Myths Are Strange Attractors
Excerpt from Narrative Machines, 1st B&W edition available on Amazon.com
Leave aside the assumption — itself very questionable — that a rational life must be one without myths. Rational or not, life without myth is like life without art or sex — insipid and inhuman.
— The Silence of Animals.
The absolutely central role of myth in our lives shouldn’t need explanation or qualification. And yet it does, now more than ever. It will quickly become apparent why this is so.
It’s not even entirely clear what we mean by “myth,” unless we want to merely play at semantics. Myths would seem not only stories, for aren’t some stories myths while others are not? Maybe. However, the stories we tell ourselves and one another can become myths. All we can say for certain at the get-go is that myths collectivize our sense of self. It’s not good enough that you know a story, what’s important is that we both do, and can orient ourselves in relationship to our interpretation of it. There is no static, codified interpretation of any text, and the authority to hierarchize or prioritize an interpretation is the centralizing principle of tradition.
Outside the arcane framework of semioticians like Roland Barthes — who approaches the subject in his book Mythologies as one might prepare specimens in a museum — it is surprisingly hard to make a clean distinction between “story,” “narrative,” and “myth.” Maybe stories are simply myths that have not gained mythic resonance. That’s a frequently employed, but entirely vague way to say they are stories which haven’t yet sprouted from the seed of some collective belief. But fundamentally, myths, stories and narratives are made of the same stuff. Stories we tell ourselves, stories we tell one another, stories we tell about what those stories mean, on and on.
“Mythos” means “by mouth.” It is that which is spread, a fabric woven of memes. A “story” implies a series of events. A “narrative” feels somehow at once less and more grandiose, and might encompass either. These distinctions break down further in the hands of narrative theorists and semioticians, by level of mediation.1
So, stories — once they’ve become culturally embedded or repeated — are generalized into myths, and those myths serve as a kind of connective tissue for human societies. There may be some sense in considering myth a story that has been repeated, and solidified with that collective repetition and remembrance, which at one and the same time permutes with each retelling, in each mind.
Renowed scientist and professional crank Richard Dawkins defined “meme” as a self-reproducing and propagating information structure analogous to a gene in biology. Various theorists have adapted the concept of memes to other domains, mythemes, narremes, and so on.
In light of amplified reproducibility online — a more fertile culture for them to grow in — this subject has also expanded from social and pop science to political and even military import. A tutorial on “Military Memetics” presented at the 2011 Social Media for Defense Summit defines a meme as, “information which propagates, has impact, and persists,” going on to elaborate that it could include “words, ideas, symbols, icons, logos, tunes, poems, catch-phrases, fashion, technological processes (e.g., making arrowheads or gumbo), fables, religion, graffiti, images, novels, movies, narratives, culture (functional or dysfunctional; national, tribal, or organizational).”
Analysis of myth is, by virtue of this, inherently a discussion of memetics, though the inverse may not always be the case. As much as we may want to reduce memes to silly photos shared on Facebook, these are just the tip of a very large iceberg, and as this narrative research is better wedded to information and systems theory analysis, we can be sure there will be more to come. As one example of many, the Defense Advanced Projects Research Agency (DARPA) has supported a series of memetics-related projects with multidisciplinary teams from industry and academia.2
A meme suffices, at the very least, as a metaphor for any idea that has the potential to be turned into a social act. As with most metaphors, there are ways in which it is accurate, and ways that it is not. More importantly, what are the repercussions of the idea within memetics of the overlapping relationship of genes and culture? In other words, do myths play a role in our evolution, as a part of our mirrored relationship with one another?
We would like to provide a quotation from A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History on this subject, and then give commentary more aligned with our specific line of inquiry.
Darwin’s basic insight was that animal and plant species are the cumulative result of a process of descent and modification. Later on, however, scientists came to realize that any variable replicator (not just genetic replicators) coupled to any sorting device (not just ecological selection pressures) would generate a capacity for evolution.
The “best” in terms of survival depends in large measure on the conditions of the environment and all the possibilities that can be defined within that space. What we hold as virtuous may not be well suited, but the aesthetic appeal of virtue, to the extent that aesthetics increases adaptation in an environment, is one of the many ways we can re-determine value in a utilitarian sense. The attraction or repulsion we feel when encountering a certain facial structure, or from a pattern of symbols constructed — we might say — right out of the genetic intelligence of an individual, helps provide one of the key sorting mechanisms in literal and figurative mating rituals. Sorting is taking place when we are attracted to one book and not another, or one song and not another. When we find a common movie or favorite show with someone, there is a bond there. Think about the sorting and matching occurring when we recognize we’ve both seen the same movie, how we compare mutual reactions to the story, and how it might affect far more than mere entertainment.3 Shared referents are social currency. This is not, at the same time, a top-down sort of brainwashing, nor is it entirely fixed and embedded in indelible biology; it is instead the pre-existing conditions that structure all societies.
