ABSTRACT
It was Angela Carter who, amid the celebratory hype of 1980s postmodernism, wryly remarked that “the fin is coming a little early this siècle.” With the end of the present century coinciding with the end of the millenium this is perhaps not unexpected. Yet the response by Christians, fellow travellers, and indeed the rest of us, for whom this arbitrary moment in time has been fixed with epochal significance, has been somewhat muted. It could well be argued that the revelatory confidence of biblical millenialism is largely overshadowed by symptoms of angst concerning identity and being, yet even this more cautious response is so far milder than might have been expected. Mega year-end celebrations for 1999 were planned well in advance with many fully booked years ahead, to be sure, but the excitement remains much more abstract than that which captured the last fin de siècle. The angst and optimism will surely quicken in the last moments of the second Christian millenium, and they may seem more intense in hindsight, but I suspect too that something else is at work. Assumptions of social power and the power of social construction are to a greater or lesser extent hegemonic in a way they never were a hundred years ago. The abstract time marked by the fin de millenium has yielded some of its power of determination.
