Technology and the Theory of Apocalypse

Introduction

The television series The Walking Dead has reached more than seven million “lies” on Facebook and more than 300.000 in Twitter through March of 2012 (March, 2012), which lead very well scholars to think that the popular culture has widely adopted the figure of Zombie as a new genre of entertainment. The idea of the “Undead” not only coincides with the contemporary needs of morbid consumption (gaze) but also with the rise of new capitalism that commoditizes “the other´s death as a vehicle towards the individual emancipation (Korstanje 2012). The undead, broadly speaking, inhabit and proliferate in this earth while they are undesired by the human civilization. They were like us, but today they are death!. The Walking dead appeals to a climate of total destruction which often does not resonate with a form of public consciousness, but in the collective unconsciousness. The undead represents a postmodern sensibility. This sensibility reeks of decay.

As the previous backdrop, Jameson argues that the postmodern culture rests on representations revolving around the “unconscious”, in which case, it articulates a specific discourse that interrogates in the political sphere. In a similar vein, the arts have represented, in what might be considered prescient ways, what has already begun in the economic, political, and social structures, but has not yet appeared in explicit terms. Somewhat arbitrarily stated, modernism began in the mid-nineteenth century. Charles Baudelaire called it modernité.

As Ulrich Beck puts it, the obsession of modern man to control the nature opened the doors to the idea that the same technology used by making of this world a better and safer place, can usher mankind into a nuclear apocalypse. One of the paradoxes of modernity began but it was not limited to the Chernobyl Accident. Technology played a leading role in the configuration of a Cold War, where the US and the Soviet Union devoted their resources to an incredible arms race. Beck acknowledges that at the time some risks are successfully mitigated by the action of technology and rational technique, new ones emerge. What is more important, the state of disaster results from the excess of modernity (Beck 1992). Jacques Ellul interrogated philosophically on the negative effects of technology in modern society, not only undermining critical thinking but also controlling -if not commoditizing- other lay-citizens (Ellul 1962; 1992). Andrew Feenberg calls the attention on technology, a-la-Marcuse, as a form of new rationalization, which means control over the rank-and-file worker. Technology disposes not only from bodies to enhance the means of production but tries to domesticate nature through the capitalist wage system. While machine operates to make our lives safer, the western rationality imposes over other voices and cosmologies (Feenberg, 1995).