°Zombies and witches
In “Alien-Nation: Zombies, Immigrants, and Millennial Capitalism,” (SAQ, 101:4, 2002), Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff take the discussion of flexibilisation and changing conditions of work (from Tronti to Harvey) into a discussion of South Africa, migrant workers and more.
Of particular interest as I put the final touches on the “Social Softwar” piece, for its discussion of the intersection between postcolony, border and labour, but of much interest well beyond that, here are excerpts from their essay:
In a world of flextime employment, it is even said that some people are made into ‘‘part time zombies,’’ whose exhaustion in the morning speaks of an unwitting nocturnal mission, of involuntary toil on the night shift.
Thus do some build fortunes with the lifeblood of others. And, as they do, they are held to destroy the job market — even more, the very essence of self-possessed labor — in the process. Those typically said to conjure up the living dead tend, unsurprisingly, to be persons of conspicuous wealth; especially new wealth, whose source is neither visible nor readily explicable.
Such things, of course, are highly relative: in very poor rural communities, where (almost) all things are relative, it does not take a great deal to be seen to be affluent. In point of fact, those actually accused of the mystical manufacture of nightworkers, and assaulted or killed as a result, are not always the same as those suspected: much like peoples assailed elsewhere as witches and sorcerers, they are often elderly, relict individuals,mostly female. Note: Mostly, not all, although there is a penchant in much of northerly South Africa to refer to anyone alleged to engage in this kind of magical evil as ‘‘oldwomen.’’ Conversely, their primary accusers and attackers, more often than not, are young, unemployed men. Zombie-makers, moreover, are semiotically saturated, visually charged figures. In contrast to their victims, who are neutered by being reduced to pure labor power, they are stereotypically described as sexual perverts whose deformed genitalia and poisonous secretions make them unable to reproduce; worse yet, to make them likely to spoil the fertility of others.
Also, by extension, of the collectivity at large, be it a clan, a village, a town. Which is why they have become iconic of a perceived crisis of household and community in rural South Africa. In this respect, they fuse, in a single grotesque, the very essence of negative value: the simultaneous, reciprocal destruction of both production and reproduction.38 On the one hand, by manufacturing spectral workers, they annihilate the very possibility of productive employment, imaginatively if not manifestly; on the other, by taking jobs away from young people, they prevent them from securing the wherewithal to establish families and to reproduce — and so make it impossible for any community to ensure its future. No wonder that, in one of the most poignant witch-killings of the 1990s, the old woman set alight by morally outraged youths — determined to save their community by removing all evildoers — was to hear in her final agony the words, ‘‘Die, die you witch. We can’t get work because of you!’’
The Comaroffs are good to think for this kind of thing. Witch burnings as a component of the labour market, that certainly puts an interesting spin on conceptualizations of modernity. For more of the Comaroffs’ brand of economic anthropology, you might like their anthology Millennial Capitalism and the Culture of Neoliberalism. It collects the articles from the issue of Public Culture that they guest-edited - Public Culture 2002, 12(2) if you just wanted to get individual articles instead. Povinelli’s in there again, her article has Australian aborigines, Heidegger, and peyote ingestion all rolled up into one. The Comaroffs’ contribution is about capitalism as millenarianism and its different articulations. It’s all good, really.
Sarapen [November 16, 2006 @ 3:58 pm]
Witch burnings as a component of the labour market, that certainly puts an interesting spin on conceptualizations of modernity.
Doesn’t it. It’s also reminiscent of Taussig’s work on commodity fetishism and the devil - which I really liked a lot. But more importantly, it confronts the risks that a work such as Federici’s Caliban and the Witch might be read as ‘in the past’ (some of which I wrote about here). That said, I wonder if the connections between this stuff and flexibililsation in the metropoles mightn’t be drawn more directly - which I guess is where I’d like to head, if in somewhat limited fashion, and in 3,500 wds for the moment.
So, thanks for the tips, muchly.
s0metim3s [November 16, 2006 @ 4:15 pm]
I’ve only now read the review you wrote (hey, I had things to do). I’m reminded of what the Chinese call the Industrial Revolution: “the time when sheep ate people.” Rather poetic, and I assume a reference to the enclosure movement. It’s interesting because China is going through its own industrialization right now and the dislocations and injustices that go along with this are justified by reference to Western history. The Western countries exploited their proletariat in the past but are now highly advanced; perhaps China needs its own time of sheep eating people to achieve modernity as well. Reminds me of the old Soviet line that true socialism couldn’t be achieved as long as the reactionary forces of imperialism existed to oppress the proletariat.
Anyway, that philosophy seems to be one of the rationalizations the Chinese middle class use to assuage their guilt while seeing yet another news story about migrant workers suffocating in coal mines and such. On the one hand a self-serving cover, but on the other hand perhaps a rather accurate assessment? If the Chinese want to achieve material and social parity with the capitalist West, then how can they really become capitalist without also becoming complete bastards to each other?
Sarapen [November 22, 2006 @ 12:18 pm]
the time when sheep ate people.
That’s excellent. And yes, I agree, the piling up of bodies is hardly anomalous. But the number of protests, riots etc in China over the last few years is quite something. On a scale and in such numbers that it makes the anti-enclosure protests in England, Wales etc look like mumbling disaffection. The most recent I know of, 2,000 trashed the hospital and a local police station after someone died as a result of being refused immediate treatment, because they didn’t have enough money.
s0metim3s [November 22, 2006 @ 12:43 pm]