DIALOGUE AND UNIVERSALISM No. 1/2018 Bogna J. Gladden-Obidzińska THE LABYRINTH: REVISITED AND REINHABITED. INTERPRETING THE MINOAN MYTH AS A METAPHOR FOR CONTEMPORARY CULTURE ABSTRACT This article reconstructs and interprets the evolution of the Minoan myth’s reception in literature, fine arts, and urban development during the twentieth century. The author’s understanding of this evolution is based on three assumptions: a) myth is a polysemantic symbol of metaphysical and historical origins and function; b) myth reflects the relationship of the cognitive vs. creative mechanisms of human activityś and c) as symbolic, myth’s form must be treated as an image as much as it is a (discursive) narrative. As a motif in literature and the arts, the Minoan myth in particular has displayed all three of these aspects by allowing first its heroic narrative and, more recently, its formal structure (i.e., the tragic maze of moral and intellectual values) and visual setting (i.e., the actual labyrinth) to serve as porte-paroles of ongoing social and civilisational transformations: aestheticisation, deconstruction of cognitive and political hierarchies, technicisation, and intensive urbanisation. The displacement of the narrative and of the figure of the Minotaur is interpreted from the perspectives of psychoanalysis and post-structuralism. Keywords: aestheticisation, cities, Mircea Eliade, André Gide, Robert Graves, irrationality, Rosalind Krauss, Alicja Kuczyńska, labyrinth, Jacques Lacan, Odo Marquard, Minotaure, mythology, structures, wandering. BY WAY OF INTRODUCTION The philosophical revisiting of mythologies, cultural and intellectual trends, aesthetic theories, and old and modern artistic formations and their conceptualisations was a mind-opening experience for those lucky undergraduate students whom Professor Alicja Kuczyńska once allowed to participate in her famous 178 Bogna J. Gladden-Obidzińska graduate seminars. The initial thrill of penetrating the impenetrable with her soon turned into something more serious—an intellectual habit—that has remained with us ever since in the most inspiring and fulfilling way. Exactly twenty years later, it proves difficult to let go of her intellectual guidance—not for lack of confidence, but from a desire to enjoy the privilege of reacquainting oneself with her insights and finding again and again, in different contexts, that they serve as deeply relevant threads leading through the maze of understanding cultural transformations. Not surprisingly, Kuczyńska’s work will also accompany us as a touchstone on this little detour around the latest transformations, from the modern to the postmodern and from the postmodern to the unknown, as seen through the lens of the Minoan myth. 1. REVISITING, BUT HOW? Beginnings require justification, all the more so those that call for a retrospection: “I believe that it is the right and privilege of each spiritual formation (or epoch, as one used to say) to cherish such a vision of past culture as emerges from accepted attitudes towards the realm of values and responds to those needs and questions for which an answer is necessary. We can establish this fact: the differentness of an image does not result from a complete difference of the substance, the material, that constitutes the object of study. It is therefore a temporary, relative differentness, as it does not relate to the main layer of the represented image: the gaze and attitude of the spectator is different; the beam of light cast at the same already-known documents, paintings, literary works, treatises, letters and chronicles, is different. Thanks to that, they themselves may sometimes seem dissimilar, new, and still unknown; they acquire an apparently new dimension, a fuller semantic hue; they give the impression of being rediscovered anew, because they speak a new language. We thus obtain visions of situations, theoretical solutions, and artistic forms that seem so unlike those known so far, that we are inclined to treat them as entirely new. “I think that this form of study, despite its having certain traits of illusion, not only enriches our knowledge about the past but also widens our scope of understanding of the present, and above all it deepens our knowledge of the mechanisms of the relationship between them.”1 ————————— 1 Kuczyńska, A. 1988. Sztuka jako filozofia w kulturze renesansu włoskiego [Art as Philosophy in the Culture of the Italian Renaissance]. Warszawa: PWN, 6–7. Translated by BJGO. [Unless marked otherwise, all subsequent translations from Polish are by BJGO.] The Labyrinth: Revisited and Reinhabited … 179 This methodology of subjective but self-aware “insight” employed by Kuczyńska in one of her works devoted to Renaissance thinkers’ understanding of the arts and of the world constituted through the arts itself belongs to the Hermetic-Platonic tradition of the Florentine Renaissance. Rigorous in selection and analysis of resources, it allows into the debate a reasoning that is an effect of phenomenological and aesthetic intuition and that goes deeper than the merely scholastic deductions and inferences allowed by reductionist methodology