In response to a post responding to my post on Enlightenment (apologies for the convoluted phrasing!), Jason Hills, of Immanent Transcendence, writes:
The denial of the mythic modality of consciousness really frightens me about Enlightenment-promoters, because their disregard for how myth channels their science, etc., blinds them to hubris. That was much of the lesson of WWI and WWII–that science is not a cure-all.
This is the sort of thesis that really frustrates me in discussions about religion, myth, science, and reason, because the suggestion seems to be that science and technology are the cause of the horrors of the Holocaust and World War I. Yet they were not the cause, but rather the occasion for these horrors. The cause was mythological thought in the form of nationalist, religious, and racial myths that animated these two wars. In this regard, there was little difference between 14th century pogroms directed at Jews during the Black Plague or the wholesale slaughter of Muslims by Catholics during the Crusades, than what took place in these wars. The difference was that the hatred generated by these mythological forms of thought during the 20th century was able to exercise itself on a greater scale than ever before due to the new technologies. Nonetheless, the problem wasn’t Enlightenment, but the absence of Enlightenment.
read on!
Jason, to his credit seems to suggest this, but then he goes on to claim that Enlightenment-promoters disregard this dimension of science and technology. Yet I have difficulty making sense of this. The Enlightenment project of critique consists precisely in tracking down these residues of myth. That’s much of what critique is all about, whether we wish to call it the critique of myth or the critique of ideology (ideology is a secularized version of myth). In this regard, it is not Enlightenment thinkers that disregard myth in science– everywhere they strive to sniff out exactly these things –but rather the users of this technology that disregard myth or cynically use it to advance their own aims.
Here it’s important that I am not misunderstood. I am not making the claim that science and technology are some picnic that can never do wrong. Practitioners of science are often animated by myth. This is precisely why we need Enlightenment styles of science critique such as we find in Latour, Stephen J. Gould in The Mismeasure of Man, Foucault, etc. Good examples of this sort of myth would be the myths that animated eugenics, the myths today that animate sociobiology where, for baffling reasons, researchers again and again choose chimpanzees that are highly warlike, patriarchal, and hierarchical as their model of human nature, all the while ignoring bonobo monkeys that are very bit as genetically similar to humans, and so on. This is what the Enlightenment project of critique is all about.
Moreover, following Adorno in Negative Dialectics, the “identity thinking” upon which scientific and technological instrumental and calculative reason engenders attitudes that, to use Adorno’s memorable expression, “generate rage against difference”– here we need only think of Plotinus’s and Augustine’s remarks about oneness, identity, and sameness to see where this logic of identity leads –that strives either to normalize beings under a single identity (what Nancy refers to as the idea of community possessing a transcendent shared essence), reducing self to an identity (i.e., rejecting those differences that don’t fit), and eradicating the difference. Yet note, in pointing out these noxious dimensions of identity thinking within Enlightenment, Adorno is engaging in the Enlightenment project of critique. He is not championing a return to myth, but is carrying a critique of myth.
Larval Subjects . 
November 8, 2011 at 4:22 pm
Levi,
Just as I did not say that you were denying the mythic modality of consciousness–I have no idea–you should not say that I suggest “that science and technology are the cause of the horrors of the Holocaust of World War I.” I repudiated the notion in a comment on your blog before you posted this. Moreover, I did not identify who the “Enlightenment promoters” were other than to direct attention to some of the comments on Shaviro’s blog. I did not mean you, as I have not investigated the matter.
“Myth” is not just a religious concept. It is just a fancy word for “story,” and my point is that humans are story-making animals as we are meaning-machines; we cannot be either-or. However, not all “stories” are created equal, and I reject Rorty’s insouciance on the matter. Moreover, we cannot escape ideology, and therefore we must do criticism. But doing historic Enlightenment-style criticism no longer makes sense, because we are not fighting the Big Bad Church anymore. We won and now we are fighting an entirely different battle.
So far, this whole multi-blog discussion is started to look like the old two-sided debate, and we should avoid that. I certainly do not want a part in it.
