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Chapter 10

Leave It All Behind: The Post-Apocalyptical Renunciation of Technology in The Walking

Dead

By Alicia Kozma

The Walking Dead (2010-present) is the latest in a succession of media products

specifically concerned with narratives of materiality, morality, and the ethics of post-apocalyptic

survival. Examples of these narrative can be found across mediums, from films like 28 Days

Later (Danny Boyle, 2002), Blindness (Fernando Mierelles, 2008) and Children of Men (Alfonso

Cuarón, 2006) to video games like the Gears of War franchise (Epic Games, 2006-present) and

the S.T.A.L.K.E.R franchise (CSG Game World, 2007-present), novels such as Cormac

McCarthy’s The Road (2006), Max Brooks’ World War Z (2006), the Hunger Games trilogy

(Suzanne Collins, 2008-2010). Television, however, has been the one significant media space to

delay in fully embracing the narratives of post-apocalyptic survival.1 The premiere of The

Walking Dead in 2010 on the cable network AMC significantly changed this.2 Although

ostensibly concerned with the aftermath of a zombie apocalypse and the logics of survival for the

few left alive, the show speaks directly to the complicated and nuanced conditions of

‘humanness’ within constructions of modern society, and how that humanness can be

understood, and rearticulated, in the wake of the total breakdown of contemporary life.

Perhaps most interestingly, the show takes a subtle look at the relationship between types

of critically-inflected humanity, investigating the constitutive links between technology,

humanness, transhumanism as the pursuit of human perfection through integration with

technology, posthumanism as the understanding of the human body as organic machine, and the

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ways in which these philosophies work to create and recreate society through various forms of

techno-human relations. As such, the show attempts an unconscious analysis of, and reflection

on, the apocalypse as mediator in the relationship between human society and technology. I

specifically posit this concern as unconscious because although the theme of techno-human

relations runs as sub-current beneath the show, it is a current whose pulse actively charges the

narrative action and the discursive relationships between the characters. It is the end to which

this subliminal technological charge is deployed, an end which I argue is a push toward the

renunciation of technology as a way to recreate the post-apocalyptic world through a non-

technologically mediated humanness, which is the organizing argument behind this project.3

The Walking Dead, then, exists as an exemplar of the current trend in mediated

apocalypses, promoting an underlying theme endemic to this type of narrative: the renunciation

of technology, or, indeed the renunciation of human dependence on technology as the foundation

for the recreation of society. By privileging a return to a pre-technical society as a type of manual

nostalgia, and aligning technology with apocalyptic causation and the degradation of social

relations, The Walking Dead attempts to understand the underlying social tensions prompting the

thematic correlation between technology and post-apocalyptic discourses in the hopes of

generating a deeper awareness of the inclusion and exclusion of technology in social

construction.

Based on a series of graphic novels created by writer Robert Kirkman and artist Tony

Moore, The Walking Dead television series debuted on AMC in 2010. Chronicling the story of

Rick Grimes, a sheriff from small-town Georgia, his family, and the band of survivors he leads,

the show narrates survival in the post-apocalyptic world through the intimate, social, and

political relations of the core band of survivors and the others they meet along the way. Shot in

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the line of duty in the pre-apocalyptic world, Rick awakens from a coma to find the world has

irrevocably changed. Disorientated, Rick fights his way from his small town toward Atlanta,

searching for his wife Lori and his 13-year old son Carl, whom he believes to still be alive. Once

in Atlanta, now a city of the dead, he is forced to acknowledge the true scope of the epidemic.

Here he meets Glenn, who eventually brings him back to the group of survivors he is aligned

with. It is in this group where Rick finds Lori, Carl, and Shane, his former partner in the sheriff’s

department and the person responsible for saving Lori and Carl. Rick quickly, if initially

reluctantly, takes over the leadership position within the group. Although composition of the

survivor group will variously increase and decrease over the course of the first two season, key

members of the ensemble cast include Rick and his family, Shane, Glenn, Andrea, Dale, T-Dog,

Daryl and his brother Merle, Herschel and his adult daughters Maggie and Beth, Carol and her

12-year old daughter Sophia.4

The first season of The Walking Dead was six episodes long, but the intensely positive

popular reaction to the show, and a well-received critical reception, saw AMC ordering a full

thirteen episodes for the second season. Its popularity grew, and in the second season AMC

began production on a live “after-show” called The Talking Dead (2011-present), hosted by

television and podcast personality Chris Hardwick, which brought together actors from the show,

celebrity fans, showrunner(s), producers, casting directors, and other production professionals, to

dissect episodes, characters, plotlines, take viewer questions, provide behind-the-scenes material,

and more. At the time of writing, The Walking Dead is the top ad supported basic cable drama in

history among viewing adults 18-54 and men 18-54 (Kondolojy, 2012). Even considering the

highly imperfect rating system in the United States, a cursory consideration of this reveals that

the show is touching a nerve in audiences, potentially appealing to complex intersections of fear,

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desire, pleasure, and paranoia. Whether this speaks to the current popularity of zombie

narratives, of post-apocalyptic narrative, or if the show is articulating more deeply-seeded

concerns of late modern society begs careful analysis. This analysis has the potential to

illuminate various intersecting fear factors, including the notion of a society living at risk, the

response to the global financial meltdown, the transnational flow of disease, the rise and

suppression of collective social movements, and more. Indeed, late modern society is living in a

state of what Zygmunt Bauman (2010) calls liquid modernity. This is the idea that the 20th

century has seen such intense political and social transformation that said transformation has

forced the disintegration—or liquidation—of modernity and its institutions (Bauman, 2010).