unrelated to the personal experience or cognitive context of the thinker. It was the right and the privilege of Ficino and his colleagues to analyze their findings in the light of the millennia-long chasm and discontinuity of tradition between the creation of Plato’s Symposium and their own era. Both enthusiastic and frustrated by the distance and irreparable loss of meaning, their studies had to rely on faculties which analytical historians would consider appropriate only for creative rather than scholarly activity—that is, imagination and a sense of formal similitude, or of its opposite, formal distinctiveness.2 The context—in their case, the span of time—was inevitably a part of the meaning drawn from rediscovered material: the literary, architectural, philosophical, mathematical and technological matter that re-emerged from antiquity as antiquity. It was partly because of this new identity (of being ancient) that the old matter’s reemergence provided the threshold for a new sense of meaning of the work based on it, a meaning which they called modernity. Perhaps it was on similar terms that Robert Graves—whose collections of Greek myths drove the popularity of such mythology during the second half of the twentieth century like no other work did—described his own methodology when humourously referring to his actual senses while pre-emptively defending his interpretation of Greek mythology from subsequent critique. First and foremost a poet, he wroteŚ “I am not a Greek Scholar or an archaeologist or an anthropologist or a comparative mythologist: but I have a good nose and sense of touch, and I think I have connected a lot of mythical patterns which were not connected before.”3 Not all of the connections one makes, based on one’s senses, need necessarily be correct, and Graves himself admits elsewhere that intuition is “by no means infallibleś”4 thus we are going to take the liberty of using his findings writ large—without a disciple’s faithfulness but rather through the lens of its connections with the contemporary context. In fact, we do not consider as binding Graves’s discriminating theory of what can be regarded a myth and, through a self-explanatory inference, how myths should be interpreted. As ————————— 2 Cf. Kuczyńska A. 1970. Filozofia i teoria piękna Marsilia Ficina [The Philosophy and Theory of Beauty of Marsilio Ficino]. WarszawaŚ Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe, 65 ff., 129 ff. 3 Graves, R. P. 1995. Robert Graves and the White Goddess, 1940–85. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, as cited inŚ Pharand, M. 2007. “Poetic MythographyŚ The Genesis, Rationale and Reception of the Greek Myths.” Gravesiana, 3/1, 56–73. 4 Graves, R. 1957. “Introduction.” In: The Greek Myths. New York: Braziller, 22–23, as cited in Pharand, M. 2007, op. cit. 180 Bogna J. Gladden-Obidzińska presented in his famous “Introduction” to The Greek Myths, only those stories and fables should be regarded as myths that in an allegorical form reflect sociopolitical transformations taking place in the Greek culture over centuries. These developments reside, according to him, primarily in the passage from matriarchy to patriarchy (symbolically represented by the cults of the moon vs. those of the sun; those of the feminine triadic and ninefold goddess vs. those of the masculine deities; and those of the earth vs. those of the Olympian realm) that accompanied the handing over of power in Greece from the Proto-Hellenic culture to the Minoan, Dorian and, finally, Achaean one.5 As he demonstrates, a completion of the process of enforcement of patriarchy across the Hellenic culture was allegorically represented by the myth of the Trojan war and, finally, by the absolution of Orestes after the murder of Clytemnestra.6 The Gravesian theory of Greek mythology undoubtedly accomplished what he called “cleaning up the dreadful mess” in mythology, by synthesising and generalising a supposed origin for all myths. However, it also sought to limit the possible field available for the development of alternative interpretations of the plethora of existing sources of Greek mythology—even as a lack of consensus existed regarding the correctness of Graves’s own interpretations.7 Moreover, this slashing at the Gordian knot of mythology administered by Graves is confounded by one particular myth, the Minoan tale, whose spatial setting metaphorically reflects the very matière of the whole of Greek mythology: an endless, multi-sequence of interrelated and parallel stories that—like chambers in a maze—morph into one another, enclose still open ones with those already completed in circular anachronical traps that transform characters into one another, swap the identities of places, events and meanings, and yet always lead back to the same knowledge of reality, presented as mysterious and, from the human perspective, absurd—or tragic. The myth of the Labyrinth can, in a word, be treated as a key to the whole of Greek mythology—a key that is not, like that of Graves, “reductionist though revelatory,” hermeneutically speaking. This myth, being a part of this thick tissue of stories, which we sum up as “mythology,” expounds, presents and repeats in its narrative the illogical character of the system we are dealing with. Thus it can be treated as a second-order explanatory story of the complex incongruity of the whole “mythical system.” Because of that, it can serve as a universal symbol of struggle between the irrational and the rational, as Giorgio Colli proposes in his La nascita della filosofia.8 ————————— Cf. Graves, R. The Greek Myths. 