Postmodern adaptations of apocalypse

Challenging the dominant power regime imposed by the apocalyptic metanarrative allows authors to move beyond the Book of Revelation’s absolute Truth and moral dualism and seek out other, perhaps less oppressive, certainly less binarily rigid, moral systems. In Apocalyptic Transformation, Elizabeth Rosen writes specifically about the postmodern search for such alternatives. Postmodernism, which emerged during the twentieth century as a reaction to modernism, describes both a set of aesthetics and a “distinct way of seeing the world as a whole,” often referred to as “the postmodern condition” (Butler 3). According to Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, postmodernism is characterized by “a highly critical epistemology, hostile to any overarching philosophical or political doctrine, and strongly opposed to those ‘dominant ideologies’ that help to maintain the status quo” (Butler 29).

Postmodernism was founded on skeptical, anti-metanarrative philosophies (especially the work of Jean-François Lyotard, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Jean Baudrillard) that deny the existence of any so-called universal Truth. Instead, theories of deconstruction and relativism hold that “truth itself is always relative to the differing standpoints and predisposing intellectual frameworks of the judging subject” (Butler 16). Following this logic:

The relativist claim is that once we see our conceptual systems in this way, we can also see that the world, its social systems, human identity even, are not givens, somehow guaranteed by a language which corresponds to reality, but are constructed by us in language, in ways that can never be justified by the claim that this is the way that such things “really are.” (Butler 21)

This is one of the major points at which postmodernism departs from modernist and liberal humanist assumptions of universal human essence, reason, or ultimate moral nature (Hutcheon 118). In postmodernism, “the human being is not a unity, not autonomous, but a process, perpetually in construction, perpetually contradictory, perpetually open to change” (Belsey 119).

This isn’t to say that in practice, however, the two positions cannot work together. “The liberal would join with the postmodernist in seeing the need for an ability to question the boundaries of our social roles…and the postmodernist deconstructive attitude has been extraordinarily effective in combating restrictive ideologies in this way” (Butler 58). And although it rejects the liberal ideal of rational self-determination, postmodern “transgressive-deconstructive loosening of the conceptual boundaries of our thoughts about gender, race, sexual orientation, and ethnicity…makes an essentially liberal demand for the recognition of difference, an acceptance of the ‘other’ within the community” (Butler 58-59).

Critics of postmodernism, including Fredric Jameson, a prominent Marxist commentator on postmodernism, believe the postmodern rejection of Enlightenment reason, Kantian human autonomy, and any other kind of objective truth has caused “a defining sense of the postmodern as ‘the disappearance of a sense of history’ in the culture, a pervasive depthlessness, a ‘perpetual present’ in which the memory of tradition is gone” (Butler 110). This has led to a critical view of postmodernists as merely “epistemological pluralists, with no firm general position available to them; However radical they may seem as critics, they lack a settled external viewpoint, and this means that so far as real-life ongoing politics is concerned, they are passively conservative in effect” (Butler 61). Taken to the extreme, postmodernists are accused of being “skeptics who cannot make significant moral or political commitments…self-indulgent and self-absorbed, and ultimately uncommitted to anything that matters” (Butler 28).

Still, rejection of essentialist ideas about human nature and universal Truth is crucial for a postmodern critique of the apocalyptic metanarrative, since “deconstruction creates an anti-apocalyptic wedge that allows us to break open Truth” (Quinby, Anti-Apocalypse 67). Jacques Derrida’s 1984 essay, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted in Philosophy,” explores the function of the apocalypse in philosophic discourse:

Whoever takes on the apocalyptic tone comes to signify to, if not tell, you something. What? The truth, of course, and to signify to you that it reveals the truth to you: the tone is the revelatory of some unveiling in process…Truth itself is the end, the destination, and that truth unveils itself is the advent of the end. Truth is the end and the instance of the last judgment. The structure of truth here would be apocalyptic. And that is why there would not be any truth of the apocalypse that is not the truth of truth. (Derrida 53)

Once such an apocalyptic tone is identified:

each time we intractably ask ourselves where they want to come to, and to what ends, those who declare the end of this or that, of man or the subject, of consciousness, of history, of the West or of literature, and according to the latest news of progress itself, the idea of which has never been in such bad health to the right and the left? What effect do these people, gentile prophets or eloquent visionaries, want to produce? In view of what immediate or adjourned benefit? What do they do, what do we do in saying this? To seduce or subjugate whom, intimidate or make come whom?” (Derrida 51)

These passages highlight the absolutism that is essential to apocalyptic rhetoric, and raise the question of whether postmodernists, as so-called “purveyors of the absolute truth of no truth” can ever appropriate the apocalyptic narrative form to challenge the idea of apocalyptic Truth (Quinby, Anti-Apocalypse 67).

Derrida’s proposed solution is “an apocalypse without apocalypse, an apocalypse without vision, without truth, without revelation…addresses without message and without destination, without sender or decidable addressee, without last judgment…an apocalypse beyond good and evil” (Derrida 66). According to Jonathan Boyarin, a specialist in Jewish apocalyptic thought, this “apocalypse without apocalypse” can be:

transcribable as endtime-without-revelation: the ultimate evacuation of any hope in meaning. Since the “historical” ancient apocalypses…fundamentally include an aspect of judgment leading to reward and punishment, the notion of apocalypse without apocalypse could also mean endtime without judgment. Phrased this way we have, I suggest, a startling characterization of the postmodern turn, revealing both its Jewish and Christian roots in the vision of an endtime and how much of a break with the modern transformation of traditional hope it represents, since Jewish and Christian apocalypse both entail final judgment. (Boyarin 43)

Quinby, however, cautions that even parts of Derrida’s argument are “inflected with an apocalyptic flattening-out of historical change,” while postmodern philosophy as a whole is vulnerable to over-reliance on “traditional social science conceptions of…a unified and bounded entity called culture, which when employed in analysis is itself totalizing” (Anti-Apocalypse 54, 49). Nonetheless, Rosen claims postmodernists “may conceivably contribute to peace through their thoughtful versions of apocalypse…in the very act of deconstructing the apocalypse, postmodern artists are being constructive” (177).

For readers disinclined to accept the argument that the dualistic myth of the Book of Revelation can be separated from the narrative to create an apocalypse without an apocalypse, Rosen holds up the stories examined in Apocalyptic Transformation as proof of postmodernists’ success in doing so (xxi). “To claim that postmodernism cannot appropriate the apocalyptic myth,” she writes, “is to deny what has already been done. It can and it has. The challenge that remains is to recognize and understand it” (Rosen 175). Recognizing and understanding Harry Potter as postmodern apocalyptic fiction has important implications for teaching readers about morality in a non-dualistic way, which encourages moving toward “active engagement with the complexity of human language and relations and away from the deadly consequences of oversimplifying human motivation and behavior” (Rosen 178).