Perhaps even more than ever—and it is here impossible not to remember Karl Marx’s

statement that “Everything that is solid melts into air”—our communities, identities, and

institutions are increasingly fragile and elusive, and thus fail to offer humanity a stable footing

upon which to construct their ideas of themselves and the society they inhabit. Without this

grounding, the object of fear is loosed from the fear it presents, and fear becomes a primary

characteristic of modernity. As Sara Ahmed notes “The more we don’t know what or who it is

we fear the more the world becomes fearsome” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 69). Here, then, it is necessary

to turn a critical eye to the ways in which this fear becomes manifest in the series. Fear

materializes, in large part, through the pre- and post-apocalyptic worlds of The Walking Dead,

and the discursive work of the complex relationship between contemporary dialogues around

constructions of humanness and techno-human relations. Critically, I also add to this discourse a

third component, what I understand to be a call to renounce constructions of humanity created

through technology as an attempt at reestablishing human agency and mastery over the world as

a way to combat the intrinsic fears of modernity.

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To substantiate this, I will trace how in The Walking Dead, as exemplar of apocalyptic

narrative, the pre-apocalyptic world is constructed as one where humanity is created through

transhumanist integrations with technology as a move toward human perfection. This will be

contrasted against the ways in which the post-apocalyptic world articulates an understanding of

humanity not through mechanized technology, but as a posthuman organic machine whose

potential can only be fulfilled by jettisoning mechanical technology and mastering its own

organic technological nature through control over itself, the land, and the zombie threat. This

analysis will work to speak not just to the narrative of the show, but to the ways in which this

narrative can be seen as an example of the interlacing fears of social, financial, and political

crisis in late modern society.

The Pre-Apocalyptic World as Transhumanist Society

To begin to understand the functions and renunciations of technology in the series it is

necessary to first reconstruct the pre-apocalyptic world of The Walking Dead. Revealed in

flashbacks, the viewer is positioned to recognize this world as the familiar every day, a type of

commonplace modernity. Invoking the everyday in this way acts not only as a simple tool for the

viewers to orientate themselves to the spatiality and temporality of the narrative, but it also

threads the historical development of social and individual construction into our understanding of

the space we are thrust into. The audience is then positioned to understand the pre-apocalyptic

world of the show to be their world, developed from the same social, intellectual, economic, and

technical traditions which all speak to one overarching construction: a world enhanced by, and

embedded in, reason. This development invokes a world construction that moves historically,

from the pre-Enlightenment thought of God as the source of truth, through the Enlightenment

rationality of truth as motivated by an internal source, reason, and the shifting locality of

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knowable truth: from a metaphysical religious space to a physical scientific space (Boon, 2011).

The pre-apocalyptic world of the show, then, is one which has been based on the combination of

rational thought, the privileging of science as a key condition of modernity, and an emphasis on

progress through technology. The viewer can recognize this subtly in the pre-apocalyptic world,

where everyday technologies—cell phones, automobiles, two way radios, etc.—are carefully

placed within the mise-en-scène to evoke the usualness of contemporary technological forms.

This is technology serving as indicators of sociality, communication, isolation, world-making, of

the expansion and collapsing of time and space; in other words, technology as the complications,

conveniences, and nuances of everyday life.

Having been positioned, then, in a space of modernity, the viewer is asked to recognize

the pre-apocalyptic society as one where the emphasis on progress through rationality has led to

a transhumanist moment, which Diane Marie Keeling describes as one where humanity “[…]

purses perfection through science and technology” (Keeling, 2012, p. 132). Transhumanism, in

this context, is a push toward to perfection of humanness through the integration of technology

and scientific thought as a type of progressive humanity, working to articulate an idealized world

by pushing past, or transgressing, the limits of humanness. Keeling expounds on the

transhumanist period as one that forces an “[…] intensification of humanism […] an effort

towards using technology, science, and rationality to transcend the limitations of the vulnerable

fleshy body, to perfect the capabilities of our intellect and emotions, and to eliminate disease and

extend our life span in the name of progress” (Keeling, 2012, p.133). Transhumanist ideology

becomes a hallmark of progress, and as such is equated with modernity. The embeddedness of

technology in the construction of humanness forces the subjectivities and habitus of the

collective human project to become implanted in the technological forms that surround and

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construct both late modern society and its vision of humanness. Technology, both in the

everyday life of the viewer and of the pre-apocalyptic world of the show, becomes a constitutive

force in understanding humanity and its place in the world. As such, the pre-apocalyptic world of

the show is one that has entered into a phase of cyclical construction: as humanity constructs

technology, technology constructs humanity (Keeling, 2012). This point becomes critical when

considering how The Walking Dead will position its group of survivors as outside of techno-

human society, and firmly with a type of posthuman pastoral naturalism, as a way of renouncing

the construction of humanness through technology.

