World Revolution Z - Gastón Gordillo

World Revolution Z - Gastón Gordillo
World Revolution Z - Gastón Gordillo

The growing popularity of the zombie apocalypse genre represents growing elite anxiety about revolutionary insurrection, argues Gastón Gordillo.

Submitted by Joseph Kay on December 6, 2012

The trailer of the Hollywood blockbuster World War Z forthcoming this summer is characterized by the dramatic appearance of huge masses of zombies that take over public space at staggering speed. Amid the rapid collapse of state power, the leaderless zombie multitude forces the global elites to retreat behind high walls or to desperately flee on helicopters onto ships out in the ocean. In the final scenes, Israeli soldiers shoot at massive avalanches of bodies that charge against them as if forming an uncontrollable flood of indistinct physical forms. The zombie multitude becomes particularly ominous in the trailer’s closing images, when it forms a monstrous protuberance that steadily climbs up the Wall of Separation protecting Fortress Israel. Yet what makes the trailer particularly eerie, and revealing, was the timing of its online release. At the exact time the gripping images of Israeli troops murdering uncontrollable crowds of zombies was going viral on YouTube in mid-November, the Israeli military was murdering and mutilating men, women, and children in Gaza and treating them, as in World War Z, as if they were part of a not-fully-human, dangerous horde that ought to be crushed at all costs.

“Everything in World War Z is based in reality,” said Max Brooks, the author of the book the movie is based on. “Well, except the zombies. But seriously, everything else in the book is either taken from reality or 100% real.” Maybe we should take Brook’s insistence about the reality of the zombie multitude seriously, and thereby examine in more depth what’s behind the growing obsession with a zombie apocalypse in popular culture. And this may require exploring this genre’s popularity as expression of anxieties about a world revolution. Am I reading too much into yet another zombie movie? Perhaps. Yet the fact that insurrections are mystified as the result of a “contagion” triggered by a “virus” that abruptly turns humans into uncontrollable crowds of zombies should not totally surprise us. This is how elites have always regarded insurrections: as pathological events inexplicably created by irrational hordes blinded by primitive, unsophisticated, impulsive desires. This is how Gustave Le Bon, the father of the “sociology of crowds,” responded to the uprising of the people of Paris in 1871: by claiming that radicalized multitudes are nothing but zombie-like, scary “hordes.”

Scholarly analyses of zombies tend to focus on the historical origins of this figure in Haiti, where the zombie as the living dead symbolized the body of the slave. As David Graeber reminds us, slaves are usually treated throughout history as humans that are already dead: as bare life that could be killed without breaking the law. In popular culture, zombies indeed often represent a state of un-freedom. But isn’t the zombie, in an ironic twist, also a body that cannot be affected and is, therefore, utterly indifferent to power, ranks, and hierarchies and that is consequently unbearably free? Isn’t this affective dimension key to any political reading of the current popularity of zombies? The author of World War Z emphasized that what terrifies him the most about zombies is, indeed, that they don’t obey rules and cannot be “shocked and awed.” “They scare me more than any other fictional creature out there because they break all the rules,” Brooks said in an interview. And he argued that this disobedience makes of zombies irrational beings comparable to terrorists. “The lack of rational thought has always scared me when it came to zombies, the idea that there is no middle ground, no room for negotiation. That has always terrified me. Of course that applies to terrorists. … Any kind of mindless extremism scares me, and we’re living in some pretty extreme times.” Brooks, on his own admission, is very scared of the world in which we live. He wrote his first book, The Zombie Survival Guide, as a call to arms to get ready for the coming planetary insurrection. His first lesson is, “Organize before they rise!” And “they,” lest we forget, are actually us: ordinary human beings that abruptly become something else: something profoundly menacing.

Zombies are menacing not only because they cannot be affected but also because they are not totally devoid of affects; after all, zombies are not dead but undead. Their lifeless bodies move, moan, and are guided by one raw appetite: the desire to eat living flesh, which magnetically attracts them to living bodies. In Brooks’ book, this desire makes zombies aggregate to form truly gigantic multitudes: “mega swarms” that roam the continents and are visible from outer space: “Truly massive, miles across, like the American buffalo must have once been.” These zombie multitudes are what Deleuze and Guattari would call uncoded desiring machines: lines of flow guided by desire, even if this is desire of a rudimentary nature. In Spinoza, Deleuze argued that a tick is guided by three basic affects: it is attracted to light, it is sensitive to the smell of mammals, and digs into the animal’s skin. The zombies’ rudimentary affects are very similar. Yet this affective condition makes them immune to the state and thereby has profound political implications. In the eyes of the state, zombies form insurgent multitudes because their undomesticated desires threaten the very fabric of state power.

