Knowing Myth, knowing History

Knowing Myth, knowing History, Fellini's Roma, and versions of Enlightenment

How do we know history? How do we know myth? Are there right and wrong ways of dealing with these forms of ‘otherness’?  History is what really happened; it is prima facie closer to us, in the same world as us. We are in history, we are not in myth.  Myth is what has never happened in this world; what we know from myth is not of the same order as what we know from history.

The demands we make on history can therefore be the demands made by archaeologists and historians.  Knowledge will be inductive or deductive but at any rate it will be empirical. What we want is facts; evidence for what really happened.

How can myth be known? The ways into, through, and, out of myth are metaphor, allegory, allusion, silence. Myth is where the gods and humans breathe the same air and live under the same sky.

I was deliberately naïve in how I outlined the ways of knowing history and myth. History is infinitely complex and increasingly distant. Evidence gathering is an indispensable, though, paradoxically doomed exercise. This is not just because of the depth and breadth of relevant and irrelevant knowledge. More importantly, if we are trying to know about human beings then we are up against the inscrutable.

Consider the difficulty any one of us has in getting even an inkling of what’s going on inside the heads of our nearest and dearest. Consider now, that irreducibility of human beings separated from us by ever vaster stretches of time. I am describing the enormity of the challenge of knowing history and historical actors (i.e. people) not to advance some brand of scepticism; but rather to reaffirm the necessity  of empirical knowledge and  also to underline its insufficiency. 

Knowing history - knowing histories far removed from and profoundly alien to our own -  demands a far wider range of ways of knowing than just evidence gathering.

History therefore appears inscrutable in a way that myth initially did.

Adorno and Horkheimer saw that enlightenment had been reduced to quantity – the totalitarian reduction of everything and everyone to number. Knowing history as number, purely as number is just such a form of dangerous stupidity.

“mathematical formalism, …. whose medium is number, the most abstract form of the immediate…holds thinking to mere immediacy. Factuality wins the day; cognition is restricted to repetition; and thought becomes mere tautology. The more the machinery of thought subjects existence to itself, the more blind its resignation in reproducing existence. Hence enlightenment returns to mythology, which it never really knew how to elude.”

(Dialectic of Enlightenment)

Hegel, too, detected this very mytho-logic of mathematical thinking in his Phenomenology:

“The principle of magnitude, of difference not determined by the Notion, and the principle of Equality, of abstract lifeless unity, cannot cope with the sheer unrest of life and its absolute distinction .It is therefore only in a paralysed form, viz. as the numerical unit, that this negativity becomes the second material of mathematical cognition ,which as an external activity, reduces what is self-moving to mere material, so as to possess in it an indifferent ,external lifeless content  (27)”

So, enlightenment as “the disenchantment of the world” and “wholesale deception of the masses” as Adorno and Horkheimer describe its degenerate form as an instrumental, quantifying reduction in the place of fuller knowing is not enlightenment at all, but a kind of benighting fog.  

But the latter effect of this corruption of enlightenment – “the wholesale deception of the masses” – is to hide its inadequacy as a common sense that enslaves the commonsensical to a new myth of scientific inevitability. There are so many pressures to remain ignorant, to absolve oneself of the Kantian imperative to “Have courage to use your own  understanding” that, in the end most human beings just give up, humiliated and prostrate before this new myth of the bounded universe mapped out by the scientific/instrumental monster that kills, categorises, organises, quantifies.

The famous tunnelling/ruined frescoes scene from the film, Roma, by Fellini is a memorable exposition of the devastating effects of knowing history only though using empirical knowing. 

Everything is devoured by the monstrous tunnelling machine as it drives through the earth to expose what had been hidden for 2,000 years – a Patrician domus decorated by beautiful frescoes. The air of the Twentieth Century enters the domus and destroys the frescoes. Fellini criticises not the brutality and carelessness of the tunnel work and machines, but rather the way of knowing the past that only looks for individual, quantifiable facts.

A dialectical engagement with the past is needed; one that, for instance is sensitive to the contamination of the past by the present  - the frescoes themselves are paintings of actors and staff who’d been working on the film itself!

Fellini’s film therefore resists the role assigned to films generally speaking – to promulgate myths of conformity to the conventions of life in capitalist societies where everything is knowable within a closing horizon of quantity – and where that knowing is not the business of the common people who are force fed the lies of romantic love, consumerism and the common sense that is antithetical to curiosity.

How do we read history? A preliminary answer to this question is we read it as myth. This means that we read it in a demythological way. 

