro-barbarism. Rather, it is coded as a throwback to a blood-dimmed pastoral of aristocratic rule, of incontrovertible laws and superstition. If there is an explicit arc to the film, it is the movement toward Sir James’ position away from that of Sylvia: men kill because that’s what that do, but there are some who are pathological in what they do, in how they combine bloodlust with greed. And they do so because they missed the news about the Enlightenment and the solid rationality of the British middle class: they are brutes and haughty elites, superstitious fools and sadist perverts. The most explicit formations of class antagonism function in this way, as a battle between modernity and the bastions of country life. When Peter refuses – because he is unable – to give the villagers a satisfactory account of just what the hell is going on, he couches it in terms of a betrayal of his principles of scientific rationality: to give them a lie to appease them just wouldn’t be “good enough.” To which, in a moment that would likely elicit a cheer from not a few readers, one of the “working class” men responds, “You’re not good enough for us!” However, the champions of “local custom” hardly far better from our perspective. As given in the film, the range of their positions range from sullen anger and inability to question the social structure of the feudal/pastoral to the canny nastiness and calculation of those in positions of power, well aware that the world is changing but equally aware that capitalizing on it requires an insistence on preserving the status quo. As we are reminded, “This isn’t London,” and it is hard to grasp this as anything other than a condemnation. That said, similarly to Lucio Fulci’s brutal masterpiece, Don’t Torture a Duckling, Plague is largely about a battle between “modernity” (London/science) and “backwardness” (Cornish village/superstition) in which neither option appears worth saving, in which it is precisely the contagion, slippage, and fraught intersections between the two in which violence emerges most viciously.
What the film approaches, yet remains unable to fully comprehend, is the particularly capitalist – and distinctly not retrograde – nature of the wrongdoing. To be sure, Plague paints a world in which that edifice of landed gentry and all its social codes still has sway. But it is out of sync with the progress of time: the voyage to the Cornish village is a voyage to a backwater, an earlier organization of feudal life confronted with the peculiar new horrors of capitalist accumulation. (In this case, the grinding horror of knowing that just because a job is too dangerous for workers doesn’t mean that workers will not be forced to do it.) If one of our preoccupations here is the question of combined and uneven development/apocalypse, of overlapping regimes of production and accumulation, of pockets of Hell and infernal circuits of capital, Plague captures this out of the corner of its roaming eye. Literalizing all those vague allegories of undead labor, of the black magic of drawing forth value from nothing, of undermining the natural order in the name of profit, Hamilton’s “disgusting” enterprise is an oblique, parodic freeze-frame of a moment in the unfreezing of capital via advanced techniques, imported from afar and brought home to mine the heart of the empire.
This first becomes evident in the assumed opposition between science and superstition. In the bravely immoral new world of Hamilton, the rational calculations of profit margins and labor affordability turn to esoteric, “magical” means. It is the scientific application of non-scientific techniques: even Sir James, upon reading on voodoo methods in the priest’s library of occult volumes, declares that, “it’s all clearly scientifically stated.” The film here actually differs from a majority of “men of science vs. supernatural occurrence” horror movies, in which the enterprise of Enlightenment critical thought is abandoned in the face of that which cannot be explained, complete with the requisite invocations of faith and the failure of those men of science to adequately become men of action, to stop theorizing and just pull the trigger. Conversely, what we see in Plague is an indeterminate zone, in which the problem of the zombies is that they are not supernatural: they are the result of hard work, ingenious arcane methods brought to bear on a ruthless drive to reopen that abandoned tin mine. Hamilton preserves his status as the squire of the region by adopting fully the mechanisms of that new social structure which will displace him. In struggling to cling to the vestiges of authority granted by feudal order, he overleaps the logic of that order. Of course, he keeps this all quite literally underground. For he is the emergent product of a mode of domination in which nothing is sacred, a saturnine hack Nietzschean who insists on raising the dead only when the living become too expensive. A moral debate between science and superstition matters not at all. It is at that point, when the cost and difficulty of obtaining labor “scientifically” ( a calculation of wages, resources, proto-industrial reserve army, etc) as an extension of the feudal mode that Hamilton turns from science, at least in its Western conception. When you can no longer squeeze a profit from your workers, the point is not to squeeze harder. It is to change the nature of the work. To change the nature of the workers, of the structure of exploitation itself.
