Zombies, Vampires, and Philosophy

by Richard Greene; K. Silem Mohammad

  Spinoza’s emphasis on bodily autonomy, as well as on motion, rest, and speed, goes some way toward demonstrating why he is an ideal writer from whom to derive a philosophy of zombiedom. One of the things that made it difficult for him to publish his theories in his lifetime was the tendency for his thought to challenge the tenets of scriptural theism, suggesting as he does that the soul can be conceived as a complex of determinate actions and reactions—that is, in much the same way that he conceives the physical body. For Spinoza, we are all, in at least one sense, automatons or zombies.

  Spinoza conceives of death as a disruption or redisposition of parts, or of simple bodies within composite bodies, wherein “the simplest bodies … are distinguished from one another only by motion and rest, speed and slowness” (II, P13 A2”). Deleuze refers to the process here described by Spinoza as one of “composition” and “decomposition”: certain bodies make themselves faster and more complex (that is, more powerful) by decomposing the relations between parts of other bodies and absorbing those relations so that they are recomposed as their own.

  When a bird eats an insect, or when a person eats a bird, the relations conducive to life are absorbed by the consuming body, and that body is thereby made stronger. When a zombie decomposes the relations of a living human by consuming its flesh, it not only thereby gains sustenance for its own body, it also facilitates a larger process of de- and re-composition wherein the victim’s body itself becomes a zombie body which in turn seeks other living bodies to de- and re-compose. Because by far the greatest amount of energy expended by zombies goes toward this process of assimilation, in some ways it makes more sense to think of the zombie’s body not as the individual, animated human corpse it occupies, but as the larger mass of bodies that constitute the total zombie organism.48

  One might wonder where ethics comes into all this. Just as Spinoza got in trouble with the religious authorities of his day by espousing a theory of pantheism (God is everything, everything is God) that in their minds—and, more approvingly, in the minds of later readers—amounted to atheism, he also courted endless recrimination by anticipating Nietzsche in rejecting the moral concepts of good and evil in favor of the more narrowly ethical (or ethological) concepts of good and bad:Those things are good which bring about the preservation of the proportion of motion and rest the human Body’s parts have to one another; on the other hand, those things are evil which bring it about that the parts of the human Body have a different proportion of motion and rest to one another. (IV, P39)

  From this point of view, that which is good or bad is so only from the perspective of the body that is either composed or decomposed by other bodies. Accordingly, concepts such as “evil,” considered in an absolute sense, are merely abstractions that get in the way of our achieving the the greatest fulfillment possible in our lives; they cause us to tend toward sadness rather than towards joy, and therefore should be avoided. Phenomena like poisoning, sickness, and death, in this ethical system, are no more than what Spinoza, as rendered by Deleuze, calls “bad encounters”:49 bad for the body that gets decomposed, good for the decomposing body (in the case of zombies, decomposing in more sense than one).

  A workable ethics, then, consists in finding out what relations are possible between different bodies, and in what way those relations can most effectively contribute to our well being both as individuals and as a collective community. Deleuze frames the questions relevant to a Spinozist ethology as follows:How do individuals enter into composition with one another in order to form a higher individual, ad infinitum? How can a being take another being into its world, but while preserving and respecting the other’s own relations and world? . . . In what order and in what manner will the powers, speeds, and slownesses be composed ? 50

  I want to suggest that zombies represent the progress of an imaginary counter-human ethology: one in which questions such as Deleuze’s have failed to be adequately considered, and accordingly, in which another more powerful body (or body of bodies) steps in to enact its own process of recomposing its decomposing self by decomposing our compositions.

