The absence of myth is the ground that seems so stable beneath my feet, yet gives way without warning. 

– Georges Bataille

Myth is a word usually used in the pejorative. To its detractors, myth is Janus-faced. Of its two faces, one is fantastical, the other quotidian. One face of myth is supernatural, mystical, irrational—it is the tales of gods and spirits in the heavens above, or heroes and villains long since past. The other face of myth is the everyday stories that justify the world as it is—the assumptions about society, the truisms and stereotypes that we are told, and sold, given flesh by images, objects, sayings and gestures. One face of myth is superstition, the other is ideology.1 These faces are not wholly separate. Their structure is the same: they offer, to quote Fredric Jameson, “the imaginary resolution of a real contradiction.”2 Myth, as both superstition and ideology, is an imaginary wish-image that smooths over the cracks and fissures in the social, hoping to bind—or blind—people into nations or groups. It seemed for some time that the superstitious face of myth had been eclipsed by its ideological face, that a faithless, globalised order had won out over the faithful myths of traditional societies. But in our volatile conjuncture today, myth is showing both of its faces again. It is time for us to think anew about myth. 

When an era crumbles, what seemed like quotidian truth can all of a sudden reveal its mythic face. The neoliberal era has been, until recently, the air we breathe. Now that air has become stale, even toxic. Neoliberalism became supreme in true mythic fashion—by slaying its rival, Soviet socialism, with the brute force of its putative rationality. In this heroic act, the contradiction between western capitalism and eastern socialism was overcome, and so, it was claimed, neoliberalism had put an end to history itself. But in the last ten years, and especially today, its own contradictions have surfaced. Neoliberalism’s faith in the free market, and the ruthless self-interest of ‘rational actors’ operating within it, to resolve all problems and produce the best possible world now looks hopelessly superstitious in the face of a trinity of crises—financial, viral and ecological—for which it is at least partly culpable and against which it is proving dangerously weak.

Through this emergent breach in the neoliberal consensus, myth’s fantastical face is once again turning to face us. Political leaders are no longer appealing to ‘experts’ and economic ‘rationality’, but instead to myths of nationhood and essentialist fantasies of supremacy. Religion and spirituality, once thought to be things of the past, are providing solace from the capricious and evanescent economic forces that have assumed the guise of Fate. Otherwise progressive artists and creatives are turning towards the mysticism of the likes of Carl Jung. Even capitalism itself is finding it hard to suppress its own mythic qualities, as the wealth that neoliberalism has concentrated among a handful of godlike billionaires, far from ‘trickling down’, is ejaculated into space in an orgy of phallic rockets. 

We cannot simply abandon myth, however. “The absence of myth is also a myth”3 as the French writer Georges Bataille noted. We witness the truth of this statement in Richard Dawkin’s zealous crusade against religion, and his steadfast faith in the authority of the gene. There are, however, more generative approaches to demystifying myth, which remain important to us in our age of right-wing irrationalism. Structuralist thinkers such as Claude Levi-Strauss and Jean-Pierre Vernant understood myth not as irrational but as its own system of thought with its own logic, not wholly separable from other kinds of reasoning. The archaeologist Marija Gambutas and the speculative historian Robert Graves both saw in the mythic archive sedimentations of entirely different mythological worlds. They both deduced an archaic matriarchy whose fertile mythology was embedded in the seasons and the land through embodied rituals, and later crushed under the patriarchal weight of the Olympian gods. In recent decades the mythographer Marina Warner has deconstructed myths old and new, revealing their value for the forces of conservatism, and has written her own counter-myths to promote another politics. For a while it might have seemed that the power of myth had been explained. 

But we find ourselves at a time in which demystification, far from producing a rational society, has brought us to the brink of apocalypse, and imaginary resolutions of any kind don’t feel appropriate to the grinding contradictions of the contemporary. What is called for in this conjuncture is an approach to myth that is neither reductively demystifying nor irrationally re-mystifying, that understands both the importance of myth and its dangers. One such thinker is Georges Bataille—philosopher, surrealist, communist. Bataille’s extravagant, materialist mobilisation of myth—strangely demystifying and re-mystifying at the same time—is particularly useful to think with today, and indeed tomorrow. Against the likes of Jung, Bataille thought myth not as imaginary resolution (witness Jung’s nationalist archetypes) but as contradiction itself. In his writings, Bataille invokes myth not in order to paper over the cracks in the social, but in order to further wrench them open in the name of a new society to come. 

