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Risk and Rapture: Apocalyptic Ideology in Late Modernity 11.09.13

List of Abstracts

G. Taylor Aiken, Durham University

Apocalypse ciao! The end times of environmentalism

Defining apocalyptic, eschatological, and millenarian concepts is notoriously difficult. These categories are not mutually exclusive, but overlap in different ways, according to different people. Of more certainty is the rise in the ‘secularised theological concept’, in the attempt to understand the social: both temporally and spatially. Simon Critchley (2012) for instance outlines the ‘’ of Carl Schmitt (1985), and the ‘secular theology’ of John Gray (2002, 2007), arguing both are united in assuming the important and neglected role of secularised theological concepts in the social realm, even in their divergent positions. This paper looks to investigate one such secularised theological concept: that of the millenarian apocalyptic. Doing so adds nuanced theoretical understanding of environmental movements, their aims and activities.

It will investigate and explore the connections between ‘traditional’ readings of the with current environmental groups and movements. It adopts Norman Cohn’s (1970 [1957]) five-fold definition of millenarian thinking, where salvation is only possible if it is: collective, terrestrial, imminent, total, and miraculous. The paper then proceeds by tracing out evidence of these beliefs, practices, activities and even faith in such occurrences, within current UK environmental activism. This is based on first-hand, empirical research with such environmental activist groups.

The paper concludes with an assessment of the value secularised theological categories provide in understanding social phenomena such as the environmental movement, compared to alternative insights from fields such as behavioural psychology or moral philosophy.

Andrew Crome, University of Manchester

“In the last days scoffers will come”: Parody and the end times in popular culture

Mockery has always been a popular response to individuals and groups who predict an imminent apocalyptic judgement. This can be counter-productive. As work by Catherine Wessinger and Michael Barkun has shown in the case of the Branch Davidians at Waco, negative media representations of the group served to reinforce the Davidians’ own which centred on apocalyptic confrontations with authority. Building on recent work by Joseph Laycock, this paper looks beyond media coverage of apocalyptic groups to examine presentations of apocalyptic belief in popular culture, concentrating on recent television shows, graphic novels and video games. It is argued that these media present a parodic reworking of apocalyptic beliefs. These reworkings have two effects. First, they strengthen apocalyptic groups in existing dualistic worldviews, allowing the concerns of such groups to be ignored by wider

1 society rather than engaged with. Secondly, in parodying apocalyptic belief these popular representations enter into a similarly dualistic worldview and present a new form of “secularised apocalyptic”, casting religious apocalyptic groups in the role of the demonic other. This paper examines this using a number of examples including satirical responses to the novels (e.g. N.D. Wilson’s Right Behind; The Simpsons: “Thank God it’s Doomsday”), recent portrayals of apocalyptic belief in Doctor Who and Torchwood and reworkings of the in graphic novels such as Gareth Ennis’s The Chronicles of Wormwood (2007-9) and Warren Ellis’s Supergod (2011). This paper thus argues that an apocalyptic mentality, far from being a fringe belief, pervades popular culture.

Chris Crosby: University of Chester

Evangelical and the environment: Understanding attitudes to ecological challenges through a scriptural lens.

Based upon data collected for an ethnographic study of conservative evangelical Christian groups in North Wales, this paper draws upon over a year of fieldwork, and in particular 40 qualitative interviews conducted to construct a framework for understanding the relationship between and attitudes toward the natural environment. This paper focuses upon several emergent themes from this project that determine the extent to which conservative evangelical Christian understandings of ecological challenges are embedded within or are mediated by scriptures that are deemed to have eschatological meaning. There is a focus upon eschatological discourses such as the dissolving of this world and the creation of a new and ; the prophetic images of a gradual deterioration of conditions on earth leading up to the end times; the nature of sin and corruption within the natural world prior to all things being made new, and God’s ultimate sovereignty and control over future events. Perceived levels of risk are also interpreted through these same themes and therefore potential engagement or disengagement with specific environmental issues such as and the loss of biological diversity are analysed. This paper provides a unique understanding in that it is not based upon the presenters own theological assumptions but rather gives a lucid insight into real life contemporary communities, and although geographically located, offers the potential for generalisations within broader evangelicalism.

