NEW NOW. Neomythologies and the Disintegration of Reality

Music Welcome everyone, my name is Anna Kirikova, I'm head of international projects for the

Manage Central Exhibition Hall in St. Petersburg, Russia, and I'm honoured and delighted to welcome you to the launch of the Manege U International Initiative, NewNow. NewNow is an online platform tailored especially for the present moment and for doing investigation into this present moment and creating together our shared future. This is of course not an easy task, therefore we are going to do this with the help of some of the most prominent thinkers of our time. These are philosophers, authors, cultural thinkers, anthropologists, curators, museum directors and many more. So briefly on the new now.

We are going to explore the present moment through eight cinematic modules. These include include ecoagenda, mental health, transhumanism and existential risks to humanity, body and identity, technology and the limits of freedom, the concept of reality, the concept of truth, and many more to come. All this is going to be published and is already online at www.newnowbymanesh.com and i'm happy to launch the first session the first discussion of the program and the theme for this discussion is neo-mythologists and the problem of the disintegration

of reality this is probably going to be one of the most theoretical if you like discussion of the series but I find it very I find it a perfect means to actually start the discussions on our contemporary naty and all of its contradictions because we think that it is exactly contemporary miss making or misthinking that are probably able to cope with the current and current dramatic transformations of our reality. So it is my pleasure to welcome our speakers today. I also invite Federico Campania, joining us from London.

Hello Federico. Federico's recent books are Prophetic Culture, Technic and Magic, the Reconstruction of Reality, last night uh frederico works as lecturer in philosophy um at the university of visual arts in the hack and also works as rights director at versa books um this is a publishing house in london i guess so once again hello uh also from london publisher Hello Sarah, great to have you with us.

Sarah is among the co-founders of Silver Press, that is a feminist publisher and Notabooks, an experimental platform exploring technology, myth-making and magic. Sarah is also the founder of the NewSense, a curation storytelling platform, which began as a literary festival at the Barbican Centre and includes projects at other cultural institutions in London and beyond. And also today with us, philosopher and writer Rezaa Ngarastani, joining us from Connecticut in the United States. Hello Riza, great to have you with us. Since the early 2000s Riza has been extensively

to various journals and anthologies and lectured at numerous international universities and institutes. So writings have been translated into more than 12 languages that is Russian. Reza's latest philosophical work is called Intelligence and Spirit and it is an inquiry the meaning of intelligence at the intersection of artificial intelligence philosophy of mind theory of computation and the philosophy of German idealism and of course as you all know Reza is also an author of the legendary texts Cyclonopedia Thank you very much, Rizal, for joining us.

It's a pleasure to have you. Thank you. And finally, I would like to present our event moderator, Alexander Vilekis. Hello, Alexander. Alexander is joining us from Yekaterinburg, that is a city in Russia. So Alexander is a Russian philosopher and social science researcher, researcher and he's going to moderate our discussion today. Before we start, I would like also to say a huge thank you to the partners of the New Now program for their general support and we couldn't have done it without you. These are the Cultural and Education Center of the British Embassy in Moscow and the Mikhail Bajanov Foundation in St. Petersburg. Thank you very much.

and um so welcome everyone and now over to alexander thank you thank you anna uh good evening dear ladies and gentlemen today we begin the first meeting of the new now program my name alexander lakers and i will be today's moderator first of all i'd like to thank the organizers the team of saint petersburg manesh for creating such last scale lecture program which we're opening now and which will be continued during this fall, winter and probably spring. And thank you to our speakers, Rezaf, Federico and Sara for being able to join us this evening.

And you, dear listeners, for being with us today. Now I will give a short introduction and we will move on to short speeches for our speakers. First of all, which I want to say today, it's about the industrial revolution that actually marked the victory of Western rationality. Domestic magic, everyday life mythology and some of other forms of enchantment of the world and witchcraft were displaced from most people's everyday life in favor of rational regulation and other practice by techniques, by mycologists, by technologies, by some kind of social engineering. Max Weber, the German sociologist, spoke of the need to disenchant

the world. It was his thesis from the science as a well, his work in the early of 20th century. Emile Druckheim, his French colleague, argued that the replacement of old rituals was not by the victory of originalization of the world but the change rituals from old one to news a century later nowadays we see that everyday magic and other forms of my whole mythology are still exist in our daily lives and european rationality has not victory it had not had not triumphed by actually changed in the forms of modern myths beliefs, cosmogony, myth, and everyday magic now woven into bizarre hybrids along with advances

in science and technology, forming a new cultural layer that will remain of our generation in future. Importantly, if we're speaking about the Western rationality, we should understand that it's not only one form of rationality that actually exists in nowadays worlds because we have like lots of other world images and myth that lived in other societies and our cultures that have very different and very interesting ways of myth-making of cosmogony and their myths actually may

say a lot about us and say a lot about our future and our past. The first important element of myth-making is myth as a radical way of thinking. Myth gives us opportunity to think that some conceptions that we actually cannot think in our everyday life because they are too radical too strange too provocative and probably too good to live in our modern world that's why myth can and cosmogonist can become effective tools for promoting foreign new ecological agenda, gender equality, reducing economic equality, and so on and so forth. It's actually a mistake to think that myth as a way of thinking was used only

in Neil Gaiman's work American Gods. Actually, there are lots of contemporary science philosophy and art beneath it, and so today we will speak about the ways of myth-making in modern world. and my introduction is over and i pass the floor to federica for the first uh for the first speech from our speakers from his introduce hello hey um so my brief introduction would be just about um one possible interpretation of what myths are in the sense of where they come from there is an impression nowadays that when we talk about myths we talk about fantasies or psychological symptoms

So things that come from the inside to a certain extent that we create. If we look at the ancient understanding of myths, it is suggested that the myths come from the outside. So that the myths do not come from our imagination, but our imagination catches something that is already in the world, in the objects themselves. So the idea is that there is something in reality itself that speaks mythically. In fact, mythos means tale, but mythology is the tale of the tale. So when you retell the tale that comes from the world. The point here is ontological in the sense that there is something in the ancient mythological understanding, says that there is something in reality itself,

which contains a mythical quality. It's a bit like if you think of mathematics. Mathematics, you wouldn't say that it is a fantasy or a psychological symptom. say that there is something in the appearance of reality itself that speaks to us mathematically and with our mathematics we do the mathematical logos you know we talk about it now what kind of part of reality is caught by the myth is a particular aspect of reality in which there is an interpenetration between the ineffable and the speakable the rational and irrational the visible and invisible time and eternity it is this mash this interpenetration that speaks to us mythically and we catch and it speaks to us in the form of a disfigurement the disfigurement of the world with the unworldly of the unworldly with the world of time with eternity and vice

versa when we speak about these things uh mythically and when i say we i mean mostly the ancients we usually speak anthropomorphically so that's the funny aspect of myths why do they speak anthropomorphically and this is this is an important aspect of mythology that doesn't take away the value of it, what actually adds to it. The point is that a myth, a mythology, so a discourse over the mythical aspect of reality, is not an attempt to say what happens in the world in the way in which we understand facts and events as normal actual events, facts that can be caught by language completely. But about things that Saluzius, the friend of Julian De Posted, said, things that never happened yet they are always. In this sense we speak anthropomorphically

because first of all according to um ancient epistemology only like knows like so to speak with humans you have to give them a human form to speak with animals you have to give it an animal form the old idea that if horses could write they would write their own mythology about horses gods but also because by looking implausible by looking anthropomorphic they remind us that these events don't fall into the history of what actually happened but fall into a meta history so in a beyond history that is intermatched with history in a in an impossible way when we think about myth-making today often my impression is that the ontological substratum is missing what is missing is the very understanding of reality as a multi-dimensional realm

in which language catches only one part then there is another part which is interpenetrated it speaks mythically and then there is another part which is entirely invisible Since we lack this understanding, we understand reality is entirely linguistic. When we speak about myths nowadays, we usually think about, speak about fantasies, which is a completely different thing. Fantastical imaginations or psychological symptoms, which is another way. Perhaps the closest thing that comes to mythology today is scientific language in a sense. However, in the way in which it is treated most commonly, it fails to to qualify as mythological truly, because it lacks the anthropomorphic part in that.

