Control of the Undead

Zizek has made some similar remarks in the past about the contemporary relevance of zombies with respect to biotechnology, but still, I would have loved to have been able to attend this event as I am sure it would have been innovative in many respects. Kudos then to this Life Sciences and Pulp Fiction initiative ...

When does a life begin? When does a life end? And who decides?


Birth and death, the indisputable boundaries of life, over which none but destiny or the gods wield control, have been embedded in cultural activity since the beginning of time. It is not the actual event, but rather the confirmation of birth and death and the repetition through magical rites, religious ceremonies, bureaucratic acts and medical intervention which allow us to enter the community of humankind and leave it again upon our death. In fact, natural or biological factors are just as significant for determining the beginning and end of life as are cultural and historical factors.


The malleability of life’s boundaries through culture (which could have sparked the formation of human culture to begin with) appears to have intensified with the latest cultural and technological developments. In the current biotechnological age, that which is regarded as living finds itself in a never-ending process of negotiation. At the same time, the imaginary arsenal of creatures which exist between life and death continues to grow and diversify. In films, novels, comics, feature pages and bestseller lists, we find dreams (or nightmares) of a world of “undead”. How do the new-found possibilities offered by the “life sciences” and advances in high-tech medicine interrelate with the reproduction of undead fantasies in the imaginary realms of culture?


This event aimed to examine what we regard as “alive” in the biotechnological age. It focused on zones of transition which we haven’t (yet) defined as belonging to the realm of the living, and forms of survival and “underlife” (Erving Goffman) which test the limits of what defines and empowers humans as social and natural creatures. We wanted to examine who exactly is defining the narrative regarding the beginning and end of life and its various stages and what their interests and justification could be. This issue involves ongoing discourse and debate from a variety of fields, including medical ethics, jurisprudence, politics, religion, philosophy, art and popular culture.


The new feasibility


Modern biotechnological advances which enable us to intervene into life processes have led to a revolution which undermines our classical ethical and ontological foundation. As the molecular-biological field forges ahead with “synthesizing” life and “producing” countless embryos (“frozen angels”), the formerly irrefutable boundaries between life and death have become increasingly blurred. Are these “entities” living or dead, not yet alive or not completely dead? Do they deserve our protection? Does this life have intrinsic value beyond its use as mere bio-material, a kind of biotic waste product of technology? Even in other areas of the medical field, especially in intensive care, we are encountering new ontological grey zones. What does it mean when a human supposedly no longer possesses personal traits? How do we convey the state of a patient in a vegetative coma? Or what about the bodies from which we extract organs and tissue – are they truly dead only because a doctor has declared them brain-dead? Furthermore, new biotechnological advances have made forms of “life after death” possible – human organic tissue (cells, organs, blood, bone marrow) can exist in the bodies of others, improving their “quality of life” and postponing their death. Cell lines can be reproduced indefinitely. The possibility of living beyond one’s mortal life in the form of stored information in specialized gene banks is becoming more of a reality every day. “When a person dies nowadays, they’re not really dead.”  (Thomas Lemke)


Whoever establishes the right to define life also controls it. These issues of feasibility are not only negotiated between the scientific community and the political branch. Pop culture plays a key role in a variety of areas – artistic examination, media-based presentation of knowledge and criticism and the drastic narratives of fear and desire. Films, music, comics, illustrations, TV shows and YouTube clips present visions, nightmares, “explanations”, links, myths and parodies of what is conceivable and feasible. The undead must be iconographized in order to stimulate social discourse. Inversely, the imagery-rich discourse strongly contributes to the production of the undead. The science fiction and horror genres have accompanied the development of the life sciences and biotechnology since their inception. And this relationship is by no means one-sided. As much as pop culture delves into science, the scientific field takes advantage of pop culture, not only as a medium, but also as a quarry of ideas, images and rhetoric.