The pre-apocalyptic world then is one caught in paradox. As late modern society strives

for the perfection of humanity through technology, humanity is also living in greater fear of that

same technology. The technological underpinnings of the threats of ecological, financial,

nuclear, and biomedical global disasters constitute a society that is constantly living at risk

(Lindhof, 2001). Living at risk, and the simultaneous pleasure and fears it produces, can be

understood as endemic to the human condition. In Crisis in the Global Mediasphere: Desire,

Displeasure and Cultural Transformation, Jeff Lewis posits that because of self-consciousness,

humans are acutely and constantly aware not only of the pleasures of their own lives but of their

impending end. As such, conceptualizing the ‘end’ is “[…] inscribed in the conditions of our

beginning as much as in the desire that mobilizes our individual and collective being” (Lewis,

2011, p.15). Lewis (2011) connects this nexus of fear and pleasure as an influential force in the

ways narratives around the apocalypse have been powerfully resonant in popular culture. Indeed,

a majority of post-apocalyptic narratives turn on the idea of worldwide pandemic,

acknowledging that modern humanity lives in constant state of precarity, with the conceivable

threat of destruction, on a individual, communal, and global scale, is potentially just around the

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corner. This precarity is demonstrated in short order in the pre-apocalyptic world of the show. As

Rick and Shane sit in their sheriff’s car, they trade what seem to be innocuous stories. The

viewer soon becomes aware that the subtext of the anecdotes is a discussion of the dissolution of

Rick’s marriage, and his inability to communicate with his wife. During the course of the

conversation the radio erupts, and the two find themselves embroiled in a high-speed chase down

backcountry roads, which ends with Rick getting shot and critically wounded by one of the

fleeing suspects; this is the gunshot that will lead to his eventual coma.

Later we are introduced to Lori, Rick’s wife, who is having a similar conversation about

the impending end of her marriage with a friend as she waits to pick her son up after school. The

conversation is interrupted by the news of Rick’s shooting, delivering two similarly constructed

scenes, scenes which undermine the stability of the social bond of marriage, highlight the

fragility of life, and also shake the constancy of Lori’s economic situation; she does not have a

job, and if Rick dies she will be an unemployed, single mother. Importantly, these are

technologically mediated life interruptions: the radio which sends Rick and Shane on the chase,

the gun that shoots Rick, and even the conversation that relates the story of the problems in

Rick’s marriage is told through Shane’s anecdote of a woman who is incapable of turning off

lights (read: women who cannot interact with technology properly). These rapid changes, shown

through the microcosm of the Grimes family, reflect the macro concerns of the precarity of the

human condition within larger society. This technological double movement—humanity’s

creation through and dependence on technology, and its simultaneous creation of and fear of

technology—extends not just too high-risk modern living. It also speaks to contemporary

constitutions of existence as well, as “Human beings become less and less human as they come

closer to a machine-like existence, all in the name of progress and a supposedly more ‘civilized’

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world” (Sampiero, 2007, p. 103). Transhumanism, in its goal to expand the boundaries of what it

means to be human through the integration of rationally developed scientific thought and

technology, has in large part succeeded in removing the ‘human’ from the equation, and

augmented whatever humanness remains with a constant state of paranoia around the

precariousness of a society deeply dependent on technology. In its push toward the renunciation

of technology, The Walking Dead will forcefully reassert the lost human in the post-apocalypse

in the form of the zombie and the posthuman. However, before moving to an understanding of

the zombie as a hyper-articulation of humanness, it is first necessary to examine exactly how the

notion of ‘human’ has been transformed in the pre-apocalyptic, technologically constructed

world.

Necessary to understanding humanness within a transhumanist paradigm is an

understanding of how humanity has become marginalized vis-à-vis technology. Here we can

look to Scott Lash’s (2001) formulations of late modern society existing as a technological form

of human life. The idea of the technological human body is a trait of cyborg studies, exemplified

by Donna Haraway’s (1991) call to remove the separations between objects and bodies, and to

dissolve what she considers to be the artificial distinctions between organic material and the

inorganic technologies that human create. This leads her to the conclusion that humans are, in

essence, cyborgs (Haraway, 1991) and dualisms such as good or bad bodies, normal or abnormal,

able or disabled need to be transcended. As such, the body ceases to become an essentialist

discourse, moving into a space of posthumanism, as human bodies are liberated through their

machine-like, or cyborg, existence. Haraway’s theoretical frame will become an important move

for the construction of the post-apocalyptic world, but for pre-apocalyptic considerations we

should look toward Lash’s mutation of Haraway’s theory of human-machine interactions.

