The setting for my essay is the digital era starting in the second half of the 20th century, when the industrial–organic society transfers into the information/cultural system as an effect of the emergence of new science and technology as well as inherent shifts in what cognitive and social relations are concerned. The aesthetic and philosophical reaction is one where perception becomes complexly mediated (and re-mediated), while the systems of knowledge and the notion of reality are relocated into the matrix of virtuality or its discursive match, hyperreality. My paper will try to discuss how reality actuates within the informational era, what its means and message might consist in and how digitization restructures the artistic poesis.
Do excuse my pathetism, but so was the switch from mechanic phone dialling to digital phone-dialling. a switch of media and of biometics which makes all the difference both in (tele)communications and perception.
Virtual Theatre will try to recreate the images that have either been impossible to render by material, non-numerical media, or those which, paradoxically, have never existed.
Imagine the artificial environment like a virtual studio, a hollodeck (for those nice fans of Star Treck where we get holograms and) in which we re-learn to place ourselves, feel, develop locomotion, and re-learn all perceptions, all over again. Virtual theatre is the next stage of evolution.
One example of enhanced sensorial exparience could be the virtual scene of
"The Multisensory Art Gallery which offers patrons the opportunity to process an art gallery experience through multiple senses, and provides inclusive learning opportunities for persons of all ages, with or without disabilities. Gallery goers encounter works of art adapted as 3-D tactiles or as 'living portraits', the latter using costumed actors posed within human-scale frames surrounding replicated scenic backgrounds. Actors may interact with viewers, expressing the kinetic energy and inner dynamism of these art works. Music, sound, scent and taste sensations may be integrated into the renderings. The gallery visit is audio described.
The Multisensory Art Gallery was inaugurated in State College, Pennsylvania, by Penn State University's Arts and Health Outreach Initiative (AHOI) in collaboration with the Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts, the SightLoss Support Group of Central Pennsylvania and 'Feel the Art' project tactiles created by Miami-Dade County Public School students."
It is one stage of the Virtual Theatre re-treatment of reality and I salute it.
The danger and likelihood of its becoming “real”:
As Slavoj Zizek observes, comparing audio-visual (to enjoy) to immersive (to be):
In the case of interpassivity, I am passive through the other--that is, I accede to the other the passive aspect (of enjoying), while I can remain actively engaged (I can continue to work in the evening while the VCR passively enjoys for me...).... [T]he so-called threat of the new media lies in the fact that they deprive us of our passivity, of our authentic passive experience, and thus prepare us for... mindless frenetic activity". (Zizek, Slavoj. The Plague of Fantasies. London: Verso, 1997. pp 115, 122, original emphasis).
Shortly, Zizek presents an ominous outlook of a massive externalization of an already “formatted” subjectivity, a shift from an internally virtualized subjectivity to an externally virtualized one that is effectively deprived of self-hood or agency, being the mere host of the symbolic order. What do we lose then on the way? The subjectivity, maybe, if Zizek’s prediction is inescapable and true, that we can read virtual reality back onto our own social reality, and see that it, too, is a Symbolic Order that shares this same virtual logic, but a Symbolic Order whose virtuality has been heretofore forgotten. The same oblivion (concerning its fictional status) may affect the “meta-reality” of virtual era and then the spectacles will not be simulacrums anymore.
This may be the bliss and the curse of virtuality, and it has to be regarded lucidly: it is a measure of the maturity of human mind. Is it wise enough for its toys?
Thursday, October 25, 2007
“Ceci n’est pas une écriture…”
Motto - a hyperdialog:
“The word made flesh" (John 1:1-14)
<"It's very artistic," said the explorer evasively, "but I can't decipher it. > (Penal Colony, p. 7)
Kafka, In the Penal Collony
In the penal colony takes a simple but difficult story and creates an intricate system of interrelating at all levels. I chose to call these relationships dialogs, simply because they are both the ingenious bridges between different categories and the very vehicles by which an elegant net of fading echoes are channeled. These hyperdialogs mediate through the subject matter and the naratological form, characters - narrator - narratee, and of course, between structure and texture. They are, in short, the nervous system of the whole ontology that the text signifies; they never qualify this fiction capsule, but highlight its main or underground freeways. To employ a graphical tool, I would say that they reveal a descendant pattern of a spiral. Why descendant?