The economic logic of life enhancement


In the differentiation of biotechnologies, we discover a phantasm that claims the bio-body is a perfectible, universally formable, undetermined entity in the current of life. The age-old dream of immortality has returned in the biotechnologically updated and thoroughly materialistic hope that “this bio-body could finally be a deathless body”, as Petra Gehring writes. In view of the logic of optimization that extends to the human body and life itself, the added (economic) value of life is paradoxically rooted in the undead. “From creating ‘good genes’ to acquiring more life time to purchasing euthanasia services for assisted suicide, biotechnologically abstracted life is attractive as a consumer good.” (Gehring)


One could say that our fear of death is what motivates the life enhancement logic of biotechnologies to produce the undead. This also applies to “trans-humanistic” visions of life-enhancement. The triumph over death through biotechnological means serves as a counter programme to other cultural and religious approaches for dealing with death and thus, takes the form of a rejection of death. The ability to “reprogramme our biochemistry” and the prospect of nanotechnology enabling us to “live forever” are among the research objectives pursued by Ray Kurzweil. His work is based on the guarantee that the “biotic substrate” can continue existing using all possible means. But is this life which is made immortal the same as the life we are familiar with?  Will we be confronted with such undead life in the future? Or does undead life already exist today?


In contrast to survival, “undead life” is an unheroic, undefined state of being which is rather uncanny and possesses only limited symbolic depth because it jumbles semiotics and ethical hierarchies. The iconic image for this type of life is the zombie with all its “vital impairments”. Zombies featured for the first time in their modern form in George A. Romero's famous "Night of the Living Dead" of 1968, only one year after the world's first human heart transplant and concurrent to the announcement of brain death criteria which would allow doctors to clinically determine the onset of death. The zombie offers both simple thrills and a subtle connection to archaic-mythical, sociological, historical, technological and even philosophical questions. Its metaphorical significance extends from the slave legends and revolts to modern epidemics. Beyond that, imagining the zombie prevailing over human life in the future certainly represents a worst-case scenario for all the life sciences.


Although the “inability to live or die” confronts us with ontological, philosophical, legal and very concrete, real-life problems, we should never forget that there are places in the world where countless numbers of people are being killed or allowed to die without a thought. The inequality of (medical) resources has also led to an unsettling and unfair economy of death on a global level. In the 20th century, the zombie became a figure of social criticism of the (colonial) exploitation of the body, the dispossession of the soul and the alienation of work. Today, the zombie is very often a post-human entity which exists in a counter-society. Who or what will the zombie become in the 21st century?


Control of the undead


The control of life and death has shifted to the control of the undead. But who determines what is undead? Who stands to profit from the undead? Who will save us from the undead? A starting point of the congress will be the assumption that Foucault’s theoretical model, which he called “biopower”, i.e. a technology of power based on biological and scientifically quantifiable basic functions, such as performance or capability of reproducing, has to be expanded to apply to the category of the undead. While Foucault bases his model on the dichotomy of “living” vs. “dead” (and the bio-political distinction between “that which should live and that which must die”), modern bio-medicine has produced epistemological and political grey zones and ontological border cases, the ambiguity of which is an expression of an ethical dilemma. Normative decisions require clear-cut distinctions and categories – for example, living vs. dead, or someone vs. something. Yet no such category exists for entities that are neither living nor dead. This leads to a sort of regulative limbo; society must take up the task of providing answers to what the undead is and who controls the undead.


One point of contention lies in whether the “new”, “improved”, “prolonged” life, which biotechnology has created with self-congratulatory hype, can even pass as human life. Another is determining who is permitted to use which resources, be it technical, intellectual or cultural in nature. While science and politics struggle to reconcile what is possible and what is permissible, popular culture has already moved on to other questions. What happens to one’s mind in that zone between life and death, of which we know so little about? What happens to a society in which life forms of "varying degrees of vitality" encounter one another? What rights do the undead have?  What about their sexual and emotional lives? Who do they belong to? Must this trend end in a “war” between human and post-human life-forms? Or are (precarious) forms of coexistence possible?
Popular culture has offered answers to such questions long before political and scientific circles even began asking them. It negotiates the divides separating what is feasible, acceptable and imaginable.