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Reconfiguring the posthuman Harawayian construction of the cyborg, Lash sees modern

humanity operating as interfaces between the organic human and the inorganic machine, where

we face our environment through these interfaces with technological systems, rather than as

technological systems, as propagated in the cybernetic model (Lash, 2001). For Lash, we operate

then as entities navigating late modern society as man-machine interface, weaving ourselves

through a type of technologically natural world, which affects our understanding of culture and

sociality. It is worth quoting him at length:

As technological nature, I must navigate through technological culture. And

technological culture is constitutively culture at a distance. Forms of life become forms

of life-at-a-distance. Because my forms of social life are so normally and chronically at-

a-distance, I cannot navigate these distances, I cannot achieve sociality apart from my

machine interface. I cannot achieve sociality in the absence of technological systems,

apart from my interface with communication and transportation machines (Lash, 2001,

pp.107-108).

Anyone who has had the opportunity to stand in front of a classroom of undergraduate students

and faced a sea of identical Macbooks as opposed to individual student faces will have no trouble

seeing how this idea of the inability of late modern society to interact effectively with itself

outside of technological interfaces operates. This phenomenon is equally observable outside of

academia, where one can see the everyday ‘tech-zombie’ walking down the street, headphones

in, head down facing a screen, texting, or gaming, or posting a status update, or tweeting.5 These

technological affordances do not, of course, have to be necessarily negative; technology has also

played a positive role in many ways, including education, medicine, advocacy, etc. However,

these interactions do need to be understood as world-making, as consciousness funneled through

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technological mediation. This is mediation as world-making is an evolution of Lev Manovich’s

(1995) human computer interface (HCI), which he describes as the ways in which a human user

interacts with a computer and constructs the circular input and output relationship between the

two.

HCI imagined in Lash’s technological culture produces the human as both the interfaced

and the interfacing, and as an integral part of the process of interfacing the interface. This

generation of Manovich’s thought is carried further when one considers how this interfacing has

transformed into what he terms cultural interface, or “[…] a human-computer-culture-interface—

the ways in which computers present and allow us to interact with cultural data” (Manovich,

1995, p. 70). All forms of human social, cultural, political, and economic life, then, present

engagements with technology, and their navigation depends on suturing human existence and its

cultural products to multiple technological interfaces.6

Evolving basic HCI logic into a state of technological forms of life, indeed of life-at-a-

distance, modernity becomes life conceptualized as precarious existence, where the boundaries

between human and machine have been transgressed, moving the body past its own failings. In

this way, the pre-apocalyptic world of The Walking Dead is established as a transhumanist

society. This society is populated by technological forms of human life which will be irrevocably

changed by the apocalypse, by the emergence of the monstrous zombie, and by the forceful way

in which the survivors on the show are reminded of the faulty technology of their own human

bodies. It is within this causal triad that the remainder of this analysis will focus, attempting to

unpack the changes wrought by these three intersecting variables and the ways in which they

serve as harbingers of technological renunciation in the name of social reconstruction within the

pre-apocalyptic world.

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The Zombie Post-Apocalyptic World as Posthumanist Society

Moving into an analysis of the post-apocalyptic world of The Walking Dead, it is

necessary to take a moment to note that the form of apocalypse that is speaking directly to the

move toward technological renunciation is not an apocalypse in the Western, Judeo-Christian

traditional (read: Biblical, and/or Revelations inflected) form. This is, specifically, a zombie

apocalypse, which adds interesting dimensions to how one can read both the idea of apocalyptic

narratives and the role of technology within them. The figure of the zombie here both

constitutive of and a byproduct of the apocalypse, and as such it is of primary importance,

especially in reconsideration of the ways humanity reconstructs itself during post-apocalyptic

social reformation.

Zombies are signifiers both of humanity and inhumanity; they are us, they are not us, and

they are a threat to us. Zombies are a type of monstrous humanity. In the case of the zombie:

That which is defined as ‘monstrous’ (and the definition of ‘monstrous’ is an exclusively

human enterprise) was not supposed to happen; that is, it is ‘unnatural’ and as such as

malformation of some universal design. Furthermore, that which is defined as

‘monstrous’ threatens the purity of the human form as that form was intended by

whomever or whatever is presumable responsible for that universal design […]The

zombie, as found in literature, film, and culture, is the most fully realized articulation of

this dynamic interdependency between the human self and the monstrous other. The

zombie myth embodies the monstrous, inhuman other and rightly locates the human

instinct for the survival of self in issues of mortality (Boon, 2007, p. 34).

