Exchange of Values

Exchange of Values
acrylic on board 48'X96'

"Structure of Color Perception"

"Structure of Color Perception"
48'X96' acrylic on board

Wednesday, October 28, 2020

 

All Hallows Eve Death Mask. 96” X 24"



On the after-life of social mediation: A review of, “Fear the Walking Dead.” 

(My All Hallows Eve Death Mask. 96” X 24”) 

“Some people live as though they are already dead. There are people moving around us who are consumed by their past, terrified of their future, and stuck in their anger and jealousy. They are not alive; they are just walking corpses.”Thich Nhat Hanh.

“The coming being is whatever being.” Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community.

“Let the dead bury their own dead.” Jesus the Christ, Luke 9:60. 

Zombie movies haven’t interested me much. But the new series, “Fear the Walking Dead” got my attention with some new creative spiritual/cultural insights. For example In this series some post-apocalyptic survivors claim that Zombies should not be killed but cloistered away and cared for by humans. Other survivors have learned to walk among the migrating hordes of Dead, speak with them in whispers and grunts, and share in their collective ‘mind.’ Some other communities put the Walking Dead to work, enslave, mutilate, and use them as mindless labor. One powerful cult of survivors led by a despotic dictator named “Alpha,” have even learned how to control massive throngs of Zombies, weaponizing them against other survivor communities in order to gain resources/power/territory.


I’v struggled to place the cultural fetishization of Zombies into some original political/theological matrix of interpretive myth-making. But informed by these series I’v come to the simple thesis that Zombies just represent *death.* Of course death is not one thing, or even a thing in itself. And death has always been part of life and humans have always made their way, thriving/perishing, with death as necessary companion. But as the series matured I realized that Zombies were not the most significant threat to human life; what threatened human existence was not chomping obsessed monsters but how humans responded to each other when threatened by social/political collapse—that is, it was the destructive collective human response to the revelation of *walking death* abiding in humanity’s own being that causes ultimate human destruction.


New to the Zombie genre I mistakenly believed that it was the Zombie bite that killed and transformed humans into the Undead; but the Zombie bite merely kills its victims. According to this genre, only later, after people ‘die’(?) an already existing virus/mutation dormant inside every human activates and emerges, resurrecting the afflicted into a new form of what might be called (pacing Agamben?) “Bare life.” That is, an existential reclaiming of *being* from the problematics of the universal and particular into a form of unitive sacramental existence. 

Zombies only eat living tissue, so Zombie-being initially reduces the afflicted into one dimensional consumers—their single fetishized commodity is life. But although hordes of quasi-dead trudge over the face of an already brutalized planet consuming/transforming life into the otherness of undecidable non-life, Zombie-being is not rewarded in this fatal exchange. The life-force Zombies consume offers no physical/spiritual nutrition adding nothing to Zombie existence. Should Zombies be considered *evil* then? At least in the sense used by Aquinas/Dalai Lama/DBH? That is, evil identified as a void of good lacking wholeness abrogating our life-force rather than ontic agency functioning through malevolent subjectivity?   

Regardless, perhaps it is the undecidability of ‘living death’ that presently so vexes and entertains? ‘Moderns’ construct world/language via antagonistic binaries: left/right, republican/democrat, black/white, male/female, enemy/friend, living/dead. But Zombies transcend our dualisms/binaries. They are dead enough to be killed with impunity yet living enough to resist non-existence; perhaps functioning as the universal underclass of *Homo Sacer* ("sacred man/cursed man”). However, unlike subjects under the ancient Roman law of ‘homo sacer,’ Agamben quotes these manifestations of living-death may be readily killed and sacrificed to the consuming gØds humans have already constructed for themselves, even as they vanquish earth into the lifeless wasteland of a spent commodity.

New season starting soon!

Keep your eyes open.

Be well.  _/\_ 




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