Joseph Campbell on Symbols

From Joseph Campbell's The Hero With A Thousand Faces, Princeton Bollingen.

From page 236:

Symbols are only the vehicles of communication; they must not be mistaken for the final term, the tenor, of their reference. No matter how attractive or impressive they may seem, they remain but convenient means, accommodated to the understanding. Hence the personality or personalities of God--whether represented in trinitarian, dualistic, or unitarian terms, pictorially or verbally, as documented fact or apocalyptic vision--no one should attempt to read or interpret as the final thing. The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey. "For then alone do we know God truly," writes Saint Thomas Aquinas, "when we believe that He is far above all that man can possibly think of God." And in the Kena Upanishad, in the same spirit: "To know is not to know; not to know is to know." Mistaking a vehicle for its tenor may lead to spilling not only of valueless ink, but of valuable blood.

And from page 248:

Wherever the poetry of myth is interpreted as biography, history or science, it is killed. The living images become only remote facts of a distant time or sky. Furthermore, it is never difficult to demonstrate that as science and history mythology is absurd. When a civilization begins to reinterpret its mythology in this way, the life goes out of it, temples become museums, and the link between the two perspectives is dissolved. Such a blight has certainly descended on the Bible and on a great part of the Christian cult.

To bring the images back to life, one has to seek, not interesting applications to modern affairs, but illuminating hints from the inspired past. When these are found, vast areas of half-dead iconography disclose again their permanently human meaning.

Beauty and Human Evil

This morning in the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani reviews two books about Leni Riefenstahl, the controversial filmmaker whose work helped to bring the Third Reich and Hitler into power in Germany. The review starts with the following two sentences.

Leni Riefenstahl liked to say that her art and life were devoted to the pursuit of Beauty. But her career, as Hitler's favorite and highly gifted filmmaker, stands as an enduring rebuke to Keats's assertion that "Beauty is truth, truth beauty," and that is "all ye need to know."

For a powerful exercise in how beauty has been used to bring fascism to power, every student should at some point try and put themselves into the mindset of a German citizen suffering the economic deprivations of the 30's and then watch Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, her 1934 film about the formation of the Nazi party and its rise to power.

It is frightening how compelling the images are. Boys play leapfrog in the morning, freshly washed and laughing. Men march together with shared purpose. Women cheerfully work alongside. Everyone is the picture of health and beauty. The gatherings, the speeches, the flags, the music. All permeated with a majestic sense of unity and a shared destiny to restore a lost dream of nationalist pride and moral and cultural purity.

And unaddressed and behind it all operates the Wotan archetype, with the Germanic myth of glory in battle and an everlasting paradise of food and drink in the mead halls of the afterlife.

From the contents of the film, taken at face value, the Nazi party is clearly the place to be in a Germany that had been badly defeated both militarily and economically in World War I. Ten short years later, six million Jews will have been murdered and millions will have died in combat on the battlefields and of starvation and deprivation as a result of this rise of fascism.

It is a great reminder that beauty serves evil just as well as good, and we should be very careful in how we apply it. The art world has devoted a great deal of attention to this problem. Unfortunately popular culture has not.

Also: Michael Burleigh's excellent book, The Third Reich: A New History, explores how World War II and the holocaust could happen in such a short period of time. Read this after screening the Triumph of the Will for an analysis of how the holocaust could take place among the German populace.

Addendum: it is important also to note that this exercise should be handled with caution and under supervision. The point of this is to first evoke a powerful inner experience and then to establish a reasoned position on or against it. Riefenstahl's film does not achieve this on it's own, and it easy to simply get caught up in the aesthetic vision that she evokes. Her film is so powerful that it is still banned in Germany for fear that showing it will achieve a popular drive back to fascism. This quote from Jeffrey Raff should help clarify some of the dangers and potential rewards of this process. 

The Decisive Moment

As anyone who has taken a camera and plunged into crowds on a busy street knows, the difference between a great photograph and one for the outtake bin can be a matter of mere slivers of a second. The decision making process happens faster than reason can account for. In fast moving situations, the pictures have to made so quickly that they are only understandable in retrospect.

The number of computational decisions that have to be made in the creation of any good photograph is staggering. If you place the picture making process in a fast moving and changing environment, it is even more impressive that it happens at all. Research indicates that the processes that handle these computations in the brain occur in the cerebellum. These guys are figuring out how it works.

Athens or Babel?

This is from an interview this morning with Lee Bollinger, president of Columbia University, on the Brian Lehrer Show, WNYC. I am paraphrasing by memory, so any inaccuracies in quoting are mine.

The internet--the blogosphere--will play out in one of two ways. Either it will become a platform for a great experiment in Athenian democracy where everyone has a part, or it will become Babel and will split apart entirely into disconnected voices without a shared language. What will determine this is how strictly people seek out only those voices that reinforce their own.

France restricts citizen journalism

The French Constitutional Council has issued a broad ruling that bans anyone who is not a professional journalist from recording, filming or photographing acts of violence. For the broadcasting of such news, approved journalists and broadcast sites will have to be vetted by the government and receive a government endorsement or face fines and possible imprisonment.

Read the full article here.

We would expect this type of ruling from China. But not from France.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité? Anyone?

On Susan Sontag, Part 1

Still, there is something predatory in the act of taking a picture. To photograph people is to violate them, by seeing them as they never see themselves, by having knowledge of them they can never have; it turns people into objects that can be symbolically possessed. Just as the camera is a sublimation of the gun, to photograph someone is a sublimated murder--a soft murder, appropriate to a sad, frightened time.

Susan Sontag, On Photography, Picador, pp 14-15

In this paragraph, Sontag outlines her basic position on the exploitive nature of photography by pointing out its ability to reveal, to reflect, to represent that which could not be achieved by the subject in any other way. She focuses primarily on the exploitive application of this function of photographs, and there certainly is good reason to examine this. Photography has a deeply exploitive role in the power exchanges of the past century. But might the operations that make photography so exploitive also be its redemption as well?

To make a picture of someone has the opportunity to transform their image of self. The picture shows the person back in ways that can’t be otherwise achieved. And this is often desired. It is a function that coincides with a deep need that has arisen in western culture from the dawn of modernism; the need to see the previously unseen.

In psychoanalysis, what is created, or at least sought, is a transformative relationship with another person whose job is to reflect, reveal, and illuminate the individual back to him or her self in a way that they could otherwise not see on their own. This is similar to the “soft murder” that Sontag illustrates, for the individual goes through a process or a cycle of small deaths and rebirths that must occur for the self to integrate. The old must be transformed into the new.

While the camera does have these murderous capacities, these may be its greatest gifts as well. Is not a camera also a receptor, a tubular opening that receives light and in its hidden chamber mediates a transformation of it? The camera is as feminine as masculine. Its mechanical shell contains a hidden mystery. It is a vessel. And if it does has the power to objectify, possess, and symbolically murder, might it not also have the power to transform, to liberate and to symbolically conceive?

In Sontag’s writings, the camera is penetrative, and thus infused with an aura of suspicion and danger. While this penetrative quality of the camera is certainly real, it is not only a negative trait. There is a biological truth that in nature without penetration, there is no procreation. A psychic truth corresponds as well. Without penetration, there is no new thought or new modes of being. It is a prerequisite for new ideas, for new perspectives, for new thought that there be a kind of psychic penetration. Without it we are isolated and stagnant. Since the camera can be penetrative, it is how this penetration is handled that determines the net effect of the picture on the viewer. The camera is indeed a thief of sorts. At question is what the image gives back in the world once it has been taken.