7(a) The First Law of Thermodynamics is the law of the “Conservation of Energy,” which asserts that energy can neither be created or destroyed in a closed system. Energy can be converted from one form to another through a variety of chemical, electrical or physical processes, but only at the cost of the transformation of the initial system or by way of the introduction of outside energy. In other words, an object—a machine or a body, for instance—cannot generate force or do work and remain constant without the input of energy from an external source. It’s this First Law that makes perpetual motion a theoretical impossibility. Machines need some form of energy input to move and affect matter; animal and human bodies need food, which we convert into energy, which we use up when we walk, talk, think and shovel dirt. In other words, the First Law invalidates any possibility of getting something for nothing, at least when that something is work. (Work, in this sense, is the application of force on objects so as to effectuate their change or transformation; it’s the power that meets and overcomes the stubborn resistance of matter.) Just a few moments ago, I called my industrious wife, on her way downstairs for yet another Zoom meeting ‘a perpetual motion machine.’ ‘No, I’m not,’ she replied, ‘I require cheese.’ Which is what got me thinking about this.

In the lion’s share of popular representations, Zombies appear to contravene this very basic law. They may want to eat your brains, but they don’t need your brains (or food of any kind) to keep shuffling about. One way of differentiating rage-plague narratives from Zombie narratives proper might be to determine whether or not the creatures respect or defy the First Law of Thermodynamics. In 28 Days Later, for instance, the infected eventually wind down in the absence of fresh meat. In The Walking Dead, on the other hand, zombies who don’t even have stomachs anymore drag their derelict bodies after any living thing. (What drives the Zombie is an interesting question, but here I’m more interested in what powers it, which is a related, but separate issue.) It is interesting to note that the contemporary Zombie remains an object of science and realism, even though its basic ontology contravenes a cardinal scientific law.  

In his book The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity, Anson Rabinbach traces the profound transformations in philosophy, politics and public discourse occasioned by the discovery and acceptance of the new science of thermodynamics, the origins of which lie in the mid-nineteenth century. One of consequences of this new science was the displacement of moralistic and religious ways of talking about personal and social non-productivity in favour of more mechanistic and ‘objective’ approaches. The problem with workers (especially those increasingly brought within the orbit of industrial processes) was not laziness or moral lassitude but fatigue. It was a question of energy, not will. (Of course, the problem was also will, but energy was more easily tackled without having to question the overall system itself.)

The discovery of fatigue as an unsurpassable human limit (but a constraint shared by all energy consuming systems, organic and inorganic alike) threw into sharper relief the implicit goal of earlier experiments in automata (like Jacques de Vaucanson’s Canard Digérateur [The Digesting Duck].) In their desperate attempt to create living machines, didn’t all these craftsman, Rabinbach suggests, ultimately “envision a body without fatigue, without discontent, and without an aversion to work?” (57). “The dream of the builders of automata was ultimately premised on a redemption from labor” (58). To put it another way, it was a born of a desire for work without labour—and labour power without labourers. It was not a quest to transform the experience of human labour—as pursued by William Morris and other socialists—but to exempt humans from labour, which was best left to less fragile, and less capricious, devices. Rabinbach quotes 19^th century physicist and physician Herman von Helmholtz, one of the great popularizers of thermodynamic theory of his day:

“…still there would be many who would be willing to dispense with the moral qualities of their servants, if at the same time their immoral qualities could also be eliminated, and to achieve instead of the immutability and flesh and bones, the regularity of a machine and the durability of brass and steel.” (in Rabinbach 58).

For Helmholtz, the mistaken assumption of the automatists was not in hoping that robots could or should take up a greater role in production, but that they remained beholden to an organicist and ultimately humanist view of the worker. What was needed was a more systematic view of production—and a division of labour that did not organize people as discrete subjects, but circumvented the limitations of the person as such:

“We no longer seek to build machines which shall fulfill the thousand services required of one man, but desire, on the contrary that a machine shall perform one service, and shall occupy in doing it the place of a thousand men” (in Rabinbach 58).  

