Revolution is not a passive activity. It names its actors and those who it affects; what is revolution? Revolution is a myth: it is a myth that shatters untrue myths. It is a history that revises and revisits all history. Shed the onion layers from the common connotations to both “revolution” and “myth” save only the most bare bones definitions. Revolution and myth are co-contingent, and revolution is too big a word, too macro a process, to define in one shot. My reflections on myth are not much better, but I’ll give it a little shot by borrowing some key formulations from Wu Ming’s introduction to Thomas Muntzer’s “Sermon to the Princes.”
In Wu Ming’s intro to Muntzer’s “Sermon to the Princes,” their expansive literary style does not elude them in describing Muntzer’s effect on turn-of-the-millennium radical politics. The theoretical core of the essay boils down to one of Wu Ming’s essential tactics: the rewriting of myth for revolutionary ends. For me, this rang all sorts of bells, especially in Wu Ming’s phrase that one must “go searching for narratives/myths in their territories.” That got me thinking: what are the essential loci of myths? What are the origins of their stories? After a lot of thought, I thought that perhaps “myth” is an expression of experience in time that withstands the transience of mere experience and attempts to express meaning across time. In a story then, myth is an essential mode of grasping and transmitting history to transient and experience-bound individuals (but perhaps I’m presupposing that we are experience-bound, or at least experience bound in the first degree…)
All this is a way of reconsidering the nature of myths in a more “abstract” way, such as “the political.” Rather than saying myths can operate in the language of “the political” one might say that the terrain of all myth is the political, and whether or not the political is consciously transferred across history, the act of transferring, the nature of the story is itself a political procedure.
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