wake up, wormblr, it's time for your irregularly scheduled schizopost:
so in an earlier post i discussed the ways in which worm resembles literature of the first world war--its style of violence, its psychoanalytic tropes--but i believe now that that was inaccurate. where i recognized one of worm's defining characteristics (its lack of ideology) i failed to put it in the appropriate theoretical framework. i now understand it is End-of-History Fiction.
i reached this insight while reading about the contemporary mexican civil war: i believe that, just james cameron's Avatar is essentially gillo pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers repackaged to be sold to an american population incurably brainpoisoned by a century of insidious hollywood plot-structuring, worm is essentially an attempt to repackage the battle between the mexican government and the los zetas drug cartel for a generation of hpmor readers. at the center of worm is, for all intents and purposes, a non-ideological civil war between the commonwealth of massachusetts (although political borders are not a useful concept here, as we shall discuss later) and a whole concatenation of gangs, namely the one of which the undersiders are but one part. but these are not gangs--as in the case of los zetas--that run according to the antiquated patriarchal model as exemplified by the italian mafia; instead, they are entirely sans ideology.
they are, as opposed to the familially or religiously or politically bound criminal/terrorist actors of the twentieth century, essentially an-narco-capitalist in nature. they have no goal but the bottom line. their mode of governing is a return to what foucault would call the society of sovereignty, which defined the feudal era. as reporter seth harp says of the so-called drug war in mexico: "it isn't that the governors are corrupt so much as they are of the cartel." but crucially, this is backed by conspiracies of technocapitalists (cauldron in worm; the united states in the case of mexico). the global circulation of drugs, guns, and money requires a speed only attained through the porousness of borders made possible by neoliberal policies such as NAFTA. both wars are not feudal but neo-feudal.
in his book Specters of Marx, jacques derrida describes the fundamentally christian eschato-teleology of hegel's conception of history, which francis fukuyama adapts and updates for the post-cold war world. this is the method by which worm reconciles its cynical post- or anti-ideology with its messianic content (in the form of taylor, who is far more christlike than moses-like, defined by the sublimated violence engendered by the "turning of the cheek"). post-coil brockton bay is the concretization of the ultimate logic of neoliberal capitalism as anticipated by fukuyama. (remember, hegel did not believe that the victory of the liberal state would end conflict forever; he believed conflict was eternal.)
just as in mexico, brockton bay exemplifies what derrida would call the hauntology of liberal democracy. there is a promise of democracy, an injunction to democracy, but there is no democracy. these words defined the twentieth century, and in the twenty-first, where they have nominally "won," they are not to be found. there is only the farce of khepri.





