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

Abstract

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.'memorialized'. This connects to how one might understand this 'imaginary' as a socialdiscursive process of giving reality to 'objects' to be acted upon in the context of crisis based on perceived normative claims to morality. It expands the applicability of the War Imaginary by referencing Benedict Anderson's ( 2006) Imagined Communities to factor historical-time into the imaginary social cohesion of nations. It also provides complementary literature to 1) provide an outline of the mythic structures supporting national self-understanding and the interpretation of America's public myths, and 2) to position the premise of identities-in-crisis, sequestered identity ideals, and the articulation of threat as it relates to war/military culture. Chapter 3: Theory -The Operative Value of Myth & Apocalyptic Rhetoric This chapter draws upon Anderson's notion of 'simultaneity' as it reflects Walter Benjamin's description of homogeneous, empty time and Messianic time and connects them to Claude Lévi-Strauss' (1955) description of the operative value of myth. It relies on the fusion of Sassure's distinction of the structure/statistics of language, with their corresponding time-associations:revertible/non-revertible. This aligns with how the fundamental cultural conflict i.e. one of the mythic structures of national self-understanding, operates based on a divide between orthodoxy/progressivism; this divide resembles the elements required for historical-imagining in the context of crisis for the interpretation of 'events'. 7 The purpose of this chapter is to forge a connection between narrative processes of identity-formation from the individual to the state and link it to motivation in the context of war via apocalyptic (epochal) discourse/rhetoric.Chapter 4: Methods -Rhetorical Criticism as 'Synecdoche for Agency' 27 This soldier has a "novel approach to warfare" and a "talent for organizing technology to exploit its potential", as well as, a "new lexicon of ...