And so we arrive, eventually, at what economists are calling the ‘end of work’, as automation displaces increasing numbers of workers in a system that still requires one to have a job if one wants to survive with any dignity.

But I was talking about perpetual motion. The interest in automata was closely linked with the quest for a perpetual motion machine. Could one of these uncanny piano playing dolls eventually be made such that it fueled itself? And while the new theory of thermodynamics enabled the desires of the former to carry on in the logics of industrial efficiency and maximal productivity, it absolutely put the lie to perpetual motion. Rabinbach:

“Even the elimination of ‘labor’ by the machine could never dispense with the requirement for labor power. By extending the idea of energy to all aspects of inorganic and organic experience, the theory of the conservation of energy permitted the old phantom of perpetuum mobile to be exorcised” (58-59).

While it may not be an affront to science think that the human being could be exempted from labour, it was sheer delusion to think that labour power—work—could be obtained without the consumption of resources. Fatigue, which was was merely the human experience of the First Law, motivated a desire to escape or minimize energy expenditure in labour; the same law asserted that all work had its costs. Helmholtz’s pronouncement on this question was unambiguous:

“Perpetual motion was to produce labor power inexhaustibly without corresponding consumption, that is to say, out of nothing. Work, however, is money. Here emerges the practical problem which clever people of all centuries have pursued in the most diverse ways, namely to create money out of nothing. The comparison with the philosopher’s stone sought by the ancient alchemists is complete” (in Rabinbach 58).

It is not difficult to see in the Zombie’s lack of fatigue the symbolic realization of the desires of both the automatists and the quixotic seekers of perpetual motion. By contravening the First law of Thermodynamics, Zombies might enable a total reimagining of both work and political economy. The fact that this possibility has not been taken up in contemporary Zombie narratives in any sustained or serious way is almost as interesting as the limited ways in which it has. Why, on the whole, have Zombies not been imagined as fleshy robots—fleshbots (I just googled ‘fleshbot’ and apparently it’s the name of a porn site, but I’m going to stick with it anyway)—which, unlike actual robots, don’t require the investment of any capital for their continued operation?  

The capitalist fantasy of pure surplus value, of profit without investment, is certainly at work in the Caribbean zombie tradition in which plantation workers, after a life of indentured servitude, are resurrected and compelled back into the fields. From the point of view of the plantation owners, slaves are better than wage laborers, and slaves you don’t have to clothe or feed are the best of all. Most treatments of this folk tradition have focused on its colonial and racist dimensions. The workers are always black, and in the case where a white person is threatened with zombism, the danger is not only existential, but carries with it a clear racial and class penalty. There is a long history of colonization in play here that generated the political and social factors that produced and maintained (I should say produces and maintains) a racialized work force throughout the Caribbean, and elsewhere. This process is reified in the form of the Hatian voodoo Zombi who, unlike the mass Zombie of contemporary narratives, is selected by a specialist of some kind (evil plantation owner, mad scientist or voodoo priest) in such a way as to keep the racial lines of the labour force consistent. Some of the workers are alive, some are dead, but all of them are black. In the film White Zombie (1932), usually considered the first zombie feature, the Voodoo master Murder Legendre also owns a sugar mill in which Zombis power the machines and perform manual tasks like sorting and hauling.    

Purely in terms of productive capacity, though, the racial identity of the zombie is irrelevant: labour power is labour power. In a capitalist or mercantile context, labour power is, as Helmholtz reminds us, money, and money is non-specific. But the real exercise of capital is never pure. We can bring in the Marxist idea that while labour power is the ultimate source of all value, work is a social process through which the given world, with its divisions and hierarchies, is created or recreated. We can see, then, that films like White Zombie expose work at both levels: the Zombie, being black, reproduces the social conditions of postcolonial Haiti (a racialized division of labour) even as its labour power produces surplus value. In this case, the surplus value, appropriated by the (white) ruling classes, likewise reasserts the prevailing cultural and political logic adhering to the plantation system.

