https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=uJBFSC-Ncbg
Welcome back to Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. Today we’re going to depart from our usual procedure in which I lecture and I would like instead, and I will do this periodically, I’d like instead to talk and have a discussion with somebody who’s doing work on either understanding or responding to or both the Meaning Crisis. The first person I’d like to talk to is the co-author with me and Philip Misovic on the book on the zombies, Zombies in Western Culture, a 21st Century Crisis. And I’ve alluded at the beginning how the zombies are a mythology for representing the Meaning Crisis and we need to now spend some time unpacking that and what Chris Mastapietro is going to do is he’s going to help lead us through that and then we’re also going to talk about the symptomology of the Meaning Crisis. What are all the different ways in which we can see evidence for and understand the Meaning Crisis? So welcome Chris. And as I mentioned, Chris is second author on the zombie book. We are currently working on the follow-up book called Unsheltered, but we want to talk now a little bit about the symbol of the zombie and why it is our sort of current cultural mythological expression of the Meaning Crisis. So Chris, what do you think about the zombie and the Meaning Crisis? Well I guess it’s interesting. The first question someone might have watching this is why the zombie? Because zombies are the subject of a multitude of different opinions and perspectives, right? There’s a fair breadth of work that’s been done already on the zombie. Some of it we’ve actually rolled in and included in our book. Right, yeah that’s right. Norman has done a little bit, Jonathan Pagio, who you’ve had some discussions with. Yeah, yeah. Has his own independent thoughts on the zombie. And zombies, I would say especially since they came to rise through Marmero’s films, stood for a variety of different kinds of symptoms and everyone has their own ideas about what they mean. What we’ve tried to do, obviously in our book and what we’re going to try to do again here, is understand how the variety of symbols, sorry the variety of symptoms rather that are captured by the zombie are symbolizations or rather they’re anti-symbolizations, we’ll get into what we mean by that, right? The features that correspond to that crisis and that the mythos of the zombie, the symbolic order that the zombie stands for, threads together these symptoms and depicts not only a creature but a world and an entire mythic dynamic and series of patterns that stand for what you could call kind of human senescence or distension, right? The kind of breakdown of the agent or any ecology and worldview of attunement. And zombies are misattunement, right? Yeah, right. If we understand the positive function of symbols as a way of tuning the self and tuning the self’s relationship to the world, then zombies fundamentally are the misattunement of that relationship and that expresses itself as a decay of ecology. Right, and so that’s going to line up then with the way the zombie symbol has sort of been magnetically attracted to the apocalypse symbol and they’re often frequently paired together, the idea of the zombie apocalypse. That’s right. Okay. Exactly. So the zombie isn’t just a creature, it’s also an entire world and fundamentally what it is moreover, it’s the relation between the creature and the world, which is to say it’s the relation between the self and the world. So what I think we’re going to argue and try to explain is that the zombie, we refer to the zombie casually as a symbol because it’s a little bit simpler to do that, right? But what we really mean by the zombie is we mean a kind of, we mean a pattern of mythoi. We mean a consistent constellation of symbols that all revolve around that creature and its relationship with the world and it’s in that relation that the positive function of the symbol is operative and it’s, in this case, it’s the negative function of the deterioration of that symbol that we want to focus on and talk about. Okay, so talk a little bit more about how you want to use this notion of symbol. I like this idea about the constellation and the tuning. Right. So in order to understand this properly, what we actually need to do is we need to make a really, really important distinction, right? And this is very easy to confuse, right? And that is the distinction between a sign and a symbol. This is Pierce’s distinction? Well, it’s Pierce’s distinction. I don’t want to claim it as Pierce’s distinction. I don’t want to map that perfectly. Okay. Pierce’s semiotics is very, very complex and there might be some alignment to it, but fundamentally that’s actually incidental. I should let everyone know that Chris’s academic background is in semiotics. So please continue. Okay. So I’m not actually invoking Pierce’s semiotics by doing this. I’m going to make a very clear and simple distinction. It might have some overlap with Pierce, but fundamentally what I’m borrowing much more from two people in particular, Paul Tillich, obviously the theologian Paul Tillich, who had a lot to say on the topic of symbols, especially sacred symbols, and Carl Jung, who also made this very careful distinction. So Jung made an observation that signs and symbols, he used the term semiotic to mean sign. I used the term semiotics to mean both. But Jung made a claim that the aspectual referent of a sign, whereas that is greater than the sign itself, right? So the tree that the sign refers to is of a greater being, let’s say, than the word tree. But actually the symbol is the opposite. The signification of a symbol, the meaning of the symbol, is actually of a greater being, per se, than the object that seems to represent the symbol. So the kiss is much greater in its signification than just the act. So we’re going to get into that example a little bit because that’s a really good one. You’re also using this term not in the way it’s used in computer science, just as a token that stands for the world. You’re using it more the way it’s used in theology or in anthropology. That’s right. Now I’m not making an essential claim that this definition and this distinction has to apply in every case, right? I’m simply framing the terms for our use. Right, right. Fair enough. So that there’s no confusion as to what we’re talking about. So I’m going to say that signs and symbols actually do something very different. What signs do is they refer, right? Word tree refers to tree. Fairly straightforward, right? Right. Semiotically it’s a fairly straightforward relationship. They call it the signifier of insignified inseminatix. That’s the old Caesarian. I’m not going to get into that, but