 Newitz, A. (2006). Pretend we’re dead: Capitalist monsters in American pop culture. Duke University Press. In Pretend We’re Dead, Annalee Newitz argues that the slimy zombies and gore-soaked murderers who have stormed through American film and literature over the past century embody the violent contradictions of capitalism. Ravaged by overwork, alienated by corporate conformity, and mutilated by the unfettered lust for profit, fictional monsters act out the problems with an economic system that seems designed to eat people whole.
Newitz looks at representations of serial killers, mad doctors, the undead, cyborgs, and unfortunates mutated by their involvement with the mass media industry. Whether considering the serial killer who turns murder into a kind of labor by mass producing dead bodies, or the hack writers and bloodthirsty actresses trapped inside Hollywood’s profit-mad storytelling machine, she reveals that each creature has its own tale to tell about how a freewheeling market economy turns human beings into monstrosities.
Newitz shows that as literature and film tell it, the story of American capitalism since the late nineteenth century is a tale of body-mangling, soul-crushing horror.Lauro, S. J., & Embry, K. (2008). A zombie manifesto: the nonhuman condition in the era of advanced capitalism. BOUNDARY 2, 35(1), 85. The zombie has been one of the most prevalent monsters in films of the second half of the twentieth century...The zombie has become a scientific concept by which we define cognitive processes and states of being, subverted animation, and dormant consciousness. In neuroscience, there are “zombie agents”; in computer science there are “zombie functions.”...The ubiquity of the metaphor suggests the zombie’s continued cultural currency, and we will investigate why this specter has captured the American imagination for over a century. We want to take a deeper look at the zombie in order to suggest its usefulness as an ontic/hauntic object that speaks to some of the most puzzling elements of our sociohistorical moment, wherein many are trying to ascertain what lies in store for humanity after global capitalism—if anything.
Our fundamental assertion is that there is an irreconcilable tension between global capitalism and the theoretical school of posthumanism. This is an essay full of zombies—the historical, folkloric zombie of Haitian origin, which reveals much about the subject position and its relationship to a Master/Slave dialectic; the living-dead zombie of contemporary film, who seems increasingly to be lurching off the screen and into our real world (as a metaphor, this zombie reveals much about the way we code inferior subjects as unworthy of life); and finally, we are putting forth a zombie that does not yet exist: a thought-experiment that exposes the limits of posthuman theory and shows that we can get posthuman only at the death of the subject. Unlike Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” we do not propose that the position of the zombie is a liberating one—indeed, in its history, and in its metaphors, the zombie is most often a slave...In the figure of zombie, subject and object are obliterated. This figure, simultaneously slave and slave rebellion, is a more appropriate reflection of our capitalist moment, and even if it holds less promise than a cyborg future, its prophesy of the posthuman is more likely to come to fruition. The zombie, we feel, is a more pessimistic but nonetheless more appropriate stand-in for our current moment, and specifically for America in a global economy, where we feed off the products of the rest of the planet, and, alienated from our own humanity, stumble forward, groping for immortality even as we decompose.
Michel, F. (2007). Life and Death and Something in Between: Reviewing Recent Horror Cinema. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 12(4), 390-397. I argue that popular zombie films can be seen as expressions of the return of repressed cultural concerns about class antagonism and about the violent and deadening effects of modern life...
The observation that it is ‘‘easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism’’ is often cited with the implication that this is surprising or illogical or ironic (Jameson, 2007, p 199). But of course it is easier to envision the end of the world because doing so requires chiefly extrapolating from existing conditions, continuing in the directions we are already going. In contrast, imagining the end of capitalism requires envisaging substantial changes in existing structures, institutions, and habits...
Gothic horror emerges as the obverse of the Enlightenment: Victor Frankenstein’s scientific research yields a creature that seems ‘‘my own vampire. . . let loose from the grave’’ (Shelley, 1969, p 77). Vampires develop with industrial capitalism. Marx famously describes capital as ‘‘dead labour which, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks’’ (Marx, 1976, p 342). But if capital is vampiric – like the aristocratic Dracula with his new property in England – then members of the laboring class are zombies. Historically, that is, the cultural associations with zombies align them with workers...
Borg, M. B. (2005). A zombie storms the meathouse: Approximating living and undergoing psychoanalysis in a palliative care culture. Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society, 10(1), 1-22. Human – that is, emotional – responses to everyday stimuli are increasingly pathologized, and we are increasingly promised the obliteration of all personal suffering. Yet at the core of all these human responses to suffering that need remedy is a deep sense of empathy with the struggles associated with simply existing at this time in this society, in a state of perpetual dread over the immense social problems that infect those around us, and that seem (and often are) insurmountable. It seems in our society it is the experience of empathy that is most feared, most defended against, and most abstained from, as if compassion is the ultimate contagion that, if experienced in full force, would lead to break down.
..the definitive aim of life in such a society is to promote fulfillment (in the form of increased satisfaction and decreased discomfort or pain) for individuals instead of communities. Other authors have analyzed the pervasiveness of this perspective in many social and cultural institutions (including psychotherapy and the social sciences in general) in capitalist societies, particularly the United States. As a character defense on a societal level, liberal individualism allows us to avoid acknowledging the social consequences of a sanctioned perspective that supports fulfillment for some and suffering for others. As this perspective becomes rigidified, it functions as an ideology.
Consistent with such a notion of ideology, control and allocation processes are dissociated, problems and fulfillments become increasingly individualized, separated from their social and cultural influences and etiologies. The inability to empathize with both self and other diminishes the potential for subversive or revolutionary processes to exert any impact on societal transformations or daily functions.Today there are many examples of compassion being pushed aside in favor of rules and regulations that diminish our awareness of our collective fragility..
Stratton, J. (2011). Zombie trouble: Zombie texts, bare life and displaced people. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 14(3), 265-281.
There has been a recent upsurge in texts featuring zombies. At the same time, members of western countries have become increasingly anxious about displaced peoples: asylum-seekers and other so-called illegal migrants who attempt to enter those countries. What displaced people, people without the protection of the state and zombies have in common is that both manifest the quality of what Giorgio Agamben calls ‘bare life’. Moreover, zombies have the qualities of workers or slaves driven to total exhaustion. The genre of the zombie apocalypse centres on laying siege to a place that is identified as a refuge for a group of humans. In these texts it is possible to read an equation of zombies with displaced people who are ‘threatening’ the state. Indeed, the rhetoric used to describe these people constructs them as similar to mythical zombies...
Mahoney, P. (2011). Mass Psychology and the Analysis of the Zombie: From Suggestion to Contagion. Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture, 113-29.
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