Undead-Ends: Zombie Debt/Zombie Theory

Attack of the Zombie Debt

“Attack of the Zombie Debt” is not the title of a topical horror movie, but the headline of an article in an online financial magazine that warns of a new danger lurking in financial markets: the return of outstanding and long-term debts owed to credit card issuers, mobile phone providers, public utilities, and loan companies. Though uncollected, these debts are not simply written off after a limited period, but remain on the books for years before being sold – at very low rates – to specialized collection agencies. These agencies then pursue debtors for the outstanding amount, often operating at the edge of consumer legislation and with limited electronic information. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, this relatively new business earned around 3 billion dollars in the US in 2011. Where vampires became the poster-monsters of new patterns of consumption in periods of financial prosperity, zombies manifest an economy that, having bitten off more toxic debts than it can chew, just keeps on chewing….
 
Zombie debt is another manifestation of an apparently contagious association between finance and the walking dead. Like zombie economics, zombie banks, and zombie capitalism, the phrase seems to follow the logic of Ulrich Beck’s “zombie categories” of modernity, in which old ideas, institutions, or practices persist despite having little currency, relevance, or credibility. The figure’s return, however, also takes its generic bearings from a longer-standing gothic political-economic lexicon that goes at least as far back as Capital’s images of industrial monstrosity and dead labor feeding on living, working bodies (Marx 506, 342). At the same time – and with the pop cultural nous of reflexive political media – its sense of a shifting financial mood responds to recent transformations in the political meanings of vampirism: the exciting figure of a voracious consumerist euphoria of unlimited desire (and credit) cedes to depressive stagnation and elegies for neoliberal fiscal strategy. But the figure of the zombie extends beyond its habitual popular cultural associations and locations to occupy space in financial columns and on big-budget movie screens, suggesting its increased significance in politicized cultural commentary. Less a figure of mass, mindless and destructive culture that ought to be destroyed like all monsters, the energy called up by the zombie figure is more dispersed and more difficult to identify and target in political terms. Embodying polarization and ambivalence without resolution, the zombie is both the mass numbed into robotic subservience without higher aims or aspirations, and the system that mindlessly accumulates without human consideration or sense of value (other than share-value, of course). Zombies – fictionally and discursively – enact a practically closed circuit of persistence, paralysis, and indecision: political and humane horizons are repeatedly imagined to collapse in apocalyptic meltdown at the same time as the fears and fantasies they evoke serve to defer actual creative-destructive decisions. Significantly, however, zombies present a more material form of undeath than the specters or vampires conjured in quasi-spiritual or phantasmatic forms: zombies are dead bodies. Hence their link to economic and material conditions is stronger, as is their relation to material rather than symbolic connotations of debt.
 
Zombies draw out the current primacy of economics, manifesting the effects of the absorption of culture and the determination of politics by unforgiving market rhetoric, in which money becomes the only law, reason, or mode of judgment. A cultural – and fictional – figure from another age of imperialism, the zombie tracks global capital’s expansion across and incursion into previously distinct social and symbolic spheres. Here, horror is significant: where economic modes of credit and debt seemed to require social, symbolic, and subjective correlates in the form of belief, trust, confidence, and desire (with debt and guilt marking the complementary poles of material and symbolic investment), the globalization and technologization of capital’s circulations are less and less dependent on anything other than material inscriptions of the debt relation. The material and symbolic relation that historically distinguished and articulated the economic and political contours of debt is stretched if not severed as economy becomes the dominant factor: not only is it a question of the extent to which economy can operate without recourse to symbols, subjects, and State (all the expensive trappings of ideological apparatuses, infrastructure and investments in social bonds and consensus), but of directly controlling and affecting subjective and financial registrations of debt. Under these conditions, articulations of desire and fear replace circuits of identification and ideological investment, bypassing the necessity for credit and debt in a symbolic sense. The polarization of desire-fear is the affective trajectory marked by the axis of vampire-zombie: if the former figures capital’s expansive, individualistic, and aesthetic flights of aspiration, liberal desire, and consumption, the latter exhibits social implosion, global disaster, and political repulsion or paralysis in the (gnawed) face of precarious markets and fearful futures. Desire and fear operate in relation and oscillation, not opposition. They operate within – and in the service of – the same system, acknowledging a continuity of debt crises and credit booms. Whether “liberating” markets from regulations and state mechanisms or demanding austerity (another name for limiting State expenditure in the interests of financial freedom and responsibility), neoliberalism’s employment of desire or fear plots an arc that inscribes market politics at extensive and intensive levels: debt is global and personal. Indeed, debt becomes just another more frightening and perhaps more primal form of credit; if the latter was promoted in terms of belief and desire, the former, through fear, accomplishes the same task of securing the bonds that tie individuals not within any consensual, social, or symbolic circuit, but directly to a world defined by and as a financial system. When the control exercised almost automatically by debt works through fear alone, does this “new order” even require individual desire, belief, or symbolic and political values?

