Affective Hegemonies

I wrote this review essay about the book Posthegemony by my friend and colleague Jon Beasley-Murray over three years ago, for the book launch we had at UBC. I then put it aside hoping to turn it, at some point, into a longer journal article. But, alas, I never found the time. It’s time to share it here.     

Jon Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America is a bold, groundbreaking proposition to abandon the concept of hegemony that may allow us, ironically, to re-politicize our understanding of hegemony by redefining it as an affective formation. Some clues about this direction are on the book’s title, an intriguing one given that this is a work committed to philosophies of affirmation. Posthegemony, after all, is a term that seeks to move beyond, and thereby to negate, “hegemony.” Indeed, Beasley-Murray critically dissects the concept of hegemony in order to shows how its alleged rationalism, its transcendent connotations, and its emphasis on ideology and representation cannot account for the affective, non-representational, and habitual dimensions that are immanent to political forces. And he suggests that we abandon the concept altogether, for we live (always have) in post-hegemonic times. This negative gesture against hegemony is thus articulated as an affirmation of concepts such as affect, immanence, habit, and the multitude. Yet “hegemony” is still on the title. Preceded by the “post,” the concept that is so thoroughly negated in the book is still present, as if Beasley-Murray were drawn to it through a Hegelian sublation that can only (wish to) destroy a concept by preserving it. This oscillation between distancing and incorporation, destruction and appropriation, pervades the entire book and reveals, I propose here, that Posthegemony is, against itself, a call for an affective understanding of hegemony.

Beasley-Murray’s main argument is that we should leave behind transcendent notions of hegemony as limit, pressure, ideological representation, and negation, as something that a transcendent state imposes on “the people” from the distance. He advocates, rather, an immanent, affective, and affirmative approach to politics based on the corporality of multitudes that come together through resonance yet may also resist change through the force of habits. And Beasley-Murray elaborates this approach through a detailed engagement with multiple bodies of literature: cultural studies, civil society theorists, studies of populism, and the work of Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, and Pierre Bourdieu, among others. More importantly, he grounds his argument on an intricate, impassionate examination of the political-affective terrains of twentieth-century Latin America: the affective resonances that made people support Juan Domingo Perón’s government in Argentina or join the FMLN guerrillas in El Salvador; the elusive, hard-to-represent nature of the Shinning Path guerrillas in Peru; the force of habituation in the resilience of attitudes forged in the Pinochet-era that lingered in post-dictatorship Chile. These historical, political, and conceptual dimensions make of Posthegemony a book of great originality and theoretical importance that is stimulating debates on multiple fronts.

Yet this is also a book that may reinvigorate the concept of hegemony by re-reading it through an affective lens. Beasley-Murray will certainly protest. It is clear that he does not want to revitalize the notion of hegemony at all. Yet in the pages that follow, I suggest that the notion of “affective hegemonies” may allow us to do this: i.e. to reveal the convergence between Beasley-Murray’s argument about affective politics and Gramsci’s understanding of hegemony as a field of contestation that involves, primarily, a struggle to define the contours of dominant forms of common sense.

This is why one of the most fascinating aspects of Posthegemony is Beasley-Murray’s masterful silencing of Gramsci. The book certainly begins by tackling Gramsci head on, naming the name that had to be named. The problem to be deconstructed in the rest of the book is clearly stated at the beginning of chapter one. Gramsci, we are told, says that no power can subsist on “coercion” alone, that domination needs “consensus,” that consensus is the bedrock of politics, and that power relies on violence only as supplement. Gramsci’s theory of hegemony is thereby presented by Beasley-Murray as a theory of “consensus” structured by a neat opposition between consent and coercion. And after being briefly presented in such a way, Gramsci disappears from the text, not to be engaged again in a book devoted to debunking the idea of hegemony once and for all.

As a result, as I was reading Posthegemony I kept looking for Gramsci and kept stumbling upon the cultural studies literature and the work of Ernesto Laclau, who in the text becomes Gramsci’s Argentine ventriloquist. Laclau is in Posthegemony the body through which the absent ghost of Gramsci seems to speak. But is this the voice of Gramsci? While reading the book, I was initially perplexed by this absence. Because Posthegemony is not just any book: it is a very ambitious intellectual project built upon a relentless, thorough, very careful reading of vast bodies of work. Every time Beasley-Murray engages with an author (be it Hall, Laclau, Bourdieu, or Deleuze), he dissects their ideas from the inside out. Gramsci, in contrast, is invoked briefly and in passing. Beasley-Murray read the cultural studies literature so thoroughly that the Gramsci he objects to is the one invoked, largely, in British and North American academia. Could it be that, in not confronting Gramsci, Beasley-Murray was paying oblique homage to the man who first thought about the very problems that Posthegemony seeks to understand?

