Understanding the Apocalypse

Of Technology and Apocalypse, or Whose Independence Day?

Christopher Keep, 2004 (from the independent journal Reconstruction)

<1> The scene is now familiar. The cities of the world are in ruins. The Empire State Building obliterated. The White House reduced to rubble. The remnants of humankind gather in the desert, scrounging together what remains of their air defence systems for one last effort to repulse the alien invaders. Haggard but determined, the last American President prepares to lead his motley crew of resistance fighters into the fray. He takes the hand mic, tests it once or twice, and his voice crackles over the speakers. "In less than one hour," he announces, "aircraft from here will join with others from around the world. And you will be launching the largest aerial battle in the history of mankind. Mankind. That word should have new meaning for all of us. We can't be consumed with our petty differences anymore. We will be united in our common interest. Today is the Fourth of July...and should we win the day, the Fourth of July will no longer be known as an American holiday, but as the day when the world declared in one voice, we will not go quietly into the night, we will not vanish without a fight....Today we celebrate our Independence Day!" The music swells on a tide of oceanic strings. The thin veneer of self- reflexive irony and the playful quoting of earlier cinematic doomsday scenarios suddenly disappears behind a cloud of patriotic cheering. This is our Independence Day.

<2> In the long shadow cast by the events of September 11, 2001, the scene is not only familiar, it has become uncanny, that curious admixture of the known and the unknown that causes a sense of psychological unease, even distress. The destruction of an iconic piece of the New York skyline, the spectre of an alien force at once both primitive and technologically advanced besieging our way of life, a president wearing a flight vest, exhorting his troops to victory. But this is not a newsroom briefing from the war on terror, but the 1996 film Independence Day, one of a spate of such apocalyptic fantasies that dominated the box office in the late nineties, and seemingly scripted the events to come. ID4, as it was abbreviated for its ad campaign, together with Armageddon, Deep Impact, Godzilla, and a host of others, might be said to have prepared the American viewing public for the unimaginable, the attaining of its own desires, the realization of its own fantasies about the end times. As Slavoj Zizek has argued, "corrupted by Hollywood, the landscape and the shots we saw of the collapsing towers could not but remind us of the most breathtaking scenes in the catastrophe big productions [of recent cinema].... Not only were the media bombarding us all the time with the talk about the terrorist threat; this threat was also obviously libidinally invested....the unthinkable which happened was the object of fantasy, so that, in a way, America got what it fantasized about, and this was its greatest surprise."

<3> Derived from the Greek apokalupsis, meaning to uncover or reveal, apocalypse is defined as a supernatural unveiling of transcendent truth, a divine revelation of things to come. It is in this sense, as a communication, typically offered by some supernatural agent such as an angel, that the term is used in the New Testament, the final book of which contains the "apocalypse" or revelation of St. John the Divine. The powerful influence of this vision, which details the frightful calamities of the end times, the coming of the New Jerusalem, and the marriage of Christ to the Lamb of God, has been such as to associate the term in the popular consciousness with eschatology, with the very concept of the "end." Hence while Biblical scholars, such as John J. Collins, use the term to refer to a specific genre of religious writing, one which would include not only the Revelation of St. John the Divine, but the books of Daniel and Ezekiel, and literary scholars, like Northrop Frye, understand it to refer to a pattern of symbolism that includes the figures of the garden, the sheepfold, and the city, the most common use of the term is to refer to images of disaster and catastrophe, images which suggest not so much the harmonious closure of history, as its radical rending from without-comets, foreign plagues, alien invaders, these have been the stock in trade of the secular apocalyptic tradition, from Mary Shelley's The Last Man and H.G. Wells' The War of the Worlds to ID4. The apocalypse, in this sense, references not so much a form of epistemology, or a literary genre, as a kind of desire, or more precisely, a structure of desire, that is profoundly ahistorical, indeed, which might be thought of as the desire for the end of history as such, and the abolition of the dialectical force of difference that drives it ever forward. As Jean Baudrillard writes,

What sometimes renders the real fascinating -- and the truth as well -- is the imaginary catastrophe which lies behind it. Do you think power, sex, economics...would have held up for a single moment unless sustained by fascination, a fascination that comes precisely from the image in which they are reflected, from their continuous reversion, the palpable pleasure borne of their imminent catastrophe? (46)