Un-debt

Debt-credit, desire-fear, vampire-zombie: these hyphenations suggest a shift from the antimonies sustained by modern symbolic and political formations to the rapid fluctuations of capital as it soaks up social and cultural spheres that were relatively autonomous. Indifferent to opposition and separation, its polarities are surface effects of an underlying but shadowy system: Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire, or Fredric Jameson’s immense network and cannibalistic monster of finance capital. It remains both vampire – a hideous monster sucking all life’s surplus – and zombie – palpably dead but continuing to consume. And it works on two parallel or doubled levels, like Jean Baudrillard’s version of “neo-capitalism,” which undergoes phases of “systematic alternation” (expansion, consumption, liberation, contraction, restraint) as an “immense polymorphous machine” that has little need of extra-economic factors to sustain it: “the symbolic (gift and counter-gift, reciprocity and reversal, expenditure and sacrifice) no longer counts for anything.” Instead, “political economy itself only survives in a brain-dead state, but all those phantoms continue to plague the operational field of value” (35). While symbolic exchange survives as phantom and zombie, the vampire is both the immense machine that works by and for itself and the cause of zombie brain-death infecting all (human) judgments.  Zombie debt is a debt that will not die, that cannot be repaid; it signals an almost total absorption into a world financial market carrying on without thought or concern for anything other than accumulation. Hence the horror: one can neither kill nor escape the global network that circumscribes planetary existence and the zombie effects of producing so many debt-bound automatons.
 
In two recent books entitled Zombie Economics, the double relation of economy and horror turns on an axis of bad in-finitude: one plotting cycles and change, the other imagining endless debt. In both, horror tropes trace global and individual poles of financial undeath. John Quiggin’s discussion of twentieth-century economic theories and policies traces how each one – whether models of efficient markets, trickle-down, or privatization – comes to a dead end. It advertises itself as “a chilling tale” and repeatedly plays on movie lore: “for the zombies in the movies, the most common such word is ‘Brains.’ For economic zombies, the equivalent is surely ‘privatization’” (174). Each section ends optimistically with a consideration of what happens “after the zombies”; for example, the redundancy of models of privatization is succeeded by a return to a mixed economy of state and markets. In contrast, the other Zombie Economics, subtitled A Guide to Personal Finance, urges individual consumers to internalize and respond to depressive economic conditions; its “zombie economy” turns global crisis into a permanent and individual matter of protecting one’s “personal economy” (Desjardins and Emerson 5). Chapter titles blast inescapable imperatives: “no one can save you”; “save yourself by saving money”; “shooting Dad in the head”; “Ending your relationship with the financially infected”; “there is no cure.” A financial survivalist handbook, life plan, and conduct guide, it urges healthy living and implies a strict morality while reiterating the need to take care of bills and control expenditure: “every one of your bills is a zombie. Every debt, every loan, and every missed payment – they’re ghouls, and left alone, they will attract more of their kind” (Desjardins and Emerson 10). Key to this zombie model of good household management is the stimulation of fear. Zombies are already on the lawn or at the door: “there’s a mass of biting, squirming death waiting to pour itself into the house” (Desjardins and Emerson 2). Finance, credit, and debt will eat you or infect you if you do not take appropriate action. Similar threats, however, pervade the wider zombie economy; market liberalism promises prosperity on the condition that “the wrath of the ‘Electronic Herd’ of interconnected global financial markets” is never incurred (Quiggin 9).
 
Zombie banks also elicit fear, frustration, and a properly neoliberal urge to destroy. Describing financial institutions that would be unable to function and repay their debts without the injection of State credit, Yalman Onaran defines the zombie bank as a “dead bank . . . kept among the living through capital infusions from the government” (2). Crippling the global economy and potential recovery, the problem reignites arguments from the onset of the credit crisis about the correct neoliberal reaction to failing institutions. One view holds that they should be killed off rather than kept on state life support; another suggests, jump-starting the “financially undead” by freeing up the money supply. “Zombie balance sheets,” zombie companies, and zombie consumers, however, all seem to impede what Cowen calls capital’s “creative-destructive process.” The crisis should have been used as an opportunity “to clean out the system” rather than supporting “inefficient institutions” (Onaran 2). Like a videogame player confronted with a horde of zombies, there is mindless pleasure in destruction. But creation is a more problematic act, in which the paralyzing effect of the zombie comes to the fore. In fear, frustration, and impatience, the urgency of the crisis demands standard zombie movie reactions: do not hesitate; aim for the brain; kill off the undead that threaten survival and growth and open the future to more speculation. But because the complex and interdependent network of global finance works on an idea of the future (at least insofar as it predicts likelihoods of continued repayment) and operates with indeterminate “subjective” investments, there is hesitation and in-decision—moments of unpredictability suspended between advocating (creative) destruction and deferring an always-imminent meltdown. In this respect the zombie is no pharmakon, no poison-cure or effect-solution, but the very persistence of systemic and subjective in-decision and ambivalence, an un-dead-end that thrives on desire or fear, whether surfing the crest of credit or bearing the weight of debt. Zombies in this guise do not mark a breaking point, but the condition of living on after being broken. That is, they mark the condition of global, irredeemable or infinite debt without recourse to symbolic or spiritual forms.

Cultural Death

Zombies are mindless messengers, media figures that repeatedly return to dead-ends; doubles of divided cultures and dehumanized creatures; half-turned mirrors of vanishing subjective, social, symbolic, and political horizons. Their history in popular culture begins in the 1920s and 1930s as one of colonial and industrial enslavement: White Zombie (Victor Halperin, 1932), set in a repeatedly ravaged Haiti under US occupation, replays the will-sapping mechanization and exploitation of workers under factory regimes in visual echoes of the dehumanized mass of Metropolis (Fritz Lang, 1927) and its suppressed subterranean proletariat (Williams). Less than human, consumed by machine, modernity’s workforce is reduced to a condition of total subservience of mind, body, and collective strength. From the late 1960s, in George Romero’s series of films, zombies move from associations with mass, industrial culture and, more than side-effects of social conformism, rational bureaucratization, and voracious consumption, signify how, in the 1970s, mass culture, mass hysteria, mass media, and mass conformism mark deadlocks in the development of international capitalism. Robin Wood’s account of cinematic horrors from the 1960s to 1980s suggests how the counter-side of counter-culture connects the supposed primitivism and overt cannibalism of destructive drives to the turmoil and tension of a world in which permissiveness and market liberalization vie with conservative social and familial moralities. Zombies thus come to mark a shift in political and economic values, displaying, as Steve Beard and Steven Shaviro variously argue, how the West’s lumbering industrial workforce becomes obsolete in the face of shiny post-industrial complexes of service, technology, and consumption. The mass is now a revolting image of the past, of state and industrial society, a site of revulsion and the springboard to a new vampire world of privatized, creative, immaterial and precarious labor in which the individual is his or her own brand or business, and freedom is the potential to buy and sell on the basis of one’s human capital.
 
