The Walking Dead: The Anthropocene as a Ruined Earth

Abstract

Much has been made of the claim that humanity has ascended to the status of a terrestrial force and inaugurated a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene. While attention has been paid to the contestable nature of the epoch and its disputed histories, insufficient attention has been paid to the significance of the Anthropocene for political praxis. Contrary to much Anthropocenic discourse that articulates a renewed sense of mastery over nature through assertions of humanity’s complete subsumption of the environment, recent work in both science and technology studies and human geography suggests an alternate reading of the Anthropocene as an epoch without mastery, one where humanity exists in a permanent state of vulnerability. The political significance of this state of vulnerability is explored through a reading of popular TV show The Walking Dead, a post-collapse narrative of a world in ruins and overrun by zombies. On a ruined earth, political praxis is orientated not towards a return of the earth to its previous productive state, but rather as an unending labour of survival and salvage. Survival is not a life reduced to bare life, but rather a state of tension between a life reduced to necessity, and the refusal to separate the question of how to live from the work of securing life itself. Left unresolved, this tension animates the politics of the Anthropocene, suggesting that in place of the teleology of progress social life is organised within it through unceasing care and repair time.

Keywords:

• Anthropocene
• survival
• salvage
• ruination
• bare life
• Agamben

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank our fellow Historical Materialism panellists on the question of surviving the Anthropocene (2014) as well as the anonymous reviewers who offered valuable criticisms that helped us to strengthen this paper. Nicholas Beuret would like to thank the Fisher Center, Hobart and William Smith Colleges whose support enabled the further development of the material within this paper.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Of course, in line with genre conventions, the ‘walkers’ in Kirkman’s work are never referred to as ‘zombies’.

2 Not that care-time in the work of de la Bellacasa necessarily takes up the implied positivity uncritically. Indeed, the preferred device for exploring the interrelation of care-time and soil is the practice of cultivating rot—composting.