1966. “Introduction,” Chapter 98, especially footnotes 1–7. Cf. ibid., Chapter 114, especially footnote 4. Cf. also Graves, R. 1966. The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. 7 Michel Pharand offers a concise though detailed account of the reception of Graves’s theory in the article quoted above, Pharand, M. 2007, op. cit. 8 Colli, G. 1975. La nascita della filosofia. Milano: Adelphi Edizioni S.P.A., Adelphi eBook, Prima edizione digitale 2014, second chapter “La signora del Labirinto.” 5 6 The Labyrinth: Revisited and Reinhabited … 181 An approach based on intuition and hermeneutic inquiry was also an instrument of study of religions and mythologies for Mircea Eliade. Unlike Graves’s analyses, however, Eliade’s aimed at opening rather than closing the scope of potential interpretations. As pointed out by Kuczyńska in her studies of his work, Eliade alternately employed two different methods of expression—the literary and scientific—in a manner that preserved their separateness while creating a certain dynamic relationship that was sometimes harmonious and sometimes conflicting.9 Others depict this tension as running deeper than the level of mere expression, reaching also to his method of study10—which is, incidentally, compared to an escape from the labyrinth, the battleground of Dionysian and Apollonian influences.11 Eliade himself compares not only the acts of scholarly or artistic creation but the whole of human existence to the labyrinth, understood as a sort of machine for conscious and unconscious processes of initiation.12 At the same time, Eliade’s theory of myths can be construed as not entirely contradicting the narrowed definition proposed by Graves. For Eliade, myth represents a revelation of the proto-beginning of the universe and in particular of the events that led to, and thus are now explanatory of, the contemporary human condition. He says, that “as the contemporary human believes himself to have been constituted by History, the one belonging to an archaic community perceives himself as a result of certain mythical events.”13 This appears to stand in juxtaposition to Graves’s historical interpretation, but if we also take into account Eliade’s claim that myths are accounts of true events that did take place in reality, as opposed to events narrated by tales and legends that are fictional,14 they can be considered as older history, encompassing also that of the methodically recorded events that we call ‘history’ in the academic sense. In fact, it may be claimed that there is no contradiction between these two approaches, because the mechanics of myth use a true historical event or sequence of events by interpreting them as universal and “petrifying” them in a symbolic form applicable as a cognitive instrument for explaining different situations happening in different historical and geographical contexts. ————————— 9 Cf. Kuczyńska, A. 1993. “Filozofia czy literaturaŚ ‘Literacki demon’ Mircea Eliadego.” [Philosophy or LiteratureŚ The ‘Literary Daemon’ of Mircea Eliade]. Sztuka i Filozofia, 6, 19–29. 10 Cf. Girardot, G. M. L. Ricketts. 1982. Imagination and Meaning: The Scholarly and Literary Worlds of Mircea Eliade. New York: Seabury Press, 113–115, as reviewed by Jordan, J. B. 1983. The Geneva Review, no. 1. 11 Cf. Boldea, I. 2016. “Mircea Eliade. The Escape from the Labyrinth.” Journal of Romanian Literary Studies, 9, 22–28. 12 The metaphor of “labyrinth” as descriptive of Eliade’s whole scientific and literary work was coined in a book-length interview with him by Claude Henri Rocquet, cf. Rocquet, C. H. 1982. Ordeal by Labyrinth: Conversations with Claude-Henri Rocquet. Coldman, D. (Trans.). Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 27. 13 Eliade, M. 1963. Aspects du mythe. Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 23. The quotation translated from French into English by BJGO. 14 Ibid., 20–21. 182 Bogna J. Gladden-Obidzińska In view of the above, our brief visit into the Daedalian myth—a visit whose aim is to draw a few insights into today’s culture—is based on the following assumptions:15 myth is above all a polysemantic symbol of religious (or in a wider sense, metaphysical) as well as historical origins and function. Secondly, myth reflects and helps with understanding the relationship of the cognitive (including contemplative) vs. the creative mechanisms of human activity. Thirdly, as an expression of the world of values, myth is symbolic, and its form must be treated as an image as much as it is a (discursive) narrative.16 2. WHY REVISIT THE LABYRINTH? Odo Marquard’s pessimistic conclusion drawn from his analysis of the process of aestheticisation in Western culture brings a prediction that there