It speaks objectively about things that truly are, that actually really are, and it substitutes itself as a language to the object which it speaks about. It's not disfigured, it's not funny, it doesn't remind you that it's not the whole of the truth. And in substituting itself to reality, a language that substitutes itself is a language that stands over something, superstition superstition superstar to stand over something scientific language unfortunately ends up speaking superstitiously not because of the content of what it says but because of of the style of how it says it and how it presents itself so my initial contribution would be about the the origin of myths and the qualification of mythology and its anthropomorphic form sorry sorry thank you federica now i will turn the floor to sarah and your introduction

thanks for having me um and thanks federico so basically i'm interested in mythology in and myth making in relation to the world of narrative in the ways that we inhabit the world in which there's not one thing nor two things but 10 000 things as the taoists might say and maybe similarly to what federico was saying i guess this narrative and mythology is a means by which we can have an active encounter with the world and so i'm also interested in how this can be connected to healing which is not an end in itself but a process of making whole le guin said that narrative is a stratagem of mortality it is a means a way of living and i see a connection there so a long time ago mythology was the narrative form that held these 10 000 things in meaningful

connection including the things that are invisible or irrational and uncategorizable by giving them a name or a place at least in the stories but as we've said nowadays myths are often used to describe that which isn't real um things which are false and i think that this shift in meaning arises in the same place where there's a break where the imaginal is severed from the material and the sacred from the mundane and our feelings and our thoughts our feelings on our bodies from our thoughts i think that this break is a collective trauma which also creates gaps in ourselves you could call this sickness of the soul which is visible in the mental health pandemic which we are living through at the same time as the coronavirus and since language is thought

incarnate mythology is soul incarnate in the formulation of someone called hubert fancroft i'd say that an example of this kind of dissociation can be seen in the character k in kafka's unfinished novel the castle where k keeps trying to telephone the castle in this dreamlike story of endless disconnection from this other higher place um and i think that healing repairing this break means not separating myth and reality out from each other but approaching the mythic in a way that involves throwing off this positivist recasting of myth as something unreal or otherwise intellectualizing and sealing myth off in a purely imaginal realm so living mythically is not fantasying and not mistaking fantasy for acting but recognizing that we need

a reality that allows myths to fall in and at the same time when we talk about mythic there should be room for connecting with the body and the social since myths have existed for both survival and for expression and they were shared orally and always in relation so in all there should be room to hold not one or two but 10 000 things some of which are incommensurate and formless and coming into being and already felt like poetry thank you thank you and now reza your introduction introduction uh hello everyone uh thank you everyone um federico sarah um so my my uh

position with regard to myth is that I think that the theory of mythological size, creating myth, mythmaking has is quite, you know, under explained, not in the sense of what are its origins but actually what its functions are uh what sort of concepts of myth we are throwing around and so on and so forth i think that i can go along with some of my internal locutors by saying that yes i agree with what you are saying with regard to the function of the myth but then we have to calibrate the notion the concept of myth

at that point. In fact, this is going to be, you know, precisely what makes me a kind of a skeptic about the themes, the overall themes of this event, as long as they are not distinguished properly. First, I would say that, you know, regardless of what we are talking about, I would say that modernity's fight against myth as a protological edifice was most probably

under equipped in understanding what it means for something to be proteological, right? But nevertheless, modernity's assault on mythological world was completely justified, in the sense that we have two different ideas of myth, myth as derived from symbolic form and myth as a vehicle of ideological mobilization, dogmas, superstition, so on and so forth, namely recourse to a primordial world where there is no, where basically politics

and rudimentary imaginative forces collide and become one. And we have seen it in terms of Aryanistic mythology. So I would say that modernity is not a world to be forgotten or left behind in its entirety. Why? Precisely because it is a world and every world will in part subsist in a new world. For the elements or ingredients of the world are not exactly equivalent to the world which is to be replaced. worlds as complete totalizations are ill-conceived. They don't exist. The transition from a totalized world vision to the detotalized one is often violent as it entails the unmaking or destruction

of the existing world on behalf of a new world. Yet new worlds do not arise ex nihilo. They always are revisions and recognitions or versions of what has come before, which is called the so-called old world or a world in the process of unraveling. Within the cognitive constructive task that we are talking about here, which is called world making, we cannot think of modernity as a world that can be merely replaced by a reintroduction of new narratives of enchantments and ancient myths and narratives of anti-modernity.

That vision of our world belongs to a version of the world that belongs to those who think that the only way out of the older world is by supplanting it with something thoroughly new to unseat its ethos with an entirely different one, as in replacing this enchantment with enchantment. It's positive and negative alienating forces of modernity with myths of a world indiscriminately antagonistic to alienation technology in all their shapes. But a world that ought to be reassembled from the ruins of modernity can never be an enchanting one at this point. For the thoroughgoing critique of modernity,

if we are actually talking about what it means to survive post after modernity, to criticize and become concretely conscious of its debacles and tribulations, That sort of task is predicated on an advance in the critical field of modernity itself, whereby the exploitations and failures of modernity are exposed not by a recourse towards a pre-critical framework such as magic and proto-logical worldviews, but by resorting to a critical framework

born out of modernity itself. It is the critical ethos of modernity understood as a cognizing and recognizing task at once that endures within a world made and remade anew. The notion of myth at this point can and should only capture the cognitive-recognitive labor of modernity, whose final goal is the disenchantment of all worlds, itself included, on behalf of an infinite deracination and drift, a labor, which is the collective exploration of reasons overcoming of its own self-imposed limitations and

obstacles, and which represents fundamental meaning of history through the nature of the human, through which the nature of the human is being concretely determined. To move towards such a new, basically, to reinvent the idea of myth, post-modernity in a Leotarian rational sense, entails to renegotiate the very nature of myth. and to leave the idea of myth as clunky as it was simply as the un as a collective subconscious

simply the symptom of symbolic forms a la kazirer even though i have a great respect for kazirer on this point is to go to a square one go back to a square one This, I would say, the notion of myth re-mythologizing a world according to the disenchanted world in which we are inhabiting and only from which we can make a solution for ourselves, is tantamount to a notion of progress, which is no longer completely abiding by the concept of the human.