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Occupying monstrosity as a liminal space positions the zombie as an example of Kristevian

abjection, which places the abject in the liminal space between subject and object, which at once

defines its subject through a “[…] paradoxical affirmation of subjectivity […]” by being neither

subject nor object (Jones, 2000, p. 20). Its abject nature, then, causes consternation by

transgressing borders, transcending its own abject space by pushing its uncanny nature into the

subjective world. The abject as border crosser is, then, the monstrous zombie, which invades the

post-apocalyptic world of The Walking Dead, and the border that is erased is the one which

separates the human from the non-human or monstrous (zombie) subject. This erasure can be

read as another perversion of Harawayian cyborg theory, which carries with it normative notions

of the cyborg as liberation from the constraints of humanity. The slippage between borders

potentially speaks to the idea that zombie narratives harness the fear of what happens when we

push past that utopian endpoint into a type of nightmare where humanity moves past technology

and into the monstrous abject. This monstrosity, represented in the figure of the zombie,

becomes a sign of humanity’s loss, its transition into a bodily form that is simultaneously

disabled and super-abled, familiar and unrecognizable.7

This also recalls previous comments about the limits of transhumant technological forms

of human life. As Kevin Boon notes, “[…] under the directive of reason, when faith shifted to the

rationalism and an increased confidence in the physical world, the zombie came to represent a

loss of internal reliability, a loss of being, which results in a human shell occupied by

nothingness” (2011, p. 55). This is, potentially, not terribly distinct from the thinning of

humanity indicative of a late modern technological form of life; the further humanity moves

from the physical world and into a man-machine interface, the more it dissipates, becoming lost

as the individual capitulates to the non-human other.

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If we understand, then, the zombie component of the apocalypse as a result of the

transhumanist trajectory of the pre-apocalyptic world, we can recognize the figure of the zombie

itself, described by Sorcha Fhlainn, as a representation of humanity which has been “[…]

zombified through the process of dehumanization, mental breakdowns, and self-annihilation,

hybridized, transfigured, and mutilated to the point where all rational thinking and reason is

abandoned or removed, leaving a destructive and destroyed shell in its wake” (Fhlainn, 2011, p.

140). Calling back to the earlier example of the everyday zombie attached to their smartphone or

other mobile technology, it would not be difficult to substitute this image for the zombie in

Fhlainn’s quote above. The processes of dehumanization, of hybridization, of the loss of rational

thought are things that individuals who participate in technological life-at-a-distance are subject

to everyday.8 As such, the zombie is the extreme manifestation of humanity’s enslavement by,

among other things, its own dependence on technology. The zombie’s intervention, then, in

technological forms of life, is to act as signifier of humanity—or specifically, of humanness—

forcefully distinguishing itself from machine and aggressively reasserting itself as primary.

This aggressiveness moves the survivors of the zombie apocalypse from a transhumanist

pre-apocalyptic space into a posthumanist post-apocalyptic moment, a term which I am invoking

in the vein of Deluze, Guattari and Haraway as a “[…] humanist-inspired project of asking ‘how

we ought to live together,’ while recognizing that the human is not distinct from or superior to

animal or machine” (Keeling, 2012, p. 133). A post-apocalyptic posthuman society is one that

recognizes humanity as organic machine, as specifically opposed to mechanized technology;

both in terms of those yet to succumb to the zombie threat, who transition immediately into strict

survival mode, which includes only life sustaining activities, as well as the zombies, who

function as automatons. Indeed, the automatic functionality of the survivors and of the zombies

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is an ironic perversion of humanism’s tendency to overvalue the ability of the human to act

independently by creating rationality through the separation of the mind from the body (Keeling,

2012). In the post-apocalypse, the hyper-concern for the body overwhelms the rational mind, as

the best laid plans of the survivors are constantly disrupted by the urgent need to maintain their

own bodily integrity.

Following the logic of Sarah Juliet Lauro and Karen Embry’s “Zombie Manifesto,” we

can understand how the zombie apocalypse, indeed the zombie itself, would foster an extremely

hospitable environment for the remaking of the word along a posthuman ideology. As Lauro and

Embry posit: “A subject that is truly posthuman would be a subject that is not a subject […] to

truly move posthuman, we would have to shrink not the body but the Enlightenment subject

position […] the zombie does not reconcile subject and object, but, rather, as walking antithesis,

holds them as irrevocably separate; in the figure of the zombie, the subject position is nullified

[…]” (Lauro and Embry, 2008, pp.94-95).

As was demonstrated previously in regards to the pre-apocalyptic world and its

dependence on transhumanism as an organizing ideology, the post-apocalyptic world of The

Walking Dead is constructed through posthuman logics. The influence of this posthuman post-

apocalyptic moment works towards a technological renunciation of man-machines in the

construction of the series itself, beginning almost immediately after Rick, the group’s leader,

wakes from his coma in the post-apocalypse. Stumbling through the hospital and out into to the

world, Rick is overwhelmed with the devastation and loss. After exiting the hospital he is faced

with two images: piles of rotting corpses and a sedentary military helicopter. The camera lingers

just as long on the helicopter as it does the corpses, framing it front and center in a point of view

shot. This image, juxtaposing the corpses with the military helicopter, implicates both the

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military industrial complex and the technology it is heavily dependent on as incapable of

stemming (and potentially responsible for?) the zombie apocalypse.

