The following text is part one of the second chapter from
Martin’s second book, titled »Vom Geist der Maschine. Eine
Geschichte kultureller Umbrüche«, published in 1999.
Martin Burckhardt
In the Labyrinth of the Signs I
The Gods are from the Field of the Real
(Jacques Lacan)
Dazzled by the Blinding
What is it like to look into the sun? To feel small sparks
burning into your eyes, expanding into rings, into a glaring
brightness mixed with blackness, shimmering red, the feeling of
growing tension. Tears gather under the retina, like a burn
blister that will eventually burst under the mere pressure of a
blink. And with the watery vitreous humor, my eyesight will also
drain away. I imagine this loss: almost a relief, no more
burning, just this liquid running down my cheek and leaving a
taste in the corner of my mouth. But I can still see: pulsating,
bullet-like flashing points. Are they specks of sunlight or
already the first holes in my eye? It doesn’t matter, who knows?
Basically, I'm no longer sure whether the radiation comes from
outside or rather from the depths of my skull, a volcanic magma
that wells up and, at the moment of discharge, causes my gaze to
explode and fly off in all directions—as if, at the moment of
dazzlement, I could see with a thousand eyes, like an insect. A
piercingly bright pain, but this pain is accompanied by an
equally clear thought, the amazement that here, where the light
shines brightest, the path leads into the darkness of Myth.
Black. Nothing else. A calm black that stretches into infinity.
And yet, this blink of an Eye [Augenblick] isn't accompanied by
total darkness. Maybe it's because of the little noises making it
feel like this blackness keeps changing color. Incidentally, it
isn’t entirely dark to me either, but as if a residual radiation
emanates from things, an almost imperceptible inner light. It
takes time to get used to it. No, that's wrong, because you don't
need time anymore. With your eyesight, time also runs out into
timelessness. Everything returns to itself, like a kind of
rhythm, so that it doesn't matter which tense I choose: I
was, I am, or I will be. At the
beginning, one sentence kept incessantly wandering through my
mind: Fame is the Sun of the Dead—now I know it refers to that
moment when there can only be light and shadow. In fact, this
last and ultimate flashing blink describes the point at which the
objective becomes one with the apocalyptic. There is the Bomb's
blinding flash, casting a final, merciless glance at the World
and simultaneously burning the body that its radiation has
reduced to nothing into the ground as a shadow. Nunc
stans.
No, here the shadows aren't burned in, much less anything else
that can be grasped. As my eyes (or what remains of them) adjust
to the diffuse residual light, I notice that a black sun is
shining here too—or are there several? But perhaps the word
›Sun‹ is wrong, because these luminous bodies
are more like Cyclops' eyes. Like spotlights, they roam through
the darkness, creating multiple exposures, image overlays, and
blurred streaks of movement.
Perhaps it’s this very presence-of-mind gaze that leads us to the
Myth’s essence: that the individual body becomes invisible as an
individual, composed of those silhouettes that the Cyclops'
headlights, as its »pursuers«, cast onto the walls. Perhaps the
Myth can be thought of as a layer of film, as a never-ending gaze
in which large, intergenerational periods of time are inscribed.
It would be misleading for the Myth to be interpreted as a face,
or even as an individual being. If a name appears, it stands as a
choir leader who embodies a long genealogy, a face assembled from
many faces like that of a wanted poster. As in the receptive
surface of the film, it’s only what’s inscribed in the Myth that
corresponds to the substrate's receptivity (the exposure time):
la longue durée. Just as the first photographs took hours until
reality had burned itself into the image, and how a pedestrian
could walk through the scene without leaving the faintest trace
of his presence, so too can Myth be understood as a surface that
remains unconcerned with passers-by and ephemera, anecdotes and
episodes. When, on the other hand, something becomes visible in
the picture, IT is because it is a condensation
and crystallization of time. This explains how the
one-and-the-same figure can appear multiple times, in different
roles and stages of life. Like a long-exposure photograph, the
Myth absorbs time, juxtaposes the sequential, and thus equates
the different levels of history. The images may be dark, blurred,
and shaky, but what is conveyed is pure architecture. There’s
nothing random or arbitrary about them; rather, everything shares
the same torpidity and heaviness inherent in our buildings and
institutions. As an edifice of thought [Bauwerk des Denkens],
Myth has always been Mytho-Logos.
It may seem as if the idea of a single Myth is erroneous, since
so many myths vary depending on the place, region, and time.
However, this diversity isn’t surprising; rather, it is a
necessary characteristic of a culture that, equipped only with
rudimentary writing techniques, listens to its Sagas. In the
absence of a fixed, canonizing writing, history constantly
reinvents itself. More precisely: it always finds itself anew,
because it is not about the individual addition, but the general,
the supra-personal. In this sense, myths, regardless of their
apparent fluidity, are based on that enduring reality as
something much denser than paper, much denser than the style and
inventiveness of the individual author. Insofar, myths should be
approached with the same respect afforded to all those things and
institutions proving their own viability by themselves – which,
even if we do not know their individual authors, allows us to
speak of a self-evidence: an immediate insightfulness.
Nevertheless, a methodological difficulty arises here. While the
myths may have once possessed exactly this form of self-evidence,
this no longer applies to us; we no longer understand them
straight away. Instead, the myths lead us into areas entirely
alien to our self-understanding and interpretation of the World.
For myths are stories without history; they refer to events that
are not dated and to people who are not tangible as persons.
Entering the world of myths can create a feeling of sinking into
a maelstrom, as you can constantly remind yourself of the
invalidity of your mind’s inner coordinate system. Myth isn't
realized in definition, but in its variation; it doesn't adhere
to the logic of space, time, and causality, and as it has no
Author, it represents a Text in our sense of the word.
If we attempt to apply any of these concepts to myths, they fall
apart – you are seized by the disconcerting feeling of being and
remaining an illiterate [Analphabet] of the
Myth. The impression of illegibility isn’t accidental. It points
to its connection with Writing, or better, to the relationship of
exclusion prevailing between Myth and Writing. The World of Myth
precedes alphabetic writing. Only with alphabetic writing does
the inexorable Logic of Signs emerge on the page, which
definitively codifies the World and, in doing so, inextricably
links cause and effect, text and author. Writing puts an end to
Myth. The identifiable Author replaces the unrecognizable
inventor of the myth; a story replaces the collectively
thrown-together web of symbols and images with all its details of
Who? Where? When? The Word replaces the evoked, conjured-up word
made definite. If Writing eliminates Myth from the World, this
raises the suspicion about Writing itself, as the crystallization
form par excellence (the monument of all things, as Aeschylus
says,) has a mythical dimension, that Logos has absorbed the
function of Myth and thus rendered it superfluous. But what does
Myth tell the person who one day opens his eyes and no longer
believes himself to be subject to…
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