Apocalyptic Imaginary
The Best of Modern Mythology, 2011
© 2011 Mythis Media
Smashwords Edition
Writing by:
James Curcio
P. Emerson Williams
Rowan Tepper
Mr. VI
Brian George
Rusty Shackleford
David Metcalfe
Wes Unruh
Cat Vincent
Gunther Sonenfeld
Dr Adventure!
Special Thanks for donating $100 or more to
2011's Mythos Media Fundraiser:
Arild Stromsvag, Renee Beattie, Judith Curcio,
Nikolai Nothos, Fenwick Rysen, Joy and Benjamin Warren.
Conversations with:
Aunia Kahn
Charles Eisenstein
Raymond Salvadore Harmon
Layout, Design and Curation
James Curcio
Creative Commons 3.0: Non-commercial
Mythos Media
What is the Modern Mythology Project?
Modernmythology.net started out as my personal blog in 2005, though the ideas I’ve been exploring there have been gestating since early adolescence. It’s become apparent to me in the years since that I’m not alone in many of them either, but that’s getting way ahead of ourselves.
Over the years it has become an open nexus for discussion and analysis on the part of people who study and create modern myths. (We’ll get to what we mean by “modern myth” later.)
Though several contributors have advanced degrees, we make no assumption that someone needs a Ph.D to be actively engaged in this work. In fact, many of the myths of 20th century academia—including the idea of a hard line between one discipline and the next—seem to pose a limitation that individuals need to overcome if they want to participate.
It is our hope that this project can continue to enter classrooms as well as people's homes, and that it will remain an open platform for the discussion and dissemination of original, forward-thinking work. Though a large extent of that responsibility falls on each of the contributors, it also falls on our audience, since this is not an entirely one-directional process.
The analysis we’ve done on Modern Mythology is the reflection of people who create media as a day or night job. Some produce video or music, write books, or even, much to Bill Hick’s legendary disgust, work in advertising.
This was not a pre-packaged, planned strategy. Aside from some general direction, I gave each of the contributors the keys and told them to write what was meaningful for them. I herd cats, which as all cat owners will tell you, is a contradiction in terms.
Blog content is written with alacrity. It is written fast and furious with the hope that it isn’t so riddled with errors that the audience feels like they’re gazing dimly at the cypher stone of a forgotten civilization of drunkards. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose. You just have to keep pounding, and keep the content running with enough regularity that people bother to check in on what head-candy you have for them today.
This book is an opportunity to give a selection of that material another polish, even if our DIY approach makes a stray typo here and there not entirely out of the question. Similarly, I have chosen to keep the style and format for each contributor as it was written, rather than fitting everything into the same mold.
A little more history. In 2006, P. Emerson Williams, Michael Szul, Tovarich Pizor and I joined forces to create Mythos Media, a platform for the production of modern myths that might slip through the cracks or be dismissed by mass-media publishers and outlets. Mythos Media was my third full-out attempt at helping to germinate an indie media collective. (Previous ones have led to shared A/V production facilities that are sadly no longer in existence, this one was more focused on virtual platforms due to the lower overhead.) Many years of hard work followed, where we produced and released books, comics, illustrated books, audio books with dedicated original soundtracks, albums, and collaborated a great deal with many other creative groups and production companies.
But there was an issue with our strategy. It became apparent that we were better positioned to help produce and incubate the creative elements of these projects than back them as a traditional publisher might. I guess I was looking to be a part of a movement, not a publisher and bean counter. And as artists ourselves, when our few investment options fell through, it became painfully clear that we simply didn’t have the fiscal resources to do what we had initially set out to do.
That doesn’t mean roll over and die. It means... try something different.
We made the concerted decision to maintain Mythos Media as a brand representing quality, off the path content. In February 2011, ModernMythology.net was opened up and made into a group endeavor, a site dedicated to maintaining a platform for the discussion of mythology and the independently produced media that follows from this discussion. Anyone involved can forge their relationships with whatever publishing or distribution approach best suits their project, as Mythos Media is no longer a publisher itself. This project began a creative collective, and it remains one, for all of those who are interested in joining and driven enough to play on the level.
Since February, the site quickly grew to a steady 20,000 - 30,000 visitors a month, all coming to investigate original content on mythology crossing and incorporating many supposedly disparate disciplines: art, writing, linguistics, philosophy, anthropology, systems theory, psychology, film. The sheer number of visitors doesn’t represent a huge marketing success, as many world-class blogs such as The Huffington Post easily see more than that on even a slow news day . However, when you consider the subject matter and our approach, it seems to indicate an interest in a rather enigmatic subject.
Over the course of this project, and in the publication of The Immanence of Myth (Weaponized), we have been developing a curriculum for modern mythos which has even spread to the classroom at SUNY Binghamton and hopefully beyond. But what is the intention of this curriculum? What benefit can it serve?
The Immanence of Myth began this curriculum of self-discovery that reaches far outside the scope of academic inquiry, which Apocalyptic Imaginary continues. This is a challenge to us all to question our beliefs and dig into our own personal history to better understand our story, and our place in the modern myths unfolding around us every day.
This curriculum isn't a route 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 knee-jerk 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, and that this collection gets you thinking about old things in new ways. If so, I feel we've certainly done our job.
What you do with it is up to you.
James Curcio
Chapter 1
Myth in the Narrative
James Curcio
I’ve had many discussions with people over the past few years about why myth is important. Many of these come down to a misunderstanding about what the word “myth” means, so what could have been an interesting discussion about politics, permaculture, or even literature quickly deteriorates into a debate on semantics.
I’d like to avoid rehashing that argument, and toward that end, give a definition of myth that all of us can wrap our heads around. I hope as a result of it you will see why this is such a crucial issue to explore, as it has relevance in regard to all other disciplines of study.