While heir to a long legacy of movies about zombie epidemics, the film World War Z is already being hailed as “The Mother of all Zombie Movies,” and rightly so. The film stands out, first, because of its planetary reach, which makes previous films about zombie outbreaks look purely local or regional (England in 28 Days or Atlanta and rural Georgia in The Walking Dead). But what is most distinctive about the zombie multitudes in the film is their staggering speed. This speed, in fact, sets the movie apart from the book, which follows the genre convention of presenting clumsy, slow-moving zombies, the walking dead. To the dismay of some of the book’s fans, on the film’s trailer the zombie multitudes charge at an overwhelming velocity, forming massive avalanches in which the zombies’ individual bodies create an undifferentiated torrent, an unformed thing-in-motion that overruns everything on its path. This vortex makes the allegory of revolution more haunting than it is in the book. Paul Virilio has long insisted that revolutions are processes of acceleration whose speed is qualitatively different from that of capital. “Revolution is speed, but speed is not revolution” (Speed and Politics). We got a taste of that insurgent speed in the staggeringly fast-paced wave of insurrections that shook North Africa and the Middle East in 2011, which in a matter of weeks engulfed multiple countries thousands of kilometers apart from each other. Some of the long-shot images of urban unrest on the trailer of World War Z, indeed, look like images of the Arab Spring.

Zombie epidemics and revolutionary situations share a similar spatiality: a territorial disintegration through which multitudes that do not take orders from the state dissolve state-controlled spaces. In World War Z and also on the hugely popular TV show The Walking Dead, the zombie multitudes create, through this territorial dissolution, an overwhelming spatial void that is first generated in urban centers and subsequently expands outwardly. As Lefebvre insisted, in an increasingly urbanized world the most radical insurrections are (and will be) urban phenomena. This is why the panoptic surveillance of urban space is a key priority of the imperial security apparatus, as Stephen Graham demonstrates in Cities under Siege. In The Walking Dead, the urban nature of the zombie insurrection is particularly apparent in the opening episodes, when the zombie takeover of the city of Atlanta forces survivors to flee to rural areas. In one scene, attack helicopters bombard the city with napalm, the epitome of counter-insurgency weapons. In subsequent episodes, the spatial voiding created by the collapse of the state acquires a particularly haunting presence. For months on end, the small band of survivors lives on the run, in hiding, always on the edge and with their weapons at the ready, suffocated by the spatial emptiness that surrounds them ---a voiding not unlike the one experienced by imperial troops in terrains controlled by local insurgencies, be that of the jungles of South America in the 1600s or the mountains of Afghanistan today.

In both The Walking Dead and World War Z, a key strategy to cope with this spatial disintegration is the production of walled, fortified spatial enclaves. Yet whereas in The Walking Dead these walled enclaves are created locally by scattered survivors who have no idea what is going on elsewhere, in World War Z they are largely the product of a globally-coordinated policy of counter-insurgency. Nothing makes Brooks’ conservative anxieties more transparent than the fact his book presents South Africa and Israel as the world leaders in containing the zombie insurrection because of their commitment to Apartheid-style policies. In South Africa, Brooks tells us, the author of the successful plan to contain the zombies through fortified spatial enclosures was a former official of the Apartheid regime who originally devised this plan to combat a human insurrection. “It was a doomsday scenario for the country’s white minority, the plan to deal with the all-out uprising of its indigenous African population.” In short, a human rebellion against a brutal, racist regime becomes indistinguishable from a zombie outbreak. Likewise, Brooks presents Israel’s Apartheid as efficient and humanitarian, for it opens its militarized borders to all uninfected Palestinians fleeing the zombies. And the Wall of Separation is rebranded, and whitewashed, as the object that protects generic humans from the zombie apocalypse. The recent bombing of Gaza by the Israeli military disrupts this fantasy of humanitarian colonialism to remind us that the current Israeli state would never act so kindly, for the Wall was built to contain not zombies but millions of Palestinians who have for decades lived under foreign military occupation.

