1 the Talking Dead: Articulating the “Zombified” Subject Under Putin

The Talking Dead: Articulating the “Zombified” Subject Under Putin Eliot Borenstein New York University [Draft—no footnotes] "'What does it matter who is speaking,' someone said, 'what does it matter who is speaking." --Samuel Beckett, as quoted by Michel Foucault. (Foucault 101) “О том, что нас всех зомбируют пропагандой, мы читаем и слышим вот уже второе десятилетие." — Berdy, “The Zombies Are Coming." Zombie Nations I have come here to tell you something you already know, but perhaps not in the way that you think you know it: our world has been overrun by zombies. I speak, of course, of our mass culture, but the border between our mass culture and our world is a sketchy one. And the blurriness of this boundary immediately points to one of the main purposes to which zombies have been used in American culture (though not, as we shall see, in Russia). After all, one of the logical reactions to the breakdown of civilization prompted by a zombie uprising would be hoarding, the frantic accumulation of consumer goods. But zombie critique reminds us that this is what we already do with our lives: George W. Bush told a traumatized America after 9/11 that it should go 1 shopping. Slow-moving zombies simply make us pick up the pace of our own consumption as we try desperately to avoid being consumed. The American zombie is, of course, a Haitian import that has been transformed almost beyond recognition (like most products of black culture in American, it has been whitewashed, only this time to an extreme, deathly pallor). The zombie of Voodoo is, we should recall, an individual; it took George Romero and his disciples to make us see zombies in the plural. Thus zombies have become America's go-to metaphor for the problem of mass culture. We may lament a face-to-face world, but we don’t want to replace it with a face-eat-face world. Zombies are pure bodies—small wonder that, in so many versions, they crave brains. Yet zombies are also very much about knowledge and subjectivity (brains again), even if they function so effectively as a symbol of a total lack of selfhood. (As a shorthand, we can understand the zombie and the ghost as polar opposites: the ghost is the self without a body, and the zombie is the body without the self.) The philosopher David Chalmers has quite productively addressed the “philosophical zombie” as a way to think about the possibility of living without consciousness. Rarely do we ask ourselves what mindless zombies are thinking about (with Hugh Howey’s I, Zombie as a disturbing exception). Yet the figure of the zombie demands that we reconsider questions of knowledge and selfhood. Indeed, the prevalence of zombies as a media phenomenon turns them into bodies of 2 knowledge, figuratively for those watching, and literally for those who used to watch, but now find themselves in their own terrible zombie stories. Zombies are the nothing we know everything about. In Mira Grant’s Newsflesh series about bloggers after a zombie uprising, an inordinate number of chacters are named “George” or “Georgia,” out of gratitude to George Romero for inadvertently training the population through films that now look like zombie-preparation public service announcements. (By contrast, the television version of The Walking Dead, unlike the comic, is set in a world that never had zombie movies, depriving the show of the multiple levels of self-consciousness available to other zombie entertainments). Thus zombies both embody the danger of the mass media and the need to pay attention to the mass media. The life saved by a zombie film could be your own. Moreover, the fight against zombies is often not just existential (as a matter of survival) but ontological. In a world where basic survival is the sole preoccupation, “I” am the subject of the sentences “fights zombies.” In the television version of The Walking Dead, when Michonne is left to wander a desolate landscape in the company of a zombie herd, she is in danger of mentally becoming a zombie herself. Rick famously says (in both the show and the comic) “We are the walking dead.” But the fight against mindlessness can also reawaken a sense of self. This is one of the themes of the novel (not the movie) World War Z. An oral history of the zombie war, it cannot work without the almost palpable subjectivity of its subjects (many of whom lived unsatisfying, automatic lives before the disaster strikes). The Rising of the zombies prompts a similar coming-to-consciousness of those who fight them. A 3 rising tide of zombies lifts all biped boats, it would seem. The Zombies of Postsocialism If zombies are such a powerful locus for anxieties about subjectivity and selfhood in the mass-culture, consumer-fixated landscape of postmodern late capitalism (itself an apocalyptic term if I ever heard one), what do we make of the postsocialist zombie? The zombie metaphor is alive