First, I’d like to start us off with a short excerpt from the introduction of The Immanence Of Myth (Weaponized press). This excerpt was also published on the net in the art journal Escape Into Life as “Living Myths.” I chose that title because most people think of myth as the study of classical myths, the study of what I would consider dead myths.
Modern myths are, quite plainly, alive. They represent not only our ideas about ourselves and the world around us, nor our beliefs of the same, but also and probably more distressingly, exist at that juncture that lies between these things, and which defy our plain view. Not quite pure fantasy, rarely easily understood as an objective or material force.
From that introduction:
We may use myths to explore why something is the way it is, or what we are to do with it, but a given myth remains just an interface. It is through us, through embodiment and direct interaction, that it is made immanent. There is no transcendent realm beyond the symbols, and in themselves, the symbols are empty shells. The myth is living because we are ever-changing and transitory. In other words, we are living, and myth too is living. It is a part of us, our mirror. It is like the moon in relation to the sun—without the sun, the moon would cast no light, but in the presence of the sun, it appears to have a light of its own. If this seems far-flung, consider this statement: coming world conflicts will be driven by ideological forces along cultural fault lines. In other words, by our ideas about ourselves, others, and the nature of the world we live in. Ideas are not just ideas, when they take hold of us.
Framing myth in this light makes the discussion of the subject anything but “coffee shop talk.” Modern myth is on the lips, minds, and knife-points of those in the midst of active revolution, as well as those working in media. In fact, all that is represented, all that we could form an opinion on as we form an opinion on it, is in that process entering the realm of myth. Doubly so when it is presented back into the world through discourse of any kind.
This is the perspective of myth from the cultural level.
You see, there are different scales on which myth can be approached.
I want to talk now about the less understood personal dimension of myth, since many of us are more familiar with how it seems to operate at the macro- level of culture. “Personal myth” is a term several of us started employing in the discussion of immanence and myth, which seemed natural but it has caused a great deal of confusion when it isn’t clearly explained what we mean. It has come to have primacy in regard to myth through the lens of immanence rather than transcendence. Which sounds pretty erudite, I suppose, but it really isn’t that difficult to grasp if we look at it headlong.
So what is personal myth?
Lately, I've taken to giving this example of personal myth when asked this question, because it is something so many of us have experienced it:
You meet someone and fall straight through the floor. You fall in love. Which means, you share a story with someone else. You are co-writers. Co-editors. And one of the preconditions of the plot is, “you’re in love.” That isn’t to underrate the reality of that experience, at that time. Not at all. It is real. Real as any other emotions are real. Dangerous as any wild animal. But it is still a story, and our relation with one another depends a great deal on it.
You develop a shared myth about your lives together. Some of it is just in the expectation they’ll be there tomorrow, or other day-to-day assumptions. Other myths might be about your shared future. You scope out houses, or fawn at the mysterious plants growing in someone’s front yard. Anecdotes, shared memories remembered as-if you are the same being, dreams, trinkets representing your shared history …
It may seem like your meeting could have been foretold in the stars because of its raw necessity. Falling in love is a deeply mythic process. Maybe that is why there are so many myths about it.
But sometimes, well, quite often, things go “wrong.” Such as your partner doing something to lose your trust in them, however you define that. Let's say, for now that they run off and join the circus, or if you prefer the more likely scenario , let us say that they get wasted and bang some trash at a bar. Either way, your perfect story has just been re-written by some hack. Unfortunately that hack was your partner. Anyway...
For whatever the reason, the story twists.
Maybe the narrative is strong enough to stick to the story after the two of you fight for a while about plot structure. But if not, if the characters of our stories become too incompatible, now what? Now you have your arc, and they have theirs. Do they continue to work as a cohesive form, creating a specific story- No.
This is your new myth. To hell with the old book. Besides, some characters have to die, figuratively speaking.
Suddenly the whole relationship is a different story. Maybe they're even a villain now. It was a mistake, they are “a total asshole.” And who knows, those assessments may be more accurate than the ones you made when under their spell. Now you have to call your friends and tell them the new story. Share it on Facebook. Re-enforce it in your music listening habits. THAT LYING SON OF A BITCH. Turn the music up.
Have you ever stopped and looked behind what you’re doing? If so, I imagine you may have experienced something interesting. The force of these narratives is so strong that often you can be aware of the wizard behind the curtain, and still be subject to his capricious whims. For better or worse, we are trapped inside our stories, a hall of mirrors that only death frees us from. (Or not.)
But maybe you don’t see behind these games we play with ourselves, and one another.
Either way, we go on thinking this posthumously written myth is the “true” myth. The most recent story is often the most appealing one. Maybe we’re all just obsessed with “The New.”
But all our myths are—at one time or another, in one way or another—equally true.
Take a breath. I want you to think about an ex-, and then recall yourself in the story you shared with them. Reify that story just for a moment, and pretend all your premises at that point in time were true. If you do it right, you’ll either feel nauseous and dizzy, or like the linebacker from the Rams just sucker punched you in the kidney. You will likely find a wide range of myths that conflicted with one another when you were with them, and a different assortment of them.
Consider that these stories were equally true, equally untrue.
Hard to swallow, isn’t it? We’re all constantly changing our stories, and the fact that we pretend otherwise is one of the greatest scams about “human behavior” that popular culture seems to pull off. (And yet we have this delusion that we have somehow “evolved” beyond myth because of the centrality of science in how we think of the world around us.)
We re-write the past like this, and we do it so constantly that it is absolutely unimaginable that a sense of our history is anything other than a series of overlapping myths. Our experience is a palimpsest—that is it is scraped only partially clean and used again and again.
A palimpsest is a manuscript page from a scroll or book from which the text has been scraped off and which can be used again. The word “palimpsest” comes through Latin from Greek παλιν + ψαω = (palin “again” + psao “I scrape”), and meant "scraped (clean and used) again.”