A brief line in the book hints in that direction. In Chapter one, Beasley-Murray convincingly argues that in order to understand Laclau’s theory of hegemony and his views of populism it is crucial to take into account that he produced those ideas in the Argentina of the 1960s (p. 42). And Beasley-Murray adds in passing, before coming back to Laclau, that the same applies to Gramsci: that his theorization of hegemony was inseparable from his experience as a revolutionary leader and thinker in the fascist Italy of the 1920s and 1930s. This was a remarkable moment in the book, in which Gramsci is briefly evoked in the text to remind us of the political, geographical, and historical terrains that made him write about hegemony. Indeed, this historical and positioning is crucial to understanding Gramsci’s thinking on hegemony. As is well known, his Prison Notebooks were produced under extremely difficult conditions in a fascist prison cell, aggravated by his weak health. And these adverse conditions prompted Gramsci to articulate an affirmative theory of hegemony, evocatively embodied in his emphasis on an “optimism of the will” that could counter the “pessimism of the intellect.”

Gramsci’s primary goal as a revolutionary leader and thinker was to create a socialist hegemony in Italy. Hegemony was for him goal, affirmation, positivity: something to be fought for. The goal of the Italian Communist Party was to persuade the Italian multitudes that communism was the common sense of the subaltern classes through a confrontation that was as political-ideological as it was cultural and tied to what counts as “common sense.” Gramsci was particularly interested in analyzing the failure of the Italian bourgeoisie, relative to other national bourgeoisies in Europe, to create political hegemony in the whole space of the Italian peninsula, which prevented the consolidation of a unified nation-state until the late 1800s. In Gramsci, this expansive view of hegemony took precedence over his own view of hegemony as negation, limit, and constraint. Yet the historical and political conditions under which English-speaking scholars read Gramsci in North America and western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s, in a context of conservative restoration, made them prioritize the latter view of hegemony, as consensus and limit that erodes radical politics.

Beasley-Murray may counter-argue that Gramsci still advocated a conception of hegemony based on ideology and discourse, without looking at the affects and habits that make multitudes resonate (or not). And Beasley-Murray is here partly right. The strength of Posthegemony is its forceful call for an affective understanding of the non-representational forces that make ordinary men and women join certain causes or support particular governments. But I would argue that the rudiments of an affective theory of hegemony are already present in The Prison Notebooks.

First, Gramsci shares with Beasley-Murray a commitment to an immanent understanding of politics that is critical of transcendent reifications. He famously insisted that the philosophy of praxis should be conceived of as an “absolute historicism, the absolute earthliness of thought” and explicitly rejected metaphysical conceptions of materialism removed from historically-grounded, existing social actors (Gramsci 1971 [1929-35]:465, also 450). And while he did not embrace Spinozian notions of affect and the body, he did not reduce hegemony to ideology or to conceptual-discursive representations. For Gramsci, the struggle for hegemony involved contestations over popular culture and, more importantly, common sense. This interest in common sense is particularly important because for Gramsci the struggle for hegemony mobilized not only ideological disputes but also the non-ideological, subterranean, not-fully-conscious subjective terrains that interest Beasley-Murray. The starting point for the philosophy of praxis, wrote Gramsci, “must always be that common sense which is the spontaneous philosophy of the multitude…” (1971 [1929-35]:421). And common sense involved for him the “feeling-passion” that shapes the relationship between rulers and ruled as well as a naturalized view of the world that is “the immediate product of crude sensation” (1971 [1929-35]:418, 420, etc.). These ideas are underdeveloped and often under-theorized. But in arguing that the struggle for hegemony involves a common sense not reducible to consciousness, Gramsci anticipated some of the points made in Posthegemony about the political power of affects and everyday habits.  

