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The title of this post is borrowed from a discussion Shawna and I were having about Allan Stoekl’s Bataille’s Peak. Part of Stoekl’s motivation for the text is what he and others have called “the end of The End of History,” meaning that 9/11 somehow invalidated Francis Fukuyama’s regrettable assertion that the collapse of the Soviet Union meant the end of History because, following Kojeve, we had arrived at the worldwide transmission of democracy and that, now, human equality was at its absolute peak. In other words, we had arrived at the end of all possible Events (in Badiou’s sense of the term). That someone could look at the world in the mid-90s and think that is silly, at best, but not the point here.

In a post on WorldChanging, Alex Steffen details a discussion he and Cory Doctorow were having about the unbelievability of post-apocalyptic fictions. This was something that I’ve actually been thinking about a lot lately. They posit a term called “the Outquisition,” suggesting that the new Utopianism for a declining America may lie in very smart people roaming around the country sharing new ideas and new technologies. All of this flies in the face of the model of post-apocalyptic life foregrounded in books like Alas, Babylon or (more importantly) The Road.

I like Steffen and Doctorow’s ideas a lot. As I’ve been paying a lot of attention to the growing food crisis (brought about by ethanol, by the way), the falling dollar, the increasing irrelevance of American politics, and the collapse of a lot of infrastructure, I’ve been reading a lot more about survivalism (which is interesting, given that my dad went through a similar period in the 70s). Problematically, I find that I don’t believe the rhetoric. Part of the doom & gloom verbiage of survivalist literature hinges on The End of the World, but as Fredric Jameson (probably) said “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.” I’m starting to think that this quote might be a positive, actually. The real problem with End of the World discourse is just that: it posits a radical break, an Event so jarring that we become completely unmoored from History itself.

When I first read Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, it scared the shit out of me (much as I would imagine Threads scared the shit out of a lot of people in the 80s). Only much later (and in the context of my worrying about whether or not I should be stockpiling ammunition), did I start to think how full of shit that book is. The idea that a nuclear war would be survivable is silly (although, Philip K. Dick’s Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep? makes it seem more believable), but, similarly, the world McCarthy sees is really a post-Modern updating of the West, as constructed in books like Blood Meridian. The fact that McCarthy falls back on post-apocalyptic cliches shows that he hasn’t really thought about the future and, I think, this might mark out one of the reasons the book (and other SF-troped books by non-genre writers) is a piece of crap that gives Science Fiction (and thinking) a bad name.

Wow. That was angrier than I’d intended. The point I’m trying to get at is the fact that McCarthy’s world view seems to have people going through a thought process something like this: “wow! everyone is dead and there’s no more working power stations. Oh well, time for cannibalism.” The likelihood of that seems less than an alien invasion. What I ultimately mean is that the problem with so many post-apocalyptic narratives and what is so smart about Steffen and Doctorow’s Outquisition is tied up in questions of the absolute Endedness of the End. In other words, Steffen and Doctrow refuse the idea that an Event of the magnitude of governmental collapse in the US is actually a complete break with History (because, really, such an idea is silly). Memory persists and, frankly, the technological innovation of the United States seems to suggest that such a radical break wouldn’t likely occur. It always bugged me that no once thought about solar or wind or water power in The Road: ultimately, I think we have to realize that books like McCarthy’s are pornographic survivalist fantasies.

While I am, perhaps, putting my faith in a salvation narrative, which is something Stoekl’s book really shreds up, the idea that creativity and innovation will respond to an Event seems more likely than the idea that we will all start eating each other. Maybe not, though. So much post-apocalyptic (or at least anti-Utopian (which is what the Steffen piece is be talking about)) SF is filled with images of human degradation (for instance, I’m reading Octavia Butler’s Clay’s Ark (which is her, best, imo) and it features a lot of savagery and brutality that his reminiscent of the Mad Max films). I’m especially thinking of Richard K. Morgan’s Market Forces in which the poor are so degraded that they approach the level of animals in terms of behavior, so much so that socialism has completely given up. I wonder how willing people are to be saved (probably pretty high, actually) following a traumatic Event (although the creation of the U.S. Security State after 9/11 suggests that people are pretty busy looking for saviors after a major, national trauma).

Nonetheless, this idea of creative solution to world changing problems suggests that we may be close, as a society, to transcending the notion of the End. I’m particularly excited about this possibility of the End of Ends because, while they are compelling, visions of the End of the World get really boring and, ultimately, fall apart if you pick at them. For me, though, I’m interested to see what comes after the End of “the End of.”

Image Credit: El árbol de la vida by “• 7”:http://flickr.com/photos/eyedeaz