When I was at RSA this year, one of the papers I heard mentioned that Karl Marx connect vampires to capitalism. “Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks” ( Capital needs citation). Marx was a bit fascinated by the supernatural. With this in mind, it’s not so strange to connect the figure of the vampire with capitalism.
Several other papers I heard talked about the media and the way they present a sort of cult of the exceptional. Individuals are held up and made into scapegoats, examples of evil people who just happened to be in positions of power. Catharsis results and we all calm down. Although the papers I heard were not interested in pursuing alternatives to capitalism, it seemed to me that the exceptional evil capitalist allows us to place the blame on individuals and ignore the possibility that the system itself is broken. Or, if not broken, inherently problematic.
I’m not entirely certain yet how I want to make this connection, but Thomas pointed out to me that lately that there has been a sort of obsession lately (he says lately; I’m skeptical) with vampires. But not just vampires, really, “good” ones. Romantic, heroic ones. At least since Anne Rice, this is the sort of vampire we’re interested in.
So I guess one of my opening interests is in this trend toward the positive exceptional individual, and how (if?) it intersects with questions of economics, given that my friend Karl has already invited the vampires to the party.