1.Miscellanios conversation about hybrids
Because, as I will try to demonstrate, this paradigm is by far neither simple, nor absurd. It undergoes a genuine “organic process” of gradual fledging, which naturally ends in its entropy. The denouement (be it readerly, allegorical or poetological) is a phenomenological extension of one and the same leitmotif: degradability and failure. But there is no track of any explicit pathos related by the author or narrator to this generalized passing away in different directions - and that’s the real beauty and atrocity of it: aesthetically speaking, we are in the very middle of the sublime, even if it intimately flirts with the grotesque of it. Because only neutral hermeneutical tools are given to us by the text, all judgments remain relative. The point of view has the possibility of being omniscient, but it lucidly chooses a heterodiegetic position, with very rare variations into using a reflector. But only for a little while. This fiction entity is insurmountable: the author doesn’t make the word into flesh, thus - we read conventions of ink and get cheated in our resurrection-addicted clichés, the prophecy turns out to be a black parody of “naïve” utopias, the machine is a dissolving demiurge, the officer dies unenlightened, the explorer never really explores… No one and nothing completes their dialectics; existentially speaking, all these nameless entities (qualified according to their function: explorer, officer, soldier, the condemned etc.) are denied transgression. Even the most extreme of actions remains futile. It feels dubious. Just like the guiding inner logic of this world is nothing but a funny auctorial sense of sarcasm…
To poorly exemplify this, I will prove how different dialogs fail to work, concluding that what Kafka (usually) depicted was the functions, sensations and memories (not feelings or thoughts) of a moribund hybrid. A hybrid world is that of the diegesis: the converging point of more incompatible energies. This is why not the climax of the story (that would be the First Commander’s era) is the most interesting, but its ending: an overall blockage of channels and eventually its succumbing.
In this sense, I could qualify this text both as a potentially open text, due to the liveliness of its circuits and the intermingling of such aberrant meetings, or a closed text (Umberto Eco), because it lucidly dismisses itself by self-consuming. An example for the first paradigm is that the explorer/reader manages to escape/surpass the plot/discourse. While, at the same time, according to the second paradigm, this is a charlatan escape because it’s a counterfeit entering. According to the same code of superficial and limited access, he/we had never been granted real presence into that world: were just pretexts for it to reveal its malignancy and accelerate its logical vanishing.
I’m more inclined to believe that this piece of literature is an eschatological text guided by a never-ending irony instead of a prophecy, a general apoplexy where no tomorrow lives. A bill of transience and extinction.
A little notification: I’m using the term “dialogue” not only in its meaning of exchanging opinions with somebody, but in its larger sense, that of an attempt to connect at an common level two frequencies. The latter requires a minimum of some reciprocal will to acknowledge the Other.
Not accidentally, Hegel’s complex dialectics of recognizing the Other through the Self meets here, in Kafka’s short story, its negative equivalent.
2. Dialogs of complaisance: blowing in the wind…
…however, they are the equivalent of the multiple strategies games. For example, inside the diegesis, they are useless. No bridge. But, metatextually, they are golden links thrown over the autarchy of various dimensions. They are the cognitive nuclei of what Barthes has called the cultural codes: “numerous codes of knowledge or wisdom to which the text continuously refers […]”1
The polite dialogs have something of masked retardation: "These uniforms are surely too heavy for the tropics," said the explorer, instead of inquiring about the machine, as the officer had expected. (p.1)”. Common sense - as I know it - would imply exactly the opposite: when confronted with a construction such as the machine, even at first sight, the explorer (!) should elaborate on something else than “the weather”: “The explorer had little taste for the machine and walked back and forth behind the condemned man with an almost visible lack of concern, while the officer saw to the final preparations” (p.1)
3. Dialog with the narratees: be they intradiegetic (explorer) or extradiegetic (implied reader)?
How much of that world is being shared with us? Is there a direct communicational pattern towards the narratee?
