It appears undeniable that the zombie has returned as one of the most prominent monsters of the 21st century after having suffered the indignity of being interred mostly in underground films and dedicated fan circles. It also appears undeniable that the zombie of the new millennium is different from its cousins from the 70s and 80s, just as they in turn were different from their cousins from the 30s onward. If we want to look beyond the unpredictable fluctuations of popular culture which may unaccountably turn certain fads into merchandise cycles, what is that the zombie visualizes which has taken such hold of us?

It is my contention that that the new zombie articulate new and different concerns. Concerns for which the zombie is the perfect image. What about this new zombie, the zombie perhaps not of late capitalism but of global network capitalism, for lack of a better word. In his chapter “The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction” W.J.T. Mitchell (What Do Pictures Want?) argues that we have moved into a new mode of image production better conceived of as biocybernetic reproduction, a period where our concern is not so much the old concerns if things fall apart. (Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want?, 335) After all, a network is defined as something which does not fall apart, even if one or more nodes collapse. Instead, our primary concern and fear is the ominous proposition that things come alive.

The things that come alive, for Mitchell, are two interrelated images – the clone and the terrorist. In fact, these two images are the mutually constitutive figures for our current period, something Mitchell goes to great lengths to show in his book Cloning Terror. I propose a different image than Mitchell as emblematic for our time, an image which is a synthesis of his two – the zombie. The zombie of the 21st century is both terrorist and clone at the same time; literally and not figuratively, as is the case for Mitchell’s terrorist clone. On the one hand, zombies are clones because they are identical and identity-less; there is nothing special about an individual zombie, instead they are better conceived of as swarms or hordes – or, in the phrase used in The Walking Dead, zombies are a herd. Such a conception of the zombie as a swarm is significant because it emphasizes a form of self-organization without intelligence. On the other hand, zombies are terrorists in the way they threaten stable societies and exploit the networks of global circulation so endemic to our age.

What I want to show here, then, is composed of three points. First, that the new zombies are viral terrorists. Second, that these new zombies are uncanny things best understood as swarms. And third, that the zombies infect and exploit the global networks so endemic to our current moment. In this way, I will point out not just how the new zombies differ from their younger cousins but also show how these zombies, like all monsters, reveal the anxieties of their time. In this case, pandemics, epidemics and terrorist attacks are the immediate, visible symptoms of a deeper lying fear of the results of being connected and living in the network society. The flow of information in a network is by design uncontrollable, so any information will spread and potentially “go viral” as the saying goes. This lack of control while being enmeshed in a global network is terrifying because it makes us vulnerable at all levels. No wonder, then, that nations attempt to create gatekeepers to regulate flow, in an attempt to turn fully distributed networks into decentralized networks. National control is an attempt at creating what Alexander R. Galloway has called a chain of triumph, which is linear, efficient, functional and additive as opposed to the web of ruin which is a solvent, rather than a directional chain of command. (Galloway, “Networks,” 281)

Viral Zombies

But let us start first with the notion of the viral zombie. A very brief survey of the zombie’s history reveals to us that Romero’s zombies changed the genre forever because he posited the zombie as ourselves and gave no explanation for why the dead rise. An explanation such as a plague is proposed in his original trilogy, as are a curse from God and the most colorful reason: because there is no more room in Hell. This inexplicability is one of the powerful forces of his zombies but this changes with the resurgence of zombie films in the 2000s, particularly following Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002). A long list of zombie films since then have used a variety of contagious diseases as the cause of zombiehood: Resident Evil (Paul W.S. Anderson 2002 and its sequels), House of the Dead II: Dead Aim (Michael Hurst 2005), Severed: Forest of the Dead (Carl Bessai 2005), The Zombie Diaries (Kevin Gates & Michael Bartlett 2006), I Am Legend (Francis Lawrence 2007), Awaken the Dead (Jeff Brookshire 2007), Deadgirl (Marcel Sarmiento and Gadi Harel 2008), Quarantine (John Erick Dowdle 2008), Zombie Strippers (Jay Lee 2008), Zombies! Zombies! Zombies! (Jason M. Murphy 2008), Plaguers (Brad Sykes 2008), Zombieland (Ruben Fleischer 2009), Doghouse (Jake West 2009), Carriers (Àlex Pastor and David Pastor 2009), Pontypool (Bruce McDonald 2009), The Walking Dead (Frank Darabont, et.al. 2010, based on a comic book series started in 2003), The Crazies (Breck Eisner 2010), Devil’s Playground (Marc McQueen 2010) and Quarantine 2: Terminal (John Pogue 2011).#