The genre of a zombie pandemic is quite distinct within the larger genre of end-of-the-world scenarios that currently fascinates popular culture. This is the only apocalypse created not by natural cataclysms but, rather, by human bodies that stop obeying the state. In being guided by one unrelenting desire, zombies are human bodies that have been freed from hierarchies, conventions, consumerism, and indoctrination by the media; and this un-coding creates a collective, leaderless, and expansive occupation of space that makes the state crumble. Zombies have this unique power to destroy the state, primarily, because they are free from fear. Brooks was asked why he thinks we are witnessing a growing fascination with zombies, and he candidly replied that they represent anxieties about a world in turmoil and about “chaos in the streets.” And this takes us back to the power of fearless multitudes. The phrase “we are no longer afraid” was one of the most recurring sentiments uttered during the 2011 insurrections of North Africa and the Middle East. Those were, indeed, multitudes that could no longer be “shocked and awed.” That is the affect that terrifies Brooks and that made him fantasize about a global campaign of indiscriminate state violence against rebellious hordes.

But the fear of the coming zombie insurrection may also be a tangential, not-fully-articulated recognition of the zombie-like conditions that capitalism has long cultivated at a planetary scale. After all, the global grinding machine depends on turning billions of people into passive, depoliticized bodies guided (like ticks and zombies) by just a few rudimentary affects: working, consuming, and obeying. Maybe what makes World War Z truly terrifying is the hidden recognition that the insurgent multitudes presented as lifeless hordes have woken up from their zombie nightmare to become unbearably human.

Gastón Gordillo teaches anthropology at the University of British Columbia. This article was originally posted at the Space and Politics blog.

Comments

EastTexasRed

11 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by EastTexasRed on December 9, 2012

Zombies. Do they have revolutionary consciousness? The author of the book is scared of zombies? Jesus Christ. I cannot even remotely accept any comparison of the zombie genre and anything to do with emancipatory/revolutionary movements, even if some shots do look like the Arab Spring. They're fucking ZOMBIES.

teh

11 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by teh on December 9, 2012

Considering that the modern zombie movie genre was popularized by George Romeros Living Dead sereies:

Discussing the creation of Night of the Living Dead, Romero remarked, "I had written a short story, which I basically had ripped off from a Richard Matheson novel called I Am Legend."[17] Romero further explained:

“ I thought I Am Legend was about revolution. I said if you're going to do something about revolution, you should start at the beginning. I mean, Richard starts his book with one man left; everybody in the world has become a vampire. I said we got to start at the beginning and tweak it up a little bit. I couldn't use vampires because he did, so I wanted something that would be an earth-shaking change. Something that was forever, something that was really at the heart of it. I said, so what if the dead stop staying dead? ... And the stories are about how people respond or fail to respond to this. That's really all [the zombies] ever represented to me. In Richard's book, in the original I Am Legend, that's what I thought that book was about. There's this global change and there's one guy holding out saying, wait a minute, I'm still a human. He's wrong. Go ahead. Join them. You'll live forever! In a certain sense he's wrong but on the other hand, you've got to respect him for taking that position

bastarx

11 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by bastarx on December 9, 2012

EastTexasRed

Zombies. Do they have revolutionary consciousness? The author of the book is scared of zombies? Jesus Christ. I cannot even remotely accept any comparison of the zombie genre and anything to do with emancipatory/revolutionary movements, even if some shots do look like the Arab Spring. They're fucking ZOMBIES.

ETR of course zombies don't have revolutionary consciousness, did you even read the article?

But zombies are more or less what the bourgeoisie sees when they look at revolutionary movements, a mindless horde destroying their wonderful world for no apparent reason.

Revolutionary movements should aspire to a certain zombieness, the refusal to negotiate is essential if capital is ever to be destroyed.

EastTexasRed

11 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by EastTexasRed on December 12, 2012

Thanks for the patronising question, bastarx. Mine was a rhetorical question. I'm not some troll who goes round commenting on comments without reading the article. You may think the bourgoisie sees zombies, and you may be right to some extent, but that doesn't mean zombie movies have any value to revolutionary thought. I don't need the example of zombies to refuse to negotiate with capital.

flaneur

11 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by flaneur on December 12, 2012

Well no one needs symbolism but films would be very boring if they were just scrolling words across the screen going THIS IS JUST A FILM ABOUT CAVING IN SKULLS/AN ANGRY MAN/A COUPLE IN LOVE. Decent article but I don't see how World War Z is any different than the zombie films of the last 40 years which actually did have symbolism instead of coincidental shooting locations.

ocelot

11 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by ocelot on December 12, 2012

EastTexasRed

Thanks for the patronising question, bastarx. Mine was a rhetorical question. I'm not some troll who goes round commenting on comments without reading the article..