Precisely because the concept of human was never given to us in advance. So that sort of the conjunction of a concept of humanity that is, that, that is totality has not given in advance to us. Its nature has not been all given in advance to us. And this notion of progress, which is simply the exploration of the limitations of the concept of humanity, constitute the very nature of history. And any sort of myth-making should go through this sort of hard labor's tribulation. Otherwise it would be just lip service

to the sort of dogmas, pre-critical dogmas that we should grow out of them. And we haven't yet. Thank you. Thank you, Riza. Now, before we start from our first topic to discussion, I want to notice to our dear audience that your questions you may ask below the window with actual stream. So if you have questions, you may ask it in Russian or in English. So our first big topic after this short presentation of three different view of how myth-making actually works which functions do it have and then

what will be the myth and the manifesto actually how do myth-making and the imagination allow us to create radical concepts for transforming the world into better place to live where with this function of myth of today of modern myth to recreate this world uh it's our first topic and our first question to discussion and i think i will give floor first of all to sarah and then and then to resign federica if you're good with it thank you um i think there's a image that i'd like to put up is that possible

sorry i think there's an image that um i asked to be okay image okay um perhaps while you find it i'll just um say that in the um pre-event discussion we talked about the instrumentalization of myth um and i really agree with razor that there needs to be more specificity about what we're talking about when we say myth um perhaps in a very loose sense

in response to this question the notion of a narrative myth is narrative that can have a transformative effect in the shared reality um and then to use another definition of myth as the kind of falsehood um the reality that we've been burdened with and is now clunking and glitching before our eyes is that there is this one stable reality which is a consensus reality in which things make sense. And I think that's really falling apart now. So the image that I wanted to show actually was a photo of graffiti that was taken at some protests in Oakland, California, following the shooting of Jacob Blake, who is a 29 year old black man

by a police officer in Wisconsin. And this graffiti said, no cops, no jails, no linear fucking time. And this was in the context of the huge wave of protests in defense of black life last year and the surrounding interest and activism around abolition and transformative justice. So there's an abolitionist in Hila called Tiffany Lennoy who tells us abolition is non-linear. That's why we're able to change the present while living in the future now. So basically to very briefly expand on abolition and TJ, where there's an instance of harm, abolitionists will reject a carceral justice model of the crime and punishment dyad and instead

actively seek to build new models of preventing and healing harms such as community accountability processes. Here we go. So this is an example of creating new narratives and putting them into practice in the current order of things from a perspective where speculation and imagination are brought together with an emphasis on structural change and it's also a method of time travel a practice of embodying science fiction which i think you know i'd be interested to hear what you think about this that in the current moment i see science fiction as a place in which new mythologies are made by refusing these either or categories of myth or reality by creating new worlds and spatio-temporal configurations in their place but at the same time it's not fantasy which

is completely rejecting and eliding the particular arc of technological modernity which has made science and technology a reality thank you thank you result do you have anything to add on this topic yes uh i mean thank you so much star uh magnificent as usual uh so what i have here is that uh what i i mean federico can talk about this more uh than me i mean really i think that uh we need first first thing we should get it right myth does not stand against reason i mean this is uh at this point in philosophy

should be should be actually myth-making is part of a theory of mind right uh so we have uh one of the things that when we we think about the old idea of commentaries about myth-making and myth the myth always has always have had in fact a very uncanny almost unhealthy relationship with the word right the word is really the origin of the world right you get this in the religious context of mythological basically sagas from sumerians from egyptians to sana harib of noah syrian empire elamite so

and so forth bible so the world and the world this sort of entanglement between world word and the world it's really the origin of myth and that's also where it is where we need to actually put our emphasis as whether myth is against reason or not whether myth is um proto-logical or anti-logical, right? I would say that it is more on the side of the former. It's a protocol logical. And that actually gives us a different form of idea of how we can go on and think about myth-making in our age.

As a world in which its logic is shrinking, we need to make a myth that can instantiate a world whose logic overcomes the logic of our own, the world in which we inhabit, right? So these are the certain kind of stuff that we need to pay attention to. But ultimately, I would say that this idea of that has been always at the center of the discussion and debates about mid language, collective consciousness and subconscious so on and so forth.

It needs to be explored even further. The idea that the world is partially or completely constitute the world. And that's where basically the idea of myth comes from. If that is the case, really, as Kazirer and so many of the people have talked about, then if that is the case, if the world partially or completely constitute the world, then for us to understand the mechanisms of mythologization, myth-making, perhaps we should start to shed more light on the origin of the world,

on the origin not in the metaphysical sense but in the in the function in the in the global function of language of how it works right as an organ of reality uh i mean max miller has this idea that uh with regard to myth the myth ultimately is nothing this is his coat but the darkening shadow which language throws upon thought it is mystifying indeed this shadow should appear ever as in aura of its own light should evolve a positive vitality and activity of its own which tends to eclipse what we commonly call the immediate reality of

things so that even the wealth of empirical sensuous experience pales before it. So if really this is the case, that one of the things that we should do, and ultimately in this modern age, and we are talking about myth-making amidst the ruins of modernity, epistemological, ontological, metaphysical, historical, so on and so forth. If that is the case, one way to actually shed light on on myth, its functions and mechanisms, origins, is to shed light on what gives its actual power, the word language. And the thing is that we have, we have disenchanted the world,

but yet we have not disenchanted language far enough thank you reza and now i give a floor to federico yeah and thank you reza and and sarah um really very interesting i i would like to concentrate on one thing that i'm not entirely sure i i share which is the idea of myth making i also on the basis of what I was saying earlier, I don't believe the myths are made. Myths emerge from reality themselves. Mythologies are made, so discourses around the mythical emanation phenomenon of reality. But the mythic quality has to do with the revelation of reality itself. I'm thinking, for example, if you think about archaic religions in Greece, for example, Apollo, Athena, they were

revelations of reality itself which were recognized by by the greeks and then mythologized in a way like wrapped in a particular narrative but in themselves they came from the world they didn't come from the from the mind if you think about archaic mentality for example which is very little theoretical doesn't have much theoretical depth the archaic mind is much based on observation on empirical observation of reality even the mythic figures have to do with empirical observations of reality including Apollo and Athena. Now I chose Apollo and Athena in particular in this case because both of them over oversee rationality. They are the two gods of rationality in different ways. Athena more in the in the projection form so to say Apollo more in the in the protological form so in setting the ground of order and both of them I think were recognized mythically in that

the archaic mind that was witnessing reality witnessed the emergence, the coming up of the logical rational discourse from something or out of something or in contrast to something that was beyond it. This grotesque mixing of the two gave the form of Apollo and Athena that speak reason. So in this sense myths are not made, they are recognized. Once again like mathematics, is not made, it's recognized. Mathematics doesn't have inventions, only has discoveries. I think the same is in terms of myths. So when we talk about a projectual quality about myths, I don't see them as tools in any possible way. I mean, and when we try to associate myths with projects, for example, political projects, I think we are talking about propaganda or about fantasies

or about rhetoric interestingly in ancient greece it was noted how the decline of myth of mythical revelations coincided with the coming up of rhetorics the two kind of philosophy took the place of sophia rhetoric took the make the place of an awareness of myths so the two things i think are separate i mean first of all i don't believe it's possible to to make myths uh and secondly i think that they don't lend themselves in any way to a projection to a project as such if we want to have a project around myths i think the only possible project has to do with um educating the hearing and the seeing to be recognizing within reality an aspect which is