Again, Roma. This film is a repudiation of what Slavoj Zizkek calls the “Family Myth of Ideology” – the way in which, time and again, mainstream Hollywood film work to reinforce conformity to the prevailing myth of the 'normal' family unit. This is how most people most of the time are taught not to think, not to question, not to step off the overcrowded train that runs down the line to the inevitable destinations of marriage, reproduction, low expectations, debilitating addictions and above all, historical stupidity.  

An early scene (on the Autostrada, leading into Rome) is a memorable antidote to the standard shapes of conventional human behaviour and thinking that are churned out in popular cinema.

The utter chaos of the traffic ends in total gridlock at the colosseum.  All roads lead to Rome but Rome’s ancient past – to deploy Hegel in service of my argument - “cannot cope with the sheer unrest of life and its absolute distinction”. The reduction of the history of Rome as ‘heritage’ in the present in one such act of knowing that obliterates history. Fellini’s film literally screams into the faces of its audience: History – living history, the irretrievable past and the scarcely less familiar present - is a total and utter riot. 

There is no nostalgia, there is no progress, there is no easy knowing on the motorway in Roma. Dead cattle, football fans, political protest, a horse and a man running along with traffic pushing a wheelbarrow, whores, floodwater, mud and torrential rain.

Significantly, Fellini’s film crew are in the midst of this cacophony. There is no 'outside' perspective available - any such gesture is the dishonest pose of the detached observer of quantifiable data; such a sleight of hand (and eyes) would be characteristic of a bureaucrat or despot, but not of a demythologising film maker.

This scene celebrates the utter defiance of history; of people in history. It should be compulsory viewing for every bureaucrat who ever opened a spreadsheet in anger, or for that matter, for anyone who ever attempted to understand the past using only the tools of common sense or instrumental reason.  

Does Roma succeed in releasing history from under the boot of degenerate enlightenment? Well, it's just a movie, but I think it does all that a movie can do in reviving the optimism of enlightenment.

Adorno died 3 years before this film was made - I think he would have loved it. It might even have restored his faith in enlightenment. [It's nearly 2 am and I am feeling optimistic!] 

Roma certainly succeeds in rejecting the dispensation that cinema produce and reproduce myth.

In other words, it uses myth – allegory, metaphor, allusion, silence and so on – to expose its own workings.

It also, as I pointed out above, releases the cacophony of history that conventional – common-sense and instrumental – accounts of history try to suppress.

Roma allows myth to demythologise the cinema. It demands respect for historical difference. It provokes engagement with the relationship between the knower of history and the known and unknown of the past and present.

It teaches us how to know history and how to know myth.

A Short Essay on Feeding!

"If you don’t feed a dog it will die."

Feeding is, at first, the most intimate relationship that can possibly exist between two human beings:  feeding as pregnancy is a meeting of irreducible self-sacrifice and complete dependence.  The body that a mother and her child have in common is the necessity that marks any subsequent act of feeding with its trace of intimacy.

This body is also a reminder of the difference and ab-originality of such subsequent acts of feeding. 

Birth or termination severs the link between mother and child. 

From here on, all the rest is voluntary. This voluntarism - in combination with the trace of that primal mother/child intimacy -  means that the choices we make about who to feed and what to feed them, are choices that define - give meaning, purpose, limits and horizons to - who we are.

Those we feed are those who are closest to us. We feed those we love, we feed those parts of ourselves that we wish to see grow and develop. Feeding is what you give to the present so that it endures into the future. 

Feeding is what you give to the living.

So, feeding, in a social sense is ‘giving’. I think that human beings have a universal reverence for the act of feeding guests. This is not to say that in the kind of depersonalised, techno-social, contractual societies of the 'West' that most or even any feeding answers to this description. Of course not.

Feeding for many people, much of the time is a kind of alienated and alienating ‘McTransaction’ that has nothing to do with generosity, nothing to do with building social intimacy.

And yet I think the rule proves the exception. It is simply not conceivable that guests, even, not –so-special guests, would not be fed.  I don’t think there is any need to draw a Levi-Straussian distinction between the ‘raw’ and the ‘cooked’ (pun intended – sorry!) to accept that feeding guests is, if only at a formal level, a clear message that an intimate relationship is being nurtured.

Feeding is intimate because it is a reminder of the primordial interdependence of human beings. 

Feeding is intimate because it is a relationship, not only of giving and receiving of love, of belonging and of nurturing but also of potentially fatal vulnerability.