Even so, there is a utopian element inherent in the notion of undead labour power that the postcolonial and racial interpretations tend to obscure. (In all fairness, though, that’s what these narratives are about: an institutionalized racism from which not even the dead are spared.) When, however, the Zombie is not selected, but generated through indiscriminate mass infection, its potential labour power is made more abstract, stripped of its particularities. (Though, if Covid has taught us anything it’s that the risks of contagion are not evenly distributed, but are disproportionately borne by those who already socially and economically vulnerable.) The film Fido aligns itself with the earlier tradition insofar as it presents Zombies as unpaid workers—domestic servants, delivery people, sex-slaves, and factory hands. But it eliminates the selectivity and racial particularity of the voodoo Zombi, and situates itself securely in the domain of mass zombification. But despite the more indiscriminate and universalizing nature of its disaster, Fido cannot explore or must suppress the potentially liberating advent of Zombie labour power—precisely because it focuses not on labour power, but on the Zombies as workers, as individual subjects, who experience their labour and social position as alienating and, ironically, de-humanizing. By endowing its Zombies with memory and feelings, the film presents the Zombie, individually, as a victim and, collectively, as an oppressed class. In Romero’s Land of the Dead (2005), the proletarian politics are made explicit; Zombies develop a class-consciousness and rebel against their exploitation, incarnated in the mob boss/feudal lord Kaufman. Whereas the plantation Zombi does not know it’s oppressed (the best false-consciousness is a non-consciousness), the industrial age Zombies of Fido and Land of the Dead feel that oppression in their very bones, so to speak. In both cases, though for different reasons, we are encouraged to despise the social division of labour because it represents a continuity with, not a departure from, a status quo we find objectionable. This is further enforced by the uniform depiction of the users of Zombie labour as evil or corrupt. (Another example of this characterization is Squire Hamilton who uses zombified locals to toil in his tin mines in Plague of the Zombies.)

Yet White Zombie and Plague of the Zombies are now outliers when we look at the prevailing tendencies of the genre today. Historically, the plantation Zombie or the voodoo Zombi has been almost entirely displaced by the contagion Zombie. Stories in which the Zombie has been incorporated into a society whose systems and norms remain mostly unchanged are few and far between (Maggie, The Cured, I-Zombie, and In the Flesh, are some examples, though, alas, Disney’s Zombies 1 and 2 are probably the best known of this type.) There is a strong tendency in these narratives for the Zombies to be agentic, self-determining—or potentially self-determining–subjects. Fido is a rare example of the contagion zombie also having a personality. More typically (The Walking Dead is the ur-text here) not only is the Zombie part of an undifferentiated mass, particular Zombies have no discernible feelings or memories, no subjectivity, no language, no consciousness, no particular skills or abilities (One never hears, ‘Oh, this Zombie sings beautifully’ or ‘I met a Zombie today that writes code.) Such a figure can never be repressed; it cannot be alienated from anything it does, because there is no human potentiality being squandered. One cannot feel bad for such an entity, any more than you can feel bad for your toaster, or a rock. The prohibition against torturing Zombies that runs so strongly through the contemporary tradition is entirely a matter of decorum. Furthermore, most Zombie narratives present their disaster as global and apocalyptic; capitalism has been destroyed at its local, national, and planetary scales, thereby throwing the world into a precapitalist (and usually pre-industrial) mode of relations. One of the consequences of this is that all labour power has been liberated from the profit motive and the capitalist divisions of labour. The need for work remains, obviously, but the social production of labour—which hitherto had produced alienated workers and the class system itself—has been nullified.

As philosopher and cyberneticist Norbert Weiner has written, à propos of robots, “the automatic machine . . . is the precise economic equivalent of slave labor. Any labor which competes with slave labor must accept the economic conditions of slave labor” (The Human Use of Human Beings 220). Zombies are like robots insofar as they work for free, do not require much investment of resources, have no need to rest, and have no subjectivity, no spirit, no humanity that is deserving of recognition or concern. But they are not like slaves at all because they are not subject to or constitutive of a capitalist or white-supremicist economic and social order. Or to put it another way, they are slaves only to the extent that they can be imagined as political subjects or human agents, which almost everything in their representation militates against. The only logical arguments against their being used as an endless supply of energy, as pure labour power, would have to be couched in post-humanist terms–and the Zombie narrative is overwhelmingly humanist in its tendencies.

