Holiday Lineup 2011

As 2011 comes to a close, I'm going to be taking a break on posting on Modern Mythology until the new year. But don't fret, there are many projects from last year for you to check out, and many new ones in the works.

Here is some of what we've produced in 2011... please consider picking some of these up and supporting independently produced media. 

Apocalyptic Imaginary: Early Edition Available

This book captures and expands upon the unique commentary and analysis that has helped define the Modern Mythology project in 2011. Through the voices of many contributors, we collectively take a hard look at the blurred lines between narrative and truth, philosophy and literature, personal history and cultural memory. All of this is done with an eye towards the imagined apocalypse that is always just around the corner.

This is the $.99 early edition, meaning that there will be one more editorial pass before the final version which will be released in print. (To be performed by Michael Tesney of Driftwork.)

This early edition contains all the final content that the final book has, but will almost certainly have typos. If they light your hair on fire, feel free to report them.  

Available as PDF, .epub, Kindle and more on Smashwords. (Just $.99) 

First edition in print ($18) and kindle ($2.99) formats Jan 2012.

A sample is available:

Apocalyptic Imaginary: The Best of Modern Mythology 2011 (Sample)


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Shabda Brahman

William Clark, who you may also remember from this audio interview or from Gonzomentary, has been making recordings and keeping a photo / blog during his time in India.

Most recent:

Kali Puja is celebrated on the New Moon day of the Hindu calendar month Ashvin. This is also the same day on which the famous festival of light, Diwali, is observed. Throughout this occasion, an intensely festive atmosphere pervades Kolkata: strings of holiday lights decorate buildings, flashing signs line the city streets, candles and lamps burn everywhere, and fireworks explode throughout the night. Although there is a lot of overlap with Diwali, for Bengalis this is definitely Kali’s special day. (Article)

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Cosmogenesis: In a Small Boat, Drifting on the Ocean/ Parts 7 and 8

By Brian George

7

In his comment titled, “The Walking Dead”, Dave Hanson wrote:

Thanks, Brian. You describe well the end of the world. Margaret the therapist expresses the spirit of the times perfectly. Margaret says, "I just sort of accept the way the world is and then don't think about it a whole lot." She likes the notion of "a mature sense of autonomy." "No external demand should compel us to be answerable to the needs of others," etc. In other words, we can have a "good life" as alienated, terrified slaves to the machine of civilization. The Kogi, on the other hand (as one example of many) are responsible for the health of the world. They came down the mountain to tell us to grow up and begin caring for our planet. Throughout the indigenous world we find that our work, our intention, must be in part to sustain everything else. We must be compelled by that external demand.

You have accurately described a culture of domesticated animals using language and myth to fool themselves into thinking they will not be slaughtered. Words, words, words. Endless words. Unless we can reintegrate ourselves into the living, conscious, multidimensional web, we will annihilate ourselves and our planetary home. We either will, or we won't, and I'm betting on the latter.

David Metcalfe Interview

David Metcalfe Interview by Rev.R4D4

David B. Metcalfe of ModernMythology.Net discusses DARPA's metaphor program, Napoleon Hill's occult background, the band Killing Joke & much more. All music tracks on David's soundcloud: davidbmetcalfe.

[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]

#Myth Week 3: Fundraiser Video

Check out this video, and consider making a donation. In exchange you'll get a nice selection of the work we've been cranking out, and a big thank you. Plus you get to feel good about yourself for helping to aid the production of independent art and media.

Thanks go out to all those who have already contributed, and to the many artists, writers, actors, & groups like the Foolish People who we've been collaborating with over the past years. Let's see what we can do in the next 10!

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#Myth: But Why Do That Hoodoo That You Do?

By Mr. VI

At the risk of treating your like three-year-old children, let's answer the question posed by this subject title. After all, I'm certainly not picturing you whining plaintively as you ask why exactly is myth so important, am I?

#Myth Week 2

Just a little over a week left for the fundraiser for Modern Mythology to raise money for 2012. We've raised over $500 so far but we still have a way to go!

I'd like to share with you just some of the interviews I've done over the past year talking about many of the projects we've been hard at work on. Projects like these are supported by donations to the campaign:

James Curcio Interview by Rev.R4D4 An interview on Stanford radio about myth, occupy wall street, politics, media, and hoodooengine. If you'd like to hear higher resolution versions of the tracks on here and more, go here and stream or pick up the mp3s! (See other Hoodoo releases on the sidebar.)