If you don’t feed a dog it will die.  You can replace the object of the verb in the conditional clause with anything you please and you’ll get the same axiom.  Stalin starved 7 million Ukrainians in the 1930s. More than a million people starved to death in this country 160 years ago. Famines will, depressingly, probably kill millions and millions more people in the future.

There are few more despicable, disgusting acts than wilfully actually starving other human beings to death. 

Metaphorically, of course,  we all do this all the time. Few of us (I hope) are Stalin but I think we’re all capable of murder.  More or less intentional killing by starvation happens every day. We don’t feed all of our relationships all of the time – we starve parts of ourselves that for one reason or another we no longer want.

If starving can kill, so too, can feeding. Over the last few weeks I have been thinking about a memory from my childhood. I was five years old. I found a sparrow with a broken wing in my grandmother’s yard. I took it inside and tried to nurture it back to health. I distinctly remember stuffing food into its beak and watching it die.  Maybe I wasn’t solely responsible for its death but I don’t think I was ever in line for the Nobel Prize in Avian Medicine for 1977.

Hopefully I have learned a lot since then. I am not so sure.  When all is said and done do I need to look any further than a 5 year old boy force feeding a wild animal to death with his ignorance?

Now, I occasionally water plants – I think I am on safe grounds there but woe betides the geranium that develops some kind of leaf disease. I am not so sure that I could feed it the right stuff if it needed it.

I also feed my dog and my cat.  Even with them it’s not so simple but I think that’s entirely my own doing; anthropomorphism has spoilt my pets.  

If I had children I guess I could manage not to give them beer and hamburgers but who knows? 

Everyone is a perfect parent in theory.

Right now I think a lot about that bird. I don’t want to force feed the people I love because force feeding kills. I was also very recently reminded that, unlike my siblings, I was a very fussy eater as a child. Maybe I have always had a difficult relationship with eating, with being fed, with feeding. 

When I think about it I remember being forced to eat some disgusting potatoes as - and this I am sure is a false memory - the ice cream van jingle came floating tormentingly in from the street.  So the story goes for me, anyway, and if I am in the mood I make some statement about my choosiness as a survival response to the historical shadow of potato blight, potato dependence and famine. So, on this ‘logic’ it makes perfect sense to be a choosy eater.

Whatever about my imagined relationship with potatoes and the famine there is something in this equation of force feeding and unwanted, unneeded, and lethal gifts.

If you don’t feed a dog it will die. But if you give a bird the wrong food it will die too. In the end no amount of feeding will save us from Mercutio’s pun that we ourselves become “worms’ meat”.

Some feeding will speed us towards the inevitable day when we're the ones on the menu. Some feeding will make the journey worth taking.

My sole ambition is to be the tastiest dish on the menu in the Nitrogen Cycle Cafe!

Since the unitary state of pregnancy/foetal dependence has been replaced by words and the uncertainty that goes with them it's hard to know in advance, and even afterwards what's too hot, too cold or just right.

There is always risk. Fairy tales, myth and religion abound with stories about the dangers of accepting food.

Hansel and Gretel's vulnerability was their hunger - a child has to eat - and it was also, the hunger of the animals who ate their trail of breadcrumbs.

Feeding, perhaps because it is so intimate, so human and therefore, so ungodly, was looked upon with suspicion by Christianity and Judaism. Gluttony is  one of the 'deadly sins' elaborated in  Early Christianity and the middle ages. It is mentioned earlier in the Bible, too: "Hast thou found honey? eat so much as is sufficient for thee, lest thou be filled therewith, and vomit it" (Proverbs)

It doesn't take much to transgress, though: Persephone ate only 7 pomegranate seeds and this sealed her fate.

I don't know about you but I'm starving.

Illusions

Goodbye Lenin (2003)

Goodbye Lenin is a film about the paradox of illusions. Illusions have both anaesthetic and aesthetic effects. They hide and insulate at the same time as they guide and inspire.  They are the stock in trade of pushers, bureaucrats, artists and messiahs.

Most of the time most people live with one eye propped open and another firmly shut.  Which eye sees better? Letting the light in, knowing and seeing clearly, not ‘in a glass darkly’ but ‘face to face’ is one half of the challenge and the burden of living; the other half is wilful blindness, the practice of anaesthesia, the assumption of ignorance, wilfully forgetting until forgetting is no longer willed.

When should we open our eyes? When is it better to go back to bed and pull the blankets over our heads?

In either case can we dispense with illusions? I don’t think so. Don’t get me wrong, there are ways of seeing and knowing that obviously access the objective truth of things. I’m speaking really about stuff like tautology, mathematics, instrumental reason. Good useful stuff.

