Zombie Manifesto - melancholische posthumane Revolution
Während die Medienwissenschaftlerin und Feministin Haraway ihre Vision eines „Cyborg-Werdens“mit der Vorstellung verband, durch die hybride Verbindung von Mensch- und Maschinenteilen und eine „posthumane“ Vervielfältigung von Wesenheiten könnten gängige Geschlechter- und Subjektkategorien unterlaufen und dadurch neue Freiräume eröffnet werden, sehen Lauro/Embry das revolutionäre Potenzial des Zombie-Werdens darin, dass diese posthumanen Wesen über keine Subjektivität und kein Bewusstsein mehr verfügen und sich deshalb dem ubiiquitären Verwertungsdruck des Kapitals entziehen können. Es handelt sich also, gelinde gesagt, um eine sehr melancholische Vision von Revolution. Mit dem Ende des Menschen verknüpft sie auch das Ende des Wissens vom Menschen.
Hier eine programmatische Passage aus dem Manifest:
Our fundamental assertion is that there is an irreconcilable tension between global capitalism and the theoretical school of posthumanism.This is an essay full of zombies—the historical, folkloric zombie of Haitian origin, which reveals much about the subject position and its relationship to a Master/Slave dialectic; the living-dead zombie of contemporary film, who seems increasingly to be lurching off the screen and into our real world (as a metaphor, this zombie reveals much about the way we code inferior subjects as unworthy of life); and finally, we are putting forth a zombie that does not yet exist: a thought-experiment that exposes the limits of posthuman theory and shows that we can get posthuman only at the death of the subject.
Unlike Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” we do not propose that the position of the zombie is a liberating one—indeed, in its history, and in its metaphors, the zombie is most often a slave. However, our intention is to illustrate that the zombie’s irreconcilable body (both living and dead) raises the insufficiency of the dialectical model (subject/object) and suggests, with its own negative dialectic, that the only way to truly get posthuman is to become antisubject.
We propose that reading the zombie as an ontic/hauntic object reveals much about the crisis of human embodiment, the way power works, and the history of man’s subjugation and oppression of its “Others.” Herein, we trace the zombie from its Haitian origins to its most recent incarnations in popular culture. Given the fact that there are multiple valences in play, it seems best to designate the distinction typographically: there is the Haitian zombi, a body raised from the dead to labor in the fields, but with a deep association of having played a role in the Haitian Revolution (thus, simultaneously resonant with the categories of slave and slave rebellion); and there is also the zombie, the American importation of the monster, which in its cinematic incarnation has morphed into a convenient boogeyman representing various social concerns. The zombie can also be a metaphoric state claimed for oneself or imposed on someone else. This zombie has been made to stand for capitalist drone (Dawn of the Dead) and Communist sympathizer (Invasion of the Body Snatchers), and, increasingly, viral contamination (28 Days Later ). In its passage from zombi to zombie, this figuration that was at first just a somnambulistic slave singly raised from the dead became evil, contagious, and plural. Our manifesto proclaims the future possibility of the zombii, a consciousless being that is a swarm organism, and the only imaginable specter that could really be posthuman. (S.86-88)
Lauro arbeitet derzeitig an der Beendigung ihrer Dissertation “The Modern Zombie: Resurrection in the Empirical Age” am Humanities Insitute der University of California Davis. Der gesamte Text des „Zombie Manifesto“ kann auf der Seite der Zeitschrift boundary 2 abgerufen werden.