26 October 2009: "Should I invade my local mall dressed as a ‘zombie’ 2 scare consumer tweens+mnstrms?"

This post is about the pharmakon. Carles looks at the contemporary trend of zombie adulation and, as always, moves beyond the obvious interpretation. One would expect the phenomenon of zombies at a shopping mall to prompt an analysis linking the rudimentary costumes to an inchoate expression of revolt with regard to the death-in-life of late capitalist consumerism. With every desire always already co-opted by retailing interests, our own libido is turned against us, and every new pleasure we imagine is a new trap to cage us into the prison-house of consumerist subjectivity.

Carles grants all that from the outset. "Is ‘consumerism’ bullshit?" he asks mockingly, knowing precisely what answer his readers will give. But Carles is testing a new problematic, in which consumerism is not merely a metaphysical enemy, a parasite on authentic humanity, but is insteada medium, a dialiectic opportunity.

Posturing as a participant in the retail zombie parade, he makes this cutting comment about current economic praxis: "It was rlly crowded. It made me feel like I was finally chilling with a group of like-minded people, who just wanted to break free of their meaningless existences and participate in an event that would generate an internet meme/bloggable photos/etc." Desire have prompted an endless pursuit of self-marketing opportunities, of public behaviors that will make this cohort resemble the products which materially manifest the circumscribed desires they are now limited to conceiving. This common impulse has made them all "like-minded" in that they are without mind, much like the zombies whose guise they have adopted. Rather than feeding on "brains" as zombies are troped to do in popular film representations, this retail zombies subsist on online attention, for which they will stop at nothing.

Carles then recounts in images the way stations of the American retail center and exposes them as lifeless, soulless. But this merely sets the stage for his true analytical insights. In a very important and deceptively facile statement, Carles declares in the persona of the retail zombie:

I felt like I was a part of something larger than myself. It felt good to transcend this space that was meant to ’sell personal branding tools’ 2 humans.

Here we see Carles attempt to assimilate the parasitical discourse of branding and marketing and sublate it. He argues that identity as such can be purified through a devotion to the its prostitution in the cash nexus. By embracing mass consumerism as a kind of living death one is paradoxically freed from its vampiristic drain Thus, though "the vampire brand made us lose 23% of our fan base [via post-Twilight]" Carles believes "the zombie brand is still strong".

The zombie, overdetermined as both brainless and full of brains, alive and dead, animated and lifeless, is reminiscent of the figure of the pharmakon, as theorized by Derrida, drawing on the seminal works of the Greek philosopher Plato. Self-zombification is both poison and remedy to the retail sickness; it is presence in the midst of absence -- an absent presence, or as it were a present absence. Of course, as Derrida asks in "Différance"

are not the thought of the meaning or truth of Being, the determination of différance as the ontico-ontological difference, difference thought within the horizon of the question of Being, still intrametaphysical effects of différance?

That's easy for Derrida to ask, but less simple to resolve definitively. Carles would perhaps agree that the ontic-ontological difference implied by zombies vis-a-vis living creatures, vis-a-vis living creatures simulating zombies, is the "transcending" space imagined in the shopping mall -- the blissful utopian fantasy of eternal life and eternal desire -- much like the striving gods of Keats's famous Grecian urn -- dreamed by late capitalism itself. "I guess in a way, antiquated indoor malls are kinda like zombies…" Carles surmises, suggesting that both are liminal spaces and fatal strategies simultaneously, occupying an uncertain and indeterminate status in the current socioeconomic striation.