For certain, nothing made by contemporary humanity will be left at the surface that far in the future, even stone edifices like the
pyramids or Mount Rushmore will be wiped away, though the fine imprints of plastic objects, like say a vinyl record, may be legible —and even perhaps listenable—in the rock like the fronds of a fern.
- David Biello, “Nuclear Blasts May Prove Best Marker of Humanity's Geologic Record”
Monster theorist and ecocritic Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s expansion of object-oriented ontology into what he calls “zombie-oriented ontology” is precisely an attempt to show that Modern
purification is impossible. In his chapter “Grey,” in the edited collection Prismatic Ecology: Ecotheory beyond Green, Cohen sets about the Latourian task of disproving the existence of the soul—that is, “the principle of intelligence, thought, or action in a person (or occas. an animal), typically regarded as an entity distinct from the body; the essential, immaterial, or spiritual part of a person or animal, as opposed to the physical” (“Soul,” def. 2a). A ghost, then, —an “entity distinct from the body”—is really just a soul: both are fictions upheld by the Modern ontology. To purify souls from bodies (ghosts from zombies, culture from nature, etc.), is to render the body (and nature) inert; that is, if the soul is the “principle of intelligence, thought, or action in a person,” than the body is left unintelligent, unthoughtful, and inactive. A plethora of new
ontologies—loosely collected under the heading new materialisms—attempts to finally dispel our belief in inert matter/nature and in so doing vanquish our belief in ghosts too. That is, for new materialism, if there are such things as ghosts and zombies, souls and bodies, they cannot be ontologically separated; there are only ever ghost-zombies and body-souls, or what Donna Haraway has famously called “naturecultures” (Companion Species 1). Cohen’s zombie-oriented
ontology, which “makes evident the objectal status of the body as a heterogeneous concatenation of parts, working in harmonious relation, or exerting their own will, or entropically vanishing, or willfully relating to other forces, other things,” is precisely an attempt at resisting the Modernist practice of purification which has resulted in this belief in bodiless soul (282-3). In other words, zombies show how bodies (the bodies of humans and nonhumans, those who in the Modernist ontology were considered “nature,” including women, Indigenous peoples, children, animals, plants, rocks, etc.), also act. While it is important to consider the phantom-quality of audio recordings, too often, I think, we take the lack of a human body to mean there is no body at all. An emphasis on the zombie-like quality of the vinyl record, however, emphasizes the recording artist’s new “immortal” plastic body and its various affects in the world.
Following media theorist Jussi Parikka, the vinyl record can be understood as a zombie medium (141). For Parikka, zombie media are “the living dead of media history, and the living 19
dead of discarded waste that is not only of inspirational value to artists but signals death in the concrete sense of nature through its toxic chemicals and heavy metals” (141). In A Geology of Media, Parikka examines media in the context of Earth’s deep time: from prehistoric fossils to “zombie media future fossils” (114, emphasis added). The concept of zombie media is developed with the Anthropocene in mind; Parikka essentially asks, if humankind is indeed a geological force, what does the layer of sediment corresponding to it look like? The term “zombie media future fossils” is intended to spur those types of questions, encouraging the practice of what Parikka calls “media archeology”: “a method for excavation of the repressed, the forgotten, or the past” (142). Parikka reminds us that modernity is not only built on the ruined and rejected
Thanks to Kyle Devine for this point.
bodies of peoples and “natural” ecologies, but on the ruined and rejected “cultural” creations of modernity itself. In fact, over-production, rampant consumerism, and built-in obsolescence mean that most media do not even get as far as the “ruined” stage; two-thirds of consumer electronics that are rejected in the U.S.—that is, thrown away—still function (EPA qtd. in Parikka 142). Parikka’s media archeology involves an in-depth look at those ruined and rejected bodies: the “slow stratification of a synthetic layer of technological rubbish” (121).
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Fig. 8. Photograph of one in a series of four similar pieces by Dario Robleto. The collected
works are called The Sad Punk (Named Extinction), 1998. Casts of 45 rpm and 12-inch singles made from hand-ground fossil dust of a Discocaphites gulosus (Cretaceous period), polyester resin, velvet, frames, brass labels; Each 30” x 24”. 6 June 2015. <http://www.dariorobleto.com/ works/277>.
Parikka’s notion of zombie media demonstrates the importance of an emphasis on bodily agency—the focal point of Cohen’s zombie-oriented ontology—and is a theoretical parallel to the artistic practice of Dario Robleto, whose wonderful passage on the geological and alchemical origins of vinyl opened track 1. His piece, The Sad Punk (Named Extinction) contextualizes the vinyl record within Earth’s deep past and deep future (Fig. 3). Robleto’s work helps us de-
fetishize the record and comprehend its “natural” past and future. He skips the petro-(al)chemical industry’s role in vinyl production, and makes records literally and directly made from disc-like fossils: Discocaphites gulosus, a species of ammonite. The fossil-fuel origins of even the best records (like The Beatles’ “Revolution”) are here indisputable and, for the modern subject/object of ecological calamity, even painfully obvious. But the work also evokes the status of vinyl records as future fossils. Indeed, in a way, the record in Fig. 3 seems to come from the future, or what Parikka calls the “future-present in which media and residues of waste might be the only monument we left behind”: like the dinosaurs, we have suffered the fatal blow of the sad punk (named extinction), and among the detritus we have left behind is a 45 of “Revolution” (Parikka 135). (“Well, you know, we all wanna change the world”—and, the Anthropocene proves, change it we have.) Having seen the deep past and future through Robleto’s work, our perspective on the present framed and fetishized record is changed; we cannot help but see records and other petro-cultural products as (future) fossils “piling up slowly but steadily as an emblem of an apocalypse in slow motion” (119). In other words, both Parikka’s theory of zombie media and Robleto’s The Sad Punk (Named Extinction) force upon the reader/viewer the
realization that vinyl records are destined to become part of the Anthropocene’s geological record. It is precisely at the moment of this realization that the possibility of a radical ecological
politics and ethics is generated; as Haraway says, contemplating the horror of humanity-as- geology and fathoming the future-present of an Anthropocene boundary line, "I think our job is to make the Anthropocene as short/thin as possible” (Haraway, “Anthropocene” 159).