Over at Intra-Being, the great Andre has continued the discussion of myth that took place over at this blog and at Knowledge Ecology and Footnotes2Plato. In his depiction, Andre presents the discussion as a debate over myth and ideology. For me myth is defined not by its content, but by its structure. For example, the fact that something contains reference to the supernatural does not necessarily entail that it is, as I understand the term, mythological. Likewise, the fact that something is secular through and through does not entail that it is non-mythological. When we speak of a structure we are not talking about the content of a thing, but of a set of relations that are shared among a variety of different things. Thus, for example, if we talk about a house, that house might have a brick or stone exterior, it might be painted in very different ways inside, it might have a carpeted interior or an interior composed of wood or tile floors, etc., but structurally houses can be identical despite these differences. That is, they can have one and the same floorplan despite all these differences in interior and exterior design. They share the same structure.
Likewise, in the case of myth, it is not whether or not something has a supernatural dimension, but rather whether or not something possesses a particular structure. I have argued that all myths, whether pertaining to religion or secular systems, share the same structure of positing one term as transcendent to all others. I use the term “transcendence” in a very specific way: the transcendent, as I use the term, does not mean “to go beyond”, but rather refers to the postulation of any entity that is unconditioned and that conditions other things without itself being conditioned by other things. Here are some examples of this sort of transcendence:
1) The concept of God as conceived by many variants of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and by philosophers such as Descartes, Augustine, Thomas, Jean-Luc Marion(?), Leibniz, etc.
2) The idea of an original being before the fall as depicted in the book of Genesis.
3) Roussea’s idea of “man” prior to being contaminated by culture (note that this isn’t a religious or supernatural idea).
4) The idea of a point that we can reach in history where we will fully coincide with ourselves and enjoy mastery over all of nature.
5) The idea that any community or group has a supreme, unchanging, and invariant essence as in the case of Nazi mythology when speaking of the Germans and Jews.
6) The Enlightenment idea of subjects standing apart from nature and mastering it and having the possibility of a view from nowhere.
7) “Laplace’s demon“.
8) The neoliberal idea of sovereign individuals that are self-made independent of their cultural and social circumstances.
9) Ontologies that conceive objects in terms of pure and complete presence.
10) Platonic forms.
11) The treatment of leaders, parties, and intellectuals as infallable and fully-self present rather than as divided or split ($).
I could go on and on with examples. Each one of these cases is premised on the idea of a transcendence that conditions other things, that is an “unmoved mover”, and that isn’t itself conditioned in turn. Each case denies the constitutively divided nature of beings, persons, communities, or things. Each one of these instances, secular or not, is what I refer to as a “religion” or a theology. Each one is also a necessarily patriarchal structure. What is it that authorizes me to call Stalinism, despite it’s supposed atheism and materialism, a religion no less than many variants of Christianity? The authorization arises from myth being defined by its structure, not its content. As we learn in topology, where two structures share the same relation they are the same structure. I outline this thesis in detail in the fifth chapter of The Democracy of Objects. Myth is not simply a narrative, but a specific type of narrative that has a very specific type of structure (the positing of the unconditioned, usually with an accompanying story of either an eschatology or a fall). With any luck I will also have an article coming out after January entitled “The Other Face of God” that points to the social, political, and ethical implications of this way of thinking. In my view, waging war against transcendence means waging war against the idea of an unconditioned in this sense, whatever form it might take. Not only do I think that ontologically belief in such an unconditioned is unsustainable (everything is characterized by finitude), but I also think that belief in the unconditioned, whatever form it might take, leads to very noxious social, ethical, and political formations.
Larval Subjects . 
November 21, 2011 at 7:50 pm
Isn’t there often a temporal dimension to myth? That is, the narrative myth is situated in a (completed) past but is applied to the contemporary situation (I think Edmund Leach defined myth as something like that). So there might be a nostalgic element inasmuch as nostalgia is determined by a fiction, the fantasy of completeness.
November 21, 2011 at 8:00 pm
Hey Tim,
Yes, I think so. That’s what I was trying to get at with my reference to origins and the fall and eschatology. The former is nostalgic, retroactively positing a time prior to the “contamination” of the world by a fall when we were in harmony with ourselves, nature, and each other, while the latter is anticipatory, positjng a future where “contamination” will, at long last be overcome. The 1950s functions as a nostalgic myth for many Americans. “People were more politie, there was no crime, children listened to their parents, people didn’t divorce, etc.” this myth has nothing supernatural about it but serves a decisive political function in the present.