The congress


The relationship between science and popular culture is generally acknowledged with embarrassment or irony. What predictions have turned out to be true? What current neuroses determine the prospective image? What sentiments are being produced and conveyed? We wish to take this relationship more seriously. It would be impossible to imagine the “undead” without the interaction of diverse pop-cultural images on scientific image production. Like the images of pop culture, those of science are also serially produced and reproduced for mass-media presentation. The figure of the “undead” haunts our literary and cinematic cultural memory and dramatically focuses our attention to the blurry boundary dividing the living from the dead. This congress examined the reciprocal relationships of theories and images and presented their mass-media dissemination through performance. Biotech experts, bioethicists, philosophers, artists, film and media professionals and pop icons have been invited to attend the congress. They met in various constellations and debated a wide range of issues in the rooms of a film set, constructed specially for the congress inside a former factory hall at Kampnagel, the theatre and cultural performance venue in Hamburg. Visitors could move freely through the rooms of the film set, each of which invokes places where the “undead” are produced. All the discussions, lectures, presentations and experiments were audio- and video-recorded. Wherever the visitors happened to be, they could decide which programme they would like to listen to via portable radio receivers with multiple channels and headphones. A film programme was shown parallel to the live events. In normal life, scientific, political, ethical and pop-cultural debates run concurrently and independently of one another. At the congress they confronted one another and productively work to make the one thing we are all trying to grasp more visible and negotiable – namely the present and future of what we regard as life.

Zombie Boot Camp

This clip I've posted here is from Pink Tentacle. It's very easy just to laugh and dismiss it as trivial, but I'm more inclined to the view that there may be an undercurrent of telling satire in this publicity stunt. So what kind of a logical extreme in biocultural planning could be relevant according to current theorists? Moreover, what about actual policies the Japanese government has considered implementing? Even if there is an element of hyperbole to such a reading strategy, sometimes I think that is ok, in the same way that science fiction can serve as a form of social theory, a yardstick to measure prospects for dystopia, or the progressive spirit of utopia.

It follows that the idea of the "bootcamp" is actually not far removed from recent plans devised to deal with Japan's growing population of "shut ins" (which I've blogged about previously) and NEETS (Not in Employment Education or Training). Apparently the asocial/non productive must be subject to the utilitarian calculus; the decommodified must be recommodified, given that they mark the failure of the liberal subject to pull itself up by its own bootstraps.

Perhaps this might be considered as further ratification of Nick Turse's thesis in The Complex that military culture is threatening to increasingly colonise everyday life (here though in response to the global recession, as Turse's book preceded this event)? To begin thinking of camps also logically leads to consideration of Agamben's dystopic thesis of "the state of exception" and its connections to the biosocial management of a population. To be deprived of your autonomy, a hallmark of what it means to be a living human being, is on a continuum with the zombie laborers familiar from films such as I Walked With a Zombie. But we should be attentive to a historical shift to more accurately capture the biopolitical dimension I've introduced here. William Bogard in his Empire of the Living dead (published in: Mortality, Volume 13, Issue 2 May 2008 , pages 187 - 200) describes it thus:

"The corpse is no longer a dominant organizing figure of power and knowledge in postmodern network society. Limited by its own corporeality and tied to modern notions of the individual, its utility in controlling life has been superseded by technologies that control birth. This essay draws a line from Foucault's analysis of the dead body as an object of biopower to Baudrillard's and Deleuze's vision of control societies, in which the body disappears and biopower becomes a function of information and genetic modification. It uses the popular film image of the “living dead” to trace this evolution of biopower from the dissection of bodies at the end of life to the pre-programming and simulation of life at its inception: an evolution from the corpse to the clone, from the individuated dead body to the hybrid, dividualized body".