That's a bit rich considering your initial comment had precisely fuck all to do with the actual content of the article, other than the bits you got from skimming the first two paragraphs.

What do you think of the re-framing of the Occupation wall and the Gaza massacres as the struggle of good versus evil, in the latest coming Hollywood shlockbuster? Nothing. Because you haven't read the article end to end - you were in too much of a hurry to shoot your mouth off and engage in the kind of loud, brain-dead macho blustering denunciation and "What you looking at? Hey, I'm talking to you!" mode of interaction that seems to pass for social manners on your side of the pond. Lamefull and shamefull...

Having actually read the article, I thought it was pretty good, in a "using media-hype around forthcoming cultural commodities to diagnose capitalist cultural anxieties" kinda way. Perhaps not quite the full Zizek, but maybe that's not such a bad thing either.

EastTexasRed

11 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by EastTexasRed on December 16, 2012

That's a bit rich considering your initial comment had precisely fuck all to do with the actual content of the article, other than the bits you got from skimming the first two paragraphs.

Because you haven't read the article end to end - you were in too much of a hurry to shoot your mouth off and engage in the kind of loud, brain-dead macho blustering denunciation and "What you looking at? Hey, I'm talking to you!" mode of interaction that seems to pass for social manners on your side of the pond. Lamefull and shamefull...

Fuck off telling me what I have or haven't read. And what side of the pond would that be? You haven't got a clue what you're talking about.

bastarx

11 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by bastarx on December 16, 2012

You just couldn't help proving Ocelot right could you?

Tarwater

11 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by Tarwater on December 17, 2012

I don't think he proved anything.

bastarx

11 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by bastarx on December 17, 2012

He proved Ocelot was correct about his poor manners.

EastTexasRed

11 years 3 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by EastTexasRed on December 17, 2012

OK guys, I apologise if my language offended, I was pissed off with Ocelot's vehement accusation that I hadn't read the article and by his 'other side of the pond' comment, which if I was american I'd be well offended by.

KriegPhilosophy

11 years ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by KriegPhilosophy on March 3, 2013

[youtube]z5LW07FTJbI[/youtube]
My interpretation of zombies has always been the misanthropic break away pack mentality against the multitude of zombies i.e they are not conscious of whatever is seen as important by the break away group. It could be ideological (Baader - Meinhof, Timothy McVeigh, militant Islam) or social (School shooters, street gangs, outcasts ).
Though even though there maybe a degree of difference in existential/psychological rationality they are all "right" because the mechanisms of control (social or not) become apparent to the individuals so they must react and struggle against it in one way or another and eventually "survive" (transcend) their situation (or not in the case of columbine shooters ha ha!). In the Ideological plain the individuals/groups maybe looking for a "cure" (revolution) to save the zombies from their "infection" (infected with perceived mindlessness) and transform them into fully conscious beings, but this has failed because all that has been done in the past is replace the existing control mechanisms (Soviet Union, Islamic Republic, Democracy).

sun207

10 years 9 months ago

In reply to by libcom.org

Submitted by sun207 on June 20, 2013

Folks, you are reading too much into it. It is very simple.

The elite families that run the world governments always uses film to tell us their future plans.

Families , mind you, whose each individual family wealth is in the trillions, simply thinks of most of the world population as zombies, useless eaters, the undead that need to die, ergo, population control thru perpetual wars that are neither won or lost but last indefinitely, so to continue to bring in profit, for starters.

A manageable population that is more easily controlled and born to serve them into perpetuity.

If you want to see what they want, go see a documentary about the present Queen, day and a life, and how watch how her servants are there hanging on her every whim and every thing has to be robotically perfect......, food just right, lighting just right, carrying the end of her gown for hours as she walk, really, really sickening.

I think if she begins to sneeze, someone is there with a royal hanky, and they better have perfect timing.

They want to be Gods, a sick version.

Thats all.