Not hazardously, the only times that the narrator resorts to a “personal narrative” and a reflector’s point of view is when he needs to highlight these discrepancies of cultural codes. But never gets deeper.
“The information about the judicial procedure had left him unsatisfied. All the same, he had to tell himself that this was, after all, a penal colony, that special regulations were required here, and that a military code had to be followed, even to extreme limits.” (p.5) The free indirect discourse limits itself to these patterns, and this restraint in sinking into some character’s thoughts proves that this is all to know, really.
While we get at least some insight to the explorer’s mind, the two other characters: the soldier and the condemned man remain absolutely obscure, we can only see-with perplexity-how they react. They appear as autistic entities. Between them and the explorer stands the officer about whose inner mechanisms only speculations are being made. The formula “as if he were…” constantly appears when referring to him. " the officer […] smiled at the explorer, as if he were still expecting a few more peculiar utterances from him.”(p.4)
Why? Because maybe, as he still shares some cultural codes with the explorer, like the language and some general representations, he’s still relatively comprehensible for the explorer.
After all, even the witches die when they’re forgotten, as they say, let alone this magic torture! To adapt Breton’s famous saying, in the Penal Colony we have the nonrandom meeting on a vivisection table between a dead god and an ink-jet printer.
The very manifest of paradoxically communicative art, or as Magritte would have said:
“Ceci n’est pas une écriture…”
References:
Barthes, Roland: S/Z. An essay. New York 1974.
Frow, John: “In the Penal Colony”. IHR (April 1999). (visited December 6, 2003)
Genette, Gerard: Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Ithaka, New York 1983.
Kafka, Franz: The Complete stories. Schocken Books, New York 1955. (foreword by John Updike)
“The word made flesh" (John 1:1-14)
<"It's very artistic," said the explorer evasively, "but I can't decipher it. > (Penal Colony, p. 7)
Kafka, In the Penal Collony
In the penal colony takes a simple but difficult story and creates an intricate system of interrelating at all levels. I chose to call these relationships dialogs, simply because they are both the ingenious bridges between different categories and the very vehicles by which an elegant net of fading echoes are channeled. These hyperdialogs mediate through the subject matter and the naratological form, characters - narrator - narratee, and of course, between structure and texture. They are, in short, the nervous system of the whole ontology that the text signifies; they never qualify this fiction capsule, but highlight its main or underground freeways. To employ a graphical tool, I would say that they reveal a descendant pattern of a spiral. Why descendant?
1.Miscellanios conversation about hybrids
Because, as I will try to demonstrate, this paradigm is by far neither simple, nor absurd. It undergoes a genuine “organic process” of gradual fledging, which naturally ends in its entropy. The denouement (be it readerly, allegorical or poetological) is a phenomenological extension of one and the same leitmotif: degradability and failure. But there is no track of any explicit pathos related by the author or narrator to this generalized passing away in different directions - and that’s the real beauty and atrocity of it: aesthetically speaking, we are in the very middle of the sublime, even if it intimately flirts with the grotesque of it. Because only neutral hermeneutical tools are given to us by the text, all judgments remain relative. The point of view has the possibility of being omniscient, but it lucidly chooses a heterodiegetic position, with very rare variations into using a reflector. But only for a little while. This fiction entity is insurmountable: the author doesn’t make the word into flesh, thus - we read conventions of ink and get cheated in our resurrection-addicted clichés, the prophecy turns out to be a black parody of “naïve” utopias, the machine is a dissolving demiurge, the officer dies unenlightened, the explorer never really explores… No one and nothing completes their dialectics; existentially speaking, all these nameless entities (qualified according to their function: explorer, officer, soldier, the condemned etc.) are denied transgression. Even the most extreme of actions remains futile. It feels dubious. Just like the guiding inner logic of this world is nothing but a funny auctorial sense of sarcasm…
To poorly exemplify this, I will prove how different dialogs fail to work, concluding that what Kafka (usually) depicted was the functions, sensations and memories (not feelings or thoughts) of a moribund hybrid. A hybrid world is that of the diegesis: the converging point of more incompatible energies. This is why not the climax of the story (that would be the First Commander’s era) is the most interesting, but its ending: an overall blockage of channels and eventually its succumbing.