Return to the worker-zombies of Metropolis after the factory has closed, the gigantic machine quiet and rusting and the cavernous halls of production empty, ruined, and still; they have been sacked and left with nothing to do and nowhere to go, vacantly roaming the streets, malls, and non-spaces of a new society in which they play no part. Cast-offs, rejects, non-people, they are as obsolete and redundant as the system they used to feed. Pathetic and seething with rage, they are repackaged as the detritus of a humanity and modernity that has been superseded. All their revolting features compose a monster of physical (rotting, slow), intellectual (thoughtless, speechless), moral (cannibalistic, will-less), natural (dead) and aesthetic (pale, bloody, malformed) degradation, establishing a negativity so repellent that it thwarts any feeling or desire except horror, destruction, or flight. This monster propels a movement away from (now base) materiality, mass, social, human, industrial, modern orders of existence and toward the newly attractive world of vampiric individualism, desire, and consumption, a deregulated flight beyond economic stagnation, inefficiency, and materiality, and into flexible financial freedoms, soaring profits, and unlimited credit. This new vampire moves from bat to wolf to eerie vapor, from barbaric, bloodsucking  (foreign) aristocratic invader to puffed-up, cigar-chuffing fat bastard capitalist predator and impersonal, distributed global accumulation machine for the exploitation of surpluses with which everyone remains on close, even hospitable terms. Its negativity is repolarized according to a perfectly commodified difference poised between brand and identity: the commodity that is one’s self.
 
A-cultural (pre-modern) and a-Cultural (postmodern) barbarism conjoin in the commerce of countercultural protest and (neoliberal) economic reconfigurations. Individualistic, self-fashioned, self-reliant, unique, talented, competitive, bellicose, romantic, fast, flexible, desirable, vigorous, free, saleable, immortal and, above all, consuming, the new vampire subject and neoliberal everyperson feeds, like the bloodsucking machine, on the life and labor sold to agribusiness, on outsourcing and sweatshops, luxuriating in an unearthly existence sustained by credit, cheap loans, creative and immaterial labor. The free market remodeling of the vampire has been variously documented by Rob Latham as a figure for the technological consumption of youth and, by Jules Zanger, as the consumerist practices of the West. It extends to technical rewirings of military and queer desire, as A. R. Stone observes, and the genetic potential of rewriting bodies discussed by Donna Haraway. Moreover, as vampire-empire, it distinguishes the “spectral reign” of a network, an “apparatus of capture that lives only off the vitality of the multitude” in which “fear is the primary mechanism of control” (Empire 48, 62, 323). At the same time, Hardt and Negri’s vampire is double bound to an image of monstrous multitude in and in excess of empire: the “unruly character of the flesh as multitude,” manifests “the monstrosity of a society in which the traditional social bodies, such as the family, are breaking down” and “new, alternative networks of affection and social organization” begin to form (Multitude 193). Amid in-distinction, there emerges the difficulty and necessity of any ethical or political action: one must love some monsters and combat others, enhancing the former’s excess and attacking “the monstrous, horrible world that the global political body and capitalist exploitation have made for us” (Multitude 196).
 
Global and individual, systemic and subjective, feared and desired at the same time, these doubled figures of monstrosity are both too distant and too proximate to know which to kill and which to save. Where over-circulation (and crisis) discredit popular consuming vampires, zombies increasingly occupy the dissolving and explosively paralyzed zones of in-decision and in-distinction between uninhibited global flows and depressive subjugation. They mark the pressures of excessive liberalization of markets and the increasing porousness of psycho-geographic boundaries: apocalyptic presentations of global change in which viral epidemics, genetic experimentation, ecological disaster, demotivated populations, media violence, urban unrest, military pacification, immigration, and poverty signal a total breakdown in social relations and human(e) bonds (see, for example, Romero’s Diary of the Dead). Not simply collapsible into categories of and against posthuman developments (from biotechnological to post-industrial), the fears that imagine the reduction of bodies to raging, ravenous hordes are reactions to change in which breakdown is less a return to modernity and humanity than a descent into survivalism or barbarism. Images of small bands of people struggling against undead masses and more barbaric survivors may be dressed up as a fantasy of natural self-sufficiency to end the degeneration of contemporary existence, but they also hold up a mirror of the anti-social contract of neoliberal competition and individuation that exhausts social ties, human energies, and planetary reserves. Zombie metaphors are, in part, modes of deflection and misdirection, fantastic and nostalgic expenditure. They are also figures of an in-decisive present, in thought, image, and action, of self-consumption in increasingly rapid, vicious, and implosive spirals of in-security.
 