• Conversation with Elizabeth Spann Craig (2011) about "why we write" on her award-winning blog.
• Audio: Solipsistic NATION (2011) interview with James and Johan of Hoodoo Engine, also featuring interviews and new music with Ogre (Skinny Puppy, Ohgr), and Tim Skold (Manson, KMFDM).
• Audio: Occult Sentinel 32 (2011) interviewed by Joseph Moore about the Immanence of Myth, Clark, HoodooEngine, and more.
• Living in Stories (2010) Planetshifter interview, focusing on the Immanence of Myth project. 

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Living The Myth: A Black Hole In Our Center

Image Mikebp

By James Curcio

Some thoughts on the nature of the ego while sipping on a really excellent mocha at La Columbe yesterday in center city philly, with Occupy people sitting about me in the cafe debating politics. The whole scenes--quiet but fervent political discussion, a beautiful tiny girl with tattoos all over her body discussing the history of surrealism just a table or two down--felt very Parisian, somehow.

These were the notes I got down longhand in my notebook while the caffeine buzz lasted.

If we grant the ego--at once the inner voice thinking "I" and hearing it--any existence at all, paradox and infinite regress abounds. Removing it from the equation, on the other hand, seems unsatisfying. The ground of being is shrouded in uncertainty. When we act, suddenly that ground is far more solid. Maybe this shows a linkage between immanence and the act rather than the reflection or abstraction; but immanence seems to reach out to enfold the numinous as well. Can it grasp it? Embody it?

#Myth Week 1

Showing some of our wares at a recent event.

Here is what some of those who have contributed to our fundraiser campaign have said about this project:

"Modern Mythology’s work is way too important to not support. We need this discourse. Rock on guys!"

"You’re doing good work; I’m proud to support that."

"Myth is something that even our technological, interdependent and global society cannot escape. Myth can illuminate and unveil aspects about ourselves and where we are going, where we have come from. Myth, in short, is self-knowing. As an essential dimension of human experience, it would behoove us to try to contextualize myth—or more appropriately see how myth contextualizes—the modern age."

"You rock so hard, rocks are jello in your very presence. Neutron stars are tied neck and neck in the races. Your stuph is dense, and heavy. Keep it up. Way up."

10 days left! We are presently running an ongoing tweet-a-thon under #myth on twitter. Listen in or join the discussion.

Even a donation of $1 gets you a free eBook and helps to keep us going.

[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]

Why Myth? An Open Curriculum

Over the course of this project, and in the publication of The Immanence of Myth (Weaponized) and the upcoming Apocalyptic Imaginary, we have been developing a sort of curriculum which has indeed even spread to Prof Rowan's classroom at SUNY Binghamton and hopefully beyond. But what is the intention of this curriculum? What benefit can it serve?

The Immanence of Myth begins a curriculum of self-discovery and questioning that reaches far outside the scope of academic inquiry. This is a challenge to you, to question your beliefs and dig into your own personal history to better understand your own story, and your place in the modern myths unfolding around us every day. The myth of your life is already underway, but this is an opportunity to engage with it in a new way: first philosophically, and then personally. It proposes no final answers, and is simply the opening line in an ongoing discussion.

This curriculum isn't a route to to learning new facts. It's the first step on a path to transformational unlearning. Become who you are and live your myth.
The benefits of this sort of challenge will vary from person to person. Many will become infuriated at first, as they feel their beliefs challenged, and certainly many will react with a kneejerk dismissal before they can ever get far enough in to realize what the potential benefit can be. This is not something that will get you rich quick, in fact the honest truth is that a deep rooted tendency to doubt and question everything will likely not make you very popular in the boardroom. However, that only further highlight how absolutely essential it is.

I have been told by many that this work has changed their lives. I hope that continues. If so, I feel I've certainly done my job.

Want to know where to start? Pick up your copy of The Immanence of Myth. Read with an open mind. And continue ahead to The Apocalyptic Imaginary.

I hope to begin an audio series that continues this but that depends in part on how the fundraiser does in its final days. So by the time you finish with those, there will be more material for you.

[Check out some of the books, albums, and soon movies produced by Mythos Media and our various media partners.]

Apocalypse: Seeing With New Eyes

We speak of apocalypse rather commonly these days, it seems to be a part of the zeitgeist of this age. Yet many seem to have only a cursory or rather simplistic idea of what the reality (and the concepts we use to encapsulate that reality), entail.