There are many more esoteric ways of explaining what a myth is but this is the most direct. It's a part of the process by which we come to know anything, because we have to make assumptions and make a story of things to understand them and understand our place in them.
Consider this except from a New Scientist article:
“We are our narratives” has become a popular slogan. “We” refers to our selves, in the full-blooded person-constituting sense. “Narratives” refers to the stories we tell about our selves and our exploits in settings as trivial as cocktail parties and as serious as intimate discussions with loved ones. We express some in speech. Others we tell silently to ourselves, in that constant little inner voice. The full collection of one's internal and external narratives generates the self we are intimately acquainted with. Our narrative selves continually unfold.
State-of-the-art neuro-imaging and cognitive neuropsychology both uphold the idea that we create our “selves” through narrative. Based on a half-century's research on “split-brain” patients, neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga argues that the human brain's left hemisphere is specialized for intelligent behavior and hypothesis formation. It also possesses the unique capacity to interpret - that is, narrate - behaviors and emotional states initiated by either hemisphere. Not surprisingly, the left hemisphere is also the language hemisphere, with specialized cortical regions for producing, interpreting and understanding speech. It is also the hemisphere that produces narratives.
Narratives are, once they've become embedded or repeated, no different from myths. There may be some sense in considering myth to be a narrative that has been repeated, and solidified with belief. If you find yourself confused by our use of the words “myth” or “mythic,” try the word narrative instead. There are slightly different connotations. Myth means “by mouth,” it is that which is spread. A narrative feels somehow less grandiose. But those connotations are aesthetic—rather than intrinsic.
So, understanding that personal, national, cultural, spiritual myths all operate similarly at different scales, at least structurally, we can see that mythology is not a topic relegated to one discipline, but is instead an open discussion that could benefit as much from exploration of cognitive psychology as from the analysis of literary symbol or the direct experience of a shamanic ritual.
In all cases, the operative word is literary. The Modern Mythology project seems to be based on this single premise: that we can gain a more complete picture of the human puzzle by looking at life as we look at fictional stories. This is not science, nor is it meant to replace science. It is instead meant to shed light on the range of epistemological, ontological, and psychological realities that quite simply cannot be parsed by the scientific method. That doesn’t make these realities less legitimate. Phenomena require no proof on their own ground—after all, analytic logic rests upon tautology—but when we seek verification, repetition or explanation, then myth comes into play, whether or not the model it presents creates a satisfactory representation of that phenomenon or not. This draws a line between the method of science and most everything else, which we discussed in The Immanence of Myth and look at again with new eyes.
The principal idea at work here is an imagined contention between science and the humanities, and that one is more valid than the other. As I expressed in what I hope was a more lucid way in “Is Myth Dead?”, this contention is a specious one, although the distinction is not. The success of the world-views supported by scientific discovery have been so complete that the common understanding of “science” has invalidated all that is seen to be outside the scope of scientific scrutiny. Again, the core of modern myth is the absence of myth. A purely scientific attempt at experiencing or interpreting literature would be as pointless as using Lord Byron to get us to the moon, if maybe not quite as dangerous. (Don't let him put the bear on board.)
Modern mythology is not a strictly philosophical project. However, we see philosophy itself as a form of “meta-literature,” which replaces personal narrative with generalized abstraction. We build this assumption upon the points explored in The Immanence of Myth, though for our purposes here we may be able to borrow from Mauthner's philosophy as paraphrased in Wittgenstein's Vienna,
The idea that there exists such a thing as logic, in the sense of something universal and immanent in all languages, is another illegitimate reification. Belief in such a thing, even though it appears to comprise a body of knowledge, is superstition. “Everything about thinking is psychological,” Mauthner insists; “only the pattern [Schema] of our thinking is logical.” However, the pattern of man's thinking—and of his speaking, which is the same thing—is determined by, and reciprocally determines, the culture in which he lives, as both develop simultaneously; it is not something pre-existing which can be derived from “immutable laws of thought.” Wittgenstein's Vienna, Janik and Toulmin.
This is a big idea, and deserves adequate consideration. Despite appearances, there is a point in this endeavor beyond philosophy or sophistry, but the point may not itself be what it seems. Regardless, this makes the project of philosophy and modern mythology virtually indistinguishable except for in this regard, where the former uses rigor and the latter additionally embraces the truth of the single instance, the irreducible, the ephemeral, rather than that which has been generalized by a rational process.
There is a natural desire to draw strict boundaries between “narrative,” “myth,” as well as the mythologization process itself, and philosophy. However, we have worked hard to avoid that desire, instead drawing the contours out slowly and through extensive demonstration that you can find in The Immanence of Myth and this work.
The distinction between personal myth and all other forms of myth remains a misleading one.
Precisely because the cosmos can be understood and interpreted only through the human spirit (ed: so far as we are concerned) hence through subjectivity, what would seem to be the purely subjective content of mythology has at the same time a cosmic significance. Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms Vol 2.
This is drawn from Schelling's observations about myth. Indeed, some academics might recognize in our work on immanent mythology a philosophical underpinning that seems derived from applying so-called postmodern critique to Schelling's idealism. This is not inaccurate, though I think it pigeonholes the scope of this project more than I would like. That philosophical position has only arrived through years of working directly with these ideas in practice, (producing and reflecting on the production of media), rather than by prescriptive design.
[Myth] is objective insofar as it is recognized as one of the determining factors by which consciousness frees itself from passive captivity in sensory impressions and creates a world of its own in accordance with spiritual [or psychological] principle. If we formulate the question in this sense, the “unreality” of the mythic world can no longer be said to argue against its significance and truth. The mythical world is and remains a world of mere representations–but in its content, its mere material, the world of knowledge is nothing else. We arrive at the scientific concept of nature not by apprehending its absolute archetype, the transcendent object behind our representations, but by discovering in them and through them the rule determining their order and sequence. The representation gains objective character for us when we divest it of its accidents and demonstrate in it a universal, objectively necessary law. Likewise, in connection with myth, we can only raise the question of objectivity in the sense of inquiring whether it discloses an immanent rule, a characteristic “necessity.” Cassirer, Philosophy of Symbolic Forms vol 2.
