Apocalyptic Thinking (original) (raw)
Related papers
"The Earth Becomes Flat" --A Study of Apocalyptic Imagery
Apocalyptic visions and prophecies often include the detail that mountains and valleys will disappear, producing a level plain. Close reading of the way this image figures in a variety of texts and contexts (Christian, Zoroastrian, Japanese, Melanesian) shows it to encode a utopian imaginary in which class distinctions, privilege, and inequity will be abolished.
Imagining the Apocalypse: Art and the End Times
London: Courtauld Books Online, 2022
What are the politics of picturing the end times? This online, open-access essay collection explores how art and visual culture has imagined Armageddon across the globe from the eighteenth century to the present. The book considers the ways in which apocalypticism has been contested by social conservatives and progressives, drawn on to perpetuate or challenge structures of power. Contributors discuss homophobia and queer utopias, climate change and nuclear anxieties, folk monsters and fears of revolt, imperial violence and anti-colonial imagination, the staging of conflict and disaster, popular culture and fascism, faith and denial in church congregations. Each reveal how a series of contradictions underpin the end times: beginnings and endings, annihilation and revelation.
Planetarity and Apocalyptic Spaces: Literature, Art and Architecture
London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT) June 30th & Saturday July 1st, School of Social Sciences and Professions London Metropolitan University Call for Presentations, 2023
Apocalyptic spaces are heterotopic thinking-spaces which offer us the possibility to re-imagine planetary futures along with an imperative to re-think alternative configurations of being human. Catastrophic encounters tend to subvert the fixed designations of the human and the planetary, thereby becoming a crucial spatio-temporal opening that resist the constant reinforcement of the dynamics of conformity. In the wake of re-thinking new planetary dimensionalities, catastrophic encounters, despite of their excruciating problematics, are events of alterity occurring as sites of difference, in the Deleuzian sense, and différance, in Derrida’s sense, that initiate a radical (un)becoming of the human, producing new environments, new relations and new subjectivities. Thinking through the concept of planetarity and the Stieglerian pharmakon, this stream seeks to explore apocalyptic spaces as open and possibility spaces, creating new models of co-existence, reinvent models of care – not merely as emancipation but also in praxis. Through our discussions, we shall attempt to recognise apocalyptic spaces as an open portal of living knowledge – a pharmacological and organological aperture that thwarts epistemic uniformity and neo-expansionist representations of globality and totality, and encounter collective inhabitations and response-ability by re-imagining the planetary and by reworking the praxis of being human. As an assemblage of indeterminacy harbouring, what Spivak said, an “inexhaustible diversity of epistemes”, we shall try to locate the idea of apocalypse in the diverse works of literature, art and architecture and discuss how catastrophic events shapes and conditions the possibility and impossibility of existence by changing our collective and individual percepts, affects and experiences. In a world riven by accelerated exosomatisation inevitably leading to what Han Byung-Chul appropriately called a burnt-out syndrome, we intend to encounter the apocalypse as a caesura – of historical discontinuity; a break from conformity; a necessary breathing rift in a compressed world from which we bleed together, blend together – a space for expunction and reassembling. Apocalyptic spaces eschew bifurcations and embeddedness and is characterised by a conceptual openness to multiplicities, collectivities, transversalities and haecceities. In other words, it is a metamorphosis machine that produces new lines of flight and new permutations of becoming. It is, what Deleuze and Guattari call, a fibroproliferative unground – a processual exercise of molecular becoming and becoming-other. In this Deleuzo-Guattarian vein and through our discussions, we shall challenge the conventional mode of apocalyptic thinking, as a demarcation problem, that ontologises a nihilistic end-of-the-world thought, without questioning its socio-political agenda. Our idea is to liberate the apocalypse from the topographical ensnarement of our constructed mapping and fractalise apocalyptic thinking – identifying the apocalypse as a fractal-scape characterised by an affirmative schizoid plurality of thought administering a radical reshaping of planetary futures.
Apocalyptic Realism: “A New Category of the Event”
ISLE Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, 2022
This is a prepublicaiton draft. Please see the journal website for the final version. Apocalypse is commonly thought of as a world-ending future event. However, for racialized peoples whose futures have been sacrificed to institutions like colonialism and capitalism, apocalypse has already occurred and becomes available to realism; apocalypse most approximates the referential experience of being made futureless. Following Fredric Jameson’s description of realism as a genre that offers the possibility of knowledge, and taking Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People as an example, I submit that apocalyptic realism makes apocalypse knowable as a form of historically produced expendability. But I also argue that in apocalyptic realism worldending includes minor forms of endurance and agency.
Mention: Due to copyright issues the published version is not uploadable. Instead, I make available here a draft version, not meant to be cited. Those interested in the published version please contact me by e-mail. Abstract: "Montague Rhodes James wrote in 1931 in his introduction to his lectures on the Apocalypse in Art: ‘Those Christians of the early centuries who read the Apocalypse most and to whom it meant most were not of those who either wrote much or made great works of art. And those who could pay for beautiful sarcophagi or handsome paintings on the walls of their burial places were not of those to whom the Apocalypse appealed.’ He concludes that for this reason, it is senseless to look for any ‘apocalyptic’ artworks until the appearance of the tentative illustrations in certain manuscripts of the eighth century or even better the real great Last Judgments from the eleventh-twelfth centuries on. But – going a step further: is there any reason at all to speak about ‘apocalyptic’ art? Could there ever be anything apocalyptic in art? This paper aims to show, that there is good reason to speak about an apocalyptic category in art history, and that its origins are to be found in the Book of Revelation. Exactly those Apocalypse-reading early Christians have prepared its later triumphal entrance into all the fields of artistic creation, by picking and consolidating those symbols and images, which eventually built up the thrilling apocalyptic iconography. As a result two kinds of apocalyptic tradition have formed over the times from the motifs of John’s Book of Revelation: one plastic-figurative line represented by the Last Judgments, and another dramatic-narrative line of eschatological Antichrist- and Armageddon-stories, the former being representative in the Eastern churches and medieval times, while the latter are predominant in the art and culture of Western Christianity."
Apocalyptic Dimensions: Seeing the Beginning from the End
Apocalyptic Dimensions: Seeing the Beginning from the End, 2023
In analysing apocalyptic discourse, it is essential to distinguish the spatial and temporal dimensions in which a catastrophe exerts influence, paves the way for the development of a particular way of thinking, and accordingly builds an appropriate and distinct worldview. My goal is to explore some of the consequences of putting discourse into action to affect political or social change. It is important to understand how certain beliefs and conventions are constructed through the use of catastrophic language, symbolism, and imagery. To this end, I will examine how apocalyptic discourse shapes the way people see the world around them, using as examples works by Mario Sironi, Ludwig Meidner, and Stanley Donwood, while comparing them to the Benjaminean notion of “destructive character”, emphasizing how the visual discourse structures space and time to unveil novel aspects of reality.