Technically, I never worked on Wall Street. But, for a difficult year in my early twenties, I did don a suit
at the crack of dawn and schlep down to one bank or another in the financial
district or, occasionally, to one of its outposts in Long Island City,
Queens, or Stamford, CT. Citibank, Chase Manhattan, American Express, Swiss Bank. I was a perma-temp in a series of glorified
secretarial pools, the highest paid work my liberal arts degree could
secure me, even in the middle of the Nineties dot com boom. But when dressed up as 'computer skills,' typing documents for a series of soulless financial
corporations wasn't exactly badly paid. In fact, it was the best I could do. When, about a decade later, I returned
to New York City a newly minted Assistant Professor, my annual salary, when converted to an hourly rate, hardly exceeded
what Wall Street had paid me. If indeed, it did exceed it.
Of course, that simple conversion, from insecure hourly waged work to a stable salaried career, is anything but simple, as today's high school and college graduates well know. What chilled my spirit back in those days, what filled me with dread and drove me from the workforce into the dishonored and impoverished ranks of the humanities graduate student, was the zombified state I felt myself enter in each morning, persist in all day, and linger in long into the night. Like the protestors in Monday's zombie march on Wall Street, I felt like precarious labor for high capital was slowly draining my life blood, taking away my dream of being young and living in New York and slowly transforming it into a grey nightmare.
Ever since escaping that corporate hellhole, I have been reluctant to to ever voluntarily reenter lower Manhattan. So I was surprised, when taking trips there this week to witness and participate in Occupy Wall Street, at the number of voluntary tourists milling around, snapping pictures, happy amidst the crush of police, brokers, street vendors, and occupiers. Considering the Stock Exchange from the point of view of a postmodern flaneur was an arresting thought. Were these shutterbugs appalled, or excited, to hear that the zombies were coming?
"Make a hole and let the zombies through!" could be the refrain for the whole, shifting swarm of people, vehicles, sounds, smells, and sights that have been set in motion around Liberty Plaza since the beginning of the occupation. The zombie is an ambiguous figure, which is part of the appeal and allure.* Unwillingly animated by another's dark bidding, we grimly shuffle. Hungry for sustenance, we feed our own appetites on the brains, bodies, dollars, and planet of the living. The NYPD strive to maintain the appearance of control over these flows of worker zombies, tourist zombies, protesting zombies, media zombies. Occasionally they break out of their blue somnolence into savage truncheon, kettling and pepper spray attacks, no more zombified than then.
The people as swarm are not to be conflated with the people as occupiers, although the groups do overlap. Boredom and creativity spills over into spontaneous, coordinated actions that then ignite a spark of recognition in others, who join in. Zuccotti Park is, as performance theorist Joseph Roach might call it, a vortex of behaviors: into and through and around it flow the zombies. But why this place, this plaza that is of, but not on Wall Street?
Zuccotti Park was once called Liberty Plaza Park, and abuts Liberty Street. Unless I am mistaken, Liberty Street derives its name from the anachronistic jurisdictional category of "the Liberties" -- the "district outside a city over which its jurisdiction extends" (OED). Wall Street, as many know, is so named for the wall that used to form the northern boundary of the City of New Amsterdam. Thus, just outside, the Liberties, the zone, as historian Jean-Christophe Agnew has shown, of both the market and the theatre in 17th and 18th century Anglo-American moral and geographic imagination. A space of exchange, circulation, theatricality, negotiation, antagonism. And unmarked graveyards. A historical, as well as geographic space to be occupied. Commerce and performance meet, compete, fuse, and confuse in a carnival of time.
Like the undead, then, I clamber out of my grave and shamble down to the City, its wall, and its Liberties. Unbidden but nonetheless drawn by the occupation as vortex. Reanimated by those dismissed and decried by the corporate right wing media as "zombies." Participate in a scene that is part festive, part fantasy, part hopeful, part enervating, part dangerous, part potential. Make a hole! Let the zombies through.
* For more on contemporary zombie socialities, see Shaka McGlotten, "Dead and Live Life: Zombies, Queers, and Online Sociality," in Generation Zombie: Essays on the Living Dead in Modern Culture, Stephanie Boluk and Wylie Lenz, eds. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Press, 2011, 182-193.
