Scholarly analyses of zombies tend
to focus on the historical origins of this figure in Haiti, where the zombie as
the living dead symbolized the body of the slave. As David Graeber reminds us,
slaves are usually treated throughout history as humans that are already dead:
as bare life that could be killed without breaking the law. In popular culture,
zombies indeed often represent a state of un-freedom. But isn’t the zombie, in
an ironic twist, also a body that cannot be affected and is, therefore, utterly
indifferent to power, ranks, and hierarchies and unbearably ungovernable and free? Isn’t this affective dimension key to any political reading of
the current popularity of zombies? The author of World War Z emphasized that what terrifies him the most about
zombies is, indeed, that they don’t obey rules and cannot be “shocked and
awed.” “They scare me more than any other fictional creature out there because they
break all the rules,” Brooks said in an interview. And he argued that this disobedience
makes of zombies irrational beings comparable to terrorists. “The lack of
rational thought has always scared me when it came to zombies, the idea that
there is no middle ground, no room for negotiation. That has always terrified
me. Of course that applies to terrorists. … Any kind of mindless extremism
scares me, and we’re living in some pretty extreme times.” Brooks, on his own
admission, is very scared of the
world in which we live. He wrote his first book, The
Zombie Survival Guide, as a call to arms to get ready for the coming planetary
insurrection. His first lesson is, “Organize before they rise!” And “they,”
lest we forget, are actually us:
ordinary human beings that abruptly become something else: something profoundly
menacing.
Zombies are menacing not only
because they cannot be affected but also because they are not totally devoid of
affects; after all, zombies are not dead but undead. Their lifeless bodies move, moan, and are guided by one raw
appetite: the desire to eat living flesh, which magnetically attracts them to
living bodies. In Brooks’ book, this desire makes zombies aggregate to form
truly gigantic multitudes: “mega swarms” that roam the continents and are
visible from outer space: “Truly massive, miles across, like the American
buffalo must have once been.” These zombie multitudes are what Deleuze and
Guattari would call uncoded desiring machines: lines of flow guided by desire, even
if this is desire of a rudimentary nature. In Spinoza, Deleuze argued that a tick is guided by three basic
affects: it is attracted to light, it is sensitive to the smell of mammals, and
digs into the animal’s skin. The zombies’ rudimentary affects are very similar.
Yet this affective condition makes them immune to the state and thereby has
profound political implications. In the eyes of the state, zombies form insurgent
multitudes because their undomesticated desires threaten the very fabric of
state power.
While
heir to a long legacy of movies about zombie epidemics, the film World War Z is already being hailed as
“The Mother of all Zombie Movies,” and rightly so. The film stands out, first,
because of its planetary reach, which makes previous films about zombie outbreaks
look purely local or regional (England in 28
Days or Atlanta and rural Georgia in The
Walking Dead). But what is most distinctive about the zombie multitudes in
the film is their staggering speed. This
speed, in fact, sets the movie apart from the book, which follows the genre
convention of presenting clumsy, slow-moving zombies, the walking dead. To the dismay of some of the book’s fans, on the
film’s trailer the zombie multitudes charge
at an overwhelming velocity, forming massive avalanches in which the zombies’ individual
bodies create an undifferentiated torrent, an unformed thing-in-motion that
overruns everything on its path. This vortex makes the allegory of revolution more
haunting than it is in the book. Paul Virilio has long insisted that revolutions
are processes of acceleration whose speed is qualitatively different from that
of capital. “Revolution is speed, but speed is not revolution” (Speed and Politics). We got a taste
of that insurgent speed in the staggeringly fast-paced wave of insurrections that
shook North Africa and the Middle East in 2011, which in a matter of weeks
engulfed multiple countries thousands of kilometers apart from each other. Some
of the long-shot images of urban unrest on the trailer of World War Z, indeed, look like images of the Arab Spring.
Zombie epidemics and revolutionary
situations share a similar spatiality: a territorial
disintegration through which multitudes that do not take orders from the state dissolve
state-controlled spaces. In World War Z
and also on the hugely popular TV show The
Walking Dead, the zombie multitudes create, through this territorial
dissolution, an overwhelming spatial void that is first generated in urban
centers and subsequently expands outwardly. As Lefebvre insisted, in an
increasingly urbanized world the most radical insurrections are (and will be) urban phenomena. This is why the
panoptic surveillance of urban space is a key priority of the imperial security
apparatus, as Stephen Graham demonstrates in Cities under Siege. In The Walking Dead, the urban nature of
the zombie insurrection is particularly apparent in the opening episodes, when the
zombie takeover of the city of Atlanta forces survivors to flee to rural areas.