I can just refer to it. So the symbol does something different. It does refer, but what it does is it enacts or it expresses. Right. Okay. Now this is something that Tillich really aptly identifies because what Tillich says symbol refers to something, but the symbol has a unique participatory quality. The symbol not only refers, but it actually participates in what it refers to. So symbols are inherently bound up then with participatory knowing. That’s right. That’s right. So the symbol instances the very phenomenon that it refers to, or it gestures to, right? That’s Tillich’s great insight is that the symbol is, to use a term that you use often, an enacted analogy. Right, right. So it’s not necessarily tied to participation, which means that phenomenologically it has a much, much different effect than simply a reference. It’s not a referential tool. We would call it rather more of an inactive vessel. Okay. That’s good. So the idea is this is going to really lock you mostly towards propositional processing, but this is going to be procedural participatory and perspectival. Exactly. That’s exactly right. Okay. So the idea is that the symbol doesn’t just refer to a signified state, but it actually actuates the state. And then crucially, because it’s a matter of identification, we identify through the state. Right, right. So the symbol is a vessel for identification, because when we participate in the symbol, what we’re actually doing is we’re momentarily becoming the symbol with our identity. Right, right, right. Okay. That’s very interesting. That’s really important to know, especially before we talk about it. So the example of the kiss, right? So when I’m not just referring to love, I’m enacting it, and then I’m also becoming a lover in the act of kissing. Exactly. Okay. I got that. I’m expressing love, and I’m potentially also opening myself to the experience of love, perhaps to a depth that I hadn’t before. Right, right. So what would be the sign or the semiotic equivalent of the kiss? We might say that. Yeah. Right? The heart. The heart. So the kiss is love, generally speaking, but the kiss, that doesn’t participate in love. The kiss actually participates in love. It instances the phenomenon. Right? So what are some other examples? How about, take a very different kind of example, right? The difference between a uniform as a sign of service, right? A sign of loyalty or service to one’s country, and a salute, an actual gesture that analogizes an expression of belonging, membership, participation. Particular identity. You assume a particular identity when you actually engage in the salute. Right. Okay. And it’s spatially referential, too, right? The salute, which is also what makes it particularly inactive. Let’s take an example that I’ve heard you use, which I think is kind of interesting. It kind of goes with the kiss. It’s a wedding ring. Okay? Now, I’m going to make a tricky little argument here to say that a wedding ring actually falls into both categories. Right. How could it, right? So I would say the difference between a wedding ring that’s placed on display at people’s diamond store and a wedding ring that is worn actively is the difference between a sign and a symbol. The worn wedding ring actually instances the participation in marriage. Right. It actually identifies my status and actually makes me somebody that’s bound to somewhere else where if it’s just sitting there, it merely signifies the potential for marriage. Exactly. Okay. I get this. Okay. All right. So I want to also make… So we’re going to kind of leave the sign behind now. Okay? Suffice it to say, for our purposes, it’s very important not to make the mistake of identifying one with the other. So we want to argue primarily the zombies and the symbol. We’re working in this domain right now. Okay? We’re not talking about signs. Interestingly… Jonathan Pajot, he calls his series, The Symbolic World. Right. Okay. Right. Now, interestingly, this is a bit of an aside, but it’s so important to kind of distinguish sign and symbol because I think erroneously, they’re conflated. And I would probably make a side argument. This is a whole other discussion for another day that part of an entire dimension of semiotics, which is postmodernism or poststructuralism, which is the semiotic expression of postmodernism, I think languishes over this erroneous misidentification between sign and symbol. Is it both conflation and sometimes also equivocation? I think so. Okay. That’s interesting. We can get locked into, especially when it comes to identity and identification, we’re going to talk about this, I think, when we talk about modal confusion, right? We can get locked into relating to ourselves as signs rather than as symbols. We can get locked into understanding ourselves as fixed referential entities. What do you think that profiles on social media do? Right, right, right. We relate to ourselves as signs. As if we’re signs, right. We relate to ourselves as fixed semiotic entities that are fundamentally objects in nature. And so I think that a lot of the anguish that comes with self-identification and a lot of what postmodernism is responding to, I think responding with a misdiagnosed framing, is having identity improperly bound up with something. So this confusion, this semiotic confusion, right, sounds like you’re saying it’s bound up with modal confusion too. I think so. Okay, that’s interesting. Yeah. I mean, I’m mapping this a little bit crudely. It’s more textured than this, but this would be something like getting locked into having a being mode and opening to a being mode. That’s simplistic, but generally I think that matters. Okay. Okay, so if I can just proceed with one more characteristic of the symbol writ large. Right. I’m just going to erase that. And this is something that you’re going to talk about when you get to talking about relevance realization a little bit more. So I’m going to gesture forward ever so slightly to some of the theoretical work that you’re going to be talking about. Right. Is that symbols, symbols by virtue of the fact that they exist liminally between states, they have a property that I’m going to call translucency. Right. What on earth could this possibly mean? Excuse my terrible, terrible. There’s some sense that the viewers have, because we’ve talked about transparency, opacity, shifting. Exactly. Okay. Exactly. And this is a way of understanding what the function of the symbol is to the phenomenology of how we relate to ourselves and to the world. So that’s perfect. You’ve already talked about transparency and opacity. I talked about how mindfulness involves transparency, opacity, shifting and things like that. Perfect. Okay. So we scale our identification at intervals along a