Return of the Zombie Imaginary

My last post outlined the way late, neoliberal capitalism (or whatever you call our current economic system in crisis) reinforces a generalized state of austerity to which zombie films and other apocalyptic narratives respond: the nightmare of a Hobbesian struggle of all against all for limited resources, and the need to create scapegoats to divert attention away from the systemic dimensions of our predicament and onto disposable populations. Ruling elites, and the politicians who support them, encourage this world-view when they identify some particular group as the alleged barrier to the flourishing of the nation or collective. Michel Foucault identified this tendency as a central characteristic of modern, “biopolitical” societies which, in assuming responsibility for the well-being of entire populations, covers over the essentially arbitrary decision over who gets excluded from the life-support systems of the state, through discourses of racism.

An exclusionary view of Canadian national belonging summoned
by threats to the lifeblood of modern, capitalist economies. 

Capitalism is a system that purports to turn competition into collective benefit, but the reality is very different. Giovanni Arrighi follows Marx in pointing out how generative and healthy competition amongst producers is transformed, under capitalism’s imperative to constantly grow privatized profits, from a positive-sum game to a cutthroat, zero-sum game (48). As this tendency progresses, the effects of this brutal competition amongst the capitalist class is downloaded onto labourers in the form of intensified competition amongst the underclasses. When competition amongst capitalists cuts into their profits, the squeeze is passed on to the workers, fracturing them along lines that are usually biopolitically structured. In the twilight of global capitalism, we can see how this top-down flow of competition is being refracted, in a biopolitical way, onto racialized minorities (when people complain of immigrants stealing their jobs), onto women and gendered minorities (in complaints about “affirmative action”), or onto foreigners (in fears of migration).

British protesters of Theresa May's government, from 2017. 

The global capitalist class has become practiced at working with governments to deploy this divide-and-conquer strategy, which seems to offer a quick-fix solution to social ills: strengthen boarders, build more prisons, protect “your own.” Politicians who do not take explicitly this route find themselves in a tough spot: they have to both pander to the interests of cutthroat capitalists while still pretending that the system can truly work to the benefit of all. When the electorate of modern democratic countries get frustrated with the hypocrisies and failures of this “third way” politics, they might turn to seemingly more “honest,” right-wing demagogues who are willing to make the “tough decisions” of which groups of people are going to be left to join the ranks of what Eric Cazdyn calls “the already dead.” Though such leaders actually work to the detriment of many of the people who elected them, they only reveal, in amplified form, the tendencies that the more “progressive” governments already harbor. Such a move can be a strange kind of “death wish”: they reveal a desperate desire for change, even if things have to get worse before they get better. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has activated a global, humanitarian response, while at the same time exacerbating and exposing the biopolitical fractures, fault-lines and weaknesses that have resulted from several decades of downloading competition from capitalists onto workers, while simultaneously uploading unprecedented profits through the appropriation of formerly socialized forms of wealth in such fields as housing, insurance, education and health care. The resulting crisis has the potential to generate a collective response that could possibly reverse the systemic tendencies described above, but it will require that we find collective ways of resisting the fantasy construction I described in my last post as the zombie imaginary.

I suggest that the zombie imaginary, as it plays out in countless films, TV shows, comic books, and political careers, is actually a wish-fulfillment disguised as a nightmare. The wish is biopotlical in that it indulges a fantasy that the barrier to one’s flourishing is other people, and that one’s problems would be alleviated if only there were less of us around. Strangely enough, such a wish sometimes informs even the work progressives and leftists. Both Donna Haraway and Timothy Morton, for instance, have offered versions of the biopolitical argument that humans are not really suited to living in such large, impersonal collectives as cities or nations, and that the solution to our economic and ecological troubles is to have a smaller global population living in smaller groups. Such arguments risk encouraging the view that pandemics like COVID-19 are ultimately beneficial, not because they summon dissent over faltering political-economic systems that can’t deliver on their fundamental premises, but because they are vehicles for the biopolitical management (ie culling) of populations. Even when such writers do the important work of challenging accepted ideologies in other ways, it is difficult not to view such ideas as social-Darwinism disguised as critical theory.  