Not only do we see from these films a turn towards the zombie as virus but we also see that in many of the same cases, the zombie virus is associated with biotechnology. Again, the precedent is 28 Days Later, where a military laboratory is experimenting with a so-called rage serum for use in warfare, making soldiers indifferent to pain and extra aggressive. Of course, there is another precedent of this type of zombie which is Resident Evil, where the zombie virus is also the result of genetic experimentation. These images of DNA sequences then come alive “by means of technoscience and information,” in other words in what we might call biomedia, where the separation between the living and the nonliving breaks down. Indeed, zombie are of course often referred to as undead, something clearly evident in the re-animated corpses of Romero’s films. But the division for the new runner zombies is not so much between living and dead with zombiehood lying somewhere in-between. Rather, the runner zombie is the intermediate of the living of biology and the nonliving of technology; the runner zombie is the product of biotechnology, in other words.

If the runner zombie is a product of biomedia, it is because it infects and destabilizes not just the factual bodies of humans which turn into zombies, but because it also infects the body politic. Our docile bodies reared to a life of production and consumption are suddenly rendered far too active and volatile; hence the new zombie is precisely a runner zombie – constantly in movement, faster than a human and sometimes capable of acrobatic feats undreamed of when still alive, such as the parkour zombies of Devil’s Playground or the frame-fucked zombies in 28 Days Later. These volatile bodies are far too difficult to discipline for our control societies, so instead attempts are made at containing them and keeping them outside of the body politic. Yet the very foundation of biomedia is the breakdown of boundaries and no matter how much we attempt to keep out the zombies, they keep breaching our defenses.

The zombie as virus is an updating of the old modernist fear of the crowd and the masses; our individual identities are washed away when we join the zombie horde, the plurality of the masses become the singular of the horde. There is no escape from the zombie masses, there is no way to regain our identity and even the identity of the living become binarized into survivors. But zombies are not identical in terms of the way they look; there is no easy profiling for zombies, no easy manner to separate who can become a zombie and who are safe: everyone can become a zombie and a zombie looks as much like you and me as they look like dangerous outsiders. Only on a deep genetic level may we find that the difference between a zombie and ourselves: in Quarantine 2: Terminal we cannot see the spread of the zombie virus until it is too late; only with the help of a FLIR camera does the zombie virus reveal itself immediately by radiating unnatural heat from the bite, a heat which slowly spreads through the body and turning it volatile as the body reaches zombiehood.

Things and Swarms

I have mentioned the idea of zombiehood before, so let me unpack it more now. For me, zombiehood is to subjecthood what the thing is to objectedhood. Objecthood, of course, is the status conferred upon the wealth of objects which are required for the notion of empire to become conceivable. Empire here is understood as,

a name for the total domination of material things and people, linked (potentially) with totalitarianism, with “absolute dominion,” the utopian unification of the human species of the world it inhabits; or the dystopian spectacle of total domination, the oppression and suffering of vast populations, the reduction of human life to a “bare life” for the great masses of people. (Mitchell, What Do Images Want? 154)

All objects are then to be categorized and taxonomized and put into the correct order, so that empire may assert its control and dominance. There are, however, ‘bad objects’ which are objects that for different reasons refuse to be categorized – these objects are what we call things. In our quest for epistemological order and control, for certainty and exact knowledge, we name things and so they become objects under our control, but things are different. They “hover over the threshold between the nameable and unnameable, the figurable and unfigurable, the identifiable and unidentifiable” (Brown, “Thing Theory” 5) and so become things are uncanny objects which flicker and distort to become Other in front of us.

Such is also the case of zombiehood, it is the instance of the bad subject which refuses to be speciated into a proper category and transformed into a docile body. Instead, the zombie flickers and distorts and becomes Other in front of us. But for the runner zombie this is not the old colonialist metaphor of the zombie being the uncanny postcolonial Other. Nor is it the domestic metaphor of Romero’s zombies of the uncanny structures of US society. Instead, the runner zombie is what happens when we become Other to ourselves. This is the fear of creating terror in our own image, of our own actions being the causes of the terror in the first place. Consider the again 28 Days Later, where the zombie horde is unleashed as the result of military genetic experiments. Or, perhaps even more significantly because of the departure from the original versions, Quarantine 2: Terminal. If Quarantine was almost a shot-by-shot remake of REC (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza 2007), this is certainly not the case with Quarantine 2: Terminal. Whereas REC 2 (Jaume Balagueró and Paco Plaza 2009) continues the story of the first film directly and reveals that the zombie virus has demonic origins, Quaratine 2: Terminal completely alters the origin of the virus and substitutes it with the biological weapon of a doomsday cult.

