The Galvanic ‘Unhuman’: Technology, the Living Dead and the ‘Animal-Machine’ in Literature and Culture

Abstract

The history of the zombie is part of a larger set of discourses generated out of industrial modernity relating to notions of the ‘unhuman’ and concepts of ‘unlife’ that develop from unease over the intersection of technology and human life. Beginning with the golem of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, a collection of dead body parts galvanised into life, such concerns continue through twentieth-century modernity into the present to include undead things such as zombies, which are created by the diseases or viruses that first destroy the vestiges of the human life before returning the zombie to unthinking mobility, and in technological life-forms such as robots and cyborgs, where technology animates machine-life or reanimates and modifies the human to extend it into the posthuman. Initial concerns with the simulation of life and its threat to the status of humanity develop different narratives within representation that further question, for example, the claims of humans to have exclusive access to consciousness, autonomy and agency (androids and AIs) or generate in the cyborg a postmodern blurring of boundaries that collapses distinctions between living and dead, subject and object, or human and machine. Within this, the conceptualisation of zombies as living dead is important because of the permeation of speculative and science-fiction texts by the technological zombie (robots, androids, cyborgs), a creature that is variously either empty of consciousness, delibidinalised or animated into life by technology rather than by what are referred to in H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘Herbert West — Reanimator’ as natural ‘life-motions’ (Lovecraft, 2008, p. 35) intrinsic to a self-regulating organism.