So before getting to zombie boot camp specifically, the broader social context in Japan should be taken into account. Were the dystopia to ever be more fully realised then, these "disciplinary techniques" would, if we take on board Bogard's perspective, mark only the beginning of a more efficient form of "pre-programming":

"The ruling LDP is contemplating a plan which would see hikikomori, NEETs, the unemployed and other undesirables bundled off to army boot camps to learn such useful trades as tree felling and ditch digging.

The issue of the supposedly endemic hikikomori (socially isolated people typically not in conventional employment) and NEET problems has vexed politicians desperate to shore up tax revenues for some time; a recent law ensured they would get help whether liked it or not, but this new proposal goes a step further.

The plan will see unemployed from throughout the nation gathered up and collected in military camps, where they will live for six month periods.

The state will there feed and house them, and they will be drilled in the sort of pork barrel schemes which have been so successful in lifting Japan out of its economic malaise; they will work tending forests and abandoned farmland, as well as gain qualifications useful in the construction industry, such as in the operation of heavy machinery.

The politicians proposing the measure all happen to be leading figures involved with the military, agriculture, or construction. It will be tacked on to an upcoming economic stimulus bill.

The scheme is modeled directly on the organisations formed by President Roosevelt to attempt to combat the impact of the Depression.

There is at this stage apparently no talk of making the scheme compulsory, although just how they will get notoriously recalcitrant hikikomori into the camps is not clear. Miruku may not be enough…"

Via Asahi.

Suffice to say, I will continue to test the theoretical application of biopower to social policy by referring to concrete examples if, (as seems likely), and when, they arise. With a gentle smile, I can now turn to the zombie boot camp in question:

"The Saikyō Senritsu Meikyū (”Ultimate Horror Maze”) — a 900-meter-long zombie-infested labyrinth at Japan’s Fuji-Q Highland amusement park — is billed as the world’s longest and scariest house of horror.

However, at a “press conference” staged last month, organizers announced they had temporarily shut down the facility because the zombie staff had lost their edge and were not frightening people enough. While the haunted house was closed, the undead employees were put through a rigorous training program designed to upgrade their zombie skills.

Here’s some video showing the treatment they had to endure...."

The horror house has since reopened and the camp-hardened zombies are reportedly as scary as ever.

[More zombie training camp videos]

ZomCon - "A Better Life Through Containment"Thanks to Zomcon we can all be productive members of society. Even after we die

The ZomCon Corporation (Zombie-Containment) is a privately owned defense company contracted to provide security for the US Government. ZomCon's mission is one of "reclamation" - the cleaning up & cordoning off of territories, fencing off entire towns and communities from roaming zombies, and re-establishing community infrastructure such as schools, hospitals, police/fire services, and stores. ZomCon's Reclaimed/ Protected Suburbs are widely perceived to be the safest places to live and raise a family.



ZomCon has built many "Showcase Suburbs" over the years, complete with the latest in security- surveillance cameras, panic buttons, rogue zombie alarms, public emergency information speakers, and regular armed patrols! In the age of zombies, can you afford to not live in a ZomCon Community?

OTTO; or, Up with Dead People

''Once upon a time, in the not too distant future, there unlived a zombie named Otto. It was a time not much different from today when zombies had become, if not commonplace, then certainly unextraordinary. Zombies had evolved over time and become somewhat more refined. They had developed a limited ability to speak, and more importantly, to reason. Some say it was primarily owing to the fact that the practice of embalming had fallen out of favour. Others say it was simply a natural process of evolution. Each new wave of zombies was beaten down and killed by the living who found them to be an irritating and irksome reminder of their own inescapable mortality, not to mention an echo of their own somnambulistic conformist behaviour. But the few zombies who survived annihilation managed to pass on their intelligence they had acquired to subsequent generations, perhaps through some strange telepathy only shared by the dead. Or perhaps by a clandestine guerrilla activity, born out of resistance against the violent and increasing hostilities of the living".