Mortality, Vol. 13, No.

2, May 2008

Empire of the living dead

WILLIAM BOGARD
Department of Sociology, Whitman College, WA, USA

ABSTRACT The corpse is no longer a dominant organizing figure of power and knowledge in
postmodern network society. Limited by its own corporeality and tied to modern notions of the
individual, its utility in controlling life has been superseded by technologies that control birth. This essay
draws a line from Foucaults analysis of the dead body as an object of biopower to Baudrillards and
Deleuzes vision of control societies, in which the body disappears and biopower becomes a function of
information and genetic modification. It uses the popular film image of the living dead to trace this
evolution of biopower from the dissection of bodies at the end of life to the pre-programming and
simulation of life at its inception: an evolution from the corpse to the clone, from the individuated dead
body to the hybrid, dividualized body.
KEYWORDS:
society

the corpse; biopower; simulation; control societies; the body; cinema and

When we have worn out the interest we once took in death, when we realize we
have nothing more to gain from it, we fall back on birth, we turn to a much more
inexhaustible abyss (Cioran, 1976, p. 11).
The new imperialism . . . makes a concerted effort to do away with the body.
Bodies are disciplined, corporeality dismantled, becomings animal hounded
out, deterritorialization pushed to a new threshold (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987,
pp. 180181).
Whereas we have an individualized view of the body, linked to notions of
possession and mastery, [in symbolic societies] it is subject to constant
reversibility. It is a substance which can move through other animal, mineral
or vegetable forms (Baudrillard, 2003, pp. 1517).

I.
There are no corpses in symbolic societies. Corpses are the creations of modern
technical societies. Figures of biopower, they are dead bodies that have utilitarian,

Correspondence: William Bogard, PhD, Department of Sociology, 345 Boyer Avenue, Walla
Walla, WA 99362, USA. Tel: 5095275122. E-mail: bogard@whitman.edu
ISSN 1357-6275 (print) ISSN 1469-9885 (online) 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13576270801954377

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W. Bogard

not just symbolic, value. The corpse is an organizing figure of truth and power in
those societies. In symbolic societies, life and death are reversible terms, and the
body is an indeterminate figure moving between human and non-human forms
(Baudrillard, 2003). Technical societies eliminate this reversibility, fix its terms,
and set limits on the variability of the human form. They dismantle and decode
dead bodies and convert them into commodities and useful things. It is in these
societies that the corpse is born.
All this, however, is once again changing. Foucault demonstrated how
biopower in the nineteenth century, in the alliance of institutions like the clinic
and the State, extended its control over life by studying corpses (Foucault,
1975). In the late twentieth century, however, a fundamental shift occurred in
the biopolitical strategy of technical societies, in the direction of controlling life
from its inception rather than from its end. Genetics and technologies of birth
promised the power to regulate life in advance, and as a result the corpse began
to lose much of its former utility. Paradoxically, the postmodern condition
appears as a return to the symbolic universe in which living and dead, human
and non-human forms, become indeterminate once again, reflected in figures
like clones, cyborgs, and other machine flesh hybrids spawned by the
convergence of molecular biology and information science (Haraway, 1985).
In fact, these figures are highly over-determined by models that regulate the
production of life with far greater precision than the study of corpses could ever
dream.
A dead body is not necessarily a corpse. It only becomes one in virtue of a
social machine that needs dead bodies, and the flows of organs, tissues, and
fluids they generate, to function. In the transition from modern to postmodern
societies, the machine that was fueled by corpses is becoming one that runs on
DNA. Well call this transition a shift in the empire of the living dead, for
fun and with a passing nod to the old zombie film. The empire of the living
dead is where the determinate body of the corpse meets the over-determined
bodies of replicants and genetic hybrids. In this empire, unlike the one
portrayed in the original film, the zombies are not corpses but the offspring of
recombined genes. The corpse is a figure whose study was hampered by
traditional notions of the bodys integrity and unity. Postmodern zombies,
conversely, are the product of a will that has no qualms about dividing the
body into its tiniest parts in order to recombine and re-sequence them. Corpses
are tied to the industrial period of Capital, but zombies are products of the
information age. Cioran (1976) notes how the modern focus on death has now
turned to birth. The nineteenth century clinics that once consolidated their
power over life by opening up a few corpses (Foucault, 1975) are now global
enterprises engaged in the development of technologies for generating organs,
growing hybrid bodies, and creating life in vitro. The move to control life at
the genetic level is driven, in part, by images of disorder and impurity (Duster,
1990), but also by the desire to structure flexible populations that support the
functions of an increasingly global, networked Capital.