No single text so captures this fascination for the real, this desire which returned to American audiences with such uncanniness on 911, as ID4. If the alien invasion films of the 1950s played out fears of the rise of communism following the launch of Sputnik, then Independence Day rehearses on a cosmic scale the outcome of the Cold War and the invention of the War on Terror: Democracy has won. Capitalism has won. The West has won. America has won. But the victory has been a curiously hollow one, leaving the west without a distinctive "other" against which it might secure its claims to self-identicality and precipitating a kind of ontological panic concerning the conceptions of nationhood and masculinity in the modern era.

<4> The contradictions inherent in the liberal apocalypse, that notion of the end in which, as the President says, all our "petty differences" will give way to an image of global harmony, are visibly inscribed in his speech to the troops. In the first instance, it is a clarion call to resist an imperial power: like John of Patmos exhorting the seven churches in The Revelation of St. John the Divine, the President calls upon his followers to rise up against the alien forces that would colonize the earth in order to exploit its raw resources. But this anti-imperialism serves only in the name of another, greater form of imperialism, that enacted in the name of democratic liberalism itself: Henceforth the Fourth of July, the great day of American self-aggrandizement, will be independence day for all the world. Local differences of language, culture, and history will give way to a single, uniform, and universal model of the nation. Cutting between scenes of British, French, Russians, and Arabs enthusiastically consenting to fulfil the American dream of national selfhood (the film's President Whitmore seems to have been more successful in his coalition building than his real-life counterpart), ID4 imagines a New Jerusalem built on the model of a suburban Cineplex theater -- dozens of screens all playing the same movie. Forever and ever.

<5> This vision of an emergent global culture at the end of history is not unique to ID4. Discussion of the philosophical and social ramifications of a transnational, capitalist economy first came to prominence through Francis Fukuyama's The End of History and The Last Man. The film, in fact, seems to literalize or at least dramatize many of the key features of Fukuyama's vision of a liberal apocalypse. Both texts proclaim the ultimate triumph of capitalism and democracy in the face of adversity. Both place at the heart of this triumph the struggle for man to know himself as a man, that is to say, to achieve a kind of unmediated relationship with himself as himself. And both postulate that from this struggle for recognition, history, not as the mere recorded sequence of events unfolding in time, but as a single, coherent evolutionary process, will come to a close. ID4 can be read, in a sense, as a kind of finely tuned radio receiver, its Dolby noise reduction and THX sound imaging systems allowing us to hear the deep ideological contradictions and occlusions that rumble in the bass register of Fukuyama's text. In particular, the film reveals something of the ways in which the liberal apocalypse effaces the alternate histories of women, sexual dissidents, religious sectarians, and people of color in the very act of calling for "one voice." The social insecurities of the present, the unmanageable fractiousness not only of Al Qaeda, but of its more proximate counterparts, the Branch Davidians, the Unabomber, the Montana Mountain Men, and a host of other millenarian cults, can be contained and ultimately resolved only through a reimagining of the nation itself. In "Dissemination," Homi Bhabha argues:

The barred Nation It/Self, alienated from its eternal self-generation, becomes a liminal signifying space that is internally marked by the discourses of minorities, the heterogeneous histories of contending peoples, antagonistic authorities and tense locations of cultural difference. (148)

It is precisely such "tense locations of cultural difference" that the liberal apocalypse dreams of eliminating in its urge toward a unity premised on the ideal of equality. The nation at the end of history is a signifying space without margins, and without exteriority, a homogenous domain of the same. Liberalism, in this scheme, takes as its telos the very end of difference as such; the need to render every constituent equal to every other requires the expulsion of otherness from the interior of the socius. As Zizek urges, "Whenever we encounter such a purely evil Outside, we should recognize the distilled version of our own essence." The alien, the terrorist, the other that returns to us does so not to bring our culture down, but to realize our deepest needs and desires.

