I. The Plague and Panopticon
Plague is a scourge that excludes and confines. The infected—blistered, boiled, more dead than alive, alive though dead—are quarantined, confined to special sanatorias where their mythical miasmas can lurk in common torment and dance a maladious dance macabre in solidarity.
This was all too necessary for the preservation of society vis-a-vis not the collective, but the population, the pure versus the impure, was at stake: the infected was necessarily outcasted as a societal exception, he was confined and survielled for the good of life, for the good of purity. And like so he became a rumor spread along trade routes (ironically along with disease); he became a nightmarish profanity, a worry for the pure and also the scientific object of observation. His hemorrhages, his necroses formed a collective—the sick, the condemned—a population that stood against the unblemished saved (or savable).
And just as the emergence during plague-time of elementary 'scientifc' notions of 'population' ushered in new techniques of social control, they also ushered in, too, a necessitated means of surveillance, a means of sifting through subjects as to part the impure from the pure. Only an all seeing eye, after all, a primitive panopticon, a disciplinary order that watched at all times (even while not watching), could keep the plague at bay by enforcing quarantines and bans of unauthorized trades and meetings.[1]
Early on, it seems, discipline was for life itself, for the sanctity of purity against the profanity of the sickly condemned. Early on, discipline was already a culture, an appendage connected to the sustainability of population and therefore life. Early on, then, discipline was a norm.
II. Zombie Films as a Panoptic Reversal
If the plague was that which mobilized society's efforts to exclude the abnormal infected, to register him, confine him, quarantine him, and exclude him as to preserve and purify society; if the plague was the force that effectively necessitated normalized surveillance, then perhaps what makes the modern zombie film so frightening is that it reverses the dynamics of power so embedded in our lives as governed disciplined subjects.
Such a hefty statement certainly deserves elaboration. Though the post-apocalyptic zombie towns of Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, Resident Evil, et al, are towns typically interpreted as ones absent of order, of hierarchy, of power, in them there is an under-discussed, subtle disorderly order. In the wake of these post-apocalyptic towns' biopolitical failure to preserve the pure, there is indeed power, there is hierarchy, there is hegemonized politics—but it is not the politics of struggling pure, rather it is the politics of the now hegemonic profane. I argue that it is not the absence of order that makes the post-apocalyptic Zombie world so frightening; rather, its the opposite: its the presence of order, the role reversal, the political switch from modern liberal-capitalist disciplinary society to the Zombieland disciplinary order under which all of us 'normal' people are objects to be hunted, objects to be fixed and 'purified.'
This Zombie Politics, though an irrational politics of unbridled madness, is not unlike the bridled rational power that preceded it. Akin but running parallel to the biopolitical programmes which today hunts the infected or soon-to-be-infected and then confines and cures or preemptively vaccinates him, the Zombie's unwritten biopolitical policy is to hunt and infect the self-confined uninfected as to purify him of his impure normalcy.
And just like the power before it, this Zombie Politics is also panoptic—even without 'official' Zombie institutions. We all know well the following scene: the lone survivor makes a noise and accidentally alerts the undead, who, armed with heightened instinctual senses (on par with disciplinary society's tools of surveillance), persists to chase the 'impure' uninfected with the intent of consuming and infecting him (Join us!). This reverse panopticism is what creates the anxiety of Resident Evil's Raccoon City and other post-apocalpyic zombie towns: Zombies are everywhere and no where; they lurk, they hear, see, and know all; they are in the woods, in the mansions, in the sewers, in the shops; they just need one quick glimpse of you, one minor sign of your existence as a contagion, as a spreader of non-cannibalistic normalcy, to find and renormalize you.
III. The Zombie As Us
The Zombie, then, can be said to represent our power unbridled, to represent our power unadultered and without norms. The Zombie represents both a reversal of power (as the impure are now in the position of privilege) and a radicalized disciplinary possibility—the frightening possibility of mandatory vaccinations and therefore mandatory infection, not via a bite, but via a syringe; the frightening possibility of one's own infection (with AIDs, H1N1, or Hepatitis); the frightening possibility of one's own seclusion, one's own mandated subjugation for the good of population (as an ill person? an alleged terrorist? an immigrant?).
This all makes relevant the classic Zombie: Romero's symbol of capitalistic cannibalism and rabid consumerism who too represents a prospective cannibalistic 'you,' what you could be if unrestrained, and also the cannibalistic prospects of a society whose politics is conducted at the level of life, conducted with the ability to 'let live' and 'let die' whole populations.
The Zombie, in the end, is a warning. As Shaun of the Dead demonstrates and also Jim's animalistic evolution in 28 Days Later: the Zombie is both what we already are and what we can be.
[1] Michel Foucault's Discipline and Punish cites the biopolitical developments/disciplinary programs that emerged in light of the plague as predecessors to the modern Benthamian panopticon.