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II.
In symbolic societies, a dead body is a point of infinite density where different
worlds collide, a singularity from which no energy can escape. These societies do
not have a utilitarian view of the body (cf. Baudrillard, 1993, pp. 131133). Of
course, there was no shortage of attempts by shamans, magicians, and priests to
bring dead bodies back to life in symbolic societies, and these efforts were already
a move in the direction of utility. In symbolic culture, the dead body ultimately is a
potential that no magic or priestly effort can bring under control. It is not only
dead, but deadly. Like a black hole, it pulls the living body into it and blocks all
escape. It is an object of pure corruption, a site of total ruin and contagion; it
seduces life in the most basic sense of that term, a fatal object that foretells its
own destruction. In its decay, the dead body is the very embodiment of pollution
and the essence of impurity (Douglas, 1966; Duster, 1990). These attributes are
the origins of every human effort to cleanse it, to neutralize its power and
transform it, finally, into something good, safe, and useful, a source of
enlightenment, an altruistic donor of organs and fluids (Healy, 2006), a
commodity (Scheper-Hughes & Wacquant, 2002), and a forensic tool (Timmermans, 2006).
Bataille writes that death, alongside sex and eating, is one of the ecstasies of
consumption (Bataille, 1988). It is a mode of the general economy of expenditure
and excess, not the limited economy of utilitarian production. The dead body
poses in the starkest terms the problem of the sacred and the profane. When a
dead body becomes a corpse, it becomes a profane thing. Actualized in the corpse,
the dead body becomes standing reserve in modern societies (Heidegger,
1977); it is targeted by a complex assemblage of desiring machines, technical
machines, and semiotic and decoding machines that convert it into a resource for
production and Capital. It becomes an object of probes and surveillance,
interpretation, and analysis and exchange. In an important sense, the corpse is a
more perfect docile body than the disciplined body described by Foucault
(1979, p. 136). Unlike the disciplined body that always resists its confinement, the
corpse lies still and doesnt move; it is open to any and all forms of examination.
The corpse, even more than the prisoner, represents an ideal of the modern
subject, and indeed has its own unique subjectivity, perfectly obedient, ready to
serve as a model and means of instruction, to work for any purpose, and set an
example to others.
III.
Open up a few corpses (Foucault, 1975).

Do we still ascribe to this method of combating mortality in which Foucault

situated the birth of the clinic and the rise of medical and State power? The corpse
becomes the object of the medical gaze and biopolitical production, and one of the

