Deadness Technologies of the Intermundane Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut
Deadness Technologies of the Intermundane Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut Figure 1. A meeting of mouths, from Natalie Cole, Unforgettable, directed by Steve Barron. New York: Elektra Video, 1991. (Screen shot by Jason Stanyek and Benjamin Piekut) In late capitalism, the dead are highly productive. Of course, all capital is dead labor, but the dead also generate capital in collaboration with the living. What is “late” about late capitalism could be the new arrangements of interpenetration between worlds of living and dead, arrange- ments that might best be termed intermundane. As Joseph Roach writes, “modernity itself might be understood as a new way of handling (and thinking about) the dead,” but the mechanisms and procedures through which this handling takes place are under constant revision (1996:14). While Roach is concerned with mapping “a revolutionary spatial paradigm: the segregation of the dead from the living” (48) in early modern Europe and its colonies, we are interested in a later arrangement of bio- and necroworlds, one centered on production of several kinds: social, economic, cultural, and affective. In this arrangement, the living do not one-sidedly handle the dead, but participate in an inter-handling, a mutually effective co-laboring. TDR: The Drama Review 54:1 (T205) Spring 2010. ©2010 14 New York University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology “Death isn’t the end,” remarks Mark Roesler, the CEO of CMG Worldwide, an intellectual property management company that plays an important role in the growing field of “necro- marketing” (in Hoffman 2005).1 In what could be seen as a case of millennial anxiety over the reconfiguration of labor in a burgeoning necro market, Forbes in 2001 began publishing their annual list of “Top Earning Dead Celebrities,” which for the past seven years has been fleshed out by a barely rotating cast of actors, writers, artists, and musicians: Marilyn Monroe, Charles Schultz, J.R.R.
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