Majorityrights Central > Category: Popular Culture

Neil Vodavzny

Having conscientiously done preliminary research for this part of The Maze on craftwork, I have to say that both Derek Whitehead and David Hamilton have a tendency to abstraction. Doubtless this goes with the territory, but it isn’t easy to sell such things except to the converted, it can be admitted. Some practical examples help to it make palatable, so I’ll attempt to weave those into the discussion.

Whitehead delves into the interrelation in Greek art of techne, praxis (production), and poiesis (world-founding). The work of art brings into being through a type of facility of production something imbued with the tension of spontaneity

Both the artist’s vision and the activity of production combine in the world-founding. It might not be recognized so much nowadays, but the aim of art is not expression. Up to the late Renaissance, it was more to do with apprenticeship, learning a trade then, after long years of strenuous graft, finally practising the craft and discipline of art-making.

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For those who might be put-off, initially or even ultimately, by the subject matter discussed here, I would refer to that old adage, that “if all you know well is one thing, then you really don’t even know that very well.”

Part 3 of the analysis of

John Shotter’s “Social Accountability and the Social Construction of ‘You”

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by Neil Vodavzny

Structural linguistics & semiotics are typically technical topics with an innate tendency to get complexified. The origins, from Greek drama and its Hegelian dialectic of ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’ are easier to comprehend.

While it’s easy enough to follow that people think in terms of binary opposites (human and animal, male and female etc), and that those structures permeate language, it’s subsequent extension in terms of semiotics or study of signs (notably by Umberto Eco) is another matter. The essential theory (Saussure) is that signs in language are arbitrary, and that they refer to external objects which give them meaning - language has a completely relative or arbitrary meaning in itself. Eco qualified this to the extent that, in his scheme, cultural convention denotes some signs as significant in themselves, ie, their content has cultural significance unrelated to the external world. He calls this iconic.

This is obviously useful enough for writing best-sellers (Name of the Rose), but there is also a sense in which iconic words are related to ‘non-culture’ - I’m taking a cue from developments in structural anthropology by Levi-Strauss. These words are again opposites, and they are words frequently associated with myth - sun and moon, life and death, male and female, predator and prey, marriage and solitude. These words are iconic in nature (there is the myth that swans will pair for life or ‘marry’) and cross-cultural. But, since they apply to nature as a whole, you can also say they are non-cultural. So, there are non-cultural signs (and portents) that occur in myth.

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by Neil Vodavzny

Myths are stories and, therefore, difficult to disentangle from the impetus to story-telling. To that extent, they are products of Man’s subconscious which itself is a more primordial product of nature. The question is what do myths mean, and second, how detached is material Man from his subconscious reality?

I don’t subscribe to the view advanced by Michael O’Meara (referenced here) that myths are there purely to advance some cause. That more or less is the wrong way round. Myths have a basis in action, whether it’s hunting, gathering or war, love and death. They comprise a variety of tropes, such as the ‘trickster’ - in tribal lore the scavenger or intermediary between predator and prey. The trickster figure is found far and wide, regardless of origin. Prometheus stole fire by trickery from the gods, for which he was bound to stone. The Norse god Loki as seen in recent film adaptations of Marvel, is a pretty complicated character forever oscillating between damnation and redemption.

The second question (how detached is modern Man) segues into pop-culture! The Beatles, being so iconic, might have taken on that mantle. Lennon maybe could be likened to a carefree trickster with shades of angst, while Ringo resembles more a buffoonish entertainer? In any case, the meaning is clear enough, so, to answer the second question, it depends if you believe in myths!

One of the problems is material Man is divorced from his subconscious because he doesn’t believe. If you accept that myths contain a truth that isn’t accessible to the ‘questioning’ mind, that is itself a critique of modernity. To quote the aforementioned John Clifton (The Comics Journal #90):

“The function of art isn’t to question our knowledge, that meagre corpus of answers we’ve managed to intuit.. rather the aim of art is to challenge the questions, to quell the analytical function from swallowing everything up in indecision and rationalising..”

Clifton’s point is that a comic-book fan or artist aims to produce the definitive version of Batman or Loki. The reason is that they’re archetypal figures; Superman the sungod to the dark dionysic Batman. Marvel’s schtick is for characters to represent forces of Nature, such as the Norse thunder god.

Now, you could take that a lot further. Nature, in King Lear, acts as a metaphor for his state of mind. In Japanese film-maker extraordinaire Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950), a bolt of lightning illuminates the archaic gate through pouring rain, stage for the epic re-telling of the forester’s story by, among others, a ghoulish medium (Kurosawa adapted the plot of King Lear in epic Ran). In The Seven Samurai, Toshiro Mifune’s hectic performance of the reluctant samurai, born of peasant farmer stock, could be said to represent the trickster. In one scene he gives an impassioned speech railing against both camps from his rough and tumble vantage point (see article here).

