PROGRAMMING THE APOCALYPSE: RECOMBINANT - CdD Home

297 Pages·2007·1.01 MB·English

PROGRAMMING THE APOCALYPSE:
RECOMBINANT NARRATIVE IN CYBERSPACE

by
Dino Enrico Cardone
__________________________________________________________

A Dissertation Presented to the
FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
In Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
(COMMUNICATION)

December 2007

Copyright 2007 Dino Enrico Cardone
ii

Acknowledgements
I would like to acknowledge first of all my parents Grace and Aldo Cardone.
Without their loving support this project would not have been possible.
I would also like to thank my friends Vinh Trieu, Jim Cleveland, Alan
Grunfeld, and Pam Brickmann for remaining firm in the conviction that I could bring
the project to completion.
Thanks are due also to my professors at USC, Stephen O’Leary, Thomas
Goodnight, Larry Pryor, Doug Thomas, Ken Sereno, Randy Lake, and Marita
Sturken. They were among the faculty at USC who always commiserated with me in
this endeavor and made me feel I had something valuable to contribute. In this same
regard, I also would like to thank my grad student colleagues Deborah Dunn, Shawn
Batt, Jacqueline Samols, Jennie Wong, and especially Ishita Sinha Roy.
iii

Table of Contents
Acknowledgments ii
Abstract v
Chapter 1: Introduction to the Study: 1
Purpose 6
Definitions of Apocalypse 10
Literature Review 12
Justification 20
Methodology 26
Scope 37
Sources 43
Outline o f Chapters 45
Endnotes 47

Chapter 2: Towards a Theory of Web-Based Apocalyptic 51
Ong’s Theory of Orality and Literacy 53
Ong and Web-based rhetorics 63
Theoretical Interfaces Fisher, Grassi 69
Apocalyptic Theory Brummett, O’Leary 87
Discursive Egalitarianism 96
Conclusion 105
Endnotes 107

Chapter 3: Dispensationalist Christian Apocalypticism on the Net 113
Book of Revelation: Topological Terrain 114
Analysis of Dispensationalist Web Sites 129
Prophetic Intelligibility 144
Reasoning by Sign 151
Narrative Convergence 156
Conclusion 157
Endnotes 159
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Chapter 4: Web-Based Traditionalist Catholic Apocalypticism 164

Vatican II as Endtimes Topos 164
Marian Apocalypticism 170
Bayside Apparitions: Veronica Lueken 172
Topical Constellations, Inversions, and Potentialities 202
Conclusion 208
Endnotes 210

Chapter 5: Conclusion: Web-based Alternative Rhetorics 215
Summary of Study 216
Alternative Sites: Rense.com and Prisonplanet.com 242
Summary of Findings 270
Implications 274
Generalizability and Limitations 276
Conclusion 279
Endnotes 280

Bibliography 288
v

Abstract

This study analyses the impact of the World Wide Web and digital technologies on
the practice of apocalyptic rhetoric in cyberspace at beginning of the 21st century.
As a mass medium and subset of the Internet, whose qualities include data
exchangeability, nonlinear hyperlinking, and a relative lack of gatekeepers, the Web,
the author contends, lends itself not only to more networked reasoning styles, but to
mytho-logics. The Web as both a virtual repository for human knowledge and a
universal publishing platform provides apocalyptically-minded individuals with the
discursive power and resources to reason mythologically, programming synthetic
fusions of mythos and logos in the creation of apocalyptic narratives drawn from a
variety of traditions. Such “recombinant narratives,” the author finds, provide
individuals with a sense of cosmic and personal meaning by acting as symbolic
theodicies. Moreover, the author contends that the phenomena of data
exchangeability, narrative programmability, and narrative syncretism are further
evidenced in apocalyptically inflected neo-orthodoxies emerging on the Web which
make apocalyptic scenarios intelligible in terms of digital technologies, even while
denying or demonizing those same technologies.
1

