Apocalypse and popular culture

No matter whether it comes by divine wrath, nuclear war, climate change, zombies, a pandemic or by machines rebellion: the apocalypse will be urban. Cities are at the same time the most complex and valuable creation of our civilization, but also one of the most vulnerable environments to inhabit during an apocalyptic crisis. However, can they also be the key to our salvation? Either a fictional or part-real apocalypse, the delirium of destination has been a constant in many societies, but nature does not negotiate and with more than 50% of the world population living in cities, the current pandemic located them as main subjects in a real-time experiment of values collapse. What made some cities so resilient while others suffered the most impact? Just within weeks, South Korea shifted the world’s attention from its Parasite (2019) film’s satirical criticism on urban social inequality, to detecting its first COVID-19 infection and soon becoming the most affected territory outside China, to end up as one of the top success references on how to confront a crisis of this magnitude especially through the use of urban infrastructures, smart systems and efficient governance tools. But Korean cities were not new to the idea of fighting a ―world-ender‖ enemy; from the North Korean war threat, to natural disaster stories such as Haeundae (2009), infection chaos in Gamgi (2013), to zombies invasion on Train to Busan (2016), Kingdom (2019), and Peninsula (2020), the increasing trend on catastrophic narratives has evolved though Korean culture beyond just entertainment, to become an open source to explore human reactions under extreme circumstances, our capabilities and reasons to survive. This presentation aims to explore the Korean vision on apocalypses and how its cities may have a valuable approach for planning our new world especially in the fight against inequality

Parmi tous les scénarios choisis par la science-fiction pour évoquer la fin des temps, certains sont liés à une conjoncture particulière (le spectre de la bombe atomique pendant la Guerre Froide ou la crainte actuelle d’un effondrement écologique, par exemple). D’autres, plus anciens encore que le texte de Saint Jean, sont récurrents et reviennent périodiquement sur le devant de la scène. C’est en particulier le cas des apocalypses célestes qui se déclinent sous différentes formes (depuis la chute sur Terre d’une météorite vagabonde jusqu’à l’implosion du soleil), pour mieux nous faire sentir que, malgré toutes nos prétentions, nous ne sommes que poussière et nous retournerons à la poussière.

This paper aims to address the rewriting and reinterpreting of the Apocalypse, from the Book of Revelation in Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Reinterpreting, reworking and rewriting of legends, myths and fairy tales represent one of the main characteristics of fantasy fiction. Although apocalypse as a plot device has been widely used in popular culture, in Pratchett and Gaiman's work it is used to provoke a discussion challenging the Christian representation of the world. The novel engages in a polyphonic, intertextual debate on the subject, subverting, reinventing and reinterpreting previous literary tradition. The approach is rather humorous, disguising such a philosophic debate under a witty wordplay. In Pratchett and Gaiman's version of the apocalypse, the Antichrist is represented by a child going on a journey of self-discovery with surprising results. His Hellhound becomes a simple pet, whereas Aziraphale, an angel, living on earth as a bookshop owner, has got a demon as a best friend-Crowley. The novel will be examined through the lens of formalist and structuralist reading, in order to analyse its reinterpreting of apocalypse as a modern myth.

Communication prononcée lors du colloque international « ‘Retours à l’Apocalypse’. Héritage et hypertextualité dans les Mondes romans du Moyen Âge à nos jours », organisé par Michele Carini, Pénélope Cartelet, Javier Jurado, Elsa Kammerer, Luís Sobreira (Université de Lille, CECILLE – EA 4074 et ALITHILA – EA 1061), Université de Lille, du 15 au 18 septembre 2021.

This paper explores the recent documentary, aired on the American Heroes Network, showing polychromatization of black-and-white World War One military footage. The film's apocalyptic character and effect on current popular culture trends will be analyzed.

A study of Catholic history, prophecies, mysticism and conspiracy theories that may have inspired elements of JRR Tolkien's 'Lord of the Rings', in particular, the 'Great Monarch and Angelic Pontiff' prophecies.  100 page document featuring color illustrations.