Recent zombie fictions (rapidly filmed by Hollywood) depict collapsing global formations and thrive on the imagination of apocalypse or trace the interminable dead-end manifested by the undead. While Isaac Marion’s Warm Bodies (2010) draws out the diminishing differences between zombie and human habits amid the ruined non-places of consumer society, Max Brooks’s 2006 World War Z critiques global flows and cultural decline, imagining a return to an American communal order at the cost of billions of dead. Elsewhere, zombies go to the heart of capitalism’s reliance on the power of the credit-debt relation; more positive renditions of the zombie as cultural critique accompany bitterly satirical images of contemporary finance capital’s obscenity and savagery in Jaspre Bark’s Way of the Barefoot Zombie. Set on a small island close to Haiti (an island that has historically witnessed disproportionate exploitation and debt), the story opposes a group of rich teenagers, calling themselves the ZLF (Zombie Liberation Front), to a group of super-rich investors. The island is owned by an exclusive management training company that teaches investors to shed their humanity (including conscience) and become as passionately single-minded about accumulation as zombies are about fresh organs. Zombies articulate a continuum of power and resistance: the undead are freed, activists return to their comfortable homes or find themselves, and management excesses are exposed. But the continuum is not altered. In two particular episodes, however, the all-encompassing zombie of debt is evinced. Published post-sub-prime collapse in 2009, Bark’s novel illustrates capital’s genius at getting something for nothing through the mortgage system: a buyer receives a credit note, takes possession of bricks and mortar, defaults on the loan, and cedes possession of actual things to creditors who only staked values. Of course, creditors at the time suffered drops in value, getting nothing for nothing. The example, however, remains timely in its interrelation of credit and debt in material and symbolic, economic and subjective terms. A mortgage wires person and private space directly into a financial network of fluctuating interest rates. Indeed, the rhetoric of household management was part of the highly effective political sales pitch of neoliberalism, directing Britain’s “Right to Buy” policy that sold off state-owned housing and promoted the privatization of national utilities in the 1980s. Home-owning became a motor of the consumer boom and was connected to greater availability of loans, credit, and mortgages enabled by the de-regulation and technologization of financial markets. Moreover, it bound individuals to an economic project in a more concrete fashion than ideology, plugging them directly into the global fluctuations of share prices and interest rates through credit and debt. Such a direct personal tie to the movements of the world economy short-circuits the need for ideological investment. Privatization also inaugurated a process of economizing all areas of life, from culture to education and care, thereby eroding – and exploiting – the difference between symbolic and social values (belief and guilt) and economic worth (credit and debt). A second episode in Way of the Barefoot Zombie goes to the heart of debt’s material and spiritual axis: Vodun ritual enables investors to dispense with the humanity that impedes the efficient acquisition of obscene wealth. Conscience—which sustains guilt with respect to symbolic, moral, and human values—can be excised, held in reserve, and then, at a price, can be redeemed, untarnished, when enough wealth has been accumulated. Not only does this move suggest that capital and humanity are inimical; it also plots a trajectory in which the former is finally relieved of its human weight, imagining a separation between debt and guilt in which one operates more efficiently without any recourse the other.

Spectral Debt

Debt establishes the foundation of morality and culture, both materially and economically. In Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that the relation between debtor and creditor holds a primary position: “the major moral concept Schuld [guilt] has its origin in the very material concept Schulden [debts]” (498-99). Where guilt is a means of socialization and subjection interlaced with moral, legal, and religious codes, debt underpins the way those codes are inscribed and enforced. Breeding “an animal with the right to make promises” requires painful training to ensure that humans pay their debts, remember their desires, keep their word, and plan for and anticipate the future. “Man himself,” writes Nietzsche, “must first of all have become calculable, regular, necessary, even in his own image of himself, if he is able to stand security for his own future, which is what one who promises does!” (494). Debt demands a relation to time, mnemotechnical skills, and models of equivalence, rights, and exchange. Throughout, however, the social bond remains a direct and material effect of debt: training renders creatures subject to morality, custom, community, conscience, and word. It is traumatic and terrifying and the basis of all symbolic rituals (497). It forges obedience and identification in pain and blood, binding individuals to structures of exchange, obligation, and law (500). Both intensive – the consequences of debt are concentrated on individual bodies or even body parts – and extensive — encompassing every exchange, possession, thing, word or value – debt covers life and its aftermath. Under Christian morality, guilt and symbolic debt come to the fore, displacing the pain of material inscriptions with redemption, value, exchange, and reciprocity. Debt, however, does not disappear: instead it is deepened, as Gilles Deleuze argues, a shackle of suffering that “now only pays the interest on the debt”; it is “internalized” and universalized, rendered “inexhaustible, unpayable” (Nietzsche 141).
 
There are two complementary and countervailing trajectories implied in the relation between debt and guilt. Material and symbolic dimensions of debt shadow each other in accounts of cultural development: the one line culminates in modernity and stresses human values and progress; the other – superseding modernity – tracks material and machinic inscriptions, new forms of training, desire, and capitalization. In the first trajectory, psychoanalysis, of course, embraces guilt. But it, too, begins, in terror, pain, and trauma, in the myth of the primal father, where crime and murder forge the basis of symbolic relations—an ambivalent site of law, ritual, custom and culture that produces guilty and indebted subjects. As Jacques Lacan observes of the “Freudian myth,” “the order of the law can be conceived only on the basis of something more primordial, a crime” (42). With it comes “punishment, sanction, castration – the hidden key to the humanization of sexuality” (43). In the symbolic realm, debt is always something for the subject to worry about, a matter of responsibility and guilt provoked by the traumatizing effects of signification, a punishment in advance – “that self-sacrifice, that pound of flesh which is mortgaged [engagé] in his relationship to the signifier” (28). That gap, moreover, constitutes the locus of loss and mourning at the core of subjective-symbolic relations, the “place for the projection of the missing signifier” whose absence provokes a host of spectral and actual reverberations: the “phallus” – the paternal signifier to whom all debts are owed in the reintegration of group, community or psyche – “is a ghost” (Lacan 35, 50).
 