If myth, understood as either superstition or ideology, serves to uphold those transcendental principles that are the crown on top of our normative beliefs about the world, Bataille’s mythic thinking chops off its head. A headless or acephalic figure (drawn for him by the surrealist André Masson) was the emblem of the journal he edited, Acéphale. This figure is a guillotined ‘Vitruvian Man’, Leonardo Da Vinci’s embodiment of humanist reason. In keeping with this, Bataille’s myth-like writings upend traditional ways of thinking about the world and our place in it. His short texts, ‘Rotten Sun’ and ‘The Pineal Eye’, tear the sun from its role as the mythic symbol par excellence of the Western Enlightenment, and re-cast it in a new mythic light—a fiery monstrosity, blinding and deadly. His image for the complexity of human life—as separate individuals who are inseparable from one another, mediated as we are by the maze of language—is the mythic Labyrinth, a paradoxical architectural form with no hard boundary between its interior and exterior. In these works, and many others, we see myth mobilised to help us think about the complexity and paradox of the world, not to escape from it. 

Bataille’s thought helps us to see the mythic element at work, not only in his time, but in capitalism today. In stark contrast to a utilitarian world-view—that is at a loss to comprehend what is at stake in the orgiastic expenditure of our new billionaire spacemen—Bataille saw ritual expenditure as a fundamental quality of societies, as well as of organisms and even celestial bodies, all of which must expend excess energy in some form, be it war, eros, violence, or radiation—or indeed in the production of poetry and art. But while Bataille believed ecstatic expenditure to be necessary, he objected to the fact that a small ruling class decide on the form that it takes in Western capitalist society, and he saw this class as responsible for the degradation of human life in general. Indeed, Bataille believed that the working classes’ inevitable revolt against this state of affairs would be a corrective ritual of expenditure. He called this a kind of potlatch (referring to indigenous rituals in which surplus was destroyed, relinquished or expended in feast) that will ecstatically lay waste to this dehumanising element.4 Bataille’s mythic thinking was neither in service of the gods, nor a justification of society as it is. Instead it aimed—through paradox, contradiction and excess—at a transgression of his society’s limits. Could myth be re-mobilised today to push against the limits of the possible?

The artworks, poems and essay in this online issue of Effects invoke myth to challenge how social reality is currently constructed. Minimalism has become a widespread contemporary aesthetic that epitomises our rationalised, demystified world, but Orlando Reade reveals how its clean lines and stark forms are bound up with myth—from early Christian heresy to vampire fiction—showing that today’s crisp consumer has not stepped outside of myth’s continuum. Florence Uniacke’s work Vocable reads like an epic poem comprised of fragments in which mythic incantation sparks against the blunt materiality of everyday language. Isabelle Albuquerque’s sculptures—acephalic in a way that Bataille would have appreciated—give body to a post-capitalist mythological world to come, in which a patriarchal language of form has been derailed and subverted by female eros. Auriea Harvey’s chimaeras re-form, and de-form, mythic creatures and demigods using both traditional and cutting-edge technologies—such as 3D printing, Augmented Reality and NFT’s—summoning the ancient myths to haunt our delirious digital world. And Clementine Keith-Roach draws from the archive of mythic gestures—the burdened hands of Caryatids, the supine legs of the Sphinx—to conjure archeological artefacts of the present, whose fragmentary tenderness seems to urge us to redeem the burden and strife of the past by imagining new rituals of care and collectivity.

All of these works invoke the mythic in powerful ways. It is important to emphasise that they are not nostalgic for a lost, enchanted world, but reveal the present to us in a new light. They may even open up possible futures—if a future for humans is still possible—not through eschatological visions, but by making manifest the contradictions inherent in our world today. The myths that oppress us, and that aid in the destruction of the world, are not best challenged by new myths that fall into the same old traps—of essentialism, of fetishism, of blind faith in authority—but by finding the possibilities lurking in their incompleteness, their failure, their blindspots and contradictions. The works in this issue invoke myth in order to unpick the stitches that hide the wounds in our social reality, wounds that might, with struggle, metamorphose into vulvas from which new modes of being could be birthed.5