continuum, right? Right. Between transparency and opacity. And what the symbol is, it’s not something we look through. It’s not something we look at. We do both simultaneously. Right. We live in symbols, right? We don’t just, we don’t travel straight through them, right? You read, right? Because of that top-down processing, you read a paragraph, you’re not reading the words, you’re reading through the words. Right. Completely, right? That’s how we treat language. Opacity, right? Your example with the glasses. Glasses are the same. I look at my glasses, I can look through my glasses. With the symbol, I would argue, we’re actually doing both at the same time. So we’re looking at it, but we’re also looking through it and by means of it to something beyond it, because of the way a symbol represents a greater reality than itself. Exactly. So there’s a tension. Right. What you might call it a tonus. A tonus, yeah. Right. There is a tonus to the translucency of a symbol. Now that also maps onto another concept I know you’ve talked about. We will talk about more with relevance realization, and that’s, I’ll write it down here, transjectivity. Yes. So we’ll come back to it. That basically is that, right, this is something that binds together subjectivity and objectivity and grounds the relation between them. I know that was central in Tillich’s idea of a symbol. It was. But one of the things Tillich was constantly arguing about is that theological symbols are terms that are meant to, right, point to the grounding relationship between subjectivity and objectivity. Exactly. I see. Okay. Good. Exactly. So let’s do a little bit more mapping then. William James, among many other things, was one of the first, many people have talked about this, the pragmatists continue the tension and so on, but James was one of the first people to talk about the tension between the I and the me. That the individual as a self organizing mechanism, we are fundamentally, this is an insight that Kegelgaard, among many other people had, that we’re fundamentally relational, right, and that we subsist in a tension between possibility and necessity for one thing, but between the I and the me. Let’s talk about that a little bit. and being an object that we can then behold, treat, address, respond to, etc. So let’s talk about this for a sec because I think that’s important. So James, right, famously, and I will come back to this when we talk about the phenomenology of relevance realization and things like that, but how the self has this relationship to it. The me is that aspect of the self that you can render opaque. It is what you can become aware of. So I can stand back and reflect on myself and say, John has these properties, etc. That’s me looking, well, that’s me looking at me. But to speak more precisely, and Dyckman talks about this in his book, The Observing Self, when he’s talking about mysticism. There’s always some aspect of my processing that’s the I, that is looking at me. So that’s John. Look at all of his characteristics. So what’s not included in the me is the I that is doing the observing. The observing self is never one with the observed self, but they’re also not distinct things. There’s a weird non-duality because there is some kind of identity relationship between the me and the I. Now you can say, but you can step back and look at that I. Yes, I can. I can step back and look at it. I can do a transparency opacity shift. I can become aware of that, but then that’s not the I. That’s now another me. The point is you can’t ever see the I. The I is always that by which you’re seeing. I’ll use an analogy. It’s also a homonym. I can’t see my eyes. I can only see with my eyes. The I is always capable of observing the me, but the I is never itself observing. There’s always some important aspect of who and what you are that is not captured in whatever opaque grasp you have on yourself. We’ll come back to this later about how this renders an aspect of who and what you are mysterious. Now the important point is logically, ontologically in that sense, these are not identical, but of course they are bound together in your sense of identity. That’s what makes you inherently in tension as an identity. Is that a fair representation? Very fair. More than fair. Yeah, that’s perfect. That’s perfect. And actually, you know, remember how we were saying a moment ago that what symbols do fundamentally is they are mechanisms of tuning. There’s this great orchestral metaphor I’m going to come back to in a minute because I think it’s very apt and it’s very telling. It’s beautifully illustrated, but it goes all the way back to Plato, right? This orchestral metaphor of harmony. Pythagoras. Pythagoras, that’s right. Sorry, yes, starts with Pythagoras and then Plato picks it up. So the symbols have a tuning effect and we become symbols, as I said a few minutes ago with our identity entire becomes the symbol, right? Such as our participatory interaction with it that we become it, right? It becomes a vessel through which we identify, as we’ve said. So what the symbol then does, right, between, and I will place the I right here, your I and I’ll place the me, your me right here. What the symbol does is it triangulates, right? What the symbol does is it has a collapsing effect, right? These two valences of the self, these two different expressions of that relation are at opposite ends of the telescope. What the symbol does is it then collapses them in together, right? It creates a kind of non-duality, an expression and a sense of oneness. So the symbol is a way of making an identity relation between things that are ultimately not logically identical because that is fundamental to selfhood and understanding selfhood is fundamental to understand participatory knowing. Right. Okay, good. I got that. Excellent. Right, exactly. To use that orchestral metaphor and it picks up a little bit on the way Plato’s sort of idea of the apartheid soul and talks about in the Republic is that, you know, if, and I’m not making a metaphysical argument for the nature of the self or what it is, I’m just talking about a way of understanding phenomenologically how we experience it and how it’s expressed. Sure. That’s all I’m doing with this, right? I’m not making any kind of claim about the nature of the self. I wouldn’t be that bold. But if we were to understand the mechanism of the self in itself, organizing property as being comprised of instruments, right? Imagine the self as a kind of orchestral expression and it’s composed of instruments. And then the effect of the symbol is to introduce a melody to those instruments to actually harmonize them. Right. Inwardly, intrasyclicly, we might say, in order to harmonize them interpsychically or extrapsychically. The