and shambling in Russia as well, though one could argue it comes to the former Soviet Union second- or third-hand. Third-hand, in that it comes from American movies, which themselves are a transformation of the Voodoo zombie. Second hand, in that the myth is somewhat more directly refreshed with references to Haitian practices (as in Victor Pelevin’s essay “Zombification.”) As we shall see, the postsocialist zombie is harder to pin down with our assorted discursive pitchforks, because the postsocialist zombie does not exist. Obviously, the zombies of contemporary Western entertainment are not real either, but they are fully imagined and imaginable. In the Russian Federation, once can certainly find the occasional zombie story that is not simply a translation or adaptation (my particular favorite example is an anthology entitled “А зомби здесь тихие…”), but the postsocialist zombie is less an imaginary creature than it is a state of mind. This, too, would sound paradoxical, particularly given our earlier distinction between the ghost as self without a body and the zombie as the body without a self. As it turns out, the zombie metaphor in contemporary Russian discourse is deployed quite differently. As in the West, zombies are the 4 product of contagion, but along a completely different disease vector. Russian discourse is less concerned with the zombie as thing than it is with zombie as process: not zombies, but zombification. Western zombies are the threat of the Other (even if one might see oneself reflected in the Other’s empty eye sockets). These zombies will destroy you. In Russia, the anxiety is different: the zombie will become you. Russian zombification is not about the perils of commodity capitalism, even after commodity capitalism becomes imaginable as part of Russian everyday experience. Rather, Russian zombification is primarily about the relationship between mass media and audience: zombification occurs when the viewer's or consumer’s consciousness becomes colonized or hijacked thanks to media input. Zombification (зомбирование) is almost always a a metaphor when deployed in contemporary Russian cultural and political debates, but it is a metaphor that reveals a great deal about the crisis of selfhood in the post-Soviet space; we might call it the “ undeath of the subject." To invoke zombification is to posit a particular anthropology, based on largely unspoken but also widely shared conceptions of the boundaries of selfhood and the power of media and propaganda. Zombification only makes sense even as a shorthand if one is willing to believe in the overwhelming power of media input and the helpless passivity of the media consumer. In turn, invoking zombification is inevitably a political gesture, a statement about the relationship between the governing and the governed. A reification of the Russian governmental “power vertical,” zombification dooms the Russian audience to an inner life impoverished by constant manipulation that brooks little resistance. And, as Russian-language 5 discussions of the events in Ukraine show, the willingness to invoke zombification as an explanation is a sign that nearly all sides in Russia’s political debates are speaking a common language when it comes to politics and subjectivity: no one has any faith in the population’s ability to evaluate media messages. As we shall see, zombification is the culmination of years of pseudoscientific discussion of mind control and conspiratorial manipulation, whose roots go back ironically to the Cold War, and to American anxieties that imported and distorted proclamations of Soviet subjectivity and reforging as a myth of mind control: the brainwashing debate. Russia imports the idea of brainwashing in the early nineties, initially as both “зомбирование” and “кодирование” (coding), when activists associated with the Russian Orthodox Church appropriate the scholarship of the Western anti-cult movement in their fight against so-called “totalitarian sects.” As the culprits behind zombification proliferate, and return to their association with governmental and national actors, the notion that people can be easily brainwashed ultimately renders the concept of free speech moot. Speak all you want; virtually no one is capable of listening. Engineers of Hearts, Minds, and Human Souls Why should people in Russia (or, more precisely, the media narrative about people in Russia) lend credence to models of mind control, and to what extent is such a belief particular to Russia? Why so much mentalizing about the mental 6 incapacity to resist outside influence? Ironically, theories of the vulnerable mind appear accurate to the extent that they spread and are repeated: the more verbiage there is about mind control, and the more the “mind control” meme gets assimilated by the broader public, the more minds are actually influenced by a set of verbal inputs.

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