November 21, 2011 at 8:16 pm
Is there a difference between this conception of the myth and Ontotheology?
November 21, 2011 at 8:44 pm
Nope.
November 21, 2011 at 8:51 pm
Right. I was thinking of the 50s as I wrote, actually. But is the structure such that the mythologized “past” is both completed (that is, separated from us decisively somehow – an event in recent history, the “time of the gods,” whatever) and felt as relevant now? I think so; it’s what makes it fantasy, I guess. And so the function of myth is maybe to transmute a contemporary lack into a mythic lost something. I understand “lack” isn’t the word kids use these days, but you get my Lacanese.
November 21, 2011 at 8:58 pm
Agreed. I would say that myth often transforms a contingent order of things into a necessary and natural order. Plato was exemplary at exploringnthese mechanisms where, in the Republic, he says the utopian society would need a myth to explain different social positions (being born with bronze, gold, or silver in oneself). During the Middle Ages the idea of “great chain of being” served a similar function with God as the sovereign father, kings mirroring the divine function, amd then fathers mirroring kings and divine. Myth converts a contingent order into a necessary order by treating certain parts as containing a “sublime object”. We see something similar in the veneration of Regan among certain conservatives and the veneration of Obama among certain democrats (not all). When suddenly every decision a leader makes is treated as good, rational, or having a legitimate excuse you know you’ve entered the domain of transcendence, the denial of split subjects, and the world of myth.
November 21, 2011 at 10:35 pm
[…] (of the excellent blog Intra-Being) post on cosmopolitics and factishes yesterday. Levi writes: Over at Intra-Being, the great Andre has continued the discussion of myth that took place over […]
November 21, 2011 at 11:54 pm
but I also think that belief in the unconditioned, whatever form it might take, leads to very noxious social, ethical, and political formations.
Dr. Sinthome on the surface of it there’s nothing here to complain about – but as I told you ten million times before, WHY do people, nevertheless, and despite all rational explanations, continue to believe in the unconditioned?
November 22, 2011 at 12:15 am
great summation of ontotheology
November 22, 2011 at 2:28 pm
Hi Levi, this is very interesting – especially the convergence of myth and ontotheology in your reading (though I’m not yet sure I agree 100% with this essentialisation of myth!). But when I read: “myth often transforms a contingent order of things into a necessary and natural order,” I find myself wondering what makes this different from ideology. Isn’t this precisely the function of ideology? And, if so, don’t we find that ideologies and myths are interwoven tapestries? If the starting premise is that myths are falsehoods (which is the impression I get from your list!), then clearly their only worth is in being debunked. On the other hand, if the function of myths, through their circulation, is to influence the distribution of affects through their impact on the aesthetic regime, can myth not also hold emancipatory potential?
My sense is that this is precisely what Latour’s analysis pushes us to reconsider. The fetish (i.e. falsehood or myth) must be smashed… to be replaced with… ???? Yes, these myths (as ontotheological falsehoods) can get out of hand and control (as your examples illustrate) but so can ‘facts’ or whatever it is that we seek to replace the broken fetishes or myths with. The argument here would be that it is only once we get beyond trying to smash myths – only to replace them with new myths/ideologies, both of which, are artifactual – and rather engage in the painstaking work of exploring and re-weaving/re-working the contingent in-between of subject-object entanglements, that we can hope to compose a new and less perverse reality. My concern, ultimately, is that your take on myth risks reducing it to the hegemonic conditions under which it is produced (patriarchy, ontotheology) rather than seeing it as a mode of translation of affect between subjects and objects. Can we not conceive of feminist or queer myths (i.e. produced under these counter-hegemonic conditions) as having emancipatory potential?
There is a difference in my mind between the construction of a myth by elites to legitimise unjust social relations (a la Plato) and the construction of a myth to mobilise humanity around an alternative story of its own emancipation (the 1% in the OWS movement). This is not to say that I do not see the dangers of blindly believing in a myth, however noble it’s cause may sound. I just think myth as a mode of conveyance can have a constructive function even if, ultimately, it must be debunked when it is no longer fit for the project of emancipation.
