Enslaved Ancestors, Technified Myths and the Summer of 2001

“Social Democracy thought fit to assign to the working class the role of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren.”
(Walter Benjamin, On the Concept of History, 1940)

In linking our From The Multitudes of Europe edict (2001), the person behind the What in the hell blog used another English translation:

this beautiful piece by Wu Ming written in 2001. This is part of the sensibility I think Walter Benjamin had in mind when he wrote in “On the Concept of History” that “assigning the working-class the role of the savior of future generations (…) severed the sinews of its greatest power. Through this schooling the class forgot its hate as much as its spirit of sacrifice. For both nourish themselves on the picture of enslaved forebears, not on the ideal of the emancipated heirs.”

The agit-prop role we had in the 2000-01 period and the texts we wrote to promote the anti-G8 demonstrations in Genoa are at the heart of Spectres of Muntzer at Sunrise, our (self-critical) essay on “technified myths”, the Zapatistas and our novel Q‘s influence on the Italian anticapitalist movement.
We wrote the text in English in 2008 as both an introduction to Thomas Müntzer‘s selected sermons, which Verso Books planned to publish in their Revolutions series (but we haven’t heard about this project ever since), and an oblique celebration of Q‘s tenth anniversary (1999-2009). Although we wrote it in English, the delays in the publication of the sermons made so that it’s still unavailable in that language. It is available in Italian and Spanish though. We thought about anticipating an excerpt, although, mind you, it’s a complex text that must be read in its wholeness. De-contextualisation might be misleading.

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[...] It is impossible to disclaim the responsibility the Wu Ming collective had, at least in Italy. We were among the most zealous in urging people to go to Genoa, and helped to pull the movement into the ambush. After the bloodbath, it took quite a while – and a lot of reflection on our part – to understand our own (specific) errors in the context of the (general) errors made by the movement.
Clearly, something went wrong with the practice of “mythopoesis” or “myth-making from the bottom up”, which was – and still is – at the core of our philosophy.

By “myth” we never meant a false story, i.e. the most banal and superficial use of the term. We always used the word for a narrative with a great symbolic value, a narrative whose meaning is understood and shared in the community (e.g. a social movement) whose members tell it one another. We’ve always been interested in stories that create bonds between human beings. Communities keep sharing such stories and, as they share them, they (hopefully) keep them alive and inspiring, ongoing narration makes them evolve, because what happens in the present changes the way we recollect the past. As a result, those tales are modified according to the context and acquire new symbolic/metaphorical meanings. Myths provide us with examples to follow or reject, give us a sense of continuity or discontinuity with the past, and allow us to imagine a future. We couldn’t live without them, it’s the way our mind works, our brain is “wired” to think through narratives, metaphors and allegories [3].

At a certain point, a metaphor may suffer sclerosis and become less and less useful, until it’s void of all meaning, a disgusting cliché, an obstacle to the growth of inspiring stories. When this happens, people have to veer off, looking for other words and images.
Revolutionary and progressive movements have always found their own metaphors and narrated their myths. Most of the times these myths survived their being useful and became alienating. Rigor mortis set in, language became wooden, metaphors ended up enslaving the people instead of setting them free [...]

No-one can erase mythological thought from human communication, because it’s embedded in the circuitry of our brains. As a matter of fact, every iconoclasm eventually generates a new iconophilia, against which new iconoclasts will rage. The cycle will be endless if we don’t understand the way these narratives work.
The trouble with myths is not their intrinsic falsehood, truth… or truthiness. The trouble with myths is that they sclerotise easily if we take them for granted. The flow of tales must be kept fresh and lively, we have to tell stories by ever changing means, angles and points of view, give our tales constant exercise so they don’t harden and darken and clog our brains.

This, of course, is an extremely hard task, for several reasons.

First of all, it’s too easy to underestimate the dangers of working with myths. One always runs the risk of playing Dr. Frankenstein or, even worse, Henry Ford. We can’t create a myth at will, as though on an assembly line, or evoke it artificially in some closed laboratory. To be more exact: we could, but it would have unpleasant consequences.

Expanding some observations by Karoly Kerenyi, Italian mythologist Furio Jesi drew a sharp distinction between a “genuine” approach to myths (although he later criticized Kerenyi’s use of the adjective) and a forced evocation of myths for a specific (usually political) purpose. Think of Mussolini describing the 1937 invasion of Abyssinia as “the reappearance of the Empire on the fateful hills of Rome”. Kerenyi and Jesi called the latter strategy “technification of myths”.
Technified myth is always addressed to those Kerenyi called “the sleeping ones”, i.e. people whose critical attitude is dormant, because the powerful images conveyed by the technifiers have overwhelmed their consciousness and invaded their subconscious. For example, we may “fall asleep” during the incredibly beautiful first half-hour of Leni Riefenstahl‘s Olympia (1938).
On the contrary, a “genuine” approach to myths requires staying awake and willing to listen. We have to ask questions and listen to what myths have to say, we have to study myths, go looking for them in their territories, with humbleness and respect, without trying to capture them and forcibly bring them to our world and our present. It is a pilgrimage, not a safari.

Technified myth is always “false consciousness”, even when we think we’re using it to a good purpose. In an essay entitled Literature and Myth, Jesi asked himself: ‘Is it possible to induce the people to behave in a certain way – thanks to the power exerted by suitable evocations of myths – and then induce them to criticize the mythical motives of their behaviour?’. He answered himself: ‘It seems practically impossible’.

In the heyday of the global movement (from Autumn 1999 to Summer 2001), we tried to operate in the space between the adverb (“practically”) and the adjective (“impossible”). We tried to use the adverb to break open the adjective. We deemed Jesi’s answer too pessimistic. We thought that “opening the laboratory” and showing the people how we processed “mythologemes” – i.e. the basic conceptual units, the metaphoric “kernels” of mythological narratives – was enough to provide the people with the tools of criticism. “Correct distance” from a myth was our chimera: not too close lest we might fall into a stupor, not so far that we no longer feel its power. It was a difficult balance to keep,  and in fact we didn’t keep it.

Because the problem is also: who is the artificer of mythopoesis, the evocator, the obstetrician? It should be up to a whole movement or community or social class to handle myths and keep them on the move. No particular group can appoint itself to that office. At the end of the day, we ended up being “officials” assigned to manipulate metaphors and evoke myths. Our role became a quasi-specialised one. An agit-prop cell. A combo of spin doctors. Sure, From the Multitudes of Europe… could make your nerves sing, it made you feel like going to Genoa right away, but that was not enough. We never looked for ways to “criticize the mythical motives of our behaviour”. “Practically” never cracked “impossible”.

At present, there is no alternative but continuing the work: we have to continue the exploration, prick up our ears and approach myths in a way that’s not instrumental. We have to understand the nature of myths without wishing to reduce their complexity and test their aerodynamic properties in the wind tunnel of politics [...]