Collapse of the Hero's Journey
There will be no Overman for the Zoographers
The fact that Nietzsche gave the preferred gesticulation of the Last Man a blink — ‘I have invented happiness, says the last man, then blinks’—is often overlooked. This little detail clearly has a telling character; one of a clear sense of satisfaction with his findings and inventions.
The blink is perhaps the quickest, least strenuous gesture. It is also a moment of physical instantaneity that occurs outside the body. Of course, our internal organs are always preforming lots and lots of little gestures to keep our bodies moving, digestion, oxygenation and so on. Yet on the outside, it is the blink that rules as king of effortless gestures.
The insinuation here is that the notion of fulfilment for Last Men, comes in the character of ease, comes in an instant, without effort and almost as an ingrained function of body’s maintenance, instead of a conscious will towards a goal which requires, in the proper sense, thought and activity. The maintenance of our eye’s hydration replaces the arduous activities that made up the lives of our historically admirable figures and peoples.
In the spirit of blinking, I recall, when I was a kid, I was once playing a video game with a friend. I was struggling with a particularly hard level. My friend asked me why don’t I just use the cheat codes he had downloaded from the internet. I said that wouldn’t be fun. When I politely allowed him to have a go, he just typed in the cheat codes and beat the level. I often come back to that memory as a formative experience that made me realise (I still have trouble accepting it) that many people are just different. They don’t experience struggle as fun or meaningful, or at least are astonishingly capable of refusing to see it that way.
This was a particularly interesting example as video games are already an easy way to sort of virtualise a real objective and invest energy in achieving it, without actually doing it. Once we reach the stage of ‘progress’ when even our virtualised simulacra of object-achievement are hacked with cheat codes, we are truly in another dimension; one characterised not by dancing, kneeling to pray, saluting or striking each other with weapons — but by blinking.
In fact, if we were to incorporate that distinction of Bios and Zoe, embedded in Greek language and often brought out by Agamben to elucidate his theory of bare life, we could state that blinking is a Zoe characteristic, not a Bios one. We create biographies for humans because bios refers to more than simply bare life (culture, character, particular virtues and vices ect.) Hence the biography of a Last Man is difficult to write. He lacks the sort of character and will to struggle for something more than his immediate safety and comfort, in order to even describe him through Bios; biography. The problem with the end of history is exactly this collapse in biography.
Perhaps Last men can only be described through a Zoography. He blinks, eats, sleeps, shits ect. Yet, of course, we don’t really reduce our self-awareness to such a zoography. Instead we come up with a novel storytelling. One that I argue is built on the separation of our ‘stories’ from the capacity to struggle which now makes up the narratological mainstream's grotesque mind. A grotesqueness that needs more elucidation; a decultured, post-struggling, post-bios story telling. It appears almost a contradiction in terms. Yet it makes sense when one realises that human beings can retain language, retain symbols, technology and knowledge, even after they have lost their spirit.
It’s important to realise that some people are simply deficient. But it’s far more important to realise the catastrophe of over-narrating this state of decultured society and ‘subjectivity’. This is what we try so very hard to do today. Some people lack, for whatever reason, that capacity to find meaning in struggle or challenge. I believe it was Mussolini that once said there was nothing more of a horror than life without struggle. What’s most worrying about our contemporary historical position is that it was fascism that best understood a psychological reality concerning human life, health, and purpose in the context of the value of challenges. I’m not crazy and I realise all the many flaws of fascism. It’s simply a difficult position to be in when one of the most important(possibly the most important) insights about something the modern world had gotten so detrimentally wrong —namely that some easy object-satisfaction set up through a technological environment is a sort of horror—would find its wisest and most committed opponent in the ideology that also did perhaps the most brutal genocide in history. It really allows such stupidity to be chronically expanded and manifested through an associational awkwardness and outrage that really is hard to argue against.