And change this he does. Not however, because the workers are technically dead and hence mindless slaves. (As we see, they require a fair amount of coercion – i.e. constant whipping – and remain capable of striking back when their moment comes.) Rather, because his enterprise represents a radical innovation in the shape of the colonial enterprise, folded back upon itself. Free labor is no longer to be extracted from the colonies by the intellect, will, and brute force of its colonizers. Rather, the colonial heritage comes home to roost: the repressed truth of empire returns to corrupt and innovate its tired home market, the blocks to increased productivity and profit. Black plagues strike indeed, but from afar. In short, the innovation – and perhaps the undergirding horror – is not just “how horrible to be killed and brought back to life as a slave” but: what if our past is never forgotten? Not remembered by historians or marked into the very landscape and bodies of the colonies, but smuggled back in, dark knowledge too powerful to be lost and too tempting for imperialism to ignore.
To be more specific: it is black knowledge, wielded by a white man. The racial composition of the film – and its portrayal of value creation – needs to be considered. A rich white squire left England to travel abroad. In Haiti, he was somehow educated in the arts of voodoo. (Foreign currency opens a surprising number of surprising doors.) He returned to find his father dead, the stable hold on the content of landed aristocracy in crisis. Worse, the rich vein of tin running below their lands could not be mined; the white townspeople refused to engage in that work. They refused the equation of the compensation offered for work that would possible kill them, in an approximation of worker power that is necromantically overcome. As such, he employs Haitian drummers (and, in one of the more compelling minor roles, a black butler) to aid him in the rites which kill, raise, and control the townspeople.
Here, however, is the crucial question. In what possible way is it economically advantageous to create zombie laborers? (And more, zombie laborers out of those same white villagers who turned down the work in the first place?) The film seems to say, obviously, because they are mute slaves who work for free, they just ceaselessly mine and turn a profit. But in one of those remarkable moves in which what the film is “about” and what actually happens become unmistakably divergent, it becomes unmistakably clear that maintaining an army of undead miners is a lot of fucking work, particularly for wanna-be overlord Hamilton. (What also becomes apparent throughout the film is that the only real reason for him to be doing all this is because he quite enjoys it, that he gets off on being “beyond morality,” on getting to put on his voodoo mask and robes, and mess around in graveyards at night.) He does not simply dig up corpses that come to un-life to work for him. No, he has to find a way via clumsy subterfuge to cut each future zombie, surreptitiously gather a bit of that blood, perform complicated rituals, wait for the “plague” death of the individual, and dig him or her up. And it doesn’t stop there.
In the establishing shots of the tin mine, we notice two things. First, the zombies require a lot of whipping to keep moving. Even though it is the sadistic stooges of Hamilton who do the whipping, they don’t seem particularly to be enjoying it, as we might imagine, asserting their position in the hierarchy of masters. They seem genuinely worn out from constantly trying to goad the shambling dead into action. And when they do “work,” it seems startlingly ineffective, some pathetic approximation of human labor. Raising the hammer weakly to let it fall. They may work for free, but they surely don’t work very well.
Second, this would be fine if we imagined a real horde of them, hundreds of fumbling, ineffective, rotting hands pulling shreds of tine from the earth. But Hamilton’s tin mine is woefully understaffed, with no more than fifteen to twenty of these workers. And hence we can only ask: how does he turn a profit? The presence of the Haitian drummers and butler immediately raise the seeming obvious solution, exporting cheap labor from afar. If the townspeople are not willing to work in the mine, Hamilton surely knows that there are those more desperate who would throw – or more realistically, be thrown – themselves into this situation at the prospect of escaping crushing poverty and famine. The other solution, one that again is more obvious than it appears, is to make the mine safer. Put in some structural reinforcements, draw workers back with minimum wages and the assurance of non-collapse, and start drawing tin from the earth at a rate far faster than that of your “free” labor. Put your very able-bodied thugs to work not whipping zombies or digging up corpse, but mining some tin themselves. If living humans won’t work there, consider not just inhuman labor but non-human labor: the shadow of the real historical development, of automated machinery, looms large over this film.
If there is an answer to this question, it is in part simply that the film couldn’t be this kind of film without this intersection of the occult, the murderous, the witty class-based barbed jokes, the lust and loss. In short, it couldn’t be a horror movie, and that was what Hammer did consummately well. And yet, we need to clarify what kind of horror movie. More precisely, what is the horror that the film purports to be about? We know what kind of horror movie it is, in a way: lightly bloody, pseudo-surreal, atmospheric, one that splits between a whole lot of carefully scripted talking and moments in which one cannot talk, the mute fear and shock of watching your wife die a second time. In this way, it is a horror movie with intended scares every so often (the seemingly dead man threw down her corpse! Sir James just cut off her head! Hamilton is about to rape/stab her!), with a generally atmosphere of creeping unease. But what about the horror it depicts, rather than the terror/unease it hopes to provoke in us? First, there is a sense of the horror of everyday relations and their minor exceptions that merely cut away the fat to show the nastiness that lays below. Like the other Hammer (and, in a sense, the Romero inflected zombie lineage) films, equal stressed is placed on the problems caused by vampires/reanimated corpses/daughters of Jack the Ripper and by those who have to deal with them but who are plenty capable of inflicting psychic and physical damage on their own, mobilizing the external threat to justify what must be done.