This sums up the essential position of immanent myth from which we can move forward without further concern about “objective truth.”
I hope this re-appraisal of myth leads us to new ideas and questions which none of us would have formulated on our own. It is a group endeavor and benefits the most from the interaction of minds in the commons.
What is, is... what it becomes, is as much up to you as it is to me.
James Curcio is a transmedia freak of nature coming to a screen near you.
He has produced a diverse range of projects including collaborative novels and graphic novels with associated immersive media/marketing campaigns, albums, unorthodox podcast and audiobook series, web magazines and group blogs, and interactive CDs. Much of this work is distinguished by its signature aesthetic and irreverent style, and has been published by a number of independent presses.
Chapter 2
An Apocalyptic Vision
James Curcio
When I was sixteen, I started writing what became my first novel, Join My Cult! (New Falcon Press). I didn’t realize at the time, but it was my first attempt at rendering some of my personal mythology:
...Yet I was finding, to my amazement, that I was not alone in these woods, or in my need to find a myth with real, personal value. Alone all of my life, estranged from any sense of greater community, I was overjoyed by this. But I really had no idea how to proceed with it, or how to broadcast this message to all of these wanderers, winding their own paths to a center, an end which is still unknown to us all. What we are looking at here is an apocalypse. Spiritual, cultural apocalypse is much more subtle than mushroom clouds, fallout, and radiation burns. People can deny it. No statistics can prove it. The only evidence we have is a feeling of profound loss, and hope for a future that does not reduce the qualitative values of life to quantities and for companions to share these stories with so that they can have value, and pass on to our children in the next world. Reflecting back on this, I believe many in my generation have been so called. Not because we merely want to be important, but because we know that we are coming down to the wire.
If there is one thread that seems to tie together the articles we’ve written over the past year, it is the theme of apocalypse as personal revelation. This is not merely a collection of pessimistic fear-mongering. Looking back now, I can see this theme clearly, passing from one mouth to the next. In different ways, we all voice the necessity of cooperation and community on a personal and very real level, juxtaposed against the backdrop of a dehumanizing corporate and consumer culture. Much of this book is an attempt to examine the imaginary dimensions revealed through apocalypse, thus the title.
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. Let me help clarify.
The destructive force the precedes apocalypse does one of two things: the rupture either creates an ouroborous, so that the currents of the past can re-shunt into the future, or it provides a true break in which an entirely new process can begin. A galaxy can whirl about itself in seeming harmony for billions of years, and then “collide” with another in such a way that the stars therein don't collide, but the two galaxies mutually annihilate, sending some stars whirling off into the void while others remain to start a new show. This is in our own distant future, as Andromeda and the Milky Way approach their death-dance.
The emphasis on destruction seems to be distracting to most people. It's the same with Shiva—how easily people forget the “all be-getter” part when they hear “all destroyer.” They lose the actual sense of the symbol, much as “myth” becomes simply “an untrue idea,” “apocalypse” becomes merely “the end of everything.” Not so!
The apocalypse is not in the explosion, the rupture, it is not the initial catastrophe but rather what exists in the silence afterwards. Apocalypse is that revelation. Another example might be seen in the times during our lives when we think things are a certain way, and we operate under the mandates of that myth, until suddenly we are shown in a stark and often painful way that those illusions will no longer suffice. However, if you can brave the passage with your eyes open, for even a split second, you will be offered the opportunity to see the truth without its clothing, before we again begin wrapping it in myth, a new myth.
Another example comes to mind, which incidentally and eerily fits the Tarot imagery of the Blasted Tower. After the World Trade center was blasted to the ground, many in the States, certainly many in New York, witnessed something interesting. In the weeks that followed, we looked at one another with new eyes. We were snapped awake, startled as if out of a dream, and though frightening, there was also a sense of possibility, even hope, in those new eyes, and in seeing our old neighbors in new ways. Of course, the predominant culture over the years that were to follow fell into a myth of fear and hate, and that rhetoric shrouded over any real apocalypse that could have been. At such times we are forced to transform, but the actual nature of that transformation is not certain.
In a purely spiritual sense, this is why towers are shattered. I'd like to leave you with a short passage from Join My Cult! Which, it's worth noting, was written before 9/11:
White walls are here because they caught me Working.
Bombed the Hive building.
The flames danced and sang about me.
Something the Agent said came back to me then, a commentary, a running monologue: “Millions of souls were freed from slavery to the Great Eye, Novus Ordo Seclorum, Eye of Shiva, blaster of towers… Of course the gate-keepers brand me a ‘terrorist.’ It is no matter. Through the power of association the entire structure will topple in due time. This is high ritual, and the ultimate sacrifice for the survival and evolution of my species, which I love so dearly. Even my friends and teachers have disowned me. Horus, the bull of your father is avenged. We can now return to our mother,whole. The dove resides within the blasted tower, and within that destruction, that madness, we lay the seed of the purest aspect of life…”
The whole structure erupted in a final, defiant exhalation, breathing out foul, billowing columns of smoke. Its systems coughed and spluttered. The whole world was dancing and singing. We sang:
Alas! With ruthless hand you have destroyed this fair edifice…it falls and decays!
And then, right before the cops came, we started a chant. It just came up out of nowhere…
In
the temple of the temple of the temple of the Holy
sits a woman
who is waiting who is waiting for the sun
in the temple of the
temple in the temple of the
Holy creeping shadows falling darkness
she is waiting for the sun.