Sexual attraction recapitulates an inherent biological imperative to produce offspring; yet humans have in various ways circumvented or sublimated that drive, and so the “children” that can be born from the co-mingling of our ideas needn’t be physical or literal. Power structures are navigated and codified through externalizations of “sex” commodity value, often implicitly, and often in a sense which has no direct connection to sexual reproduction or intercourse. Artists are inherently mythically promiscuous. Nevertheless, the ideas that are most compelling to us, the art that attracts and changes us, seems to operate on the same principles that determine a mating selection process. This is part of the central role aesthetics plays in our lives — in politics, in identity, in religion, in economies…
Thus, we can use a genetic metaphor in regard to our myths. Read that again. Selection processes, sorting mechanisms, and other systemic relationships apply to the ways myths replicate, spread, feed, and die. And these myths have an effect on our own breeding, as well as the basic relationships we form with one another and the environment around us. They are a part of these feedback mechanisms.
Richard Dawkins independently realized that patterns of animal behavior (such as bird-songs or the use of tools by apes) could indeed replicate themselves if they spread across a population (and across generations) by imitation. (ibid)
This has clear repercussions in the study of the diffusion of language and culture. No matter how many layers of regress are added here, it is the relationship formed by a myth that gives it a defining motive. Here we see the undercurrent of all forms of human representation, a collective shadow that looms over societies, which we’ve taken to refer to simply as “myth.” This opens up the door for new approaches to mythic study which go far beyond what can be accomplished in a single introductory volume, but we are hopeful that more work will continue in this direction in the future. Not that the basis for this perspective is new to those familiar with the history of psychoanalytic thought. In 1901 Freud wrote the following in the Psychopathology of Everyday Life,
A large part of the mythological view of the world, which extends a long way into the most modern religions, is nothing but psychology projected into the external world. The obscure recognition … of psychical factors and relations in the unconscious is mirrored — it is difficult to express it in other terms, and here the analogy with paranoia must come to our aid — in the construction of a supernatural reality, which is destined to be changed back once more by science into the psychology of the unconscious. One could venture to explain in this way the myths of paradise and the fall of man, of God, of good and evil, of immortality, and so on, and to transform metaphysics into metapsychology.
And today we echo this sentiment, though it should be directed toward operative psychology in the world, rather than solely the mythologies of Psychology, the discipline.
The relationships myth allows for can be forged in many directions, both from the inside out (sense- and identity-making, defining who “we” are), from the outside in (placing ourselves in relation to one another, conceptualizing the structure and nature of the outside world, and our relationship to it), and they are also self perpetuating and, to an extent, self structuring or replicating (myths as heuristic, pedagogical, or mimetic device).4
Myths define who we are, defines where we are in time, what role we serve, and what the nature of that role should be. They ask “what if,” little realizing that fantasies are informed by the same impulses as the rest of the psyche, ideas which feed back directly into the material world — the myths of nations, of gods and kings, have had a direct effect on human history, as the genetic and ecological future is shaped by such phantasms, whether an institution erected after the fact, or as inspirational motive.
All our relationships with ourselves and with one another are composed of stories. Identity, especially, is grounded in myth. All that is represented, all that we form an opinion on, as we form an opinion on it, is in that process entering the realm of myth.
In I Contain Multitudes, a book by Ed Yong, the ecological structure of both microbiomes and ecosystems are laid out, and it is further observed that they behave according to similar self-determined rules. That is, the context of an ecosystem are dependent on every other component element of that system, and vice versa, and the same is true of the microbiome of our body and the billions of organisms that live within us, or we might more accurately say, which are a part of us. We are “always a we, never a me.”
The same point holds for myths. An analogy can be drawn between the relationship of the two (microbiomes and mythologies) in a manner of scale, emulating the Gnostic motto, “as above so below.” The observations drawn in the world of biogeography might be applied to the behavior of narrative as a part of an ecosystem. Further, as the Internet further acts as a representation of social networks, analysis can be assisted through elaborate real time modeling and analysis of the global narrative machine. We will deal with this in only the most general sense — we will explore many of the philosophical problems that are liable to be overlooked within any such purely analytic approach.
