Ideas on the (Post)Apocalyptic

• The post-apocalyptic narrative is a fantasy or species of wish-fulfillment that expresses a desire for the end of civilization as we know it. The popularity of such films and novels suggest a range of audience responses and psychological conditions behind this wish:

1. Economic despair and disempowering socio-economic structuring lead to a fanciful embrace of post-apocalyptic narrative as a balm, compensation, a comfort. We imagine a future where all systems of power, all hierarchies of values, all bureaucracies and governing institutions are utterly leveled, creating a landscape of pure possibility where anything is possible. A Nietzschean “re-evaluation of all values” begins. The rigid class system enforced by unbridgeable chasms of wealth withers away, leaving only a meritocracy based in strength, wit, and a willingness to commit violence. Your station in life is determined by your fitness, not the position to which you are born: your future is no longer predetermined by your origins. A plumber becomes the leader of the new order.

2. Cultural artifacts (such as film and novels) function as temporary compensations for the economic hopelessness of the underclasses under global capitalism. These narratives of destruction are received as revenge fantasies. The world that has wronged the underclasses is destroyed; the economic machine that has ground them to dust is violently dismantled; the high classes are brought low and are forced to suffer poverty, deprivation, and insecurity along with the rest.

3. Many cultural artifacts articulate a powerful nostalgia—a desire to return to a simpler time without the complexities and petty annoyances of life in the first world: no technology, no social media, no cable television, no traffic. No one looks at a screen anymore; instead we hold a hoe and cultivate a bean field. It is a return to the land—to a bucolic, pastoral existence. However, this reverie is rarely the subject of the post-apocalyptic, which concentrates on the threat that other humans pose to each other in the state of nature. These states of rural perfection are always overturned or under threat from others.

4. In some post-apocalyptic narratives the focus is on environmental regeneration; the apocalypse can pave the way for a new earth that is healed from the pollution and destruction created by mankind. Nature returns, and throws off the dominant hand of mankind to assert its supremacy. Capitalism is destroyed. The anthropocene melts away: roads, bridges, cities, infrastructure, lie in rusty heaps.

5. Post-apocalyptic narratives often articulate a deep conservatism that presents a nostalgic return to more “traditional” social arrangements or structures, particularly those related to gender roles and sexual orientation/identities. In some cases this produces fantasies of a return to frankly sexist and racist social arrangements.

6. The post-apocalyptic narrative depicts cults of hypermasculinity that redress the “malaise” of the modern male–cowed by feminism, political correctness, and the social sanctions against putative masculine traits of competition, aggression, and violence. Fantasies of empowerment based in dominance, gun culture, adventure, subordination and control of others (particularly women) form.

7. Many of these films express an incipient or perhaps secret desire to destroy civilization because it is seen as enervating and feminized, lacking in masculine values or characteristics. Fight Club might be considered a symptomatic text. In the critique of the quiche-eating beta male and the emasculated office cubicle drones, we see a nostalgic desire to return to the hard masculinity of the past paired with powerful neo-primitivist fantasies.

8. We also see films and television with strong populist and anticapitalist features. Fight Club, Mr. Robot, all seem symptomatic here. As Tyler Durden remarks, we are “an entire generation pumping gas.” The trammeled underclass turns against the prevailing socio-economic structures and endeavor to destroy capitalism, which produces debt slavery. They blow up all the banks, resetting civilization to zero. #Jubilee.

• The post-apocalyptic signals anxiety about the loss of the symbolic traditions that previously helped us make sense of a chaotic and ambiguous universe. While our forebears inhabited a world ordered and made meaningful by a divine plan, we lack a telos; there is no longer a prevailing sense that God is at work in the wings of the world, shaping history for some future purpose, or poised to emerge deus-ex-machina to deliver us at the end. Events no longer have meaning or intent; they are merely things that happen after things that happen—an apparently discontinuous and unrelated stream of phenomena governed by nothing more than the physical rules of the universe and the haphazard, ephemeral agency of human beings. Progress is an illusion. The zombie apocalypse genre is particularly symptomatic as it features an inversion of the Christian resurrection: the dead rise again and walk the earth without salvation.

• A knowledge economy emerges that is centered on the forgotten practices required for the bare comforts of the human animal. Such basic, practical know-how has been so completely outsourced to technology or service industry that only a few possess the ability to: make fires, hunt for food, clean game, grow food, build shelters from raw materials, etc. The apocalypse reveals just how tenuous and interconnected the various systems are that provide for our basic needs in the present world. Foxfire books are used a currency. In other cultural domains we see the popularity of television shows based in survival, where we vicariously experience the wilderness or “prep” for various doomsday scenarios.

• Films where climate change is the main agent of the apocalypse often use the impending disaster to show how, at long last, humans can put aside their politics or nationalism to join together as human beings to defend civilization from a shared disaster. Alternatively, films where a disease outbreak precipitates the crisis often figure mankind as irredeemable.

• Mystery returns again to a world that had become typified by frictionless access to knowledge and the discovery of information. No longer can you: search wikipedia for a fact, connect with distant family and friends, etc. The world is now shaped by rumor, myth, sham spiritualism, magic, cults of personality; distance is an insuperable barrier to communication, organization, awareness. The universe shrinks to the local–to the modest circle accessible to the human senses. *But in truth, this is kind of bullshit, because Facebook has almost single-handedly returned us to a profoundly insular echo chamber bepopulate with chimeras, disinformation, and incitements not unlike what I described before.

• Without powerful forms of surveillance, bureaucratic systems, persistent record-keeping, licensing, and various forms of oversight, the freedoms of anonymity return along with certain cognate possibilities such as the reinvention of the self or imposture.

• The alien invasion narrative is an expression of a need for human solidarity on a grand, global scale in an era of fractured identity and caustic dissensus. To defeat the enemy, we must all work together and put aside our differences: race, sex, politics, national enmity. A universalism is forged in the invasion by something so radically other that all our differences are rendered trivial, illegible.