tenor of, I mean, for Pythagoras it would have been the tenor of the cosmos. Right. So, Rusin in his book on Bearing Witness to Epiphany talks about the musicality of intelligibility. And something analogous to this was how I talked about how we become a temporal self, temporally extended selves by internalizing narrative, but also by finding our self participating in a narrative in the world. And then you get that sort of identity across the I and the me through the narrative. Right. Okay, so narrative, melody, the musicality of how we’re making sense of things. Okay, that’s good. So, the point that we’re taking about all of this is, right, we have to think about all of this functionality of this symbol and we have to remember that when we’re talking about the zombie as a symbol, we’re not talking about it as a sign, we’re talking about it as this, right, because we’re trying to talk about how it impacts people and expresses the participation in, if that’s the right word, or at least maybe the anti-participation and the meaning crisis. That’s right. Okay, so let’s start, should we start talking about some of the aspects of the zombie? Yeah, let’s start talking about zombies. So, the zombie, so what we’re going to do, I think, is we’re going to talk about some discrete symbols of the zombie, right? We said before that the zombie is a mythic pattern, right? It’s a complex of symbols, it’s not just one symbol. Sure, sure. So, what we’ll do is we’ll go into a couple of the different symbols and show how they’re ultimately they’re feeding into a relatively coherent and consistent account of the symptomology that we’re then going to talk about later on. Right. Okay. So, the first symbol, we talked a little bit about this in the book, but part of what we’re going to do now is elaborate on that. Right. Because certainly we’ve done work since then. Yeah, Chris and I have been doing some ongoing work since. We’re going to be writing a very confusing document, an evolving picture, right? And you know, if we could be writing it constantly, if we would. So we’re going to get into the, so the first symbol that we’re going to talk about is the symbol of the creature itself. Right, right. Right? Not talking about the world now, not talking about the narrative, the metanarrative, right? We’re just talking about the monster. And what are some of the aspectual properties of the monster? That’s a term that Jonathan emphasized in his discussion of the zombie, the way the zombie’s a monster. Right. And exactly, he did. He said something very similar. When we talk in the book about how the zombie picks up on the legacy of previous monsters, but subverts a lot of the war. Yes, right, right. It’s not the werewolf, it’s not the vampire, it’s not the mummy, right? It’s not the alien. It’s not the alien, right? It’s not the alien interloper. Yeah. It’s something altogether different. It doesn’t have, you know, malicious intent. Anyway, we’ll get there. So, okay, what’s the first trait that we want to talk about? We want to talk about how zombies don’t talk. Right. Now, I have to pause here for a second because there are films, so predominantly, I think, and I think you’ll agree, we’re taking our feature list primarily from cinematic representations of the zombies. And those in television as well. And certain canonical. Yeah, I would say canonical ones. The ones that do variations on this only take precisely because the canonical ones are in existence. Exactly. And at which point they’re no longer zombie stories, right? Right, right. You take a genre and you subvert it. The point is that after you subvert a genre, it’s no longer that genre anymore. So there are a lot of more recent films that take the zombie and depart from it, but they depart from it very, very intentionally. So what we’re talking about are the canonical depictions, beginning with Romero and a lot of the branches that have reached beyond. So zombies don’t talk to, what does that mean? They’re unintelligible, right? And that means they lack what’s fundamentally the chief axial inheritance of our sense of humanness, right? Our intelligibility, our logos. Right, right. Fundamentally, zombies lack, they have no logos. They have no mechanism of co-hering themselves into any sense of identity, right? They’re sort of the anti-axial creature. The fact that they’re sort of literally falling apart also means they’re like, they’re like coherence. Exactly, exactly. So they don’t talk and they can’t engage in any discourse, right? And especially in the axial tradition, discursively, that’s our mechanism for self-correction, right? Self-reflection, second-order thinking, all of the mechanisms that we have to actually cohere and stabilize and transmute, mature as an identity, as persons comes from this capacity. So zombies, from the beginning, we lack that. Right, OK. No. OK. What’s the second one we want to talk about, right? They’re a perversion of comunitas, or culture, both. And this relates to this one, right? Well, comunitas is the sense, that sense of belonging to and with other people. Right. As something you actively participate in. That’s right. And it’s not only the act of belonging with and identifying with other people, but it’s also actually being able to interject and internalize other people. Right, right. It’s being able to create internalized models of other people that actually allow you, create the fordance for growth and transformation and maturation, right? So what culture does, it’s not only a series of linked minds problem solving, but you’re feeding in and feeding out, and that’s actually allowing an evolution of wisdom and attunement. Right. So what culture’s doing is culture’s growing together. It’s not just a bunch of people linked. No. People, they’re theorists who talk about the ratcheting up effect of culture. Exactly, right? The concerted effect of culture is what’s truly lacking here, right? Because they are communal in some sense. They travel in packs and they have some nominal interaction, but they’re not coordinated in any sense and they’re not producing out of it. Right. So they’re a shambling hoard rather than a culture of any kind. Exactly. Okay. What’s the third one? They are untouchable. So this is very interesting, right? And there’s a couple of different ways to… Well this points to me, for me to, you know, the real loss of the axial legacy because This is the loss of the contact epistemology really powerfully symbolized. Right. A loss of a sense of realness too. Right. I mean we make all… We talk about this in the book a little bit. We make all of our assertions of truth and verity with some kind of iteration of the touch metaphor. Right. Right. We talk about closeness in terms of touch. We talk about the graspability