Additionally, it is important to note that Beasley-Murray’s argument for abandoning the notion of hegemony is very different from the position articulated by other authors who also reject the concept. Derek Sayer, for instance, criticized the idea of hegemony by arguing that people may not challenge the state not because they consent to it but because they are aware of its power to unleash violence and repression. Every state, he concludes, is ultimately founded not on hegemony but on violence (Sayer 1994). Another well-known critique is that of James Scott (1990), who argued that what we call “hegemony” is merely the superficial appearance of consent. For Scott, the oppressed pretend to consent in order to deceive the powerful, presenting a “public transcript” of acquiescence that hides a “hidden transcript” of dissent and critical awareness. Sayer and Scott, in other words, argue that the idea of hegemony is misleading because ordinary people are aware of their oppression and, deep inside, are free subjects. As Tim Mitchell (1990) has argued in his critique of Scott, this perspective assumes the existence of a mind-body dichotomy, in which the bodies that strategically bow down to the powerful are assumed to be autonomous, free-thinking subjects unaffected by domination.

Beasley-Murray’s critique of hegemony, however, does not follow this path. His argument, in fact, is hostile to utilitarian views of political action such as Sayer’s and to the type of neat dualism between “public” and “hidden” transcripts proposed by Scott. Even if he often flirts with the idea that people are, indeed, free and conscious (as we shall see), Beasley-Murray is well aware that subaltern actors are bodily, affectively, and subjectively constituted by formations of power. Unlike Sayer and Scott, and very much like Gramsci, Beasley-Murray is interested in the problem of the creation of political legitimacy or, in his words, the reproduction of “social order”: the subjective constellations that make bodies willingly rally behind a leader, a political cause, or a government. And this is, at heart, what the Gramscian theory of hegemony is all about, even if we may debate the role of discourse, the body, ideology, affect, the working class, or the multitude in it. Beasley-Murray, tellingly, never questions that Peronism was hegemonic in the Argentina of the late 1940s and early 1950s. What he takes issue with are the attempts to explain this hegemony through rationalized, transcendent concepts (ideology, representation, consciousness) that miss the affective nature of this hegemony: the fact that millions of men and women willingly supported President Perón and his wife Evita at an often hard-to-articulate, affective, intuitive, yet powerful level. This is why Beasley-Murray proposes, if against himself, an affective theory of hegemony.

Beasley-Murray may still object that the concept of hegemony is too full of representational baggage to be redefined this way. But I think we still need a concept of this kind to articulate this problem, which is one of the most fundamental in politics. The alternative proposed by Beasley-Murray, post-hegemony, is still very close, a hyphen away, to the term he tries to conjure away. Why not just skip the post and rethink the problem of hegemony along more affective, immanent, non-representational lines?

The reason we still need a variation of the Gramscian idea of hegemony is that, contra Sayer and Scott, throughout history ordinary people have on many occasions willingly and enthusiastically supported the political conditions that kept them dominated. This is the same problem that concerned Spinoza, who famously asked why people would fight for their servitude as if they were fighting for their freedom (2007 [1670]:6). Spinoza’s answer was that “men are led more by passion than by reason” and that affects such as fear and hope can, indeed, make people desire the conditions that reproduce their own domination (Spinoza 2000:64). Making explicit their debt to Spinoza, this was the question that Deleuze and Guattari identified in Anti-Oedipus “as the most fundamental problem of political philosophy” and that they tackled in their analysis of fascism. “No, the masses were not deceived, they desired fascism, and this is what has to be explained” (Deleuze and Guattari 1983 [1972]:29, 257, my emphasis). In short, Spinoza and Deleuze and Guattari anticipated the concerns articulated in Posthegemony about the affective dimensions of politics but without downplaying the fact that affects fueled by fear can become hegemonic and naturalized as common sense.

Paradoxically, Beasley-Murray draws heavily on Spinoza and Deleuze to develop his argument yet, at the same time, downplays their commitment to examining why social actors may support the actors that oppress them. This positioning is clearly articulated in the very first paragraph of Posthegemony, where Beasley-Murray writes: “There is no hegemony and never has been. We live in cynical, post-hegemonic times: nobody is very much persuaded by ideologies that once seemed fundamental to securing social order. Everybody knows, for instance, that work is exploitation and that politics is deceit” (2010:ix). Beasley-Murray mentions the last phrase (“everybody knows…”) several times in the book. But what is it exactly that people “know” and why would such an “awareness” undermine an affective view of hegemony? Most people in North America, for instance, may know that they are exploited in their alienating jobs and that politicians lie. But many of them also believe that capitalism is the best way of organizing production and that they are free subjects who live in democratic societies. In other words, people may “know” that work is exploitation and politics is deceit but this cynical awareness does not mean that they may not naturalize or support the status quo and thereby contribute to the reproduction of hegemonic dispositions.