<6> A Rand Corporation analyst and former Bush administration policy advisor, Fukuyama first proposed his claims concerning the end of history in an article in the neo-conservative journal The National Interest in 1989 and then expanded those claims into a best-selling book in 1992. He argues that the collapse of communism constitutes empirical evidence of its failure to meet the inherent needs and desires of its people. "Liberal democracy," he writes, "remains the only coherent political aspiration that spans different regions...liberal principles in economics have spread, and have succeeded in producing unprecedented levels of material prosperity, both in industrially developed countries and in countries that have been...part of the impoverished Third World" (xiii). Little troubled by the unevenness of such "prosperity" or by the inequities of the division of labour by which it has been produced, Fukuyama boldly claims that we have come to the very brink of history. This is not to say that events of significance will cease to occur, or that time itself might stop, but rather that there will "be no further progress in the development of underlying principles and institutions, because all of the really big questions will have been settled" (xii). This is the end of History in the Hegelian sense: the evolution of the World Spirit is not random but teleological; it proceeds dialectically, manifesting itself in different nations at different epochs, but moving ever forward to that time in which it would it overcome the self division of alienation and achieve self-presence in the form of a single global political system [1].

<7> Proclaimed by Allan Bloom and others as "bold and brilliant," The End of History and the Last Man was the subject of considerable debate both in the popular and academic press in the 1990s, much of which was decidedly negative [2]. But what is of particular interest about the book is not whether or not Fukuyama misappropriates Hegel (there is, after all, a long and honored tradition in this), but its cultural function as a Book of Revelation for the post-911 generation. Two main mechanisms of historical development underpin Fukuyama's sense of historical development. The first is the role of technology in the emergence of consumer-oriented capitalism and the second is the need for inter-subjective "recognition" in yoking capitalism to liberal democracy. As David F. Noble has argued, the belief in technology as means of attaining a kind of spiritual perfection has a long history in western culture, and is much deeper than the current divide between science and religion might presently suggest. What is more, such a belief is fundamentally millenarian in character, informed by "an apocalyptic spirit which held out the promise for fallen man of a return to Edenic grace" (57). Fukuyama reinvents this narrative of technology's capacity to usher in a new millennium, by suggesting that the paradise we are destined to find at the end of history is not that of Milton, but of Adam Smith.

<8> Briefly put, that narrative goes roughly like this: The advent of the scientific method in the seventeenth century changed humans' relationship to the natural world, not only by separating the two from one another, but by acknowledging the former's right and ability to master the latter. From this altered relationship comes the new technologies that assure that successful societies necessarily develop in the direction of capitalism. Fukuyama pursues this argument along two lines. First, technology gives certain societies military advantages over their counterparts who must, in turn, modernize in order to protect themselves and become, in the process, capitalist. Second, technology transforms the modes of production of a society, and thus makes possible "the limitless accumulation of wealth, and thus the satisfaction of an ever- expanding set of human desires" (xiv). Technology, in this schema, is the Mechanism that directs or regulates historical development. That is to say, it transcends a mere culturally and historically-specific ideology and attains to the level of a "universal" principle. It proceeds, we are told, "according to certain definite laws laid down not by man, but by nature and nature's laws" (xiv). One passage deserves particular attention:

Apart from fast-disappearing tribes in the jungles of Brazil or Papua New Guinea, there is not a single branch of mankind that has not been touched by the Mechanism, and which has not become linked to the rest of mankind through the universal economic nexus of modern consumerism...Those that were not defeated by superior military technology were seduced by the glittering material world that modern natural science has created. While not every country is capable of becoming a consumer society in the near future, there is hardly a society in the world that does not embrace the goal itself. (126)

The passage is remarkable in a number of ways. There is, first, the startling opening exception, those tribes in the jungles of Brazil or Papua New Guinea whose speedy and one can not help but think fortuitous disappearance will quickly remove them from consideration. But, perhaps more to the point, is the claim for the "universality" of natural science that allows him to dispense with those tribes so easily. Fukuyama insists that the wide-spread evidence of industrialization is such that while natural science "had to be invented at a certain point by certain Europeans" it can not, in and of itself, be considered a reflection of European biases. Such a claim is indicative of the quasi-evolutionary rhetoric that pervades his version of the apocalypse: if capitalism has survived communism it must be because it is better adapted to the environment of human needs and desires. The ways in which such needs and desires take shape in relation to the social conditions of production remain unaccounted for by a model that assumes a self-knowing subject untouched by the material conditions of its historical moment.

