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.