The response to 9/11 involved appealing to apocalyptic rhetoric to capitalize on the affective chaos following the tragedy to discursively mobilize actors while engaging in historical (re)imagining of the state. This thesis uses Benedict Anderson's concept of Imagined Communities as it concerns national/historical-time to expand upon Paul Fussell and Lilie Chouliaraki's work on the War Imaginary. It demonstrates how the operative value of myth mirrors and is serviceable to the discursive-reconstitution of the state in times of crisis and how individual self-understanding emerges via Narrative Identity. The major mythic structures that provide the source of authority to American self-understanding include: the American civil religion and the American culture-wars. Crisis compels identification to make sense of unfamiliar events according to one's origin myth; adaptive 'editing' for familiarity permits those in-crisis to shape/eliminate anything that contradicts their moral-truth to consolidate it as 'authentic' when faced with the 'inauthentic' threat of an alternative.

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Restart the ‘World’ with Revolutionary Ruptures: Imagining Identity through War & in Crisis – Apocalyptic Rhetoric & the American Civil Religion

In an endnote to a recent article, Katherine Hayles comments upon how “it is interesting that science fiction writers, traditionally the ones who prognosticate possible futures, are increasingly setting their fictions in the present” (“Computing” 149, n.2). In this article, Hayles contends with the hu ma n desi re to gener ate prog nost icat ions ab out t he future, and she argues that such attempts (whether they are in scientific discourses or in the literary domain of science fiction) prove inherently problematic: “If the record of past predictions is any guide, the one thing we know for certain is that when the future arrives, it will be different from the future we expected” (131). Hayles argues that such speculations are important not for what they tell us about the future but for how they allow us “to explore the influence that such predictions have on our present concepts” (131). She proceeds to examine the ways in which speculations about the future of computers and robotics affect our views of such technologies in the present. Therefore, both scientific and science-fictional visions of the future prove to not be about the future at all but about the present in which we live.

The Eversion of the Virtual: Postmodernity and Control Societies in William Gibson’s Science Fictions of the Present

Henri Bergson once argued that “the mechanism of our ordinary knowledge is of a cinematographical kind.”2 Bergson resorts to the cinematograph as a metaphor in his discussion of becoming and its relation to perception and knowledge: “We take snapshots, as it were, of the passing reality, and, as these are characteristic of reality, we have only to string them on a becoming, abstract, uniform, and invisible, situated at the back of the apparatus of knowledge, in order to imitate what there is that is characteristic of this becoming itself. Perception, intellection, language so proceed in general” (306). For Bergson, cinema mirrors our natural perceptual schema—from the initial images of reality, our intellects engage in an ongoing process of transforming these into linear narratives. This consistent ordering of reality constitutes the basis of becoming as we continually revise our own linear narrative in relation to the perceptions that our brain orders into coherence on a constant basis.

The Spectacle of Memory: Realism, Narrative, and Time Travel Cinema

As the above epigraph from Hayden White suggests, narrative functions as humankind’s most basic tool for navigating and making sense out of reality—it operates as a kind of universal code that transcends linguistic and sociocultural boundaries and that lies at the very core of the human. From our personal thoughts to our everyday conversations, from the shortest flash fiction to gargantuan novels, narrative is always already philosophical because it represents our perhaps feeble attempts to carve manageable slices out of the chaotic manifold of sensory input. We are continuously assailed with stimuli not just in the sense that we live in an era of overstimulation and information bombardment but also in a more fundamental way. With our five senses receiving input that ranges from the constant streams of data that emanate from ubiquitous media sources to our continually evolving interactions with other individuals, one might expect our systems to crash already from information overload without ever considering the continual barrage of data assaulting us from smart phones, laptops, electronic billboards, televisions, GPS devices, and the various computer displays that appear everywhere from supermarkets to car dashboards to the backs of airplane seats. But we constantly delete or strain off irrelevant bits of data like so many unwanted cache files on a hard drive.

Gerald Alva MillerJr.

Papers

The Eversion of the Virtual: Postmodernity and Control Societies in William Gibson’s Science Fictions of the Present

The Spectacle of Memory: Realism, Narrative, and Time Travel Cinema

Introduction The Genre of the Non-Place: Science Fiction as Critical Theory