<9> And it is here that one can turn back to Independence Day to see the kind of logical impasse that the assumed universality of the scientific method serves to occlude. As for Fukuyama, the central drama of this film also involves the struggle of a technologically-oriented humankind against nature. Formally, ID4 might be said to be the forerunner of all subsequent Hollywood blockbusters more dependent on the latest generation of computer graphics than on the traditional narrative machinery of plot and character development. It is, in this sense, an extended demonstration of the power of technology to subdue the body-as-nature: with its overwhelming visual and auditory impact, the film seeks not simply to capture our attention but our organs, to blur the line between special effects and somatic affects. This is a film not content with dominating the space of the screen; it reaches out into the audience, bypassing even the nominal line of resistance that is the critical function of the mind in its effort to achieve an irresistible hold on the body itself. So complete is its direct stimulation of the nervous system that it scarcely requires a narrative at all, and, indeed, the one it provides is the slightest excuse for orchestrating its various spectacles.

<10> Even so, the narrative seeks to reproduce and reaffirm within the diegesis the triumph of technology over nature. While the aliens arrive in city-size spaceships that can withstand nuclear weapons, they are, as beings, more closely associated with a form of primitive insect life than with the self-aware "last men" of Fukuyama's capitalist technotopias. Like Wells's Martians, they are more indicative of the dangers of an over dependence on technology, than they are emblems of its capacity to yield a form of moral and spiritual perfection. In one notable scene, President Whitmore confronts a captured alien and is able to learn its thoughts through a telepathic link. "I saw its thoughts," he reports. "I saw what they're planning to do. They're moving from planet to planet, their whole civilization. After they've consumed every natural resource, they move on. And we're next. Nuke 'em. Nuke the bastards." As mere unthinking, unfeeling "locusts," the aliens lack any of the more advanced attributes that Fukuyama, after Hegel, would associate with a technological society. They do not possess language, communicating simply through thought transference, and they have not sublimated the primitive desires for self-gratification. In Whitmore's estimation, they are motivated solely by appetite, the need to fulfil bodily needs. In fact, in trying to combat the aliens as another technological society, the humans are repeatedly thwarted. Los Angelinos' bullets, conventional air strikes, even nuclear weapons delivered by stealth bombers, all fail before the impenetrable shields of the invader's spacecraft. But when cable TV operator David Levinson strikes on the idea of giving them a "cold," that is, disabling the alien computers with a software "virus," he effectively alters the terms of the conflict. Only by considering the invaders as biological forms that might be "infected," even if only cybernetically, are the aliens vulnerable. And it is here that the unacknowledged eurocentrism of Fukuyama's "universal" Mechanism crackles most loudly from the booming sub-woofers of ID4's sound system. Armed only with his Apple PowerBook, Levinson uses conventional dial-up modem software to connect his computer to that of the aliens and to transmit his encrypted virus into their mainframe computers. The scientific method is, it would seem, so much a part of nature, so truly universal that it has developed the same communications protocols on every planet in the galaxy.

<11> What worries Fukuyama about the end of history, however, is not what is lost by the increasing homogenization of cultures as they are brought into closer contact through the insistent need to modernize. Nor is it the enshrinement of capital and its forms of social inequity as a kind of divine order of things. It is rather the prospect of getting what we want, of achieving our dreams of transcendence and becoming, in the process, "men without chests." The phrase is Nietzsche's, but for Fukuyama it signifies the danger of men who no longer need to struggle and hence no longer strive for excellence. "Is not the man who is completely satisfied by nothing more than universal recognition," he asks rhetorically, "something less than a full human being, indeed, an object of contempt, a 'last man' with neither striving nor aspiration? Is there not a side of the human personality that deliberately seeks out struggle, danger, risk, and daring, and will this side not remain unfulfilled by the 'peace and prosperity' of contemporary liberal democracy?" Fukuyama identifies this fundamental need for struggle as an expression of thymos, a term adopted from Plato referring to the spiritedness of the soul but which is pressed into service here to mean something like self-worth or dignity. It signifies a need to be recognized not as superior, but as equal to one's fellow humans. And it is this higher form of recognition that characterizes the modern liberal democracy. "Thymotic pride," he writes, "leads [people] to demand democratic governments that treat them like adults rather than children, recognizing their autonomy as free individuals. Communism is being superseded by liberal democracy in our time because of the realization that the former provides a gravely defective form of recognition" (xix). The end of history, in this sense, is not so much our salvation, as a crisis; the end of difference that it affords is also the undermining of the primary condition of selfhood, the need for recognition. As Baudrillard notes, this reversal, this moment when the thing most feared is revealed as the thing most longed for, is the real disaster at the heart of the structure of apocalyptic desire.

