Notes on Strategies to Engage Mythopoesis Without Necessarily Moving to the Right*
A spider creates its home by attaching its building material to foreign structures, then uses it as a trap to catch insects, small birds, reptiles and mammals. In a number of tribal societies scattered across Central Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Europe, there exists a myth about the origins of spiders. For these tribes, there used to exist two species of spiders, but we only know one of them since the other went extinct. The one that remains today searches for spots where other animals could be found. The cleverest of these spiders analyzes the changing flight patterns of its preys and constantly moves from one location to another in their search. The extinct species of spider did something else. Once they found a large carcass of a dead or dying animal it would build its cobweb around it. These spiders would stay around their net even long after the carcass would turn to dust and most of these spiders would then start to starve. All the while the net would expand in the hope that some small insects could be found along the way. In the end, most of the spiders either left to become solitary hunters, forming other species of spiders or fought for the few scraps of insects still coming to their bloated net.
Of course, the above description is totally false but we thought it might not only show how one can easily engage in mythopoesis but that the content of the story might help us understand the sorry state of necropoesis practiced by the Left. Accustomed to absolute ethics and concrete politics, the Left has been unable to break perhaps the toughest of all shells when it comes to overcoming its social defeat. The Left is so accustomed to seeing itself in its own mirror as the official cultural avant-garde that it cannot engage freely in any other form of performance for the fear of being viewed as something other than powerful and historical.
Necropoesis involves parasitic strategies which are in essence pathognomonic of leftists’ meme making logic. They use outdated approaches for engaging a public in the hope of fostering progressive change, and even though they ultimately fail, again and again, they nevertheless keep using the same failed strategies over and over. While the mainstream part of the Left is out there trying hard to reapply esoteric remedies to its moldy strategies, the Right actualizes its program by turning leftist aesthetics into neutral forms, using them for its own sake as viable tactics. Whenever the Left needs a new strategy it has nowhere to turn but to its ancient ways in the hope of waking up a dead idea. It’s as if the leftist necromancer is using crumbling, dusty spells to create ghoul-like memes but they are soon turned by right-wing illusionists against their intended goals.
For the Right, lies and deception are built into its operational logic. With its adherence to a minimum level of truth and objectivity the Left, on the other hand, has to hack its own deeper system to compete with the Right, but the bloatware it carries prevents it from a complete system overhaul.[1] The origin of this problem lies in the Left’s adherence to classic dualistic modes of distinction between true versus untrue and logos versus myth during the process of strategic decision making. In addition, the Left’s sincere commitment to a variety of vernacular and universal causes (from supporting nationalist leftists in Rojava, Syria to veganism for example) has made it look like a mountain climber who is increasingly unable to do the main task of climbing due to the heavy weight of their backpack.
While the Left meme warfare resembles that of a cannibalistic necrophile, the Right practices vampirism, drinking away the blood lifeforce of its enemies. Unable to create its garlic potion, the Left does not even notice when the blood of their antediluvian patron saints is stealthily drained by its eternal opponents. It is known among totalitarian state apparatuses that many leftist intellectuals broke down not under physical torture but when the interrogator used alternative facts as a psychological lever against them. Often, the interrogator would level that the secret leftist cell wanted to kill children and old people, and repeatedly would utter this as fact, until the prisoner would finally break down and say that they had intended to do something completely different.