Aside, I have a degree in science and was a software engineer before turning to the humanities, so I cannot be claimed to be a closeted academic. Might as well trot out all the stereotypes and cliched counters.
November 8, 2011 at 4:26 pm
Jason,
Looking at the role that religion plays in American politics, I think we’re far from having defeated the big bad Church. Not only is religion one of the major players in obstructing action on climate change due to its own apocalyptic narratives, it also works daily to undermine the rights of women and homosexuals. Yes, myth is another word for “stories”. Those stories are often extremely dangerous and exclusionary. Hence the project of critique. Also, you’ll note that I qualify my statement about your suggestion in third paragraph of this post.
November 8, 2011 at 4:49 pm
Levi,
While our current situation is worrisome, we are not 16th century France. The matter is much more one of education that fighting outright maniacal incalcitrance. The battle is different. For instance, our students for the most part do not care, I bet.
I am not claiming that religion is something to be “defeated,” especially given how totalizing that claim as written would be. Only a subset of religious beliefs are a problem here.
The mythic structures that are at play in American culture must be altered. That’s part of what the Occupy movement is attempting.
November 8, 2011 at 4:58 pm
Jason,
I’ve never claimed otherwise. Indeed, a particular set of religious beliefs is the problem. I said as much in my remarks, referring directly to some of those particular beliefs. While I don’t particularly understand religious beliefs or what draws people to religion, I’m not hostile to all or even most religious beliefs and could care less about whether or not someone believes in the supernatural so long as it doesn’t hurt other people, lead to exclusionary public policy, etc. This same issue came up months ago in our previous discussion about religion where I said something like “If your religious beliefs tell you that women should be obedient and subordinate and that they shouldn’t have equal rights and that homosexuals are an abomination, then this makes it all the easier to denigrate women and kick in the teeth of homosexuals.” This was somehow taken as a mortal insult against religion, completely ignoring the if/then nature of the construction and its specificity, i.e., that it wasn’t a generalization at all but referring to specific beliefs. This same tendency towards ignoring specificity is rearing its head in this discussion as well.
November 8, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Another option as sub-critique to critique itself would be the possibility that we have innate drives of sex and aggression which, despite the best efforts of enlightenment, fail to hold back the very ‘rage at difference’, if not, a ‘peeve at difference’, that seems to be (disappointingly) going on here. What these drives do is prevent the Other being heard because unacknowledged internal needs take over and create perceptual distortions that skew the Other into objects of aggression or hate. The needs being unresolved primitive emotions that act powerfully from our infancy and early childhood. Not that the two of you hate here…but the inability to listen and re-present each other with accuracy from those sporting the banner of critique is not exactly… er…. edifying. Not that I wish to stop anybody peeving, btw.
November 8, 2011 at 5:17 pm
Strav12,
I go back and forth on this issue. If we take the psychoanalytic route that you’re talking about (and I’m heavily entrenched in that orientation) then it seems like there’s little hope for us as a species. I take it that this is the root of the dispute between psychoanalysis and Marxism, and the reason that, despite the efforts of folks like Deleuze and Guattari, Marcuse, and Zizek, it’s so difficult to fuse the two.
November 8, 2011 at 6:07 pm
Jason,
And I should, of course, apologize. Over at Footnotes2Plato I initially misinterpreted your statement, no doubt as partially a result of the fog of having just woken up, but also because I actually often hear the argument I discussed over at Footnotes2Plato. I think Enlightenment is often a whipping boy in contemporary thought for reasons I don’t believe to be valid. I attributed that to you. Sorry.
November 8, 2011 at 8:08 pm
Strav and Levi,
That is exactly my route, but a pragmatic route, which in its day was a now little-known alternative to psychoanalysis. Two of the three founding members of the tradition were famous psychologists…. I think of the “mythic” in terms of semiotics at the intersection of culture and nature. Myths make our world meaningful, but they do more than “add content”….
So, the danger of myth is that once embodied, once culture becomes nature, then those myths (semiotics) are nearly impossible to change. Hence, the important thing to stress about the Enlightenment, for me, is education and public method. I’m a pessimist about “rationality” for the reasons that I believe you both imply. Not a Humean, but he’s onto something.