The idea of apocalypse has factored rather centrally into many of the projects I've helped create over the years.

Let me spell this way out by way of example:

Images of Happiness: The Tragic as Farce

I. After the End

Beyond the eight o'clock blue of August twilight

Lies the truth we now see, that in our grandeur and temerity,

We have outlived the <fin de notre Histoire>, and in our sur-vival

we bypassed this end, and yet stand suspended above the abyss that it is.

I have ever lacked the sense of endings, death and departure are the unknown

to me;

in me;

The deep blue sky, as it prepares to erupt, whispers to me,

that the end was always already completed, and elevates me

to that apex of poetic grandeur, from which I can see that

at the end of History, every ending has touched my heart, inscribing

seductively this truth – that every ending has been dear to me.

A crack of thunder shatters the immense silence of this kingdom of ends

Illuminated by the lightning bolt, this silence is exposed as refusal

– As an obscurantism of ends –

And shattered, torn to pieces, a new truth is born; that each and every ending

Has been but the inverted image of nascent beginnings waiting to be born.

The sense of our hypertelic Histoire will never again be the same,

for the lies of stillborn worlds have been exposed – even if

our Histoire was finished before it ever began, it is now possible

to inscribe on my heart, on our Histoire, a new truth – that the end

was no more than a beginning, and that death and departure have no sense,

are the absence of sense,

    except as rebirths in joyous non-sense

Modern Gnosticism: Surrealist Revolution & Death by Sex

Modern Gnosticism: Surrealist Revolution & Death by Sex

Fuck you André. You just look silly. 

And Bataille, instead, was awarded the Legion d'honneur

Boring excitement, exciting boredom... “The time of the eternal recurrence is, then, not the 'eternal present' of a goalless revolving in which past still becomes and future always was; it is rather a future time of a goal that liberates from the burden of the past and arises from the will to the future.” [1] Surrealism, in “its revolutionary phase – the analogous universe is destroyed... the world with itself and the ego with itself are disunited, and both equally are smashed to pieces. The surrealist allegory orchestrates the worldlessness [Weltlosigkeit] of a nihilistic experience, that initially joins itself to the postulates or a revolutionary communism... [this aspect of] the surrealistic experience “repeats” in modernity the nihilistic worldlessness of Gnosticism in late antiquity... The Gnostic pneumaticist is [much like Baudelaire] the dandy of antiquity.” [2] To cite Benjamin: "A reconciled humanity will take leave of its part -- and one form of reconciliation is gaiety. '...The last stage of a world-historical form is its comedy... Why does history follow this course? So that mankind may take leave of its past gaily.' Karl Marx. Surrealism is the death of the nineteenth century in comedy." [N5a,2]

If we are to foreground certain more-or-less secularized elements drawn from the tradition of Gnosticism, it should be emphasized that, as Jacob Taubes notes, in his rejoinder to Hans Blumenberg during their discussion of Surrealism and Gnosis, Gnosticism in Late Antiquity could hardly be called a monolithic doctrine. If it is true that eschatological and apocalyptic thought is rooted in gnosis, it is equally true that doctrines such as that of Marcion emphasized a rather more “modern” response to the evil of the world and demiurge – rejection and revolt against the established order, destruction of a corrupt world in the hic et nunc. This radical opposition which refuses collaboration by having no particular vision of the immanent and imminent, improved world to follow the rupture, Taubes illustrates, is borrowed and explicitly acknowledged by Ernst Bloch.[3] Norbert Bolz, in “Erlösung als ob: Über einige gnostiche Motive der Kritischen Theorie,”[Salvation as if: On several Gnostic motifs in Critical Theory], makes the case for a gnostic element, not only in Bloch, but at the very heart of Critical Theory as a whole, and particularly in Karl Barth, Theodor Adorno (“es gibt kein rechtige Leben in dem Falsch,” and “die Ganze ist unwahr” and Negativ Dialektik, on the whole, evidence a gnostic acosmism) – including Dialektik der Aufklärung,with Horkheimer, and especially in Benjamin, from his earliest to latest works. Bolz writes that Baudelaire can be seen as an allegorical image of Modern existence:

          In Modernity, as the time of Hell, never appears identical to itself, rather the most recently named –                   

          this is infernal eternity... In great abbreviation, Benjamin unveiled the Gnosticism of Modern everyday 

          life in the necessary form: Nothing is boring to living people than the cosmos [4]