Since the late 1990s, it has become slowly clear how The European New Right or Nouvelle Droite knows how to infuse its logic with key points taken from the teachings of the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, Louis Althusser and other obvious deities of the left.[2] The clearest proof of the vampirization of Gramsci’s was clear to us when we stumbled upon the website of Generation Identity, an ethno European nationalist organization. Under a heading titled Metapolitics, the authors claim: “We’re fighting a battle for concepts, for what is acceptable to say and in the end also for ideas. In addition, the Identitarian movement creates contact spaces and cultural offerings for those Europeans who have long been forgotten by the establishment: young people without a migration background.”[3] This process has also been noticed by mainstream media. An Economist story makes a similar claim about the Right: “[h]aving learned from the identity politics of the left, right-wingers are shaping the conversation.[4]”
Without embracing ideological plasticity, the frigid body of the Left will have no use other than playing for the rabid beasts fighting over the salvageable scraps of its methodology. Just as noted by Hermann Kurzke that fascists in Germany appropriated socialist songs, the new right uses mimicry, according to the Verfassungsschutz Brandenburg, a branch of the Federal Republic of Germany’s domestic security agency, even the works of John Heartfield have eventually been appropriated by a German right-wing group called the “Schutzbund Deutschland”.[5]
Only a leftist fox can battle the right wing chameleon on the terrain of trickery without succumbing to the pitfalls of memepolitics. While it is certainly important to analyze individual right-wing social-media phenomena like Milo Yiannopoulos, Gavin McInnes or Alex Jones, the left needs to focus on the actual ideologies of the new right. To treat the contemporary right as a copy-paste return of the old right is to dramatically misunderstand their trajectories and chameleonic tactics. The Left’s false adherence to old strategies can thus only diminish the possibility of the very change the Left wants to enact.
It’s not that the Left does not engage in meme warfare but that its sterilized memes have no potency since they are void of credible new myths. The Left’s situation can also be called necrostasis, or the hardened form of necropoetics, when the circulation of the old and already accepted notions replace the ongoing generation of myths.
Surprisingly, the rejection of myth-making, by the left has not been the result of encountering the Right but the outcome of inside conversations between different leftists camps that dates back to the 1930s, particularly when the mainstream socialism rejected the Surrealists’ experiments with mythmaking as a viable strategy.
Going back even further, Marx and Marxism have a long history of grappling with the question of logos and mythos. An example is Mircea Eliade, the Romanian anthropologist who worked on mythology, posited that Marxism was a new eschatological myth that stands opposed to the denialist stance most often seen in normative mythology. “It is … significant that Marx takes over for his own purposes the Judeo-Christian eschatological hope for an absolute end to history… In fact Marx’s classless society and the consequent disappearance of historical tensions find their closed precedent in the myth of the Golden Age that many traditions put at the beginning and the end of history”[6] This unfortunate trend took shape despite Marx’s clear distinction between illusions and the conditions that require illusions: “The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions.[7]”
Even the early anarchists were well aware of the power of myth in reshaping the political landscape of their time. In his Reflections on Violence George Sorel, the theorist of anarchic syndicalism, speaks about the role of political and revolutionary mythification in the production of the future: “We are perfectly aware that the historians of the future are bound to discover that we laboured under many illusions, because they will see behind them a finished world… Our situation resembles somewhat that of physicists who work at huge calculations based on theories which are not destined to endure forever.”[8]
In 1937 just a few months after the International Surrealist Exhibition in London, Andre Breton published his seminal essay “Limits not Frontiers of Surrealism” in which he delineated the importance of mythmaking as a strategy to counter the nationalist mythmaking of his time: “A work of art worthy of the name is one which gives us back the freshness of the emotions of childhood. This can happen only on the express condition that it does not depend directly on the history of current events whose profound echoes in the heart of man can make themselves felt only by the systematic return to fiction. No attempt at intimidation will cause us to renounce this self-allotted task, which, as we have already made clear, is the elaboration of the collective myth belonging to our period.”[9]
However, according to Sorel, “The theory of myths produces such fine results that so many people seek to dispute it.”[10] New York’s intelligentsia however fought tooth and nails against Breton’s mythopoetic project. The art critic Harold Rosenberg countered Breton’s arguments and claimed that it was party politics, not myths that would free man. “To be free, man must be free of all myths. Better get rid of these mysifications – myths, initiations, rites, both positive and negative – and devote yourselves to the science of practical politics, to everyday affairs.”[11]
The Left’s inability to engage in mythmaking has more to do with the contradiction between their actual socio-economic class than their idealistic and seemingly progressive virtues. Moreover we ought to go beyond the mainstream critiques of hipsterism and declare that these values are the result of living their own particular social and economic lives. This process was apparent to Roland Barthes who, in his seminal work Mythologies, wrote that “[p]olitically, in spite of the universalistic effort of its vocabulary, the bourgeoisie eventually strikes against a resisting core which is, by definition, the revolutionary party.”[12] Except in the case of contemporary young petit bourgeois, believing in negative capabilities or what Unger describes as, “the denial of whatever in our contexts delivers us over to a fixed scheme of division and hierarchy and to an enforced choice between routine and rebellion”, comes down to supporting oppressed minorities and living an environmentally ethical life. This is when another theory formed by Unger called the false necessity, or the rejection of fixed social organizations and believing in their plasticity and potential to be shaped in new ways is used by the left intelligentsia against its intended purpose by creating new rigid frames for progressive action.[13]
To gain new negative capabilities and reject the resulting false necessities described above, the Left needs to break the chains it laid with its own hands on tricksterism. The figure of the trickster is actually much more akin to an ideal leftist position in society than the right-wing rebels. One possible starting point for developing the archetype of leftist mythopoesis is returning to the figure of the trickster found in the slave era African American folklore called “John & Old Marster”. John, a representative of blacks, is an unsubmissive slave who outwits the Old Marster, who transforms into the character of Old Boss after the civil war, in nearly every case, without the plot really changing. Using a wide range of skills, from performativity, wordplay or straightforward humor, John manages to win against the plantation system. John’s main ability, amongst many others, one which occasionally might even backfire, is to trick his antagonist into believing that he is totally a daft and incapable of doing any harm due to faked gullibility.
