Dead Metaphors: What Do Zombies Mean?, Part 2 - Mark Dery
Zombies short-circuit philosophical dualisms in other ways. When Boing Boinger Spaceghost comments, “Zombies represent our fear of mobs…[a] group of people, completely blind to reason, who mean to tear [us] apart for not belonging,” finding in the zombie horde a parable about “how in joining the mob your reasoning dies, making you an instrument against others who still live like you used to,” s/he touches on a subject dear to pop sociologists, early in the 21st century: the trope of the crowd.
Unwittingly or not, Spaceghost’s post relocates the living dead within the history of mass psychology. Zombies are close cousins of the 19th century sociologist Gustave Le Bon’s conjuration, in The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1896), of the “hypnotized” individual tossed on the heaving sea of the crowd, a “slave of all the unconscious activities of his spinal cord,” “no longer himself, but…an automaton who has ceased to be guided by his will,” or, worse yet, an atavistic throwback who has devolved “several rungs in the ladder of civilisation.” One on one, writes Le Bon, the same man “may be a cultivated individual,” but “in a crowd, he is a barbarian—that is, a creature acting by instinct.” A zombie, for all intents and purposes.