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dominant organizing figures of modernity. It is in the corpse that the gaze grounds
its claims to the truth of disease and becomes a force in the control of living
populations; the dead body, the very evidence of medicines failure (Aries, 1974;
Foucault, 1975), is turned back on that failure and, with the help of modern
scientific techniques of dissection and autopsy, becomes the new sign of its
success. We know, of course, that cutting up dead bodies had been prohibited
throughout much of Western history. Ancient societies did what they could to
insure that the body remained intact after death and was disposed of properly. The
medieval church in Europe was obsessed with problems of its integrity and
continuity in the afterlife, and viewed the whole, undivided body as necessary for
redemption (Nelkin & Tancredi, 1989). Viewing or touching it was strictly
controlled, and dissecting it for study was considered a sacrilege. Few believers
would consent to an autopsy, fearing it would imperil their salvation. Public
executions that dismembered the body were sometimes allowed, but only if they
offered the condemned the chance to confess his crime and thus be redeemed at
the last moment. Even then, dismemberment alone would make redemption
unlikely.
At the end of the eighteenth century in Europe, according to Foucault, there
was a new and spontaneous convergence between the requirements of political
ideology and those of medical technology (Foucault, 1975, p. 38). All of the old
medical practices yielded before the requirements of the gaze, and the new
techniques of optical control were linked to the space of freedom imagined by the
revolutionary movements of the modern age. Emerging states and medicine
formed an alliance to demand the suppression of every obstacle to the constitution
of this new space: Liberty is the vital, unfettered force of truth. It must, therefore,
have a world in which the gaze, free of all obstacle can assert a supreme mastery
over the truth (Foucault, 1975, p. 39). The first teaching clinics were established
to supplement and eventually replace the work done by the unorganized
patchwork of public hospitals and care facilities. The medical gaze re-mapped
the dead body and targeted it as an open field of investigation, as a thing to be
sliced up, observed, classified, and catalogued. At the same time, the value of
medical knowledge rose and the wealth and power of physicians grew. Medicine
became an ally in the States efforts to control its population and to the modern
insurance industry, which calculates death in probabilities that in turn calculate
profits. Foucault writes that a powerful myth developed in this period remains
with us today, although in new ways, that truth lies not in old doctrinal systems,
ruled by superstitions and prejudices, but in the interior of the body opened to
vision. The line of biopower from the dead body to the corpse is a revolutionary
and utopian path to the good life, abundant health, and the normal well-run
society.
These themes are familiar enough: the rising power of modern medicine and the
biological sciences, the connection of these discourses and technologies to State
power, the emergence of health monitoring systems to regulate populations.
Today, without doubt, we still open up plenty of corpses. The corpse as a
thing has not disappeared nor outlived its usefulness. It is still used in autopsies

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to train medical students, in forensic research (e.g., in studies of rates of decay to

improve time of death estimates in police investigations and trials, and to
resolve suspicious deaths), and in the trade in body parts. Research on disease
today can often substitute molecular samples from living bodies, but when this
proves impossible the tissues from corpses are still used. The corpse certainly
remains a dominant figure of obsession in the popular media (Six Feet Under,
forensics shows like CSI, reality TV autopsies) and on 24-hour news channels. We
have grown accustomed to detailed, gruesome, and repeated images of the dead
bodys degradation in the mass media, scenes of dismemberment, injury, murder,
torture, starvation, and genocide. As a result, the display of the violated dead body
has lost virtually all of the old taboos once associated with it. The corpse remains a
central figure in this general social voyeurism surrounding death. Death, more
than ever, must be witnessed, replayed, and, in its absence, simulated (e.g., in
preparedness training for terrorist attacks, in disaster cinema, in insurance
calculations, in medical instruction; this list is very long). In all this, then, the
corpse has not lost its status as an object of cultural fascination and an emblem of
contemporary society. Foucaults observation that it was a conduit for the
transmission of knowledge and power in the nineteenth century still describes its
function today.
Just as certainly, beyond Foucaults analysis, the biopolitical value of corpses has
diminished since the middle of the twentieth century. They are still used to teach
anatomy and surgery, but medical students increasingly use computer simulations. Forensic investigations still conduct autopsies, but they also turn to
statistical profiles to determine causes of death. Increasingly, medical research
uses cells harvested from living persons, not tissues from dead ones (Callen, 1995;
Nelkin & Lindee, 1995; Nelkin & Tancredi, 1989). Genetic technologies are
about decoding strings of proteins, not dissecting the bodies of corpses (Duster,
1990).
The production of corpses was part of a larger strategy of individuation as a
method of social control and capitalist accumulation in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Corpses, much like prisoners, are confined bodies subjected
to detailed analysis, experimentation, and exhaustive use (Foucault, 1979). They
are models for the discovery and eradication of abnormal tendencies in the
outside population (in our case, the living population outside the dissection
room). In the modern period in Europe, the dissection of corpses, like the
observation of delinquents, became a tool in the diagnosis and containment of
individual deviations from dominant norms of social health and conduct. Deleuze
writes that since the mid-twentieth century, however, information networks and
the demand by Capital for more fluid labor populations has gradually shifted the
strategy of control from individuation to dividuation (Bogard, 2007; Deleuze,
1992, p. 4). Whereas individuation is a process of molding something into a fixed
form, dividuation involves the continuous modulation of multiple forms. Despite
their use in dissection, corpses are still geared to the production of normal, whole
individuals, whether it is to supply temporary skin for burn victims, to train
surgeons, to solve crimes, or to donate organs to make people complete again.