The mind of true tricksters cannot be contained by the prisonhouse of our current political climate. The fluidity of the trickster slides on the sticky molasses of all ideological trajectories. While the ever-evolving tricksters may be seen as too chameleonic to the point of being antagonistic figures seeking to sink the battleships of the mainstream left, it is precisely their transpersonal interconnectivity that allows them to turn the technology of the right against its masters.
While it may not be possible to unshackle all of the potential tricksters with Promethean dreams we can at least take aim at the right wing vampires that seek nourishment from their ill body.
* this essay was first published in April 2018 on Arts of the Working Class, a new bimonthly street journal for poverty, wealth and art. It contains contributions by artists and thinkers from different fields and in different languages. Developed by artist Paul Sochacki and curator Maria Ines Plaza Lazo, it will be available at the gallery Exile, as part of Paul Sochacki’s solo show “Self-reflection”. This text was written as a follow up to Mohammad Salemy’s “Overcoming Left’s Mythopoetic Deficit” published by Triple Ampersand Journal. See: http://tripleampersand.org/overcoming-lefts-mythopoetic-deficit/
[1] In computer lingo, bloatware is a software or a group of apps whose usefulness is reduced because of the excessive disk space and memory they require: “a nasty piece of cross-platform bloatware that’s in serious need of a total overhaul”.
[2]. See: Susan George in her 1997 article “How to Win the War of Ideas: Lessons from the Gramscian Right”, Tamir Bar-On in his article “The Ambiguities of the Nouvelle Droite, 1968-1999” or Angela Nagle in her book “Kill All Normies”.
[3]. See: https://www.generation-identity.com
[4]. See: https://www.economist.com/news/europe/21739668-having-learned-identity-politics-left-right-wingers-are-shaping
[5]. See: http://www.verfassungsschutz.brandenburg.de/cms/detail.php/
lbm1.c.341804.de
[6]. Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and the Profane page 206 Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc. New York.
[7] See: Marx’s Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 1843-4, https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/
Marx_Critique_of_Hegels_Philosophy_of_Right.pdf
[8]. See: George Sorel, Reflections on Violence, Cambridge University Press,1999 page 141. See also: George Sorel, La De ?composition du marxisme, Chalon-sur- Saône, Editions Hérode, 1908
[9]. See: Andre Breton, “Limits Not Frontiers of Surrealism,” in Surrealism, ed. Read, London Faber & Faber, 1971, pages 106-7
[10]. Sorel, 24.
[11]. See: Harold Rosenberg, “Breton – A Dialogue,” View 2, no.2 (1942): n. p.
[12]. See: Roland Barthes, Mythologies page 138-141
[13]. See: Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Politics: The Central Texts, Theory Against Fate page 174-176. See also: Robero Mangabeira Unger, ‘False Necessity: Anti-necessitarian Social Theory in the Service of Radical Democracy’ in Politics, A Work in Constructive Social Theory (London: Verso, 2004), xvii.