is no way out of the said process. The second half of the 20th century, recognised as postmodernity, resembles, in his account, a hangover after intoxication whose aim was to forget about the crude reality. The only state that the said hangover can give way to is the same disenchanted pain that the crude reality had caused in the first place. After postmodernity only modernity can come (back), Marquard claims. The enchanted reality of yore, of pre-modernity, is forever gone,17 like Paradise, like the Golden Age. His reconstruction of this process points to the same source of perversion as did the works of many of his contemporary thinkers, that is to the unbridled domination of Cartesian rationality over the realm of understanding, and the Kantian banishing of all transcendental components outside of philosophical reflection into the realm of “irrationality.” This concerned especially the metaphysical and the religious elements of cognition, including moral and aesthetic axiology. What is original and noteworthy in Marquard’s account is the connection of the rationalisation of cognition with the aestheticisation of reality, interpreted by him as compensation for the loss of rational axiology and as an attempt at a secular redemption of reality from evil (in modernity, identified with the ugly). In his view, the Nietzschean diagnosis of abandonment of the moral categories of “good” and “evil,” but especially of the latter one, had precedents in the post-Enlightenment and Romantic career of the beautiful as a leading category for the evaluation of crafts and techniques ————————— 15 The brief study developed here narrows down the analysis of myth to its hermeneutic value as a religious and aesthetic phenomenon; it does not take into account pragmatist and politicalanthropological approaches to myth, as explored in its important classical theories and definitions, such as those used or proposed by Bronisław Malinowski, Emile Durkheim, Jean-Claude LéviStrauss and Ernst Cassirer. Cf. Strenski, I. 1987. Four Theories of Myth in Twentieth-Century History. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. 16 Eliade often underlines the religious symbol’s function as an epiphany of the reality of values through a concrete image. C.f., e.g., Rocquet, C. H. 1982, op. cit., 62. 17 Marquard, O. 2003. Aesthetica und Anaesthetica. Philosophische Überlegungen. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 11–34. The Labyrinth: Revisited and Reinhabited … 183 (including those of government and education, vide Schiller’s Letters, cited by Marquard) and in the development of the fine arts as an attempt at an aesthetic amelioration of the human sphere. Marquard identifies consequences of this process in the 20th century in the form of anaestheticisation and a complete loss of the sense of aesthetic axiology (“if everything is aesthetic, nothing is”). Anaestheticisation happened partially by itself and partially was consciously implemented by artists through redeeming the ugly and the repulsive, presented as equally aesthetically valuable as the beautiful. At first, this redemption employed the old category of the sublime (e.g., Barnett Newman and abstract expressionists), and then a category of experience itself, derived from Deweyan pragmatism and used as an opening passage from experience to experience, to yet another experience, and so on, devoid of evaluation (e.g. performance art). Marquard’s diagnosis of the anaestheticised culture morphing into another stage of modernism seems to be refuted by the sociological thought of Michel Maffesoli, who uses a different term for today’s eraŚ “ ‘[P]ostmodernity’ is more pertinent in the scientific sense of the term because of the prefix, ‘post.’ In France [...], when historians talk of ‘modern history’ it’s something that starts after the Renaissance and that finishes at the end of the 19th century. After that there’s ‘contemporary history.’ [...] So we shouldn’t use the word ‘modernity’ for nowś we should say ‘contemporaneity’ [...] As Weber shows well, the three grand values around which modernity was constituted were those of reason, progress and work.”18 What constitutes this overwhelming contemporaneity and does away with what might follow Marquard’s postmodernity is an era in which, according to MaffesoliŚ “instead of work, there is creationś instead of the future, there is the present; instead of reason, there is imagination,” and “three particular bricks of Lego: tribalism, nomadism and Dionysus. And [...] these forms are ancient, archaic, and [...] they are advanced by new technological developments such as the internet.”19 Interestingly, also in view of Marquard’s analysis, technological acceleration can be regarded as another phenomenon representing the same Romantic drive at amelioration—only directed at the future, and identified by him with the revolutionary future-oriented transposition of redemptive compensation.20 The dynamic between these two views of our present and near future seems to well demonstrate the state of consciousness of contemporary man: torn between the perspective of all-repetitive trends and the perspective of unimaginable new options and realities proposed and promised by technological develop————————— 18 From an interview by Dewes, S.; http://www.theoryculturesociety.org/interview-withmichel-maffesoli-on-postmodernity, accessed on Sept. 12, 2017. 