of an idea. Being in… The tenability of an idea. Yeah. The plausibility. We use… Being in touch with reality. Being in touch with reality. Being out of touch with reality. Being close to someone. Having a hold on something, right? We use permutations of a touch metaphor to talk about intimacy and to talk about our sense of realness. And our sense of comprehension, of intelligibility. I mean, I grasp something that even comprehension comes from, like, comprandra to grasp, to hold. Yes. Right. So the fact that the zombie is untouchable is actually exemplifying a loss of all of that contact epistemology. Exactly. Exactly. Okay. What’s the third? What’s the fourth one? They’re homeless. Right. And so this is something like the idea of domicide. Yes. Yes. And the domicide, and also as a decay of that agent or in ecology, right? They don’t belong anywhere. Right. Right? Oh, right. So they… They haven’t embedded themselves into a world. They don’t belong to anything, right? They aren’t coherent with their environment. And so their domicide is significant because they have no sense of reciprocity with their environment, right? They have no pneumatic exchange, we might say, right? There’s no breathing and there’s no respiring with their environment. So, I mean, the idea here is that they’re homeless, but it’s such a depraved version of homelessness that it’s not like there’s any possibility of them ever returning home. That’s right. And in that sense, they’re unlike the other monsters in a lot of powerful ways. Yeah, I mean, other monsters actually have very stylized homes, right? Right. The zombie has its coffin or its cavern. The vampire. Sorry, the vampire, rather, has its coffin and the werewolf has the lair. Most monsters actually are associated quite closely with a particular environment. And so either… And the alien, ET, either wants to go home or the alien is coming here and trying to take our home from us, right? But it’s still a home orientation, like in one of the worlds or something like that. That’s right. That’s right. Homelessness, I think, also, incidentally, is one of the aspects of the zombie that is very, very evocative of nihilism, right? Because we talked about this understanding nihilism as, in part, a disinterest in the world, right? A lack of connectivity, a lack of involvement with the world, right? A certain apathy and sense of indifference, of boredom, right? Right, right. And so there’s something almost bored. Of course, zombies aren’t… They can’t take enough of a perspective on anything to be bored, right? That’s a different issue. But if they could, they would be bored because they don’t have any interest in their environment. Right, right. Okay. They’re insatiable. Right. And moreover, what they do eat, and these are kind of two different things, but we’re bundling them together. They eat brains. So what zombies are, among other things, and this is part of how they float and defy the axial paradigm of the person, in some sense, that is defined by Phylaea, by the discourse and intercourse with other people, is that their insatiability is a perversion of Eros. Right, they consume, become one, but they actually never become one. They never become one. They never become one because their erotic instinct isn’t actually cultivated with the practice of any other kind of love, right? Phylaea is the love that concentrates Eros within a communitas, within a communal practice that internalizes others and actually sort of transmutes it, right? And Agape, of course, the love of creation, fundamentally the love that Christ symbolizes, is the erotic instinct, is the impregnation by the erotic instinct leading to perjuration, leading to birth. Tillich has this great metaphor, actually, where he’s talking about the symbol. He talks about how the effect of the symbol impregnates our, I can’t remember what he’s, he says, one of you, he says, I just said it impregnates our subjectivity with objectivity or vice versa, right? Maybe both. Maybe both. But the idea is that this idea of pregnancy and birth is really fundamental to understanding how an erotic instinct is transmuted and transformed into something more fundamental to Agape, right, into creation. And so the zombie is a perversion of all of that because the zombie, the zombie’s erotic instinct has no object in community tabs, right? So it’s left to sputter. It also isn’t contributing to the zombie’s own agency because it’s actually not constituting the zombie in some way. Like, the zombie eats and they’re never satisfied. It’s also an open-ended consumption, very much like aspects of some of the criticisms people have of a market economy in which we’re so beset by the bullshit of the having mode that we’re just, we’re uselessly and endlessly consuming but we’re never satisfied. Right, exactly. And that’s why, and that’s why especially after Romero, I think most people will say, if you talk to the average person and say, what does the zombie mean? They’ll say, oh, it’s consumerism, right? And so our response to that is… Without realizing the depth of the meaning of consumerism. That’s right. Consume. That’s right. And so our response to that would be, well, yes, it is, but this is part of schema that has much more breadth than just consumerism, precisely in the way that you frame it. It’s eating brains precisely because brains are the symbol, they’re the source… Of intelligibility. …intelligibility, the ability to make meaning. That’s right. So it hungers, it’s insatiably hungers for the ability to make meaning. So there’s this interesting thing happening, right? It’s like mind devouring mind. There’s something, I think that gestures in some sense to a form of our perennial despair, which always threatens to nod itself. Right, right. There’s something self-destructive about the zombie and what the zombie expresses. There’s something sort of also, I mean, and this is a Kierkegaardian idea, there’s something about our self-consciousness that can go that way. Yes, it’s a perennial feature, it’s a perennial possibility of the spirit, I think, Kierkegaardian. We’re constantly in, we’re constantly despairing and we’re constantly entangled in this tension. And that’s why, you know, that’s why being able to… That’s why the cultivation, in his case, the Christian spirituality, agape, is so crucial because it takes that erotic instinct and again, it cultivates and transmutes it, impregnates it, and allows it to become a vessel for creation, in this case, the creation expressed by the idea of God. So that essentially undermines all of that machinery. Right, okay. What’s another? Ugly, they’re ugly. By definition, in fact, right? Now again, more recent instances of the zombie have tried to play with that a little bit, say, no, no, they’re