The stage has been set for a materialist, progressive, and wholly pragmatic view of the Zombie as free energy, the ‘philosopher’s stone’ of productive capacity and the generation of use values. Requiring no investment, incapable of fatigue—or less humanistically, able to “produce labor power inexhaustibly without corresponding consumption” (Helmholtz, above), the Zombie is, or could be, the enabling condition of paradise on earth. Given that the single greatest problem in most survival scenarios is scarcity, coupled with extreme physical and emotional fatigue, you’d think the existence of an unlimited source of energy within pitchfork’s reach would prove attractive. Certainly, chaining a few zombies to a treadmill and dangling a cat or small child in front of them could heat a greenhouse or electrify one’s security fence. Sure, it’s a little dangerous, but so is nuclear power.

And yet the positive utopian potential of Zombie power has not been explored in any Zombie narrative I can think of. Despite the absence of the structures that would render Zombie labour exploitive (as in White Zombie or Land of the Dead), the users of Zombie power in the contemporary tradition are still usually antagonists like the Whisperers in The Walking Dead who wield zombie hordes like a bunt force instrument against the enclosures of their enemies. (A similar idea is presented in The Girl With All The Gifts.) In fact, we could say that the prohibition against instrumentalizing the Zombie, individually or collectively, amounts to a generic rule that links all Zombie stories, notwithstanding the significant ruptures and transformations in their content and social context. In the (lousy) sort-of finale to season ten of the The Walking Dead, Carol and Lydia lead a stadium-sized horde off a cliff. Good guys waste the Zombies, bad guys use them.

If one of the hopes of modernity had been to free the individual from the curse of labour—manifested in the early experiments in automata and the quest for a perpetual motion, and later transmogrified into the rationalization of industry and the automation of production under capitalism—then there is something peculiarly antimodernist in the mainstream Zombie tradition which lays perpetual motion and free energy at its own doorstep only to reject it. I have examined aspects of that antimodernity in other entries on this blog. The narrative investment in differentiating labour from labour power in contemporary zombie novels and films is clearly a statement against rationalization and instrumentalization and the loss of individuality these entail. Characters are depicted as workers of various kinds, and work is ultimately ennobling and productive of community (as opposed to society, which was invented in modernity alongside the combustion engine and electricity.) One of the discoveries of the Zombie narrative, and a valuable one, is that in the absence of capitalist systems of control and the division of labour, work can be non-alienating. Except for the conspicuous absence of artists and artistic labour in these narratives, they share the same goal as Morris’s News From Nowhere, which is to assert that work is at the centre of personal and communal fulfillment, but can only serve that purpose when not subjected to rationalist control and the division of labour—when, in fact, a quest for labour power does not supercede the integrity and freedom of the worker him/herself. (I wish it were so; it only requires the destruction of the world as we know it for this to obtain.)

And yet, the Zombie’s narrative investment in its own conditions of scarcity (lack or resources, food, shelter, tools and machines), concomitant with its rejection of free Zombie energy, does raise the question whether its critique of instrumentality, which, alongside the apparent hatred of invention and techne, of science more broadly, that it shares with other anti-progressivist ideologies, is rather more reactionary than utopian in spirit. Like the characters in Morris’s News From Nowhere, the characters in most Zombie narratives are no longer alienated in their work, but unlike denizens of Morris’s socialist utopia, neither are they happy.

(Note: I have not admitted here the obvious corruptibility of the Zombie—it rots, and so it’s not entirely an infinitely renewable energy source. I will address this in my next post, which takes on the Second Law of Thermodynamics, that is, the law of entropy and the inevitable loss encountered in any transfer of energy.)

Fellow travellers: Anson Rabinbach, William Morris, Norbert Weiner

Stops along the ways: White Zombie, Plague of the Zombies, The Walking Dead, Fido, Land of the Dead, The Girl With All the Gifts, News From Nowhere