  We say that zombies are “mindless”—it is practically part of the definition. What we mean, a Spinozist would say, is that they are very focused (“single-minded”). They have no time to spare on abstract reflection or moralizing. Or they are not permitted that privilege. Zombies, whether they are the will-sapped slaves of Haitian voodoo lore, or the bloodthirsty ghouls of Romero’s living dead movies, are radically task-oriented beings. They have a job to do, and nothing else. And herein lies their true difference from ghosts: ghosts are often highly imaginative, even fanciful. They can afford to be, as they are far less subject to the constraints of time—that is, to the relations of rest and motion. A ghost, as a result, need hardly move at all. Zombies, on the other hand, are the products of imaginations in the grip of tremendous and immediately present real-world anxieties. And if they were at one time apprehended as a sluggish but steadily progressing horde on the horizon, symbolic of some vaguely imminent but still dormant catastrophe, they are now a violently swift and powerful explosion of nightmares spawned by our actual daily headlines.

  Fast Zombies

  As though sensing that Romero’s relatively hopeful political idealism has overtaken his grasp on the severity of crisis, younger filmmakers have instituted a new modification of the Undead mechanism: the fast zombie. Two recent films get maximum mileage out of this innovation: Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), and Zack Snyder’s 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead.

  In 28 Days, we are to understand the force driving the “zombies” as chemical, not radiological: they are impelled by a virally induced “rage” that apparently has nothing to do with hunger or any other bodily desire beyond the will to inflict harm. This compulsion is so strong that the actions of the infected ultimately lead to their own demise, as they do nothing to sustain their bodies, which finally break down. Contributing to this breakdown, no doubt, is the frantic pace with which they pursue the uninfected. Shots in which huge crowds of the infected chase the film’s protagonists through the streets of London are chilling in their suggestion of real-life scenes of politically and religiously motivated mob violence, and even more chilling in that the social impetus for the violence is absent; there is no specific social grievance, only the mayhem that generally attends such grievances.

  Similarly, in Dawn, rioting swarms of Undead surrounding a suburban shopping mall break windows, overturn burning vehicles, and shriek with what sounds like the extremist fervor of revolutionaries (but is in actuality brute blood lust). As with Boyle’s infected, there is some suggestion that Snyder’s zombie epidemic is virally or otherwise biologically induced, but unlike the former ghouls, these zombies don’t wear out; they rot and break apart, but keep on coming. In both cases, there is a pronounced swerve from the “classic” model in which zombies are relatively easy to evade once one has gained a little distance and secured some fortification. It finally matters little whether the zombies in these films are “really” Undead or merely “sick”: the physiological conditions they have entered fundamentally change their ethological composition, and thus their status as persons or nonpersons.

  The first few minutes of Dawn constitute what should come to be considered one of the premier set pieces of zombie cinema. Ana (Sarah Polley) is a hospital nurse who drives home one evening at the end of what seems like a normal day, except for largely ignored media reports in the background (car radio, TV) of some vaguely developing crisis. Ana distractedly switches the station and turns the channel. When she pulls into the driveway of her suburban tract home, she is greeted by Vivian, the neighbor girl (the name connotes life and innocent vigor). Ana and her husband Luis go to bed.

  In the next scene they awaken to see that Vivian is standing in the dark doorway to their bedroom. She is bloody and crazed. She hurls herself forcefully at Luis and tears out a big chunk of his flesh. Ana shuts herself in the bathroom. Luis, now also a zombie, batters down the
door, and she manages to escape through the window. In a subtle visual shock, we see that it is not night-time, as the scene has seemed to suggest, but broad daylight. As Ana gets in her car and flees, pursued by the now-running Undead Luis, we see first that the neighborhood is in a state of chaos, and beyond that the entire city.

  There are flames, sirens, and people running in the streets. Frantic residents run from sprinting zombies only to be struck down by speeding ambulances. As Ana makes her way onto the open road, the camera pulls back to give us wider panoramic views of the catastrophe. The city skyline is a haze of smoke and helicopters. In a computer-enhanced aerial shot, Ana’s car narrowly escapes another car coming at her from a cross street at a T-shaped intersection, and the second car goes on to crash into a gas station, which explodes spectacularly. Ana’s car goes off the road, into a secluded woodsy patch, where it collides with a tree.