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They are bulky and slow, however, when it comes to the needs of information
societies, where control of databases and codes, not the production of individuals,
is what matters. The dream of Frankenstein, to produce a living body from the
parts of corpses, is now the dream of genetic engineers to produce life in vitro. The
individuals future lies not in the corpse, but in his code, in dividuated,
informated, modular man. Increasingly, death appears a closed road to knowledge
and control of life, but birth is an open book. Who knows what monstrous forms
we can produce?
IV.
Life without passion, desire, or intensity. Birth without the body: a virgin birth,
analysed and sanitized, midwived by computers. Baudrillard paints a cold, grey
image of postmodern existence: life stripped bare by its technicians, like
Duchamps brides, then reclothed by them with all of the artifices of electronics,
as though with a second skin (Baudrillard, 1995, p. 64). Birth in a test tube, the
course of a life determined by screens at conception. Birth as the controlled
outcome of those screens, an event sorted out completely in advance with no room
for error.
What is a screen? A screen, simply put, is a filter or a mesh (Bogard, 1996). It is
a device that allows certain items to pass through and blocks the rest, a machine
for sorting different flows. By filtering out irregular or undesirable elements,
screens produce controlled, homogeneous flows, and this precisely describes their
despotic and exclusionary character; the power of screens is their capacity to
separate and rank differences. Screening, not surprisingly, is an important means
of social control. Screens divide (and protect) them from us, the impure
from the pure, the useful from waste or residue. If your life (your body, your
conduct, or your DNA) does not match the holes in the screen, you cannot pass
through.
We know that postmodern life in the West runs a gamut of screens, which have
developed far beyond their earliest uses as means of physical separation. Today
they control access to data with digital codes and passwords (Baudrillard, 2002;
Deleuze, 1992; Poster, 1990; Virilio, 1989, 1994). The corpse was a strategic tool
in the development of screens for disease in the general population (Foucault,
1975). In that sense, it was a precursor to current technologies that test for genetic
abnormalities. Knowledge gleaned from the corpse translated into tests able to
measure the state of health of the population, which in turn supported the
biopolitical strategies of the State (e.g., regarding the appropriate care of ones
body and ones health in relation to work, family, and ones obligations as a
citizen).
Postmodern screens, however, have a different function than corpses in one
important sense. They do not screen for abnormal bodies in populations, but prescreen patterns of information (encoded, e.g., in strings of DNA) to block the
reproduction of abnormalities before they even occur in the general population.
Screening, that is, begins with birth (in the sense of conception) not with death.