Levi,
I know. That’s why I kept talking. You probably assumed that I had the same view as Leon and Matt; I do not. It’s a plausible inference. My concerns about the Enlightenment are really about scientific realists and those who are unwittingly such. You’d hate on them as under-miners…..
Oh, I prefer being direct, so if it looks like I’m implicitly attributing views to anyone, including yourself, I’m almost certainly not.
November 8, 2011 at 8:25 pm
I’d just say that this very conversation about what Enlightenment means is mythic in character. We are engaged in story-making, arguing over which narrative is more adequate to our own understanding of the rise of rational consciousness. Critique can be (and I’d argue always is) immanent to myth; we critique stories in order to replace them with better, more evident and just stories. We don’t critique stories to transcend them entirely. That would be impossible.
November 8, 2011 at 9:03 pm
I see no conflict between enlightenment and myth, but between enlightenment and a literalising belief in myth. Deleuze and Guattari talk about thinking using conceptual characters (badly translated as “personae”). The idea is that the pure concept is associated with spatio-temporal affective-perceptive dynamisms that are best expressed in recurrent characters that incarnate and give content to the concepts. Myth does the same thing, and only becomes a danger when these figures are literalised, codified, stratified creating closed static lists of entities with fixed attributes. The problem is not myth but religious tratment of and belief in certain myths as literal realities. In this sense Enlightenment, Science, Reason can function religiously (or if this is too restrictive a definition of religion, we could say creedally). Freud is full of mythological figures, both classical ones and those of his own invention. One could argue that his Enlightenment (and here we must say that Freud is not part of the radical enlightenment, but rather of the authoritarian, élitist, conformist enlightenment) was precisely the concretising and dogmatising force that Lacan and later Deleuze and Guattari had to overcome. This deterritorialising of Freud can be seen equally validly as fracturing his enlightenment dogmatism and monism by valorising the conceptual (mythical) characters over the positivistic conception of reason and the real, or by radicalising the notions of reason and the real and so pushing his enlightenment further. Melville in Moby-Dick is both mythical and radical enlightenment in his style, as the scattered remarks of Deleuze on Moby-Dick would suggest. A book like ALL THINGS SHINING with all its defects is in close convergence with what D&G say in MILLE PLATEAUX on Moby-Dick, and their use of mythology is neither obscurantist nor proto-fascist. Dreyfus and Kelly call Melville’s work a masterpiece of polytheism, Deleuze and Guattari call it a masterpiece of becomings, and given their analysis of becomings in relation to a plurality of conceptual characters, they concur very closely. So mythic thinking is more widespread than one may think in enlightened works and thoughts.
November 8, 2011 at 9:42 pm
Interesting discussion everyone, I’ve been lurking here and there trying to follow the action. I have a question that I would like to pose — without directing it at anyone in particular or presupposing that we we can come up with an answer here — and it has to do with a different take on the critique/enlightenment tango than what has been explored so far.
One of my favorite works by Latour is his essay “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Recall that in this essay Latour has some stern words for the culture of critique that has piled up in the academy over the course of the twentieth century. Implicating himself in some of these debacles (e.g., “the science wars”), Latour urges us to favorably re-consider Heidegger’s notion of “gathering” and Whitehead’s notion of “society” so that we can get closer to the facts (as matters of concern) rather than assume a critical distance away from them — as is common in some modes of critical, post-Kantian theorizing.
I don’t take Latour to be at all at odds with what you are suggesting here Levi, but rather points us towards a different aim. The question, then, I think, is what to do with all of these “objects” laying around that are variously rational, mythological, paradigmatic, or ideological. I don’t pretend to know where the one ends and the other begins, just that they are strewn about everywhere and have effects irreducible to their nature(s).
For Latour this question is always one of composition where the criteria for evaluation is aesthetic insofar as our criteria for evaluation is not simply some crypto-positivism wherein we ask “well, is your myth true? how do you know its true? how objective is it?” But rather, following Latour’s sense, we ask “how well is it constructed? to what is it obligated? how does it tend to your matters of concern?”