Of course, in the long run, detaching the truth in the above paraphrasing of Mussolini from the historical atrocities of fascism should be part of our moral awakening from the hangover of the post-war era. Yet, as much progress as we may gain in this direction, it doesn’t change the reality that somewhere after WW2, particularly within neo-liberalism, the kid wanting to complete the game without cheat codes is now the pathological one, while the cheat code-enjoyer is normal and healthy; he might even get a nice job at Google. In fact, cheat codes are an even better point of elucidation than I had realised beginning this essay because cheat codes are detrimental to the story of the game. One gets to move quickly to the next level at the detriment to the story that makes the game meaningful to begin with.
Obviously this is not a sustainable situation. However, neo-liberalism, as I have recently pointed out, was not just a badly thought out economic structure. It was also an extremist psycho-political change in how we perceive ourselves, work, our activity, relationships and psychology. Its main aim is to normalise the cheat code enjoyer and pathologize the struggle-enjoyer; unless, of course, that struggle is in the name of more ease and more safety and more instantaneity.
We’ve seen this flare up from time to time. During lockdowns, claiming the gym is fascist, creating offence-free educational or workplace environments, the over-use of pharmaceutical medicine, the indulgence of psychosis among teenagers and a their identity issues, the boomer-luxury retirement village that promises affluent old people a sort of new-individualism at the end of life; an new-individualism that requires increasingly high economic and social burdens to be put on the rest of society to maintain. But at its base is the cheat code-enjoyer and his detrimental normalisation we should speak of.
I don’t wish to psychanalysis this person here (his motivations, development, ect.) I simply wish to point out what his normalisation, manifested into social engineering, technology, economics and so forth, looks like.
This is observation that fits well in Adam Curtis documentary work and his term ‘Happiness Machines’. The convergence of many things—the last man, end of history, mass medication, consumerism, gerontocracy, over-responsiveness to ‘women’s needs’, screen technologies and so forth—have all created a sort of mass collapse of the journey space. By this I mean simply the environmental construction of a civilisation that further and further closes off the space between individuals and their desired-objects.
I discussed this in an OG Rose conversation I had a while back. Daniel gave me the helpful framework of a spatialised category. There are three modes, roughly speaking. Objects, horizons and walls. Objects map onto desire, horizons to spirit (thymos in Platonic terms) and walls to rationality(or logos). I discussed this schema in much more detail in my essay Catastrophe and Walled logoi. But I thought it as necessary to come back to these insights again and further illustrate its psycho-spatial and narratological character.
We have long now been using technology and industry in order to create a smaller and smaller distance between people and their desire objects. Digital capitalism is the highest point in this process and could only be surpassed by a Musk-styled brain chip in which commodified object-consumption was somehow literally built into your nervous system. Fortunately, I don’t think it will go there as the screen-world hyper consumerism whereby all our social relations are already redesigned to meet immediate, efficient, speedy, object-gratification, dopamine hits, social reassurance and other appetitive demands. This has already been such a catastrophe that I struggle to predict going a step further would be even desired among the already overstimulated yet anxious and depressed masses.
The problem comes back to the flawed psychology of human motivation and fulfilment. Object satisfaction is too entrenched both into modern psychology, work and clearly consumption. But what if neither objects or even objectives are where people really find a sense of fulfilment. Of course, we need objectives to motivate ourselves. However, the space in which a journey can take place on the way to that objective is detrimentally overlooked. Not all motivations are the same, even when motivated by the same objective. This is a spatio-psychological argument. The space which lies in between ourselves and that objective —what we could call the journeying space—is not the same even when the objective is the same.
To use again the analogy of cheat code enjoyers, the distance to the objective victory of a level in video game, is not the same for a cheat code enjoyer as it is for what should be ideally understood as a normal person who struggles through it. However, you can’t measure or even identify this space. It exists as a phenomenological digression between temperaments. However, it also makes up a sort of vital space that gives life’s objectives a charge of life blood and innately transforms how we experience triumph or loss. In other words, playing with cheat codes or without transforms the very meaning of triumph or loss itself.