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Modern screens developed from the corpse help regulate the normative sphere of
society (Foucault, 1979), but postmodern screens control its formative sphere.
More exactly, the latter are pre-formative means of control: controls that generate
the conditions for having a particular embodied form at all. Why screen dead
bodies when you can pre-screen cells at the level of their genetic code and
eliminate the abnormal body, not just in practice but in its very format? Why be
concerned with dead bodies when the real problem is the genetic conditions of
birth at its inception? Just like terrorism today is fought with pre-emptive
strikes, so postmodern society fights the terror of being born badly or malformed
by pre-empting the form of birth itself.
Of course, this is not really news; for some time now, the trend has been to prescreen birth and manage the populations biological destiny in advance. Genetic
screening is the wave of the present, the open backdoor of eugenics (Duster,
1990), every strand of DNA pre-tested for significance and organic purity. This is
the dark side of the popular film Gattaca, where de-generate bodies are
systematically relegated to the lower ranks of society, barred from reproducing, or
eliminated altogether. Bad DNA? Then you are insignificant, you can never be a
complete subject, you dont deserve to be born; all part of a process that converts
life in its totality into data and distributes it on operating systems, hard drives, and
networks. This is postmodern biopower, pre-sorting your information and
compiling your (choose one or more) genetic, medical, political, legal, cultural,
aesthetic, gender, and racial profiles. Wrong profile? Then unless it is fixed in
advance, you have significance only as a risk, you are a handicap or, worse, you
dont deserve a life.
The drive to pre-screen birth is motivated by the quest for a new kind of
immortality. Virilio (2000, pp. 93106) traces it to a desire to perpetuate youth
not, as is traditionally thought, to become god-like or to never die. All of our
postmodern screens are created, he says, to place a prohibition on prohibition,
to enable us to do all of the things we were forbidden as kids. You dont have to do
anything youre told, you dont have to work, you dont have to worry, and you
dont have to grow up ever. After a certain pre-set time, you wont have to age.
Who needs to be a god anyway, with all of a gods responsibilities? All of our
screens today, all of the endless tests and filters and means of biological
homogenization we subject ourselves to, have the sole aim of endless youth. A
frightful utopia: childlike irresponsibility and godless immortality achieved
through complete technical control over birth (cf. Baudrillard, 2002, pp. 102
106). No more growing up.
Ironically, although the social assemblage that controls birth has a much
different function than the one that produces corpses, it still piles up dead bodies
everywhere. It still aligns itself with State and corporate violence, with a
biopolitical apparatus that increasingly targets the most defenseless elements of
populations. Virilio condemns, for example, the modern scientific abortion
apparatus, the experiments with cloning and genetic recombination, the traffic in
organs, the generation of organs from stem cells, the technologies that promote
genetic cleansing and gene-ocide, etc. (Virilio & Armitage, 2001). We do not

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have to accept the Catholic religious line of his argument to appreciate his disdain
with the alliance of biopower, information networks, and global Capital today.
How many dead bodies will it take to exert absolute control over birth? The
answer is that it will take the death of all bodies, where death is equated not just
with physical death but with the material bodys disappearance. The dream of the
system, beyond the return to childhood, is to dismantle corporeality absolutely. It
is a simple logic: no more body, no more having to grow up. The birth machine
works by decoding and deterritorializing a body its function is to strip the
human body down to basic elements of bio-information (organic codes, molecular
bonding formulae, etc.). Global corporate Capital today demands that bodies be
easy to program and re-fit for different applications at work, home, school, and so
on. The unitary material body is a thing of the past; today, research is directed to
growing modular body parts, producing flexible body functions, mobile labor
forces, organ markets, prosthetics, and cloning, hybridization, cellular regeneration, and genomics. The dividuated body, that is, the body as an effect of the
recombination and control of information, is the project of the present: to produce
a multiplicity of bio-flows coursing a global network (Deleuze, 1992; Harvey
1989). Deleuze and Guattari ask how one resists the forces that dismantle
corporeality today. Translated into Virilos terms, this is a problem of changing a
system bent on the production of childhood as a function network control, where
the body is so deterritorialized that it can be made to flow in any direction, so
decoded by information that it disappears.
V.
Night of the Living Dead, or Dead Alive, or Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or . . .

Although they are living dead bodies, the zombies in these classic horror films are
still related to the corpse; they all start out as human beings, as normal everyday
people. In Dead Alive (1993), the zombies are plague victims who become
murderous corpses, infected with the venom of a Sumatran rat. The protagonist
has to kill them with a lawnmower. In Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), the
zombies begin as corpse-like replicas of human beings that grow while the latter
sleep and repopulate their community. One character in the film is horrified by the
sight of his own unfinished body laid flat on a table, simulating his own corpse and
about to come to life. These films play on our fears of the dead body as a force of
lethal possession and site of evil, but also as a target of exploitation and control by
alien forces (Newitz, 2006).
Another genre of living dead horror film has emerged in the last 25 years that is
not about the corpse but rather about the genetically engineered body (Gattica;
Minority Report); the cyber-body (Blade Runner; I, Robot; Terminator; AI); or the
body as pure information (The Matrix). Unlike the classic films, the human beings
in these already start out as zombies, not the reverse. That is, they are born that
way. These films are about the birth of zombies, not their return after death.
Corpse films are still caught up in a problematics of truth that dates back to the