The symbolic advanced in psychoanalysis remains too closed – too phallic and logocentric – for deconstruction. Yet when it comes to matters of debt and mourning, Jacques Derrida repeatedly looks to an excess that escapes purely material or economic value, whether in the form of the “immaculate commerce” liberated by poetry, or in terms of the gift situated “aneconomically” outside all  equivalence, substitution, and circularity (“Economimesis” 9; Given 111). “Impossible” and “essential,” the gift “interrupts economy,” “system,” and “symbol,” but is not a “simple ineffable exteriority.” To give back is to “amortize” giving, a dead gift, a mortgage (Given 7, 12, 30). A symbolic equivalent returns a value in place of a thing; recognizing a debt draws any idea of giving back into a system of calculation: “the symbolic opens and constitutes the order of exchange and of debt, the law or the order of circulation in which the gift gets annulled” (Given 13). Economy, then, is not “suspended” in the move to the symbolic but manifests an “incessant movement of reappropriation of an excess” (Given 111). Something excessive, however, lies beyond appropriation—an infinite, impossible, inexhaustible debt beyond the “‘bad infinite’ that characterizes the monetary thing,” value or exploitation (Given 158). Like the gift, such a debt, if there is one, would hold open a radical alterity of time, death, mourning, and being. Yet gifts, in Given Time, remain increasingly threatened by monetary things: counterfeit money – its falsity apparently neither an impediment to the operations of capital and credit, nor requiring recourse to faith and belief – engenders a vertiginous economic overwriting of differences that occludes the possibility of an outside-gift or heterological space. That aneconomic element which sustains a relation to an outside increasingly finds itself within “the restricted economy of a differance, a calculable temporization or deferral” (Given 147). That pattern of encroachment, appropriation, and economization operates on an increasingly abstracted and global scale: the “new world order.”
 
The new world order: economic obliteration of borders, expansion and imposition of market logic, relentless capitalization, technologization, and mediatization, it absorbs domains once outside its purview, including the law, the nation-state, and culture. Its “plagues” are laid out in Derrida’s Specters of Marx (81). Running counter to the gift, the speeds at which it operates and the calculations and codes it imposes follow the “other reading” suggested in Given Time: that of “economic closure” (26-8). The reduction of temporal and geopolitical horizons threatens the possibility of sustaining some kind of history, humanity, or hegemony (the “hauptgespensts” of modernity whose “hauntology” holds on to gifts of time, death and being) and forecloses “a certain experience of the emancipatory promise” (Specters 74). The site of deconstruction and politics is “a present never identical with itself,” a “phantasmatic, anessential practice” the aim of which is “to reactivate the moment of decision that underlies any sedimented set of social relations” (Laclau 70, 78). Specters perform two related operations in deconstruction’s defense of modern values: in moving across and opening occluded borders and stagnant differentiations (“spooking” as a kind of disturbance and alert), they return to founding and impossible questions and dis-continuities that form the basis for subjective, democratic, and emancipatory decisions. But, like Hamlet before the ghost of his father, they also hesitate and question, prompting deferral rather than action. Nonetheless, there and not there, specters sustain the idea of something like historical difference and futurity, holding onto the effective memory of the possibility of some kind of symbolic system. Conjured up and mourned in order to keep alive that which has been buried, opening solidified structures and relations to the (aneconomic) decisions that animate and expose them to time, gifts, debts, promises, justice, horizons (and monsters), deconstruction works as a counter to the reductive pressures of capital’s accelerations, calculations, and expansions.

Debt Machine

As immaterial entities and effects, specters are conjured up as an animating difference between incorporation and institution, body and phantasm. In contrast, as excess materiality, zombies manifest body without will, soul, spirit, or consciousness. Their training is traumatizing, numbing, automatic, and suggests an inscription of debt’s more brutal and basic mnemotechnics: figures of debt-death suspended, existence given over to death-in-life, its course closed down, paralyzed and without horizon. Given their materiality and their associations with work, death, and the theft of life, it is not surprising that zombies feature in Deleuze and Guattari’s account of the transmutations of debt under capital. Following Nietzsche’s assertion of the primacy and materiality of debt, Deleuze and Guattari’s zombies embody the painful inscription entailed in breeding slaves without sovereign consciousness plotted in anti-oedipal deployments of debt from filiation (stock-breeding) and alliance (mobile debt). With the rise of bourgeois capitalism, a “primitive inscription machine” becomes “an immense machinery that renders the debt infinite,” a “debt of existence” that subjects never cease paying (Anti-Oedipus 192, 197). Infinite debt involves a spiritualization at the level of a despotic state apparatus that turns debt into social and symbolic values, and an internalization within the capitalist field through which the creditor-debtor relation becomes the motor of accumulation, surplus exploitation, and drive. It produces torpor, hatred of life and freedom, depression, guilt, and neurosis: its mechanism is the “death instinct” (Anti-Oedipus 268-9). It delivers institutional, symbolic, productive stasis, causing libidinal exhaustion, turning life against itself while celebrating a “mortifying, imaginary, and symbolic theater” (334).  A “wedding of psychoanalysis and capitalism,” the death instinct indicates how much the latter has drawn from “a transcendental death-carrying agency,” the “despotic signifier,” how much the “absorption of surplus value” that governs its expansion depends on the incorporation and exploitation of the excesses of life, energy and time into its system (335). Capital in this guise is a “death enterprise” (335).
 