Paul DaPonte, Stonehill College, Easton, Massachusetts

Exclusion as apocalyptic experience

The experience of various forms of socio-political exclusion in the context of expanding globalized consciousness is the basis of some apocalyptic discourse in contemporary settings. In particular, humiliation experienced as alienation from networks of inter-connectedness, especially those perceived to be instrumental to gainful participation in the social goods of late-modernity, can be understood as phenomena aptly described in terms of apocalyptic dissonance and end-time urgency. A helpful lens

2 through which we can interpret experiences of exclusion as humiliation is theological anthropology, namely, the ongoing challenge to derive a most adequate notion of personhood, here understood as the human person-in-relation. The contrast notion of exclusion as apocalyptic experience is itself an “unveiling” of the foundation of personal integrity and wholesomeness understood in terms of created interconnection and right relationship.

This paper explores the pervasiveness of contemporary experiences of exclusion and the phenomenon of humiliation as apocalyptic experiences of catastrophe and crisis. It utilizes the event of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as a frame of reference in which to explore how exclusion fosters and energizes the apocalyptic imagination. Writings of certain Trinitarian theologians, among them John D. Zizioulas and Miroslav Volf, will help to develop a robust notion of personhood from a theological perspective. The phenomenon of intersecting will likewise be analyzed in terms of this notion of exclusion as a threat to authentic personhood.

Sergio Fava, Anglia Ruskin University Adam’s processed apple: Religious eschatology and climate risk mitigation technologies

Current CO2e emissions and cumulative CO2e emissions have become harbingers of a catastrophic climate future. Risk mitigation technologies such as artificial trees are now being actively promoted as a necessity. Such technological fixes are unproven, have significant limitations and uncertainties, encourage delays in emission reductions, and overlook the wider dependencies of the climate system. Artificial trees are presented as viable now, but paradoxically only implementable in the future (Lackner 2005; Graves, Lackner et al. 2011). Real trees, on the other hand, generate fuel, ecosystem support, food, shelter and materials, are selfreplicating and have countless externalities. Real forests are powerful enough to determine regional climate and influence global climate. The FAO (2008) estimates that the mitigation potential of forests is enough to make the agricultural sector carbonneutral. This paper examines how and Buddhism two traditions where (real) trees feature centrally having instilled apocalyptic or ekpyrotic expectations deep into our cultural matrices, also bear insights of ethical and ecological balance. More, the sense of essential interconnectedness of everything is an integral (and necessary) part of the teleological or eschatological vector of history in religious . The cultural, social and spiritual power of religion can counter the cultural, industrial and political impetus of tech fix mitigation, and foster successful mitigation (i.e., proven, scalable, sustainable, and implementable now). Ecology inspired by religion can therefore serve to reclaim the processes and narratives of environmental sustainability to local communities and their cultural practices, instead of the concentration of wealth that large sociotechnical systems tend to generate.

Matthew Francis, University of Lancaster

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Suspending the norm: Using the ‘sacred’ to explore ‘apocalyptic thought’ in religious and secular groups

Many accounts of groups, including Aum Shinrikyo and al Qaeda, have focused on the role that religious beliefs have played in violent discourses and actions. In this paper, I focus on the role that non-negotiable beliefs, including those that invoke an ‘emergency situation’ leading to a suspension of normal moral codes, play in a group’s move to violence. This approach suggests a shift from a focus on ‘religious’ discourses to those of ‘sacred’ values and beliefs, which might equally be shared in form and or content by non-religious groups. In making this distinction, I demonstrate a framework that can be applied to secular as well as religious apocalyptic thought. The findings presented in this paper will draw upon public utterances which more broadly evoked a sense of an emergency situation, from a mix of religious and non- religious groups.

This research is based on earlier work exploring the move to violence in religious and non-religious groups, which is currently being updated as part of a Global Uncertainties funded leadership fellowship exploring the role that beliefs play in justifying, motivating and catalysing actions in the face of risk and uncertainty. This paper will also introduce this project as well as focusing on how the above approach fits into the broader aims of the project.