For
the people of the people by the people making people
in the temple
of the temple of the temple of the Holy
She is weeping for the
people of the people
making people in the temple of the temple in
the temple of the sun
The possibility of Apocalypse also presents itself in our perception of time. While, from a scientific standpoint, time is a sort of grid within which events occur at discrete intervals – x1, x2, x3, …–without qualitative distinction, from an apocalyptic and mythic standpoint, time is measured by the ruptures that identify different eras.
So, from the Christian standpoint, we live in a time defined chronologically from the chaotic moment of Christ's birth until the point of his return. (Interesting that it should be from his purported birth and not death, since much of their symbolism is based around his crucifixion.)
It may be easier to grasp this concept if we view it from the perspective of our personal life, as we identify “eras” by the institutions that rule our lives for periods of time (such as during high school or military service), or when we are in a relationship with one person, and then others. The very characteristic of our experience during one period may be qualitatively different than the next, so that we might ask “who was I?” when we look back upon a past “era” from the privileged perspective of the present.
This would seem to highlight an event that characterizes those points in time–but in an apocalyptic sense, they are characterized most of all by that point when a previous historical framework was destroyed to produce the new one–every invocation is a banishment, and each step toward one thing is a step away from something else.
Chapter 3
Myth, Undead:
The Apocalyptic Imaginary
Rowan Tepper
The apocalypse is sublime. This is no great leap of thought, for not long after he wrote the Critique of Judgment, from which I derive my understanding of the term “sublime,” Kant wrote an essay entitled “The End of All Things.” A direct translation of the Greek ἀποκάλυψις as “lifting the veil,” or as “revelation” suggests that the concept of the sublime may help shed light upon the persistence of this eschatological myth in secular, (post-) modern culture. Apocalypse was always something more than a theological concept—the object of our fascination, anticipation and even desire has only taken new forms throughout history: the Bomb, unprecedented epidemics, “the end of history,” the ultimate fate of the universe, the end of the Mayan calendar... even the zombie apocalypse. The idea of apocalypse is strangely attractive—sublime, surpassing nature.
Compared to any of these scenarios our ability to resist becomes an insignificant trifle. Yet the sight of them becomes all the more attractive the more fearful it is, provided we are in a safe place. And we like to call these objects sublime because they raise the soul's fortitude above its usual mediocrity, and allow us to discover within ourselves an ability to resist which is of a quite different kind, and which gives us the courage to believe that we could be a match for [their] seeming omnipotence. [2]
The apocalypse is immanent—as a more-or-less thinly disguised myth. The apocalypse is always imminent—as an event ever on the horizon. Always yet to come, this imminence signifies our safety—it is a formal structure of eschatological myth: nothing that happens can be the apocalypse, rather the apocalypse is fundamentally what does not happen—immanence itself revealed, unveiled and disclosed. [3] In what time I have today, I shall speak of apocalyptic myth as not only “our symbolic interface with the world, often but not always presented in allegorical or metaphorical form,” [4] but as a narrative form that functions, as it were, as the plot (μύθοσ) of history. The apocalypse would be the climax, dénouement and closure of a particular history: judgment, revelation and end.
The zombie apocalypse is trendy—Facebook tells us that 599,332 people have RSVP-ed. [5] It is the latest form of the apocalypse—a postmodern incarnation of the myth with modern zombies. While folkloric zombies have a long history and various cultural forms, “modern zombies are often related to an apocalypse, where civilization could collapse due to a plague of the undead” (Munz, Hudea, Imad & Smith, When Zombies Attack!). [6] This was an entirely new vision of the end when Night of the Living Dead appeared in 1968, the year during which post-industrial, post-modern capitalism attained undisputed ascendancy after the failed revolts of May.
The zombie apocalypse is the eschatological event most fitting to post-modernity—being tongue-in-cheek and altogether lacking in seriousness, we can laugh off the very real anxieties it nevertheless signifies. While it is doubtless true that the sources of this anxiety—our mortality and the very real capacity of our civilization to annihilate itself (attained with the advent of the Bomb, object of other forms of the eschatological myth, enduring element of the contemporary apocalyptic imaginary)—are inextricably bound up in every such myth, others appear to be more significant.
Modern zombies are American—the largely interchangeable zombie flick settings signify an automated, atomized and alienated society. Modern zombies embody the undead afterlife of modernity and its myths—the alienated subject, no longer properly an “individual,” lives and labors like an automaton. The ideologies of post-modern liberal capitalism produce and rely upon subjects such as these—zombies with a pulse.
The modern zombie is the apotheosis of the Cartesian subject in a world in which the Enlightenment project and modernity have revealed themselves in the end to be bankrupt. Atomization and alienation are not merely the result of ideological operations—for, with the flight of the divine of which Hölderlin was prophet and Nietzsche apostle, the subject can no longer have any certainty concerning the world and others. The (post-) modern subject has never since free of false consciousness.
The zombie apocalypse is an allegory of the final triumph of the ideologies of post-modern capitalism. What leaves us in fear and trembling is the possibility of becoming a working zombie with a pulse in a monkey suit. The apocalyptic sublime serves both as a call to arms—vive la Résistance—and as a promised, imminent return of mythic lost immanence.
Killing zombies is just plain fun, too.
The zombie apocalypse heralds not just the end, but the annihilation of history. The mutism of the (post) modern zombie signifies the irrevocable loss of language—that fickle mistress that first led human civilization from primordial Chaos to the Cosmos of myth, then from exile to the millinery Kingdom of Judeo-Christian theology, and thence into our times. Of course, the sum total of this inheritance has since passed into and come to give shape to the practices of both history and politics: eschatology—secularized—takes the form of the ideology of progress that has long deluded “the left.” In Germany, during the 1920s and 30s the SPD remained convinced until the bitter end that Hitler and the Nazis represented a temporary aberration and that the country would “come to its senses.”