mythic in itself that one i can see as a project around myths beyond that i'm not sure um in a way if you think about how a real kid talks about orpheus for example and it says that orpheus to his listeners created a temple inside their hearing and that is i think the only type of possible project around myth making just a final comment about um the the practice of mythology today as i've tried to describe it the practice of relating to myths in antiquity and especially in archaic antiquity used to take very public forms so there was a collective awareness so to say like there was a collective performance of witnessing the revelation of the divine in the contemporary world because of different metaphysics so because of a different understanding

of what reality fundamentally is there tends to be a more private experience of this thing and so in that sense the mythology in the sense of talking about how reality reveals itself to us in this mythic form tends to have more private forms um when it's when it's pulled into the public in the kind of political realm it it tends to be a misnomer when we when we talk about these things mythically thank you uh thank you for the weekend thank you all for sharing sharing your ideas about myth-making of the manifestation and i actually have a question in this point of our discussion question to all of you i think we find like one of them important important point of our discussion

the um conflict between myth as something that invented actually or myth as something that emerged What's the difference in this point? May you explain more clearly the difference between the concept of myth as invention or creation of something and of myth like imagination as you Federico said. It's a question to all, probably Reza, you want to start? I want to start so that Federico actually utterly disseminates my answer. I actually quite liked Federico's response, but I would say that, look, this is why actually we should distinguish

different concepts of myths and rather than abiding what by one concept of myth and defending or attacking it we have to distinguish various concepts of myths that have been going around and people have been smuggling them we have been smuggling them for for too long so So myths, absolutely, they cannot in their symbolic form, in their symbolic collective form cannot be made, right? They are spontaneous, you know, they cannot be made. But that doesn't mean that myths cannot be made. In a different concept of myth, myth as vehicles, as vehicles, political myths, so on and so

were vehicles of basically historical mobilizations, intentional historical mobilization by a specific people who have a certain kind of monopoly over certain kinds of myths. And we have seen it from, I don't think that we should talk about Greek culture. Greek culture is an upstart culture when it comes to Sumerians, right? the first isle of Crescent, when we should talk about Akkadian and Sumerians. And absolutely, I would say that the myths in a certain sense have the spontaneity, come and coalesce regardless of ideologies.

But then that's precisely because the conjunction, the entanglement between the word and the world, myth and language, the people begin to start the salient and tacit elements of a particular myth, whether it's to their advantage or not. The greatest myth ever invented, Arianism. and yet it is the most bogus myth of all right it has been so akamani dynasty and before even akamani dynasty in iran plateau where darius and cyrus the great call themselves of arian people

people, yeah, Aryan people, really, we don't know anything about what these people are. Simply Aryan people at that point means people of what would have called people of language, of an original language, of some common language, simple as that. There is nothing more to it, Right, but then we see the transition of this sort of myth-making as a vehicle of political enterprise and political enforcement in a materialist sort of way during the Sassanid era against the Arabs, against anything the non-Persian Romans, so to speak.

I mean, all Romans, sorry Federico, are basically of this sort of people. Like there are non-Ariens, you know? And then you see that the further mobilization of this sort of myth by people like Govino, right? The ultimate racist French commentator on all of this. commentator on all of this. And then Shelgel, other kind of Germanic things, and then all of them come in a very critical moment in history. Arianism, right? Which is completely actually

very different from what Aryanism of Iran is, because Iran simply means Aryan dakunam, the nest of Aryans. But so I would say that we need to be very careful about when we say that, well, basically myth is not myth-making and myth is always collectively coming emanating from a certain and kind of non-agentic groundwork. I think that they are both true, but I would say that going for the former, that myth can never be mobilized politically,

or can be mobilized, but myths cannot be made. I think risk the historical, lessons that we have learned from the very people who have made, or rather accentuated existing myths and mobilized it toward their ends. This is why I would say that myths are never neutral. Even though in their origins are neutral, as Kazeerer would have said, interconnectedness at best, holes making new holes out of this universe such that we can find our place in that but i would

say that myths absolutely not neutral nor innocent and we should not normalize that innocence for myths it is a recipe for disaster thank you rita sarah or federica do you have anything to add um there's a lot to respond to um i agree that myths can be so when i pointed to that image i wasn't saying that it was an example of myth making but more the way in which a dimension of myth that um is otherwise more far away from us in our mundane daily lives that such as time travel or an experience of time which is not clock time and that can be a window into imagining everything

else differently um but then there are so many things to respond to as i said firstly the connection between the word and the world which makes me think what kind of word um is it a written word is it phonetic written in a phonetic alphabet is it written in a pictographic alphabet or is it spoken if it's written and it's phonetic then it is progressively more disembodied which connects to perhaps an idea of enchantment which i think that we should also dig into but before i go there and just to respond to what federico said and maybe try and kind of bring them together in some way that do myths emerge or are they made um i think that there's

something here which makes us uh which demands that we think about um again a philosophy of language are words animate do they have potency why should words be disenchanted further um and this thing about i suppose disembodiment and the way in which a certain kind of word or alphabet can uh precipitate that like a kind of increasing logocentrism which i suppose is something that we connect with the age of reason um but yes so when we think about uh mis-enchanting reality or dis-enchanting them i think we need to look at how we are understanding something as enchanted or not so this is where the language comes in so in our pre-chat we talked about david

abrams and his work that puts sensuous embodied knowledge in relation to enchantment which i roughly define as a sense that the world around you is living and in connection and perhaps here it's better described or better referred to by speaking about its opposite so i thought of camus mythos isifus when you were talking about reason raiser that um in the mythos isifus the human is confronted by the unreasonable silence of the world and that is perhaps um an example of modern disenchantment so his book the spell of sensuous is this kind of classic of ecological thinking about the encounter between the human and the non-human world and it's trying to understand what it is about our perception that makes the world seem more or less enchanted and so basically

to cut it short a pictographic or an ideographic alphabet gives more of a window into the world which is non-human and is animate and is alive and that for abrams gives a more uh enchanted sense of the world so this idea of whether myths are made or whether they are already existing perhaps it's a matter of attunement as you say federico i think that's what you said um and then this question of uh political mobilization yes uh arianism is one very dangerous myth as is patriarchy but then the myth of patriarchy is the one that does divide language up into various forms of validity basically or um just in a very kind of material sense what we have as knowledge is passed

down and reproduced in a particular way and so oral traditions in which myths would have first been transmitted to carry various forms of knowledge no longer really exist among us thank you federica do you have anything to add uh yeah i think it's very interesting uh what both of you said and i was fascinated in particular by the the reference to arianism um it kind of started making me think in a way um about the the mythic quality of the question of of the arians in the way in which it is used usually um i believe that the the way in which arianism is is utilized is usually um a metonymy to mean us so for example it's the arians are always us it's never them

whoever uses the trope of the arian always signifies the arians comma us against them usually this is a typical thing that is done by many tribes when they call themselves the alemanni all the men or when they call themselves inuit the humans we are the humans fundamentally so the arians are the true humans which means us now usually it's the nobles noble humans yeah Yeah, etymologically means, yeah, or you could say in Greek, the virtues, the one who has the virtuous. Yes, for the aristoi. But now this experience of the us is in itself a mythic revelation. There is a revelation of the us, of the me. Okay, so the experience of somehow feeling the identity,

