Revisiting Midwestern Infinity Doctrine
Why Ulrich Jesse K Baer’s Midwestern Infinity Doctrine (Apocalypse Party, 2023) Is the Mind-Shattering Book You Should Read This Year
The picaresque novel has long been a vehicle for the marginalized, the outlawed, and the excluded traversing a society designed to alienate and destroy them. From Moll Flanders to Lazarillo de Tormes, these narratives center characters who, living in ongoing precarity, are forced to navigate corrupt and oppressive systems improvisationally, in real time. Midwestern Infinity Doctrine resurrects and reconfigures this tradition for the 21st century, presenting a surrealist, anti-capitalist (anti-)odyssey that fractures the concept of time, deconstructs desire, and exposes the systemic absurdities that dictate contemporary life. It is not merely an experimental novel; it is a literary glitch in the matrix, an existential hacking designed to intervene in the reader’s progressivist resignations.
Linear Time as Capitalism’s Self-Perpetuating Illusion
One of the most transgressive aspects of Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is its deliberate defiance of conventional temporality. The narrative rejects the traditional structure of beginning, middle, and end, instead treating time like a ravaged vinyl record, looping, skipping, and disrupting the very fabric of experience. In a modernity where the future is consistently repackaged as nostalgia, this novel forces readers to confront the alienating, self-reinforcing temporal loops that define our present under capitalism.
As theorists such as Mark Fisher and Franco Berardi have posited, late capitalism traps society in a recursive feedback, where time itself is commodified and manipulated to serve the economic and surveillance systems that regulate it. Midwestern Infinity Doctrine introduces a flame grenade into this cycle, exposing the ways in which time has been weaponized by capitalism to reinforce its own dominance. The novel discloses the constructed nature of linear time as a conceit of syntax, theoretical guarantor of a meaning that is always deferred in an endless text, forcing us to question whether genuine progression is still possible — or if we have, in fact, been relegated to an eternal present dictated by economic imperatives.
A Surreal Picaresque for the Age of Alienation
The picaresque novel has historically served as a critique of corrupt societies, centering on protagonists who, often operating outside the boundaries of conventional morality, employ wit and resourcefulness to survive. The form often uses satirical humor and biting irony to reveal the contradictions within the social order, transforming the hardships of exploitation into a pointed commentary on hypocrisy and human cruelty. Consider Lazarillo de Tormes, a story of a young boy forced to fend for himself in a harsh, hypocritical world. In this narrative, Lazarillo is not a traditional hero, but a shrewd, adaptable figure, defined by his ability to survive through cunning and manipulation as he endures the moral decay and exploitation of those around him.
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine reinvents this tradition, thrusting it into the complexities of the “eternal present.” It merges the picaresque with an undercurrent of existential dread. The fragmented narrative voice, barely holding (on or together), traverses a world that feels increasingly like a paranoiac construct rather than a lived reality. This figure embodies the quintessential modern picaro — a character who eschews societal roles and expectations, instead navigating fractionated and absurd landscapes shaped by personal desires and economic forces.
This is the picaresque for an algorithmic epoch, where the “I” meanders across the decaying ruins of a post-industrial economy whose attempts to control and account for risk have emptied the world of possibility. The (non-)narrative serves to reveal a defamiliarizing reality in which labor, relations, and even our most intimate desires seem like half-remembered nightmares, manipulated by invisible forces beyond our control.
Desire in a World That Manufactures Longing
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is not solely concerned with the distortions of time — it is equally an exploration of the ways in which capitalism exploits our desires, commodifying and restructuring them to align with the imperatives of the marketplace. This book lays bare how our longing has been monetized, transforming human desire into an endless cycle of consumption without fulfillment, and ponders the consequences in the form of conspiratorial thinking and ufology. As in Benjamin, what can’t be expressed returns in the form of uncanny new myths.
In a world of circulating simulacra, Midwestern Infinity Doctrine refuses to surrender uncritically to enchantment. It disrupts conventional storytelling and syntax itself, offering a brilliant, chaotic rupture that demands the reader’s attention and forces them to confront the alienation embedded within contemporary existence.
Why You Need to Read This Paranoiac Picaresque Space Opera Now
If you feel disillusioned with conventional literature and seek a text that interrogates not only your understanding of time and identity but also the foundational structure of narrativization itself, Midwestern Infinity Doctrine is an essential read. Within a world of instant pleasures and hegemonic inducements, this novel serves as an opportunity to reinvent consciousness, compelling us to examine the fractures in our perception of reality.
Midwestern Infinity Doctrine will leave an indelible mark on you. In a world where the everyday horrors of life are rendered banal through the constraints of temporal regulation and the resignation to positivist teleologies, this book provides a necessary interrupture — reintroducing the possibility of reading the world differently and imagining alternative futures and pasts.