Second, the horror of the “natural order” being disturbed, that doing this with corpses just goes against nature, coupled with the sense of disturbing the peace of the dead. Yet as a character in the film wonders: “peace… what is that?” And further, what is so wrong about any use of the dead? We should briefly interrogate this attachment, even from within a framework of the capitalist reproduction of life and wealth. For we could easily imagine a form in which we wouldn’t care, in which we would happily sell our posthumous labor. That is, if we were properly remunerated for it. That is the true problem lurking behind the blind of meddling with the natural order of things. In a conservative form: well, if I’m not getting paid, there’s no way I’m working for someone else. And in a radical form: if we refuse work, if we refuse to accept a system in which I should put myself at risk for minor recompense, if we refuse to play the game, we refuse to be brought in against our will, black magic tricked into participation. In short, the seething anger at the prospect of not having a choice. The true underbelly of “freely selling one’s labor,” the realization that it has been a non-choice from the start.
And out of this anger, lurking along the surface, something bursts through, intermittent at first before truly exploding at the end. Its first real expression is not one of labor betrayed, at least not in the form of masculine mining labor. It is an expression of desire that the staid middle class-ness of the film’s world cannot fathom.
Peter’s wife Alice, voodoo-seduced and killed by Hamilton, is to join his dead work force. (A rather odd plot conceit, given that the miner-zombies are resolutely male and that when he gets Cynthia in his clutches, his interest seems primarily in threateningly molesting her before pulling a sacrificial knife. We might question just what he has in mind and the ways in which this indicates how much Hamilton does this things for pleasure and the reassurance of knowing that he can.) When Peter and Sir James interrupt her dis-interring by Hamilton and his masked crew, they witness her skin and hair go gray before she rises. And walks, with a look of direct lascivious lust, or perhaps a proper graveside smile of some knowledge of other horizons, the likes of which has no place elsewhere in this film about men and the things they enjoy talking about. If there is a return of the repressed here, it cannot be separated from this instance as easily as her head is cleft from her body.
For as before, the question is one of apocalyptic fantasy. And this should be stressed in its particularity: apocalyptic, in the sense of the revelation of what was hidden all along, and fantasy, in that it is a mode of narrative that consists of frozen captures, a distorted way of organizing desire [5] so that it can approach what it “wants” while prohibiting ever reaching it, without having to confront the shock of drive’s blind repetition. For what are all these films and cultural objects, political theories and ideologies if not series of crystallized desires, ordered to avoid the real apocalyptic confrontation, which is that of the anxiety of the same, of realizing that the emergent new – the end of days punch line – has been hidden in plain sight all along? Hence, to speak of return and repressed is misleading, for these things have never left. Shunted to the side, caught at the edge of our vision, perhaps, but only because we so resolutely turn from them, again and again.
And in this case, none more so than the colonial past repurposed in Plague, a bloody, teeming site of experimentation and innovation, brought back to break the impasses of stagnant capital. But like the attempts to manage and control these pasts, fantasies slip and fail, symptoms overwhelm, the never-left comes back wrongly. It’s just a matter of time before your undead miners get their shit together. Here the occasion is perhaps an accident (the burning of the voodoo dolls that preserves their control), but what happens is striking. Because when the technics of control and animation are destroyed, the dead don’t just go back to being dead. We might imagine that the destruction of the instruments of plague, the willful sickness that put them to death to put them to work, would be the end of the zombies, now just lifeless corpses in an abandoned mine. But no. The plague persists and turns back on its source. The zombies, some on fire in psychic bonds with their voodoo dolls, swarm and attack their whipping overlords. It is a plague that cannot be separated from its victims: they are nothing but the embodiment of this sickness to be given back, in full ferocious rage, to all who have capitalized on it.