Later psychoanalysis such as Lacan correctly identified the ultimate lack and failure of desire. Yet, it still viewed human nature as essentially motivated by desire (simply in an inevitable failed state). Yet, this still doens’t go far enough. It observed a limit of desire but it doesn’t move over into answering the question ‘if fulfilled desire is futile, then what are we?’ It’s odd that nobody really asked this question. It left the theorizing of human nature a sour, damp, contentious task. No doubt there was (ironically) some enjoyment in this failure. ‘Oh we humans are futile beings’. Intellectuals love this. They get to transpose the most depressive aspects of Christianity into something seemingly scientific. It was only Carl Jung that attempted to really fill in this gap. This is likely why Jung has been the most influential in mass media and culture (Star Wars ect.). As Philip Reiff put it, at the basis of the Jung vs. Freud split was the distinction in how therapies should work: towards informing yourself or transforming yourself? Yet, the problem with Jung, again pointed out by Reiff, was the individualised nature to this transformation. Archetypes becomes personal objects—like collectors art pieces. Excessive personalisation strips them of their social reality.
I would add to this conflict and confusion that the problem with Jungian psychology is that is makes archetypes fit individual expectations (usually middle class liberal expectations), instead of allowing the power of archetypes to lead us towards different ends. One can assume that the nature of clinical work, alongside the conflation of assuming that the demographic of bourgeois individuals that have historically sat in the analysts chair is likely too easily conflated with a universal character; people who wanted meaning and relief from certain symptoms but lacked the courage to upset an already carefully cultivated life attached to certain social status and economic expectations.
But my point here is simply to say that perhaps this subject is too easily elevated and universalised. It’s a confused subject but is still satisfied with some archetypal enrichening of its banal life, or of some reasonable acceptance of certain disappointments. Yet it still focuses on an object of sorts. Even when moving beyond Freudian love objects, it turns the archetype itself into an object (we might even say today an identity.). It is no coincidence that it always some psychiatric authority that punishes people for not ‘respecting’ the identity of some idiot in our family or work or school. When you make an archetype user-friendly for the cowardly neurotics that make up the majority of overly-psychologised ‘subjects’, you must feed it to them, without cost, sacrifice or virtue, as necessary standards to achieve such a claim.
We see these affirmed-identities, as low-hanging, therapeutic fruits everywhere today. Youtubers and bloggers who engage in a sort of indie film critiquing often point out that the heroes journey archetype is now almost incomprehensible to modern film writers. Either super-empowered female characters who are just given all the special abilities defacto of enjoying a main character position(what is called a Mary Sue), or the new popularity of film franchises like Avengers, where main characters are these banal superhumans who ‘save the day’, again defacto of being the ‘good guys’. This signifies a total flattening of the journey into a quick and immediate ‘victory’, for the the ‘good guys’ or the favoured identity who demands ‘but it’s my turn’. Hollywood is not even ‘politically correct’ in the simple sense. It is now a machine of democratised narcissism. In other words, the audience feels the need to be dressed up and represented in a heroic costume, without having the first notion what the substance of the heroic is.
It is the screen production version of cheat codes—and it has been heavily encouraged through the advances in CGI technologies and overly formulaic screenwriting; not to mention the franchisement of film making whereby you can guarantee making money because it’s a Marvel film — and not because it’s a good film.
Yet, these problems with story telling are also symptoms of this larger flattening out of the human experience of trial and struggle into fast food recognition of consoomers. The very industry of Hollywood is now a sort of indulgence exercise in elevating the last man into a position of psychologically deranged inflation of his or her power. Hollywood tries to make consumers feel represented, elevated and inflated(why they love a sort of infantile LARPing exercise in which nerds and bossy, affluent women get to constantly feel like the strong, intelligent leader we all know they could never really be.) On a more bio-political level, Hollywood has operated as a flattening of the space between the strong and intelligent leader and the rest of society, fooling us into believing we have some consumer right to be, not just like him, but literally him.
The reason this goes from a good telling of heroes journey to a deranged one, is because the good one(the one Hollywood rarely ever tells anymore) includes in it failure, repetition, perseverance, tragedy and so forth, before the category of hero is obtained. It shows a journey, not simply an object of reward or object of identification.