19 Ibid. 20 Marquard, O. 2003, op. cit., 18–19. 184 Bogna J. Gladden-Obidzińska ment. The oscillation, or repetitiveness, of intellectual phases described by Marquard is a theme widely exemplified in the artworld of today and, as Kuczyńska demonstrates in her essay on formal and semantic appropriations, it also bears deeper existential meanings that infiltrate every aspect of life and propagate the “culture of recycling” further, into attitudes, behaviours, philosophies, fashions and beliefs of everyman: “[...] it can be noted that in contemporary art, whose preferences are for such forms as a reproduction of a reproduction, photomontage, compilation, and bricolage, the category of the [artistic] ‘loanword’ acquires an ennobling status. The aforementioned trends take diverse forms, starting with explicitly declared dissent and hostility towards tradition, on the one hand, to careless concealment of its appropriations, on the other (often, indeed, appearing under a transformed name different from the original). Often, the boundary between the old and the new become ever less clear, and there are overlaps as well. At the same time, however, the deficit of ‘the new’ is becoming more and more evident; its boundaries are being narrowed and are shrinking, which directs the gaze towards a search for ever newer sources of inspiration.”21 The confrontation of this trend by the prehistoric (and in fact also reenacted) way of living as “nomads” that is characterised by constant creative passage, movement fuelled by imagination, and (optimally) ecstatic transgressiveness, as diagnosed by Maffesoli, may cause two states of cultural activity: a restless neurasthenia or a numb confusion and insensitivity (anaestheticisation). Usually both are present at the same time—sometimes taking clinical forms and sometimes the more noble state, leading to creativity and philosophical contemplation, melancholia.22 This sort of discomfort of identity is rather closely related to the mood described by Ernst Robert Curtius, Gustav René Hocke and Herbert Read, among others, as characteristic of cultural mannerism,23 understood as an intellectual and creative formation directed against formal classicisms. Its characteristics include deformation, exaggeration, concealment, indirectness, instability, indefinition, and unclarity. Apart from the manneristic strategies of artists analysed by the authors mentioned above, Kuczyńska identifies two other particular strategiesŚ the exploitation of the “decay and breaking apart of a whole” and the ————————— 21 Kuczyńska, A. 2011. “ ‘Przewarto ciowanie’ warto ci estetycznych. wiat zapożyczeń” [The ‘Re-evaluation’ of Aesthetic ValuesŚ The World of Loanwords]. In: Medium a doświadczenie. Drzał-Sierocka, A., M. Skrzeczkowski (Eds.). ŁódźŚ Oficyna, 62. 22 Cf. Kuczyńska, A. 1999. Piękny stan melancholii. Filozofia niedosytu i sztuka [The Beautiful State of Melancholy: The Philosophy of the Not-Quite-Sufficient and Art]. WarszawaŚ Wydział Filozofii i Socjologii Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 57–70 ff. 23 Kuczyńska, A. 2011, op. cit. 63–64. The Labyrinth: Revisited and Reinhabited … 185 “kinship by choice”24—a method of matching phenomena not because of their internal connections, but arbitrarily, because of connections originating in the preference of the interpreter. This method of breaking reality into new elements in order to reconnect them according to one’s own interpretation is a noteworthy example of projection. It is an interesting projection because it repeats the archetypical mechanism of a narcissistic mind: first, the subject casts his own mind’s structures onto the reality he is exploring (e.g., by constructing a technology) and then he reacquaints himself with these structures as if they were an alien reality independent of him, and not a reflection of his mind (e.g., technology construed as a coherent organic realm and object of study). In the second volume of his Die Welt als Labyrinth, Hocke in a similar manner sums up such tendencies as what he calls “a problematic” self-identity25 that the historical Mannerism shared with what he considers its reincarnations, e.g., Romanticism, re-emerging Neo-Gothicisms, and the contemporary culture: disharmonious, drawn to irregularities, internally conflicted between materialistic monism and dualism of emotions vs. rationality, purposefully unstable, narcissistic (equivocally and unconsciously self-centred), consciously absurd and erratically deconstructing. Hocke explicitly links this cultural identity with the mythical type of consciousness, as represented by the Labyrinth of Knossos. 