Death in Life: a Zombie Waitress and Her Boss Called “Corporate”

Abstract

Engaging an array of theoretical traditions – including feminist writing on bodies, anthropological perspectives on possession trances, and the masterful psychoanalytic concepts of Freud and Lacan – this article links reflections on dissociative “pathology” with the everyday realities of life under corporate capitalism, especially as they play out in the service industry. It examines serving as walking death. First the context in which we find the animated corpse is elaborated; then the conditions of its production and its practical and theoretical significance are explored. I argue that serving customers at a corporate chain effects death in life in one of two ways: the death of oneself absent in an entranced automatism – a self identified with a corporate agenda, often lost as the body rises to the surface – or the hyper-happy death of one’s honest connection with a body whose cues are ignored and senses converted as it is transcended by a mind defined by the corporation as right.