  Coinciding with Ana’s implied unconsciousness, the credits begin. Documentary images of global unrest are montaged against news reports of the unfurling zombie crisis, to the accompaniment of Johnny Cash’s jangling end-times anthem “The Man Comes Around.” Shots of rioters in the streets and Muslims bowing their heads at prayer in mosques are juxtaposed with Undead faces and limbs gaping and clutching at the camera. Talking heads on TV inform us that no one knows anything and that there is no end in sight to the terror.

  At this point the viewer may already be exhausted, and indeed, although there are other memorable moments in the film, nothing quite compares to these first nightmarish minutes in terms of sheer adrenaline-surging shock. These fast zombies, unlike Romero’s, are never presented as poignant embodiments of desire, whether for food or for lost identities. When Luis pounds on the window of Ana’s car with his fist, he seems more angry than hungry. There’s no indication that Snyder’s zombies bite their victims in order to eat them rather than just to attack; like Boyle’s infected, they are driven primarily by naked, irrational aggression.

  If, at the end of Romero’s Land, there is the implication that the class of the living must find some way to adjust its own all-consuming demands in order to accommodate the irresistibly emerging class of the Undead and thus avoid annihilation at its hands, the implication of Boyle’s and (especially) Snyder’s films is yet more alarming: the living have had their chance and blown it. More to the point, the alarming shift from representations of zombies as slow-moving to fast-moving predators signals a mass awareness that these Undead figures, without losing their fierce relevance to our contemporary condition of permanent crisis, have changed the visceral referent of their terror-inducing power from the relatively placid, yellow- to orange-alert realm of the Uncanny to the full-bore red-alert level of the Real.

  Zombies, we might conclude, are the monsters par excellence of late-capitalist culture. If voodoo mind-controlled zombies translate the uncanny into a twentieth-century context of alienated labor and an oppressed third world, postmodern and postnuclear zombies such as Romero’s—and to an even greater extent, fast zombies like Boyle’s and Snyder’s—push us beyond uncanniness. They are not just symbols of repressed desire or anxiety; they are the radically embodied, limit-breaking consequences of repression in its social totality, the inevitable eruption of crisis on a global rather than personal level. The increase in zombie velocity we see in recent films is an extreme expression of a Spinozist-Deleuzean bad encounter which outstrips humanist imagining. The perspective from which we view these zombies is one we cannot rationally assume: the perspective of the Body transitioning into the greater composition of the Body by which it is decomposed.

  Vampires play to a fantasy of quasi-imperialist dominance, of identification with Evil as a force of powerful immortality (and accordingly, of Good as a convenient escape hatch). Zombies afford no such flattering binary constructions of morality. They confront us with a world reduced to the elemental valences of good and bad, bodies in motion and bodies in faster motion. If we identify with zombies, it is an impossible identification with the dissolution that must inevitably ensue in the failure of our species to assimilate other bodies into ourselves in a mindfully ethical way.

  PART III

  Dirty Rotting Scoundrels

  9

  Zombie Gladiators

  DALE JACQUETTE

  Those unmindful when they hear for all they make of their intelligence may be regarded as the walking dead.

  —HERACLITUS, Fragment 3

  On the Prowl

  Hollywood zombies are easily distinguished from ordinary civilians like you and me. They are ravenous, stalking, reanimated dead people with superhuman strength, overturning cars and breaking through doors. They feed on the living flesh of hapless victims, and with a single infectious bite they can turn others into zombies in a growing mob of the marauding Undead. We know them by their rotting limbs, sunken dull lifeless eyes, and gnashing teeth. The classic Hollywood zombie stagger gives them away even from a distance as we flee in our SUVs from one ravenous horde to the waiting maws of another hulking throng blocking the street at the edge of town.

