Do you know Robert Latham's Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs and the Culture of Consumption? (2002: Univ of Chicago Press) I really liked it, this is from the first chapter:
“The historical roots of the theoretical connection between the vampire and the cyborg can be found in Karl Marx’s Capital, where he develops his understanding of industrial automation as the objectification of human labor—a process that, as he envisions it, is both prosthetic and predatory….In the process of its conversion into fixed capital, the fluid dynamism of labor is congealed into a technological simulacrum that confronts the working class as a seemingly autonomous system with its own powers and demands…. [L]aborers thus experience the industrial apparatus not as the crystallization of their creativity but as an ‘inimical’ alien power.” [Latham 2002: 3]
“In brief, capital is ‘dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.’ For Marx, the capitalist factory system is a regime of avid vampirism whose victims are transformed into undead extensions of its own vast, insensate, endlessly feeding body. ‘The automaton itself is the subject, and the workers are merely conscious organs, coordinated with the unconscious organs of the automaton, and together with the latter subordinated to the central moving force.’” [Latham 2002: 3]
Donna Haraway also has her chapter "Universal Donors in a Vampire Culture: It's All in the Family. Biological Kinship Categories in the Twentieth Century." In William Cronon (ed). *Uncommon Ground: Reinventing Nature.*W.W. Norton & Company. New York, October 1995, pp. 321-366,... later expanded in the OncoMouse book... though she uses the trope quite differently.
Quotes from early in the peice(s):
Race, like nature and sex, is replete with all the rituals of guilt and innocence in the stories of nation, family, and species. Race, like nature, is about roots, pollution, and origins. Inherently doubtful, race, like sex, is about the purity of lineage, the legitimacy of passage, and the drama of inheritance of bodies, property, and stories. I believe that, like nature, race haunts those of us who call ourselves Americans. [Vampire 1995: 321-2]
And like any expanding capitalist society that must continually destroy what it builds and feed off of every being it perceives as natural—if its strategies of accumulation of wealth are to continue to push the envelope of catastrophe— the United States is consumed with images of decadence, obsolescence, and corruption of kind. [Vampire 1995: 322]
Fascination with mixing and unity is a symptom of preoccupation with purity and decomposition. [Vampire 1995: 322]
The figure is the vampire: the one who pollutes lineages on the wedding night; the one that effects category transformations by illegitimate passages of substance; the one who drinks and infuses blood in a paradigmatic act of infecting whatever poses as pure; the one that eschews sun worship and does its work at night; the one who is undead, unnatural, and perversely incorruptible. In this essay, I am instructed by the vampire; and my questions are about the vectors of infection that trouble racial categories in twentieth-century bioscientific constructions of universal humanity. I think vampires can be vectors of category transformation in a racialized, historical, national unconscious. A figure that both promises and threatens racial and sexual mixing, the vampire feeds off of the normalized human; and the monster finds such contaminated food to be nutritious. The vampire also insists on the nightmare of racial violence behind the fantasy of purity in the rituals of kinship.2 [Vampire 1995: 322-3]
Deeply shaped by murderous ideologies since their modern popularization in European accounts in the late eighteenth century -- especially racism, sexism, and homophobia -- stories of the undead also exceed and invert each of those systems of discrimination to show the violence infesting supposedly wholesome life and nature and the revivifying promise of what is supposed to be decadent and against nature. [Haraway, Donna. 1997. Modest*Witness at Second*Millennium.FemaleMan*Meets*OncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience. New York: Routledge. 215]
The vampire is the cosmopolitan, the one who speaks too many languages and cannot remember the native tongue, and the scientist who forces open the parochial dogmas of those who are sure they know what nature is. In short, once touched by the figure of this monster, one is forced to inhabit the swirling semantic field of vampire stories. In those zones, uninvited associations and dissociations are sure to undo one’s sense of the selfsame, which is always neatly prelabeled to forestall moral, epistemological, and political scrutiny. [1997, 215]
Remembering the toxic cocktail of organicism, anti-Semitism, anticapitalism, and anti-intellectualism that percolates through vampire stories, I cannot see Randolph’s painting as a simple affirmation of the woman and indictment of the techno-vampire. Rather, drawing on her practice of metaphoric realism, Randolph uses the vampire-cyborg mythology to interrogate the undead psychoanalytic, spiritual, and mundane zones where bio-medicine, information technology, and the techno-organic stories of kinship [END p.216] converge. This is the kinship exchange system in which gender, race, and species—animal and machine—are all at stake. [1997, 216-7]
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> Feudalism had the Dragon?
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> and the classical age?
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> ....after that we can thrash out what it all means.
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> Joanna
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-- ********************************************************* Alan P. Rudy Dept. Sociology, Anthropology and Social Work Central Michigan University 124 Anspach Hall Mt Pleasant, MI 48858 517-881-6319