I guess this is a round about way of saying/asking a cosmopolitical question: to what extent are mythical and rational schemas equally indicative of the presence of some larger and stranger activity of the human mind — one that wields science, myth, and rationality in proportion to the needs and obligations of a larger society?
November 8, 2011 at 9:56 pm
Levi,
I’ll just declare an interest by saying that I am exceedingly ignorant in contemp philosophy so please bear with me. That out the way, I think psychoanalysis is misrepresented as biological determinism which, as a practicing therapist, I don’t subscribe to or use in clinic. My clients find that reflection/interpretation or working with psychoanalytic models enables them to have choices they didn’t have before rather than subscribe to pathological type (the latter being a myth) ie drives, once understood, can be transformed into a topography of choices. To me, the connect between Marxism and psychoanalysis is pretty straight forward if you come from a place of practice – though mine is atypical in its multimodality – and I’m not sure why Marcuse et al found it so difficult to do. This is where my ignorance begins: if Marx is about social inequalities and its tools of oppression being transformed into, let’s say, more equality and less oppression (greater distribution of freedom) why would psychoanalysis oppose that? The hierarchical structures implicit in, for example, the Oedipus complex can either be followed or ignored or used in a multitude of ways to enable a Marxist outcome?
Jason – I’ll try to subscribe to your blog, but the notion of myth as semiotics (Christ, I haven’t heard that word in decades!) that once culturally accepted as normative can’t change is interesting. Influenced by Jung as I am, myths can be seen as sub-types of archetypes – a neo-Platonic view of universal blueprints that run through the universe. Where these archetypes are denied, ignored or repressed, they exact a collective vengeance – eg civilized Europe will produce the horrors of Holocaust and precisely the country of philosophy and music will locate and enact that aggressive energy. Here psychoanalysis points to the shadow as archetype, that Enlightenment has its shadow too where it fails to acknowledge the subconscious and emotional (not to mention spiritual – see Assagioli’s psychosynthesis on repression of the sublime) dimensions that lie above and below the conscious ego.
For me, Enlightenment, whatever the word means, requires a depth it is not usually allowed by the philosophy I am coming across….
November 8, 2011 at 10:57 pm
This is a difficult area that has never — in my reading –had a conversation where the two sides were actual speaking anything like the same language. For myself, I am very interested in Hamann’s metacritique of Kant and I am interested in the concept of hubris. Still, these tensions are so vested as to make anything useful almost impossible. While I am an atheist, allow me to register some ideas that perhaps support a non-abject concept of humility that instills a sense of wonder and restraint.
In “What is Enlightenment,” Kant suggests we only need courage, freedom, and reason to throw off the bonds of what is here called myth.Certainlyy, I think this is the image of the progressive that persists in what Eisenhower called the “military-industrial complex.” Still, I think that is un-true and in ways of interest to this blog.
If we pick a cubic meter of forest, for instance, and ask science “what is this?” no useful answer is available since the infinite complexity of the object, its open-ended character, and its dynamic alteration make it impossible for characterization. All of science in all ways would need to be mobilized and would even then fall behind and alter the the “thing” under consideration. But is this problem not that of almost any cubic meter not chosen because it lent itself to the methods wanted?
This not to say that science/industry, the children of the enlightenment, are useless but that their use is that of a certain limited kind. Science is vastly reductionistic not just in how it models objects as having high degrees of closure and impermeabilty and stability but in its very metrics and exclusions. So what? I understand objects well enough to profit. Isn’t that good enough?
I think not. While models and sales can afford reductionism, the planet cannot. The emergence of complex down-stream consequences that the model does not model and the society does not value are bringing an end to the planet as a viable home for almost all species. That is part of the 200+ year heritage of the enlightenment, and yes, I think that’s a fair assignment since rational humility was not on Kant’s list, nor was its affective complement, wonder.