Availaible as a free PDF file

Resenha sobre a obra: "Guia Fácil para Entender o Apocalipse: tudo sobre o livro bíblico das revelações, reunido e organizado de maneira simples e acessível". Revista Paralellus (Online), v. 6, p. 528-532, 2016. Universidade Católica de Pernambuco (UNICAP). Palavras-chave: Resenhas, Resumos, Avaliações; Apocalipse, Escatologia, Apocalipticismo. Grande área: Ciências Humanas; Meio de divulgação: Digital. Série: 13; ISSN/ISBN: 21788162. Homepage: http://www.unicap.br

This conversation between a private security guard, Dharmendra Panchal, and  Irfan Ahmad serves as a window to understand contemporary India from the perspective of an “ordinary” or “common” man, an ardent and articulate supporter of the current ruling party and its worldview. At the centre of this conversation is the salience of Hinduism in politics, not only at the national level but also internationally. Addressing such issues as the visibility and assertion of Dalits (ex-untouchables) in the public realms, inter-caste and inter-religious marriages, prostitution, development, technology, corruption, terrorism, the notions and practices of war, the United Nations and the current world order, in this conversation Panchal describes his worldview according to which the current dark time of Kaliyuga marked as it is by untruth (adharma) is about to end. The advent of
Kalkī, future avatar of god Vishnu, will end the present Kaliyuga and herald the age of truth (Satya Yuga) which Panchal saw actualized well in his own lifetime. The new age of truth led by Hindus will establish a righteous and prosperous order at domestic as well as at the world level. Panchal skilfully connects the Hindu metaphysical postulates to the empirical world of politics to present a description and narrative that invite analytical attention.

This article provides an outline for a new interpretation of the trial of the Templars, with special attention to the texts written by the instigators of the case, namely, Philip the Fair and his ministers. The trial had everything to do with the growth of the French monarchy. With the “discovery” and repression of the “Templars' heresy,” the Capetian monarchy claimed for itself the mystic foundations of the papal theocracy. The Temple case was the last step of a process of appropriating these foundations, which had begun with the Franco-papal rift at the time of Boniface VIII. Being the ultimate defender of the Catholic faith, the Capetian king was now fully invested with a Christlike function that put him above the pope. What was at stake in the Templars' trial was the establishment of a royal theocracy.

Now we are at the edge of a nuclear conflagration, perhaps a few words about what vast opportunity we missed because of our blind insistence in ignoring any possibility of powers greater than the human will at work in shaping the destiny of the world. This essay, companion to my The Meaning of the Bomb as World Destroyer, (see https://www.academia.edu/35453625/The_Meaning_of_the_Bomb_as_World_Destroyer_2014_) tells the inner story of nuclear power, i.e. the story of our first encounters with the soul aspect or inward meaning of nuclear power and how a future possibility for us and the world was thwarted by our sheer stubbornness in privileging power and control over all else. We have missed that opportunity and now our destiny has become our fate. Instead of transformation of life on Earth we face instead utter destruction of everything.

Drawing on observations from on- and offline fieldwork among transhumanists and artificial superintelligence/singularity focussed groups, this article will explore an anthropology of anxiety around the hoped for, or feared, post-human future.  It will lay out some of the varieties of existential hope and existential despair found in these discussions about predicted events such as the ‘end of the world’ and place them within an anthropological theoretical framework. 

First, this article will draw on participant observations of events where aspirations for the future include the elimination of suffering through the alteration of the hedonic set point of the human brain, the greatest good decided on a macro-ethical level by a theorised artificial superintelligence, and/or a post-terran, and possibly post-human, future once immortality has become plausible for members of the Earth’s population. This optimism in the face of what amounts to the end of the world, and humanity, as we know it will be examined to emphasize the positive affective aspects of certain apocalypse scenarios, especially those with an implicit eschatological direction. Further, discussion of an underlying anxiety about the world as it is now will show that existential despair is in symbiosis with this form of existential hope.

Existential despair will then be explored further through examples of the anxiety that can occur in response to certain Superintelligence/singularity thought experiments, such as Roko’s Basilisk. This comparison will demonstrate that predestination can temper transhumanist optimism as well as illustrate the psychological impact of apocalyptic memes; replicating the described power of the Basilisk itself and demonstrating the intrinsic role of anxiety present in ideas about a future AI apocalypse.