Myths are a primary selector for social motility, even if not a motive,5 as it’s not as if we read and enact our lives like a play. We are tugged and pulled by them, as they are simultaneously created by us and creating us, existing at all the junctures where our worlds overlap with one another. Myths arise as relationships, points of intersection. They present within a context, and it is in that context in which they must be understood. These relations are complex, and involve an open ambiguity about their power dynamics. The relationship between ritual object or work of art and individual audience member, the relationship between audience members, all occur within the framework provided by our myths themselves, especially the almost inaudible but ever-present whispers of the past.6
Finally, myths are strange attractors, the set of values toward which a system tends to evolve.
A body plan defines a space of possibilities (the space of all possible vertebrate designs, for example) … The formal study of these possibility spaces is more advanced in physics and chemistry, where they are referred to as ‘phase spaces.’
Their structure is given by topological invariants called ‘attractors’, as well as by the dimensions of the space, dimensions that represent the ‘degrees of freedom’, or relevant ways of changing, of concrete physical or chemical dynamical systems. …
In the biological and social sciences, on the other hand, we do not yet have the appropriate formal tools to investigate the structure of their much more complex possibility spaces. — A New Philosophy of Society, Delanda
This means that the tools of literary, psychological, and social analysis may all be set loose on our myths, with a recognition that this is considerably more than a purely academic issue. Beyond that, assuredly neurological and mathematical-linguistic models will continue to have a place, using multi-discipline approaches. It is an open discussion that could benefit as much from exploration of cognitive psychology as it can from the analysis of literary symbol or the direct experience of a shamanic ritual. This is not a science, but that doesn’t make our aims any less legitimate. And science can even provide us with some of our most useful metaphors.
What we learn in this domain may never be certain — many of the difficulties that lie between us and such a comprehensive systems theory approach to myth will be sketched out in the pages to follow — but it is nevertheless vital to do so. Not only in the hope of understanding ourselves, but more troublingly, because these semantic and sentiment systems are already at work in our social-technological ecosystems, our media, our political systems, our markets, all as a part of the ever-evolving web of language darting around the globe and bouncing off our satellites.
It is our objective to reassert the role of mythos in a nominalist pan-psychic materialism, which is to say that by denying universal reifications — in the sense that souls or political parties, gods or spirits or even minds refer to an essence which itself exists in the world — we can still affirm the existence of common narratives. Like the poststructuralists, we only need to drop an appeal to universality, objectivity, or even centralized coherence. If we are honest, this is already the state of affairs in the world, and it is not one from which there is any acceptable return.
We hope this re-appraisal of myth leads us to new ideas and questions which none of us would have formulated on our own. It is a group endeavor and benefits the most from the interaction of minds in the commons. What it becomes is in all of our hands.
1 Those connotations are descriptive rather than prescriptive, with distinct meanings in formal or subtle ways, but functionally there is venn-diagram overlap and a high amount of ambiguity outside academic contexts, even if that is philosophically problematic. Throughout Narrative Machines, we will attempt to stick to using “myth” to refer more to the communal aspect of narratives, “mythos” to their communicability, “story” to refer to the personal dimension, and “narrative” as the over-arching structure. But the closer one looks the more they blur into one another, so this may prove an empty promise.
2 Epidemiology of Ideas (2006) Military Memetics (2006–2009) Social Media in Strategic Communications (SMISC) (2011-in progress) Narrative Networks (N2) (2011-in progress)
3 Economy as sex, representing social and material realities (compare the market behavior / psychology of the art world, to commodities, to blind speculation). There are always bound to be “realists” that think the model is the reality and behavior is driven by that image. This really puts a fine point on the infuriating and confounding issue of beauty as commodity, which contrary to popular opinion is not the product of capitalism, any more than beauty as innate preference in some way began with global trade. Capitalism merely emphasizes the fungibility of such commodities.
4 For example, a traditional motif for myth as pedagogy appears in folklore such as Frau Perschta, Krampus, or Saint Nick, winter tales original told to teach children discipline. When this is attempted by the state, for instance as is explored in the BBC article “Moscow fairytale comics to help migrants ‘behave’”, it feels forced and overtly propagandic, to modern sensibilities. Further, as indoctrination, it is unlikely to be successful for outsiders who don’t already feel a connection to those myths of common origin. However, most advertising and similar messaging serves many similar roles, in a way that feels natural to those already inculcated by the implicit logic of Western capitalism.
5 Though do we recognize our motives for the first time when they are reflected back to us in our myths? This is the primary function of psychoanalytic critique.
6 This assemblage looks exclusively at those in-between spaces, the connective tissue that holds us together. It is not an exegesis of any one particular mythology.
