Capitalism: A Horror Story
Jon Greenaway;
INTRODUCTION: A Spectre Is Haunting Us All
08/25/24INTRODUCTION: A Spectre Is Haunting Us All: 27
“They’re planning for thirty thousand years ahead… They’re out to destroy everything. Every living cell contracts under their blows… They cripple the baby in the mother’s womb.”
08/25/24INTRODUCTION: A Spectre Is Haunting Us All: 36
They borrow an aphorism from Fredric Jameson, who said that history is what hurts. As they put it, “Horror is the genre above all others that pushes beyond the hurt to the open wound. Horror is what bleeds.”
CHAPTER TWO: Life and Death in Capitalist Modernity
08/25/24CHAPTER TWO: Life and Death in Capitalist Modernity: 69
The secret horror of the realist novel of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is the simple, brute fact of industrial capitalism’s use and consumption of the very bodies of the working classes.
08/25/24CHAPTER TWO: Life and Death in Capitalist Modernity: 70
Xu Lizhi, a twenty-four-yearold worker in a Foxconn factory who committed suicide. His poem “I Fell Asleep, Just Standing Like That”
08/25/24CHAPTER TWO: Life and Death in Capitalist Modernity: 74
“cruel optimism.” This phrase, originally coined by the writer Lauren Berlant, refers to a particular kind of attachment or affect — Berlant argued that it was the dominant mode of feeling under neoliberal capitalism.
08/25/24CHAPTER TWO: Life and Death in Capitalist Modernity: 77
Thatcher’s famous dictum that there is no such thing as society, there are simply individuals
08/25/24CHAPTER TWO: Life and Death in Capitalist Modernity: 78
Mark Fisher posited that neoliberalism was essentially a machine for the destruction of class consciousness,
08/25/24CHAPTER TWO: Life and Death in Capitalist Modernity: 89
There’s a telling exchange between Ki-taek and Chung-sook. He toasts to the beneficence of the Park family, pointing out that, even though they are rich, they are still kind. His wife (quite correctly) retorts that he has the connection completely backward — they are nice not despite being rich but because of it. Given their wealth, who wouldn’t be? To put this another way, the problem of capitalism is not a lack of manners — the issue with poverty is not its lack of social graces — the problem is the exploitation that good manners can cover and excuse.
CHAPTER THREE: The Social Function of the Monster through the Ages
08/25/24CHAPTER THREE: The Social Function of the Monster through the Ages: 107
politics is fundamentally lived on the level of the body.
08/25/24CHAPTER THREE: The Social Function of the Monster through the Ages: 110
worker; the more intelligent the work, the duller the worker and the more he becomes a slave of nature… It is true that labour produces… palaces, but hovels for the worker… It produces intelligence, but it produces idiocy and cretinism for the worker. Frankenstein’s invention is thus a pregnant metaphor of the process of capitalist production, which forms by deforming, civilizes by barbarising, enriches by impoverishing — a two-sided process in which each affirmation entails a negation
08/25/24CHAPTER THREE: The Social Function of the Monster through the Ages: 117
extractivism
08/25/24CHAPTER THREE: The Social Function of the Monster through the Ages: 118
There is no shortage of writing on the political economy of the vampire, the very embodiment of dead labour that lives only by sucking living labour. However, as Katie Stone points out, while it may be tempting to see the vampire as antithetical to the utopian future beyond capitalism, Dracula does not labour and so Stone sees the vampire as both anti-work and utopian.
08/25/24CHAPTER THREE: The Social Function of the Monster through the Ages: 154
the labourer consumes his disposable time for himself, he robs the capitalist
08/25/24CHAPTER THREE: The Social Function of the Monster through the Ages: 127
The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save — the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour — your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.
CHAPTER FOUR: It’s in the Blood: Body Horror and the Fear of the Flesh in a Post-COVID World
08/25/24CHAPTER FOUR: It’s in the Blood: Body Horror and the Fear of the Flesh in a Post-COVID World: 142
so much abject pulp
08/25/24CHAPTER FOUR: It’s in the Blood: Body Horror and the Fear of the Flesh in a Post-COVID World: 148
“The concept of progress must be grounded in the idea of catastrophe. That things are ‘status quo’ is the catastrophe.”
08/25/24CHAPTER FOUR: It’s in the Blood: Body Horror and the Fear of the Flesh in a Post-COVID World: 155
the body horror is not what is done to the flesh; rather it consists in the splitting of the subject’s mental life in the name of employment.