Personally, I think the structural hubris of the applied enlightenment will have largely killed the world within 300 years of its start (on the scale of planetary time, that is an amazing feat– the envy of termites everywhere). And no, I do not think we can self-correct now. China and India have climbed on board the capital/enlightenment model just as the globe’s bearing capacity is being reached. Lemmings have better birth control than enlightened humans (of every nation!).
Part of the non-humanism (not for me post-humanism), that should be resident and the antidote to the worst of enlightened hubris is the recognition that our embedding in the world and our inability to ever scope its full emergent complexity calls upon us to exercise more care and sense of consequence: that the shorter and shorter sighted politics that have marked the “progress” of enlightened demoocracy are a fatal irresponsibility.
November 9, 2011 at 12:03 am
[…] earlier this week, precipitated by THIS stimulating post by Levi Bryant (with a follow up by Bryant HERE and a rejoinder from Matt Segall HERE), concerning questions of mythic, rational, and ideological […]
November 9, 2011 at 12:15 am
Matthew,
I think what you’re saying here far too broad a concept of myth to be useful in any discussion. Myth is much more specific than “stories”. Minimally, a myth has to be 1) some account of origins, that 2) grounds a particular system of values in the present. For example, the idea that “America began as a Christian nation” is a perfect example of a myth. It provides a narrative of the origins of America. Unlike the work of the historian this narrative functions in popular consciousness not as a thesis about the past, but rather as a grounding claim as to what things should be like in the present. In other words, this mytheme is an abbreviated argument: “because America was founded as a Christian nation, it ought to be a Christian nation today.” in other words, myths serve a legitimating function, or are ways of attempting to legitimate certain ways of life and norms.
However, while all myths are narratives or stories, it doesn’t follow that all narratives or stories are myths. To make a claim about history doesn’t immediately entail that hecause something about history is narrated it must necessarily be a myth. Indeed, the very work of history as a discipline is an attempt at non-mythological narrative. Likewise, we can think of forms of practice and thought that strive to overcome myth in existence. The subjective destitution aimed at in Lacanian psychoanalysis in traversing the fantasy, for example, is the abolition of myth in the desiring economy of the subject. In traversing the fantasy the idea of origin and foundation, as well as the idea of founding narrative, is abolished for the patient. On the other side of fantasy is anlife without groundingnor authenticating myth where the patient takes responsibility for her own value, meaning, and existence. Deconstruction aims for something similar in its abolition of foundations and origins or transcendental signifieds. I think the claim that “all narrative and stories are myth” is too baggy or loose and is a bit of a smarmy maneuver designed to defend certain kinds of myths not unlike those that argue something like “everyone has religion, for atheists their religion just consists in their not believing in god.”
November 9, 2011 at 12:28 am
Matt,
And I hasten to add that what’s important is the functional dimension of myth, not whether it has religious or supernatural content. There can be secular myths as well as religious myths. Take the example of the popular American myth that “the west was conquered by cowboys who were rugged individuals.” Once again, this myth functions in a legitimating capacity with respect to the present. It is designed to say what public policy should be like today, ie, that real Americans ought to be rugged individulas that “do it on their own” and do not rely on public assistance or programs. Here we encounter a good example of just why we shouldn’t conclude that all narratives and stories are mythological. The work of the historian that debunks this myth by showing all of the communitarian dimensions that were involved in living in the west is not simply providing an alternative myth such as the way that the Hindu story of creation provides an alternative myth opposed to the Biblical story of creation. The historian is actually undoing myth through engagement with documents contemporaneous with these findings, archeological evidence, etc. History is anstory and a narrative, but quite different than myth. We see thisnclash between myth and history all the time in the United States surrounding how history should be taught at the high school level. Conservatives are defending mythological accounts of history because of the legimating function those myths have and how they are intertwined with power. Consider, for example, how they think about Christopher Columbus. They are threatened by history which often undermines these legitimating functions and discloses a much uglier, very different set of events.
