Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the changing role of hope in the narratives of modernization and of apocalypse, focusing thereby on the political potential for subversion.

Paper long abstract:

Many ideological and political projects have been fuelled by the apocalyptic narrative of doom for the dominators and hope for the oppressed. The Revelation of St. John the Divine was, in the time of Roman persecution of Christians, a 'countercultural code for dissent' (Keller 2005). The same narrative matrix shaped also the projects that did not explicitly rely on the discourse of apocalypse (e.g. the Jacobins as the Elect (Sickinger 2004), the Nazi movement (Waite 1993), the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the Cold War, 'Y2K' issue and the feared Mayan end of the world in 2012). In order to demystify the narrative underlying many fears and social worries (overpopulation, eco-disasters, rapid technological changes), and to explain increased popularity of utopias and dystopias, created in the face of crises, we need to start from the fact that this underlying narrative has but rarely been acknowledged as being apocalyptic. Notwithstanding this, even those people who do not believe in it seem to be influenced by the apocalypse, in the sense of the End of the world, such a belief being something of a 'civilizational habit' (Keller 2005), capable of both revolution and reaction. We seem to be unable to provide an essential subtext but can recognise the performance of something that can be called the cultural apocalypse script (Keller 2005), which literalises itself in history in different ways through our different performances of it, similar to Scott's hidden transcript (Scott 1990), operating at the very core of centuries-long processes of modernisation.