This is the way that the viral zombie is coded as a terrorist. Not only is the zombie a volatile body which refuses to comply with the structures of empire, it actively rejects and breaks down these very structures by infecting others with its volatility and undisciplined behavior. Many zombie films explicitly engage with this configuration of the zombie, not only 28 Days Later and Quarantine 2: Terminal but also instances such as House of the Dead II: Dead Aim, The Zombie Diaries, Zombie Strippers, The Crazies and Devil’s Playground. These films also all locate the origin of the zombie virus in military experiments and military presence, something which is rare in the earlier shambler zombie films. It appears that the military and zombie have become part and parcel of the genre, which to my mind further connects the association of the viral zombie with the terrorist. The only solution to the volatile zombie body is military action, yet inevitably this same military action is revealed to be insufficient.

Significantly, despite all the cultural coding of the runner zombie as terrorist, it is never cast as an outsider or as cultural Other. Indeed, these new films all unswervingly locate the zombie as ourselves, changed by military experiments. The blame for the runner zombie terrorist is thereby not placed on some radical fundamentalist outside the order of our empire. Instead, we are the cause of the zombies and so the cause of the terrorists. At the very least, then, these films suggest that our military interventions are what causes the zombie terrorist outbreaks, or more radically I believe, that our configuration of empire is what causes zombie terrorist outbreaks.

Just as the actual terrorists of 9/11 targeted not only a sovereign body politic, they also targeted the global world system of capitalist empire. In the same fashion, the runner zombie as flickering entity disrupts this global world system by questioning and overreaching the “limits, border, boundaries of the body (politic),” and its “relations to inside/outside, friend/enemy, native/alien, literal/figurative” (Mitchell, Cloning Terror 46) in what Jacques Derrida has suggested is parallel to an autoimmune reaction of the immune system. This image of the immune system is interesting becase, as Donna Haraway reminds us, the immune system itself is best understood as a network (Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women 218) and so we find a pregnant metaphor for conflating the individual body with that of the body politic. The human body is infected by the zombie virus, thus moving from subjecthood to zombiehood, just as the body politic is infected with the fear of outside invasion and so attacks supposed infected areas inside itself. But as Steven Shaviro has argued, in the network society there is no difference between the inside and the outside: “The network is the great Outside that always surrounds and envelops me. But it is also the Inside: its alien circuitry is what I find when I look deep within myself.” (Shaviro, Connected 12) This is not such a new idea as it may at first seem, for already with Plato we find the argument that the greatest threat to the body politic always comes from within. Eugene Thacker even goes so far as to suggest that,

we can begin to identify a specific type of ‘life itself’ taking shape, a life (bios) that is always undone from within by a disease (nosos) that threatens order and law (nomos), be it in the shape of an actual epidemic, or the diseases caused by the imperfect societies of democracy, oligarchy, and tyranny. (Thacker, “Nomos, Nosos and Bios”)

Although the image of the runner zombie is new, it seems that the concern it pictures is as old as the hills. What is new with the image of the zombie, is the loss of individuality which happens in the transformation into zombiehood. The zombies are not individuals, they have no intelligence or intellectual capacity, yet at the same time it is evident that they are capable of functioning in groups and exhibit some form of communication and powers of distinction, since they never mistake each other for humans. It is my argument, then, that we should understand zombies not as individual entities but rather as swarms, defined by Eugene Thacker as

a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, but it is also a heterogeneous whole. This is not to identify a unified, homogeneous group that serves the heterogeneous needs and desires of individuals. Rather, the principles of self-organization require that the group only arises from the localized, singular, heterogeneous actions of individual units. (Thacker, “Networks, Swarms, Multitudes, Part Two”)

The relevance of a swarm has to do with pattern and purpose. We may identify a certain pattern in the movement and behavior of zombies – they tend to follow and chase the living – but we are unsure as to what purpose. It may seem that zombies generally simply want to stay alive and sustain themselves. Yet with the exception of 28 Days Later, it is rare to ever encounter a zombie who will die from starvation. Indeed, most of the runner zombies will in fact not eat the bodies they kill, unlike Romero’s zombies who seemed to dine on the brains of humans to ease the pain of being dead. The purpose of the runner zombies, instead, may be to spread the virus. Proliferation is the key, contagion is their sole purpose and it is through contagion and dissemination that we recognize also the pattern of the runner zombie.