feeling the identity of being something, being somebody that is specific and that is me, that I recognize as mine. This is a mythic experience in that you have a linguistic layer in which I can call us by name, me by name, and the ineffable experience of darkness out of which this us emerges. Now, you can find this, for example, you can find this mythic experience of the us, of the being Aryan, developed in two different ways. And it depends how you mean us. If you mean us indexically, or if you mean us taxonomically. Indexicals are words like here and now. if i say it my here is here your here is there and that's no problem indexical is like this pen this pen is this pen whoever says it is an objective thing that stands by itself

now the religious way to to say us as in the mythic way myths are part of religions let's not forget this it's like sometimes like talking about yoga as a sport myths have to do with religion so the the myth the religious way of understanding the us the the revelation is indexical in the sense that the god of individuation, the Adam in monotheism, for example, the first true human, is in us, acts through us, but is not reducible to us. So, for example, in ancient Greek mythology, whenever you act, it's the god that acts through you, but you don't say it was fully me, I coincide with Athena that acted through me, so I'm the only taxonomical human there is here. It's Adam that is working through me.

So you see this is an indexical way. When it goes taxonomical and it says, oh, us is just specifically us, and the God is not acting through me, but it's me. It's fundamentally truly me and only me. Then you have blasphemy. This is blasphemy. And from blasphemy comes propaganda and politics as it uses mythology in that particular way. that kind of like full appropriation of the thing of the myth so in this case i was still contend that yes it is true that there could be a blasphemous use of myths in the sense that there is a blasphemous mythologization so a blasphemous retelling of the myth in a way that can be completely twisted but in itself is like um it's like yoga being reduced to a sport it is a it is a uh you know it is a problem but it's not a problem with yoga itself it's not a problem with

myths themselves it's a problem of bad practice and in mythic language you would say it's a problem of blasphemy uh thank you federica i i think we may just uh it's pretty interesting and serious topic that we may discuss like eternally but we got a question from our chat that actually reflects the next question that uh i want to ask you and reminder to our dear audience if you want to if you want to ask a question if it's possible uh by the forum near the near the stream actually not below but left uh so the question is question from uh from arsini uh question about how we may

deval everything then we what we speak about now to our everyday life how the new myths is used or activated in real social life because uh it's very important to explain how the form of old myths new myths myth as an explanation or myth as an political myth myth of the propaganda working in our social everyday life and i want to add to these questions two important points from me first point is how mythological thinking may resist the disintegration of reality on a global level and on level of everyday actions of our today world and second point from me it's about the urban legends and

city mythology how from your opinion it's actually work and why the urban legends are so different from the previous myth so it's like uh three questions and um three questions to all of you actually probably somebody want to start sarah may interrupt there i thought i i there's too many questions i i lost them first question three questions first one about how we made well all theory on the practical level how new myth working in our everyday life uh then second question about mythological thinking

and resistance of disintegration of reality on the global and the local level and third actually my own question about the modern urban legends what how they differ from the old form of myth why they actually exist and how they work so these two questions i think by going first i basically i'm going to try maybe one of those and then hand over so um and i think that this relates to the previous block of discussion about uh whether myths are made or whether you can tune into them in some way because say that the great motorcycle trip as ursula le guin put it in one of her essays i think it's a non-euclidean view of california or something she says that westernized

modernity has been a big yang motorcycle trip as opposed to um the paradox of what a yin utopia could be and and so against this kind of linearity and uh yeah directionality she proposes that side trips and reversals are precisely what minds stuck in forward gear most need so um there is not necessarily to me about whether something is made or um already exists but maybe we can just step sideways and rethink for example not so in the mode of technological myth but twist or flip what the myth of technology is so in her in ursula k-leguin's essay the carrier bag theory of fiction she explores the problem of technological mythology which she calls the linear progressive

times killing arrow mode of the techno heroic and and so she basically proposes a different an alternative theory of technology and the human development of tools so instead of the big killing stabbing hero a phallic hero's weapon she says that it's the humble container the sack of oats or the sling to carry the baby or the shrine that holds whatever is sacred as being the greatest invention of humans and so it's striking to me that these are you know domesticated feminized tools of reproductive labor and that leads me to this notion of uh everyday life and therefore narrative and uh yeah something about how narrative doesn't also have to be so linear and directional

in everyday life so the embeddedness of mythology is something that i think exists still in lots of different cultures other than westernized mythology where for example the i-ching is at once a mystical divinatory tool that was based on esoteric knowledge of cosmic and mythic forces but at the same time it was used for statecraft and questions of governance and at the same time the principles underlying the I Ching are inseparable from a practice of traditional medicine and also practices such as Qi Gong and then also in the in Aboriginal Australia or some not to flatten it but there are cosmogonic mythical songs which are maps that carry

knowledges of how to navigate vast areas of land what is called the labyrinth of invisible pathways which meander all over australia and are known to europeans as dreaming tracks or song lines and to the aboriginals as the footprints of the ancestors or the way of the law um so i think that this points back to um the animacy of language and that in some cosmologies there's no there's not such a strong distinction between animate and inanimate and things can indexically be alive or not at any other time so i guess you know the thing about what the role of missus in everyday life is that it's also a technology if storytelling and songs are word-based technologies to carry

knowledge and culture and mythology is that in which the essences of words such as gods and heroes and once they take on their own independent lives so that's a method that does allow for for multiple realities to come together and be inhabited at the same time. Thank you. Reza, Federica? Sure. Thank you so much, Sarah. Great as usual. I think I want to say something before completely stopping to say anything, right? And giving the mic to Federico to finally end this session.

I want to say that I don't feel comfortable with this sort of stuff. We're basically, you know, there is what Sarah is describing is essentially the metaphoric origin of the myth, right? We're basically metaphor, as we know it is an extremely potent device, technology, so to speak, and where basically language goes upstream to meat and myth goes downstream to language. And we borrow stuff from one another, from this side and from that side of the river,

upstream and downstream, and we put it together. Otherwise, I wouldn't say that without this sort of considerations, which are fundamentally modern and critical, modern and critical, philosophical, and theoretical considerations, I would say they wouldn't be any sort of use to hold on to things like magic or myth. It would be, as I mentioned, if there is actually a reason to keep reason to keep the idea of myth. My apologies, Federico myth

making not in the sense that someone makes them it, but myth making as if there is a collectivity that goes into the constitution of the myth itself, right? Whether it is dark, undercurrent or not. I would say that that can only be we can only say that we can basically preserve it if it allows us to move from the certain kind of unexamined dogmas that we have had as empirical facts to new facts of experience which can challenge what we deemed as empirical and as facts in the previous world.

I think that myth at this point should only make that sort of function. a pincer assault on the old world. Like Tenet's movie, Christopher Nolan, moving forward in time and moving backward in time, from future to the past and past to the present, right? We need to do something like that. Otherwise, whenever we are talking about this source of stuff, I feel that we will eventually find ourselves in an extremely sordid intellectual atmosphere.