really cute and cuddly. They’re not, right? They’re not. And that actually, again, differentiates them from a lot of other creatures, right? Because, I mean, vampires are imbued with so much, they’re flushed with sex appeal. Well, at least since Bella Lugosi, right? And of course, in the whole, that dreadful Twilight series, right? Right, right, right, they became incredibly sexy just to be a vampire. And that saga was also doing the same thing with the werewolf, making the werewolf something sexy and interesting, right? Whereas the zombie just does not go there. You don’t want to, again, to use Plato’s words from Symposium, you don’t want to give birth to beauty with the zombie, right? Yeah. You know, it’s inimical to any, it sort of goes along with the intimacy issue, right? It’s completely, it’s inimical to any kind of substantial contact. But it’s also a way of representing the zombie’s decadence, the fact that the structural functional organization is breaking down. Right, that’s right, that’s right. And it’s a disruption of our cosmetic sensibilities, right? There’s no coherent cosmos within the zombie. Cosmetic, obviously, deriving from cosmos. So fundamentally, it’s also the absence of any kind of, it’s the absence of the cosmic order, the zombie, right? Okay, keep going, this is excellent. Oh, this is an interesting one, this is one of my favorites actually, insofar as you can have a favorite of these. Of these horrible things. Yeah, they’re not, exactly. They’re not evil. Right. So I think this is fascinating because… Yeah, we’ve talked about this a lot. The lack of malevolence is something that really, really thwarts us, because it actually undermines our purchase on the phenomenon, and it denies us the opportunity to arouse ourselves in defiance. It’s really, really important to have that, right? The espousal of virtue has a lot to do with the defiance of malevolence, as represented certainly in our great metanarratives, and as represented, I think, also in our day-to-day life, right? And so the zombie actually denies the survivors of the situation, when they’re tangling with the zombie. The zombie denies them that. There isn’t any sort of moral superiority in that sense, because the zombie wasn’t evil, the zombie does not have mal-intent. The zombie is even less than an animal in some sense. And so it’s not inspiring. To kill a zombie is not inspiring at all. It’s perfunctory, right? There you go. There’s no great declaration of moral superiority, right? There’s no great stand. So this is the opposite of like… It’s an empty gesture killing a zombie. It’s meaningless, except in terms of survival. That’s why you have to repeat it. That’s why you have to keep repeating it. Again and again and again and again. Again, right. So the absence of evil really undermines that. But it also does something else. I want to stop here. Doesn’t the absence of evil point to the fact that we’ve lost that normative order and platinus, right? Because there’s no sort of metaphysical place for evil in the zombie. There’s no moral arbitration. None. Right. So exactly. I was just going to say the same thing. In addition to sort of within narrative thwarting the resistance, the efforts of the survivors, the absence of evil is also representing the loss of that fundamental normative framework. That what we call the moral compass, right? Our ability to map and chart normativity. And the zombie expresses the undermining of that. The disorientation of that. Right. And the fact that they drift also points to them not having a compass and things like that. Exactly. Exactly. That’s right. And then another one I would add. And this is actually not one that we talk about. I don’t think in the book, but they lack perspective. Right. And this is what draws the semiotic zombie into discourse. With the philosophical zombie. Right. Right. Let me talk a little bit about that. So let me just introduce this issue of the philosophical zombie. And it’s telling that it was natural to philosophers and cognitive scientists to use the zombie as a way of talking about this. So one of the issues, of course, and we’re going to, we bumped up against this, we’re going to bump up it again, is the issue of consciousness. And one of the things that is problematic about consciousness is why you have it and what does it do for you. Because first of all, most of your processing can be done unconsciously. In fact, most of your processing is being done unconsciously. Most of what’s happening so that I can speak to you is not any process of which I am introspectively aware. My consciousness in no way penetrates to tell me what’s going on such that I am being grammatical, such that I’m articulating, etc. All these things. When I’m remembering something, I don’t know what I do to remember. I just remember. What other, and so one of the great difficulties is, well, what is consciousness for? Now let me explain a phenomena for you to try and extend the possibility of how much you could be unconscious. And this is a phenomena of blind sight. By the way, I recommend the book by Peter Watts, a science fiction book on blind sight. It’s one of the great science fiction novels dealing with, encountering aliens that actually do not possess consciousness and what that might mean for us. How truly alien that would make them. So here’s the phenomena of blind sight. A person has blind sight. You bring them into a room and they are absolutely sincere. So phenomenologically, experientially, they are blind. They cannot see. And there’s all kinds of reasons for believing that they’re being absolutely, so they are not having what we would call the experience of sight. And then what you could ask them to do is you bring them into a room and you say, okay, there’s a bottle somewhere in this room, point to it. And they’ll get angry and they’ll say, what are you doing? You’re being cruel. And you say, just trust me, you know, point to it. And they’ll say, okay, I guess a bottle is there. And they point to a bottle. There’s even been experiments where you can change the orientation of the object and they can guess the orientation. It can be that quite precise. Now here’s the interesting possibility, right? So what’s going on here is you have what we might call a lot of the intelligence of sight, the ability to, you know, detect, not experience. I’m trying to pull these apart, but detect and pick up and potentially interact with objects in a very efficacious manner without there being any experiential component to it. So does that make sense, blind sight? Okay, so now let’s consider that we have a creature that had not only blind sight, but deaf hearing. And notice how that might strike you as a contradiction, but it’s no more of a contradiction than