Likewise, the fact that “everybody knows that politics is deceit” did not prevent George W. Bush from securing unparallel levels of political legitimacy and support in the United States after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The narrative of the “war on terror” amplified by a powerful media machine indeed became hegemonic, accepted as common sense by millions of Americans. But this was a profoundly affective hegemony, based on the memory of the attacks on 9/11 and the inculcation of fears modulated by the media-state complex (Massumi 2005). The affective, visceral power of this hegemony, in fact, explains its political resilience, and the fact that the American Left failed to undermine it through rational, factual discourses alone: for instance, by arguing that Bin Laden had been supported by the CIA in the 1980s or that the terror attacks were a response to US imperialism in the middle-East. This hegemonic modulation of collective affects certainly lives on under Obama. The fact that in the name of fighting “terrorism” Obama legalized the policy of assassination of US citizens without due process and that this move enjoyed popular support is a case in point. As Glenn Greenwald put it: “From an authoritarian perspective, that’s the genius of America’s political culture. It not only finds ways to obliterate the most basic individual liberties designed to safeguard citizens from consummate abuses of power (such as extinguishing the lives of citizens without due process). It actually gets its citizens to stand up and clap and even celebrate the destruction of those safeguards.” It is precisely to account for attitudes such as this that the notion of hegemony remains crucial.

We are therefore back at the problem that Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, and Gramsci identified as constitutive of politics. The sections of Posthegemony that emphasize the “cynical awareness” that allegedly defines mainstream subjectivities seem unable to explain these willing, non-cynical forms of support for state power and domination. Yet in other sections of the book, Beasley-Murray moves in a different direction, acknowledging the forces that constrain people’s willingness to support radical change and, therefore, the type of problems that made Gramsci write about hegemony.

One of the most original contributions of Posthegemony to an affective theory of hegemony is Beasley-Murray’s re-conceptualization of Bourdieu’s notion of habit. And in contrast to other parts of the book, the sections on habit reveal that Beasley-Murray is well aware that relations of power constitute social subjects and that these subjects may contribute to reproducing their own domination over time. And he turns to Bourdieu to try to explain this attitude, arguing that not-fully-conscious forms of bodily habits (“affects at a standstill”) make people resist abrupt changes. “Old habits die hard” (p. 178). This analysis is developed in the chapter on Chile, in which Beasley-Murray examines how the transition from dictatorship to democracy in the 1990s was notably measured and conservative in contrast to other countries in Latin America, with the military (including the senator-for-life Augusto Pinochet) retaining key positions of power. Beasley-Murray’s examination of habitual forces in the reproduction of political legitimacy provides us with an insightful and in fact fundamental theoretical tool to examine affective hegemonies; but it also reveals something that Beasley-Murray disavows: the labor of the negative. The Chilean case, in this regard, reveals that the force of habits can, indeed, constrain and negate the possibility of radical political change.

Affective hegemonies, in this regard, not only produce subjectivities but also limit the possibility of imagining alternative futures. Affirmative notions of hegemony, in other words, also need to account for the negativity that is immanent to politics and collective struggles. As Benjamin Noys (2010) has argued, the recent popularity of theories of affirmation in the humanities (of which Posthegemony is a major expression) has led to an unfortunate dismissal of notions of negativity that are fundamental to account for the destructive-constraining power of capital and the state as well as for the negation of the status quo by critical and potentially revolutionary action. An affirmative theory of hegemony, in other words, should account for the negativity of politics, not as abstract negation or as reactive force but as a moment in the creative-disruptive generativity that is constitutive of fields of confrontation (see also Coole 2000).