Politically and culturally so. but that doesn't mean that we have to uh inferiorize the role of myth no this means that we need to take the idea of myth seriously but a myth that is completely updated to the sort of world whether we like it or not we are living and there's a critical

Last thing would be, I would say that literally any source of myth, precisely by virtue of its metaphorical loadedness, needs to be, as I said it earlier on, needs to be distinguished, needs to be decanted into different compartments of what it means in terms of symbolic form, in terms of its potency for political mobilization, so on and so forth.

I feel extremely queasy to feel that we should just talk about no mythologies at this point without actually doing the groundwork. I would say that lacking the sort of groundwork that I think some of us are actually interested in simply lead into another sort of, this sort of charade of basically what I call the zombie inclusivity.

Basically magic is fine, animism is fine, inanimism is fine, this is fine, this is that fine, this is fine. Yeah, look, yes, they all need to be fine In what sense? In the sense that yes, they can all be part of the proto-culture from which we have come, or we have to analyze them. And not all of them are on the same rankings. And I don't want this whole idea of no mitology shetic to gain an ontological and metaphysical foothold. That would be complete disaster against the critical legacy from which we have come and to which we have a responsibility.

Thank you, Rosa. Federica, your comment? I think this conversation could last a very long time, also because we seem to be different viewpoints on many different aspects, of course, which have been beautifully put, each of them so far. far but um as i understand the question of myths um and of course the first thing that i want to clarify here is that i i think that there is a risk sometimes to to have the attitude of the last man as you see in niches zarathustra the one that walks through the museum of the world and picks a bit of animism here a bit of that there because it looks nice with my couch you know like that kind of like picking and choosing from from a shopping center myths are not that stuff Myths are not that kind of stuff.

Like religions are not that kind of stuff. Myths are revelations. They are revelations and thus they don't, although they come from outside, in a sense, they are imbued within reality, it's a way of reality to reveal themselves. They are not contained. They cannot be fetishized. They cannot be reified. You cannot put them into an object and then you consume that revelation. The revelation happens individually to a single person in the way the revelations do. It's a bit like love. One thing is experiencing it and one thing is consuming it into an object. The two are entirely different things. What kind of revelation are there? The revelation that reality is multi-dimensional. So the revelation, this is, by the way, this is to respond to the first question, what can we do in practice with myths?

The revelation that reality is multi-dimensional, that there is a level of language, the level of rationality, they're all true and legitimate. There are other levels as well, and they coexist in a coincidence of opposites that coexists. So all the different registers are legitimate, but none of them can reclaim the totality of the discourse. Now what does this do in practice if you have this revelation? It gives you freedom. Freedom because basically allows you to no longer identify with any particular layer to which other people usually classify you with, and freedom from the superstitious belief that the one layer of reality, for example, in contemporary world, the layer of language, which is the domain, the only one that is the totality of things.

And so if you fail in that one, if you disappear in that one, you've really disappeared. And so freedom from the blackmail of that particular blackmail. Now, how do you get to this kind of freedom? How do you get to the revelation? By paying attention, fundamentally, by paying attention to all the different, to the co-presence of things, to the blind spots within discourses, and realizing already what people call sometimes today the glitch. But the glitch as the ulterior, the beyond, which doesn't deny the entire discourse, but simply hints to the fact that beyond the discourse, there is something that is outside of all discourses. This is all very nice. However, the problem is how you get there. It's easy to say, just pay attention to things.

Yes, but how do people usually pay attention to things? How do revelations usually happen? If you look at, for example, mystical literature, you see that the first step to achieve a revelation is desocialization. Desocialization is, as Christ says in the gospel, you have no longer mother and father, husband and wife or children. So basically, you extract yourself from your social roles. You disidentify with your social roles. You get out of the being swallowed of the whirlwind of society and of the particular layer. How do you achieve that? How do you de-socialize today? And this is actually the only practice that you can truly do at this point. In order to get to the practice at the end, how it makes your life better, you have to go all the way back. And the starting point at the moment is rendering possible to de-socialize.

How do you do that? First thing first, fighting against work, for example. Fighting against the regime of work is the first step, I believe, to reopen the channel of a possible revelation. Fighting against the regime of nationalities, that's another one. Fighting against a particular understanding of the economy that tries to reify everything and substitute its own abstract values to everything. Political work in itself I see as conductive to mythological revelation, even though the two are entirely separate. It's a groundwork. Now, about the disintegration of reality, and I'll try to be as fast as I can. About the disintegration of reality, well, one thing that was interesting that I found in one of the comments by Reza was about what we leave to the next world.

And I'm also very fascinated by the idea of leaving ruins. And I also agree that worlds don't usually come up anew. One of the horrible things that were told in Christianity was Tertullian, an early Christian, used to say we are so new we will eradicate your old world of the gods everything will be a new now that is tertullary is tertullian was a trumpist fundamentally a trumpist of late antiquity and and i also believe there is a continuity between worlds the difficulty is that we don't know what remains in the next world we need to leave something and we know that something will remain we don't know what usually based on on experience what remains is chosen by them not by us and misunderstood and reappropriated so i think with the best to the best of our abilities one good thing would be to um leave to the next world a certain education of the gays that allows

them to have that freedom so like the understanding of reality as multi-layered in which no particular layer can advocate the the whole the absolute to itself and to conclude the urban legends well Well, urban legends are fantasies. Okay, so they're not myths, they are fantasies. They are interesting to the extent to which they reveal a lack. They reveal, there are compensatory forms. You know, like there is a lack for a feeling of, there's a lack of meaning fundamentally. There is a lack of meaning in reality itself. Reality is so perfectly closed today, and closed within language, that the one thing is missing. When language is entirely closed, it's full,

there is one thing missing, meaning. If you think of a dictionary, the one thing that is missing is within a dictionary, is sense. And so there is this feeling of a lack of something else, some other thing where meaning might lie. And so you invent these fantasies about God knows what, and the conspiracy theories and all that kind of stuff. These are symptoms, symptoms of a lack. In reality, of course, meaning comes from outside of language. By definition, it is the non-linguistic, the voice is the gaping hole of the throat through which the voice emerges, that is irreducible to the voice. So in that sense, urban legends as fantasies signal, however, to an interest. The problem is that this interest, without the conditions for de-socialization

that allow for the paying attention, that allows for the revelation and thus for the freedom, you know, like it will not be fulfilled. thank you we actually before we start uh start speaking about the traces that we actually live from modern making the traces we live to our uh turning generations which uh federica actually started before uh i want to ask two questions from our audience uh they are pretty connected uh they're pretty connected with each other first question is about uh how modern uh myth works as with new mediums because uh like the previous means the ancient one or the myth before them

before the 20th century was uh passed by voice and not writing down or recording most of all and now we have myths we have internet to be actually internet posts may become a myth or may become a viral meme something else do actually internet created created some myths and the second point it's pretty connected to the idea of internet or globalization or internet connection with each other it's actually can we can we reflect um on the connection between mythology and gender equality for instance projects like me too and so on that actually made it possible by these new mediums so the question of myth and new mediums and the the developed questions of

myth and new medium is the phenomena of me too and how myth may help or may not help actually uh to achieve a gender equality so it's two questions from our audience and actually we have like lots of uh good and interesting questions but we have not so much time. Yeah. So probably anyone want to start it? I'll say something very quickly about the internet question, which is that I think a lot of this thing about memes and whatnot can be,

I'll just refer back to Federico's answer about something that is more about a lack and signifying a lack. But what I do find interesting, not about Web 2.0, which is this hell of just shortening, tightening, more constraints on the ways in which we can talk to each other. It is what Federico might describe as the ongoing hell of capture by language, that's social media. But what's maybe more interesting is the internet that is coming, in which new configurations or emerging configurations of our own social formations interacting with new technologies such as VR, AR, and continuously existing metaverses.

