Centaur Consciousness: Technology, Myth and the

Cultural Narrative

A Conversation with Dr. Ted Friedman, Georgia State University

Discussion via – David b. Metcalfe

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“For the last few years, I’ve

been preoccupied with a
concept that hasn’t received
much academic attention lately:
myth. Specifically, the idea that
popular culture narratives are
forms of myth.”
- From Myth, the Numinous and
Cultural Studies, first published online at
FlowTv
In an age of near ubiquitous
communications, the classic
divisions of society still affect
our interactions. Barriers
between businesses and
consumers, academia and the
public, governmental groups
and their constituents, each
block the development of a
sustainable society and silence
valuable discussion.

“I’d lost my bearings, not only
physically, but also intellectually
and spiritually. In grad school,
I’d imbibed a heady brew of
postmodern theory. But as I
struggled to define myself on
my own, away from my
classmates and professors, I
realized I didn’t really know
what I stood for. I’d learned to
talk the talk, but how much of it
was really important to me?
Dizzy, disoriented, I turned to
my intellectual commitments to
find solid ground. But in the
disavowals of poststructuralism
– antiessentialism,
antihumanism,
antimetanarrativity – I found
nothing to believe in.” – From
Vertigo, first published online at FlowTv
***
What lead to your interest in
mythology and fantasy as
valueable tools for cultural
analysis and critique? This
seems far a field from your
first book Electric Dreams.
I took a leap, I was feeling sort
of stuck at that theoretical spot.
My book had started as my
dissertation, and I think by the
time I finished my dissertation
and then tried to turn it into a
book I had changed a lot of my
thinking from where I started.
At the same time the project of
writing a dissertation has to
please so many masters and
has politics behind it. For
example two of my greatest
mentors and inspirations were
advisors on my dissertation
committee, Fredric Jameson and
Janice Radway.
“At the same time that myth
has become a touchstone for
screenwriters, it’s also become
a keyword for the New Age
movement, inspired by
Campbell’s injunction to “follow
your bliss.” The very ubiquity of
the concept of myth in
American popular culture may
help explain its absence from
academic discourse – a term
which once held a lot of
academic cachet has become
awfully déclassé. But as
scholars of popular culture we
ought to take vernacular theory
seriously, and to try to
understand the continuing
resonance of a concept we’d
thought we’d left behind.”-
From Myth, the Numinous and
Cultural Studies, first published online
at FlowTV
***
Do the ideas of Joseph
Campbell and
mythographers of previous
eras still hold value for you?
Campbell was not one of my
biggies, but I figured I’d go and
look more carefully. In particular
I found a wonderful book by the
writer Howard Siegel, called
Joseph Campbell: An
Introduction, it’s an overview of
Campbell’s ideas and the
limitations of Campbell’s ideas.
Siegel also has another book
called Myth: A Very Short
Introduction, which is in that
great Oxford Press series of
Very Short Introductions, all of
Howard Siegel’s stuff is really
smart and great and is a very
helpful dash of cold water on
the more, I don’t know if
idealistic is the right word, the
Campbellians who I think are
more naïve about the limitations
of that often apolitical approach.
Campbell himself was a
conservative, and Siegel’s work
helps those who never thought
through his politics or came to
different conclusions.
***
“Magic serves the role in
fantasy that technology does in
science fiction - and in fact, the
role that technology serves in
real life. Magic is the fictional
force that makes tools work in
fantasy worlds. The funny thing,
though, is how little separates
technology from magic in our
own everyday experience of the
world. Think about all the
technological devices you own.
Now, for how many of them do
you actually understand how
they work? In an increasingly
technologically complex society,
we grow more and more
alienated from the actual
workings of our technology.” -
From The Poltics of Magic:
Fantasy Media, Technology,
and Nature in the 21st Century,
first published online at Scope
***
How does the Lord of the
Rings reflect the hero’s
journey and Jung’s concept
of integration? Does Tolkien
affectively address the
darker aspects of reality?
There’s that great scene where
they are crossing the Mountains
of Mordor, and Gandalf tries to
lead the group over the
mountains. He wants to take the
path the world that our world
has taken, he wants the world of
the mind. So if you want to
follow the Cartesian split that
says the mind is opposite the
body, he’s turned back, he
realizes he can’t win against the
mind, Sauroman sends a storm
to him it’s too strong, and they
have to turn back.
Instead they’re forced to go
through the Mines of Moria. At
first they hit the sea monster
who threatens to pull them
under. So they’re actually afraid
of going completely under, and
you might even argue that
perhaps this a flaw in the Lord
of the Rings, in terms of
Tolkien’s own psychology, he
was very Franco-phobic and sort
of emotionally stunted. We don’t
get the exploration of the
Cthonic forces that other more
emotionally mature authors
provide. For instance in Pulp
Fiction, the suitcase, Jung’s the
Numinous, Hitchcock’s
MacGuffin, all of these are
versions of the same thing,
they’re versions of the
unrepresentable.
Tolkien was a scholar, that
richness of understanding of
world building, of history upon
which to build a world, is really
critical to the power and depth
of Tolkien’s vision. He’s also
interesting, because like
Campbell, he’s a conservative.
***
“The American media’s
enthusiasm for the new media
elements of the Iran story, then,
may have less to say about
what’s going on in Iran than it
does about the United States.
The “Twitter Revolution”
rhetoric fits a familiar American
narrative of technological
utopianism, in which hopes for
social and political
transformation become
attached to the promise of new
technologies.
But if cybertopianism offers a
distorted lens for understanding
the complexities of political
struggles, its virtue lies in
opening up the possibility to
imagine new and different
futures beyond the ideological
constraints of conventional
wisdom. This is the dynamic I
describe in my book Electric