Stephen Jackson, Lancaster University

Opening the door to chaos and barbarism”: Imaginaries of climate-driven violence and war

The deeply worrying prospect of a global catastrophe frequently operates as the conceptual backdrop of rhetoric meant to convey the dangers of climate change. In recent years, however, concerns about the risks posed by climate change have also given rise to detailed apocalyptic and dystopian visions of a future in which environmental crises propel and define social conflict. As one author puts it, ‘Climate change is emerging as a new variable—some might argue a “hypervariable”—in international security in the 21st century’ (Smith, 2007). Such forecasts imparting tremendous causal power to climate change are articulated through warnings of impending ‘climate wars’ (Dyer, 2010), ‘climate-driven conflict’ (Sanders, 2009), the assertion that ‘climate change, increasingly, can cause actual political violence’ (Goodman, 2011), and in statements such as James Lovelock’s that ‘civilization’ may ‘degenerate into Dark Ages, with warlords running things’ (Goodell, 2007). Political scientists and defence professionals contribute to such environmentally-linked Hobbesian forecasts in which climate change is framed as an emerging security threat, opening a role for military-related interventions. Hence, catastrophic narratives about the future partly help to shape how the future unfolds, and in ways not necessarily intended by the actors who employ them.

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Bearing these concerns in mind, I ask: How are such narratives changing the way present-day conflict is defined? How do they influence thinking about the relationship between social conflict and natural forces?

My paper explores such questions through a discourse analysis of texts that present scenarios of climatically-driven social conflict.

Steve Knowles, University of Chester

Risk society, the fundamentalist turn and gnostic non-knowing

The notion of risk has become a dominant motif in contemporary society. According to Ulrich Beck we now live in a ‘world risk society’. Risk of terrorist attacks, ecological disasters and the possibility of global fiscal meltdown occupy governments, experts and the public psyche. We are “all members of a global community of threat” (Beck 2009: 8). These risks are unlike those in pre and early industrial times. They are mainly the result of conscious (political) decisions based on economic gain. Such decisions inevitably have ‘side affects’ or ‘unintended consequences’ which are often unpredictable and unknown: the result of non- knowing. As a consequence existential angst increases. A symptom of such a climate is the increase of fundamentalist groups, who attempt to offer catharsis from the existential angst faced by many today by promising ontological security in the here, now and future. They are defensive identities that function as a refuge from a hostile world (Castells 2010).

After outlining the relevant conceptual components of Beck’s critical theory of risk that are relevant to the growth of fundamentalisms, I will argue that non-knowing—a principal element of world risk society—is prevalent in a gnostic form in some Christian fundamentalist groups. This is most apparent in their understanding of eschatology and apocalyptic ideology exemplified in digital media.

Diane Langlume, University of Paris The politics of the apocalypse in Battlestar Galactica (2004-2009)

In her book The Terror Dream: Fear and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America, Susan Faludi argues that the American post-9/11 film and television industry replicated the trauma of 9/11 instead of delving into it: “no official moral leadership emerged to challenge [America] to think constructively about [its] place in the world” and to reassess its strength and weakness1. However, it would appear that the series Battlestar Galactica2 attempts to achieve precisely that, by using apocalyptic discourse to criticize religious terrorism and to question strategies used in response to it. The series opens in media res with a nuclear Apocalypse, triggered by human looking cyborgs known as “Cylons”. It renders the planet Caprica uninhabitable and forces the humans to an exile in space aboard a fleet of spaceships. The Apocalypse is religiously motivated: Cylons are monotheists and it is their religious intolerance of the polytheist religion practised by humans that leads them to ruthlessly attempt to eradicate the human race. Religion and allusions to Christianity play a pivotal role in the series. Therefore, unsurprisingly, analogies with 9/11 and the ensuing

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War on Terror abound in Battlestar Galactica and range from the thinly veiled to the unapologetically blatant. They target every aspect of modern conflict: genocide, suicide bombing, incarceration, torture, casualties, etc. This paper will therefore question Battlestar Galactica’s use of apocalyptic discourse: how does the series impart its political message against an apocalyptic backdrop? What is the nature of that message and which narrative devices are used to convey it? We will articulate our assessment by focusing first on the rhetoric of victimization and punitive action derived from the Apocalypse and second, we will highlight the shift in perspective that the series operates to denounce the Apocalypse and incite its characters to reflexiveness.