And so the film ends consumed in flames, consuming the site of their condemned labor. In the particular history that could have been, of which Plague is the outpost, the zombie film writes the full apocalyptic obscenity and frivolity of this scenario: you are raised from the grave to perform the work of digging the grave of the world that brought you back. Yet we should stress this is no impossible imagining relegated to schlock horror. However hyperbolic, this is the plague of capitalism. The point is to learn how to give it back, to become infectious. Following Italian Marxist Mario Tronti, we begin to grasp that the development of capitalism is not a story imposed from above, of new technologies and modes of accumulation and circulation, of a constant drive forward against which workers struggle, like harpooning a leviathan that drags us forward and casts us off. For Tronti, capitalist development must be understood from below: it is because workers struggle, because they refuse to freely give their power to production, that capitalism develops. It innovates, becomes stronger, more flexible precisely because workers resist the world and wages it offers them.
Class antagonism – and its expressions in riotous moments and long grinding struggle, in the gulf between bourgeois ideology and proletarian theory – is not the secondary consequence of the drive to profit. It is the motor that drives the whole ungodly enterprise forward. And as this trajectory of films shows us, when the condemned and damned, plagued and unwanted begin to act in concert, when hell isn’t just full but mined for its innovations, the dead won’t just walk the earth. They will share that hell with us, one and all.
[1] It’s hard to imagine a zombie film in which zombies felt ashamed for consuming wrongly, although I’d love to see a version in which the zombies collectively shame one of their own for hoarding flesh, rather than sharing with the collective hunt, for consuming wrongly “wrongly.”
[2] There are, of course, exceptions, and the 2006 film Fido, on which I'll eventually write, raises the question of zombie labor again. However, it is telling that in that film, it is an issue of capitalizing on the already zombified, fitting them with control collars, in the arch-entreprenaurial move, making money out from something that nobody wanted.
[4] The insistence on “not giving” satisfaction shows itself clearly here, in Sir James’ further response: ““I have not come all this way to interfere with local customs and antagonize the people just to satisfy your sensitivity about the welfare of wild animals.” Perhaps, but he shows little hesitation in that interference and antagonism when it’s on his terms.
[5] Desire here should not be thought of as the act of wanting what you really wants but rather the structure that allows for the simultaneous approach to and endless deferral of reaching those objects of desire. Desire self-reproduces in its inverted ladder of pleasure, where pleasure is taken in the negotiations with the Law of prohibition.
In response to the letter from Executive Vice Chancellor Kliger:
These are times of crisis. Across the nation, workers are losing their jobs, families are losing their homes, and students are losing access to public education. The administration agrees that these are times of crisis, but they refuse to acknowledge how this affects us all. They ask us to tighten our belts for a year, to take furloughs and budget cuts, to accept massive fee hikes. Now, they tell us that attempts to protest and fight back against this are part of the problem and that they add to the costs placed on students and workers. They accuse us of making worse a situation that they have perpetuated and exploited. This is not the case.
According to EVC Kliger:
“When added to cleanup costs following the earlier occupation of the Graduate Student Commons, these efforts will run into tens of thousands of dollars — costs directly borne by taxpayers, students and their families. Those dollars are diverted from educating and supporting students.”
We reject this entirely. The figures for repairs they invoke are ridiculous. It is hard to fathom that this “cleanup” should cost “tens of thousands of dollars.” If true, they only indicate the corporate structure of the university and its reliance on inflated costs for services, costs that are indeed “placed on students and workers.” More crucially, these are not dollars “diverted from educating and supporting students.” Kliger, of all people, should know very well that this is not how the university works.
These sums that he touts to scare and divide people are only a drop in the bucket compared to the real cuts that the administration has overseen and indeed foisted upon those who depend on the university’s functions and services: students, faculty, and workers alike. To insinuate that it is attempts such as these occupations that are responsible for increased costs is a cynical lie. The funds raised by the proposed fee hike, in addition to the laying off of workers and the slashing of student services, will not be directed to preserving or improving the quality of education or access to jobs. They are directed to preserving the bond rating of the institution so that it can borrow money for unnecessary building projects, and to bolstering the state of California’s credit rating against its own future borrowing.
We have no illusion that these actions fully or correctly expressed the discontent felt across the UC system and the state. Many disagree with the tactics, and we encourage those who do to join a wider struggle and to pursue their own ways of fighting against this ongoing trend toward the destruction of our education.
But the false claims of the administration need to be countered. Vandalism did occur at both occupation sites. It was not the work of those who planned these actions. It is not the point of these actions. But we see this as the expression of wider student discontent. More troubling is the response of the police and administration to protesters who expressed solidarity. On Thursday night, three undergraduates were maced by the police, and one was arrested. They were not told to cease and desist, they were not given warning of the extreme response, and the one who was arrested was not Mirandized. Whether or not you agree with the specific action, such a response is unacceptable. The university is trying to have it both ways. They dismiss this action as petty vandalism. And they have chosen to respond with excessive police force to a serious expression of student discontent. We ask all of you to consider the consequences of that position and what it indicates about how they see and treat their students.
