The Myth of Estrangement

From the Immanence of Myth, available now through Weaponized Press.

“The apocalypse is finished, today it is the precession of the neutral, of forms of the neutral and of indifference…all that remains, is the fascination for desertlike and indifferent forms, for the very operation of the system that annihilates us. Now, fascination (in contrast to seduction, which was attached to appearances, and to dialectical reason, which was attached to meaning) is a nihilistic passion par excellence, it is the passion proper to the mode of disappearance. We are fascinated by all forms of disappearance, of our disappearance. Melancholic and fascinated, such is our general situation in an era of involuntary transparency.” Jean Baudrillard

    We stand “outside the Garden,” as we said, estranged from ourselves. What does this estrangement mean? Where does it originate? What mythic repercussions does it have?
    Amongst the multiplicity of myths that have played themselves out through the history of the so-called Western world, there is a single idea that seems a prerequisite for all of them. The ideological history we discussed in Pretty Suicide Machine is the legacy of this simple valuation: the priests, scientists, and even artists painted the natural order as something which must be overcome, restructured, and dominated for personal, economic, or even spiritual progress to take place. This prefiguring idea amounts to an underlying assumption that structures the world that we know today. It is not an assumption that lies under all cultural heritages: most Native Americans, for instance, had no such concept in their mythic DNA. However, it would appear that cultures that do not maintain the necessity of mastery, control, and possession quickly become the possession of cultures that do, or they are simply driven into obscurity or even oblivion.1
    This is one of the premises explored at length by Horkheimer and Adorno in Dialectic of Enlightenment, “In thought, human beings distance themselves from nature in order to arrange it in such a way that it can be mastered.” Though this thesis is arrived at in part through only considering the negative function of myth, their point is valid nevertheless. Mastery of nature is far from the only valuation that shapes our heritage, but it is a ubiquitous one. The myth of ownership, the myths of social hierarchies, the myth of capital, individuality, freedom, and so on are all the true backbone of our culture, for better and worse, and all of them are informed by this valuation.

Invasive Stories: Wombs, Brains & Survival

By Mr. VI

Allow me to tell you a story – and I say allow, because you will have to give consent. A story can't be told without the audience participating in some way, even if it's simple suspension of disbelief.

The written and spoken word require a little more effort, because that kind of story requires the audience to use their imaginations, and we've already spoken of how communication and storytelling actually require – and produce- a kind of bizarre neurological entanglement.

(If you've not been following this blog long enough to read it, or need your memory refreshing, it's here – Red Riding Hood: Narrative, Neurology & Storytelling. Go on, I'll wait, because it really is essential to what you're going to be reading next, and will help you see where we're going.)

One of the interesting things about stories is that they build on each other – they provide a referential framework. A story is not just one event, it is in fact an arrangement of events. Story, as a word comes from the same linguistic roots as history:

history

late 14c., "relation of incidents" (true or false), from O.Fr. estoire, estorie "chronicle, history, story" (12c., Mod.Fr. histoire), from L. historia "narrative of past events, account, tale, story," from Gk. historia "a learning or knowing by inquiry; an account of one's inquiries, history, record, narrative," from historein "inquire," from histor "wise man, judge," from PIE *wid-tor-, from root *weid- "to know," lit. "to see" (see vision). Related to Gk. idein "to see," and to eidenai "to know." In Middle English, not differentiated from story; sense of "record of past events" probably first attested late 15c. As a branch of knowledge, from 1842. Sense of "systematic account (without reference to time) of a set of natural phenomena" (1560s) is now obsolete except in natural history.

As you can see, it's quite literally a recounting of events – an order of experience conveyed to you.

That same earlier post you will have read was collected in a best-of Modern Mythology 2011 – a selection of our work last year. It's a peculiar thing, because it ends up giving you a snapshot of events which may lead you into looking back on 2011 with new eyes. Certainly, many of those posts were inspired by events in our lives and the wider world.

Those events spawned those pieces, which even now are spawning this piece, folding in current events, reacting and changing in accordance with circumstance and stimuli. No story, no myth, no recounting of events is immune to this.

Not even the Bible – or at the very least, the interpretation of it.