Chapter One

Programming the Apocalypse:
Recombinant Narrative in Cyberspace

Introduction

Coincident with the onset of the Third Christian Millennium, the advent of
the World Wide Web heralded a flourishing of apocalyptic discourse in cyberspace.
The Web and its attendant digital technologies forever altered the discursive
landscape for apocalypticists, rendering not only increased rhetorical opportunities to
apocalyptic rhetors, but novel evidentiary resources as well. Among the latter are
“Bible codes,” reality re-imagining digital imaging technologies, powerful research
tools, and publishing capabilities enabling individual apocalypticists to reach a mass
audience.
As an instrumentality of scientific rationality in the fields of information and
computer science, it may seem incongruous that the Internet should provide a
seemingly natural home to “the ancient logic of apocalypticism.”1 Indeed, a whole
range of apocalyptic, alternative, non-mainstream, and unorthodox discourses
deploying apocalyptic topoi find their place on the Web. However, as David Noble
argued in The Religion of Technology the drive toward technological development in
the West has long been imbued with millennial spirit. Religious imperatives and
millennial belief have gone hand in hand with technological advances and
“confidence in the ultimate triumph of reason.” 2 Indeed religious imperatives have
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driven those very technological advances and were instrumental in promoting the
idea that the universe is fundamentally rational.3
As topoi within apocalyptic discourse, particular technologies themselves
may become objects of examination for the discourse. They may even become
identified with a specific apocalyptic topos. For example, microchip technology and
the Mark of the Beast topos can become so identified with each other in some
rhetorics that they become one and the same in the discourse. To talk about one is
ipso facto to talk about the other. Moreover, technological developments may
function as warrants for claims in apocalyptic arguments: These are the endtimes,
because chimeras are being created via genetic engineering or the technological
enactment of the Mark of the Beast is upon us in microchipping and RFID
technology and so forth. Apocalyptic arguments reveal both technology as topos,
and how aspects of technological development/innovation function to make an
apocalyptic topos, such as the Mark of the Beast, intelligible in terms of current
technological development, connecting it to the world of actuality and thereby
advancing the argument for the prophecy. Furthermore, even while deploying digital
technology, apocalyptic rhetors may evince anxieties about the technology’s rapid
progress, particularly digital technology’s ability to surveil and control. Thus, some
apocalyptic rhetoric includes an anti-technological stream. Noble, however, largely
ignores the anti-technological stream of discourse that is also a part of Western
tradition.4
Although apocalyptic and conspiratorial web rhetors are highly literate and
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avid users of digital technologies, the unorthodox rhetorics they produce frequently
deploy elements of pre-literate mythopoetic “logics,” apocalyptic commonplaces,
various insights gleaned from ancient traditions of gnosis and mystery religion, and
most significantly for this study signal aspects of orality. That is, even while
deploying rationality and scientific rationality’s child, technology, to promote their
message, apocalypticists show evidence of a syncretic epistemology combining
elements of rationality with mythopoeia.
Hence, the rhetorical situation brought about by the advent of networked and
digital technologies transcends issues of technology and religion, however, going
straight to the heart of longstanding epistemological tensions. These are variously
conceived of as the incommensurability of logos and mythos,5 fact and value,6 the
rational world paradigm and narrative logics,7 formal and informal logics, 8 or
philosophy and rhetoric.9 The practical, as opposed to theoretical, dimension of this
problem is how to best assess truth claims and brings us to the central concerns of
this study which are not about technology and religion per se, but rather about how
to regard incommensurable truth claims on issues of public controversy in new
media.
Various theorists of apocalypticism have argued that apocalyptic belief is a
result of anomie, disaster, or a sense of deprivation, a maladjustment of the
apocalyptic rhetor to the world.10 With the focus of some theorists on the etiology of
apocalypticism, as if it were a discursive disease whose origins must be explained,
one is left with the impression that apocalypticists themselves are irrational.
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However, no less a figure of Enlightenment rationality than Sir Isaac Newton did
extensive studies of Revelation and Daniel in Latin.11 Yet, even Newton in his day
felt he needed to hide his apocalyptic studies.12
Since Newton’s time, rationalist discourse has come to further dominate the
institutions of the West, enjoying a privileged status over and against other
discourses, like apocalypticism, which are rooted in mythos. However, often a
strictly rationalist or empiricist notion of knowledge has had little influence on the
conduct of ordinary discourse. In this sense, both reason and technology as the
instrumentality of reason are a philosopher’s concern. The debates of knowledge
specialists have failed to engage the imaginations of non-specialists, namely, the
everyday user of language and reason. The institutional enshrinement of rationalist
discourse is not devoid moreover of political implications and certainly implies a
hegemonic status for rhetorics consonant with the discourse of institutions such as
government, media, and academe over and against all other varieties of discourse.
Thus, in a Culture of Conspiracy Michael Barkun lamented the threat posed to
“consensus reality” by emerging synthetic worldviews and near epistemological
pluralism, but found no way of profitably rhetorically engaging with the discourse
only warning against it.13 The Web furthers challenges to the discursive and
epistemological forms of institutions considerably. Thus, the problem has a practical
as well as theoretical dimension. In this study, I argue that profitable forms of
rhetorical engagement with emerging forms of discourse in new media are essential
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and that guardians of hegemonic “consensus realities” ignore emerging forms of
discourse in new media at their own peril.
Web-based discourses on a variety of topics constitute a rhetorical challenge
which gated mainstream media, such as print, television and film cannot ignore.
Web-based discourses place the individual rhetor at the narrative center, relatively
freed from institutionally enforced orthodoxies, whether scientific, theological or
otherwise. This individual-friendly rhetorical position, further assisted by digital
media technologies’ plenipotentiary ability to plasticize visual and audio
representations of reality, allows rhetors to construct alternate narratives and
rhetorics which challenge those of the status quo. The implicitly subversive aspect of
the rhetorics described in the preceding analysis fits apocalyptic (and conspiracism)
well. Subversion, as we shall see later, is an inherent aspect of apocalypticism. Thus,
conspiracy and apocalyptic are a natural fit for the relatively non-gated Web. Indeed,
I argue that Net-based discourse has redefined older media discourses both through
the process that allows for the construction of competing accounts and also by
mainstream media’s active mining of the Web for topoi.14
An essential feature of Web-based rhetorics in being able to pose rhetorical
challenges to the status quo rhetorics of older media is the former’s syncretism. This
study examines the rhetorical dynamics of apocalyptic web sites showing the
essentially syncretic nature of apocalyptic discourse in cyberspace. This syncretism
I have termed “recombinant narrative.” The syncretic aspect of Web-based rhetorics,
described later in this study, is one of the signal aspects of emerging media and