We are not interested in clandestine actions. We have acted upon a broad base of support for radical measures. It has become evident that the modes of protest condoned by the university cannot change the decisions it makes. On this campus, we embrace a radical past: it is part of the legacy of UCSC, and students and faculty are proud of this. But the administration discounts any and all attempts to produce a radical present. We know that in these increasingly desperate times, when workers lose their jobs and families are stretched thin to pay for education, such a radical present is necessary.
We believe in common access to education for all. Like the Master Plan for Higher Education in California, we believe that no one should be denied access to education because of financial barriers. Working families and working students across the state scrimp, save, and borrow in order to afford this education. They make real sacrifices to earn degrees, degrees that are supposed to earn us jobs. But these jobs are disappearing. The future for which these sacrifices are made is becoming impossible: graduates face an economy where there are few jobs to come, where student loans cannot be repaid, and where a college degree increasingly means little. We have to face this reality. We have to confront the fact that the administration is raising the costs of education while that education’s value is materially diminishing. We are told that we should appreciate the education that we do have. But to appreciate it means to fight not just for what it is but for what it should be.
We must all fight back against this situation. This cannot be the work of few. This is a collective and urgent task.
When one of the students was maced and arrested, he was told that “any pain you feel, you deserve.” We respond: any pain coming to the administration and legislators who have overseen the gutting of California’s education system, they deserve.
In solidarity with all students, workers, and faculty.
On a superficial (and perhaps more resonant level), they are “us,” the everyman and woman, regular Johns, Janes, and all between. The genre takes deep and recurrent pleasure in raising the zombie “types,” so that the viewers get the game of spotting the shambling incarnation of “what they were before”: zombie clowns, zombie hare krishnas, zombie cheerleaders, zombie bike messengers, and so on and on…[1] And one effect of this, beyond the mild chuckle, is indeed a sense of the zombies as the underbelly of the everyday. Not merely the manifestation of how we react to global shifts – in that doubled void of the representation of reaction examined earlier – but also the detritus that persists through any of those shifts, in the surprising perseverance of what will surely end in decay. If the apocalyptic New has yet to be fully revealed, it is in part because the old not only refuses to die, it also keeps doing, with an uncanny sense of fidelity, what it used to do.
Including, apparently, go to the mall and hang out, wander aimlessly without really buying anything.
In Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978), arguably one of the century’s greatest, cruelest, and darkly funniest films, that’s just what they do, thereby inaugurating the endlessly recycled line of embedded critique: in the society of the spectacle, here in its vaguest sense, we already live like zombies. The zombies are us, in all our cowed ignorance, shambling through the motions of an impoverished existence. They are “unaware”, stupid, and easily tricked, barely able to navigate an escalator, reeling in the perma-shock of the always new, the glossed bounty of the commodities displayed.
Yet of course, they are also threat, “monstrous otherness” made uncanny by its proximity to normal textures of everyday life. Their specificity and threat is to be found in the particular fantasmatic position they occupy: an impossible triangulation between 1) concrete structures of dominance and exploitation in capitalism, 2) capitalism’s abstract form of valuation and antagonism, and 3) all those who populate this system, the full range from those too abject to register to those who reap profit from its infinitesimal fluctuations.
Any materialist account – or just any account capable of thinking beyond internal genre shifts – must be conceived roughly along these lines, passing back and forth from what and how zombies threaten to who they are (rather than just who they were), all mapped onto the specificity of the envisioned world. And it goes without saying that this envisioned world is, with notable and powerful exceptions, the emergent late capitalist world: shopping malls and suburbs, postcolonial islands and teeming metropoles barricaded and eaten away from within.
What (or who) and how do zombies threaten? One influential account, best known in the version advanced by Robin Wood, is that the zombies threaten all that is not compatible with advanced capitalism: their cannibalism is consumerism in literalized reification overdrive, a desire to consume and possess not just objects but the bodies of fellow citizens. However, this consumption has a particular edge and articulation in that they dominate and destroy the “Other” of American society: persons of color, women, homosexuals, anyone vaguely or explicitly countercultural. As such, the zombies stand as the swarming enforcers of a social order familiar to us all, even in a vision of the end of that order.