3. WHOSE LABYRINTH? While the timing of the discovery of the Cretan Neolithic archeological sites by Sir Arthur Evans and Duncan Mackenzie and publication of their results, especially in the years 1921–35,26 was a serendipitous coincidence with the conflicting Apollonian-Dionysian mood already rising in Western culture, it certainly triggered a ripple in the form of an unprecedented magnitude of creative output devoted to the mythical motifs of Crete: Europa and the Bull, King Minos, his wife Queen Pasifaë and her son Asterion, princesses Ariadne and Phaedra, son-in-law Theseus, craftsman Daedalus, and the central space where the crucial events are focused, the Labyrinth, identified with the Palace of Knossos.27 ————————— 24 Ibid., 64. Hocke, G. R. 1987. Die Welt als Labyrinth: Manierismus in der europischen Kunst und Literatur. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 267–275. 26 Two other major theoretical works of that time were: Hooke, S. H. 1935. The Labyrinth: Further Studies in the Relation between Myth and Ritual in the Ancient World. New York: Macmillan; and Kerényi, K. 1950 (1941). Labyrinth-Studien: Labyrinthos als Linienreflex einer mythologischen Idee. ZürichŚ Rhein-Verlag. These were followed later by the equally significant study: Santarcangeli, P. 1967. Il libro dei labirinti: storia di un mito e di un simbolo. Firenze: Vallecchi. 27 The works of Pablo Picasso and Jean Cocteau being perhaps the most well-known. 25 186 Bogna J. Gladden-Obidzińska Starting in the 1930s, at the verge of modernism’s giving way to the postmodern or contemporary phase of Western culture, this unending stream of literary and visual works exploring the myth focused predominantly, as Theodore Ziolkowski demonstrates in his book dedicated to this motif,28 on the narrative aspects of the Minoan saga: the rape of Europa and the infatuation with the sacrificial bull by both Minos (aesthetically) and Pasifaë (sexually)ś the social and religious repercussions of these transgressions of tradition; the character of the Minotaur conceived by the artists as the untame “inner beast” rising from unconscious instincts, as interpreted through the psychoanalytical lens; and the unconsummated love of Ariadne, together with the further tragedies of Phaedra and Hippolytus. In studying the inception, contents, graphic design, and reception of the avant-garde journal Minotaure, created by George Bataille and André Masson and edited by André Breton between 1933–39, Ziolkowski describes this rising interest in the myth in the context of the political unrest that brutalised and oppressed Europe in that decade—which, ironically, also allowed conflicting interpretations of the Surrealists’ programme, which coincidentally cherished naturalistic violence and emphasised the relationship between the human being and the beast.29 Minotaure gathered the most prominent creators, including Pablo Picasso, André Derain, Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte, Max Ernst and Diego Rivera, and published thirteen issues. Then, “At the end of World War II, when Albert Skira established in Geneva a new monthly journal of art and literature as 'a bridge to a world searching for its identity,’ he called it Labyrinthe, explaining that ‘After the Minotaur, the next trial of Theseus was the labyrinth.’”30 According to Ziolkowski these two publications established the popularity of the myth for the rest of the century and made it a compulsory element in the works of, among others, William Butler Yeats, Conrad Aiken, Wystan Hugh Auden, Edwin Muir, Jack Lindsay, Robert Penn Warren, Anthony Cronin, Nicole Markotić, and outside of the English-speaking world, Miroslav Holub, André Gide, Franz Spunda, Friedrich Dürrenmatt, Jules Supervielle, Jorge Luis Borges, Zbigniew Herbert, Mary Renault, Nikos Kazantzakis, and Marguerite Yourcenar. The themes have entered also into new media narratives, especially video games.31 As the author concludes: “To be sure, the Minotaur and its labyrinth offer astonishingly multivalent images [...]. Most generally [...] the labyrinth represents the social-cultural world in all its chaotic darkness. For several writers with personal experience of World War II [...] the realm of Minos with its prisonlike labyrinth ————————— 28 Cf. Ziolkowski, T. 2008. Minos and the Moderns: Cretan Myth in Twentieth-Century Literature and Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 68 ff. 29 Ibid., 71–72. 30 Ibid., 73. 31 Ibid., 114. The Labyrinth: Revisited and Reinhabited … 187 took on the appearance of Nazi Germany and Minos the characteristics of Hitler. In the works of those writers who identify more closely with Theseus [...], the figure of the monster is often reduced to the point of being hardly represented. Others focus more centrally on the Minotaur. [...] Many of the writers [...] viewed the Minotaur as an image of the outsider.”32 And later he elaborates: “The adaptations have assumed the widest possible variety of forms and genres. We have encountered not only plays and paintings, novels and sculptures, but opera and ballet, high art and kitsch, traditionalism and experimentation. To that extent the forms assumed by these adaptations reflect modern art in its total breadth, just as thematically they mirror a broad spectrum of twentieth-century concerns, ranging from the most personal (sexual awakening, lust, alienation) to the most public (war, social prejudice, political oppression).”33 