November 22, 2011 at 2:46 pm
Hi Andre,
In my view, all ideologies are variants of myth. Reciprocally, all myths are ideologies.
November 22, 2011 at 2:51 pm
I do think myths can have emancipatory potentials, but I also think they tend to generate a whole slew of problems. Take the difference between queer politics and GLBT politics. The latter often ends up falling into various gender essentialisms that lead to an identity politics that becomes exclusionary, generating its own– to use Deleuze and Guattari’s language –micro-fascisms. Asserting an identity can be emancipatory, allowing other restrictive identities to be challenged and contested, but it also has this dark side which we’ve seen in the fragmentation of American “leftist” politics. By contrast, the strategy of queer politics consists in challenging identities altogether, refusing any essentialism. As a result, it doesn’t fall back into exclusionary identity politics. What I’m trying to think– ever since my first article “The Politics of the Virtual” –is how structures themselves (not just contents) can be challenged and transformed.
November 22, 2011 at 7:55 pm
Hi Levi
In your argument that myth requires transcendence in the form of one unconditioned entity:
A) Then where does animism fit into myth?
B) Does that mean any conception of anything before the big bang is also mythological?
November 23, 2011 at 12:38 am
Schizo,
I don’t think myth and falsity are synonyms. All myths are false, but not all false statements are myths. Animism is probably false, but that doesn’t make it mythological in the sense I define the term here. As for speculation prior to the big bang, I think it all depends on how these claims are arrived at. Talking about how something began is not the same as talking about an origin in the mythological sense.
November 23, 2011 at 3:10 am
Levi,
Your definition seems to imply that the ancient Greek gods, for example, were not mythic in structure (they were not transcendent, they were finite in power and in virtue). What were they, then?
I’d argue that the concepts of transcendence and monotheism were invented relatively recently (around the axial period), while myth, especially in its more ritualistically embedded and mimetic forms, has been structuring human experience for tens of thousands of years.
November 23, 2011 at 6:19 am
Matthew,
As I’ve already remarked to you in discussion, I think your definition of myth is overly broad and fuzzy. You treat narrative and myth as synonyms, which they aren’t. As for greek gods, in my readings of classical texts they’re regularly treated as eternal and we get the stories of origins and falls I describe throughout Greek and Roman literature. I always get suspicious when people refer to the “axial age”, but I’ll set that aside.
November 23, 2011 at 8:23 pm
Levi, your definition in terms of mythic structure, rather than content, is helpful. Any definition of myth will be “fuzzy,” however, since mythic forms of consciousness are indeed dream-like and can only be falsified by the “clear and distinct ideas” of mental-rational definitions. I come from a school of thought (Gebser, Jung, and more recently, Bellah) in which myth is to be grasped on its own terms, more akin to poetry and story, rather than collapsed into the theoretical terms of rationality.
I think an important distinction can be made between the immortality of Greek gods and the eternality of a transcendent God. The former does not imply transcendence of the emotional tumult of human-like existence, while the latter does imply a great distance, absolute or not, from such confusion.
As for the Axial age, it has survived Jaspers’ initial formulation quite well and remains a key concept for many sociologists and scholars of religion. You might look into Robert Bellah’s “Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age” (2011).
November 23, 2011 at 8:31 pm
[…] Bryant has posted a few more reflections on myth. I’ve pasted some of our discussion over on Larval Subjects […]
November 23, 2011 at 8:42 pm
I think Jung is an example of the form of thought I’m critiquing. I base my concept of myth on what I draw from ethnography, especially features of Levi-Strauss. As for the concept of the axial age, I’ve always and only seen it used to advance a certain agenda. I think the transformation that occured during this time has everything to do with the emergence of a new form of agriculture and the accompanying rise of the despotic city-state, and not a certain spiritual enlightenment.
November 23, 2011 at 9:16 pm
Well, I can’t argue with that… I think we all inevitably have agendas. The trick is being as honest as possible about what that agenda is and providing convincing reasons and narratives to back it up.
Thanks for engaging, Levi.
November 26, 2011 at 8:40 am
[…] Bryant recently (here and here) has criticised myth from a point of view that assigns it uniquely to face (1). Myth posits a […]
November 28, 2011 at 5:44 pm
Interesting. Looks like this description of myth could hit science too; many forms of science seek to dig into the structure of ultimate reality, and find as integrated as possible a description of the universal invarients of reality that condition the rest, things like the speed of light or the relationship between spacetime geometry and mass/energy distribution.