Here it would be apt to draw a parallel to Blanchot's politics of refusal and rupture, which, of course, is indebted both to Bataille and Benjamin; refusal is defined by Blanchot as “absolute, categorical... not discuss[ing] or voice[ing] its reasons,” refusal of “an offer of agreement and compromise that we will not hear. A rupture has occurred. We have been brought back to this frankness that does not tolerate complicity any longer.” This cursory glance alone demonstrates a remarkable kinship to Marcion's gesture of freeing man “from all that was of this world, while providing nothing better,” as Bloch wrote in Atheism in Christianity (1968), which “gave birth to that 'break' mentality which was always to militate against any idea of 'reception': history is devoid of salvation, and salvation of history.” [5] The only determination of refusal is gained in its extreme form, in the “right to insubordination,” which, as an exemplary instance, “designates the right that founds or maintains itself in this refusal and from this refusal: the right not to be oppressed and not to be an oppressor." [6] Whether gnostic in actual inspiration or not,[7] Blanchot's politics and the events of May '68 at large, point to the periodic repetition of gnosis – in its Marcionite form, in this instance – throughout history, which render an exemplary moment of crisis and revolutionary kairos visible and active. [8]

Klossowski's Illustration of Bataille's L'Abbé C.

Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001)

Pierre Klossowski, in an interview with Jean-Maurice Monnoyer, published in 1985, makes the startling revelation that: “Benjamin lent me his copy of Dokumente der Gnosis: the collection edited by Schulze.⁹ From there I began to study the great heresiarchs, Carpocrates, Valentin, Basilides, before the theologies of Catholicism or Calvinism. ”¹⁰ Gnostic allegory. “Allegory should be shown as the antidote to myth.” ([27], 179) “As soon as the poetic power of allegorizing leaves [Nietzsche], the whole decomposes into two contradictory parts, which only conflict holds together. For the tendency to eternalize that has become ephemeral does not enter into the circuit of the eternal cycle of the natural world – unless the temporal will of human existence that has become eccentric were to fly in a superhuman fashion into the heaven of the pre-Copernican world, in order to circle along in the middle of being.”¹¹ Allegory in late antiquity: “In the course of such a literature the world of the ancient gods would have had to die out, and it is precisely allegory which preserved it. For an appreciation of the transience of things, and the concern to rescue them for eternity, is one of the strongest impulses in allegory.”¹²

He later became Cardinal and died in a whorehouse.
There is a word for death by orgasm: epectasis or epecstasy

Bataille was already interested in and familiar with Gnosticism, having published “Base Materialism and Gnosticism” in Documents, in 1930. His friend and theological interlocutor, too, Fr. Jean Danièlou, S.J., a scholar of patristics, in particular of Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, later lectured on the topic of Gnosis for the Vie Spirituelle circle, on the topic of Gnosis: “Revelation is apportioned out by the gift of God, and this transmits itself in secrecy. Human beings are divided by predestination into somatics or psychics, and it is impossible during the course of life to pass from one category to another. Only the pneumatics can attain salvation.”¹³ While Bataillle, in 1930, did not mention Marcion, using Basilides as touchstone instead, the Gnosis he describes is rooted in materialism, that is, insubordination:

Abraxas, from the Gnosis of Basilides

It is difficult to believe that on the whole Gnosticism does not manifest above all a sinister love of darkness, a monstrous taste for obscene and lawless archontes, for the head of the solar ass. The existence of a sect of licentious Gnostics and of certain sexual rites fulfills this obscure demand for a baseness that would not be reducible ...Gnosticism, in its psychological process, is not so different from present-day materialism. I mean a materialism not implying an ontology... it is a question above all of not submitting oneself, and with oneself one's reason, to whatever is more elevated, to whatever can give a borrowed authority to the being that I am, and to the reason that arms this being. This being and its reason can in fact only submit to what is lower, to what can never serve in any case to ape a given authority. Also I submit entirely to what must be called matter, since that exists outside of myself and the idea...”¹⁴