CHAPTER FIVE: Witches, and Being a Monster to Capitalism
08/25/24CHAPTER FIVE: Witches, and Being a Monster to Capitalism: 165
“We are the daughters of the witches you couldn’t burn,”
08/25/24CHAPTER FIVE: Witches, and Being a Monster to Capitalism: 167
monstrous feminism. This would be a feminism that is trans-inclusive, one which abolishes the family form, and which stands outside the normative structures of heteropatriarchal capitalism to bring something radically new into being
08/25/24CHAPTER FIVE: Witches, and Being a Monster to Capitalism: 180
bloodlake
CHAPTER SIX: Ghosts and the Haunting of Modernity
08/25/24CHAPTER SIX: Ghosts and the Haunting of Modernity: 198
Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s Pulse (2001) and Unfriended: Dark Web (2018) to Rob Savage’s Host (2020
08/25/24CHAPTER SIX: Ghosts and the Haunting of Modernity: 205
dominant metaphor
08/26/24CHAPTER SIX: Ghosts and the Haunting of Modernity: 207
haunted cyberspace in which we are all already enmeshed
08/26/24CHAPTER SIX: Ghosts and the Haunting of Modernity: 207
find ghosts in Japanese horror much more terrifying. In the standard American Horror canon, because a ghost violently attacks you or comes after you, at least you have the chance to fight back. And what you’re fighting for is the idea that you can beat the bad thing and go back to the good old days when you were peaceful and happy and there weren’t any ghosts hanging around. But if they don’t attack you then the best you can do is figure out a way to co-exist with them. I find the idea
08/26/24CHAPTER SIX: Ghosts and the Haunting of Modernity: 216
the collapse of cyberspace into an omnipresent immediacy has made the internet boring and therefore sadistic — what else is there to do other than transgress?
CHAPTER SEVEN: Crises of Liberalism and Necro-Neoliberalism
08/26/24CHAPTER SEVEN: Crises of Liberalism and Necro-Neoliberalism: 252
Roan — whose entire family was tortured to death in front of her during a Purge when she was a child — believes the only acceptable answer to the violence of New Founding Fathers is to vote for her.
08/26/24CHAPTER SEVEN: Crises of Liberalism and Necro-Neoliberalism: 253
murder tourism
08/26/24CHAPTER SEVEN: Crises of Liberalism and Necro-Neoliberalism: 260
But in the end, the film retreats into “we’re all in this together, can’t we get along?” posturing, landing in a centrist-to-conservative mind-space wherein we can all agree that heavily armed and openly bigoted terror groups run by Anglo-Americans are bad, and that wanting to murder rich white bigoted exploiters, while perhaps historically
CHAPTER EIGHT: Gothic Historiography and the Idea of a (Monstrous) Utopia
08/26/24CHAPTER EIGHT: Gothic Historiography and the Idea of a (Monstrous) Utopia: 268
“the darkness of the lived moment”
CONCLUSION: We’re All Monsters Now
08/26/24CONCLUSION: We’re All Monsters Now: 289
the creature is stitched together from the bodies of the poor and the dead he’s vivisected (a fact that we seem to gloss over in talking about Frankenstein
08/26/24CONCLUSION: We’re All Monsters Now: 301
rehearsal for revolution
08/26/24CONCLUSION: We’re All Monsters Now: 305
they missed their wives, their mothers, their daughters and girlfriends and dominatrixes. Or maybe they were happy now, free to rape and kill and eat whomever, free to shit and piss and jerk off in the street. Maybe this world was the one they’d always wanted
08/26/24CONCLUSION: We’re All Monsters Now: 311
trans people and queer people can build the world that they want together. And that even though it’s miserable and it’s endless work and it’s really shoveling shit against the tide in so many different situations, it can be done. And the work is worth doing on its own merits, because what is the point of eking out an existence if nobody loves you… Politics is who you love and who you’re willing to kill. That’s really it. And I think that if you don’t come to politics willing to fight for what you believe, willing to throw away the idea that consensus and assimilation are necessary end goals, what are you doing
08/26/24CONCLUSION: We’re All Monsters Now: 314
“We know that even many who love us are bewildered by our unrealism… our utopian foolishness, in striving for what we strive for: but can you understand how unrealistic their beliefs are to us?”