This account is quite flawed and feels oddly unmoored from the texture of the films themselves: if zombies remain capitalist subjects, they are surely not capitalists per se. Capitalism works concretely through a small number of capitalists exploiting the labor power of hordes of workers, with the attendant threat and pressure of the industrial reserve army hungry for access to jobs. Zombies may be many things, but managers they are not. This is not to misrepresent Wood’s point: his argument is subtle and recognizes that it isn’t an issue of what the zombies think they are doing but how and to whom the violence is done (an all-out assault by the many on a smaller group of individuals largely coded as marginal to mainstream American society). It isn’t a model of intentionality but of the creation of cinema in which we witness men of color and (primarily white) women struggle for their lives against the white men locked in the houses/malls/bunkers with them and against the rainbow coalition of the undead outside. (That said, it’s difficult to truly argue that it is the zombies who are the ones “targeting” these Others, even within the Romero films: it is the redneck cops at the end of Night, dead boyfriends and biker gangs in Dawn, and coked-up/adrenaline-fuelled military macho men in Day.)
The bigger problem with the argument is its conception of possessiveness and consumption. The collective hunting and enjoying-wrongly – the fact that enjoyment is no longer mediated through the value-form but through a deep, gory mining of the potential hunger-sating use-value of one’s friends and neighbors – point, if anything, to the fact that individual possession has nothing to do with it. While hunger may be the symptomatic absence that gives truth to consumption, possession is merely a misconstruction of what happens. They move en masse, they work together, they rip and tear, and move on. If anything, this is closer to a model of mutual aid or collective goal oriented hive mind than atomized life in the face of market relations. They do not own what they kill, and they do not care. One could begin to imagine how different the films would be if this were the case, something far closer to a vampire film, in which the one who has bitten and “turned” you has a position of ownership and control, or at least stands as more ancient, and hence more legit. In a zombie film, this would produce an endless chain of pseudo-ownership and authenticity, but this would thereby undo the very core of the films, the glimpse of a totality that affects everyone. There is no original, and certainly no aristocratic glamour even if one could be found.
A related analysis, one manifested on the surface of the films themselves, figures the zombies as consumerism run amok, the barbaric forces underlying the management of commodity culture unmasked for all to see. Mindless consumers from life to undeath, they have simply moved from a slavish devotion to buying plastic trinkets to a slavish devotion to swallowing the flesh of the living. Folded into this is the vaguest sense of apocalyptic immanentism, something worth guarding even if its articulation is the worst form of critique: it’s the apocalypse, man, we’re already mindless zombies, it’s all ideology and spectacle, and we’re just thoughtless drones watching the world burn… Crucial to note, however, is that in this vision, stressed in both cultural responses/parodies/reloads and the films themselves, the zombies are still “consuming subjects.” They may wander without buying anything, staring glassily, yet the stress is put on their consumption as a continuation – at most, a slight perversion or unmasking – of how they consumed before the apocalypse. They are not the poor or the homeless, or at least not truly lumpen. The first zombie/“ghoul” we see in the Romero films indeed is coded as a homeless drifter, a man down on his luck, but in Dawn and in its echoes reaching far beyond zombie cinema per se, the zombie becomes the “good” consumer simply gone too far, an indictment not of a system that lets people “fall through the safety net” but which encourages decadent, selfish, barbaric behavior. Hence if we accept the argument presented in Dawn, that the zombies return here because they came here in life, with as much critical gravitas as it seems intended to have, we also accept that their remembrance establishes them as the continuation of “correct” consumption, even as they learn to consume wrongly. [2]
What, then, are the ideological consequences of this, the dominant mode of reading zombie films (i.e. zombie films are about the anxieties of late capitalism, with particular focus on the consequences of excess consumerism, individual greed that, taken as a whole, threatens communities, and a decline in individual critical thinking in favor of shared consumption of mass ideology)? More specifically, if there is indeed a “critical” connection between the consumption of the zombies and the general consumption of commodities, what is it?
Everyone can save
The ideological operation at work is a division of the world into two:
Taken as a whole, the zombie film – insofar as it not only is misrepresented in this manner but also fosters this ideological construction – is a fantasy of just such a division, of being on the right side of the divide. And that fantasy does not go by the name of Romero or Fulci or any director. It goes by the name of cynical reason. [3] And by passing through the door of supposed anti-consumerist left political critique, it smuggles in the self-disavowing illusion of standing outside of the system and the self-sustaining fantasy of freedom of choice. As such, what is really at stake here is the cynicism of master knowledge that claims to act so as to “make the unthinking think,” to help the cowed sheep of the post-proletariat stop rampant consumption and to cure the bourgeoisie of their false consciousness. Put otherwise, to face the anxiety about the unknown that lies beyond the illusory stability of capital and to confront the possibility of acting otherwise. Hidden in the critique is the formulation of the critical speaker’s position, as the one who can bravely push through anxieties toward the new horizon.