In view of Bataille's marriage of Gnosticism to materialism, we must at least entertain the hypothesis that the theology which, in Benjamin's “Concept of History,” is both the puppet-master and secret weapon of historical materialism, might in fact be neither Christian nor Jewish – and rather more Gnostic than Kabbalistic. In the first instance, Bloch's discussion of Marcion casts an intriguing light upon Benjamin's reference to the fact that “the Great Revolution introduced a new calendar. The initial day of a calendar presents history in time-lapse mode. And basically it is this same day that keeps recurring... in days of remembrance.”¹⁵ Bloch writes that by designating the year of Marcion's birth as Year Zero, the Marcionite calendar marks “the beginning of a new time-series which in itself has no real place, but only an apparent one, in history... the only real parallel lies in the Jacobin calendar, whose year naught was 'also' intended as a totally new beginning, with its break from the entire 'old testament' of history.”¹⁶ In the context of this admittedly inexact parallelism, the content of Eingedenken, and of the whole of history, would be the nullity and nullification of that which has been transmitted and passed off as history “the way it was.” Just as Marcionite Gnosis sought to “wrest tradition from the conformism [of the ruling classes] that is working to overpower it”¹⁷ and to start anew, Benjamin substitutes the practice of redemptive memory for the “general system of redemption by forgetting – or forgetting conceived as an apocalyptic event (this is one of Basilides' theses that I discovered in reading Schulze's collection,”¹⁸ in which Eternal Recurrence and the figure of the Antichrist, which “is not just a word, except in pure criticism, such as that of Lotze, which binds together the history of christianity”¹⁹ inhere. However, in the damnatio memorae of the redemption – in taking leave of the past following victory over the Antichrist – the Gnostic superposition of redemption and forgetting remains.

1Karl Löwith, Nietzsche's Philosophy of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, Trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 87.

2Jacob Taubes, “Notes on Surrealism,” From Cult To Culture, 101-2.

3Jacob Taubes, “Notes on Surrealism,” & “The Iron Cage,” From Cult to Culture, 118-20 & 139-142.

4Norbert Bolz, “Erlösung als ob: Über einige gnostiche Motive der Kritischen Theorie,” Jacob Taubes, Ed., Religionstheorie und Politische Theology: Gnosis und Politik (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1984). 264-289. 267. Translation R. Tepper.

5 Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, Trans. J. T. Swann (London & New York: Verso, 2009), 176-7.

7Blanchot, “[The Declaration (of the 121) … is not a protest manifesto],” PW, 23.

8 See Sur-Representation: Revolution & Repetition (R. Tepper).

9Wolfgang Schultz, Dokumente der Gnosis (Jena: Eugen Diedrichs, 1910).

10Pierre Klossowski & Jean-Maurice Monnoyer, Le Peintre et Son Démon, (Paris: Flammarion, 1985), 184. Trans. R. TEpper

11Löwith, 83.

12Benjamin, Origin, 223.

13“Père Danièlou: la gnose, Vie Spirituelle, seance n° 8, 7 mars 1942,” Digraphe 86-7, 45-6. Trans. R. Tepper

14Georges Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” Visions of Excess, 48-51.

15Benjamin, SW 4: 395.

16Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, 177.

17Benjamin, SW 4: 391.

18Klossowski & Monnoyer, 184. Trans. R. Tepper

19Klossowski & Monnoyer, 184.

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Sur-Representation: Revolution & Repetition

Sur-Representation: Revolution & Repetition

“Philosophical writing [must] continually confront the question of representation.” [1] – Walter Benjamin, Ursprung der Deutsche Trauerspiel

The question of representation must indeed be confronted and the impossibility of making do without representation entirely. For, even in the least representative poetic evocation there remains the fact that even Wortsalat has as its building block words that in principle do represent objects. Moreover, the logic of total escape or opposition presupposes the binary logic of mutually exclusive alternatives, which we now know in light of quantum mechanics and subsequent developments in physics to be entirely superseded. Except in human language and quite possibly the forms of human thought. Perhaps there is way to think and to write that can resist the reduction of the infinite richness of experience that all representational-conceptual thought has as its price. A revolutionary possibility whereby experience might break through, within representations themselves, whereby experience would be, to borrow one of Blanchot's formulations, “affirmed in a negation that, while opening a void and stopping time, also point[s] toward the future... a transgression: an innocent transgression.”[2]  Such a possibility for thought and language makes representations of experience transgress their own limits, and the surplus over representation, its sur-representational excess, would no longer represent or signify, but mark an instance of the exemplary. Of course these instances in the course of a “treatise” on time will be ephemeral, and representative discourse remains as an instrument of thinking, but they indicate and articulate that which is to come. It is to make use of “representation as digression.”[3]