Michael J. McVicar, Florida State University Provident living: Latter-day Saints’ self-reliance discourse and the business of preparedness

During the 1970s, Spencer W. Kimball, twelfth President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS), refined and popularized the discourse of “provident living” as an official component of the LDS experience. Although the basics of provident living—charity for needy church members, familial preparedness, and “self-reliance”—had been components of LDS teaching since the earliest revelations of Joseph Smith, Jr., Kimball assembled these disparate strains into a coherent program of action for LDS families. The modern program of provident living combines the millennial aspirations of the church to build Christ’s kingdom on earth with the consumer practices of contemporary American society. Through the “neoliberal” logic of individualized risk management in an era of insufficient public services, the church hierarchy has hybridized a project of familial disaster preparedness with the suburban, middle-class, consumerist ethos of post-World War II American consumer culture. This paper explores the relationship between provident living and disaster preparedness by situating both within the context of post-New Deal controversies associated with the rise of the American welfare and warfare state, and the wider “conservative” backlash against these centralizing trends. By tracing the connections between provident living and the development of a nation-wide market for disaster preparedness products— ranging from food preservation and storage, survival homes, preparedness expos, and a host of other goods—this project outlines how the millennial aspirations of a specific religious community resonates with a host of social anxieties related to public policy, normative familial structures, and contemporary consumer culture to contribute to the development of a billion dollar industry in the .

Ashli Mullen, University of Glasgow

Christianity and conspiracy: An exploration of convergence

The relationship between contemporary conspiracy theories and what we conventionally regard as cosmologies is one of surprising convergence. Both are characterised by an ‘ordering capacity’ (Spark 2001), postulating a worldview that is characterised by coherence and structure; a feature which is ever

6 elusive in an ‘age of anxiety (Parish and Parker 2001). Christian fundamentalist cosmologies, not unlike many conspiracy theories, may be seen as a reaction against modernity itself, and these tensions have been accelerated, exacerbated and proliferated in the postmodern period. Yet this alone does not reveal the nature of their convergence. Much of the available literature examines the ideological nature of this fusion, as manifest within the often racist and violent groupings of the New Christian Right. Conversely, based upon the theoretical contention that there is nothing inherent, intrinsic or essential within the doctrine of Christianity that renders this coalescence possible, this paper will explore the respective cosmological, epistemic, communicative and representative characteristics that are shared, thus prioritising form over content, whilst appreciating interrelation therein.

Suzanne Newcombe, Inform, London School of Economics

Apocalypse as distraction: Lessons of new religions on apocalyptic risks

Apocalyptic nuclear war, natural disaster, earthquakes, tsunamis – global imaginations of the worst possible end terrify both the individual and could even inspire groups of people towards specific actions. Apocalyptic myths, stories and rhetoric inherently fascinate. However, when considering the potential for actual harm to self or others in an apocalyptic scenario, this paper will argue that present-time phenomena rather than apocalyptic imaginations per se should be the focus of any risk assessment. This paper will discuss the role of vivid eschatology and the development of several specific new religious movements such as the Children of God, Aum Shinrikyo, the DK Foundation, and the New Age. These examples will be contrasted to the use of apocalyptic in more 'mainstream' manifestations of religion. Through these examples, this paper will argue that the apocalyptic story is a distraction from the meaning and purpose that the prophecy gives to the daily lives of those who believe. Factors associated with risk of greater harm can be isolated from eschatological theology. The paper will argue that any realistic risk- assessment of apocalyptic beliefs should begin with the mundane effects of prophecy on daily life. The conclusion will explore if these case studies offer any lessons for how to approach the real technological, environmental and human risks of the contemporary world and will argue that a focus on empiricism offered by social scientific methodology is essential to making accurate assessments of risk and appropriate long-term planning decisions.

Yutaka Osakabe, University of Aberdeen

The risk of nuclear power: Japanese Protestant criticism of the recent government’s nationalistic trend

This research aims at identifying how Japanese Protestant Christians have perceived the event of earthquake 3.11 in the apocalyptic view and how this perception is reflected in criticism of the government’s persistent employment of the nuclear power. Since “Fukushima” has been considered a

7 symbol of evil nuclear power since the event, the majority of people including protestant Christians have advocated for its abolition. The claim is made alongside the anxiety regarding the government’s nationalistic trend and the mistrust towards the government. Japanese Christians see this trend in the recent government, who are persistently attempting to maintain the nuclear power when the majority of citizens argue against it. The anxiety in Japanese Protestant churches emerged during and after World War II when they were forced to worship the Emperor to present their nationalistic royalty. Haunted by this unpleasant memory, many Christians have been cautious with the recent government position towards nuclear power. Both the state corruption and the event of this tragic natural disaster have nourished their sense of social responsibility in the society as a voice for the end of the world.

Having this recent phenomenon in mind, the research particularly focuses on Japanese Protestant academics and practitioners, employed qualitative document analysis, which includes analysis of books, articles, and public lectures, to identify how they present issues of nuclear power in apocalyptic rhetoric. The study of this “non-western” case nurtures valuable insights into discussion of the western case.