In this sense, I could qualify this text both as a potentially open text, due to the liveliness of its circuits and the intermingling of such aberrant meetings, or a closed text (Umberto Eco), because it lucidly dismisses itself by self-consuming. An example for the first paradigm is that the explorer/reader manages to escape/surpass the plot/discourse. While, at the same time, according to the second paradigm, this is a charlatan escape because it’s a counterfeit entering. According to the same code of superficial and limited access, he/we had never been granted real presence into that world: were just pretexts for it to reveal its malignancy and accelerate its logical vanishing.
I’m more inclined to believe that this piece of literature is an eschatological text guided by a never-ending irony instead of a prophecy, a general apoplexy where no tomorrow lives. A bill of transience and extinction.
A little notification: I’m using the term “dialogue” not only in its meaning of exchanging opinions with somebody, but in its larger sense, that of an attempt to connect at an common level two frequencies. The latter requires a minimum of some reciprocal will to acknowledge the Other.
Not accidentally, Hegel’s complex dialectics of recognizing the Other through the Self meets here, in Kafka’s short story, its negative equivalent.
2. Dialogs of complaisance: blowing in the wind…
…however, they are the equivalent of the multiple strategies games. For example, inside the diegesis, they are useless. No bridge. But, metatextually, they are golden links thrown over the autarchy of various dimensions. They are the cognitive nuclei of what Barthes has called the cultural codes: “numerous codes of knowledge or wisdom to which the text continuously refers […]”1
The polite dialogs have something of masked retardation: "These uniforms are surely too heavy for the tropics," said the explorer, instead of inquiring about the machine, as the officer had expected. (p.1)”. Common sense - as I know it - would imply exactly the opposite: when confronted with a construction such as the machine, even at first sight, the explorer (!) should elaborate on something else than “the weather”: “The explorer had little taste for the machine and walked back and forth behind the condemned man with an almost visible lack of concern, while the officer saw to the final preparations” (p.1)
3. Dialog with the narratees: be they intradiegetic (explorer) or extradiegetic (implied reader)?
How much of that world is being shared with us? Is there a direct communicational pattern towards the narratee?
Not hazardously, the only times that the narrator resorts to a “personal narrative” and a reflector’s point of view is when he needs to highlight these discrepancies of cultural codes. But never gets deeper.
“The information about the judicial procedure had left him unsatisfied. All the same, he had to tell himself that this was, after all, a penal colony, that special regulations were required here, and that a military code had to be followed, even to extreme limits.” (p.5) The free indirect discourse limits itself to these patterns, and this restraint in sinking into some character’s thoughts proves that this is all to know, really.
While we get at least some insight to the explorer’s mind, the two other characters: the soldier and the condemned man remain absolutely obscure, we can only see-with perplexity-how they react. They appear as autistic entities. Between them and the explorer stands the officer about whose inner mechanisms only speculations are being made. The formula “as if he were…” constantly appears when referring to him. " the officer […] smiled at the explorer, as if he were still expecting a few more peculiar utterances from him.”(p.4)
Why? Because maybe, as he still shares some cultural codes with the explorer, like the language and some general representations, he’s still relatively comprehensible for the explorer.
After all, even the witches die when they’re forgotten, as they say, let alone this magic torture! To adapt Breton’s famous saying, in the Penal Colony we have the nonrandom meeting on a vivisection table between a dead god and an ink-jet printer.
The very manifest of paradoxically communicative art, or as Magritte would have said:
“Ceci n’est pas une écriture…”
References:
Barthes, Roland: S/Z. An essay. New York 1974.
Frow, John: “In the Penal Colony”. IHR (April 1999). (visited December 6, 2003)
Genette, Gerard: Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Ithaka, New York 1983.