While Neoconservatism has fallen out of favor and is scarcely taken seriously outside of a few remaining enclaves, its theoretical underpinnings and fundamental myths have not. The political philosophy and philosophy of history to which Neoconservative thinkers and politicians have subscribed are in truth a particularly theatrical and shamelessly bare-assed instance of the dark inverse of the ideology of Progress, by means of which many cling to the wreckage of Modernity and the Enlightenment project.
While for the progressive, justice, utopia, apocalypse, etc, etc, are thought to be part of an inevitable future End of History—a Last Judgment that will brook no more delays, the Neoconservative, begins with and builds upon the extremely idiosyncratic reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit developed by Alexandre Kojève in his 1933-39 lecture course at the Sorbonne, later published as “Introduction to the Reading of Hegel,” in 1947, as transmitted through Leo Strauss, Francis Fukuyama, etc. According to this line of reasoning, the vanguard of humanity has, in fact, already reached the end of History, and all that remains to be done as a political task is to bring the rest of the world “up to speed” (c.f. Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. That all went according to plan, right?)
Here, Kojève's words are every bit as intelligible as my own:
The disappearance of Man at the end of History... is not a cosmic catastrophe: the natural World remains what it has been from all Eternity... nor is it a biological catastrophe : Man remains alive as animal in harmony with Nature or given Being......the end of human Time or History—means quite simply the cessation of Action... the disappearance of wars and bloody revolutions. And also the disappearance of Philosophy; for since Man himself no longer changes essentially, there is no longer any reason to change the (true) principles which are the basis of his understanding of the World and of himself. But all the rest will be preserved indefinitely; art, love, play, etc, etc; in short, everything that makes Man happy.
A. Kojève—footnote to the first edition of Introduction to the Reading of Hege.
Post-historical humanity would thus be “happy zombies,” as it were. For, with the cessation of Action, the disappearance of Philosophy and the end of Becoming, language would become superfluous, mere glossolalia.
According to a footnote added to the second edition, which happened to appear during that fateful year that saw both Kojève's death and the release of Night of the Living Dead, this apocalypse signifies the post-historical epoch during which the Lion of American Capitalism shall lie down with the Lamb of Soviet Marxism (or vice-versa): One can even say that the United States has already attained the final state of Marxist “communism,” seeing that, practically all the members of a “classless society” can from now on appropriate for themselves everything that seems good to them, without working any more than their heart dictates.
I was lead to conclude that the “American way of life” was the type of life specific to the post-historical period, the actual presence of the United States in the World prefiguring the “eternal present” future of all of humanity. Thus, Man's return to animality appeared no longer as a possibility that was yet to come, but as a certainty that was already present.
[1] Immanuel Kant, “The End of All Things (1794),” in Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, Trans. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1983), pp. 93-106.
[2] Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, Trans. Werner S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), pg. 120.
[3] Georges Bataille, “Beyond Seriousness,” in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, Trans. Michelle Kendall & Stuart Kendall (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 212-218.
[4] James Curcio, “The Immanence of Myth—an Anthology,” Escape Into Life, January 27th 2011. http://www.escapeintolife.com/essays/living-mths/
[5] As of January 31st, 2011, around noon.
[6] When Zombies Attack!: Mathematical Modelling of an Outbreak of Zombie Infection", by Philip Munz, Ioan Hudea, Joe Imad and Robert J, Smith?. In Infectious Disease Modelling Research Progress, eds. J.M. Tchuenche and C. Chiyaka, Nova Science Publishers, Inc. pp. 133-150, 2009.
Rowan G. Tepper is Adjunct Lecturer in the Department of Comparative Literature at Binghamton University. He is the author of the essay “After God: The Revolutionary Absolute,” in The Immanence of Myth, and previously of Michel Foucault: Toward a Philosophy and Politics of the Event (2010). Somehow they let this loon teach. He considers it his job to corrupt the youth of various parts of New York State.
Chapter 4
Modernism to Postmodernism to
Postmortemism
P. Emerson Williams
“Lady Gaga killed sex,” says the once much-discussed Camille Paglia. She quotes her subject who declaims “Music is a lie,” “Art is a lie,” “Gaga is a lie.” The death of the novel is an idea so oft repeated that one can envision members of the literary establishment daring each other to intone the phrase three times in front of a mirror in expectation of the Candyman to appear. We cultural types do love to declare death wherever we cast our jaded, blood-shot eyes. When our imaginations are exhausted, hard-ons for the latest arising require new extremes of fetishism.
And closer to home for us, the right honourable psychonaut James L. Kent says “we've come to rest after years of the deceler8ing [sic] of music as a living mode of expression.” [1] Nice opening shot.
Every style of traditional, ethnic, and world music has been incorporated into the modern pop uber-genre, a black hole from which little seems to escape. There are no more Afro beats, throat singers, Middle Eastern microtonal scales, Buddhist Ohms, Irish sea shanties, American folk songs, or Navajo ancestral chants that haven’t already been chewed up, digested, and shat out by modern pop composers.
Forcing sound snippets into a twelve-tone, four on the floor format is for sure a denigration of these traditions, but it's a very colonial Western POV that would consider that this raiding of sampled sounds a canceling out of entire traditions of music and culture.
I recall a thread in an occult social site that began from a post that stated that Eastern philosophies were being killed by Western adoption through Western seekers not understanding the finer points or getting entire belief systems wrong. Well, I have news—taking a photo of a person does not trap their soul in the camera and Americans weaving Tibetan Buddhism into candy-coated self-help material doesn't make all the monks in exile disappear from the Universe.
Maybe he's right. Perhaps the hum that is plaguing many towns across the globe with no detectable source is just the musicological equivalent of the smell of dead plague victims piling up.