Do they evade this description because they present their theories as a closer stage towards the unconditioned fundimentals, and not the finished article?
November 28, 2011 at 5:47 pm
I do give examples of points where science hits the structure of myth (Laplace’s demon). I don’t think the examples you give fit that description as these aren’t unconditioned invariants but have to do with the way in which our particular universe developed in the early stages following the big bang.
November 29, 2011 at 12:28 am
I still don’t see that destinction:
If we were to say “because of how the universe developed after the big bang, my structure for society is inevitable” that would presumably match your structural rule about mythic/ontotheological stuff, but if we substitute “my structure of society is inevitable” with “the speed of light is inevitable” which seems to me a change of content, you get the sort of statement people make all the time in physics.
In fact many (probably most) physicists would put it stronger, saying that it is not just that the big bang+early development made the speed of light we know, but that the speed of light (ie “c” the max speed of light) gave us the kind of big bang we know, and if it was conditioned by anything at all, it was prior to or at the moment of the big bang itself.
Unconditioned (by anything else in the universe), but conditioning.
Is there some other feature that seperates statements like this from the kind of thing you’re talking about?
November 29, 2011 at 12:42 am
No physicist I know of claims that the big bang is an unconditioned event. They make the claim that we don’t know what precipitated that event because the laws of physics break down under conditions of energy at that level of concentration. These two claims are entirely different. There are all sorts of things in the universe that are inevitable without being necessary. It’s inevitable that hydrogen will behave in certain ways when combined with other atoms. That doesn’t make it mythological. Hydrogen is still the result of a genesis within the furnace of stars and is therefore not unconditioned.
November 29, 2011 at 1:44 am
Hmm, I feel like we’re talking at cross purposes.
The big bang, as an event, is a very different thing from a “law of nature” as they used to be called. So the big bang doesn’t have to be a prime mover, not totally sure what difference that makes, but fine.
I was sort of talking more about einstein’s metric tensor equations, or the speed of light, which are attempts towards invarients in how things relate. We know these things break down, or at least that the first one does, but the attempt continues to find theories of everything, or more specifically in many cases, the theory of everything.
Do you think this kind of search is mythological and should be avoided?
What about if people discover partial laws that cover their sphere of application absolutely? That still opens the door for people to say “the laws of economics [or whatever] preclude any alternative”.
Is it the invocation of these things that is mythological, rather than searching for them?
November 29, 2011 at 2:50 am
Josh,
What is the aim of your questions here? Are you trying to demonstrate that there’s no difference between science and mythology?
November 29, 2011 at 3:09 am
The aim of my questions? Pulling at loose ends of conceptual formulations, in the hope of finding something better.
You might set up the thing you dislike, mythology, only to find that your description of it hits something that is quite close to you. Better to get the splash damage out the way in a little comment thread. Perhaps you can find that the reason that you dislike mythology is not the stated one, in that there are subtleties in distinguishing it from the other elements of your symboloic world that you see intuitively, but haven’t yet expressed.
Or perhaps there are swathes of scientific thinking that exactly fit what you dislike, and the reasons you dislike them could be helpful to consider, in terms of the social consequences of science or whatever.
Don’t know really, my basic motivation is that I enjoy finding things that are insightful with little niggles in them, seeing if I can express those niggles cleanly. The more powerful an idea, the more I like to turn it on itself and see what it produces, both for entertainment and because I think that kind of recursive process can help improve it’s consistency.
I’ll do it myself before accepting an idea, but I feel blogs are a great way to involve the person writing in the same kind of process. It’s pretty much all bonus from my end, but I’ll only continue if I think it actually helps you. So yeah, say the world if you want me to stop poking!
November 29, 2011 at 3:15 am
Josh,
I already said in both this post and in the post on a-theism that what makes a myth a myth is not whether it refers to the supernatural, but to a basic structure. I explicitly remarked in both places that there can be myths in what we commonly refer to as science. Ergo, I’m unclear as to why you’re pressing the point. I am, however, very specific in how I define that structure. I say that myth always involves an element that transcends all the others and conditions them without being in conditioned in turn. I provide the analogy of a sovereign or king that stands over his subjects ruling them without being conditioned in any way. The answer to your question would spin on whether the speed of light is something that stands above all instances of light in this way. I don’t think it does, but I might be mistaken. At any rate, it’s not the invariance that’s at issue (there are all sorts of invariances in the world, eg, mathematics). It’s that relation of “standing above”.