Blockage, paralysis, frozen desire: it is easy to see the kinds of workers produced under the productive-symbolic regime: “the only modern myth is the myth of zombies – mortified schizos, good for work, brought back to reason” (Anti-Oedipus 335). The encoding of mnemotechnical training – the inscribing, branding, mutilating, taming and herding of bodies into a uniform and regulated mass – constitutes the cruel, painful and numbing signifying work of death, operating  intensively as debt becomes extensive:
 

Above all, the State apparatus makes the mutilation, and even death, come first. It needs them preaccomplished, for people to be born that way, crippled and zombielike. The myth of the zombie, of the living dead, is a work myth and not a war myth. Mutilation is a consequence of war, but it is a necessary condition, a presupposition of the State apparatuses and the organization of work (hence the native infirmity not only of the worker but also of the man of State himself).  (Deleuze and Guattari, Plateaus 425)

 
Bonds become binds that tie life, desire, and time to the regular circulation and rhythms of production and reproduction. In contrast, as Deleuze and Guattari develop their gothic theme in A Thousand Plateaus, the vampire manifests uncontained flows and desires, a figure of becoming unsubordinated to regimes of work, alliance, and reproduction; it is asymbolic, anomic, aneconomic, outside patterns of filiation and evolution. A co-mingling of heterogeneous forms, associated with packs, bands, and multiplicities, the vampire operates as epidemic, contagion, infection (Plateaus 241-42). Schizovampirism seems to escape the despotism associated with organized production and State-symbolic subjection and debt-death, but it also heralds “life” modulated, recoded, and dividuated by Deleuze’s notion of “control societies,” rebranded by informatics, recast as commodity and patented by financial, global, and networked powers. Depending on “floating rates of exchange,” the move to control societies sees a further extension of the hand of debt, more abstract and yet more direct because it permeates every area of life, intimately and from afar through the vast decentered network its fluctuations inhabit: “the operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit” (“Postscript” 6).There is no outside to this network and no outside-debt in this erasure of horizons and supersession of limits: “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt” (6).
 
Global control obliterates distinctions of outside and inside, allowing neither boundaries nor bodies – geopolitical, planetary, subjective, genetic or symbolic – to impede its flows and transformations. Finance, biotechnology, and digital media have established an almost total economization. It is a horror story that has been told repeatedly: “biopolitics” charts neoliberalism’s “unlimited generalization of the form of the market” (Foucault 243); economics “becomes the explicit discourse of a whole society” (Baudrillard 33-4); stocks and share calculations have “invaded . . . our notion of value” and require all questions – not only economic but aesthetic, semantic, and metaphysical – to be “posed from within the logic of the financial (in)security of mobile values” (Goux, “Values” 160); and everything, sacred or profane, falls into the “magnetic field of the political economy (of market exchange-value)” in a “total bankerization of existence, by the combined powers of finance and computers” (Goux, Sacred Economies 202; “Cash” 99). Now “dependency upon the market extends into every area of life” (Beck and Beck-Gernstein, 203), while economic thinking “undoes the major oppositions of traditional thought” (Goux, “Values” 165), and “techno-mediatic powers,” political “good news,” and financial calculation supplant the basic concepts and oppositions of critical discourse (Derrida, Specters 67, 75). Or they enact their own “practical deconstruction” (Derrida and Stiegler, Echographies 36). Even the capacity to think critically and effectively is problematic, some positions seeming little more than “dead ends” in that they fail “to recognize adequately the contemporary object of critique:” given that the object has “mutated,” critique seems “depotentialized” in advance (Hardt and Negri, Empire 137-8).
 
What remains is “symbolic misery”: Bernard Stiegler’s term for the reduction and economization of life under control, consumption, and technological mediation. The term signifies the cultural and symbolic impoverishment and proletarianization of existence as a “herd-becoming of behavior and loss of individuation,” a saturation of memory and diminution of spaces of “symbolic sharing” (“Suffocated Desire” 54-7). Anticipation and desire are eroded as planning, calculation, and control reduce the future to questions of predictability and short-term management: subjectivity, Stiegler underlines, is depressed and desire demotivated in the face of “generalized discredit” (Decadence 88). Short-term financial investment undermines other social, symbolic, and individual futures defined as the “investment in common desire” (Stiegler, New Critique 6). Speculation, in contrast, “freezes time” by trying to cancel out any past or future that cannot be measured or predicted in terms of the present (New Critique 107). The question of the future returns to debt, to its power of harnessing and delimiting futures based on calculations of profit or return. Against the economic absorption of libido, belief, and time, Stiegler proposes a return to longer-term, symbolic investments, invoking models of gift and the sacred to open horizons to exchanges “not enslaved to immediate subsistence” (Decadence 89).
 