this, right? So that their ears can do all kinds of detecting of, you know, air disruption, but they have none of the experience of hearing. They have numb touch, right? So there’s none of the feeling of contact, but nevertheless, all the mechanics and all the intelligible interactions, presumably. Now put these two together. Pay attention to this. You’ve been driving down the highway for the last 15 minutes, and you realize, oh, I haven’t been paying attention at all, right? And in fact, in some of the literature, people talk about this. Yeah, people talk about this as their inner zombie. So there was something in them that was successfully driving, but it was not the part of them that was having the conscious experience. So take that capacity to have this intelligent interaction, and then imagine that that creature has blind sight, deaf hearing, and numb touch. So here’s the thought experiment, right? I get a creature that acts as well as you do. It can move around the environment in this completely sophisticated fashion. It could drive a car down a highway. It’s doing all of this, but it’s doing it completely through blind sight, deaf hearing, and numb. It is completely lacking in consciousness. It has no conscious ability. Now whether or not such a creature is philosophically possible, that’s part of the dispute. That’s not an issue here. I don’t think it is, but that will come later. All we need for our purposes is this creature that is completely lacking in consciousness, completely lacking in perspectival knowing, was without hesitation, I think without any thought, was referred to by many philosophers spontaneously as a zombie. And then they would also often call it a philosophical zombie because they wanted to bring out this particular thought experiment. So the whole issue of consciousness and our somewhat insecurity, our metaphysical insecurity, like what is consciousness? What place does it have? It’s the locus for so much of my identity and who I am and meaning, but how does it fit into the scientific worldview? All of that insecurity is wrapped up in the possibility that we might not need consciousness at all. And so the zombie, the fact that it was called a philosophical zombie, again, the zombie idea points towards this insecurity, this kind of potential loss, the threat we’re feeling, and the complete lack of perspective and perspectival knowing. Excellent. Okay, I think that that concludes the features of this. So all of this, I’m just going to remind everyone of this again. All of this is one symbol. This is all the symbol of the creature. This is an aspectual feature list of the symbol of the creature. But the thing about it is it’s a symbol precisely because it triggers things in us. We participate in this. We all can feel a potential domicile. We can walk down the streets of Toronto, especially in winter, and there’s a horde of people around us and we are lacking in communitas. We are insecure about the status of our consciousness. We feel that we might be immersed in a having mode, consumerist way of being. We worry about meaning, hence the meaning crisis. All of this is being activated in us. And that’s why, of course, some people in fact choose to participate in this symbol. They go on zombie walks and enact being zombies. They do. They do. And they identify… It’s interesting that we said before that this is a symbol insofar as it has… it extends to the function of a symbol, but it’s a negative function. Because the body of a symbol, if I can refer to the semiotic vessel of a symbol as a body, what the body of the symbol does is it actually delivers, especially the sacred symbols, delivers the participant beyond the body of the symbol itself. That’s part of the gesturing effect of the symbol. That’s the translucency. It ushers us through and forward. What the zombie symbol symbol does, conversely, the zombie symbol is like an ointment you get trapped in. It’s like a viscous film. You embody the zombie, but the zombie doesn’t take you anywhere. So it’s kind of an anti-symbol in that way. That’s why it’s an anti-symbol. And this is part of the decadence. The body is a symbol that is undermining symbolization. That’s right. It’s the mis-attunement. Right, right, right. Instead of tuning us, again, cohering our sense of identity to espouse that kind of transjective function, to involve us, to afford our participation in the world and our accession to new states of perspective, what it does is it traps us. It prevents us from doing just that. That’s why it has that negative function. That’s why we’re associating it with this. Now, the expression of going on a zombie walk or dressing up as a zombie, that in and of itself is a very interesting behavior. I think you and I understand that phenomenon to be a kind of mostly unconscious, in fact, arguably it would have to be, but that’s a different argument, a mostly unconscious expression of this crisis. Yeah, I think so. At least what it does is it gives you a moment of, instead of nebulous disconnection, you at least have connection to the crisis itself. Yes, exactly. Okay, so we’re talking about the transdictivity. We’re invoking the agent-agent relationship. Why don’t we move to that part? So now the relationship between the zombie and the world itself. Right, and the zombie symbol, which originally was a separate symbol, and the apocalypse, which is magnetized towards each other. Right, that’s exactly right. So the apocalypse is an interesting idea that has been distorted over time and now somehow is synonymous with calamity. Which is of course not the original meaning. The original meaning is revelation. It’s something like an insight. The world was framed in one way and it’s going to be restructured and reveal a greater depth, a better reality. Which is a kind of, just like, so again, I’m just saying this is one way of understanding. I’m making this disclaimer because I’m going to invoke the symbol of Christ again. This is just one aspect of that symbol. So I don’t mean to say this is a comprehensive account. But because one way of understanding the symbol of Christ is as a symbol for a parturition, as a symbol for the transmutation of Eros into Agape, the birth of the individual, the birth of the self into eternity. You could say something like that, right? And the zombie, because the zombie is a resurrected corpse, the zombie is a resurrection without rebirth. It’s a perversion of that whole thing. But the same is also true of the world itself. So just as the zombie perverts the rebirth of Christ through resurrection, and therefore the rebirth of the integrity of the self entire, it also does that, it makes that same contortion with the world. Right, because the world is resurrected after the apocalypse. When