/lit/ - Literature

catastrophe is what comes after acceleration. and the reason why, perhaps, i keep circling back to Christianity is because Christianity does eschatology really, really well.

post-apoc sets ideology free, if that makes any sense. being a fascist after the bombs go off isn't the same thing as being a fascist before that. the same holds true for communism. under post-apoc circumstances, where history really does catch up with itself, and we find ourselves in the Big Nowhere, every ideology becomes, in a way, the same as every other. the race for CTRL of time comes to an end in a huge aporia.

you know what holds up fairly well under those circumstances? churches. post-apoc is neither fantasy nor is it sci-fi. it is more like Life After History, if that makes any sense. i wonder about this, sometimes, if the endgame of any such roundabout postmodern craziness is not, in fact, to conclude upon the necessity for disaster. i've said before that i believe post-apoc is simply the disaster externalized, and cyberpunk the disaster internalized: an explosion rather than an implosion, which is what cyberpunk is, i think: it's capital basically rewiring your own brain, from the inside, as much as the bombs rewrite the borders on the outside.

the post-apoc landscape is an *aporia.* the shared, enlightened bewilderment, at last. you're a fascist in that world? cool, good for you. good luck. you're still all about Gramsci? awesome. want to revive the Thinking Machines? sounds good to me.

the New World as such isn't a place where Hope exists in the same way as it does today, for us, however tortured and mutilated. the New World allows everyone to try whatever fantasies they want to try again, once more and with feeling, except with a caveat: we aren't all sucked into each other. in the aftermath of WW1, four years in which we learned that poets were not in fact a match for machine guns, people felt a similar vertigo. socialism answered the call, in a variety of ways. after 1990 a similar phenomenon, perhaps: what do we do with all this freedom? we still don't know. we have never known what to do with Max Freedom, except make conspiracies and political fantasies out of it.

maybe the church isn't supposed to compete for political power. maybe it only thrives under conditions of futility and impotence. that's where it actually shines. now there's a message i can get behind!

>>12446379
>>12446398
np gents, happy memeing and becoming massively depressed