What is more, the runner zombie infects the networked body politic of our current historical moment and it does so it ways that run counter to the logic of the network. The immediate definition of a network is a “self-generating, self-organizing, self-sustaining system,” (Shaviro, Connected, 10) but this definition seems echoed in that of the swarm. However, Thacker points out the difference between networks and swarms: “networks can form a collectivity, through connectivity, while swarms can initiate a connectivity, but only through collectivity.” (Thacker, “Networks, Swarms, Multitudes, Part Two”) Zombies, then, are connected because they are a collective. We humans, however, may become a collective but if we do so it is through connectivity and it is a choice which we believe we make ourselves. In reality, of course, there is no choice in being connected, it is utterly impossible to not be somehow connected in the network society and this is why the image of the runner zombie terrorist is so frightening – we are all, at any moment, capable of being transformed into a zombie through our connected collectivity. In fact, as we have seen, this is how the zombies spread: they exploit our networks against us. This is why, I believe, that every zombie narrative attempts to contain the zombie threat, in other words, to contain the contagion.

Networks and Containment

I have already briefly sketched a definition of what a network is, but it might be useful to extend it slightly here. The most useful definition for my use, comes from Andrew R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker in their book The Exploit, where they tackle the issue of a networks as protocol-based systems, attempting to move beyond an understanding of networks as necessarily human. For them, a network is

any system of interrelationality, whether biological or informatic, organic or inorganic, technical or natural—with the ultimate goal of undoing the polar restrictiveness of these pairings. (Galloway & Thacker, The Exploit, 28)

They also associate the condition of empire with that of a specific configuration of the network, following Hardt and Negri in understanding the political network of empire as something which does not “follow an architecture of pyramidal hierarchy,” but is instead “fluid, flexible, dynamic, and far-reaching.” (27) Our current condition of empire is then one of the network, understood as endlessly reconfiguring relationality from which it is not possible to escape or disconnect. The origin of the runner zombies appear inextricably connected to this very notion of connection and network dynamics, seeing that the attacks generally target either large metropolitan areas or other massive nodes along the network. 28 Days Later, The Zombie Diaries and Devil’s Playground all take place in London, while Quarantine and Quarantine 2: Terminal take place or originate in Los Angeles. As can be gathered from the title of Quarantine 2, the zombie virus spreads via an airplane, something we also find in 28 Weeks Later. The global flows of airlines is thus one major way of spreading the infection, but what is just as significant is the way that attempts are made at containing the virus from spreading.

We find the motif of containment in most of these new zombie films, including of course  28 Days Later, and 28 Weeks Later but also in Quarantine, Quarantine 2: Terminal, House of the Dead II: Dead Aim, Severed: Forest of the Dead and The Crazies. Unlike earlier zombie films, where the protagonists were usually the ones to be trapped in confined areas surrounded by the hordes of walking dead, we now instead find that the protagonists are caught inside the containment area with the zombies. The plot structure has also changed from one of escape and fortification against the shamblers, to one of attempts at containing and eradicating the runners. Needless to say, perhaps, either strategy never truly works and the traditional horror film structure where the monster escapes unnoticed in order to spawn infinite sequels is typical of these new zombie films. While 28 Days Later is the exception to the rule here, with clear signs of the protagonists having survived the zombie plague and the infected having starved to death, this did not prevent the creation of a sequel, perhaps only proving that viruses may lie dormant and suddenly be reactivated when a fresh host is presented.

In all these instances, then, we find that there is a tension between containment and the relationality of the network. On the one hand, the network permeates everything in these narratives and inevitably is what spreads the virus but at the same time, the idea and desire for containment is what drives the strategies for exterminating the zombies. The very network flows which we set up to help us survive nuclear disaster becomes the very means by which we are now attacked in the global network flow we ourselves praise. The containment always fails, revealing that the global flows are unstoppable because they have become definitive and insurmountable. The logic of the network is then revealed to be double; on the one hand, we live under the desire of a connecting network, which adds value to the constantly circulation of capital and images. At the same time, we live in fear of the ensnarement of the network, the inevitable attack on the network which dissolves all the nodes of the network and thrusts us into a state of bare life. The zombies, like the terrorists we fear, exploit this vulnerability of our networks; they use our circulation against us and in this way the image of the zombie becomes a symbol of the weaknesses in our network society.

It is here, I suppose, that it makes sense to finally mention Romero’s presence in the new zombie genre field. While his zombies have not changed from the shamblers of his first trilogy, he keeps on commenting on current political culture in the US through the image of the zombie. Significantly, in Land of the Dead (George A. Romero 2005) Pittsburgh has been turned into a sort of free haven for the living, protected from the outside world infested by shambler zombies by an electric fence, as well as other military installations. With Romero’s usual sly irony, he casts the containment narrative in reverse, revealing how the humans turn against each other inside the supposedly safe area. Indeed, as many commentators noted, Paul Kaufman (Dennis Hopper) seems a thinly veiled parody of George W. Bush, attempting to ignore the ravages of the outside world as the settlement he controls becomes more and more divided.

Many of the other new zombie films reveal a similar deep mistrust against military intervention, considering the way that containment is typically handled by eradicating the infected area, which we see in House of the Dead II: Dead Aim, The Crazies and Quarantine 2: Terminal. Extermination and destruction of the nodes is then regarded to be the best way to handle the contagious outbreak of zombies, yet the problem persists and the containment fails despite this strategy and that is precisely because of network logic; the connectivity established by the network refuses to distinguish information – all information is passed along the network and this goes equally for the circulation of capital, bodies, images as well as viruses. What may be considered contagious noise on one level of the network is simply information on another level and so there are no means to distinguish between subjecthood or zombiehood. Despite all the uncanny qualities we recognize as differences between human and zombie, for the network there are no differences in information and so it is passed along. In other words, we have created the networks which will lead to our own dissolution and that is the final fear which the image of the runner zombie pictures.

The connectivity of our networks foster a certain kind collectivity and we believe, as I mentioned, that we may choose what kind of collectivity and when to step out of it. Yet the very logic of network connectivity insists that we cannot choose to not be connected, which inevitably means that we cannot choose to disconnect from collectivity. We are doomed to be collective, just as we are doomed to be connected. I say doomed because this notion of collectivity is anathema in many ways to the individualistic project of Enlightenment and the thought of being a small cog in a larger machine has been one of the things which liberal ideology has combated for centuries. This is why the zombie is such a potent and frightening image, for it reveals that we ourselves generate the systems which lead to our (individual) demise – all that is individual melts into multitudes and swarms. The fractal nature of networks has revealed that not only are networks the same all the way up, they are also the same all the way down, into each and every one of us where the network is embedded within us.

This fear of the network and the virus swarms which will overtake us should not surprise us, though, as it is a fear which is built into the very system of the network. The network has been likened many times to the state of globalization and the emergence of empire, an argument I have also made use of here. However, if we look at the history of globalization and the global network, it is becoming increasingly obvious that globalization did not begin in the 1970s or 1980s with the emergence of finance capitalsim, nor did it begin in the 1960s with the emergence of the ARPANET which grew into the Internet of today. Rather, as Nicolas Mirzoeff has suggested, it began with the birth of the modern age located temporally quiet specifically in 1492 with the exile of Muslims and Jews from Spain and the invasion of the Americas. (Mirzoeff, An Introduction to Visual Culture) In other words, the modern age and the emergence of a global network are the same event. It begins with the circulation of bodies because of slavery but it becomes the circulation of capital and images and now we have seen that it also includes the circulation of viruses which exploit the network itself.

The significance of the invasion of the Americas in the context should be clear; while on the one hand the invasion was facilitated militarily and culturally, we should not ignore the fact that a host of viruses laid waste as much as 95% percent of the indigenous peoples: smallpox, typhus, influenza, diphtheria and measles were all responsible for epidemics across the Americas. The birth of the network was the invasion of the Americas, the weapons were in large part biological and the white European was the first viral zombie. The global network was built in part on viral epidemics, so little wonder then that we fear that the collapse of our own network society should come by means of another strain of virus.

In this paper, then, I have argued for the runner zombie as one configuration of a contemporary monster; a monster which expresses the fear that the future will be monstrous just as our past has been monstrous. I have traced the legacy of the new millennial runner zombie as the image of the terrorist born from viruses spread throughout the network by exploiting this very same network. In this way, I have argued that not only is the zombie an image of the fear of terrorism in an age of war on terror, but also the even more insidious fear that we will be swallowed up the networks we ourselves have created, just as we swallowed up others on our path to empire.