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clinic. Can the dead body be made to speak the truth about the living body? In
Night of the Living Dead (1968), the zombies are meant to represent a general truth
about life and the collective body in modern America; Americans have become
walking corpses with no minds of their own. In the cyber-film genre, however,
there is no problematics of truth, only one of the reproduction of a model. The
cyber-body is beyond true and false. As Baudrillard (1983) says, it is a simulation,
truer-than-true, a hyper-reality. The valids in the film Gattaca are engineered to
perfection in advance and replicated on demand (in-valids, the term for natural
birth children, conversely, do the dirty work of the society and will one day be
eliminated); in The Matrix, genesis is the code itself, pure and simple, and bodies
are just simulations or reproductions of some computer profile, with nothing true
to be discovered in them.
These are not horror films in same way as corpse films; their horror is not
about the dead body coming to life but rather the de-materialization of the body in
simulation, in information, in molecular logics, and so forth; they are not about
the physical bodys return but its conversion into data and its extinction. This
conversion results in an over-determinacy of living and dead forms that recalls the
symbolic order but with a twist; what we have is the triumph of an antiseptic
technology that simulates the reversibility of the symbolic but eliminates all
contingency and short-circuits desire (the dream of scientific projects like human
cloning and genetic engineering is to control the symbolic function of desire).
We should not overplay these distinctions of genre too much. All living dead
type films play on themes of the disappearance of the body, whether it is into a
different body or into information. The body is replaced with its double, which is
sometimes monstrous, sometimes indistinguishable from the original body,
sometimes engineered to perfection, but always missing or absent in some
fundamental sense. Beyond this, what we do see in cyber-body films is a new
problematic of life and death that emerges not at the level of the macro-level body
but at the molecular level and along micro-pathways of desire, and that takes on a
wider range and deeper intensity with the advent of postmodern network society.
We sense that power relations have fundamentally shifted, that the technologies
and scientific models have morphed beyond their former limits, that old categories
once anchored in those relations and technologies; the subject, the human being,
the body, the corpse, have been deconstructed, and that the very object, scale,
intensity, and nature of control over life has changed forever. A new figure of
global power emerges that regulates the tiniest details of life and, worse, over every
detail of birth, envisaging a utopia when the simple control of the materiality of the
body (re: Foucaults disciplinary power) is a thing of the past, when every birth is
pre-designed, every future already traced, and you can stay a kid forever.
VI.
Welcome to the Empire of the Living Dead, an economy of hybrid forms realized by
the new forms of biopower organized around the controlled modulation of
information. Hardt and Negri define postmodern Empire as an irresistible and

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irreversible globalization of economic and cultural exchanges, as well as a logic