In one scene, attack helicopters bombard the city with napalm, the epitome of counter-insurgency
weapons. In subsequent episodes, the spatial voiding created by the collapse of
the state acquires a particularly haunting presence. For months on end, the
small band of survivors lives on the run, in hiding, always on the edge and
with their weapons at the ready, suffocated by the spatial emptiness that
surrounds them ---a voiding not unlike the one experienced by imperial troops
in terrains controlled by local insurgencies, be that of the jungles of South
America in the 1600s or the mountains of Afghanistan today. 
In both The Walking Dead and World
War Z, a key strategy to cope with this territorial disintegration is the
production of walled, fortified spatial enclaves. Yet whereas in The Walking Dead these walled enclaves are
created locally by scattered survivors who have no idea what is going on
elsewhere, in World War Z they are largely
the product of a globally-coordinated policy of counter-insurgency. Nothing
makes Brooks’ conservative anxieties more transparent than the fact his book presents
South Africa and Israel as the world leaders in containing the zombie
insurrection because of their Apartheid-style policies. In South
Africa, Brooks writes, the author of the successful plan to contain the
zombies through fortified spatial enclosures was a former official of the
Apartheid regime who originally devised this plan to combat a human insurrection. “It was a doomsday
scenario for the country’s white minority, the plan to deal with the all-out
uprising of its indigenous African population.” In short, in World War Z a human rebellion
against an oppressive regime is practically indistinguishable from a zombie
outbreak, thereby confirming that the zombie is the figure through which Brooks affectively reads the bodies of rebellious humans. In an effort to whitewash Israeli Apartheid, Brooks presents Israel as a humanitarian nation that opens up its hyper-militarized borders to all
uninfected Palestinians fleeing the zombies. And the book and the movie rebrand The Wall of Separation as the object that protects generic humans from the spatially expansive zombie apocalypse. The recent bombing of Gaza by the Israeli military disrupts
this fantasy of humanitarian colonialism to remind us that the current Israeli state
would never act so kindly toward Palestinians, for The Wall was built to contain not
zombies but millions of Palestinian men and women who have for decades lived under foreign
military occupation. The images on the film's trailer of Israeli soldiers machine-gunning crowds of zombies that seek to breach The Wall are therefore, indeed, "100% real."
The genre of a zombie pandemic
is quite distinct within the larger genre of end-of-the-world scenarios that
currently fascinates popular culture. This is the only apocalypse created not
by natural cataclysms but, rather, by human bodies that abruptly stop obeying the state. Zombies are human bodies that have been freed from hierarchies, conventions,
consumerism, and indoctrination by the media; and this un-coding creates a collective,
leaderless, expansive occupation of space that makes the state crumble. The zombies' unique power to destroy the state is, in this regard, based on a distinct bodily affect: the power to be free
from fear. Brooks was asked why he thinks we are witnessing a growing
fascination with zombies, and he candidly replied that they represent anxieties
about a world in turmoil and about “chaos in the streets.” The fascination with zombies, in short, is the fascination with fearless multitudes. The phrase “we are no longer afraid” was
one of the most recurring sentiments uttered during the 2011 insurrections of North
Africa and the Middle East. Those were, indeed, multitudes that could no longer
be “shocked and awed” by the state. That is the affect that terrifies Brooks and that made
him fantasize about a global campaign of indiscriminate state violence against rebellious crowds.
But the fear of the coming zombie
insurrection may also be a tangential, not-fully-articulated recognition of the
zombie-like conditions that capitalism has long cultivated at a planetary scale.
After all, the global grinding machine depends on turning billions of people
into passive, depoliticized bodies guided (like ticks and zombies) by just a few
rudimentary affects: working, consuming, and obeying. Maybe what makes World War Z truly terrifying is the hidden
recognition that the insurgent multitudes presented as lifeless hordes have
woken up from their zombie nightmare to become unbearably alive and human. 