Modern Myths in Final Conflicts

By Wes Unruh
While fairy tales like Red Riding Hood may historically be better indicators of psychological tendencies within a people than the more traditional myths of a civilization, I tend to think the division is tragic. We are always somewhat separate from our gods, but the urban legends all happened to a friend of a friend's cousin. Same with fairy tales - the stories are the narratives that people use to flesh out the world around them - the farther away the space they are mapping, the more surreal and empowered the hero, the more archetypal the expression.

Now we ourselves are journeying to the darkest spaces of the planet with diodes and halogen bulbs, scanning the earth itself with orbital satellite platforms, a technologically empowered ghost dance chasing every last spirit, for good or ill, deeper into the core of the earth (picture Agartha overrun with fables seeking shelter from the mundane accountant). It's been said if god did not exist we would have to invent her. I'm pretty sure that's been said, at least - the same goes for all myths - if they don't yet exist, sooner or later someone will speak it, seek to express that archetype in narrative, that it might be apprehended, toughened up, and brought into conversational space.

We cannot parse our existence without narrative - even if that narrative is implied. When we hear of something spilling out from the crawling chaos of our own psyche, it can only appear in divine or demonic forms until we understand it - and even then it gets iffy. When I read about the 'central nervous system for the earth' I immediately think of Gaia, first the goddess and secondly the planet in Asimov's Foundation meta-novel - and I suspect I'm not the only one who sees the shadow of Skynet as a kind of distant third. Myth-making with archetypes is a fundamental expression of sign-wielding cognition, a 'here-there-be-dragons' kind of filling in the gaps, that helps reality stabilize for a society.

Unfortunately, our current global situation seems to be a clashing of archetypal expression preventing true communication. Our world's biggest belief systems most extreme fundamentalists are all obsessively focused on the Temple Mount and the end of the world. Or more precisely, ending the world. Every time someone says they can't wait for the Second Coming of Christ, they're publicly expressing the desire to see the world come to an end. Give them a good hard slap in the face - it may not wake them out of their trance, but it will give them the slightest taste of the sheer magnitude of harm they are wishing upon the rest of the planet, not to mention the blood which has already been spilled in the name of the Kingdom of G-d.

Perhaps the new modern myths will not be myths of distance, or of the huge archetypal forces moving just beyond the liminal, almost formless yet manifest... the new modern myths will be more like fairy tales, urban legends, and cross-cultural movements of signification. The days of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity squabbling over the Dome of the Rock in the hopes of kickstartering up an armeggedon so the thousand year reign of Christ can begin once the Dajjal's armies of djinn and demons have been put down are almost over.



This is the myth of the far-away god that kills, a powerful myth that persisted for years, but didn't become apocalyptic until the myth-forms themselves sensed the encroachment into their space of the 'thought-at-a-distance' technologies of the telegraph, the radio, and finally the satellite. With the telegraph came the refinements in notions of the Rapture, with Sputnik and the Space Race Hal Lindsey conceived of and exposed 'The Late Great Planet Earth' planting armeggedonist dispensationalism into conservative politics and linking the modern state of Israel with the violence described in the Revelation of St. John the Divine.



In opposition to this traditionalist nationalist view of history, we're seeing the rise of the borderless state and the collective mind, a cybernetic enhancement assimilating (borg-like) all of the world into a new cognitive model of networked spaces. With this new virtual state, we see a different kind of archetypal force moving (as promised) against the God who kills from the skies with fire. The new world order will be all of us, illuminati each and every one, creating environments about us as we grow off world, or it'll be a cannibalistic holocaust, something very Soylent Green, perhaps. I don't think it will be the final expression of Islam OR Christianity - if anything, we appear to be smack dab in the middle of the Kali Yuga, having completely externalized every aspect of the human body (hence the above central nervous system of the earth) and that from here on out it's all going to be the rising sun of the golden age. I'm not saying we are the new modern myths, but rather the idea that we are the new myths is a new, modern myth - and it is shaping who we are becoming.



...oh, and a very happy birthday to the dead Dr. Seuss.

Pre-order a copy of The Immanence of Myth, published by Weaponized in July 2011.