Pill Pod 133 - Modern Mythology (Patreon Exclusive)
Added 2023-08-01 18:27:57 +0000 UTCLast week we looked at fairy stories as more than stories, and before that we decided we've never been modern. Together then, we'd conclude we are as myth-tended as our savage forebears. So today we begin to pick at some threads of modern myths, which are deployed in marketing, politics, sports, and... oh holy shit they're everywhere.
Myth is a particular form of signification or language and everyone is ineluctably in it, according to Roland Barthes (https://amzn.to/47i5kpd)
We want to spend a couple weeks on modern mythology so definitely throw your thoughts/examples our way!
Comments
I’m a few months behind and am catching up on pod episodes. The myth topic is intriguing and a good thread to pull
Jonathan White
2023-11-04 14:58:19 +0000 UTCFuck the irony in this response made me lol 🤣
GuLL
2023-08-09 16:39:25 +0000 UTCIdeology becomes ontology. You can't change someone's mind when their reality is ready to hand, the only possibility for change is when they're ideology is disproven and shown to be just a map and not the actual world. Hard when the culture of global capitalism is so ubiquitous. But this is how the human mind works, we'll always recreate this mess bar something like a global spiritual enlightenment that changes the way our mind's function and brings everyone into a, more often, present at hand relationship to the world.
Myles Jeffers
2023-08-08 16:30:54 +0000 UTCThis is why Jung has secretly always coincided better with Critical Theory than Freud. Jung examined myths while Freud created them, including himself.
Joe Green
2023-08-07 00:30:40 +0000 UTCRE Rammstein: their DEUTSCHLAND music video was a masterclass of image play. I’m not sure if there’s before or since been a song on mainstream play very loudly singing ”Deutschland über allen” picked from the forbidden stanza of their national anthem AND get the pass for using the correct chain of images beside it (not without a little stir though). Also if looking for more of the similar image play the band Laibach (by which Rammstein has been greatly inspired) have been on the same WW2/Nazi image play forever to the point where I’m not sure if there is a ”read” to have on them, politically speaking.
Kari Mämmilä
2023-08-05 07:38:32 +0000 UTCEmpirical facts can be tested and model predictive trajectories, often with a high degree of accuracy, but any narrative more complicated than that is myth. Maybe if Barthes is applied to metaphysics all forms and substances are myths too, bringing myth down into the micro level of empirical data? The way the order of myth floats strips away humanity (Orientalism), a prerequisite for terrorist/hostage situations. So dehumanising myths are pretty interesting to critique. It seems useful to categorise myth by how widely it is believed. Majority acceptance makes the Scene of Ideology. The Obscene would be rarely believed myths (fun stuff like the paranormal) and those believed by a larger minority, potentially half of the mass, myths like immigration causing economic harm, which seem to gravitate into counter-identities like today's right. They anchor onto each other and drift further away from foundations of evidence, easily weaponised to manufacture polarisation, an untethered obscene gathering mass in an artificial dialectic. The left are more interested in empirical evidence, preoccupying them with attempting to erase each others' myths, breeding monoculture, for now giving them the Scene, but it's a battlefield scene of that spreads out so far that alternative ideas can only ever be born into conflict with it. Empiricism let's us deeper indoctrinate ourselves that we've left myth behind, which is the greatest myth of all. So much further entangled in myth are we now that we have become the mythical creatures, of an expanding otherworld, and it would be fun except that all of our relationships are dematerialising and we've dislocated to the point of actively attacking our ever more fragile life support systems.
Alex B
2023-08-04 12:32:22 +0000 UTCGreat episode, absolutely fascinating, definitely warrants repeated listens. That Barthes video on MAGA is still one of your best vids, Pills.
anacidcommie
2023-08-04 12:16:17 +0000 UTC😞 - Zizek’s take was spot on there tho. Mass chanting/repetitive movements/etc are these neutral forms of pure libidinal investment that you can then fill in with whatever ideology/myth you want and they’ll still produce the same jouissance.
anacidcommie
2023-08-04 12:15:12 +0000 UTCDid anyone notice how ideology and mythology are almost (?) indistinguishable from each other? Once a person “believes” a myth, there is no point in seeking deeper understanding. No point in arguing or trying to disprove. No point in presenting other contradictory myths for consideration. Each ideology is a self-sealing capsule, its story, reasons, meanings, hopes and fears come right out of the bottle, ready to be forced down someone’s throat – with a nice warm milk-and-honey chaser. Fact is, everyone wants the easy certainty of religion, ideology, and authority. It is foolish that this wish not to be understood as just another means to the same end: freedom from responsibility and accountabilty, freedom from the burden of thinking for oneself. (Anyone notice that the world is afire?)
Stephen Nelson Willis
2023-08-04 11:40:54 +0000 UTCAnother great episode! I liked the question raised - What do you as a critic and get out of all of this? Is it just a sense of superiority or is your life really made better having had this awakening? Are we really better off having spent an hour listening to this conversation or have we just been entertained is a way that feels deep but really isn’t any better than sitting through a Marvel movie? Anyway, looking forward to future episodes. 👍🏼
Timothy Kenner
2023-08-03 16:50:00 +0000 UTCJesus dude go back to Twitter
Stian van Wyk
2023-08-03 13:50:36 +0000 UTCVic is such a lib that he can’t help but get low key triggered any time anyone makes an anticapitalist statement like Erik invoking Fisher early on. Capitalism is a socioeconomic system based on self-expanding value via surplus labour exploitation. No mythological abstraction here: this is capitalism’s core essence. So when Fisher says we can more easily imagine the world ending, this is what he means, that we can more easily imagine the end of the world than an end to the logic of this particular mode of production. And when we (the left, generally) says “lib”, they mean a procapitalist who tends to espouse otherwise (or surface level) progressive views on other social issues. Sure there’s a lot more that goes into what either mean, but it’s a useful enough shorthand for the purpose of discourse. Not that there aren’t legions of leftists who don’t understand what capitalism is, but Victor keeps trying to make it seem like well-read radicals don’t know what they’re talking about when they talk about “capitalism”, and this is just him being as insufferable as ever. I feel like Pills and Erik should have called him out on this, because it weakens their position whenever they make an anticapitalist critique.
anacidcommie
2023-08-03 10:01:54 +0000 UTCUFOs are doing the rounds again. There are a few books on how they relate to myth. Jung's 'Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies'. Also, 'Intimate Alien: The Hidden Story of the UFO'.
Xavier
2023-08-01 22:03:54 +0000 UTCThere are a range of lawsuits against Till Lindemann concerning systematic sexual abuse ATM - so the libidinal enjoyment has severely dropped when watching Rammstein 🥀
hoppi
2023-08-01 20:38:31 +0000 UTC