When it comes to human beings things are different. People are not knowable as x is x, as sum totals, as the objects of manipulation. Or rather, precisely because this kind of stupidity and evil happens all the time, what I mean is that human beings should not be knowable in these ways. That doesn’t stop people trying to find out.

What happens here is the return of fantasy, the endurance of mystery, the revival of faith and love. In other words people are not knowable without the mediation, or that should really be the substance, of illusion.

Once you allow the variables of illusion to disrupt expectations and truth concerning human beings things can get messy. Because if anything goes then who’s to say I’m wrong if in my fantasies about other people they frequently end up dead, abused or enslaved? What’s to stop me from putting these fantasies into practice?

The film Goodbye Lenin is set in a political system where choice was routinely taken out of the hands of its citizens. This did not mean that illusions were discarded. As in any political system the official illusions, the dominant narratives had heavy doses of illusion. I am tempted to say that the elite in East German/Soviet society were, comparatively more paranoid and less trustful of their own people than was the case in the contemporaneous west. I am tempted to think that the illusions that were current at that time and in that place – as opposed to those circulating in the west then  -  were primarily of the anaesthetic variety. I think that would be utterly naïve. What political system will encourage the dissemination of illusions that seek to guide its citizens to undermine, to destroy its own foundations? Or, if the answer to this question is: “Well, precisely those western societies that encouraged freedom of speech and of thought” you need look no further than Immanuel Kant’s essay “What is Enlightenment” where he lauds the model of governance of  Frederick the Great, summed up as “Argue as much as you want and about what you want, but obey!” to see that there are real limits to what can be done in ‘enlightened’ western democracies.

Say what you want, criticise what you want: no alarms go off as you cross the line from debate to incitement but it’s only a matter of time before you come up against the violence that protects the social order.

Or, even more pessimistically, what if even the most rigorous criticism of the dispensed illusions of any given social order is permitted precisely because it serves to reinforce that social order?  If the end of dissent is nothing more than the strengthening of the object of that dissent does it make a difference if dissent is forbidden?  Because, when all is said (not done) sticks and stones break your bones while names won't put anyone in the hospital.

What is worse – an illusion that seeks only to protect or an illusion that seeks to deceive, that masquerades as criticism but is really nothing more than elite-sanctioned catharsis for the proles?  I suppose, when all is said; the latter.  You can always change state-sanctioned catharsis into something else – illusions are not fixed as either anaesthetic or aesthetic!

Illusions - even, or really, especially, the total lies spouted by the most oppressive regimes - can be extremely powerful incubators of real change. In even the most oppressive circumstances, in especially the most oppressive circumstances, illusion is absolutely crucial in order to defend people, to defend privacy, in order to defend other illusions.

What better way to hide than to hide in plain sight?

A digression: Perhaps, this is why a film like The Interview (2014)  is unlikely to succeed in the way that its makers want it to: to give a voice to the oppressed in North Korea. This film is too obviously a piece of Hollywood trash to hide as anything other than itself. But then again...

But I digress...

Goodbye Lenin is a film about a woman's movement from and through disillusionment to terror, followed by an almost complete loss of everything - husband, self-respect -  and a long, determined struggle to rebuild her life using the very tools of her own oppression.

The film begins with a recognition of the oppressiveness of life in the GDR. The Stasi arrive to the family home to interrogate the mother about her husband’s trips to the west. However, the rest of the film leaves the question of the relative merits of life under either system open.  Indeed a credible premise of the film is that the capitalist system that replaced the GDR was just as oppressive in its own way.

This film is set in the year before and after the fall of the Berlin wall from 1989-90. Alex tries to protect his mother, Christiane, from the possibly lethal stress of discovering that her beloved German Democratic Republic had failed by inventing a ‘virtual’ East Germany replete with fake food, newspapers and news reports. As he struggles to maintain this illusion the lie takes on a life of its own.

On one occasion his mother wanders out of their apartment into the street and sees billboards, a second hand car dealership and a statue of Lenin being winched away ignominiously by a helicopter. They get her back to bed, invent a fantasy news story with their film editing equipment about tens of thousands of West German refugees coming to East Germany to escape the failing capitalist system and so the lie goes on.

Slavoj Žižek criticises this movie because of how it uses the Mother’s weak heart as the threat that means the illusion has to be sustained; it is, he argues “the means to blackmail us into accepting the need to protect one’s fantasy as the highest ethical duty” (In Defence of Lost Causes p65).