Emily Pennington, University of Chester

Prophetic earthquakes? Questioning the alignment of apocalypse with disaster.

Discourses of apocalypse in fundamentalist religious groups offer worrying interpretations of the environment. Such perspectives, if not exclusively then certainly predominantly, see this world as temporary and, more disconcertingly, the destruction of this world as integral to a divine telos. These attitudes suggest that God’s plan for creation culminates in its obliteration, erosion, and degeneration. In addition to this, some suggest that such disasters are indicative of God’s wrath: incited by or directed to certain individuals. Indeed, a senior Iranian cleric recently blamed the country’s earthquakes on women; in the case of fault lines, it seems the fault lies with immodestly dressed Iranian women. Alongside ecological considerations, then, apocalyptic discourses also transmit assumptions about and implications for women. My paper will claim that this presents a problematic image of God and a dangerous attitude towards earthen and embodied creation. Using biblical imagery of a flourishing earth, Catherine Keller’s reading of apocalypse as ‘unveiling’, and Sallie McFague’s critique of anti-environmental discourses, I will propose an alternative perspective. I will claim that an increasingly broken land is irreconcilable with the intentions of a loving God. My paper will then argue for an understanding of apocalypse that unveils the earth as our forever home; a place of incontrovertible and eternal worth. I will interpret ecological disaster as a contradiction, rather than a confirmation, of God’s actuation of the ‘’. Furthermore, I will explore the extent to which such a view can remedy damaging attitudes towards materiality, and promote both a preservation and celebration of earthen and embodied existence.

Hilary Perry, University of Sheffield

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Is Hagee also among the prophets? Eschatology and politics – a symbiotic relationship

This paper focuses on the putative influence of The Scofield Reference (London: O.U.P., revised edition, 1917) on Christian Zionist beliefs, exemplified by those of , whom Stephen Spector considers to be ‘one of the most dedicated and outspoken American Christian Zionists’, (Evangelicals and Israel; Oxford: O.U.P., 2009). It also explores the effects of these beliefs on the Israel-Palestine issue, and the ways in which biblical texts are used in conjunction with current events to support a political agenda.

The paper compares elements of annotation in The with statements by Hagee in Jerusalem Countdown: A Prelude to War, (Lake Mary: Frontline, 2006, 2007), From Daniel to Doomsday: The Countdown Has Begun (Nashville: Thomas Nelson Inc., 1999) and ‘Seven Biblical Reasons Why Christians should support Israel’ (www.cufi.org, accessed 2 April 2013). Comparisons are also made with material from The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy (Mearsheimer and Walt, London: Penguin Books, 2007).

The paper argues that Hagee extends Scofield’s interpretative techniques by interpolations within the biblical text. It demonstrates how Hagee develops his own prophecy from biblical prophecy and pursues a political agenda in his biblical interpretation; Hagee deems the existence of a Jewish state in the Israel- Palestine area to be essential for the fulfilment of predicted eschatological events. The paper concludes that Hagee’s eschatology influences his political stance, but that equally his view of current events informs his eschatology, so the two enjoy a symbiotic relationship.

Alejandro Romero Reche, University of Granada

The nuclear fungus as punchline: The comedy of the apocalypse

In his 1967 classic The Sense of an Ending, Frank Kermode explains how the end of the world helps us make sense of the world, channeling the flow of history into a definite, linear shape: that would be one of the reasons why societies often regard themselves as being at the end of times. Apocalyptic fiction has been intermittently popular through the last century, understandably coinciding with international crises and the approaching Millennium, and within that trend a particular subgenre has flourished: the apocalypse comedy, Dr. Strangelove (1964) being one of its first and still most influential milestones. Nuclear weapons make the human race effectively capable of self-, and nuclear war as a comedy of errors provides a new meaning to the end of the world: it is not caused by divine intervention, nor is it invited by human sin, but actively provoked by human stupidity; later modalities (ecological disaster, the spread of viruses, etc) follow a similar pattern. This paper examines how comedic visions of the apocalypse (and the post- apocalypse) are related to the weakening of traditional normative consensuses (as illustrated, in its most eloquent extreme, by Adam Parfrey’s anthologies Apocalypse Culture), conflicting conceptions of social structure and power, and an ironic sense of the conventional nature of the social world, understood as a

9 representation that we could choose to stop at any moment, but that somehow generates its own self- sustaining logic.