Kafka, Franz: The Complete stories. Schocken Books, New York 1955. (foreword by John Updike)
The new stylistics of surveillance: pocket films
The new stylistics of surveillance: pocket films. Mobile phones is when everybody participates to the panoptikon model.
I am signalling the new cinematic trend of pocket films, already coded and validated through 2 Paris festivals. It retakes the trand of the vintage productions of "sepia" aesthetics and the performance of the non-mediated experience, by the very fact of unedited content, immediacy of the recording experience and the explosion of ubiquitous snap-shots of reality as it happens on the streets, in the matrix of quotidian.
Pocketmovies will be the next boom in cinematography and internet video industry, based on a more advanced type of user-generated webs and visual content, a visual type of wiki-project. It is joining the raw and schyzotic experience of unrefinable poetry of postmodernism and the classical nostalgia of the authentic.
For further info, read the BBC article at: http://www.dailywireless.org/2006/10/10/pocket-film-festival/
"Paris is arguably the most photogenic city in the world. The setting for countless movies, the French capital has been filmed from every angle and in every style.
In fact, so many films have been shot here that there is an organisation which collects them, even those movies in which Paris has played just a passing role.
With digital technology and camera phones putting moving pictures within everyone's grasp, Paris's Forum des Images has got its work cut out.
Last year it held a festival dedicated to the latest craze in Paris film circles - the pocket movie. These are films shot on mobile phones and the results are often startling.
Laurence Herszberg, director of Forum Des Images, says: "Using a mobile phone gives you more freedom with the people acting and your relationship as a film-maker to your actors.
"Because even when I am doing videos, I have the video camera between you and me.
"When you are using a mobile phone it is very free: nothing between us, no screen, we can look at each other. It is more freedom and it expresses more freedom."
New priorities
Pocket movies are often intimate and engaging, and because mobile phones can go anywhere the camera gets a licence to roam. You can film on a bike, or shoot the rush-hour crush; one director has even filmed herself voting.
With images snatched from real life, the pictures are rough and ready, so you are not going to win any awards for picture quality. So much so that it is often the sound that Benoît Labourdette, the organiser of Festival Pocket Films, says: "If you look at a movie with a very bad picture and good sound, you'll feel you are in front of a professional movie.
"But if you look at a movie with a very clean picture but very bad sound you feel this is an amateur movie."
So, in fact, we watch movies with our ears. And while the soundtrack tells us what to think about what we see, it is the edit that is all important.
The ability to film on your feet means that the process of movie-making is turned on its head. The pocket movie motto is "shoot first, ask questions later".
Film director Jean-Claude Taki says: "These days the process is more after the fact.
"By that I mean that we don't make out a storyboard and organise the filming beforehand, but we start with the filming which is something which becomes part of your life that you do whenever you want, then we edit.
"And all the time you can film stuff for the edit and that's how the film is constructed."
Revolutionary style?
One pocket movie pays homage to the Lumière brothers, the Frenchmen who invented cinema.
France has been stuck on films ever since, and its talent for film-making is to make it look as easy as a moody walk in the woods.
France has spawned cinematic movements like the New Wave where, if actors fluffed their lines, the director would just jump cut in the middle of a scene.
It saved them plenty of money on film-stock, but it also became a stylistic innovation.
So what revolution is the mobile phone going to bring?
Director Stéphane Galienni says: "In contrast to the 60s generation with the super-8, today's filmmaking is available to more people. It is similar but this is for a new generation that spends more time on the internet.
"For me this is a tool that allows you to show people what you've got.
"In France we have a movement called vlog, a contraction between blog and video, which allows us take shots and film situations and immediately put them online."
Many pocket movie-makers like the pixelated look and washed out colours they get from mobile phones.
While phone manufacturers themselves are doing their best to improve picture quality, the makers of these miniature masterpieces are happy for the technology to advance at a slower, more artistic pace."
I am signalling the new cinematic trend of pocket films, already coded and validated through 2 Paris festivals. It retakes the trand of the vintage productions of "sepia" aesthetics and the performance of the non-mediated experience, by the very fact of unedited content, immediacy of the recording experience and the explosion of ubiquitous snap-shots of reality as it happens on the streets, in the matrix of quotidian.