I am thankful for this post (as well as the reference to Shaka's work -- I plan to read it, asap). It's worth asking whether there is any conceptual or material link between Wall Street zombification and the academic discourse on "social death" in the work of Orlando Patterson (SLAVERY & SOCIAL DEATH) and Saidiya Hartman's thoughtful elaboration of his argument (SCENES OF SUBJECTION, LOSE YOUR MOTHER), in Vince Brown's critique (REAPER'S GARDEN), or even Ruthie Gilmore's notion of "premature death" (GOLDEN GULAG)-- it's no doubt an especially chilling comparison in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti and its ensuing crisis with deep roots. I'm also struck by the way many current themes in hip hop resonate with your blog post: from Rick Ross' description of forensic crime scene blood-stained walls as reminiscent of Basquiat paintings to Nas' lyricism ("If you could look inside my mind you'd find, where bodies are buried"), you could argue there is a resurgence of interest in a certain kind of gothic political culture reminiscent of the 19th century (or twentieth century artists, like Basquiat, inspired by such legacies). In this sense, it's perhaps worth noting the marriage between the gothic and the colonial, particularly in people like Jamaican planter Matthew "Monk" Lewis, who authored planter diaries and gothic novels. Makes me wonder how many Wall Street bankers write gothic fiction (or maybe that question is redundant...)?
Thanks for these references, Michael. Yes, I am sure the figure of the zombie has a lot to do with the social death discourse, in particular because one social function of the reanimated corpse is slave labor, at least in the circum-Atlantic cultural forms with which I am most conversant. And the colonial gothic is a current interest of mine, and indeed seems to be newly resonant in an era in which the revanchist right seem determined to build a bridge to the nineteenth century!
This special issue of Periscope on “Work and Idleness in the Age of the Great Recession,” reconsiders our sense of what qualifies as work or idleness when there is little or no work to be had. The role idleness might play in our lives, and in our collective imaginaries, may strike some as unthinkable or even irresponsible when so much suffering and uncertainty has been triggered by high unemployment rates. Yet perhaps now more than ever we have arrived at a moment that necessitates a critical rethinking of the normative institutions of work—in the form of employment or occupation, amongst others—under capitalism, especially during this time when “Right to Work” legislation, notions of a “jobless recovery,” and austerity measures have been proposed and implemented as the means of resolving various crises, both social and economic, in the U.S. and other parts of the globe. >>
I am thankful for this post (as well as the reference to Shaka's work -- I plan to read it, asap). It's worth asking whether there is any conceptual or material link between Wall Street zombification and the academic discourse on "social death" in the work of Orlando Patterson (SLAVERY & SOCIAL DEATH) and Saidiya Hartman's thoughtful elaboration of his argument (SCENES OF SUBJECTION, LOSE YOUR MOTHER), in Vince Brown's critique (REAPER'S GARDEN), or even Ruthie Gilmore's notion of "premature death" (GOLDEN GULAG)-- it's no doubt an especially chilling comparison in the aftermath of the earthquake in Haiti and its ensuing crisis with deep roots. I'm also struck by the way many current themes in hip hop resonate with your blog post: from Rick Ross' description of forensic crime scene blood-stained walls as reminiscent of Basquiat paintings to Nas' lyricism ("If you could look inside my mind you'd find, where bodies are buried"), you could argue there is a resurgence of interest in a certain kind of gothic political culture reminiscent of the 19th century (or twentieth century artists, like Basquiat, inspired by such legacies). In this sense, it's perhaps worth noting the marriage between the gothic and the colonial, particularly in people like Jamaican planter Matthew "Monk" Lewis, who authored planter diaries and gothic novels. Makes me wonder how many Wall Street bankers write gothic fiction (or maybe that question is redundant...)?
Thanks for these references, Michael. Yes, I am sure the figure of the zombie has a lot to do with the social death discourse, in particular because one social function of the reanimated corpse is slave labor, at least in the circum-Atlantic cultural forms with which I am most conversant. And the colonial gothic is a current interest of mine, and indeed seems to be newly resonant in an era in which the revanchist right seem determined to build a bridge to the nineteenth century!