Simon Speck, University of Derby

‘Whoops, apocalypse’: The comedy of risk and reflexive modernity

This paper focuses on the central trope of the thesis of a ‘world risk society’: the framing of the contemporary era as the confrontation with the unintended consequences of industrial modernity, such that the very success of modernisation and thoroughgoing rationalisation issues in the threat of global catastrophe. I argue that this encounter with risk is, thereby, the enactment of the comedy of reflexive modernity as classical modernity’s project of absolute mastery is experienced as its self-confounding, resulting in the need for a re-cognition of the normative and cognitive bases of its institutional and subjective foundations. The paper understands the ‘comedy of risk and reflexive modernity’, therefore, as a subjective and objective genitive which explicates both the ubiquity of comedy in contemporary culture - as taken-for-granted norms are reflexively interrogated – and the ‘comic’ structure of the modernisation of modernity itself - as overweening self-confidence gives birth to disaster and the revivifying of forces complacently assumed to have been banished by technocratic enlightenment. The paper surveys the comic performance of the various actors in the drama - noting how evolutionary biologists become theologians, holy warriors emerge from the ranks of IT graduates, environmental activists embrace nuclear power and (not least) theorists of reflexive modernity counsel unquestioning faith in the agencies of the secret state – and concludes by suggesting that the comedy of risk thereby illuminates the ways in which the apocalyptic dimension of reflexive modernity presses its agents and theorists into an all-too-hasty jettisoning of a properly ‘reflexive’ perspective on risk – and modernity - itself.

Stefan Skrimshire, University of Leeds.

Why we disagree about apocalypse: On activism and untimely .

What is the difference between prophecy and apocalyptic? And why does it matter to us? This paper critiques recent associations, made in scientific and social scientific publications, between “alarmist” environmental activist (and policy) rhetoric and (conflated) apocalyptic and prophetic modes of discourse inherited from Jewish and Christian thought. I will do this first, drawing from , by examining claims that an emphasis on the ‘predictive’ elements of both prophetic and apocalyptic texts is partly a Christian-centric interpretation of a Jewish genre, and partly a historically contingent response to risk in western societies. To assume that ‘Judeo-Christianity’ bequeaths western society an exercise in foretelling unchangeable, catastrophic events in the future is to impose our own fantasies of imminent collapse upon two nuanced and distinctive modes of discourse. But I will then draw from recent

10 continental philosophy, in particular the works of Zizek, Badiou and Agamben, and their interest in St Paul, messianic, and apocalyptic discourse. Why this recent interest? Apocalyptic discourse (rather than prophecy) might represent a shift in our relationship with time itself rather than simplistically locating its ‘end-point’: rather than predicting events in linear, gradualist and predictive fashion, apocalyptic time in the Christian tradition speaks of living in a new aeon, the “time of the end of time” (Zizek) or time of “the exception” (Agamben), which demands radically different values to those upon which our linear notions of progress have been founded and which are still sought out in times of economic and ecological crisis. I hope, finally, to vindicate ‘activist’ responses to crisis that rely not on a return to paradigms of growth or progress, but rather by a sense of rupture with the present order that retains the original meaning of apocalypse.

Stella Marega, University of Trieste

Revelation, revolution: Apocalyptic expectations in modern political thought

The apocalyptic symbol embodies two tendencies, opposite and contradictory, around which Western history has developed: the Christian hermeneutic, which directs future expectations in the eschatological course, and the secular practice, which has now reached its extreme goals. The shift of apocalyptic expectations outside the ground of faith is the foundation of modern conceptions of history. This shift has occurred imperceptibly over the centuries, starting with the Gnostic heresy in first centuries A.C., passing through the reception of the theology of history developed by in late twelfth century. Modern thought has, in many ways, taken over these legacies and using them for creation and development of new historical paradigms: the age of positive science for Comte, the realm of freedom for Hegel, the classless society for Marx and Engels. So the idea of the Final Kingdom has been transfigured and filled with revolutionary expectations. This opened the way to an irreversible process of transformation of the apocalyptic symbol into a messianic expectation of progress. The wait was all for a perfect Kingdom of peace and freedom: no longer the Kingdom of God, but the Kingdom created by man for man. Scholars who have supported this theory agree in acknowledging the tragic fate which doomed any form of political in modernity. War and totalitarian rule were the only results of the crazy project of man who, having replaced God, intended to change the course of history, but remained overwhelmed by it.