Pocketmovies will be the next boom in cinematography and internet video industry, based on a more advanced type of user-generated webs and visual content, a visual type of wiki-project. It is joining the raw and schyzotic experience of unrefinable poetry of postmodernism and the classical nostalgia of the authentic.
For further info, read the BBC article at: http://www.dailywireless.org/2006/10/10/pocket-film-festival/
"Paris is arguably the most photogenic city in the world. The setting for countless movies, the French capital has been filmed from every angle and in every style.
In fact, so many films have been shot here that there is an organisation which collects them, even those movies in which Paris has played just a passing role.
With digital technology and camera phones putting moving pictures within everyone's grasp, Paris's Forum des Images has got its work cut out.
Last year it held a festival dedicated to the latest craze in Paris film circles - the pocket movie. These are films shot on mobile phones and the results are often startling.
Laurence Herszberg, director of Forum Des Images, says: "Using a mobile phone gives you more freedom with the people acting and your relationship as a film-maker to your actors.
"Because even when I am doing videos, I have the video camera between you and me.
"When you are using a mobile phone it is very free: nothing between us, no screen, we can look at each other. It is more freedom and it expresses more freedom."
New priorities
Pocket movies are often intimate and engaging, and because mobile phones can go anywhere the camera gets a licence to roam. You can film on a bike, or shoot the rush-hour crush; one director has even filmed herself voting.
With images snatched from real life, the pictures are rough and ready, so you are not going to win any awards for picture quality. So much so that it is often the sound that Benoît Labourdette, the organiser of Festival Pocket Films, says: "If you look at a movie with a very bad picture and good sound, you'll feel you are in front of a professional movie.
"But if you look at a movie with a very clean picture but very bad sound you feel this is an amateur movie."
So, in fact, we watch movies with our ears. And while the soundtrack tells us what to think about what we see, it is the edit that is all important.
The ability to film on your feet means that the process of movie-making is turned on its head. The pocket movie motto is "shoot first, ask questions later".
Film director Jean-Claude Taki says: "These days the process is more after the fact.
"By that I mean that we don't make out a storyboard and organise the filming beforehand, but we start with the filming which is something which becomes part of your life that you do whenever you want, then we edit.
"And all the time you can film stuff for the edit and that's how the film is constructed."
Revolutionary style?
One pocket movie pays homage to the Lumière brothers, the Frenchmen who invented cinema.
France has been stuck on films ever since, and its talent for film-making is to make it look as easy as a moody walk in the woods.
France has spawned cinematic movements like the New Wave where, if actors fluffed their lines, the director would just jump cut in the middle of a scene.
It saved them plenty of money on film-stock, but it also became a stylistic innovation.
So what revolution is the mobile phone going to bring?
Director Stéphane Galienni says: "In contrast to the 60s generation with the super-8, today's filmmaking is available to more people. It is similar but this is for a new generation that spends more time on the internet.
"For me this is a tool that allows you to show people what you've got.
"In France we have a movement called vlog, a contraction between blog and video, which allows us take shots and film situations and immediately put them online."
Many pocket movie-makers like the pixelated look and washed out colours they get from mobile phones.
While phone manufacturers themselves are doing their best to improve picture quality, the makers of these miniature masterpieces are happy for the technology to advance at a slower, more artistic pace."
ironically, there are moments when you feel a myth passed by...
...and everything is ok...
excuse this seemingly pointless line, overly smoked with cheesy sentimentalisms, but it refers to something very down to earth. This is when I declare that books are down to earth: Joseph Campbell's THE POWER OF THE MYTH.
The reconstructed mosaic of THE story, this is. Strange to accept, after at least 16 years of positivistic education and half a life of street knowledge that leads to no faith other than "there is a zero defference between doing it and not doing it".