The publication of Josef Schmid's landmark work on the textual history of the Apocalypse seemingly established the Andreas Text Type as a fourth-century product. The primary evidence for Schmid's claim came from the fourth-century corrections of the Apocalypse in Codex Sinaiticus, corrections which bore a close resemblance to the Andreas text of the Apocalypse. Schmid's reconstruction, however, is flawed. The fourth-century corrections he identified are actually from the seventh-century. The data supporting a fourth-century Andreas text type does not exist. Schmid's widely influential error appears to have been based on a misreading of Milne and Skeat's "Scribes and Correctors of the Codex Sinaiticus."

In a comparison of the 2016–17 Malheur occupation and the #NoDAPL movement at Standing Rock, this essay parses apocalyptic storytelling for problematic pivots around an emergency event. It argues that apocalyptic stories of single disastrous moments shelter the settler state of emergency, protecting the logic of the settler colonial capitalism’s continuous creation of and dependence upon the emergency event. This comparison clarifies the master metaphor lurking in the apocalyptic state of emergency—the ways apocalyptic emergency appeals reinforce the exclusionary violence and ecological devastation they so often seek to diagnose and disrupt. Ultimately, I offer the exigency of an event-versus-structure distinction in apocalyptic environmental storytelling. Following Indigenous and Black feminist futurisms’ invocations of apocalypse, which indict the structure of the settler state(s) of emergency, I suggest that stories that both summon and see beyond the structures of settler colonial capitalism’s past, present, and future ends of worlds constitute a state of emergence for an antiracist politics of storytelling in the context of climate change.

Mémoire présenté par :
Erwan MOREAU
en vue de l'obtention du diplôme de :
MASTER 2 RECHERCHE
Domaine : Sciences humaines et sociales
Mention : Ethnologie-Sociologie
Spécialité : SOCIOLOGIE
Préparé sous la direction de M. Jean Bruno RENARD, professeur de Sociologie
Juin 2014
Mention obtenue : très bien


Abstract (French) :

Le synonyme le plus proche du terme "monstre" est l'expression « contre-nature » (Aristote, Saint Augustin, Canguilhem, Lascault, Cuny Le Callet, Valton, etc.). Sentence paradoxale s'il en est quand on sait qu'au niveau biologique, il est entendu que rien de ce que produit la Nature ne peut voir le jour indépendamment du respect de ses lois et qu'il est le propre de l'imagination de pouvoir y créer des exceptions.

Mais parallèlement à la Nature, objet de la biologie et de la physique, se trouve une autre « nature » : la « connaissance ordinaire » (Aristote employait pour sa part le terme de « cours ordinaire », « ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ » en parlant du statut contre-nature du monstre), cette « chose que l'organisme construit dans le but de créer un ordre dans le flux de l'expérience »

Ainsi, tout monstre peut être traduit comme étant ce qui apparaît contraire à une  « connaissance ordinaire », à une réalité sensible, dans son acception la plus large, c'est-à-dire orientée vers l'esthétique (le plus couramment rattaché à une vision anthropocentrée) et/ou vers l'éthique (intolérance idéologique).

Aussi par le partage des affects que met en œuvre une communauté d'esprits (religieuse, laïque, révolutionnaire, impérialiste, etc.), des éléments « contre-nature » peuvent apparaître à un niveau macrosociologique. Éléments émergeant de l'esprit gnostique et de son succédané l'esprit dogmatique, chacun ayant pour spécificité de mettre en exergue le dualisme entre bien et mal, connaissance et ignorance les entraînant ainsi vers l'ère de la déliquescence, de la décadence, en somme vers les temps eschatologiques et leurs abominations monstrueuses.


Abstract (English) :

The best synonym for the word ‘monster’ is the expression ‘unnatural’’ (Aristote, Saint Augustin, Canguilhem, Lascault, Cuny Le Callet, Valton, etc.). That is a paradoxical sentence - if any - when we know that biologically speaking nothing produced by Nature can exist regardless of the respect of its laws. It is among the characteristics of imagination to create exceptions.

But parallel to the Nature as objet of biology and physic is another kind of ‘nature’: the ‘ordinary knowledge’. (Artistote named it the ‘ordinary course’ (ὡς ἐπὶ τὸ πολύ) to mention the unnatural aspect of monster), this ‘thing that is produced by the organism to create an order within the experience’s flow’.

