Apocalyptic Voices
Bridging the Gap Between Former and Future Fellows
The fellows and their academic work are the heart and core of CAPAS. Each semester, around ten fellows from a wide range of disciplines conduct research at CAPAS and the centre offers them a unique opportunity to engage in interdisciplinary exchange. Specifically, said exchange happens in the form of working groups that come together at the beginning of each term. On a weekly basis, the fellows come together to work on a common topic and theme that aligns with their individual research interests.
However, it is important that the research developed and deepened at the centre has a platform. On our open-access, open-source, and open-science platform PubPuB we have created a space in which said research has a voice; bridging the gap between the work of former and future fellows but, additionaly, equally offering a broader, interested public a unique level of transparency into the lively discussions, research, and debates that happen here at CAPAS.
In the winter semester of 2023/24, three groups formed around specific aspects of apocalyptic and post-apocalyptic studies: Apocalyptic Encounters, Apocalyptic Voice, and Feeling the Apocalypse. Based on joint readings, discussions, pop-culture relics, and media artifacts each group wrote a report on their work. In the following you will find a brief overview of the topics that were at the centre of the discussions of the latest fellow cohort. If your curiosity is piqued, you can delve deeper into the topics via the "read-more" link.
Apocalyptic Encounters
by Pamela Karimi, Rolf Scheuermann, Susan Watkins and David Wilson
The group “Apocalyptic Encounters” was formed with two aspirations. The first was to focus on the relationship between colonialism and the apocalypse (examining how central a language of apocalypticism was and is to particular instances of the colonial encounter in history and how the colonial “encounter” can be framed in apocalyptic terms). The second was to examine how Indigenous, First Nations, and Fourth World cultures and contexts, that have their own apocalyptic traditions, might adapt and rework or repurpose colonial apocalyptic beliefs, or might produce syncretic hybrids of those.
Thinking in terms of ‘Decolonising or provincialising the Apocalypse’ can be useful; however, in order for this to attempt to be authentic, merely ‘additive’ or dilettante gestures have to be avoided, particularly from the perspective of a majority white cosmopolitan elite.
Apocalyptic Voice
by William Sherman, Katie Barclay, Robert Folger, Marcus Quent and Timo Storck
What does the apocalypse sound like? So many cultural explorations of the apocalypse are gauged to images, visions, events, “content,” and to stuff. We find the apocalypse as a what: as this or that prophecy of catastrophe, as this or that cosmic courtroom of judgment, and so forth. Taking a cue from Jacques Derrida’s wry commentary on the “apocalyptic tone,” however, this group gathered to read and discuss the apocalypse as voice and tone: as a how rather than a what and as the voice that can (or cannot?) be teased out from the prophecies and judgments days it may describe.
Once we pose the question of apocalyptic voice, what other questions can we now ask? Following Derrida’s lead again, we might wonder whether we would like to cultivate an apocalyptic tone in our own writing and thinking or whether we’d rather exorcise the apocalypse from our voice (even if such a task is impossible, per Derrida). Once disconnected from, say, a particular vision of catastrophic finality, does the apocalypse—as tone, as voice—open up new methods? Does apocalypse as voice open new ways to think through relationships between temporality, subjectivity, and language?
As we quickly learned, however, there is not a single apocalyptic voice. An unsurprising revelation, perhaps, but one that nevertheless altered (as an après-coup perhaps) how we understood our research together. We began to tease out particular types of apocalyptic voices, sorting the varieties of apocalyptic voice based primarily on how temporality and language intersected. Typologies are never as precise as they seem, but a typology can be a critical first step for it allows us to understand the stakes of our inquiry. For instance, does the apocalyptic voice speak within or outside of history? As our work suggests, it depends on which apocalyptic voice—but we can then trace the implications for a host of other themes (such as subjectivity, scripture vs. orality, and so forth) by appealing to our typology. This short report, therefore, is an introduction to the apocalyptic voices we identified over the course of a semester: the prophetic, the messianic, the apostolic, the mystic, the mystagogic, and the psychoanalytic.
And the end? The end of this experiment gives up the illusion of a coherent, authoritative voice and devolves into the (hopefully not cacophonous) chorus that participated in this research endeavor. There is no single conclusion, just as the voice—whatever it might be—cannot be reduced to the message it conveyed. And, indeed, if we were to attempt the impossible by offering a single conclusion about the apocalyptic voice, it would be a self-denying, apophatic conclusion: the apocalyptic voice is one that ruptures meaning and sense through the way it forces time upon us through tone, style, and repetition.
So, did you hear about the apocalypse? And, if so, from whom…?
Feeling the Apocalypse
by Katie Barclay, Vincent Bruyère, Jana Cattien and Jenny Stümer
When we think about what it might mean to experience an apocalypse, we immediately think of heightened emotional states. Rather than following this intuition, our working group was interested in apocalyptic feelings that are associated with ordinary living and ‘mundane’ questions of survival, both in the face of the apocalypse and as a matter of navigating it in the everyday. Drawing on the work of apocalyptic affect theorists (despite never really using the term apocalypse) such as Lauren Berlant, “ordinary apocalypse” instances in the form of museum exhibitions, and novels we explored said “low affect” apocalypse.
In the texts we’ve read and discussions we’ve had, the emphasis was, on the one hand, on the emotional regimes that might allow people to cope with the apocalypse and on the other hand, on the shifts in emotional regimes that might themselves be considered apocalyptic in their impact and scope. Both these dimensions showed us that affects and emotions are no mere epiphenomena of more fundamental political and social states of affairs, but themselves capable of making and unmaking worlds.