/lit/ - Literature

the thing about jung is that you can't criticize a myth. if you say a thing is meaningful, it is. a myth is a structure, a pattern. you can *dislike* it for any number of reasons, but you can't *disprove* it because it doesn't make a rational appeal, it makes an aesthetic appeal. this cuts both ways. i may not *like* the meaning, but i can't say that it isn't there. and if a million people agree with me and only seven agree with you, that's your problem and not mine.

suppose i borrow the structure of the archetypal hero's journey to make a film that has conclusions you disagree with, but i follow all the steps along the way. my protagonist does everything a hero does, but you, as the audience, have the distinct feeling that you - people very much like you - are being painted as representations of the dragon of chaos, as servants of the enemy, and so on. you don't *like* these characterizations, for whatever reason. you can't deny that they aren't meaningful. they aren't. that's why you don't like them.

but what do you want to do? write a film review that makes an appeal to identity politics? or just personal taste? what makes your brand more valid than any other? nothing, and that's the point. myth is the proverbial sword with no handle, and that's why it should be handled with caution. myth is the formal structure of the sacred. it *is* the way we talk about meaning. it's where we derive the power of ideology from, and there is no critique of its basic psychological substrate that lies outside of Bloody Neo-Marxist Nihilist Postmodernity, with all its attendant faults.

there's no final choosing between freud and jung. they're both right (and wrong). peterson is trying to get people off a pathological bent for ressentiment-fuelled critique that turns them into activists. that's a noble and profoundly good thing to do. but mythology and mythological structure is fully beyond good and evil. it has been with mankind since the beginning of time. and both wings of a political spectrum can engage in comparative mythology.

granted, peterson isn't talking exclusively about filmmaking. he wants you to be the star of the film of your own life, a self-authored self. *that is a good thing.* but even then we derive order from mythic narrative patterns. we read stories and we watch stories to figure out how to orient ourselves properly. he's right about that. but what do you do when somebody else is doing the same thing, but coming up with different conclusions? if we write off the critique of ideology - which is a useful component of postmodern thought - we lose the capacity for dialogue or hermeneutics.

this is a compromised argument. the west has lost its own way in the desire for a perfect, ecumenical decentering. much confusion subsequently reigns. JBP has gone back to the primordial well for an antidote and he's found the pharmakon. heidegger found it too. the pharmakon is cursed.

>>11133060
>>11133069

what would eliade have thought of pic rel? is it too simplistic?

the only real place where politics and metaphysics wind up, in fact, is in the path of the hero. and then only by implication.

it's why screenwriting is good, perhaps, but hard as balls, because you actually have to articulate the sense of an ending. it's possible that screenwriting is always theopolitical in this sense. the masters - melville, mccarthy, joyce, any number of others - are able to get past this.

i'm still seduced, tho. that's basically my problem. because you can't resolve act 3 w/o ideology, and i'm not sure what ideology i have.

it's fear, for lack of a better word. failing to complete this project turned me into a philosophyfag. so now i'm marginally more cognizant of how memes work but in doing so i have become a kind of meme myself. it's why petersonian self-authoring works. we're all scribing private myths, but what really needs to be done is to get over one's own tortuous obsession with symbols: to 'traverse the fantasy' as lacan says

>and so girardfag delenda est

but even lacan did not ultimately succeed in doing this, i think. he spent his final years obsessing over knots and his analytical sessions worsened. heidegger had his turn, baudrillard also had his, and nick land opted for NRx and the love of bitcoin. maybe shit like that is inevitable.

but. but but. still artists now and again pull it off. herbert would never have reached the end of his dune saga, but he did write some good shit along the way. tolkien managed to get the ring into mount doom, rowling snuffed voldemort, and ahab eventually got his whale. the wachowskis jumped the gun with the matrix but part one is still dope. kurosawa managed to film seven samurai and not lose his shit. people do still manage to resolve their complexes.

it's just that artistic complexes are too easy to resolve via coup d'etat. politics is something to be overcome, not tragically endorsed, or turned into some kind of Event that you can then give yourself the imprimatur to spend your whole life waiting for.

artists, for lack of a better word, are capable of *shutting the fuck up* and *moving the fuck on.* this too is my endgame. everything else i say is really only so much deferral of this bare and simple truth: that in the end, the best thing you can produce is a kind of silence, a small and habitable clearing in the chaos.

>>9656004
and yet most of cinema follows archetypal patterns. how do you explain this?