Briefly, Campbell is the slayer of cynicism. Cynicism brought about by the urban jungle, by daily fatalities, by the familiarity and vicinity of violence, by bad movies and bad sects, by good people that we leave behind and those inspirational ones we no longer have the guts to encounter...
So here is my book review. Why? Because i feel it speaks all languages, amnd this is still a dangerous thing to do.
I think The Power of the Myth is a rare anthology of dialogs that manages to almost exhaustively compile the human condition not into patterns, but energies. It does not talk about "being", but about "becoming (a transfiguration that starts from outside and ends within)" - that is my definition of a myth, and Powell's monomyth is a universal pattern manifesting itself subtly in all that is conceived and left by men, a verb flowing in the human guts, a verb that urges, stimulates, spurs towards a finality whether consciously or not. The paradigms that Campbell studies and unifies cross-culturally are disturbingly revealing and of a rare beauty. Why disturbing/ boundary-breaking? Because they incorporate and resolve millenary differences in a superbly down to earth wisdom married to metaphor. Visionary? Not even, because he does not preach anything.
He just reviews the puzzle of the world through the unified glass of the myths, seen comparatively and beyond the conditioning borders of historical and religious determinism, if you will.
I watched and read Campbell's "The Power of the Myth" and felt as if an alien had decrypted the cannons of human culture. beyond the thorough richness of literacy, there is immense lucidity. It must have been a tremendous exercise of de-culturation, where the learned certainties are requestioned profoundly and without resentment, and then an exercise of reconnecting everything, every sign, symptom and strand into a beautifully revealing genotype of the human spirit. In great lines, this is it: the anthropological bible.
I am not even by far saying he is the first to conduct such a study, but I find he is the first to formulate it so simply and charmingly. So easily to pass over. Like it had been dead obvious all along. Therapeutic? Inspirational? I do not know. It is surely something that is meant to integrate you with yourself.
excuse this seemingly pointless line, overly smoked with cheesy sentimentalisms, but it refers to something very down to earth. This is when I declare that books are down to earth: Joseph Campbell's THE POWER OF THE MYTH.
The reconstructed mosaic of THE story, this is. Strange to accept, after at least 16 years of positivistic education and half a life of street knowledge that leads to no faith other than "there is a zero defference between doing it and not doing it".
Briefly, Campbell is the slayer of cynicism. Cynicism brought about by the urban jungle, by daily fatalities, by the familiarity and vicinity of violence, by bad movies and bad sects, by good people that we leave behind and those inspirational ones we no longer have the guts to encounter...
So here is my book review. Why? Because i feel it speaks all languages, amnd this is still a dangerous thing to do.
I think The Power of the Myth is a rare anthology of dialogs that manages to almost exhaustively compile the human condition not into patterns, but energies. It does not talk about "being", but about "becoming (a transfiguration that starts from outside and ends within)" - that is my definition of a myth, and Powell's monomyth is a universal pattern manifesting itself subtly in all that is conceived and left by men, a verb flowing in the human guts, a verb that urges, stimulates, spurs towards a finality whether consciously or not. The paradigms that Campbell studies and unifies cross-culturally are disturbingly revealing and of a rare beauty. Why disturbing/ boundary-breaking? Because they incorporate and resolve millenary differences in a superbly down to earth wisdom married to metaphor. Visionary? Not even, because he does not preach anything.
He just reviews the puzzle of the world through the unified glass of the myths, seen comparatively and beyond the conditioning borders of historical and religious determinism, if you will.
I watched and read Campbell's "The Power of the Myth" and felt as if an alien had decrypted the cannons of human culture. beyond the thorough richness of literacy, there is immense lucidity. It must have been a tremendous exercise of de-culturation, where the learned certainties are requestioned profoundly and without resentment, and then an exercise of reconnecting everything, every sign, symptom and strand into a beautifully revealing genotype of the human spirit. In great lines, this is it: the anthropological bible.
I am not even by far saying he is the first to conduct such a study, but I find he is the first to formulate it so simply and charmingly. So easily to pass over. Like it had been dead obvious all along. Therapeutic? Inspirational? I do not know. It is surely something that is meant to integrate you with yourself.
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