Welcome to the Desert of the Real

Brian McHale has claimed that there is a" peculiarly postmodern form of temporality: the vision of apocalypse, of the end of history."  While that has been clearly evident, in a seemingly obsessive way, in the novels of Douglas Coupland, as well as the eco-disaster of Davis Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, it has somewhat appeared overly paranoid.  Of course Slavoj Zizek would argue that paranoia is the naturalized conditioin of post-modernity, and his work Living in the End Times explores some of the current situation.  But, it is becoming more and more clear that apocalyptic concerns are not solely in domain of neurotic writers in the world of postmodernism.  It is an ever present element in the historical world of post-modernity itself.   From the closed White House meetings of Ronald Reagan and Ollie North, to the continued lunatic ramblings of Michele Bachmann, to the violent injections of Al Qaeda et al into the civilized world, the end of modernity (and the Cold War) has seemed unsatisfactory to those who wished that it would have been the end of history as well.  However, the attempt to end history has only projected it father along, throwing us back in.  As Baudrillard notes in The Illusion of the End, we are erasing our progress. I conjecture that this eschatology is not just on the minds of a few extremists, it is part of the fabric of the current historical reality.  The break in the signifying chain that has revealed not only the underlying gaps in mental processes (the Symbolic and linguistic), but has been injected into the physical and practical as well.  The ideology that holds back the Real from invading the civilized Symbolic world is no longer sustainable.  The sooner we realize this danger, of ideology as means to sustain civilization, the sooner we can avoid further calamities like the one in Paris today. The message of Zizek's Welcome to the Desert of the Real continues, and will continue, to return.

For now, we can only reflect on how far we haven't come since 9/11: