Contested Meanings, Myths and Hyperimages of the Apocalypse: The Bakhtin Circle and the Politicisation of Catastrophism

Abstract

This article considers the depoliticising effects of current images and myths of apocalyptic visions, such that the world faces a catastrophe whether this emerges from environmental degradation, mass migration, terrorism, or global financial collapse. In our digital media age, apocalyptic images are now also captured through the raw footage of actual disaster events. In the article we call such footage, ‘hyperimages’. The power of the hyperimage is not, as Baudrillard once said, that reality is ‘just like the movies’, rather, hyperimages demonstrate that the image captured and shown to others is all too real because they depict actual everyday disasters. Importantly, such is the power of hyperimages that they are often employed by the political right to help them construct a hegemonic project aiming to win state power and to influence state policies. Drawing on the Bakhtin Circle, however, we show that hyperimages are also mediated and circulated through a multitude of social groups and voices in society, which contain seeds of radical heteroglossic alternatives to that of the right. Following this, the paper then examines how responses to apocalyptic hyperimages can be politicised in a progressive direction.