Anyone But Me, Anywhere But Here: Theorizing Zombies
Before I get to the meat of this post, a quick update: I went out with A yesterday (the guy I talked about previously) and had a lot of fun. Since I complain about this place so much, I thought it fair to make an annotation if when that is not the case :)
I was reading a newspaper article about theorizing the Zombie phenomenon here: http://www.elmundo.es/elmundo/2012/03/30/cultura/1333115831.html#comentarios (it’s in Spanish). Theorymon galore of explanations to how zombies became everyone’s favorite creature that goes bump in the night.
I want to bring your attention, quite specifically, to the idea that “Los zombies también nos sirven para sublimar más miedos, empezando por nuestra condición de 'marionetas' en un nuevo totalitarismo tecnocapitalista.” In English, “Zombies are also useful for the purposes of sublimating our fears, starting with our condition as ‘puppets’ in a new style of technocapitalist totalitarianism” (my translation, no page in the original). Sounds like something you’ve heard before, my gender fiends? Well, that might be because a fellow compatriot to the Spaniards interviewed in this article, Beatriz Preciado, has made a similar (and just as fucking eerie) point on pages 36 and 37 of their book Testo Yonqui:
El verdadero motor del capitalismo actual es el control farmacopornográfico de la subjetividad, cuyos productos son la seratonina, la testosterona, los antiácidos, la cortisona, los antibióticos, el estradiol, el alcohol y el tabaco, la morfina, la insulina, la cocaína, el citrato de sidenofil (Viagra), y todo aquel complejo material-virtual que puede ayudar a la producción de estados mentales y psicosomáticos de excitación, relajación y descarga, de omnipotencia y de total control. Aquí, incluso el dinero se vuelve un significante abstracto psicotrópico. El cuerpo adicto y sexual, el sexo y todos sus derivados semiótico-técnicos son hoy el principal recurso del capitalismo postfordista.
In plain old English,
The true motor of our current system of capitalism is the pharmaco-pornographic control of subjectivity, whose products are serotonin, testosterone, antacids, cortisone, antibiotics, estradiol, alcohol and tobacco, morphine, insulin, cocaine, Viagra, and any other material-virtual conglomerate that can help in the production of mental and psychosomatic states of excitement, relaxation and release, of omnipotence and total control. Here, even money becomes an abstract psychotropic signifier. The body that is addicted and sexual, sex and all of its semiotic-technic derivatives, are the principal resource of post-Fordist capitalism.
According to Preciado, we can see an intensification of the efforts to study--and control--gender and sexual impulses since the fifties, intertwined with an increased interest in mental conditions and drugs to treat psycho-sexual “dysfunctions”. Roll downhill 60 years and here we are, higher and more wired than ever before, finding ways to smuggle the T from Tijuana and the E from Vanatu, transnational bodies in constant motion, almost as fast as the images in the media or the constant outpour of knowledge to the point there is no way to keep current on any one topic if by that we mean to read all available topics. In America, the golden years of the heteronormative American dream are consumed through the edges by the succession of the crises of late capitalism, none of which we have recovered completely from since we have no place to expand capital, since Globalization at this point has meant the cusp of the expansion of Empire, throwing through the white picket fences (now covered in unkept grass and dust) the retirement photo if the lone white guy, now in his 60’s, with a Rolex in hand in his retirement party after working 8-5 for the same company for over half his life. There are still lone white guys out there, but they’re learning to hustle like the rest of us undesirables have.
It’s a scary world out there, changing faster than the change of generations. My pseudocompatriots and I are at the mercy of the weed and the Ativan to cope with the student loans up our asses and the increasingly distant prospect of the “normalcy” of the “Golden Years” of the USA. We run from the unemployment by going to Craigslist.
We are in the stages of a general sense of being “stuck”, a death of the past times foretold. And we have no clue where in the fuck we are headed.
Images of Zombies come here to comfort us, a comfort we don’t find to the same degree in vampires or werewolves. Unlike their fellow monsters, zombies have managed to shake off their cultural upbringing to overtake us in a way ghosts and goblins, vampires and were-creatures haven’t. We have surrendered our world in our imaginations, confident humanity will not be able to deal with them until there’s a dozen or so of us poor devils left. Unlike the vampires that sex us up or the werewolves that bring out our inner animal, zombies overwhelm us us through their sheer numbers, overwhelm us by exposing the isolation that we find ourselves in when we are left to care for no one but ourselves. Zombies are not the result of voodoo and amarres anymore: they are the result of government experiments gone wrong, the final indicator that our government has forsaken us at the altar of some higher force. Whether that altar is the surgical bed of the surgeon who haunts my dreams (and the pharmaceutical companies He will refer Nos to) or the cold ground of the dying cityscapes in the Rust Belt where the jobless suspend their bodies, in either case we are still just as alone and just as fucked.
Zombies are the indicator waiting to usher us to the end of ages.
But what do the times have to do with the proliferation of the living dead? A response to Herbert Marcuse’s One Dimensional Man. In ’64, Marcuse warned us that “A comfortable, smooth, reasonable, democratic unfreedom prevails in advanced industrial civilization, a token of technical process” (1). Flash forward to 2012 and despite how much I complain about how idiotic and gullible people are, we can paint a darker picture. I think we're quite uneasy about ourselves (the USA) as a nation, as a "superpower", as a coherent society led by a coherent government. The zombie phenomenon goes beyond us, of course, but that’s because a good chunk of the industrialized world is feeling the intense heat, the searing flame under our knowing asses.
It could be that I’m high on unspent urges and I’m drawing conclusions where there are none, but I think the rise of zombie narratives has to do with our collective anxiousness in crescendo over a future growing more uncertain by the second and by the fact that we do realize the precariousness of our current condition. Whether we, the masses, can articulate this fascination to someone else (let alone ourselves) and whether we can fully digest the situation in terms that go beyond the stock images of horror we’ve been vested with, is another set of issues that I, that they and we are still grappling with. While our situation continues to be as recorded by Preciado, zombies will be there to help the Prozac exorcise our societal demons.