Critical Foresight: Alt. Styles

Through this investigation of contemporary futurestext I argue that fragmentation of Australia’s future perspective along apocalyptic fault lines is most visible during the last decade of the twentieth century. Indeed, apocalyptic subjects exercise a strong influence over Australia’s internal styles of thinking about the future towards the close of the 1990s. During this period, many religious organisations through their publishing arms provided an intellectual justification and articulated account of their apocalyptic and endist positions that usually always opposed dominant cultural values of progress. The default view is to regard their accounts as positioned on the margins of society. Yet their styles of futures-thinking — which suggested a form of apocalyptic anticipation towards the times ahead — were produced and expressed within a specific historical, cultural and symbolic conjuncture of late twentieth century globalisation, postmodernism and pre-millennial apocalyptic expectation inclusive of society.