November 9, 2011 at 12:00 pm
In the interests of furthering interdisciplinary dialogue, I would encourage a view of Freud from his texts rather than as promoted by his organisational precipitates. Psychoanalysis (which is not owned by Freud) can work as a supplement to enlightenment/critique, not an alternative, and certainly not in any competing format. The mythical figures of Lacan, Deleuze/Guattari, Foucault, Latour, etc, are not to be dismissed because they concretise ways of approaching knowledge. Jung’s point would be that we need more myth making, not less, to represent the interconnected complexity of our world to which we contribute so much destruction. If enlightenment/critique could acknowledge its shadow, I wonder what that would look like?
November 9, 2011 at 1:49 pm
Strav,
I practiced as a Lacanian psychoanalyst for a number of years. I do not share your enthusiasm for Jung or theory of myth making in the analytic context, but I’ll leave it at that.
November 9, 2011 at 2:29 pm
Strav,
I did not say that they cannot change. I said that it is hard. In the same manner, try to “forget” how to read English once you are an adult. Short of violence to oneself, you cannot. It’s phenomenological semiotics, and I’m doing something parallel to what continental wandered into after Heidegger, e.g., Derrida.
Levi,
I agree with you on Matt; “story” is too broad as he’s using it. It sounds like Rorty, and I reject that.
Matt, response?
November 9, 2011 at 2:52 pm
Levi – the divides around apparently conflicting epistemologies (disguised as conflicts in method) in psychoanalysis almost demand a metacritique in which psychoanalysis might look at its own shadow through the lens of critique. At that level, there may be a place for accommodating Lacan, Jung, Freud, Klein, Winnicott, Bion, Green, etc and critique may play an enormously useful role for psychoanalysis to break the cult like tendencies that can go on in trainings today?
Regarding myth, I take any proposition claiming knowledge as myth making despite our very human attempts to claim objectivity (hangover from Nietzsche) – for Jung, the archetypes were unknowable but related to the origin of figure, object, form… However, I appreciate your generosity regarding your feelings ref Jung.
November 9, 2011 at 4:24 pm
Strav,
I agree with that. In my practice, at least, theory wasn’t something you talked about with the patient. The clinic was about listening, punctuating the speech of the patient, asking questions, and occasionally offering an interpretation. I suspect your practice was very similar. Back around 2006 I began separating myself from the Lacanian community– though I still occasionally write articles on Lacan and psychoanalysis –for precisely the reason you mention. I felt that the cult-like tendencies of the organizations I was a part of were the exact contrary of the aims and spirit of analysis.
November 9, 2011 at 6:26 pm
Jason – intrigued to hear about your ‘return to Derrida’ – after decades of avoiding philosophy, I’m surprised to see him so off the map on my return – there is a mythical tradition which ends/begins in him via Sausurre through the Russian formalists and into French structuralism/deconstruction via Barthes, Kristeva, Todorov, Genette which nobody seems to talk about in contemporary philosophy – very happy for you to point to references of your work that way…
Levi – fascinated at your reasons for leaving the Lacanian community – I still work in clinic but have qualifications in psychosynthesis and psychoanalysis – having additionally trained but not completed in Integrative Humanistic therapy – your experience seems endemic with all schools of psychotherapeutic training and though your interests may have broadened out into epistemology/ontology/politics in an OOP kindda orientation, it would be useful to have some reflections on what you think is going on, esp given that somehow trainings lead to ‘the exact contrary of the aims and spirit of analysis’ – and I very much agree with the phrase ‘the EXACT contrary’ – weird, huh?!
November 9, 2011 at 8:03 pm
Strav,
I’m not returning to Derrida. I’m offering an example in the continental tradition that parallels what I’m doing in the American pragmatist tradition. E.g., phenomenological semiotics as it is implicated in culture as organic semiotic systems. Myths are actual semiotic structures, etc.
November 9, 2011 at 8:44 pm
Levi,
There is certainly room to tighten up definitions here.
In an essay entitled “Logos of a Living Earth: A New Marriage of Science and Myth for our Planetary Future”, to be published very soon in The Journal of General Evolution, I do that. I attempt to unpack Haraway’s statement in “Modest_Witness@Second_Millenium” that “There is no way to rationality—to actually existing worlds—outside stories, not for our species, anyway” (p. 44). I place her and Latour in conversation with Varela and Thompson’s enactive paradigm.