November 29, 2011 at 4:24 am
Yeah fair enough, I’m not saying your scared of touching science. And it is very likely that I don’t understand the subtlety of these ideas. So I’ll speak in “how I think this should work” to save time. I’ll hopefully display my melange of misunderstings and insights more purely this way:
Like I said above about the big bang not being a prime mover, not sure how that matters if we are resolutely downstream from it; a myth of a god who is an emenation of a higher and unknowable god/of other undetermined origin might still assume that the former is omnipotent/omniscient with respect to us.
It seems like the focus of your attention is the position of “higher knowledge” where the observability/controllability continuum reaches it’s infinite limit. Perfect access to the structure of existence, with the associated assumption that that knowledge brings power rather than fatalism.
And that to you, a myth is anything that supports the existence of such a domain of perfect knowledge, and more specifically one that attaches to human scale existence.
In this intepretation, the big bang would not have that position in current physics because of the endless novelty of quantum fluctuation, meaning that the historical originating point is not sufficient to determine current events.
It seems like that is the source of the big bang’s non-troubling-ness, wheras laws of nature have a different character, the ability to say “I know this about you”, and to assert that in one sense a person can be reduced to knowledge of a certain model, which allows you to disregard their complexity.
Could be wrong, but it seems like this is about stories that assert power-knowledge that is not in any way chosen by those subjected to it. Expertise that acts autonomously on someone by virtue of it’s conditions of existence lying outside their domain of power.
If this is true, denouncing some process description as myth could be about showing it’s hidden democratic character. That by not taking hidden-but-now-revealed means against it, those subjected to it are now simultaniously complicit in it but empowered to change it.
If I’m right about that, then it also opens up the other option, of expertise that people are truly powerless against. Of building wells that are physically too tall to climb out of, or other more horrible analogies. This kind of thing could be described as “true myth”, but will more likely not be spoken about at all, except where they are produced peicemeal or via methods of discovery not primarily focused on domination or control (ie scientific papers).
Of course, knowing about such structures, if they exist, would allow you to watch out for people building the means to produce them, and working out where they have been put, just as we currently watch out for nuclear proliferation, another method to simplify a control process in that case the matter of national defense.
November 29, 2011 at 3:50 pm
Some bits that I cropped out in editing:
I think you’re probably right that it is the position of “standing above” that does the business, but also that that can be relativised to an assymetry of conditioning in a relationship. In this latest attempt to understand your ideas, I am obviously doing it in terms of my own like “all power is projected” etc. but I hope that doesn’t invalidate it from your perspective.
I also feel that mathematically based laws or invarients fit perfectly in this category, given plato’s forms were supposed to have a mathematical (or at least geometric) basis, and the modern political use of economics or climate modelling.
I’m interested in your distinction between invariance, inevitability and neccesity; to my mind the first two are subsets of the latter, and that formal neccesity is nothing more than a description of the limits of possibility. But that’s likely a story for another time!
November 29, 2011 at 4:03 pm
Josh,
I think there’s quite a difference between a Platonic form and a mathematical physical law. In the former case, you have the form standing self-same and identical over all instances. For example, there are all the instances of justice in the world and then there is the form of justice itself. The form of justice is forever unchanging and exists regardless of whether any just acts take place or whether any human or rational beings exist to engage in just acts. Likewise, for Plato there are all the physical triangles that exist in the world as well as all thoughts about triangles, and then there’s the form of the triangle that is eternal, unchanging, and that always remains the same. For Plato there is only one triangle that exists and everything else is a copy of that triangle that more or less approximates or comes close to that form. The speed of light is not analogous. There is not a form of the speed of light that stands above and beyond all instances of light. That law is not a thing in and of itself, but is a description of movements of light. Apples and oranges. One need not be a Platonic realist in order to ground a theory of mathematics, nor need one posit a form of the speed of light over the actual movements of individual light photons.
December 18, 2011 at 1:57 am
[…] infinite number of sentences, so-called “normal” loops would have a very simple basic structure while nonetheless generating an indefinite number of variations of this structure. Nonetheless, […]