Do dreams and myths have a reality which is lost to modernity, and is this visible mainly in folkloric films and the superhero mythos? If so, it’s the reality of iconic forces and their corresponding folklore. We know that these forces exist, and that the storms are rising, and we choose to believe in our increasingly fake world of information-flows, genes, cyber-systems, money-markets, latter-day materialism. There seems to be two separate things going on. One is that we are accepting of ‘advances’. The other is that they are less relevant to the iconic forces we see around us, ie, we are detached from reality.

The problem (see previous article) is our creative, temporal world of artists with talent (pop-culture) is superimposed on a fake world of gadgets! ‘Temporal’ in this context means anything with a story, a rhythm, a meaning, a presence (I mean like a lot of classic comic art has presence), some creative impulse. The modern world is more and more of the present (not ‘presence’), probably for the reason there’s too much questioning and not enough simple action.

A peasant-culture is easy to identify in terms of very straightforward actions; threshing, herding, singing, dancing. These actions, as I suppose, have a certain mythic context. In a similar way, the American West with its cowboys, rustlers, lawmen and outlaws with conflicting values had a certain mythic context. That’s why what I see in folkloric fantasy has more realism than the fakery to which we are increasingly subject.

by Neil Vodavzny

Just a bit of background - perhaps as a result of experience as a comicbook fantasy writer, I’ve become convinced that mythical action is needed for reality to be ‘felt’ or meaningful. I’m actually quite serious about this. The world of action is the world of ethics. It’s the idea acting makes things more real, through cadence & song, ritual.

Action and myth
Myths provide a basis for reality because they contain action as ethical constructs. Pictorially, this could be Disney’s fairy-tale world - you have cuteness & at the same time hints of goth wickedness. It’s quite easy to extend this concept into Levi-Strauss’s structural ideas - Man the hunter, gatherer, harvester - but even without going into tribal lore, it’s apparent that a world without action is amoral.

I myself am a believer in structuralism, and it’s worth noting Levi-Strauss is dealing with myth in terms of action – predatory raptors, crows that scavenge, the prey, the harvest. You believe in myths because they seem sensible, not because of any formal proof. That’s the point - if the universe is an ethical construct predicated on action, this is why we have myths. Myths have reality because of their meaning; contrast latter-day existentialism – we live in a world which believes in ‘realism’, not sense & feeling, archetypes of heaven and earth.

This is a circular argument. Myth & action belong together because neither are capable of formal circular proof - instead they are ethical constructs. Basically, you have to believe in the presence of a moral grounding to reality, and myths are accessories to that belief.

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I coined the term Pervasive Ecology and hypothesized that it provides a context of the broadest utility that one may take in White advocacy because it may be universalized but not foundationalized.

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From the hubris of objectivism to the implicative force of Mulatto Supremacism

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The publicity machine for Angelina Jolie’s directorial debut, In the Land of Blood and Honey, has cranked into gear.  The line is that this love story across the ethnic and religious divide of the Bosnian war is stirring passions among those who lived through its three pitiless years.

Murat Tahirovic, who heads an association of ex-prisoners of war, added: “This film is deeply moving for the victims who experienced all of these things.

“It is completely objective and it really tells the facts of what happened during the war. She succeeded in telling the story of the whole war in her film and to show… situations that detainees faced - mass executions, rapes, [being used as] human shields and all the other horrors.”

But Branislav Djukic, who heads the Bosnian Serb Association of Camp Prisoners, had a very different reaction after seeing a trailer. He said that the film “is showing lies” as it depicts only Serbs as rapists during the war and called for it to be barred from cinemas in the autonomous Serbian half of Bosnia. “We’ll do our best to ban the film,” he said.

A commenter on the (at present, very short) thread writes:

A Croatian friend said something that made me think when I was over in Zagreb this summer, whilst discussing the conflicts he said “There are no good guys in this region.”

There is a sense in which the appreciation of the Serb role in the conflict as “no-good guys” but also as victims marks the break-down of the Establishment narrative.  Jolie is still telling it, of course, and she will win all the usual plaudits and probably an Oscar or two.  Coincidentally, another false narrative had an airing on BBC2 this evening.  But the “evil Serb” may not prove as enduring as the “evil Nazi”, and one small light on that may be thrown by the Telegraph comment thread.  So far, it’s hearteningly balanced.  I shall watch it with interest.