An excerpt from the essay:
“Enactivism provides a novel way of relating to language as primarily communicative, rather than representational. The meaning of our words comes not from a correspondence between them, a neural pattern in our brains, and pre-existing objects or events in the world, but from the consensual coordination of our lived bodies and their linguistic intentions.[xi] Social coherence, rather than representational correspondence, produces meaningful linguistic domains.
The communicative origins of language should make it clear that claims to establish a pure observer language free of cultural idiosyncrasy (and so capable of objective description of phenomena) are more political than scientific. Human beings speak with one another in order to share emotion and direct attention, and so any notion of descriptive or explanatory truth must include at least the potential for agreement between structurally coupled agents. In most cases, if one culture’s emically verified description contradicts another’s, there has not been a factual conflict but a failure to communicate. Such conflicts of description are especially insidious when political power is used to enforce ‘true’ accounts of reality despite the resistance of marginalized cultural enactments of meaning.”
Myth is usually oral, but when it starts getting written down, it becomes more like history (since now there is a factual record to refer to). I do agree that we need to distinguish myth and history, though I would say history is still a species of myth (just as writing is still rooted in speech). Historians piece together the available evidence in order to tell a “likely story.” I would not say that such historical accounts simply provide “alternative” myths, since not all myths are created equal. There are criteria (aesthetic, ethical, scientific, etc.) that allow us to judge the relative adequacy of the stories we tell about our origins. But I think we have an ethical obligation to remain sensitive to the many ways of knowing available to humans and non-humans.
November 9, 2011 at 11:11 pm
Matt,
Thank you for the useful clarifications.
Perhaps we’re all talking past each other at this point? Maybe, but I suspect there are still disagreements lurking, e.g., about whether this is a (value) hierarchy in “myth” such that science is higher than religious myth? I don’t think there is a hierarchy per se, but that certain “stories” are better are doing certain things than others. E.g., I want the “scientific myth” when I go to the doctor with no exceptions. At this point, we should probably step back from over-use of the word “myth” and “story.”
Strav,
Additional clarification. Pragmatist semiotic, e.g., Peirce and Whitehead by extension, is realist, though not in the contemporary sense of the term. You don’t get that sense from Derrida or contemporary analytic philosophy of mind.
November 10, 2011 at 8:41 am
Responding to Levi in his own terms I think that given his distinction between virtual proper being and manifestation he assigns mythology too readily to the domain of manifestaion. I would argue that mythology has two faces: a virtual face of myth and a manifest face of creed or religion. Myth has far more differance and withdrawal than Levi seems willing to recognise, whereas religion is the reduction of myth to the conditions of identity and manifestation. Even Levi’s parable of his experience as a Lacanian analyst goes in this sense. (I say “parable” because I cannot think that Levi is indulging in some sort of empiricist version of the argument from authority, citing the authority (at least over him) of a past theory and practice that he has deconstructed, relativised, and pluralised many times since he left it behind). Even lacanian psychonalysis can have “cult-like” tendencies, and needs its fabulating function to be set free from its religious manifestations.
November 10, 2011 at 8:42 am
[…] confirms this opposition to myth in a follow-up post, “Myth: A Pet Peeve” , where he claims that not science and technology but mythological thinking are responsible […]
November 10, 2011 at 11:58 am
Jason – thanks, I’m in the UK where, as you might imagine, a ‘Continental’ approach to semiotics is dominant. Peirce looks like a definite worthwhile follow up – and Whitehead, well, yeah!
Matt – curious about any possible distinction you might make between communication and translation – are they both the same from a process perspective? The poet Coleridge abandoned his investigations into meaning and decided that communication was a ‘miracle’ of the imagination….
November 10, 2011 at 12:26 pm
How can you determine how causal technology was in WWII? Industrialization created multiple new abstract modes of thinking which were necessarily predicated by technological potential. Humans have come to mimic machine processes as a means toward efficiency. During WWII there were systematic reorganizations of national behavior as a means of improving efficiency, that existed only in and through technology.