Then any monster can be understood as what appears in contrary to an ‘ordinary knowledge’, a ‘sensitive reality’ in every sense, that is to say aesthetics- (mostly associated to an anthropocentred vision) and/or ethicspositioned (ideological intolerance).

And the sharing of affections made by a minds’ community (religious, lay, revolutionary or imperialist, etc.) can reveal some ‘unnatural’ elements at the level of macrosociology. Elements that are emerging from the Gnostic spirit and its substitute: the dogmatic spirit. Each specifically brings out the dualism between good and evil, knowledge and ignorance that leads towards the decay, decline age - in other words towards eschatological times and their monstrous abominations.

In recent years zombies and the zombie apocalypse have loomed large in the collective American imagination, in film and television, theme parties and marathons, shooting target companies and survivalist groups, videogames and counterterrorism training, and used in course curricula from elementary to college levels to teach topics from geography to public health to sociology. As a recurrent monster in the history of capitalism, with its origins in New World slavery in Haiti, zombies reflect what is monstrous in an economic system "that seems designed to eat people whole" (Newitz). As the "political unconscious" of late-era capitalism, what does this increasingly normalized pop culture obsession point to in the "non-human condition", of labor exploitation and unbridled consumerism? What apocalyptic futures are we repeatedly rehearsing, and how do they signal both despair of, and hope for, fundamental change? This piece examines representations in popular culture, draws out historical connections and diverse monster theories that help us see how we, in the United States in particular, are processing and making sense of systemic social and environmental horror.

Much post-modern cinematic narrative has been preoccupied with apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and dystopian fantasies that closely reflect aspects of our lived reality.  This paper seeks to distinguish the boundaries between films categorized as apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and dystopian and to examine some of the most iconic cinematic artifacts in each of the categories to differentiate their parameters and to explore in detail dystopian film through the prism of cultural theory, to better understand the cultural work that specifically dystopia cinema does.  Dystopia film is primarily concerned with the social conditions inherent to patriarchal capitalism in which the narratives simultaneously expose and reproduce social and economic contradictions in an ideological process of repressive tolerance.  Contemporary dystopia films such as In Time (Andrew Nicoll, 2011) and The Purge (James DeMonaco, 2013) criticize the aspects of capitalism that contradict social mythologies in an effort to reconcile these contradictions with a valorizing fantasy of romance and revolution.

*NOTE: final, published version is "'Master Metaphor': Environmental Apocalypse and the Settler States of Emergency" (in _Resilience_ 8, 1, 2021, 60-81).
which can be found here: https://www.academia.edu/45569872/_Master_Metaphor_Environmental_Apocalypse_and_the_Settler_States_of_Emergency

On October 27, Ammon Bundy and associates were acquitted of charges stemming from their armed takeover of Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Bundy justified his occupation through the apocalyptic threat of white genocide to warrant his declaration of martial law and a state of emergency. On the same day, with the visual drama of an apocalyptic dystopian film, a militarized police force arrested 141 water protectors in Standing Rock, North Dakota–an area ostensibly secured by treaty rights, Native sovereignty, and the state of emergency that the tribe declared in August 2016. The divergent consequences of each “occupation” are marked by racial difference best understood in a genealogy of the genre of American apocalypse. This genre centers on the invocation of a state of emergency, which has ties to settler-colonial structures of the frontier, sovereignty, and racial fear that continue to influence juries and the use of police force in 2016. Apocalypse can be a framework for lived experience that a genealogy of the literary genre can help us understand. Moreover, this genealogy helps us understand the stakes of using the genre of apocalypse to narrate environmental crisis.
The apocalypse genre’s close ties with American environmentalism did not begin with the idea of slow violence, the term climate change, or even Rachel Carson. American apocalypse, and its environmental sub-genre, must be understood in the context of the genocide of Native peoples in the Americas. Just as Patrick Wolfe tells us that settler-colonialism is not an event, but a structure taking land as its primary object, Kyle Powys Whyte’s work reminds us that the structure of settler colonialism is a past and ongoing apocalypse. I place the contemporary events at Malheur and Standing Rock in conversation with their literary forbearers. Examples can be found in Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” and the simultaneous refutation of Turner’s thesis in Simon Pokagon’s “Red Man’s Rebuke” and in contemporary works like Ian McEwan’s Solar and Thomas King’s The Back of the Turtle. These texts exist within a genealogy of American apocalypse that reveals that while the American apocalypse genre typically regards the unsettling end of a (white) world, the genre has the potential for rupturing the exceptionalism inherent to its narrative emergency structure once situated in the context of settler colonialism.