Dreams: Computers and
American Culture as the
dialectic of technological
determinism.7 On the one hand,
technological determinism
reifies complex social
phenomena, minimizing the role
of human agents by ascribing
change to the impersonal,
inevitable force of technological
“progress.” On the other hand,
the rhetoric of technological
determinism opens up a utopian
sphere where we can
momentarily transcend
immediate pragmatic concerns
– since the magic of technology
will take care of the “how” – and
imagine a more radically
different future.” – From
Tweeting the Dialectic of
Technological Determinism, first
published online at FlowTV
***
What are your thoughts on
contemporary myths such as
the Singuarity, and other
technofetishist cultural
narratives? Do you think
that these movements will
provide the solutions they
are promising?
It’s technological utopianism
very much in the mode of, for
example, in my first book I
mention hydrogen fueled cars.
They were pulled out every year
that Bush was in office in
inauguration speeches as just
around the corner.
Technological determinism
wants to achieve that future
immediately. One day we want
a world were high technology
allows us to continue to live
within our means sustainably.
The technology is part of the
solution somehow. We can
fantasize that there’s a techno-
fix, and that’s naïve, but we can
also ask intelligently what are
the best tools available that we
have to address the situation.
***
“A funny thing happened to
cyberpunk in the twenty-first
century. Its insights absorbed
by the culture, it lost its critical
edge. As SF editor David
Hartwell once put it, discussing
the similarly counterintuitive
contraction of the genre after
the Sputnik launch in 1957,
"When it becomes real, it's
merely technology. Real space
travel almost killed the science
fiction field" (Hartwell, 1996:
109). Similarly, as real life
became more cyberpunk,
fictional cyborgs grew
redundant. The Matrix sequels
(2003) were critical and
commercial disappointments,
and no new SF blockbusters
emerged to take their place.
Science fiction television series
such as Star Trek (1966-2005)
and The X-Files (1993-2002) ran
out of steam. And no new
movement of science fiction
writers emerged to capture the
public's imagination as
cyberpunk once did.” From The
Poltics of Magic: Fantasy
Media, Technology, and Nature
in the 21st Century, first published
online at Scope
***
Millions of people, me included
whether it’s the universe of
Harry Potter, or Lord of the
Rings, or a novelists like
Susanna Clark, China Melville, or
comic book writers like Neil
Gaiman or Michael Bendis, all of
this world building, this boggling
amount of world building, and
the creation of these alternate
universes seems to have a
particular imaginative crux to it.
In the 90’s and into the early
21st century when cyberpunk
became interesting in academia,
it was capturing something that
avantgardists like William
Gibson had addressed nearly 20
years prior. There was a twenty
year echo for cyberpunk, just
like there was this 15 year echo
between London 1977 and
Seattle 1992 with grunge rock.
I’m not sure the time line will
stay the same, but take
something like Gaiman’s
Sandman, which was written in
the late 80’s and early 90’s, and
hasn’t made it into a movie yet.
Game of Thrones, the wonderful
Tolkien’esque fantasy written by
George Arimartis, started in the
early 90’s and HBO is just now
making the mini-series.
Buffy was the best show on
television for much of the
1990’s, and only now with True
Blood is a different, more adult
audience, enjoying stories that
Buffy was telling better nearly
20 years previously
So this is the way culture works,
in these uneven modes and
models of uneven development
and lags. At this point I think
that we are in the middle of,
certainly economically, a
fantasy boom. Most of the
fantasy writers that I’ve talked
with, even if they were
ambitious, were finding that
most of the money was in young
adult fantasy. That’s really
starting to change.
With such a lack of focus on
myth in academia how have
you branched out in search
of other contemporary
mythographers?
I was fortunate enough to get in
touch with the Mythic
Imagination Institute. They host
two large conferences, with
marriage of science and spirit that
these fantasies are groping towards.
In calling for a "reenchantment of the
world," Morris Berman points out that
the posthuman science of cybernetics
actually has much in common with the
archaic tradition. Cybernetics, like
animism, recognizes "the relational
nature of reality" (Berman, 1981: 273):
the fact that we are all us - human,
animal, machine, plant, stone, wind --
part of the same integrated circuit,
inextricably enmeshed in multiple
feedback loops. To be a centaur is
already to be a cyborg, and vice versa.
Learning the lessons of fantasy, then,
does not need to mean clinging to a
lost, mythical past. But it will require
us to re-imagine the future.” From
The Poltics of Magic: Fantasy
Media, Technology, and Nature
in the 21st Century, first published
online at Scope

various theorists, fantasy writers

and hundreds of people at the *

conferences apparently. They * *

haven’t had the money to stage

a third big conference, but they
hosted something called Fairy
Escapes, it was mostly fantasy
writers and fans, but they were
very receptive to discussion and
interested in what I am working
on.

***

“What are the possible consequences,

then, of the emerging centaur
consciousness produced by twenty-
first century fantasy media? We could
certainly see the strange mixture of
technology and nature in these stories
and games as simply a compensatory
fantasy: as the globe melts, we retreat
to our movie, TV, and computer This conversation is hosted by
screens to recreate an imaginary [ open myth source ]
version of the world we've lost. But if In collaboration with
we are to have any hope for the
future, it must involve just the kind of Planetshifter.com Magazine
 leaders, philosophers,
This is the first part in a artists and musicians
continuing conversation with Dr.
[ open myth source ]
Friedman
reactivates myth and
You can join the storytelling to develop
conversation at: sustainable philosophies for
the 21st century.
Openmythsource.com
TedFriedman.com
***
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***

Dr. Ted Friedman

Associate Professor of
Communications
Georgia State University

Through conversation and

collaboration with
academics, business