I think he misses the point here; rather he misses two points. The first, weaker objection to this ‘blackmail’ argument is that the son’s highest ethical duty is to protect his mother; not the illusion.

Secondly, and more importantly, there is another, antecedent illusion at play in the film that points to the high cost of illusions. Late in the movie, the mother, perhaps realising that her days are numbered, reveals to her children an even bigger lie; a foundational myth for her family that has, over decades, maintained the integrity their unit after their father ‘abandoned’ them. It turns out that the children’s father had not, as the story had gone, defected to West Germany with another woman. The truth is he’d planned to defect with his wife and children but the plan never worked out because, she, fearing that her children might end up taken away for her by the authorities for attempting to leave the GDR never went and joined her husband.

When it came down to acting in defiance of the state in order to have a new life with her husband overseas, the private narrative of a husband and wife’s imagined defection to the west  was not powerful enough to enable them to escape the gravitational pull of the GDR’s  distinctly non-illusory narrative of absolute power over its citizens.

The knowledge that the state could, if it so wished, take everything from her – her children, her freedom, her life – is very real to the mother. There is no doubt. There is no illusion here.

How powerful was her love for her husband?  She tells her children it “was the biggest mistake of my life. I know that now…my dear Robert, I’ve thought of you so often…What I would give to see you one more time”.

She deeply loved her husband and yet she was terrified into rejecting him.  Žižek’s criticism that the protection of the mother’s illusion is the highest ethical value misses this point. The mother, following the loss of her husband, indeed, of the loss of her own self, becomes a model citizen of the GDR, actively engaging in a semi-official capacity in the social and political life of the state.

Yet, she has seen the truth. She has seen behind the mask to the brutality of the state apparatus that can do anything it wants to; to anyone it wants to. Her enthusiastic commitment to the official illusions of the state therefore appear in two modes: on the one had she is using these illusions to protect what remains of her family. She is also using them to enclose her private self, the self that had been terrified into submission, to hibernate until conditions allow her to reappear. She takes these illusions and uses them until they change and they change her.

So, in addition to protecting her children and preserving herself she has, by means of working to propagate the official state illusions of the GDR managed to undermine the very structure that had forced her to carry out the annihilation of her own and her husband’s story. She has internalised the anaesthetic illusions of the GDR’s ruling ideology to the point where she has released their latent emancipatory content – she rediscovers the potential of communism that was distorted and abused by the state that took its name in vain.

This rebirth of the mother at the vanguard of history is neatly symbolised in that bizarre sequence where she gets out of bed for the first time and walks the streets amazed by the changes that have taken place. She is ‘selected’ by Lenin when his statue, as it is being craned away on a helicopter, hovers past her, its hand outstretched, beseeching/inviting at her.

She has beaten the GDR by re-membering its official ideology. The criticism is sharpened by the fact that this moment is way past the point in history where the GDR had just been dis-membered.

The moment when she is reunited with her husband does not take place on screen; they’re given their due moment in privacy – the very privacy that had been taken from them – she has therefore succeeded in preserving herself through a courageous and sustained struggle through impossible choices and complicity in the system that had initially enslaved and terrified her.

Another digression, this time, one that makes me wonder why Slavoj Žižek 'half' read this film:

 The resonances with Hegel’s dialectic of the master and slave from the Phenomenology of Spirit are very clear. The mother has, like the slave, been enslaved by her capitulation in a ‘struggle to the death’ where she preserves her commitment to her life, her children. Later, it is through terror – where she undergoes the loss of her previous self – as Hegel puts it she “has trembled in every fibre in [her] being, and everything solid and stable has been shaken to its foundations”. The work she undertakes is, as is the case for Hegel’s ‘bondsman’, in combination with the absolute fear she has undergone to abandon her husband, the thing that eventually sets her free. Through her work she has preserved herself and her children, surviving to be reunified with her husband at the end.

Finally, as I mentioned above, there is an added dimension in Goodbye Lenin of criticism, not only of the Communist regime, but also of the new order that replaces it. In the first place, the illusion of a ‘better life in the west’ is, at the moment she is terrified into rejecting her husband and spinning a defamatory lie about him to his children, of no bloody use at all.

It is as if she knew, even then, before she had ‘converted’ herself into an ideologue of the Communist system, that these illusions were seriously questionable.

Capitalism is just not a credible alternative to communism; its illusions are, if anything even more offensive than those of the GDR. Capitalism promises everything and delivers nothing.

The communism of the GDR promised very little – did it deliver much less than capitalism?