Read on Twitter
Culture has three phases:
The Mythic: the imaginary is incorporated into the real and the “self” is incorporated in the “world,” whose ontology includes mythic beings; Gods, monsters, spirits, and is subject to magical interventions and alterations of myriad kinds
The Mythic: the imaginary is incorporated into the real and the “self” is incorporated in the “world,” whose ontology includes mythic beings; Gods, monsters, spirits, and is subject to magical interventions and alterations of myriad kinds
The Mirror: the subject becomes aware of itself and its consciousness as a distinct entity. Society becomes aware of its myths *as* myths and questions their validity, aware of its culture as a political entity, aware of its customs as hindrances to one or another cultural aim:
This examination of itself, questioning its actions spawning from the Mythic phase, is akin to a teenager looking at herself in the mirror, disliking what she sees, and undergoing various techniques to alter it; some healthy, some not
The Real: the imaginary and the real have totally dissociated. Matters of societal administration focus wholly on material concerns, often in crises. Managing money occupies a vast amount of time and resources; previously mythic heroics become a matter of mere entertainment;
In this phases ontology becomes schizophrenic: people from other cultures infiltrate the dominant culture equipped with contradictory or otherwise wholly unrecognizable myths, some of which attract meme era of the host culture. Worse (cont’d)
Members of host culture begin to invent new hybrid mythologies. All of this because the “real” or the material plane has been desiccated of the imaginary and is now drab and devoid of any spiritual hierarchy. This void is then filled with the aforementioned foreign (cont’d)
Myths, invented myths, or entertainment. Likewise, manic participation in carnal endeavors, like sex and food, become not just a proclivity but an object of worship.
In all these phases we see shifts in literature: myth/epic poetry, to drama and prose poetry, to novels, television, film, video games and -worst of all - newspapers.
More to come as I continue to read Lukacs, Spengler, and Lacan
