Undead Labor: Recorded talk with David Bering-Porter
March 10 2022
"This project develops a theory of “undead labor,” defined as the value extracted from life beyond its natural limits, through the story of the zombie as a shadow of modern capitalism. Taking the zombie as its central object, this book finds, at the heart of capital, a desire to push past the natural boundaries of life and to overcome all limitation and even death, creating a condition of “undeadness,” which promises a new kind of body with a limitless potential for the extraction of value. Through a series of case studies on labor, slavery, analogy, vitality, and realism, this project tracks the history of the zombie as a history of racial capital rooted in undeadness and excessive life and undertakes a genealogy of the zombie that contributes to discourses of racialized labor and its ongoing place in twenty-first century economies."
David Bering-Porter is Assistant Professor of Culture and Media and is core faculty in the Code as a Liberal Arts program at the Eugene Lang College of the Liberal Arts at The New School. Areas of research include film and media studies, digital culture, and the intersections of media, science, and technology. His current book project is a study of undead labor and the ways that race, labor, and value come together in the mediated body of the zombie and his articles have appeared in the journals such as Culture Machine, Critical Inquiry, Flow, MIRAJ, Post 45, and the Los Angeles Review of Books.