  Often we do not know even by the end of the movie where zombies come from. It’s a virus, or a curse, or just something that happens every once in a while. Filmmakers can cook up the flimsiest plots about why the Undead are loose, or they can just picture the world of today as though it suddenly had to barricade itself against an onslaught of the predeceased. It scares the pants off of us in the theater to watch these ghouls rampaging on the screen, just as it is meant to. The point, dramatically, is to portray these unfortunates as a frightening life- and even civilization-threatening menace, and then to blow their heads off in interesting ways. They are, after all, already dead, and they will thoughtlessly destroy us all if we don’t destroy them first. Hollywood zombies nevertheless are not the most frightening kind of zombie that might be encountered.

  Philosophical Zombies

  We need to distinguish Hollywood from philosophical zombies, the latter of which are still more insidious than their Hollywood prototypes, even though as a rule they do not feed on human flesh. They terrify precisely because they are so difficult—practically impossible in many contexts—to discern from ordinary human beings.

  Philosophical zombies were dreamed up by philosophers as a thought experiment to test concepts and illustrate a variety of theoretical problems about the nature of consciousness and the mind’s relation to the body. Philosophical zombies look and act just like you and me, so that, in contrast with Hollywood zombies, there is often no way to know the difference. Indeed, the only difference between philosophical zombies and non-zombies is the stipulated fact that the former have no conscious states of mind such as feelings of pain, joy, belief states, desires, or the like.

  A rock presumably has no conscious mental states, whereas a dog probably does. Philosophical zombies are more like rocks than dogs in this regard, even though they behave and even talk in a manner indistinguishable from that of normal conscious persons. David J. Chalmers proposes in this light “to consider the logical possibility of a zombie: someone or something physically identical to me (or to any other conscious being), but lacking conscious experiences altogether.”51

  If we look around at the persons in our community, standing in line at the bank or grocery store, or even members of our family and friends we have known for many years, we should consider the logical possibility that any of them might be philosophical zombies. The problem is that we would have no way to know it from their external appearance or behavior. You and I, on the other hand, can rest assured that we are not zombies, and in a sense we could not be, as long as we are thinking thoughts such as these.52

  Automata Among Us

  How is it possible for human beings who look and act just like you and me to exist without any conscious states? It may be conceivable for such a thing to occur, if all motor actions including a subject’s verbal behavior are governed autonomically by those parts of the brain that in normal individuals are solely responsible for suc
h unconscious functions as heartbeat, breathing, digestion, and the like, over which we do not generally exercise volitional control.

  Suppose, then, that all aspects of zombie behavior are controlled by autonomic functioning of the brain stem. This would leave completely inactive the frontal lobes of the brain where consciousness is supposed to reside. The brain of a philosophical zombie manages all the creature’s behavior, including body language, speech acts and verbal interaction, by purely unconscious neural functioning. The outward appearance of a philosophical zombie is indistinguishable from that of a conscious psychological subject, but there is, so to speak, nobody home.

  A philosophical zombie is an automaton. All its movements function autonomically without any accompanying conscious mental states. The philosopher’s zombie is so fluid in its movements, and sufficiently natural-appearing in facial expression and what to it is meaningless verbal exchange in conversation, that it blends in perfectly in all walks of life in human society. No one can tell philosophical zombies apart from what I will call “conscios”: that is, those of us with conscious inner mental lives. Philosophical zombies are capable of articulate speech that cannot be told apart from that of normal conscious persons. They can write and publish books, including novels, scientific monographs and abstruse treatises in philosophy. They can be President of the United States, members and even chairpersons of the boards of directors of major corporations, television evangelists, university administrators, and no one need ever be the wiser! One way to describe the difference between Hollywood zombies and philosophical zombies is that philosophical zombies are so well-behaved as a rule that you can invite them to dinner (contrast evangelists and administrators), whereas a Hollywood zombie, given half a chance and without benefit of cutlery, will have you for dinner.