Recent economic discourse had already – and inimically – reworked the very terms invoked by Stiegler to hold open another path of symbolic credit, investment, and desire: their opposing trajectory pointed towards completely opposite ends and implications, dragging aneconomy more tightly within an expanded orbit of exchange and speculation. George Gilder argues that giving and ideas of the gift become central to the new entrepreneurial economy of risky, creative, and generous investment. As Goux glosses the process, gift-giving now forms the model for rather than the exception to economic expenditure, providing capital with “legitimation” as a “theology of chance” (“General Economics” 213). Gilder’s creative, altruistic entrepreneur, romanticized as capitalist hero, came to prominence during the neoliberal 1980s: part of the project of transforming work and economy in terms of “human capital.” Individuality and life as a whole can thus be reformulated according to calculations that aim to optimize the potential manifested in the analysis of “human capital:” an individual’s life becomes the object of speculation, training, self-fashioning, and invention aimed at making “him into a sort of permanent and multiple enterprise” (Foucault 242). As Maurizio Lazzarato develops the idea, technologies of the self thus involve “the mobilization, engagement, and activation of subjectivity through the techniques of business management and social government” (37-8). As stated in management guidebooks and practices, individuals must identify with the entirety of the consumer and corporate mechanism that encompasses existence and embrace all its codes. In order to perform to one’s potential, one must think of and invest in oneself as a brand – what management guru Tom Peters calls “the brand called you” – and engage all the techniques, skills, training, and networking necessary to promote, differentiate, manage, and market that brand.

Fear Management

One figure of this injunction to entrepreneurial internalization, self-fashioning, and flexibility – a figure, appropriately enough, returning to cultural prominence in the 1980s – is the vampire. Reinvented as fabulously speculative and immaterially potent, the vampire is oblivious to any final debt repayment (death) or any natural, material and physical limitation (transmogrification). Like triumphant neoliberalism, it exists beyond all borders (domestic, ideological, cultural or, national), its unreality a figure for an immanent expansion of capital’s incessant reinvention. As a figure of the euphoric economic transvaluation of all social, individual, and political positions, its only role lies in feeding and feeding on the vital flows of global circulation: blood must keep flowing. To be otherwise, of course, is to be a zombie. The move to a crisis-consciousness dispatches any euphoric identifications with and internalizations of the vampire figure, along with an entrepreneurial rhetoric of credit, growth, and endless immaterial expansion. Financial crisis signals the “failure” of neoliberal business models and the exploitation of “human capital” (Lazzarato 109, 113). Yet, as zombie, this system just carries on, exploiting the crisis it engendered. How does one put a bullet in the brain of a decentered network of electronic, emotional, and economic impulses?
 
The move from euphoria to depression, from vampire to zombie, might discredit but does not mark the end of neoliberalism. Nor does it temper excess except in the way that credit reappears as the debt it always was. For all the manufactured differences, rises and falls, or shifts in mood, a systemic continuity remains in place: credit is just another name for debt. Debt does not relinquish its hold easily, pressing for a continued and expanding neoliberal program of social transvaluation. Austerity becomes the means for extending the power and control exercised by financial markets over the State to ensure continued adherence to, even further internalization of, the debtor-creditor relation: “finance is a war machine for privatization, which transforms social debt into credit, into individual insurance, and rent (shareholders) and thus, individual property” (Lazzarato 113). If credit, vamped-up in the 1980s, encouraged everyone to “buy in” to this power relation through mortgages, privatized shares, loans, and credit cards, global zombie debt makes plain the other-same side of the coin, requiring individuals to take on any costs, responsibilities, and risks previously assumed the State, whether  welfare, education, housing, health, unemployment, or pensions: “not only – far from it – those of innovation, but also and especially those of precariousness, poverty, unemployment, a failing health system, housing shortages, etc.” (Lazzarato 51).  Extensive in the form of global markets and global debts, the power relation is also highly individuated and intensively modulated through specific networks of control, access, and lending. Debt becomes the mechanism to engage every body, every role, and every relationship, permeating every sphere beyond banking, especially those associated with social bonds:
 

All the designations of the social divisions of labour in neoliberal societies (“consumer”, “beneficiary”, “worker”, “entrepreneur”, “unemployed”, “tourist” etc.) are now invested by the subjective figure of the “indebted man” which transforms them into indebted consumers, indebted welfare users, and finally, as in the case of Greece, “indebted citizens.” (Lazzarato 38)

 
A universe of debt is literally installed through the extension and internalization of financial models. Debt is realized rather than spiritualized, its subjectivization manifesting a de- or dis-spirited indebtedness based on performance, finance, and credit-worthiness rather than on the socially- and symbolically-framed investment of individual desires, aspirations, and beliefs. Debt knows no bounds and employs only direct bonds of control; it has no outside except the penury of no credit rating, and even then it administers its controls according to the same procedures and principles: mothers, children, and the unemployed receive all sorts of benefits – renamed as “credits” – for health, education, wages, and insurance; immigrants are judged according to (economically calculable and redeemable) point-values, thereby locating their existence within the power relation of debt and subjecting them to a variety of procedures of assessment, monitoring, accreditation, and regulation.
 
These procedures enact a kind of training, inscription, and coding akin to inaugural debt. But they seem to have little need of symbolic or spiritual coordinates. Increasingly, too, this training is inscribed automatically, without the production of belief, the evocations of desire, or the long-term investments in structures that sustain relations that are more than economic. The separation of symbolic and economic structures, for all their isomorphism, has a history: from the paternally-sanctioned realities of exchange founded on gold to paper currency and virtual share value, the story has been one of abstraction and autonomization in banking. In line with the Big Bang that deregulated markets and accelerated technological exchanges, Goux argues that the shift to stocks and financial capitalism manifests an “abstract operational symbolization” at a remove from any human world of symbols (Symbolic 130).  Direct human intervention is increasingly removed from decision-making processes as the credit card installs an “autonomization of operations” that replaces human labor insofar as it “internalizes” banking operations (Goux, “Cash” 120-121). Credit cards directly approve or refuse funds so that debt is individuated, general, and inevitable: “we carry with us the creditor-debtor relation – in our pockets and wallets, encoded on the magnetic strip of plastic that hides two seemingly harmless operations: the automatic institution of the credit relation, which thereby establishes permanent debt” (Lazzarato 20). No decisions have to be made, no thought; it is an automatic subjugation manifesting “a molecular, intrapersonal, and pre-individual hold on subjectivity that does not pass through reflexive consciousness and its representations, nor through the self” (Lazzarato 146-9). As an “Automatic Teller Machine”, the “subject” has only to remember a few responses and insert a short personal numeric code calibrated to that card alone, a “dividual” responding to the modulations of an automated network.
 