Bronislaw Szerszynski, Lancaster University

The Anthropocene – A geological apocalypse?

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In recent years there have been growing arguments that the Earth has entered a new geological epoch, named the Anthropocene, in which the human is the dominant geological force. In this paper I explore the idea that the analogies between Anthropocene and Apocalypse are not simply ones of position – as the final chapters of the great stone book of geochronology (Szerszynski 2012) and the Christian Bible respectively. Situating the geochronological concept of the Anthropocene within the wider cultural context of ongoing transformations in the dominant imaginary of the human story enables us to see the complex eschatological registers in which the Anthropocene is being articulated and debated. On the one hand, the positing of the Anthropocene can be seen as the latest move in a crucial late-twentieth-century shift in the dominant genre within which the changing technologically-mediated metabolic relationship between humanity and the environment is narrated – from a narrative of salvation to one of damnation, from a progressive eschatology of progress brought about by human ingenuity to a series of cataclysmic disasters. The Anthropocene in this reading is the ‘revelation’, by the contemporary earth sciences, of the slow but accelerating apocalypse of human geohistory. On the other hand, proponents of the ‘Good Anthropocene’ offer a ‘post-millennial’ reading of the new epoch, in which humanity are destined to take technological control of planetary processes. I thus suggest that the notion of Apocalypse can help us to see what contemporary debates around the Anthropocene tell us about our current ecological predicament.

Nick Toseland, Durham University

Conspiracy theories: formulations of contemporary apocalypse.

The 21st Century has been a site of growing interest in ‘conspiracy theories’, which reject world affairs, past and present, as purely natural or innocent, and instead view reality as controlled by insidious and shadowy forces acting towards some malevolent end. Institutions and political parties claim to be ‘transparent’ organisations acting for the public’s best interests that have nothing to hide: journalistic investigations constantly refute such notions. Indeed, today’s salience of information, disseminated by a competing constellation of profiteering media outlets, and whose affects are amplified by the proliferation of Internet access, yields contradiction and uncertainty; multiple interpretive discourses now compete to best describe the underlying dynamics of an uncertain and ever-accelerating globalising world. ‘Conspiracism’ constitutes an innovative approach that links potentially socio-cultural developments into an explicable, meaningful whole. Confronted with the potential risks of late-modernity, conspiracy theories insist on an underlying agency behind contemporary political developments and sociological processes, notably including ‘secularisation’, as indicative of an apocalyptic plot towards a ‘New World Order’ by an evil, shadowy elite often called the ‘Illuminati’. This paper stems from extended interviews with conspiracy theorists, and illuminates how perceived risks demand diagnosis; this search for meaning restores a sense

12 of control and certainty to the underlying feelings of powerlessness. This religio-poitical discourse stresses the authority of the individual consciousness to unravel the apocalyptic trajectory of the 21st Century world.

Joseph Webster, University of Cambridge

Embodied apocalypse

The Brethren communities of Scotland’s northeast coast inhabit a world that is both modern and enchanted; a state of affairs made possible due to the ways in which life as a deep sea fishermen relate to life as a millenarian Protestant. The connection between them is a search for ‘signs’ – in storms, hauls of prawns, EU fisheries legalisation and so on – that the end of the world is near. Moreover, this apocalyptic sign searching can also be seen as a feature of what some theorists refer to as ‘the postmodern condition’, whereby, I suggest, the cosmos is effectively reduced to the size of the individual. This hyper-individualism is important because it forces the search for apocalyptic signs out of the world and into the body. Recognising this shift helps explain certain contemporary attitudes towards illness and death. Where for moderns, the end of the world is to be found ‘out there’, in wars, famines, and earthquakes, for postmoderns, the apocalypse is relocated ‘in here’, that is, in my body, as materialised in fat deposits, liver cirrhosis, and malignant tumours. This relocation is an ongoing process. Over the last decade the embodiment of apocalypse has been intensified by developments in biotechnology. Signs of ‘my’ illness, redundancy, and death, (and therefore the end of the world), are no longer restricted to my organs or even to my cells, but are now sought with my very DNA; a search made possible by the achievement of genetic mapping and the promise of genetic engineering and human cloning. The results are striking: the apocalypse becomes not only temporally imminent, but also corporally immanent.

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