Analogismoi Three: Observation, Articulation and Meta-Narratives

Karl Marx, in his book Das Kapital (1867), attempts to make the claim that history is a story of power struggles. He sees this primarily thorugh the lens of class conflict and economic control. In the future we will return to this short sighted, dangerous and, frankly, moronic understanding of the world…what is important for now is to know that the idea that all of history was the result of power struggles and class conflict begins with Marx.

French literary theorists like Michel Foucault take this ball and they run hard with it. For Foucault and the French literary critics of the time the meta-narrative of power was the overarching meta-narrative not just economically, but of all human endeavors.

The French literary theorists begin, as so much terrible academia does, with an insightful and intelligent question. The question, in essence, is this: if there are an infinite number of possible interpretations of a book (say, Hamlet) then who is to say which interpretations are canonical? And yeah, fair enough. Good question French literary theorists. The answer they give to this most excellent question, however, is just painfully rotten. The answer is, there is no canonical reading of a literary work and what we think of as canonical readings are forced upon people by the elite in order to strengthen their tyrannical hold on power.

From power being the source of canonical interpretations the next move is that books which we consider canonical are only canonical as the elites in power have decided they are canonical as an attempt to control the masses. For the postmodern literary critic the reason we read Hamlet or The Great Gatsby or Crime and Punishment or the Bible is because the powered and wealthy elite have privileged what we consider the Western Canon because it reinforces their dominance in the power hierarchy.

The final step is, if there is no canonical interpretation and there is no canonical book and if the world is far more complicated than any given book, then even truth itself is nothing but a product of the power used by the elite to maintain the status quo and repress the peasantry.

Unlike Marx who saw power merely as repressive, Foucault argues that it is also productive (Discipline and Punishment 1975, History of Sexuality 1976). Foucault challenges the traditional view of power as something wielded by a single authority (e.g., a king, the state) to oppress others. Instead, he sees power as productive, creating social realities, identities and knowledge. He further argues that, in the way that Marx saw power determining economic systems, it shapes what people consider “truth” or “normal” in given historical contexts. So not only economics and politics and culture and art are a product of the uneven distribution and tyrannical exercise of power, but truth itself as well (I cannot even imagine a more simple minded approach to humanity).

Foucault’s understanding of power as the meta-narrative (for our purposes, you can say that Foucault sees power as the arche) is informed by the Frankfort School theorists like Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer and their concept of the cultural hegemony (influenced by Italian socialist Antonio Gramsci) and highlights how ideology, disseminated through media and culture, maintains capitalist power by shaping consciousness and truth while operating top-down with elites controlling cultural production to suppress dissent.

Foucault’s concept of ‘power-knowledge’ sees power as embedded in all discourse and practices, not just ideology. Power isn’t owned, but circulated through institutions, language and everyday interactions. Where Marx saw political and economic history as the relationship between oppressor and oppressed, the Frankfurt School thinkers, Foucault, the postmodernists, deconstructionists and neomarxists take it a step further to suggest that all human interaction is one of oppressor and oppressed. This doesn’t matter if it is a corporate head and his underlings, a politician and his constituents, a mother and her newborn or two young lovers, the thread running through everything is that you cannot escape the oppressor-oppressed dynamic or the crushing influence of top down power.

And so these cynical halfwits have come to the idea that the meta-narrative of power is the only thing that truly exists and all other things are a consequence of the abuse of that power to maintain a social order which benefits those on the top.

When it comes to the Frankfort School, the neomarxists, the French literary critics, Marx himself as well as the

pool of modern academics who blindly shovel this nonsense onto impressionable young students the lesson is clear — there is no truth, only interpretation and interpretation is made true by the wealthy elite to bolster their claim to power. Life is meaningless. Truth doesn’t exist. Everything is power. This serves the climate alarmists like David Suzuki very well as he claims that humans are nothing but a cancer on the planet. There is nothing to the story of man other than power. This is the end of the road that  begins with the scientific revolution.