In the realm of fantasy, Zombie films and other pandemic-narratives, including many environmental thrillers, are good vehicles for this wish because the agent that is killing people (or turning them undead) in these stories is impersonal: it is democratic in that it can affect anyone. Up until a couple years ago, it was not really permissible to openly share racist and intolerant sentiments, and while this has recently shifted for the worse, many people still remember the biopolitical nightmares of the twentieth century, and wish to avoid them. Zombie films provide the extraordinary circumstances that allow us to indulge antisocial fantasies about the culling of whole populations, while also providing a container for the guilt that (hopefully) accompanies such indulgences. The best of these stories simultaneously critique the tendency they are illustrating, leading us to question which the greater monsters are: the zombies or the survivors. The worst of these stories uncritically justify and even gloat in the killing of whole populations, making them akin to a modern form of eugenicist propaganda. This, incidentally, is a premise structuring Quentin Terantino’s Inglorious Bastards, which situates us, the audience, as akin to the spectators of a Nazi propaganda film: enjoying the violence that the film also shamelessly indulges, in order to sell tickets.

Some films criticize spectacular violence while simultaneously
indulging it, as if tacitly mocking their own audiences. 

So, if progressive social change is to result from the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, we need to be wary of this tendency of the zombie imaginary, and the novel possible forms it might take. Akin to the coronoavirus, we might consider the biopolitical logic addressed (and sometimes critiqued) by the zombie imaginary to be a kind of narrative virus, one that has been multiplying, mutating and circulating through our collective imaginations, predisposing us to respond to crisis and anxiety in ways that the capitalist system would very much appreciate. As such, it is likely to seek out and most strongly effect the weakest amongst us, though in unusual ways. While COVID is most likely to harm the elderly and those with compromised respiratory and immunes systems, I would anticipate the reactionary, system-reinforcing strains of the zombie imaginary seeking out a different demographic: the young. Though physically hale and resistant to the more serious effects of the coronavirus, a large, population of youth has been excluded from the dreams of prosperity and upward mobility that informed the lives and careers of many of the people who are currently most at risk in the pandemic. This is a systems failure, from top to bottom, but it is tempting to believe that an older generation, lumped together as “baby boomers,” is the barrier to the flourishing of young people currently struggling to gain a foothold in the increasingly slippery terrain of contemporary, Western countries.

In the Canadian film Fido, zombies provide
a convenient working class.  

There is a subversive, revanchist glee that informs some of the best zombie films, and many commentators have pointed out that the zombie is the proletarian monster par excellence: a surging mass that expands beyond the capacities of the establishment—military, governments, media, scientists, corporations—to contain. When social order is suspended or in crisis, the suppressed voices of oppressed groups can find new ears, while people in positions of power struggle to maintain the fragile and necessary fictions that hold civil society together. 

However, if we look to comparable moments in the past, we should be careful not to underestimate capitalism’s slippery power to coopt, contain and dissipate dissenting energies. It happened after World War Two, when workers’ ambitions to socialize major industries were mollified by suburban homes and vacations. And it happened at the end of the 1960s, when those excluded from the post-war compromise—women, service workers, racialized people and youth—believed their various, collective protests would humanize, if not dissolve, the rigid, paternalistic structures of the Fordist era. In response to this and other resistances, and like a crafty virus, capitalism mutated, finding new ways to purchase our consent while further exacerbating the fracture lines that divide us.

Parisian students in 1968 passing cobble stones to defend a
street barricade. Photo by Bruno Barney.

Our current predicament could be viewed as the end result of these previous struggles, pushed sideways by the headwinds of relentless competition: a world of dramatic inequalities, threadbare social structures, and the mounting unrest of those excluded from fantasies of prosperity that are proving unsustainable and destructive for the planet. But, rather than blaming an older generation for this impasse, and imagining that they have enjoyed lives free of struggle, regret, suffering and hope, we need to direct our criticisms squarely at a global system of managed inequality whose hour of reckoning is surely imminent, if not with the current crises, then with the next one.

Stay tuned for: Beyond the Zombie Imaginary...