The Myth of Myth

There is no simple or even single definition of myth, which would decide its inherent undecidability. Myths have come to broadly embody the ‘fab­ulous narration’ (Williams 1988, 211), the creative fiction contrasted with the facticity of historical narratives or the immanent experience of reality.

The logos/mythos dichotomy can be traced back to the dialogues of Plato, who distinguishes between the arguments of logos and the fables of mythos, enabling simplistic binaries to emerge by placing myths among fictions and falsehoods. Yet in Plato’s dialogues, logos/mythos do not exist within simplistic binaries such as fact/fiction or true/false. Plato’s dichotomy establishes philosophy as logos and in doing so establishes the birth of metaphysics to the detriment of mythos. Yet while for him logos signifies reason, truth, presence, and falsifiability, mythos signifies the non-argumentative and therefore is neither true nor false. Plato himself frequently utilised myths and mythic thought, appropriating myths or even inventing his own ones as an integral part of his philosophical endeavours (Spitzer 2011, xvi-xvii). Mythos eluded comprehension within the bounds of reason and rationality, as non-falsifiable, and thus appealed to inferior faculties. And it is in this respect, at the greatest antithesis between logos/ mythos, that myth did not simply signify an aberration away from rational­ity but a potential threat—a ‘disease of language’, the internal Other of metaphysics (Williams 1988, 211).

While this confusion surrounding simplistic binaries deserves to be dis­missed, they do succeed in emphasising the recurrent priority and privilege of logos, which cannot be ignored. For the sake of emphasising such privi­lege, our focus will revolve around the works of Levi-Strauss, Ricreur, and Yanow.

Levi-Strauss² provides an interesting beginning, since he is aware of the dichotomous problematique of myth and seeks to overcome it (Derrida 2005, 365). While rejecting the notion of any finality either theoretically or practically in myth analysis, Levi-Strauss nevertheless strives to uncover the ‘basic logical processes which are at the root of mythical thought’— effectively, the universal laws of myths (Levi-Strauss 1963, 3-5, 224-5, cf. 1970, 10). Myths and their elementary structures signify a deeper reality of relational patterns, which unveil their universal and unconscious order—a meta-language, which informs a latent logic of structures. To Levi-Strauss, logos is therefore the ontological foundation of mythology, sublimating mythos into logos. This is further reflected in his ‘scientific’ approach and the reduction of complex narratives into mythemes (Levi-Strauss 1963, 210-11), that is, units of myth, which in relation to one another follow a logical structure and hence acquire meaning.

For Levi-Strauss, the categories of both culture and nature are under­pinned by this ‘logic’ of myth, contrary to other structuralists such as Barthes, who sees myth as a matter of culture disguised as nature in a depoliticised narrative (Coupe 2009, 148). In the Barthesian sense, myth always signifies an ideology, a sophistry, which needs to be demytholo­gised and exposed as a social construct, otherwise reinforcing the political status quo and hegemony of the ruling classes (Barthes 1991, 142; cf. also Müller and Sondermann, Chap. 13; Finlan, Chap. 10).

Such a claim directly contrasts Ricreur’s understanding of myth as a challenge to hegemony through the hermeneutic disclosure of ‘the pos­sible’ (Ricreur 1991, 482-90). Taking a broad temporal perspective on myths in terms of both their historicity and possible futures, Ricreur dis­tinguishes between mythos and historic, in which the beginning is histori­cal but the origin is mythical (Ricreur 2006, 139-40). Situated in history and constituted through language, hermeneutics discloses at the heart of society and language a mytho-poetic nucleus in which mythos (at first) appears central. Yet while myths are not to be discarded or reasoned into submission, Ricreur still distinguishes between deviant and genuine myths.