As he travels away from the hospital and toward Atlanta, Rick will constantly resort to

manual implements rather than technological ones, both for practical reasons and as an indicator

that in the post-apocalypse mechanized technology will fail humanity. For example, to escape

the carnage at the hospital he opts to ride a bicycle; when being taught by another survivor how

to kill zombie he uses a baseball bat rather than the guns they possess; when attempting to use

his emergency radio he is unable to hear the response he gets, and that failure will eventually

send him into Atlanta without the knowledge of its extreme dangers; while traveling in a car he

runs out of gas and in forced to ride a horse for the remainder of his journey. All of these small

examples cumulate into a larger narrative within the show, a narrative which devalues

technology in favor of human ingenuity, the surviving human body, a return to manual

expressions of humanness as organic machine, and an emphasis on a type of pastoral naturalness

which stresses a connection with the physical world.

Underlying all of these examples and the larger narrative they work to construct are

issues of the physical body. As traced previously, corporeal bodies in The Walking Dead are

practical and abstract, human and monstrous, individuated and automated. Importantly, in the

posthuman post-apocalypse, they are also organic and inorganic technology. Looking for safety,

aid, and answers, Rick and his group journey from their camp on the outskirts of Atlanta to the

Center for Disease Control (CDC), located within city limits. Once at the CDC, they encounter

Dr. Edwin Jenner, the last remaining person within the compound. After a day of showers,

eating, and alcohol, the group presses Jenner to explain what has happened to the world. The

only way Jenner, rooted in the tranhumanist ideology of science and technology, is only able to

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offer an explanation utilizing technology from the pre-apocalypse. Having been in the CDC’s

underground laboratory since the devastation occurred, Jenner has not yet been forced into the

posthuman post-apocalypse. Jenner shows the group a MRI virtual scan of test subject 19, an

individual who was bitten and volunteered to have the CDC record the changes the disease

wrought in the brain. During the scan, the human brain is presented as a series of electric pulses

and lights.

Shane: What are those lights?

Jenner: It’s a person’s life. Experience, memories. It’s everything. Somewhere in all that

organic wiring, all those ripples of light, is you. The thing that makes you unique, and

human.

Daryl: You don’t make sense, ever?

Jenner: Those are synapses. Electric impulses in the brain that carry all the messages.

They determine everything a person says, does, or thinks from the moment of birth to the

moment of death (Fierro and Darabont, 2010).

Jenner goes on to explain how the disease works, shutting down adrenal glands and then major

organs, resulting in death. The individual is then ‘resurrected’ by the disease.

Lori: It restarts the brain?

Jenner: No, just the brain stem. Basically it gets them up and moving.

Rick: They are not alive?

Jenner: You tell me.

Rick: It’s nothing like before. Most of that brain is dark.

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Jenner: Dark like in dead. The frontal lobe, the neocortex, the human part, that doesn’t

come back. The you part. Just a shell, driven by mindless instinct (Fierro and Darabont,

2010).

The description that Jenner provides of both the pre-disease brain and the post-disease brain, and

the way the disease transforms the corporeal body accordingly, is the show’s articulation of the

posthuman breakdown between organic and inorganic technology, of the human as posthuman

cyborg. The human body is constructed as a technology in its own right, and like the rest of the

technology in the post-apocalyptic world, it is a technology that will fail the survivors. Before

leaving the CDC Jenner confides something to Rick. At the end of season two, Rick relates to the

group (and the audience) the information from Jenner: everyone, bitten by a zombie or not, is

infected with the disease. This means that no matter how a person might die in the post-zombie

apocalypse world, they were doomed to reanimate as zombie. Survivor bodies are faulty

technology, remnants of a pre-apocalyptic transhumanist world where as man-machine interface

they contacted and contracted a systemic virus, a virus which contaminates their post-apocalyptic

organic machines just as their bodies are primed to pervert their own humanity at the exact

moment they experience the natural culmination of humanness: death. These bodies, essentially

ticking bombs, are deeply frightening, as they represent both the constructions of pre-apocalypse

transhumanist technological life and the post-apocalyptic posthuman life; bodies which can be

feared and rejected, but bodies which cannot be parted with (Lauro and Embry, 2008).

Bodies, then, in The Walking Dead, must be protected at all costs. Here, the binary of

productive and nonproductive bodies is added into the previously outlined sets of dialects related

to corporeality in the posthuman post-apocalypse. The protection necessitated by the explicitly

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pre-diseased human bodies depends on how well those bodies are able to perform productive,

and protective, labor outside of man-machine interfaces. Kyle Bishop notes that Hegelian

philosophy dictates that labor is necessary for an individual to achieve self-awareness and

consciousness (Bishop, 2010). In this way, the productive labor that post-apocalyptic survivors

are forced into—hunting and gathering food, creating shelter, scavenging for supplies, producing

weapons, training for combat, killing zombies—works not only as a way to protect their bodily

integrity, but as a way to distinguish themselves from the simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar

zombie horde, whom are neither self-aware nor self-conscious.

