hegel undead, or, critical rot

Music: The For Carnation: Fight Songs (1995)

Last Friday a very engaging graduate student from the Radio, Television, and Film program dropped by to talk about zombies. He is writing a thesis on Night of the Living Dead that employs Fredric Jameson's protocol in The Political Unconscious: in the horizon of chapter one he will conduct a close, narrative analysis of the film itself; in chapter two, his horizon will be historical context, and in particular, reading the figure of the zombie up against a cultural imaginary of concentration camp imagery; and he'll nest the third horizon in chapter three—but hasn't determined what that will be (cart before the horse issue, you know). He doesn’t need me on a committee or anything, he simply wanted to discuss zombies with someone who gave a shit. It was a fun discussion.

One of the things I mentioned was that in writing about zombies, we need to justify the figure as a privileged "monster" of our time: why is the zombie more important than the vampire? Is there a resurgence in zombies? My friend Laura might argue, for example, that the cyborg and/or virus are the monstrous figures of our time, not the zombie. So I recommended Jodi Dean's most excellent Aliens in America as a good example of how one might justify a cultural figure for organizing a study. I also thought of Jean Comaroff's stuff on the coincidence between industrialization and the rise of the zombie figure in South Africa.

I also shared with him my argument for the importance of zombies, and it goes a little something like this: like many monsters in the popular imaginary, zombies are figures of social critique. Their purchase, however, is the consistently conscious way in which zombie fantasy marks itself as a critique. In the early days of zombie film (say, 1920s-1940s) zombies critiqued capitalism by amplifying it's threat to the nuclear family and implicating fascism as the terminus of instrumentality (a point that coincides with the work of the Frankfurt School during the same period). In the so-called "Golden Age" of zombie film, and largely as a result of George Romero's innovations in the genre, zombies critiqued gender, race, and class issues. Today, zombie films continue to critique all these things (most pointedly race and class in Romero's Land of the Dead, the latest undead flick to make a splash).

Of course, any critique of zombie films will have to contend with the doubling of ideological labor: with regards to the notion of "cynical reason," arguably zombie films, by critiquing the postmodern scene, are actually doing the work of interpellation. This will be my and Shaun's point with the film 28 Days Later, which is careful to show the close relation between paternal sex right (Pateman's notion) and the institution of marriage, which would seem to be an extension of the military order. This "critique" works to obscure the neo-primitivism of the film (that is, the British fascination with black women as fetishized sex objects, and by extension, imperialism) that surfaces in the way the female lead is cast. And worse, after the critique is actually made, the film ends by unraveling it: the nuclear family is reunited at the end, man's centrality in that order established (the telling dialogue is a crack made about a "cock," which we learn as the camera widens refers to a chicken . . . yeah, right).

Talking with the student, however, it occurred to me that perhaps the purchase of the zombie is that the figure represents the key move of any critical gesture, and one premised on a fundamentally Hegelian understanding of self-consciousness: does not critical theory presume a retrojected pre-given subject? That is to say, to theorize subjectivity and its relation to ideology, the symbolic, and so on, it seems that---for reasons demanded by informal logic at the very least---one must posit a priority in the way that Lacan suggests one must posit a mythic plenitude in his notorious graph of desire. Before interpellation or subjectification, there is a "mass of the pre-text, namely, the reality that is imagined in the ethological schema of the return to need." Zombies represent the underside (that is, the horror, as opposed the presumed joy we tend to retroject) of this fluxus, the counterpart to the human infant. To say that rhetorical studies has some "zombie trouble" is not, then, only the one-dimensional Burke-ificaiton of ideology critique sans the unconscious, nor is it reducible to the fear of determinism. Rather, the zombie trouble of rhetorical studies in some sense is the unwillingness to admit of the necessity of a mythical gestures in the act of critique, that I must at some level posit the unreal in order to make claims about "the real" (in the everyday sense). Zombies are horrifying because they are both gross and, at some level, testify to the nothing that is pre-interpellated existence. We tend to assume---even in Lacanian scholarship---that the mythic plenitude of the prior, the place of the pregiven, is harmonious, blissful, and so on, when it is in point of fact just as horrible: it never existed.

Perhaps in this respect Camber Van Beethoven better diagnoses zombie trouble as both a predicament and a command: "Never Go Back."

But it's just as you feared
Never go back
If you see me sitting around
Thinking the same old thoughts over and over again
Or going back to old ways I've long ago abandoned,
Please, tell me
Never go back