Arthur Krystal is a voice in the “Death of the Novel” chorus for some time. In an interview in Harper's magazine he expands his theme:
Leaving film aside, since it’s a relatively recent art, the arts as we know them have run their course. You can argue this until your face is blue, but it won’t change the historical fact. Time and technology wait for no artist, and unfortunately history has seen fit to alter our sense of time by the invention of new technologies.
Philip Roth has devoted his life to creating novels, but he’s pessimistic about their future.
“The book can’t compete with the screen,” Roth tells Tina Brown in this video, and even the Kindle won’t change that.
“It couldn’t compete beginning with the movie screen,” Roth says. “It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen.”
Krystal does admit that this could be in part a personal issue, though. In what appears on the surface to be the similar line of argument, Nick Currie wrote in his blog a few years back that the realm of popular music is an endless exercise in what he termed retro-necro. All a re-hash of old ideas, established forms entirely lacking in innovation.
Said Mr. Momus:
There's a very simple, very big problem for today's pop musician: if you fail to attack the father and rip up his rules, the father will always beat you. He will beat you because he did what you're doing first, with more spontaneity and passion, and with less reverence. If you fail to rip up the rules of your father's pop music and start again, you will see pop music becoming what classical and to some extent jazz have become: interpretive art-forms dominated by performers who simply run through a canon of set masterpieces.
The retro-necro argument is very different, though. While claiming development and innovation has not been occurring within popular music, he is writing from a point of view that this is not only needed, but also very much possible. Altermodern means Western art will be rescued by assimilating the work of artists outside the Western canon. As if Cubists and earlier movements were not doing this generations ago. The answer to retro-necro is to throw out that canon entirely. Forget the necrophilic worship of mouldering rock stars and discard arts previous incarnations.
Postmodernism's endless production of hybrid beasts was an admission of defeat in the face of not knowing where to explore next. So, are we post-cultural, post-production, post-industrial, post-historic, post-consumer, post-toasties...? The feuilleton age has come to a conclusion and music is verily the final cultural corpse to be assimilated by the Glass Bead Game.
Looking at who is digging into this scorched ground, it seems that what we have here is 40 to 60 somethings telling the kids that they can go home because we did it already. We're tired and the most compelling myth to the most intellectually exhausted among us is that we built it, we trashed it and the rubble is not worth bothering with.
It occurred to me when soldiers and tanks were sent into Tiannanmen Square that this was done partly because the old men in charge didn't want what they had given their lives to to disappear with their last breaths. It may be natural to want one's age to be the concluding chapter and the rest of time to be the happily ever after. If it is true that the first generation to never die is in the wings, as has been said, these immortals could turn out to be the biggest pains in the ass for those joining them later. Just as the rich want to keep it all. That's why they bought our governments, after all. Have we reached our full capacity for creation and development? Is there nothing ahead but technocracy and narrower permutations of master-slave relationships until the final death-rattle?
We're stuck in a loop of end-time pornography and can't see beyond it, but anything not only can happen, but it must happen. This static death-march can only come to a conclusion and what's on the other end of it are events that can only arise there. Survivors will do things that were never done before. If humans are not around for much longer, we can be sure the last moments of the last human will be experienced with a head full of brand new stories.
[1] Writing for Acceler8or, the new transhumanist vehicle established by R. U. Sirius.
P. Emerson Williams is a writer for Dominion magazine, the host of the Necrofuturist Transmission on Nightbreed Radio, editor and producer for Music Tuesdays on Alterati.com, core member, sound design, actor, artist and composer with FoolishPeople and is currently working with FoolishPeople on the feature film Strange Factories. Williams is product development manager and art director for Weaponized , the publishing imprint of FoolishPeople. He is also a visual artist whose work has graced book covers for Original Falcon, Weaponized and Westgate Press, the pages of magazines including Culture Asylum, Isten 'zine, Ghastly, Esoterra and too many more to list, album and CD covers for Rat King, a Primordial/Katatonia split 10" EP on Misanthropy Records, SLEEPCHAMBER and his own bands Veil of Thorns, Choronzon and kkoagulaa. He has worked with Manes and John Zewizz and is currently recording two albums with SLEEPCHAMBER.
Chapter 5
Red Riding Hood
Neurology, Narrative & Storytelling
Mr. VI
Once upon a time, half-way back and a little off to one side; this is where the stories live. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin:
Stories are a form of communication, and they open doors. Doors to understandings and concepts that are unbound in time—their relevancy shifts according to circumstances, environment and culture.
To understand and remember stories, readers integrate their knowledge of the world with information in the text. Here we present functional neuroimaging evidence that neural systems track changes in the situation described by a story. Different brain regions track different aspects of a story, such as a character's physical location or current goals. Some of these regions mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities. These results support the view that readers understand a story by simulating the events in the story world and updating their simulation when features of that world change. Psychological Science August 1, 2009 vol. 20 no. 8 989-999
Read that again:
Some of these regions mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.
Certain parts of your brain do not discern between “reality” and “fiction.” They simply create and act. Further:
Verbal communication is a joint activity; however, speech production and comprehension have primarily been analyzed as independent processes within the boundaries of individual brains. Here, we applied FMRI to record brain activity from both speakers and listeners during natural verbal communication. We used the speaker's spatiotemporal brain activity to model listeners’ brain activity and found that the speaker's activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener's activity. This coupling vanishes when participants fail to communicate. Moreover, though on average the listener's brain activity mirrors the speaker's activity with a delay, we also find areas that exhibit predictive anticipatory responses. We connected the extent of neural coupling to a quantitative measure of story comprehension and find that the greater the anticipatory speaker–listener coupling, the greater the understanding. We argue that the observed alignment of production- and comprehension-based processes serves as a mechanism by which brains convey information. PNAS August 10, 2010 vol. 107 no. 32 14425-14430
Before there was written text or visual media such as film, stories were the primary method of cultural transmission:
“The speaker's activity is spatially and temporally coupled with the listener's activity.”