As such, a defining feature of their humanity becomes their relationship to, and

engagement in, the natural world. This natural world is represented most fully in the idea of ‘the

farm’ in the second season. Finding a secluded back-country farm virtually untouched by the

events of the broader world, Rick and the group imagine the space as a borderline utopia where

they can begin to rebuild their lives. The farm and its physical space represents a move away

from technological forms of human life and a return to a pastoral naturalness, or organic nature,

as survivors engage in growing their own food, tending to livestock, drawing water from wells,

and living and working communally. Negotiating their semi-colonization of the farm, and the

land it represents, with its owners and current occupants builds much of the narrative arc of the

second season.

Interestingly, it is here where the character’s dialogue begins to switch to an overriding

colonialist discourse of ownership of both the natural land and the inhabitants it is supporting.

Speaking to Hershel, the farm’s owner, Rick constantly refers to the space as ‘your farm,’ ‘your

land,’ ‘your barn,’ ‘your fields,’ and so on. Hershel uses similar language with Rick, but in

relationship to the group of survivors he leads; such phrases as ‘your boy,’ ‘your people,’ ‘your

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group,’ etc. The emphasis on ownership here is doing double duty: it is reestablishing human

mastery both over the natural world as well as the humans remaining in it. This language is

positioning the survivors as endemically connected to the natural world, a connection that is

unmediated through technology and one which emphasizes the primal connection between

organic humanity and the organic pastoral world. This is specifically human reclamation, one

which emphasizes the humanness, the ‘you’ in the world, demonstrating how the posthumanist

post-apocalyptic landscape requires a non-technological engagement with humanity and the

natural world in order to guarantee survival.

Part of this emphasis on world reclamation is also manifest in the survivors attempts to

manifest control, albeit subconsciously, over the zombie hordes through a specific interaction

with outdated technology. The survivor group, over the course of two seasons, remains hyper-

focused on the maintenance of one of their vehicles, a 1978 Winnebago owned and primarily

driven by Dale. This recreational vehicle (RV) serves as a traveling hospital, storage unit,

arsenal, and more at various and overlapping points during the seasons. While it clearly has a

functional application in the survival of the group, it also represents a major area of concern. The

RV has a radiator hose which is constantly failing, as well as a host of other recurring

mechanical problems. However, rather than pilfer a replacement from the unending miles of

abandoned cars, recreational vehicles, vans, trucks, etc., or even visiting an RV sales lot, to

obtain an upgrade, Dale and the group are pathologically committed to fixing the RV.

They repeatedly open themselves up to danger when stopping to fix it, they are limited

only to travel routes that can accommodate its size, are forced to send other cars from their

caravan ahead into unknown areas to clear a path for it, and they spend a significant amount of

time scavenging other cars for parts that will fit its system in the likely event of yet another

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breakdown or malfunction. Learning the knowledge to fix the RV becomes a rite of passage for

group members, particularly Andrea and Glenn, and even the knowledge of the exact

combination of ‘tricks’ to starting it promptly becomes coveted information. While watching

these rituals over the course of two seasons, viewers are apt to ask themselves ‘why don’t they

just get another RV?’

The pathology connected to the constant maintenance of the RV, as an example of

outdated technology, is precisely to establish the same ownership and mastery demonstrated in

the language used to create the survivor’s connection to the post-apocalyptic natural world and

its inhabitants. The RV is constantly ‘dying’ and is reanimated by the survivors; metaphorically,

the RV is ‘zombified’ by the survivors and as such stands in for the zombie hordes. The

survivors’ pathological need to be able to control this reanimation process speaks to their desire

for control over the zombies, both as a form of survivor instinct, but also as a further articulation

for their need to exercise control over the entire natural world in both its human and monstrous

articulations. Extending this train of thought even further, the resurrection of and control over the

zombified RV is also a way for the survivors to jettison the transhumant ideology of the pre-

apocalyptic world by reasserting the hierarchical position of human above technology. The RV,

as a representation of outdated technology, and its dependence on human intervention to function

properly, allows Rick and the other to move past the transhuman postulation of humans as equal,

or perhaps even subservient to, technology, and reclaim a position of power and mastery over the

technological and natural world. This is yet another way in which The Walking Dead constructs

the post-apocalyptic world as one where the interdependence of organic and mechanized

technology has been renounced, and humanity has been restored to a position of dominance over

the world in all its incarnations.

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In addition to establishing a trend toward human mastery over the natural, unnatural, and

technological world of the posthuman post-apocalypse, the series also forefronts the social

reconstruction of the world through many of the same binaries mapped onto the construction of

corporeality and how these structures are engaged through technological discourses. The post-

apocalyptic process of social bonding and rebuilding is intimately related through the ways in

which the survivors transform from individuals into a cohesive group. In their evolution from a

transhumanist pre-apocalyptic technological form of life into a posthumanst post-apocalyptic

natural order, the members of the group are forced into the most foreign of social situations, an

apocalypse, and must quickly learn to adapt to their new social milieu. Some of these tentative

moves at establishing more than casual relationships are based in their pre-apocalyptic

transhuman ways: attempting to form connections through the invocation of technology. Michele

Wilson notes “The act of connecting becomes increasingly important, sometimes even more

important than content of the communication itself […] through practices afforded by the use of

[…] technology, the techno-connected individual experiences him/herself as largely in control of

his/her sociality and communicability” (Wilson, 2012, p. 281).