A symbolic and transindividual framework sustaining subjectivity through desire, motivation, and belief becomes unnecessary when the credit-debt power relation has been inscribed automatically: responses are pre-coded just as futures are predicted. Desire cedes to fear; thought to reaction- and real-time. Horizons close; no one cares. Ideological apparatuses that shape productive individuals and social consensus become obsolete and expensive. Guilt, a debt beyond exchange, is supplanted by material inscriptions and control procedures that define and maintain “indebted man.” Neither will nor desire, consciousness or self-reflection remain in play. Alternatives are foreclosed:  “the logic of debt is stifling the possibilities for action” (Lazzarato 71). One can readily see the revolting outlines of a new zombie. All that is required for the operation of the credit-debt relation is fear, a mechanism sustained by training and threats of loss, by technological disconnection or non-ranking from ratings agencies. Fear attends financial markets; it signifies our being wired into an affective and economic network, a nervous system. Writing in the 1990s, Goux observed how the mobility of share values involves a “vulnerability” to thousands of direct and indirect variables, an incessantly alternating present that is never quite present, flickering rates of return or loss outlining fragile, uncertain, and nerve-wracking fluctuations of existence: “life overwhelmed by the globalization of value” (“Value” 159-60). Permanent in-security is evinced in fluctuating circuits of exchange and the reactions they prompt, an electro-emotional network in which machine, human difference, and temporality are reduced to near zero, vacillations of affect accompanying oscillations of digits. As Goux describes it, this network is
 

a constant, driven time of anxiety, hypersensitive to worldwide information, tense, unpredictable, irrational, subject to the whim of ungovernable impulses, brief crazes that spread like a viral infection, a paradoxical time that balances the most weighty matters of the economic and political life of nations upon the most delicate and febrile factors of human psychology (euphoria, depression, optimism, confidence, anxiety). (“Values” 160)

 
Without objects to stabilize or ground its flows, its default setting is anxiety and insecurity.
 
Fear, at least temporarily, settles on some figure. Where anxiety underpins the circulations of global financial capitalism, undead and unreal figures from popular culture provide familiar forms through which to reshape, contain, or direct the inherent instability of an abstracted yet all-too real system in relentless pursuit of surplus. Like the mathematical modelling of disaster scenarios using zombies (for example, exercises in “Zombie Preparedness” undertaken in the US by the Centers for Disease Control), cultural forms deploy their own modes of planning, predicting, and retraining; if not calculating futures, these modes occlude, habituate or divert those futures in fantastically apocalyptic dead-ends that keep on returning. Born of frustration, in-decision, and stasis, these urgent fantasies of destruction and creation, disaster and survival are played out and held at bay, precarious (non)precipitation meeting (in)decisive (un)dead-end: kill-kill-kill; pay-pay-pay; spend-spend-spend; save-save-save. But who, what, and where are the zombies? Capital, banks, political-economy, debt, shareholders, stakeholders, creditors, investors, managers, oneself?  Fear opens onto unpredictable possibility, monstrosity, or event, and quickly closes again. If rapid global fluctuations, uncertainties, and anxieties are, in fear, downloaded in an automated debt relation, the result may be the kind of pacification that shocks and numbs en masse like it did to workers in modernity. Constantly exposed to images of financial apocalypse, the zombies roaming streets and clicking on screens may be too habituated, too inoculated by familiarity or numbed by fear, to see beyond the material and imagined disasters of global debt. Trained to feel, perform, and react, their automation allows no time for reflection, action, or motivation. Like life and desire, time is paralyzed in a present that calculates and closes off any future other than that of the market privileging accumulation over expenditure, and is denied any final expenditure or vital-destructive opening: it is zombie, neither living nor dead but frozen between the two, life in stasis, death arrested, in debt forever. In constant electronic flux, an overstimulation of organisms, it may also generate a hyperactivity, restlessness, and undirected overflow that comes from immersion in and resistance to the multiple and divergent messages of media-managed capital’s debt impulse. A tension might remain between new procedures controlled more directly by economic debt, and the expectations and aspirations associated with forms of subjectivity defined in symbolic, social, and historical terms. In that tension—a space of incomplete transition and in-credulity—there is some hope of resistance, as Lazzarato notes: confronting “subjectivities that consider public assistance, retirement, education, etc., as collective rights guaranteed by past struggles is not the same as governing ‘debtors,’ small business owners, and minor shareholders” (114). If the transition allows space for disaffection, the general “herdification” identified in symbolically immiserated economies and techno-media also produces energies in excess of control; Stiegler’s disindividuated herd is permanently unsettled, disquieted, without form and identity, yet irrepressibly “furious” (“Suffocated desire” 55). Enter the “zoombie”: the fast-moving, voracious and extremely contagious mutation for an age of speed and sensory overstimulation. In 28 Days Later (Danny Boyle, 2002) and 28 Weeks Later (Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, 2007), the zoombie is an entity born of global media and urban violence, of biotechnical experimentation and militarized control: the name of the virus it spreads across the world is “RAGE.”