‘Utopia’ and ‘Apocalypse’ have become secular and commodified themes in contemporary entertainment; packaged and wrapped, ready to consume. This essay will explore the ways in which utopia and apocalypse have become commodified, and argue that postmodern shifts and the modes of commodification partially deter utopia and apocalypse’s original functioning in their dynamic of terror and hope, which used to work as a catalyst for progress (Kumar, 1995). First, both terms will be defined, alongside a description of what is understood as the term commodification. It will be explained how apocalypse and utopia have been absorbed and appropriated by the popular media, art and culture and in the social everyday life, and how this poses a philosophical dilemma as it hinders contemporary individual’s imagination for a better future. Nevertheless, the continuing importance of both themes reveals their persisting significance to social and political life, and if consumers and audiences were to become conscious of this, and more active, they might discover that these commodities could be the tools that can inspire a better tomorrow.

The uncertainties and scale of the Covid-19 pandemic has mobilised global anxieties and insecurities, and many cultural groups have conjuncturally embedded conspiracy theories within millennial and apocalyptic thought to explain and find meaning in the pandemic. The apocalypse lends itself well to conspiratorial thinking because conceptually it is flexible enough to reflect any crisis. To this end, the global development of Covid-19 conspiracism is what the authors term 'contagious conspiracism' which is defined as viral global cultural conspiracism. The paper explores how millennialist responses to Covid-19 in various media outlets transcend academic categories of analysis and cultural boundaries between, say, religious and secular, far-right and radical left. First explored is how the crisis became embedded in established (mainly American) contemporary millennial beliefs and prophecies through selected far-right, evangelical and radical left narratives. Second, it is shown how these theories have been 'improvised' to include 5G and also travelled to Europe and taken on local significance in Belfast and Berlin. Third, the authors illustrate the shared ingredients, motivations, and semiotics across apocalyptic conspiratorial Covid-19 narratives, all of which resonate with concerns about power, specifically emergent surveillance technologies, governmental abuse of power, and neoliberal capital, with divergent truths about who is blame from 5G/vaccine theories to corporate technocapitalism. The paper concludes that these shared discourses across apocalyptic and conspiratorial Covid-19 narratives mean many of us are conspiracists and/or conspiracy theorists at some level and is therefore both revealing of the similarities and has the potential to create democratic constituencies.

Abstract Let me sketch out here my vision of the cloistered cornucopia of AD 2100:
Management of Planet Earth is entirely rationalized. Nature still nurtures. Artificial
intelligence is history. The Machine has met its Master. The rich are enraptured. The
poor are happy. The ducks of demography are all in a row. Never more is heard the
discouraging word. Welcome to my sanguine vision of our future totalitarian utopia.

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339587731_Blissful_Devolution/link/5e5a76fd299bf1bdb847c5d6/download

The zombie as a peculiarly American monster is ubiquitous in contemporary popular culture. One of the most prominent examples for the cultural productiveness of this figure of fear is Robert Kirkman’s serial comic The Walking Dead (2003-), which has itself spawned a number of incarnations in other media, including a television show and a computer game. Like most recent zombie fiction, Kirkman’s comic mixes contradictory genre traditions—horror, science fiction, and apocalypse—to unfold a story about the end of the world in a serial mode that endlessly defers closure. Yet the distinct inclusion of a travel plot in the serial narrative enables a story of development and provides the closure that the zombie—this insatiable creature unable to die—and the serial format collude to deny. Thus grounded in the gothic tradition of the undead, the graphic narrative pushes anxieties about contingency to their limits, but ultimately controls these anxieties by adapting the cinematic language of fear and spatial control for the comics medium and by returning to a fully-fledged apocalypse that includes an elusive vision of a New Jerusalem with the father-son pair at the center of its family-based, pre-modern utopian community.