At face value, for Ricreur the dichotomy between logos and mythos ceases to be entirely in the former’s favour in arguing that the ‘claim for logos to rule over mythos is itself a mythical claim’. Myth can never be sub­sumed into reason absolutely, granting a ‘mythical dimension to reason itself’, therefore making any ‘rational appropriation of myth’ a simultane­ous ‘revival of myth’ (Ricreur 1991, 485-7). The two are rather deeply intertwined, even complementary, inspiring Ricreur’s call for a hermeneu­tical dialectic between ‘critical’ logos and ‘creative’ mythos (1991, 490). It is only when myths combine their critical-creative insights and, therefore, hold the capacity for ‘liberation’ through the possible that they are to be considered genuine. Perversion of myths occurs at the ‘level of naivety’.

In the pursuit of the possibility of liberation through myth, Ricreur (1965, 191) relies upon the ‘principle of hope’, understood broadly as the expectation for some future good. Myths take place within the realm of consciousness so that their creative difference may open up the possibil­ity of forming resistance against oppression. This disruptive function of the imagination is not guaranteed and requires maintaining a critical vigi­lance, for which an outlook based upon hope is required.

In this sense, therefore, both Levi-Strauss and Ricreur look to, and are dependent upon, a form of logos—in spite of never expecting to find it. Whereas Levi-Strauss looks to a sense of latent logic or order, Ricreur seeks radical possibility. This consistent hierarchical prioritisation of logos at the expense of mythos is no coincidence: Western metaphysics is funda­mentally logocentric. Logocentrism signifies, within the metaphysics of presence, the desire for a transcendental signified, such as the appeals to truth or reason, as forms of plenitude (Derrida 1997, 43, 49). Whereas logos is vivified as this presence, mythos is in turn vilified as its absence.

Yanow’s theory is less abstract and instead seeks to be ‘analytically useful’ (Yanow 1992, 399).³ Myth is defined as ‘a narrative created and believed by a group of people that diverts attention away from a puzzling part of their reality’ (Yanow 1992, 401). These puzzles are products of the clash between two or more incommensurable principles and, as such, Yanow’s articulation is in line with Ricreur in regarding myth as an answer to ‘existential crisis’ (Ricreur 1991, 484).

The key difference, however, is silence. Where Ricreur analyses myths in the form of speech and through discourse of what could be, Yanow analy­ses their silences and deflections of what is. Where Ricreur’s myths are explicitly conscious, Yanow’s concern embraces the unconscious. Meaning in myth, in Yanow’s analysis, is therefore to be found in her analysis of unacknowledged ‘verboten goals’ and ‘tacit knowledge’ (Yanow 1992, 402). Hidden beneath the factual, rather than the fictional, such myths precisely cannot be recognised as such, else the incommensurables cease to be tacitly accepted and thereby incite crisis.

Therefore, demythologisation similarly ceases to be a necessarily con­scious activity and is simultaneously prone to remythologisation to (re) resolve and (re)divert the returned conflict. Although never explicitly stating a position regarding logos/mythos, Yanow’s acknowledgment of ‘the verboten’ as ‘the real’ is logocentric, implicitly diminishing myths to merely false representations—a secondary presence, relatively absent in comparison to the immediacy of present reality. The chosen factual policy myths, using her method, are exposed as palatable fictions masking the real (incommensurable) facts. For Yanow, the separation between the conscious and unconscious is determined by the implicit tension between incommensurable values. However, that which remains silent within Yanow’s analysis is her own hopeful evasion, her own tacit logocentrism underpinning her concept of verboten goals.

This presence/absence hierarchy upon which metaphysical discourse has constituted itself could be seen to suggest its logocentric limits border upon myth and mythos, excluding them from philosophy’s mastered space of logos. In the following, however, I will argue that mythos, as the Other to logos, plays the part of Derrida’s ‘trace’, which is that ‘part played by the radically other within the structure of difference that is the sign’ (Spivak 1997, xvii). The next section will trace mythos through logocentric dis­course to reveal its differential excess destabilising and de-centring origi- nary presence. Giving a voice to this Other logic by exploring philosophy’s aporias tests the limits of logos. It shall be argued that it is mythos that acts as the foundation to logos and logocentric metaphysics.