CAPAS RESEARCH PROJECT - Roger Luckhurst Grey Zone Apocalyptics: The Biopolitical/Necropolitical Dyad
The grey zone is how medical researchers describe the uncanny space between life and death – a space that medical advances in brain imaging and intensive care treatments have continued to expand. The biopolitical management of populations, as outlined by Foucault in the 1970s, has now definitively extended into the realm of new kinds of necropolitical forms of categorisation and control. The strange population of newly undead persons has become pervasive in cultural representations of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic worlds. The most obvious of these is the zombie apocalypse in film, fiction and computer games as a form of viral undeath. This project aims to map the symbiotic relation of medical discourse and Gothic culture, entwined in a biomedical imaginary that has been through constant transformation and extension since the late 1960s to the present day. But it also aims to extend this realm beyond the zombie and into striking new grey zone conditions, from coma and catatonia to vegetative states or types of psychogenic stupor and trance. These apocalyptic conditions haunt contemporary culture, as my project will track.