we say apocalypse, what we really mean is post-apocalyptic. The zombie world is post-apocalyptic, right? The way it’s depicted, especially in cinema, the calamity has happened. This is now what the world looks like. Right, it’s post-apocalyptic. The post-apocalyptic world is a corpse just like the zombie world. Right, because nothing has been disclosed, there’s been nothing that’s been revealed that is going to give a new basis for meaning. It’s nothing like the new heaven or the new earth at all. No, no, it’s just a scarce place. It’s emptiness and scarcity. And filled with zombies. And well, yeah, scarce except for the presence of constant, yeah, constant horror. But so the same corruption that the zombie mythos has administered to the symbol of Christ as a symbol for the self, which is kind of a way of saying a symbol for the process of symbolizing, for the process of interjecting symbols and using them to scale and transmute and reconfigure our identification, right? Right. All of that is bound up with that symbol really, really powerfully. That’s why it’s, I mean, that’s part of why it is as deeply, deeply sacred to us. Part of the fundamental graph. It still is, right? Even arguably in something of an afterglow. Right. But the zombie has that same effect. The zombie mythos administers that same corruption to the world itself. So what we see is these two symbols, right? The symbol is being perverted, right, into the zombie, and then the symbol of the apocalypse is being perverted. And then these two now belong together in the way in which… Something approximating a cohabitation. They don’t really cohabitate because the zombie is homeless. Right, right. Right? They just happen to be there. They’re disconnected. They’re unglue from one another. Yeah, so they represent… There’s no exchange. Right. There is no agent arena relationship here. But what there is is there’s this sort of calamitous slamming together of them. That’s right. That’s right. That’s why it’s an anti-ecology. Right. There is nothing reciprocal in that relation. They don’t respond. They keep coming back to this idea of respiration, which is something that… The pollution of the atmosphere, right? So Costa, I know, invokes that a little bit. Kierkegaard way back when talked about the despair of the self as being kind of a hyperventilation, an asphyxiating sensation. Not being able to get a purchase on the world is analogized by essentially not being able to breathe in the world and have the world breathe you in. Right, right. Right, right. So the apocalypse and the zombie have found each other because the perversion of the rebirth of the world and the perversion of the rebirth of the self are now conjoined. And then there’s even another way in which this is symbolizing the meaning crisis, right? So, of course, that apocalypse points to our disconnectedness from the world, but also the looming threat of the biological ecology. So you’ve got both the undermining of what we might call the existential ecology and the biological ecology, and they’re sort of reinforcing each other. But also the whole thing, this whole package, also symbolizes the meaning crisis. This point about the sort of the metanarrative. The metanarrative, yeah, the metanarrative too, because, you know, when we… It has to do with the way that the viewer or the reader or whatever the person who’s party to the story, right? The way that they relate to the story. So not only the characters within the fictional story, but how we relate to it. How we relate to it. So the idea here is, right, we got, like, typically, although we have this weird thing, right, and movies are great for this idea of translucency, I’m identifying with the characters, but there’s often dramatic irony. I often possess knowledge, right? Well, this is how you deal with a vampire. You’re in tragedy, right? I know this is coming. I know this is coming, and I know what to be done. I can intervene. I can bring wisdom to this. Yes, right. So there’s a kind of self-transcendence in the dramatic irony. That’s completely lacking. Because the situation isn’t archetypally recognizable, right? We don’t look into it and instinctively know it and recognize it. We can’t interpose ourselves, right? We couldn’t intervene in any kind of productive way. That’s part of the problem. And were we to interpose ourselves, we wouldn’t be able to extract any wisdom from it either. So there’s also no reciprocity between the person that’s party to the narrative from without and the narrative itself. And because it’s unrecognizable to us and because it doesn’t seem to tend in any given direction, it’s the directionality of the narrative that creates the kind of meta-meaningful effect. Because we know how the story is going to end. And we’re so preoccupied with that right now as a culture. The idea of the loss of a meta-narrative is deeply, deeply, deeply destabilizing. And the zombies… This is one of the things that Han talks about when he talks about the atomization of time. Time no longer leads into eternity. No, it just buzzes. It just buzzes. And so too does the narrative of the zombie. It just sputters to… It doesn’t conclude, right? It just ends. Okay, well that’s very good. I think that gives the viewers a very good understanding of some of the main arguments and how they’re ongoing and developing that we pursued in the book, trying to show how much our culture is expressing the meaning crisis symbolically and how we can therefore use this as a way of reflecting on how people are fundamentally experiencing or not experiencing perhaps the meaning crisis, the way in which it’s eating away at the sense of identity, the sense of connections. And it’s interesting what a very powerful symbol it is for us. So, Chris, I wanted to thank you for coming. That was a very excellent discussion. Thank you. Yeah, it was a lot of fun. And this dovetails with what I’d like to talk about next. Because this mythology is obviously not often… Well, it’s often as well. But this mythology is obviously a symbol, right? But it’s a symptom also. Right. It symbolizes the symptom. Right. What I mean by symptom is something that is an effect that has been caused by the meaning crisis. So the meaning crisis impacts on us and it expresses itself symbolically, right? And that’s evidence, that’s a symptom of the meaning crisis itself. So what I’d like to talk with you next time is about some of the symptomology of the meaning crisis. What are the symptoms of the meaning crisis? How can we organize them together and make sense of them? And I think when we have that discussion, we’ll see, only incidentally, we’ll see how they gesture back in this direction to the zone. Right. Thank you very much for your time and attention. Thank you.