The End of “The End of”?
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.