And the same way that an affective theory of hegemony needs to avoid a dualism between affirmation and negation, it also requires overcoming a rigid counterpoint between affect and consciously articulated discourses. While Posthegemony puts forth a compelling, persuasive argument about the political power of affects, it often seems to suggest that the latter are divorced from discourse, representation, and conscious forms of ideology. In one of the many moments in which Beasley-Murray presents this dichotomy, for instance, he writes, “Peronism shows that populist politics are structured by habit, rather than belief” (2010: 63). But why should habit exclude belief? The history of Peronism in Argentina, in fact, reveals that the two dimensions have been entangled, and that for millions of men and women their conscious endorsement of Peronist social reforms and ideological slogans (i.e. their “belief” in particular narratives about the nation, the state, and “the people”) was inseparable from their affective, visceral, intuitive, habitual support for Perón’s and Evita’s legacy. While notions of ideology as false consciousness or utilitarian manipulation are certainly too crude, “ideology” is still a heuristically important concept to examine the legitimizing power of certain conceptual and affective formations. Another example is the narrative on “the war on terror” in the United States, which while engaging the public at affective, not-fully-conscious levels has ideological dimensions linked to the legitimization of imperial violence overseas and of increasing surveillance at home. In short, the power of an affective notion of hegemony lies precisely in its capacity to examine how affect, habit, and ideological narratives come together to legitimize and naturalize particular relations of power.

There is much more that could be said about Posthegemony, a book that in its conceptual, political, and historical breadth defies summary. But there is no doubt that Beasley-Murray has written a groundbreaking book that will survive academic fashions and shape debates in years to come, for it persuasively and originally challenges us to re-think older paradigms through a new conceptual lens. In Posthegemony, this exercise in critical thinking is not just a theoretical gesture but a bold call to reinvent radical politics through an affective and immanent examination, despite the book’s declared goals, of the ongoing political salience of Gramsci’s explorations of “hegemony.”

References

Beasley-Murray, Jon

            2010. Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America. Milwakee: University of Minnesota Press.

Coole, Diana

            2000. Negativity and Politics: Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Post-structuralism. London: Routledge.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari

            1983 [1972]. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Gramsci, Antonio

            1971 [1929-35]. Selection from the Prison Notebooks. New York:: International Publishers.

Massumi, Brian

            2005. "Fear (The Spectrum Said)".  Positions. 13: 31-48.

Mitchell, Timothy

            1990. "Everyday Metaphors of Power".  Theory and Society. 19: 545-577.

Noys, Benjamin

            2010. The Persistance of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Sayer, Derek

            1994. "Everyday Forms of State Formation: Some Dissident Remarks on "Hegemony"". In Everyday Forms of State Formation: Revolution and the Negotiation of Rule in Modern Mexico, Joseph Gilbert and Daniel Nugent, ed. Pp. 367-377. Durham: Duke University Press.

Scott, James

            1990. Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Spinoza, Baruch

            2000. Political Treatise. Indianapolis: Hackett.

            2007 [1670]. Theological-Political Treatise. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

World Revolution Z

The trailer of the Hollywood blockbuster World War Z forthcoming this summer is characterized by the dramatic appearance of huge masses of zombies that take over public space at staggering speed. Amid the rapid collapse of state power, the leaderless zombie multitude forces the global elites to retreat behind high walls or to flee on helicopters onto ships out in the ocean. In the final scenes, Israeli soldiers shoot at massive avalanches of bodies that charge against them as if forming a flood of indistinct physical forms. The zombie multitude becomes particularly ominous in the trailer’s closing images, when it forms a protuberance that steadily climbs up the Wall of Separation protecting Fortress Israel. Yet what makes the trailer particularly eerie, and revealing, was the timing of its online release. At the exact time the gripping images of Israeli troops murdering crowds of zombies was going viral on YouTube in mid-November, the Israeli military was murdering and mutilating men, women, and children in Gaza and treating them, as in World War Z, as if they were part of a not-fully-human, dangerous horde that ought to be crushed at all costs.

 “Everything in World War Z is based in reality,” said Max Brooks, the author of the book the movie is based on. “Well, except the zombies. But seriously, everything else in the book is either taken from reality or 100% real.” Maybe we should take Brook’s insistence about the reality of the zombie multitude seriously, and thereby examine in more depth what’s behind the growing obsession with a zombie apocalypse in popular culture. And this may require exploring this genre’s popularity as expression of anxieties about a world revolution. Am I reading too much into yet another zombie movie? Perhaps. Yet the fact that insurrections are mystified as the result of a “contagion” triggered by a “virus” that abruptly turns humans into uncontrollable crowds of zombies should not totally surprise us. This is how elites have always regarded insurrections: as pathological events inexplicably created by irrational hordes blinded by primitive, unsophisticated, impulsive desires. This is how Gustave Le Bon, the father of the “sociology of crowds,” responded to the uprising of the people of Paris in 1871: by claiming that radicalized multitudes are nothing but zombie-like, scary “hordes.”

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.