Indeed, this question of anxiety is the crux of the issue: how does it function and what is the particular anxiety of which the zombie film is a manifestation and to which it contributes? Who do we imagine to be anxious and about what?
The real problem with this cynical reason/consumer model is its short-circuited leap that conceives zombies as at once über-consumers – the blind, ideologically determined subject – and as the monstrous other. In short, doubly overdetermined as the subject who doesn’t know better, who just does these things for no rational reason. Worse, for those of us who do know better, is that there are a lot of them. We are quite outnumbered. As such, what is on trial is the block to rationality of the consuming masses, with the critique falling firmly on “what they were before death”: one tends to assume that zombies are beyond reform, therefore the source has to be located in the kind of people inhabiting the kind of world in which these things happen. And it is their anxiety that seems to be the problem, a crippling anxiety at the prospect of the world becoming something unrecognizable, impossible to navigate, an anxiety so massive that it leads to complacency, clinging to the edifices of ideological certainty, the gloss of the safely new, new objects to purchase that reinforce the perpetuation of the same.
Hence, the general anxiety about the “decline of the West” finds a blameable source in the particular anxiety of the masses toward the New, their incapacity to envision modes of life that exceed the shining forms modeled in the shopping mall. To be clear: in the schematic of the cynical subject [4], anxiety emerges for the masses at the prospect of the New which terrifies them, and the role of the critic/artist is to produce texts that call into question the inability of the unthinking ones to see beyond themselves to these horizons of possibility. As such, the alleged power of Romero’s Dawn as a cultural object is not that it shows how “we are all like zombies” but about how we, the knowing subjects, need to be vigilant in our attacks upon them, upon the blind consumers.
You’ve had it coming…
And isn’t that the heart of the pleasure we see taken and we take in watching? No more cultural mediation and propaganda, no more trying to convince someone that there is a better life beyond the circle of work and consumption. Years of failed arguments replaced with the simple clarity of a gunshot or the libidinal outpouring of a chainsaw: you dumb fucker, how could you not see? This is pleasure of enlightened false consciousness, the trademark of cynical reason, those who know very well, but nevertheless… Who know very well that they cannot themselves change anything or escape the ideological network, but who make this knowledge of impotency the very condition for their claiming to know better than the rest. The deep cancerous form of smug resignation, of letting the world burn while you repeat to yourself, at least I know that there wasn’t anything I could do about it.
"where they came in life..."
Like all false consciousness, self-knowing and self-disavowing or not, this needs to be dismantled. On two fronts. First, we should reject a causal chain of the fait accompli, a bad reasoning that goes as follows: Dawn has been enormously influential and popular, part of that influence has been the embedded social critique, that critique (and the horror of which it was a part) struck a nerve with contemporary anxieties, therefore the anxieties represented in the film – rampant consumerism produces the kind of world that ends this way – are the underlying anxieties of an audience and their historical moment.
Against this we should insist that just because it has an “anti-consumerist” tone, and indeed was has become such a classic in part because of that bent, does not mean that the real anxiety underpinning. This is not to claim that fears of a general trendline toward societal decadence, due in large part to consumerism and a naturalization of the capitalist life world as the only option available, are absent, or that the film did not savagely capture some of those fears. Rather, it is to claim that if we speak of the anxiety of an era, the film must be thought of as a mediation, of a perfect storm of contradictory tendencies, a working-through of subcurrents and patterns of fear and desire that cannot be simply represented. What remains powerful about Dawn isn’t that Romero put his finger on a “widespread anxiety,” but rather that the film represents a particularly messy and canny constellation of factors and influences in which we can detect what is missing – think here again of the conspicuous absence of hunger - and on which we can see the cynical logic we project as a way of protecting ourselves from having to admit our deep complicity with this late capitalist world.
The second, and more important, attack on thinking zombie movies as “about” consumption, is the model of anxiety it employs. It is the common notion of anxiety, that we get anxious at what we do not know, when we have a lack of knowledge and don’t know if the New will be a pleasant or unpleasant surprise. We feel unmoored and uncertain, and anxiety is the affect of that inability to predict the New. It is an obstacle to action, pushing us to remain content with what is certain or to find other, safer ways to get the shock of the New without exposing ourselves to all the risks of undoing the assurances of this world order (or relationship or housing situation or pattern of behavior, and so on).
