However, the key point of his argument is that mythology does not produced capitalism but merely legitimated it when it needed legitimation. After it became the hegemonic social force, capitalism did not need that legitimating mythology anymore - as it could legitimate itself by the virtue of its hegemony - but the mythology continued to live on, as people ritualistically adopted it as the dominant cultural paradigm.
In other words, legitimating mythology is like a ladder - useful only when one want climb to a higher level, but useless thereafter. However, it often becomes a fetish or cult object for those who venerate the climber.
Wojtek
On Wed, Jun 23, 2010 at 1:51 AM, <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
> Carrol writes:
>
> "The myth of
> capitalism must be a myth which dramatizes the _formation_ of social
> relations, not the survival of the individual 'outside' of any society."
>
> I don't see this at all. It seems that from the beginning capitalism is
> concerned to articulate how self-interest trumps social relations, which are
> portrayed as hide-bound, suffocating, and backward. Think of Prince Hal vs
> Hotspur. Think of Macbeth's tragic leap into the future.
>
> "The myth must make clear, first, how, given only isolated individuals
> (recognized by all as impossible and grotesque but nevertheless a
> necessary assumption) those individuals by free acts of choice _formed_
> a society, and of how that formation cannot be a single non-repeatable
> act but must, rather, be endlessly repeated."
>
> I don't think the idea of isolated individuals is at all grotesque: the
> period begins with Montaigne's notion that self-examination is the
> equivalent or even superior to a meeting with the world. There is a
> continuing and growing rejection not only of man in society but also of man
> in history. Capitalism's total victory in fact claims a victory over history
> which "stops." The myth of self-making is the first step in the rejection of
> social bond and social debt.
>
> "(Unlike in a tributary
> social order, where the real is the past, in capitalism the real is the
> future. Odysseus _returns_ to a family: his task is to preserve the past
> in the present. The hero of a capitalist myth, coming fron nowhere, must
> _found_ a family, pointing to the future.)) Robinson Crusoe cannot begin
> to catch that myth, since Crusoe comes from thickly socialized worlds
> and struggles to return to them. The use of the Robinsonades was to
> illustrate exchange by showing how Crusoe related his different
> activities. But Crusoe's story as a whole not only is not the or a
> capitalist myth, but Crusoe doesn't even _belong_ to capitalism. The
> book might be seen as dramatizing a subordinate myth, that of petty
> commodity production as constituting the orign of capitalism.)"
>
> The founding of the family forms a very, very brief moment in the novel.
> Joseph Andrews, Austen, and that's it. Trollope is fantasy land as is
> Dickens.
>
> The experience of odyssey and exile in the classical world is a ritual by
> means of which the hero is able to break rules because he is outside of
> society. He is a hero because he has the courage to temporarily break away
> (in a kind of walkabout) and then return to enrich his community with the
> experience he has gained. He is wiser upon his return; but that wisdom would
> be meaningless if it were not spent in his own society.
>
> The novel, on the other hand, which Lukacs called the form of
> "transcendental homelessness," recounts the story of the hero who can never
> find a home, beginning with Don Q and ending with The Stranger. If the
> hero's experience of exile has enriched him, it is not a richness that he
> can share with anyone. Is Horatio able to understand Hamlet's story? What is
> the narrator of Heart of Darkness actually able to convey to the "intended"
> except a lie?
>
> I won't argue Milton with you because you know him inside out and I have
> mixed feelings. I'm more of a Blake type. And I won't argue Richardson
> because I think he writes pure pornography.
>
> "Remember that Maggie Smith allowed not only individuals but _families_
> to be real (as opposed to society which did not exist.)"
>
> She only allowed families to be real because she needed a placeholder for
> the functions that (nonexistent) society could no longer play.
>
> "Don't build your own resentment of capitalism into the literature of
> capitalism."
>
> Well, I don't think I am. I think the literature of capitalism enjoys a
> very, very brief comic period with Fielding and Austen, each writing their
> own fairy tale version of how the hero's virtue-based rise from poverty
> paradoxically justifies a fundamentally hierarchic system (with Austen
> telling a very ironic version of this canard), after which you get the
> tragic period of Balzac, Stendahl, Flaubert, Conrad, Tolstoy....all telling
> over and over and over again how it is not possible for the hero to find a
> place, build a home, or rectify anything.
>
> The solitude of the modern hero is not the solitude of Gilgamesh or
> Achilles or Adam. It is a blank, empty, resourceless abyss. "Man is in love,
> and love's what vanishes" wrote Yeats. Maturity and depth is not possible
> without actual, meaningful social ties. And it is precisely these ties that
> capitalism cuts at every turn. That's why I would argue that Crusoe's
> isolated self-making has a mythic dimension.
>
> Joanna
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