Let these two statements combine in your head for a moment; see what they point to—scientific speculation that a story can draw you in, change your perception and have an effect on you.
Suddenly the idea of the magic word doesn't seem too far fetched, does it? Immerse your listeners in a narrative and it becomes their reality. Expose them to it every day to reinforce it—this is the province of politicians and news anchors the world over.
If you go deep enough, the statement “it's not real” loses potency. Of course it does, because your brain is modeling it “as if”, and some stories are extraordinarily old.
From a 2009 article in Britain's Daily Telegraph:
A study by anthropologists has explored the origins of folk tales and traced the relationship between variants of the stories recounted by cultures around the world.
The researchers adopted techniques used by biologists to create the taxonomic tree of life, which shows how every species comes from a common ancestor.
Dr Jamie Tehrani, a cultural anthropologist at Durham University, studied 35 versions of Little Red Riding Hood from around the world.
Whilst the European version tells the story of a little girl who is tricked by a wolf masquerading as her grandmother, in the Chinese version a tiger replaces the wolf.
[…]
Contrary to the view that the tale originated in France shortly before Charles Perrault produced the first written version in the 17th century, Dr Tehrani found that the variants shared a common ancestor dating back more than 2,600 years.
[...]
The original ancestor is thought to be similar to another tale, The Wolf and the Kids, in which a wolf pretends to be a nanny goat to gain entry to a house full of young goats.
Let's think about that:
Red Riding Hood is a modern iteration of a story that's older than the Christian religion. Its themes and characters have inhabited the human consciousness for longer than the dominant religious narrative on this planet of approximately 7.2 billion human beings.
Here at Modern Mythology, we've talked much about werewolves, witches, zombie apocalypses and vampires lately. We've given nods to Twilight, to Buffy:The Vampire Slayer, True Blood and more; pop-culture narratives, flirtations with the shadowy Other—these are wildly successful in capturing money and attention.
Millions of people the world over have synchronized their brains in similar ways as they've been drawn into the narratives, and so I find myself wondering—is this actually modern at all? If our brains become spatially and temporally coupled with the tales, are we in fact moving in myth-time, sacred kairotic time?
If stories can be modeled on taxonomic lines, then familial structures apply—then each generation partakes of some of the others.
This year, we see a new iteration of Red Riding Hood—a film released in March, directed by Catherine Hardwicke, of Twilight movie fame no less. As the second trailer for the new Red Riding Hood film states in blood red letters: HOW CAN YOU KEEP OUT WHAT IS ALREADY IN?
Gary Oldman's werewolf hunter Father Solomon makes much of what we've discussed about the terror of the monster explicit in the trailer:
“The real killer lives here, in this village—it could be your neighbor.”
And even this current version owes much to an earlier predecessor—its structure and plot appears to be strongly influenced by the 1984 film The Company of Wolves.
“The worst kind of wolves are hairy on the inside and when they bite you, they drag you with them to hell.”
Contagion and the Outsider on the Inside—the deepest fear of any community. Is it any wonder that deception is often classed as morally reprehensible? Consider then what seemingly innocuous actions might somehow become imbued with a sense of the sinister if a strange affect occurs.
Imagine what would happen if that which forms groups—the act of communication, of coming together at a fundamental, even neural level—can be used to alter and manipulate individuals and the group itself?
Might this skill be viewed with suspicion—the very act of alternative narrative-construction becoming potentially morally dubious, and even synonymous with evil and falsehood? Even the notion of “a fabrication” seems to imply something less than righteous; an ersatz version of events which gives the concept of myth its general pejorative sense, doesn't it?
And thus myth and myth-makers are at worst reviled as liars, frauds and mountebanks, and at best regarded as irrelevant and perhaps semi-entertaining because of their ability to make people feel emotion. Even spin-doctors and political speech-writers are somewhat scorned by the general populace, and they and their siblings in the advertising industry are either ignored or derided as manipulative individuals whose sole goal is money—something which alienates them from the general populace.
Which means, as aliens, they often are perceived as faintly sinister—they operate in the murkier realms of the human psyche, away from the clear and rational. In a sense they are lunar and mercurial—both in the planetary correspondence sense, and the adjectival. They take the enlightened solar construction of language, born of the neo-cortex, and use it to produce movements in the deep emotive dark of the reptile brain.
What's more, they do this in such a way as to hijack the investment in the rational, non-mythic narratives—the same machinery that models “reality” can be used to create and work with the mythic precisely because, as already noted, parts of the brain cannot tell the difference!
Due to this this investment in the rational narrative, so-called irrational or mythic narratives must be treated as second-class in modern society, because to do otherwise is to suggest that the dominant narrative may also be a made thing—a fabrication in the truest sense of the word.
This would, apparently, undermine an awful lot of important things.
Imagine, if only for a moment, what would happen if all narratives were created equal. Imagine if Merlin stood shoulder to shoulder with Einstein, or Zeus went for a stroll with Michael Faraday and they met Thor and Benjamin Franklin chatting about super-heated plasma?
Those who prefer a singular narrative might say that such a moment would be a retrograde step, a movement back to the dark ages of superstition. Yet that moment exists every time we spin a tale and immerse ourselves within it—the data seems to confirm what we already know!
We speak spells, we weave worlds from songs and stories. If it's any kind of movement, it's not merely retrograde because it goes so far back as to be beyond any world we can conceive. It's so far back it's looped around and met the deep future, and the only way we can get to that space is to perform an act of willful imagination.
Beyond superstition lies hyperstition; fictions that make themselves real in the place where the eldest ancestor meets the last child of mankind. Both are creatures so far beyond us that they are literally dreams, which means that every time you step into that dream-time, you are with them as part of a community which is hard-wired into the very heart of our brains. (So to speak.)