<12> Fukuyama's anxiety for "men without chests," his fear that the real threat posed by the end of history is an end of traditional masculine values, is a distinctive feature of the apocalyptic desire that has sought in technology a vehicle for transcendence. "Insofar as the technological project was now aimed at the recovery of Adam's prelapsarian perfection," Noble writes, "...it looked back to a primal masculine universe and forward to the renewal of that paradise in a masculine millennium" (210). So, too, Fukuyama's millennial dream, as Mark Poster has observed, "is easily comprehensible as the end of the white, male metanarrative, the end of the heroic bourgeois epoch, and the emergence of a time in which nonthymotic types are able to maintain full agendas without filling time by auto racing" (64). ID4, however, firmly puts such fears to rest, for here the apocalypse provides ample opportunity for our "men without chests" to recover something of their megalothymia. As the film opens, former fighter pilot and hero of Desert Storm, President Whitmore is in the role of the mother, gently tending to his daughter while Cross-Fire is on the TV. As he leaves the room we hear one pundit sum up his presidency to date, "That's the problem. They elected a warrior and got a wimp." His aide Connie agrees: "Age was never an issue when you stuck to your guns," she tells him. "You were thought of as young, idealistic. The message is getting lost. There's just too much politics. Too many compromises." And this problem, that modern liberal democracies tend to get bogged down in the compromises necessitated by the politics of special interest groups, the environment, and political correctness in all its manifestations, appears systemic. Much like the concerns that arose in the wake of 911 that the federal agents responsible for national security had became mere bureaucrats, too closely observing the niceties of regulations in the careerist pursuit of promotion, so too all of the male leads in this film confront a sense of emasculation. Levinson, for example, is an M.I.T.-educated genius who has settled for an unchallenging job at a cable TV company. His lack of manly ambition has cost him his marriage and is closely tied by the film's tropology with his incessant attention to recycling and the dangers of smoking: even at the height of the alien invasion he stops to throw a pop can in a blue box and lectures his father on the dangers of second-hand smoke. Captain Steve Hiller, by contrast, is bristling with thymotic ambition and drive, but he can't realize his one great dream of entering the space program because, in the words of his friend, he hasn't learned to "kiss ass."

<13> The apocalypse changes all that: the destructive forces unleashed by the aliens might kill millions of people, but they also strip civilization of its troublesome "politics," envisioned here not only in such bureaucratic figures as the duplicitous Chief of State, but in a whole range of social undesirables. Among the first to go is the party girl/stripper Tiffany who, despite the warnings of her family-oriented co-worker Jasmine, goes to greet the aliens atop a building where she is among the very first to be incinerated by the aliens's death ray. Then there's the film's queer character, Marty Gilbert. Initially seen camping it up around Levinson's office, then hiding under a desk talking to his mother on the phone, Gilbert meets his demise while, in another horrendous cliche, trying to get his psychiatrist on his cell phone. A similar fate befalls even such marginally-queer characters as Hiller's friend, Jimmy Wilder. Having first been shown down on his knees giving Hiller "ass kissing" lessons, then playfully resting his head on his friend's shoulder, Wilder is vaporized in the cockpit of his jet fighter after failing to heed the warnings of his superior officer. Crazy intellectuals, alcoholic 'Nam vets, and even that most neglectful of mothers, the First Lady, all meet speedy and spectacular ends. Thus, while the film at first glance presents an admirably diverse if stereotypical coalition at its heart, showing a WASP President working in close alliance with an African American fighter pilot and a Jewish American scientist, this liberal vision of cooperation seems wholly dependent on expunging a variety of other forms of dissonance that might disrupt the "one voice" for which the President calls.

