Myth and meaning

Cyclopean Vision vs Poly-sensual Engagement (Part #4)

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Spectacles may therefore be understood as offering access to larger meanings -- or crafted substitutes for them. The "script writers" of spectacles are offered unique media frameworks into which cultural allusions of every kind may be interwoven. These offer attractive resonances to the high values of a culture -- heroism, poignancy, devotion -- whether through blockbuster movies or "Shock and Awe" military campaigns. They effectively appropriate as instant myth-making that which is otherwise articulated as the myth of cultural traditions. As noted by Karen Armstrong (A Short History of Myth, 2005), who addresses the curious status of myth in industrialized societies, despite its long-demonstrated function:

Another peculiar characteristic of the human mind is its ability to have ideas and experiences that we cannot explain rationally.... imagination is the faculty that produces religion and mythology. Today mythical thinking has fallen into disrepute; we often dismiss it as irrational and self-indulgent. But the imagination is also the faculty that has enabled scientists to bring new knowledge to light and to invent technology that has made us immeasurably more effective.... Mythology and science both extend the scope of human beings. Like science and technology, mythology...is not about opting out of this world, but about enabling us to live more intensely within it..

Spectacles thus offer a sense of the sweep of history -- a sense of macro-history (cf Engaging Macrohistory through the Present Moment, 2004). Spectacles effectively assume mythical proportions and take on mythical functions.

The role of the spectacle may in this sense be related to that of the epic as explored in relation to the novel by Mikhail Bakhtin (Epic and Novel In: The Dialogic Imagination, 1981). He shows that the novel is well suited to the post-industrial civilization because it flourishes on the diversity that the epic attempts to eliminate from the world -- through its totalizing function.

As but one of the challenges to which society is called upon to respond, "peak oil" points to the complex implications for the governance of oil-dependent economies. The potential for collapse of those economies may however be associated with another form of collapse to which spectacles effectively provide a response, namely the "collapse of meaning". Such a collapse -- following the "peak meaning" of globalization -- would be associated with a radical loss of confidence in the institutionalized articulations "oiled" by global meaning. The difficulty in recognizing the potential for such collapse may be intimately related to the difficulty in acknowledging the possibility of the collapse of the monetary system that is so emblematic of one form of confidence on which society is dependent. And yet many national governments have gone bankrupt in the past, and many specialists have highlighted warning indications that the global financial system could collapse..

In relation to the the range of spectacles noted by Kellner, it is readily forgotten that faith-based "myths" are major current influences on American foreign policy, on the Christian leadership of key members of the Coalition of the Willing in its response to Islamic terrorism, and as an inspiration for that terrorism. The theological underpinnings of Israeli policy may also be defined in such terms. Interwoven in their various understandings is a variously shared belief in the myth of Armageddon (cf Spontaneous Initiation of Armageddon -- a heartfelt response to systemic negligence, 2004). This might well be considered to be the ultimate spectacle into which the world is now being effectively driven by faith-based governance.

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