We see the invocation of technology as a form of communication and social connection

in season one, when the women of the group are in the quarry doing laundry. As they sit by the

side of the water, washing clothes with the most basic of implements—scrub brushes, buckets,

rocks—they reminisce about what they miss most about the pre-apocalyptic world. All of these

nostalgic items are pieces, or functions, of technologies: Maytag washing machines, cars, coffee

makers, computers, texting, and vibrators. By sharing themselves through their technological

proxies the women are able to make human connections and begin to develop a type of sociality.

Importantly, the series shows how the women, who form intimate connections through

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reminiscences about the conveniences their missing technologies afforded, also overcome their

dependence on them. They are able to make coffee and wash clothes without machines, they

communicate face to face rather than through screens, and they even accomplish sexual pleasure

in the most human way possible—with other people. This not only reinforces the move past

technology, but implicitly supports it renunciation; without transforming into a cohesive society

and overcoming the pre-apocalyptic need for technology, survival becomes a distant prospect.

Conclusion

Howard Hendrix states that the “[…] apocalypse is a metaphor for the end of alienation,

for a return to unity, the closing of the fissure between subject and object, between the normative

and descriptive, the inward and the outward, the personal and the universal, the spiritual and the

material” (1990, p.7). It is also the moment when the tenuous and nuanced relationship between

humanity and technology is summoned to the forefront of our understanding of our past, present,

and future constructions of sociality and contemporary life.

This analysis of one particular vision of the apocalypse has attempted to demonstrate how

technological concerns are intimately wrapped up in this vision for an end of alienation, and how

through the construction of a post-apocalyptic world devoid of a human dependence on

technology, popular culture attempts to address the complicated issues of fear, desire, and

precarity wrapped up in its conceptions of its own end. Specifically, The Walking Dead presents

a post-apocalyptic world where survival is dependent on recreating the world, its inhabitants, and

their collective social structure through a multilayered process of technological renunciation.

This renunciation allows for the reassertion of humanness, and its associated power, in the

construction between humanity and the world it seeks to live in and master. The project of this

analysis is, then, to show us how one specific post-apocalyptic construction can illuminate

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glimmers of the complicated and imperfect understanding of the interactions between humanity

and technology, the impact of that imperfect understanding on the construction and

foregrounding of visions of the apocalypse, and the paradoxically celebratory and frightening

relationship late modern society shares with their technological creations.

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Endnotes

1. The one notable exception to this would be the reboot of the 1970s television program

Battlestar Galactica. The revamped version of Battlestar ran on the SyFy (then known as Sci-Fi)

network from 2004-2009 to broad critical and popular acclaim.

2. The success of The Walking Dead can be said to have inspired several new television

shows organized around types of post-apocalyptic survival, including Revolution on NBC (2012-

present) and Falling Skies on TNT (2011-present).

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3. The analysis in the work restricts itself to the first two seasons of The Walking Dead

television show only, bracketing the graphic novel the series is based on, and the recently aired

third season, for consideration in an alternate platform.

4. With the exception of the children in the group and Herschel, who is in his 60s, most

members of the group are in between their mid-20s and mid-40s. Almost all of the group

members are white, and all are straight. Issues of the intersections between race and gender

among the survivors are taken up in the Baldwin & McCarthy chapter in this volume, but group

composition merits a note here.

5. This same idea was replicated in the film Warm Bodies (Jonathan Levine, 2013). As a

zombie named R is walking through an airport, his internal monologue is ruminating on the other

zombies present, and their inability to communicate with one another. He reminisces that life

must have been so much better when people were able to communicate with one another, sharing

conversations and ideas. As he speaks this, the film transforms the airport scene from post-

zombie apocalypse to pre-apocalyptic times, where all the people are ‘communicating’ and

‘sharing’ ideas through laptops, smartphones, and tablets.

6. The intense connection between humanness and human identity and technological

systems can be seen in the proliferation of biometrics, developments in facial recognition

software, full-body scanners, and the rhetorical connection between personal and national

security and technologies that produce and verify identities. For in-depth analysis of these issues,

see the work of Shoshanna Magnet and Kelly Gates.

7. I would like to acknowledge Megan Condis for making this implicit reading explicit.

8. Although this may seem like an extreme statement, consider the car driver who makes

a right hand turn into a fence post based on his GPS directions, or the individual who cannot

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experience a musical concert without taking pictures or video, or those individuals who depend

on the distance provided by online dating sites for intimate encounters, or Instragram users who

obsessively chronicle their daily lives as a type of proof of their own existence.