and structure of rule; unlike previous forms of rule, this develops a new form of
sovereign subject. Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these
global exchanges (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. xi). Further, Empire is a decentered
and decentralizing apparatus . . . that manages hybrid identities, flexible hierarchies, and plural exchanges though modulating networks of command (Hardt &
Negri, 2000, pp. xii xiii). If we are to find the descendents of the corpse today,
the new living dead, it is within the historical context of such a system that we
should look.
By decentered and decentralizing, Hardt and Negri mean that biopower
within Empire is not concentrated in space but distributed across information
networks (cf. also Harvey, 1989). Postmodern biopower is not about controlling
fixed territories. It does not require physical enclosures or partitions to separate
abnormal from normal populations. Foucaults analysis of the disciplinary
institutions of enclosure must be updated to account for non-spatial, networked
forms of production and the management of subjectivity (Bogard, 2008). No more
need to confine bodies; all this is accomplished through pre-screening and
programming (in the way, for example, that scientists suggest that criminal
tendencies will be identified through genetic tests). Sovereignty today lies in
decoding series of chemical bonds. The radical achievement of biopower in
Empire is to informate life and release its control from the material constraints of
place, and this includes the constraints of the material body. There is no place
of sovereign power today. In Empire, control no longer requires walls to produce
docile bodies (Foucault, 1979, pp. 135169). It can program in docility in vitro.
And it no longer requires bodies either, just the molecular information to design
and fabricate them.
Postmodern biopower does not establish a fixed hierarchy of visibilities under
the control of a central gaze. It is not visibility that matters, but the retrievability of
data on a distributed network. It is not necessary to see bodies, only to register their
information and compare it against a set of coded parameters. This happens, for
example, every time you use a card swipe; the information on the card is decoded
against a database whose parameters (e.g., health status, credit status, etc.) are
adjustable in real time. Power here is not applied retroactively, but rather decoding
accompanies every connection to the database, whether by scanning barcodes or
retinas. Soon even this process will lose its physical component. Your genes will
come to you pre-swiped, everything about you will be decoded from
conception; no need even to carry a card or present your eyes for inspection by
the authorities.
Empire, Hardt and Negri write, manages hybrid identities. Hybrids are the
offspring of genetically, culturally, or technologically different parents, like biotech soybeans, cloned from the DNA of soybeans, viruses, insects, etc.; persons of
mixed race and sex (Canclini, 1995); or part flesh, part machine cyborgs
(Haraway, 1985). The dominant hybrid form in information control society is the
dividual, not the individual (Deleuze, 1992). Individuals are relics of modernity.
The individual subject, with all its associated rights and duties, is the product of a

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disciplinary assemblage perfected (and to that extent already obsolete) by the

middle of the nineteenth century in the West. The modern individual, however,
really is dead and gone today, too static in its form and too trapped in its body. It
resists confinement and is not easily adapted to the network controls of
postmodern Capital. The dividual is a more flexible form; it is programmable,
updatable, rewritable, and renewable. Individuals are molded or fixed forms
(persons, human beings, or corpses), but dividuals are settings within adjustable
parameters, that is, within numerical characteristics of a population, like credit
scores or risk ratings. Dividuation does not separate you from other individuals
(like, e.g., the dividing walls of the prison, the school, or the office), but from other
points along the parameter, and from other parameters that comprise your
multiple connections to distributed networks (your health information, voting
records, web surfing habits, and so on). The mark of dividuation, as Deleuze says,
is not your signature, but your account number, password and login (1992, p. 5).
Dividuals are not human beings or corpses. When we see a human being or a
corpse, we still see an individual, and to that extent still have modern eyes.
When we see a dividual, however, we see a sequence of numbers and letters, or a
profile on some computer screen.
Formal flexibility and multi-functional capabilities; these are the keys to
understanding the workings of subjectivity in Empire today, not individuation,
which results in rigidities and inefficiencies of production. Deleuze, we have
noted, uses the model of a mold to characterize the production of individuals,
against the model of modulation for the production of dividuals (Deleuze,
1992, pp. 45). A mold is a technology for casting a liquid material into a
hardened form, for mass producing a fixed, standardized product. In Foucaults
analysis, the production of the individual is perfectly consistent with the
development of mass society. Despite the old illusion that the individual is
somehow singular or unique, individualization is a means to regulate and
normalize life. Aggregated individuals tend to a median or distribute themselves
around a mean.
Modulation, conversely, is not concerned with means or central tendencies but
with real-time variations of matrices of information. It does not aim at fixed,
finished forms or finalized functions, but rather the freedom to micro-adjust
intensive events as they unfold. The term modulation is consciously borrowed
from the discourse of electronic communications, i.e., the transmission of an
impulse by imposing it on a carrier wave thereby changing the waves
frequency, amplitude, velocity, phase, its reverberation rate, its echo level, register,
distortion, ambience, etc. Changes in levels of intensity are changes in nature, not
changes in degree (De Landa, 2002, pp. 4546; Deleuze & Guattari, 1994). They
are numerical, but not additive (any more than you can add 328C to 338C and
get 658C) Modulation changes the nature of a wave, its very form of expression,
unlike a mold, which merely imposes a fixed form on a malleable substance. A
good example of modulation is the real time formatting capacities of digital music
software, which can dividualize sonic waveforms by adjusting their envelopes
on the fly, providing parametric control of the music as it plays. In the same way,