<14> Amidst the carnage of the alien invasion, our "last men" rise to meet the challenge, the galactic struggle for recognition, posed by aliens. The President fires his Chief of Staff, dons his flight suit and personally leads the counter-offensive in his F-18 fighter bomber. Hiller finally realizes his dream of space travel, helping Levinson pilot a captured alien craft back to the mother ship where they successfully infect it with a digital cold. As the three men meet in the film's closing sequence, massive, wide-angle panorama shots show them swaggering across the desert where they are greeted by cheering, loving women, each of whom has shown a renewed commitment to the institution of marriage and the importance of standing by your man. And, if any further indication is required that these men now have chests, the formally asthmatic Levinson is shown proudly chomping on a stoagey. "So. This is healthy?" quips his father. "I could get used to it," Levinson replies, his eyes lit with steely thymotic pride. The apocalypse, in short, has allowed the "message" of man's "true" self to manifest itself.

<15> The imperialism that underlies both ID4 and The End of History and the Last Man revives and intensifies the antipathy toward difference that organizes and subtends the structure of apocalyptic desire. As Steven Goldsmith argues, "The Book of Revelation describes the violent end of history that results in the New Jerusalem, with its transcendental harmonies that are at once purely formal...and social; at the same time, this narrative...describes the end of historical differences, as if the vanishing of difference were itself a necessary and inevitable component of social redemption and liberation" (20). In these modern texts, as in the marriage of Christ with the Lamb, difference must be exteriorized, forced to the margins of the socius, but only so that it may return in the form a pure other, a force of inherent, unproblematic evil, against which the anointed may come to recognize themselves as themselves, that is, as the anointed, and thus attain their rightful place in the great design, whether this be of God's ordering or that of Fukuyama's similarly transcendent Mechanism of natural science. The paradox that lies at the heart of the apocalyptic discourse of the late-twentieth century is that the dream of homogeneity requires the continual reinvention of difference, not so much as a punching bag for the unfulfilled thymotic energies of the last man, but as part of the deep logic of that dream. Reading The End of History and the Last Man as if it were the shooting script for the film Independence Day is not to argue that the one influenced the other, but to discover ways in which we might better understand the ideological stakes in the current debates concerning the "war on terror" and the "inevitable triumph" of liberal democracies in the post-911 era. In the face of an increasingly undifferentiated global culture, one which may yet find itself celebrating the originary moment of American independence as its own, we must look to understand the cultural and historical mechanisms by which the values of technologically-enabled capitalism and democracy attained to such seeming universality.  

Notes

[1] On Hegel's role in the current debates concerning "post-history" see Lutz Niethammer, Posthistoire: Has History Come to an End?, trans. Patrick Camiller (New York: Verso, 1992), and Allan Stoekl, "Round Dusk: KojŠve at 'The End,'" Postmodern Culture 31 (1995): 37-56. [^]

[2] Apart from Poster, noted below, useful discussions of Fukuyama's thesis can be found in Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Morning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Routledge, 1994), and in Perry Anderson, A Zone of Engagement (New York: Verso, 1992). [^]

Works Cited

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Collin, John J. "Towards the Morphology of a Genre." Semeia 14 (1979): 1-20.

Frye, Northrop. The Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957.

Fukuyama, Francis. The End of History and the Last Man. New York: Free Press, 1992.

Goldsmith, Steven. Unbuilding Jerusalem: Apocalypse and Romantic Representation. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993.

Independence Day. Dir. Roland Emmerich. Twentieth Century Fox, 1996.

Noble, David F. The Religion of Technology: The Divinity of Man and The Spirit of Invention. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

Poster, Mark. Cultural History and Postmodernity: Disciplinary Readings and Challenges. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997.

Zizek, Slavoj. "Welcome to the Desert of the Real." The Global Site. Online. Internet.1 January, 2004. http://www.theglobalsite.ac.uk/times/109zizek.htm.