Yeah, what's interesting there is that to see what forms of narrative are produced, which are non-linear, they're immersive and they're participatory. And so there could be new forms of communality and collective narrative making, which, yeah, it's basically different ways of being present together to share and to create and to hold and to swap knowledges that I think can open up maybe new ways of thinking about the trace in itself. Thank you. Probably Federico, you wanted something to add. Yeah, I don't want to take always the last position, which is the easiest, so you're responsible. Interesting questions, and I'm not a technologist, so I cannot comment with

maybe with sufficient understanding, but it seems to me that the question regarding the new medium is a question not so much about myths, it's a question about mythology. The difference, of course, being the myth are in reality mythology is the discourse around the revelation. So it's a mode of distribution of the mythology. So how does this revelation once it is put down into a narrative form that it is distributed. Now, this is fantastic, but the problem of distribution is that you have not, if you have nothing to distribute. So it's, it's like this enormous, like enormous highways when they are completely empty, because there was like a ghost town is an entire ghost town in which there's nothing actually to populate it. So the problem I think is, is not so much the potentiality of this distribution network

is what do you actually distribute in it? If according to my particular case, to my own understanding of what the myth fundamentally is, I see that we have these enormous highways and nothing to make run through them, except propaganda, rhetorics, fantasies, and all that kind of stuff, which has nothing to do with this, of course. The question of gender, I remain skeptical about the possibility, of course, of using myths projectually. So in terms of as part of the project, to use them as tools. However, it does have an impact, I think, a mythic revelation does have an impact in terms of understanding of gender, not so much in a political sense of, I believe that it's politics that leads to myths, not myth that lead to politics.

So the good ordering of the life leads to a good understanding and not the other way around. But in the sense of a mythic revelation and gender, well, it leads you to an indexical understanding of gender once again. So like not understanding it taxonomically as like, this is a woman, this is a man and so on and so forth, but to a transcending of genders in that particular form. So not so much in terms of gender equality, more in terms of transgenderism and queering of genders. In that case, yeah, probably yes. As a side effect, not as an intended necessary effect. And I don't think it should be used for that, but as a side effect, it does have that. so that you can be accompanied by the god or the goddess as in you can in you can be inhabited by

masculinity and femininity in a way that is not uh then you can you don't own masculinity or you don't own femininity you don't coincide with we were talking about it a moment ago um so this is how i think it relates to gender in particular the political struggle i think is a separate thing and it probably comes first but it's separate thank you for the recap result do you have anything to add uh nothing much uh i would say that well i mean obviously from from uh from a communist perspective when uh you say that all the this the technologies of distributions uh basically are ceased uh by whom right so i mean a good example of this in terms of uh the the kind of mobilization of

mythologies right discourse around mythologies is very much like netflix uh look uh so we have great uh uh film directors in the golden age of hollywood but basically more or less they are independent yes sure they are under uh you know the the constraints of the producer and so forth right producers are different from distributors right they can negotiate with you and they have always been doing that even for the worst but the thing is that we have arrived in an age of cinematography of film industry where the goddamn distributors are both the producers and the guys

who hire directors that is a recipe for disaster distributors should always be seized by the collective communist 101 the moment that coming that the channel of distribution sees by something other than the collective uh i would say that it results something like netflix mythology of culture if i may say so right an extremely sordid liberal american mythology for the white left for them to feel good about themselves after all these years absolutely under

my goddamn dead body. Now, coming back to the idea of lack, I wouldn't call this a lack. Of course, Federico and I can go after this. I wish he was here so we could share this on the and Sarah as well. Beer, wine, whiskey, going through that I wouldn't call this really a lack. I would say myth as a very carrying a very special form of ignorance. Why do I call it ignorance? You see ignorance is usually in an epistemological sense supposed to be neutral, negative, meaning it doesn't know anything about the facts. Its attitude toward

empirical facts or truth is neutral, simply ignorant of them, right? It's negative. But myth has something quite vibrant about this, about its own sort of ignorance, which is not really a lack of empiric of misunderstanding or understanding of empirical facts and rational truth is actually get excited by its own ignorance, such that that sort of excitement allows it to mobilize it toward a certain form of ignorance mitigation down the line, rather than truth discovery, ignorance mitigation. And ignorance mitigation is the

fundamental of what you might call to be a rational enterprise. So to to really distill and decant that ignorance mitigating power of myth, that sort of weird excitement about the sort of ignorance that i have and i can mitigate it is i think something that should be preserved accentuated and yes in left acceleration is since accelerated thank you uh thank you all and we actually have one last question which federica started to answer

before it's a question which uh make the line after our discussions the final conclusion of it which traces we will have the modernity remain for myth making for the next generation which actually we may remain for them and it's question for all of us and probably which myth they may create on the material that we actually made or which myth may emerge from this material that we leave federica maybe we started from uh started with you because you actually started to speak about this before yeah um yes i mean when talking about what will remain of modern

myth-making my first reaction of course to say there is no such no such thing so not very much the content is missing if we're talking about what remains of um modern fantasies then nothing by definition because fantasies disintegrate and propaganda modern propaganda also very little because propaganda sees becomes immediately obsolete as soon as the context the historical context changes like sci-fi. So in that sense of all that kind of stuff is usually associated with modernity and myth. So the myths about modernity or the myths produced by modernity, that stuff, I don't, I say it's not mythical in any way, it's fantasy and propaganda, none of it will remain. Something else probably will remain. So some aspects of what Reza was defining also as the

critical engagement with things, some of these aspects of course will remain, they don't fall into the mythic realm as such, they are discourses. So in a sense, they are the development of particular discourses within the rules of the discourse itself. And in that instrumental sense, so like logic, for example, in the way in which it operates is an instrument, they will remain as instruments and so as infrastructures. Usually, I have to say, when we look at the collapse of civilizations, infrastructures are the first thing that usually goes so the chances are that probably of that not much will remain but not because it's not worthy but simply because it tends to be the first thing that goes um now if we if we were thinking about something that might somehow support them

and support the the the survival of these infrastructures such as criticism such as logics as we understand it such as the scientific discourse is grounding we it's a good is a good way to ground infrastructures into something outside of them. If we look at the collapse of civilizations once again, the usual way in which things were survived is if they were grounded into a sacred realm. So usually a sacred actifist tended to survive better even if they had an infrastructural necessity, even when they were misunderstood. They were misunderstood to be somehow sacred that they tend to be preserved for misunderstanding. How do we ground these epistemological fields well we have to ground them with something that is outside of them of course that grounds them by definition so we have to operate on the limits of them so we have to work

around the limits of logics around the limits of criticism around the remits limits of knowledge what is there around the limits of knowledge there is specifically what nicolas of cusa renaissance philosopher called the doctor ignorancia of learned ignorance and here is exactly when we're talking about myth once again working on the idea of of of ignorance uh is is fundamental to be able to preserve the discourses because it grounds because it gives them a shape and a limit now how do you work around the the the idea of ignorance in a way that is not superstitious so uh denying that you having superstition is denying that you are ignorant then it's affirming that you know everything okay this is what superstition