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the postmodern dividual is designed to adapt to all of the accelerated demands of

consumer society, to the swiftly changing imperatives of global labor, to media
polls and information bottlenecks, to shifting patterns of global exchange, in short,
to all of the new forms of sovereignty within Empire.
With this, we return to the problem of the corpse. Modernity replaces the
reversible semiotics of life and death in symbolic societies with an individualized
view of the dead body. This is behind all of the nightmares of its disintegration and
the horror of its return. The more it was cut to pieces, in the way Foucaults
prisoner or madman were studied and analysed to death, the more it returned as
the normal individual in the wider society. We can forget the corpse today. It
has become one more piece of information. In Empire, disintegrating flesh is not
the problem; what matters is the production of the hybrid body as a hinge in the
global system of consumption. Today the body is data trash, fabricated,
replicated, and deleted according to the whims of postmodern Capital (Kroker &
Weinstein, 1994). It is the dead body in its latest, most disenchanted and derisive
form, a mockery of the symbolic body it simulates.
However, is all this even about the body anymore? Marx believed that
Capital could not discard the living body and replace it entirely with dead labor
(i.e., machines), because only the living body could produce surplus value.
Marx did not really understand that dead bodies are not limits of Capitals
powers of exploitation. By turning them into corpses, into commodities, it
could still profit from them. Today, however, more profit can be squeezed
from information than corpses. Sign waves, square waves, straight waves;
ideally, this is what the body would be, waves subject to modulated control,
turn a knob and, at the molecular level, adjust the bodys velocity, rates of
compression and decompression, volume, rhythm, all in real time. Regulated
feedback, programmed syntheses, nanotechnical fabrication of animated forms,
the body as a simulation (Bogard, 1996), these are the dreams of postmodern
Capital. If it could, Empire would reduce every problem of the dead body (its
inertia, its sheer recalcitrance in the face of coercive power, its disintegration)
to a problem of genetic engineering. In the pre-birth technologies of Empire we
see in germ the final solution to the dangerous reversibility of life and death in
symbolic societies. These technologies dont abolish this reversibility, they
translate it into the controlled modulation of data. Empire, in its fullest
development, would simulate the symbolic body and program it with the overdetermined reversibility of a clone. The corpse, a figure of industrial Capital,
would then be just the first step in this historical translation of the body into
information.
Two extremes of a life: the cloned cell and the dissected corpse, each the
product of a rationality whose dream evolves from perfect health and the well
ordered society, to endless youth. The trajectory of biopower in the last century
has curved away from the dead body, which has begun to lose its fascination for us
along with its utility as a source of knowledge, value, and power. Power today is
power over birth, and the new forms of sovereignty will take advantage of all of the
current developments in bio-informatics, recombinant genetics, stem cell

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technologies, and parametric control to extend its reach. At first, it would seem
that the corpse and the clone have no obvious relation in terms of relations of
power and knowledge, but they are in fact parts of the same line in which
postmodernity pushes the forms of social control developed in modernity to their
logical conclusion. Just as disciplinary societies give rise to global information
networks in the twenty-first century, the corpse gives birth to the clone, its
paradoxical child in the process through which biopower is consolidated and
transformed into the sovereignty of global Empire.
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Biographical Note
William Bogard is DeBurgh Professor in Social Sciences at Whitman College. He has written
extensively on social control technologies and contemporary theory, and is currently researching
haptic technologies and their function in social stratification and change.