This paper explores the mimetic patterns found in a selection of zombie films with reference to the philosophy of René Girard. To begin with, it argues that the zombie apocalypse, rather than only representing a future upheaval of society is also apocalyptical in the literary and theological sense; this it to say that it represents present social conditions by taking a very particular stance on the trajectory of human history. This article describes how the zombie contagion can be read as a symbol of what Girard calls ‘mimetic desire’. Thereafter, it deals with the way in which this contagion of desire, through the hegemony of mimetic undifferentiation, results in the escalation of reciprocal violence in a global society. Finally, it highlights specific plot points in recent zombie cinema that suggest the possibility of curing this reciprocal violence in such a way as to imply the necessity of a politics of weakness.

This is the first of two essays in the Bruce Metzger festschrift, edited by J. Harold Ellens, Text and Community, Essay in Commemoration of Bruce M. Metzger, Vol. 1 (Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2007), 196-216. Serious errors of interpretation include the facts that: (1) "Antichrist" never occurs in Revelation--only in 1 John and 2 John; (2) the "Antichrists" are mentioned as plural rather than a singular individual--referencing an actualized schism and impending visits of false teachers; (3) their christological errors are different--the first schism refuses to believe in Jesus as the Jewish Messiah/Christ, the false teachers advocate a docetic Christology--refusing to believe Jesus came in the flesh. Therefore, the Antichrists in 1 and 2 John reference two distinctive threats in the late first century with implications for later interpretations.

** PRE-PUBLICATION DRAFT, PLEASE VIEW LINK BELOW FOR FINAL VERSION **

https://www.ijurr.org/article/ecological-gentrification-in-response-to-apocalyptic-narratives-of-climate-change-the-production-of-an-immuno%e2%80%90political-fantasy/

Anxieties over the potential impacts of climate change, often framed in apocalyptic language, are having a profound but little-studied effect on the contemporary western urbanscape. This paper examines the ways in which current theorisations of 'Ecological Gentrification' express only half the process, describing how green space is used for social control, but not how ecology is used as a justification regime for such projects. As urbanites seek out housing and living practices which have a lower environmental impact, urban planners have responded by providing large-scale regeneration of the urbanscape. With the demand for this housing increasing, questions of inequality, displacement and dispossession arise. I ask whether apocalyptic anxiety is being enrolled in the justification regimes of these projects to make them hard-to-resist at the planning and implementation stages. The paper shows that in capitalizing on collective anxiety surrounding an apocalyptic future, these projects depoliticize Subjects by using the empty signifier of 'Sustainability' leading them into an immuno-political relationship to the urbanscape. This leaves Subjects feeling protected from both responsibility for and the impacts of climate change. Ultimately this has the consequence of gentrification coupled with potentially worsening consumptive practices, rebound effects and the depoliticization of the environmentally-conscious urbanite.

It is well known that Alfred Doeblin was fascinated by the apocalypse. In his 1920 novel Berge, Meere und Giganten he had presented a global end-time scenario that contained everything we associate with apocalypticism: devastating wars, natural and environmental catastrophes as well as the end of humanity, caused by man-made monsters.

This presentation suggests that the novel Berlin Alexanderplatz, which appeared 9 years later, can also be read as an apocalyptic text – and perhaps with more reason than Berge, Meere und Giganten. While there are no wars or catastrophes in this book, its language, structure and plot relate in many ways to the apocalyptic tradition – most of all to the biblical Book of Revelation. The author claims that Berlin Alexanderplatz is, in fact, a modern literary apocalypse that is deeply rooted in the Judeo-Christian tradition. It may even be read as a reflection of Doeblin’s own conversion to Christianity.

Apocalyptic ideas traditionally have been associated with religious eschatologies, but American secular culture also has contributed to widespread beliefs, images, and expectations about the end of the world. The concept of a meaningless apocalypse brought about by human or natural causes is a relatively recent phenomenon, differing dramatically from religious apocalyptic cosmologies. Instead of faith in a redemptive new realm to be established after the present world is annihilated, secular doomsday visions are usually characterized by a sense of pessimism, absurdity, and nihilism.

Ever wondered what would happen if mankind was threatened by a zombie apocalypse? What would happen our respected governments and other political authorities? Would mankind be able to come out of this pandemic with its political system intact or will society divide?