Within the collapse of the heroes journey into a sort of entitled object-identification with a persona literally designed to cover up a stenching mediocrity, one must now write the heroes journey as a subversion of the very easy identification. Good story telling now more involves anti-heroes, more moral ambiguity and a more particular and costly identification. (also think of the change from Tolkien to George RR Martin). Anti-heroes such as Walter White, Tyler Durden, Arthur Fleck are more genuine hero-archetypes than a Luke Skywalker today. In the most extreme instances (think of Kanye’s Wets recent song) even moustache man can act as a sort of anti-hero. Again, this is not because anyone really thinks he is, but because the collapse of the heroes journey has meant that it must be rebuilt through a much more particular, costly and ambiguous identification that isn’t so easily formulated and handed out as an identity badge to the so very unheroic.
Modern story telling, forms of psychological therapies, media, social status and so on have collapsed the particularly, costliness and distance on the road from the first act to a gruelling triumph, to such an extent that there is no more heroes’ journey, simply an unheroic identity production, making overmen out of underchildren; a process which doesn’t end up looking like very much at all.
This story telling is simply the manufacturing of an object that makes the story fit the consumer rather than demand the consumer denounce himself as consumer. They have too flexibly moulded our past figures and eternal archetypes to suit us, as we presently are, in our technologically flabby comforts, self-obsessed insecurities and anthropological flattening into consuming individuals. It should be opposite: they should insult us, provoke us and deny us such heroic identification until the point that we demand more from both oursevles — and the mass producers of object-identifications.
Therefore Nietzsche’s announcement of the Overman should include into it a warning against such a process of easy identification. Of those who allow us to mutilate our historic symbol systems to fit us, now, as we are.
Nietzsche warned against this in what I consider a necessary prerequisite to understanding the Ubermensch project announced in Zarathustra: the Use and Abuse of History for Life. Nietzsche had already warned that the education of history can too easily slide into an attempt to make the past fit us. Or in his words:
You can interpret the past only on the basis of the highest power of the present.
Only in the strongest tension of your noblest characteristics will you surmise
what from the past is great and worth knowing and preserving. Like by like!
Otherwise you reduce the past down to your level.
The past, and I believe we can now include an archetypal structure discovered by Jung, Joeseph Campbell ect. should only be interpreted by those with an inner tension that can turn that identification into a greater horizon, and not, as I have been repeating here, a cheap object of identity'; an immediate affirmation of ourselves as we already are.
It is noteworthy that we don’t really speak anymore of character, or even a full personality in the Jungian sense. Rather, we just speak of ‘identity’. Here we are simply unwitting advertisers for the industry of underchildren demanding the past historical figures, archetypal heroes and shamans, simply look more like us; a smothering, same-making presentism.
In fact, a society that has historical education, industries of mass produced books on history literature, psychology, archetypes, myths, fantasies and so on, is not deprived of points of distinct identification from itself. It is deprived of the capacity to use these resources in order take up a new journey that transforms itself into something greater. We fail to identify in this noble way. But we are masters of this same making. We are true masters at collapsing the distances and dangers of those journeys that make it heroic to begin with.
A society that has become masterful at reducing that distance( profitable industries that incorporate into them psychology, medicine mass media and bad education are the worst culprits here) boasts an arrogance that it knows what is good and it can make its consuming mass feel good by showing images of themselves, simply images constructed within the fantasy of more interesting situations.
Notice how the heroic now gets represented in a sort of juvenile doll-making. We now see grown men with dolls of superheroes and movie characters straddling their shelves. And why? Because if we lack that capacity to be more like some heroic archetype, we can make the heroic archetype more like us: Small, plastic and house bound—like a doll!
So how could we rebuild the heroes journey? It is not by manufacturing more deluded identity-objects. But by recreating the space for a journey. If human beings are more than desiring-machines and are motivated by more than desired objects, then they must not even come up with yet another mere objective. They must learn to destroy in themselves their habit of collapsing the space in between — and learn to rebuild it. No objectives without a gruelling journey. No identity for doll collectors! No biographies for blinkers!