by definition is but also that in a way that is not entirely silent and says we know absolutely nothing is that in between working on attuning once on hearing and seeing to the mythic revelation i think paradoxically can ground rational discourses because it operates around their limits by giving some form of connection, like a bridge between what is said within the discourse and what is excluded from the discourse in a way that doesn't say, since there is something outside of the discourse, then the discourse is false. But say the discourse as a whole in which there is a hook that hooks it to something else, that act of hooking is the mythic revelation. And this, I think, sets the foundation on the one hand for the survival of the critical discourse,

and on the other hand, also for a non-superstitious discourse. Now, thinking about ruins, this interesting cooperation between people that work within the discourse, the people that work around the limits of the discourse, at the moment is kind of lacking in the sense that there is either the old opposition between rationality and irrationality okay that's the old school opposition or which is even worse a pseudo mishmash of irrationality and irrationality without really understanding what we're talking about and it is like that form of fantasy okay that kind of like the fantastical element that is sold as a dealing with the outside of the rational and so like the scientist has this kind of like fantastical dreams uh a bit weird and that it's like somehow mythological to them

and and then like they think that by by dealing with this fantasy elon musk is a typical example of this by dealing with these fantasies they are tapping into the unknown okay this is first of all it's but also it doesn't in any way help to preserve that particular discourse it discredits it entirely and it discredits it entirely especially to the eyes of somebody in the next world as in the next configuration of sense who will have no particular sympathy for what is old to them we will be old and by saying we will be old we will be as old as gilgamesh we will be as old as the ancient greeks as old as the aztecs to the present the past is all equally old okay and that but that this way of mishmashing just will make it look like a fraud always entirely in the first place so i believe in a like a like a good old scholastic of the middle age i believe in an

orderly uh kind of a cooperation of the of the religious and the scientific work thank you thank you federica uh sarah um the question was which traces will remain modern myth making um i mean i'm gonna keep this brief because we have one minute and there are whole vistas that we have not touched upon together including you know what is an archetype these things and so i guess what remains i think federico's definition of myth as revelation and essentially a gnostic experience is something that takes place within the body and the reason i keep going on about the body is because you know i thought oh i'm going to be talking about three

philosophers i'll reach for sadie plant who said that um you know this flight from the body is the greatest trick of western patriarchy and going back to socrates and um yeah it's in the body in which gnosis happens but also where perhaps some of this groundwork is happening the withdrawal of senses and de-socialization is number one in uh the practice of yoga and that is again something that cultivates the body which is also a microcosm of the bigger cosmos and so when for example external uh infrastructure is falling apart what kind of spiritual infrastructure do we have um that could perhaps last and carry over into the next world or what traces will remain

um and then finally just quickly uh to mention that epigenetically we also do pass on the material trace of things that happen um mythically perhaps thank you and brother your uh final statement thank you so much um thank you everyone um so uh two things um one. I think that what will remain, I would say that this question asks us too much. And actually compels us to commit the sin of bunching this stuff together without any sort of in this

critical discrimination i would say that um for me any sort of myth as i said it on at the beginning uh needs to be within the continuation of the enlightened project and within that enlightened project as I have tried to say that I'm not really proponent of a sort of kind of like enlightenment project where basically reason is always in a clash with unreason and this sort of stuff you get in the earlier on romanticism of the project of enlightenment no but what I would

want to say that essentially three words that are important to me humanity history and reason in the sense that reason should always underline the limitations self-imposed limitations of the human and in doing so also underlines and highlights the self-imposed limitations within them within the edifice of myth but that is not actually happening within

the edifice of myth we cannot talk about how myth functions what can remain of it how we can go on about it so on and so forth unless on unless and until we have inhabited a position which is peculiarly that of enlightenment a critical position so to speak by enlightenment here understand that i am not endorsing white dude sort of enlightenment after all i'm a middle easter i'm i i think that there are sorts of alternative histories of enlightenment so this is why i'm

talking about that that sort of enlightenment the core of enlightenment would be how how we can make narrations about our limitations and our obstacles within this age, here and now critically understood obviously that sort of uh question uh does not at least on the paper does not uh lend itself uh

to the organ of meth but nevertheless i think that's uh a narrative can come out of that A potent narrative can come out of that in the sense that how modernity, how rationality, how reason in a collective sense can learn its own limitation and obstacles. And in that, it can coincide with the ultimate truth of myth. That every myth that has come and been supplanted by another one has been spontaneously taken root from the edifice of myth itself.

that myth ultimately is the concrete overcoming of its own dogmas, of its own ignorance, right? As I mentioned, it is a very special, excited, collective, and necessary form of ignorance, especially in the sense that it can mitigate itself. And ultimately, when we look into the age of reason, if there is such a thing, rationality and with that,

the fundamental concepts of personhood, agency, humanity, so on and so forth, should also adopt this sort of attitude. that we are not gaining knowledge. Essentially, even though we do, but it's not the main focus of mother. That is not we are not gaining knowledge about who we are. Essentially, we are shedding our ignorance. We are mitigating our ignorance. That the idea of myth with that modernity, Ultimately, as the formal realization, formal and conscious realization of the mechanisms

that went into myth is the great age of unlearning. Unlearning is slavery, unlearning biases, unlearning dogmas. Rather than learning, rather than this whole idea of that accumulating facts. The great age of unlearning is yet to come. I think that that is the myth, that we need to create narratives for it. By any means possible. Whether we have to invent gods. or necromantize bring old elder gods back in the shapes of the humans as ancient eastern

religions have all have always been doing right you know the greatest way to show that all gods are death is by practically showing it and what is that sort of practice by you becoming God itself but not as objects of religion but as objects of philosophy thank you Riza and thank all of you to come today and to have such interesting and pretty difficult discussion because we have very important and close to our everyday life topics which are

actually have very different points of view and me personally will think this night and probably the next night about these discussions and the conclusions idea that actually starting to grow in me. So I think it was pretty interesting and pretty, pretty important discussion. Thank you. Thank you all for coming and thank audience to being with us. And I personally want to thank the organizers teams of New Now Project. And now give a floor to Anna. Thank you all very much. Right, so I guess I'm just gonna sum it up in a few words.

Thank you, Alexander, for beautifully putting this conversation together. Thank you to all of the three speakers, really very interesting and out of the box conversation and three interpretations of contemporary mythologies of neo-mythologists. It's been really, really interesting. Yizani Garastani, author and philosopher Sara Shin, publisher, curator, writer, and Federico Campagna, author and philosopher. Thank you very much again. And I personally look very much forward to actually re-watching and re-listening to this discussion once again. I would like to remind our audiences that on the program website,

the video of this discussion will appear in just a couple of days, so you will be able to re-watch it once again. And also a reminder to our audiences that also on the website you will find a list of carefully selected supplemental materials to this discussion that could help you in your self-guided immersion into the topic of today. So please all tune to www.newnowbiomanage.com and stay tuned to our news. Coming next, basically in several weeks, we're going to have a second session, second discussion of the new now program, which is going to be based around the theme of mental health and will take place on October 14th.

Again, please stay tuned and see you all online. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Thank you.