Wittgenstein makes the point that we should be attentive to the difference between justification and cause. A justification is often an ex post facto tool for a set of actions, or is a means of capitalizing on psychological tendencies–adorno writes on this in the culture industry–that is different from the causes of an event. As adorno comments, the fascists used mythological means to influence natural tendencies in groups, engendering support. But that isn’t the pure cause of WWII, it is one of many; and it is as much a means of justification for militarism and expansion as it was the cause of them.
Technology has a similar multiplicity. It is a natural predication of war as well as a justification for its escalation. Its economy and its relationship to tehnological advancement make this apparent.
Wittgenstein also makes a point about the use of cause. What does one mean by cause? Is it mechanism, motivation or probability? Mechanism is natural and forceful, motivation is projective and linguistic, while probability is ideal and speculative. Your mythic cause is in this sense a motivation, wherein thinking of humans is caught in this cause, through belief in myth; but at the level of objects there is a distinct plane of thought that relates to a human’s natural disposition toward objects through his sense of mechanism. I think benjamin/adorno’s use of mimesis, d&g’s machinic metaphor or heidegger’s equipment all point toward the mechanistic causality of technology. We are within their milieu and therefore unconsciously participate in, mimic and repeat them, but just as they also open new complexes and potentials for thought. Your appeal to Adorno is strange, because I have always found him to center upon the demystification of Capital as an abstraction that bares directly on the human’s identification with industry and commodity (as two technologies). This further implicates the causal nature of technology, industry and economy.
November 11, 2011 at 12:13 am
Levi, I’m pretty sure you cannot resolve all myth into those terms, it’s not just about what we should do now given the past, but sometimes about the characterisation of certain forces in reality without specifically containing a moral command. Or about contextualising current trends in terms of assumed results in the future. Not all myths start in the past, apart from the structural requirement of notional transmission to empower the speaker; most stories start in the past, because at the minimum the teller had to find out! There are many myths that happen “far away”, in that they do not produce their power from the fact that they precede this moment. Often myths with woolly beginnings and de-emphasised attribution chains for example.
Of course, your definition of myth fits quite nicely with your own actions defining “the enlightenment”.
Legitimising critique by seating it in a historical movement you credit with many successes could be ok, so long as you acknowledge and surpass the ugly roots/elements of that movement. Or you could deny taking on the legacy of previous generations, and define a critical attitude in new terms without confusion. That seems more in keeping with the objectives you’ve advocated.
There is one big reason not to do this; pointless word multiplication. For example, creating a position of post-enlightenment, where you critique the real historical enlightenment from a position taking what you consider to be it’s best and excluding it’s worst, etc.
Then what happens when you realise later that however self-reflexive and self-deterritorialising the post-enlightenment is, you still need to move beyond it to a whole new domain, underwriting your critiques with an entirely new and more flexible standpoint but fundamentally same attitude of re-recognising the past? Well you’ll probably have to call it the post-post-enlightenment or something!
I have a solution for this: 2011 enlightenment. Years automatically increment, no need to worry about identifying turning points! :P
So why not just keep the name? Because the danger is in repeating history by identifying with people without critiquing them. Is an argument in favour of your enlightenment proposed in 2011 simultaneously an argument for everything done by self-identified pro-enlightenment people of the past?
Obviously not. There will be people who said they were doing enlightenment stuff, and you’ll be able to go “ah, what they said was the core of the enlightenment was actually a mixture of real enlightenment and leftovers from it’s predecessors, or maybe partially including a reaction to it”.
Of course the enlightenment wasn’t really the enlightenment, but it was a bit like it.
In fact, to me this is like dubstep. Dubstep, if you haven’t heard it, is actually the good bits of things that call themselves Dubstep, but only contain elements of it. But it’s not without definition, as you can listen to me wax lyrical about what it means to me, and therefore set the fuzzy limits of the set. If someone criticises dubstep, naturally, they’re probably thinking of the specific popularised versions, and not the real thing.
I hear communism is pretty similar.
November 11, 2011 at 12:49 pm
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November 26, 2011 at 8:40 am
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