Going back to the Enuma Elish and the story of Marduk, we see a decidedly different….more human….story. When chaos emerges in the form of the dragon Tiamat various gods go to confront her. Ea (Nudimmud), the god of Wisdom and Magic, is the first to confront Tiamat. His power is in cunning and intellect and yet when he confronts chaos he is not able to stand in her way. At the very sight of Tiamat and her monstrous army led by Kingu, Ea flees. Remember, it is Ea who kills Apsu which starts this entire war.

Really stop and think about what wisdom the ancients are giving us here. Ea, intellect personified, in his careless ingratitude for the culture that gave birth to him, destroys it and attempts to survive by living off of its corpse (you can see this careless stupidity today in the idea that the patriarchy is nothing but oppressive tyrant which needs to be destroyed). However, with culture dead there is no longer a mitigating limitation on primordial chaotic potential and nature and, without that limitation, she comes forth to threaten the world. Ea, who destroyed the culture which kept her at bay, flees from a confrontation because whatever it is that tames chaos, intellect is not it.

The second of the gods to confront Tiamat is Anu, the sky god. Anu is acknowledged to be the most powerful of the gods. However, for all his power, he is intimated by the chaos of Tiamat and her terrifying army and he retreats back to the other gods and admits his inability to confront her. And so, with the intellect not able to subdue chaos it is Anu, the personification of power, who goes to confront Tiamat. Once again the elder gods fail. Whatever it is that can confront and subdue chaos it is also not power.

Whatever your preconceived notions are about these ancient people and their stories, I believe it is impossible in good faith not to see the absolute genius presented here by the ancient Babylonians. There is a situation. The situation is that the stability of the world which is created by the harmonious balance of nature and culture has been destroyed. Intellect, the child of culture, destroys it and attempts to survive on its corpse without tending to its rennewal, unleashing the chaos of nature for which both intellect and power are no match.

It is after Ea and Anu fail to successfully confront chaos that Marduk, a new kind of god, comes to the battle. Marduk is not wise like Ea and he isn’t powerful like Anu. Wisdom and intellect failed in this task. The attributes that Marduk brings to the table are vision, that is the power of careful observation, and truthful articulate discourse.

This is something that we see in the Egyptian story of Osiris, Seth and Horus which will be our discussion next week, and also in the Genesis account where the all powerful God uses the power of the articulate word to tame the primordial chaos at the beginning of time. We see it again in the New Testament in which, with an infinite range of possible weapons, Jesus uses truthful articulation and courageous acceptance of tragedy to defeat the Hebrew and Roman powers which saw to stop him.

We have been telling stories of heroes who use truth, observation and articulation to confront evil, to confront chaos, to confront challenges both mortal and divine for at least tens of thousands, possibly millions of years. It is

in our oldest foundational texts, in our myths and in our fictions. It is in our novels and our paintings and our movies. The entire history of humanity is the story of people crying out that the healing balm for the tragedy of life is courage, truth, speech and careful observation. The idea that human history is a story of power is so patently absurd that the gymnastics it takes to reach such a conclusion gives the postmodern thinker the illusion of intelligence while, in reality, attempting to explain what essentially amounts to saying that water polo is cruel to the horses.

So what’s the point?

The stretch of time that it took to get from half starving, naked, flea infested apes falling out of a tree to the concept that the tragic suffering of life, voluntarily confronted with attention and articulation, will transform chaos into habitable order and that that order is good is unimaginable. Trying to superimpose an idea contrary to that over the existing framework will never work over a long span of time. It will be like the chimpanzee troops that deWaal studied. Yes, an overly aggressive and unusually powerful chimpanzee (the scientific revolution and Enlightenment era philosophy) can move himself to the top of a troop’s hierarchy, but its reign will be short and end brutally.

The postmodern, neomarxist concept of power as an overarching meta-narrative is not just wrong, it is anti-right. It is the application of not just the wrong meta-narrative, but of a meta-narrative concept which has been repeatedly rejected for thousands of years by the architects of western culture.

This is very much the same as the way the scientific revolution overlayed a fundamentally anti-human framework over the meaning laden connection between humans and their world. Like Marx and the theorists who are ideologically linked to him, the overlay has borne some value (negative and positive) but inherently contradicts human nature and cognition and as such is doomed to collapse in on itself in a relatively short period of time.