martin hardie on Mon, 27 Feb 2012 23:57:46 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> some reflections from australia on recent events here - the demise of zombie politics? |
after watching the so called leadership struggle here in australia over the last week i needed to purge myself of it on paper: http://blogs.crikey.com.au/northern/2012/02/27/where-governments-reign-but-dont-govern-the-demise-of-zombie-politics/ i was drawn to the zombie reference by a recent article on polanyi: Double movements and pendular forces: Polanyian perspectives on the neoliberal age 20 Current Sociology 60(1) http://csi.sagepub.com/content/60/1/3.abstract As Peck et al. (2010) have argued, as an intellectual project, neoliberalism is practically dead, even while it blunders on as a mode of crisis-driven governance. In this scenario, it is entering a post-programmatic, ?living dead? or ?zombie? phase, ?in which residual neoliberal impulses are sustained not by intellectual and moral leadership, or even by hegemonic force? ? as in the 1980s and 1990s, during the neoliberal ascendancy ? ?but by underlying macroeconomic and macroinstitutional conditions?, including enforced public austerity and global indebtedness, ?and growth-chasing, beggar-thy-neighbor modes of governance? (Peck et al., 2010: 94). Peck et al. are not alone in identifying the zombie as a metaphor appropriate to the socioeconomic present. Mark Fisher (2009: 15, 78) drew attention to the zombifying logic of neoliberalism, Colin Crouch (2011) described neoliberalism as undergoing ?Non-Death? and Time magazine hailed the zombie as representative of ?some real American values? and anointed it as ?the official monster of the recession? (Grossman, 2009).10 Gillian Tett (2009) had earlier recruited the metaphor to a more specific purpose, in designating the phalanx of businesses and private equity firms that are ?too weak to flourish but too complex and costly for their lenders to shut down?, such that they remain ?half-alive, poisoning the corporate world by silently spreading a sense of stagnation and fear?. John Quiggin (2010) and SOAS economist Ben Fine (2010) adapted the metaphor ? as ?Zombieconomics? ? to refer to mainstream economics in the neoliberal age: an approach that is dead in that its methodology has been comprehensively debunked, but undead in that it persistently returns. (It blunders around ?looking for applications out of the incidence of market imperfections, whether in the dimly incorporated real world, or through appropriation and degradation of the material of other social sciences? [Fine, 2010: 167].) Adding to the gathering crush of zombie metaphors, finally, are Chris Harman?s Zombie Capitalism (2009) and David McNally?s Monsters of the Market: Zombies, Vampires and Global Capitalism (2011), for whom the zombie, together with the vampire, symbolize capital. Capital, writes Harman (2009: 84), ?is labour that is transformed into a monstrous product whose only aim is to expand itself?. It is ?dead labour?, in Marx?s phrase (in Harman, 2009: 84), ?that, vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks?. In this use of the vampire metaphor Marx is making three interrelated claims: the argument for exploitation (that capital feeds off living labour), the idea of invisibility (like vampires, capital?s bloodsucking is shrouded in darkness) and the notion of alienation ? the dead dominate the living (McNally, 2011: 140). Equally, capital can be likened to zombies. Although zombies in literary and cinematic culture of the first decades of the 20th century figured specifically as mindless labourers (or Caribbean slaves) and in the second half as mindless and flesh-eating consumers, analogies with the capital?labour relation in its totality should not be overlooked, argues McNally (2011: 141): In awakening past labour, living labour raises it from the dead, makes it undead. Indeed, only the vital activity of labour keeps capital from lapsing into a death state: ?Living labour must seize on these things, awaken them from the dead?. In so doing, living labour also alienates and deadens itself. ?All the powers of labour project themselves as powers of capital?, thus rendering workers appendages of the animated monster. In a perverse dialectical inversion, the very powers of labour that re-animate the dead also deaden the living, reifying them, reducing them to a zombie-state. Having escaped human control, capital?s goals are determined ? like zombies ? by impersonal forces and not by conscious human volition. Harman?s use of the zombie analogy is akin to McNally?s, although his creatures more closely resemble one species of the zombie tribe: the denizens of Romero?s films. Like Romero?s zombies, global capitalism, for Harman (2009), is not only parasitic upon living human labour and dead to the needs of living human beings but is prone to erupt in savage bouts of activity that inflict chaos all around. The threat it poses is apocalyptic, a catastrophic collapse of social organization ?in Harman?s allegory, through runaway climate change. -- # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org