The obscene stillness of the empty same
Let us offer another model, one drawn from French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Following and moving out from Lacan, we could say that anxiety is never about the radically new but rather about the horrible possibility of the same persisting. Lacan refers to this as the “lack of a lack”. In short: what’s worse than Mom’s breast not being there when I need it? Mom’s breast always being there, forever. Anxiety emerges with the creeping realization that there may be no lack, no space in which to move, leaving us crushed by the awful possible certainty of knowing how things are and knowing that they will remain that way. Mass anxiety, in this way of thinking, arises in and fixates on a world without a clear directionality or progress, a world in which the self-same repetition of drive – or the self-same accumulation of capital – is king.
So if it is indeed the case that Romero “put his finger on a widespread anxiety” about the state of life in late capitalism, is it not the case that the real encounter here is not about the knowing critique of political art pointing out the anxiety and resistance of those who don’t know better and must be woken from their slumber, but precisely the inversion, that the real encounter is the rendering comprehensible of the zombies? Not the difficulty of getting “them” (consumers, zombies) to comprehend but the sudden opening up of our thought beyond the deadlock of cynical reason? This is not a rendering empathetic, not of simply understanding that we don’t really know better, that we are still subject to mass ideology. Rather, these the first steps toward a traversal of irrationality. Precisely not by claiming, we’re all just like zombies, but rather that, zombies are all like us. And not to further generalize, of seeing that we’re all in this together, but locating in them the emergent possibility of something truly wrong, beyond feeling that they are beneath our conceptions of morality and proper decorum. The real difference emerges: not between us and the zombies but between us as bourgeois subjects (those who know better) and us as we are in all our situated messiness. What disappears is that everyone, that universal category which allows the exception of the cynical subject and demands the exception of those who can’t be included without rupturing the category’s capacity to restrict the meaning of being one of everyone to a limited range of acceptable thought and action.
The anxiety proper to zombie films is the deep horror of something not being different, of everyone remaining as limited a category as we know it to be, of the same persisting, of the end of death and lack. In this way, the consumerism account very much identifies the “problem,” namely, the pseudo-new of late capitalism, the foreclosure of revolutionary possibilities and the contraction of experience to petty alternatives of which color of car upholstery or which centrist president. But what it misses is that this situation isn’t the result of an anxiety about the New. The situation is the very source and site of the anxiety, the awareness that this may be all that there is. People are not capitalist consumers because they are unthinking, ignorant, and scared of change. They are unthinking, ignorant, and scared of change because they are capitalist consumers.
Target practice: shooting mannequins in lieu of zombies, or vice versa
More than that, the zombie is not the simple manifestation of this anxiety, not the monster that makes clear the “truth” of consumerism. They are not the problem but a blood-spattered possibility, still nascent, still reeling from the shock of undeath, still learning how to speak. What should be taken aim at is not those who don’t know but this entire stress on “purchase politics,” on thinking that that the real problem is to be solved by more sustainable, informed ways of buying commodities. The whole reduction of critical thought to the facile move of claiming that some people consume wrongly, while the consumption deemed “wrong” in that schematic is precisely the kind of consumption needed to keep the system afloat. One who supports capitalism as a system cannot speak of those who “consume wrongly.” It is purely an aesthetic and moral condemnation, of saying that the uncultured should be more subtle about their participation in the reproduction of wealth.
That is, until you get to those who really do consume wrongly. Therein lies the zombie: the obscure, decayed-from-the-start vision of something beyond, something really outside the systemic logic, something truly wrong. Not bad taste but bad hunger. A spreading shadow making darkly clear that even our attacks on those who can’t think beyond the degraded world of consumption are expected attacks, just demands for more subtle degradation. That is the injunction of Dawn, against itself: to make the dead talk clearly, to take on and talk from that position, to hear the unseen speak rationally out of the irrationality of managed life, and to force everyone to take on a very different meaning. It is an injunction that will be answered, but never by zombies and always uncertainly.[1]I’m still waiting for the most cringe-worthy meta moment to arrive, when a film will show Halloween party-goers (or zombie flash mobbers) dressed as zombies turn into real zombies, already fake decayed before the fact sets in. There is a different tradition worth noting, of avoiding detection by “playing” zombie, from the incredible sequence in Zombies on Broadway in which the trained monkey mimics a zombie walk to the moment in Shaun of the Dead when they practice their zombie lurch before successfully “fooling” the horde. This points more broadly to a crucial question throughout the genre: how exactly do the zombies know who to attack? What, exactly, separates the living from the undead?
[2]It is this notion of consuming wrongly and enjoying wrongly that we should guard from these popular accounts, even as they need to be taken to task for their deeper implications.