Since the second half of the 20th century—and especially in the recent decades, with the accelerating rise of ICT and the subsequent non-diachronic but synchronic or anachronic, multidimensional maze of hyper-communication integrated into life beyond its professional spheres—the Minoan myth has resurged as a metaphor and is frequently referred to, either directly or (more often) indirectly, in theoretical and philosophical works, based on and continuing the thought of such thinkers as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, with their concept of rhizome, Bruno Latour and his analyses of networks, and Rosalind Krauss, in her theory of grids, to name but a few of the most important.34 Similarly, post- and neo-pragmatist philosophies of experience, as well as the speculative realism that aims at reconstructing metaphysics starting from the outer reality, all seem to shift the focus of attention of the myth from the storylinenarrative-moral to the structural one. It is through these structural aspects that the universality of and polyvalence of the myth of Knossos seems to resonate especially well as a metaphor of the contemporary culture. Krauss identifies this phenomenon as already being present in the Pre-War avant-garde movements: “’Silence, exile, and cunning,’ were Stephen Dedalus’s passwordsŚ commands that in Paul Goodman’s view express the self-imposed code of the avant-garde artist. The grid promotes this silence, expressing it moreover as a refusal of speech. The absolute stasis of the grid, its lack of hierarchy, of center, of inflection, emphasizes not only its anti-referential character, but— ————————— 32 Ibid., 115. Ibid., 167. 34 We are listing these theories all together, despite obvious differences and even oppositions, insofar as they spring from the avant-gardes, on the one hand, and provide contemporary thinkers with relevant terminologies and concepts, on the other. 33 188 Bogna J. Gladden-Obidzińska more importantly—its hostility to narrative. This structure, impervious both to time and to incident, will not permit the projection of language into the domain of the visual, and the result is silence.”35 For Krauss, the grid is the opposite of the natural; it is the culturally enforced structure of reality that killed, “collapsed,” nature. A similar trend is clearly visible in the literary arts, as Marcin Wołk argues in his book dedicated to explicit and implicit uses of the symbol of the labyrinth in the Polish-language literature of Stanisław Lem, Artur Sandauer, Miron Białoszewski and Sławomir MrożekŚ “Modernity [here understood in the wide sense, as contemporaneity – BJGO] is, as it happens, intrigued with the labyrinth as a type of space and not as a fragment of heroic mythology. [...] [N]one of the characters has such a strong impact on contemporary imagination as the thought of a house constructed with endless corridors, built especially for the sake of misleading those who enter. What terrifies and fascinates us is not the roar of the human-bull, but the thunder, thumping, wham, bluster, bellow, moan, and swoosh or silently oppressive presence, of the labyrinth itself, and first and foremost the thought that we could find ourselves in it—or, that it already surrounds us.”36 The symbolic use of the figure of the labyrinth is also widely employed by contemporary architects in its structural rather than narrative aspects and, again, in symptomatically different forms than traditionally. The original functions of the labyrinth as an arrangement of space may be summarised as a type of prison (physically open, mentally locked), home (a place of sheltering and lifenourishment as well as death, two designates of the name labrys: a dual axe representing the waning and waxing moon, figures of life and death 37) and way (into and outside)38. There are various examples of historical architectural technologies that applied labyrinths as fortifications (e.g., to elongate enemies’ path into the city by forcing them to go around the city walls in a specially constructed maze) or as symbolic “shelters” of a most important element: a person, tree of life, spring (font, well), or treasure39. In all of those applications, the centre, the inner chamber, the mystical navel of the universe or community, or, in Eliade’s terms, the axis mundi, used to be the very reason for the construction of the labyrinth. As Kuczyńska expounds, ————————— 35 Krauss, R. 1981. “The Originality of the Avant-Garde: A Postmodernist Repetition.” October, vol. 18. The MIT Press; DOI: 10.2307/778410, 54. 36 Wołk, M. 2009. Mugitus labyrinthi. ToruńŚ Wydawnictwo Naukowe UMK, 8–9. 37 Jewett, C. 2004. “LabyrinthŚ Myth, Meaning and Symbol.” Music & Psyche Journal, 8–29. 38 Wołk, M. 2009, op. cit., 11 ff. 39 Jewett, C. 2004, op. cit., especially his accounts of diverse enclosures and strongholds that used such a structure. The Labyrinth: Revisited and Reinhabited … 189 “Eliade’s proposal to go through the labyrinth presented in his Endless Column bears no stamp of the ludic element; it is a serious offer explicated with the view of repealing the reduction of transcendence to illusion. Labyrinths ‘embodied the idea of defending ‘the centre.’ Not everybody could enter and leave them unharmedś the entrance had the value of initiation.’ A new motive assumes a significant role in the process of concretising and, as it were, objectifying the adopted aimŚ it is activity, man’s persistent and toilsome labour to go the ‘difficult way.’ This endeavour comes to be identified with man’s assiduous attempt to shape himself. This is the essential novum presented in and through the play. [...] Eliade seems to have concentrated in his play on the inner obstacles to be surmounted in order to gain the mastery over the stuff of things.”40 These “inner obstacles” are represented in the myth by no other figure but that of the unintelligent and unconscious but mighty beast. Thus, this dangerous, sacred, or precious central place regulated the orientation of the whole structure in a concentric and decentric manner, creating both a goal and a guide for any potential motion within it. As many scholars point out, the Cretan labyrinthian space—as intrinsically associated with the dialectic of movement (Theseus’s journey in and then out41) and its inhibition (the Minotaur’s settlement)—is always, although vast and intricate, ultimately finite. Consistent with the motif of the journey as a passage that initiates, the myth reveals that the labyrinth was recreated by Ariadne in a special symbolic dance defined in time and space along the lines of the maze, which became known and performed in Greece as “the crane” dance42 and which later reappeared, transformed, in Christian traditions as an accompaniment to daily prayers.43 Its orientation and organisation bore the same characteristics as the original Labyrinth and served to restore metaphysical order and ontological hierarchy by reenacting the placement of all agents in their respective positions and relations. In contrast to such phenomena, the contemporary organisation of mazelike spaces frequently manifests the opposite: the sense of labyrinthian arrangement is achieved by a deliberate lack of centre, axis, aim, orientation, hierarchy or the like. Typical examples of this increasingly popular kind of architectural design in historical monuments (e.g., the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin), museums (e.g., the V&A in London), sculptural-architectural formations (e.g., the BIG Maze in Washington) or even private houses (like that of Xavier Corberó in ————————— Kuczyńska, A. 1983. “Symposium.” Dialectics and Humanism, 1, 92. Which is, as Eliade remarks in The Ordeal by Labyrinth, qualitatively different each way. Cf. Eliade, M., C. H. Rocquet. 1982, op. cit., 27 ff. 42 Cf. Colli, G. 1975, op. cit. 43 Cf. Hawes, D. M. 1999. “Mundane Uses of Sacred Places in the Central and Later Middle Ages, with a Focus on Chartres Cathedral.” Comitatus: A Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 30 (1), 30–31. 40 41 190 Bogna J. Gladden-Obidzińska Catalonia) are analysed by Ernestyna Szpakowska-Loranc in terms of aimless “continuous experience.” According to her, there is no clear distinction between the way in or the way out of these constructs; instead, they combine the real with the virtual, and are multi-sensorial, multi-dimensional, and fragmented, so that they do not constitute a classical open-closed whole, but a symbol of indefinite and infinite diversity.44 More interestingly, as she demonstrates, these contemporary uses of this “centripetal space” in which “homogeneous interiors are broken into alleys and nooks and crannies,” which “lacks a certain external form,” and is “the disintegration of the uniformity of the classical space”45 do not, for the most part, aim at scaring, overwhelming or “trying” those who enter into them. On the contrary, they bring the participant or visitor—through an entertaining and enlightening interplay and invitation to wander in such spaces—to a state of positive engagement and cognitive comfort46. These new spaces do not promise answers or clues achieved and mastered after the aforementioned Theseian-Eliadean “surmounting of inner obstacles.”47 Instead, they offer the impression of safety, familiarity and open-homeliness in themselves, in continuity with the same reality that they break and discontinue and—by making the reality conform to their own formulae of discontinuity—that they thus appropriate. An example of this kind of experience is described by Henning Eichberg in his materialist philosophical interpretation of the sportive-recreational uses of free zig-zagged, roaming, mazelike movement for the sake of balanced development of fitness-oriented culture and of deep ecologyŚ “Wandering ‘in’ and ‘out’ into the world, winding in curved lines and wonderingŚ the labyrinth delivers a bodily ‘language’ for the anthropology of human movement.”48 4. REVISTING OR REINHABITING? Kuczyńska carefully considers what possible character human presence may take in the postmodern embodiment of the labyrinth—that is, the city itself. Following her powerful account of the experience of this necessarily erratic wandering within the contemporary maze, the reader is confronted with its postorganicism: ————————— 44 Szpakowska-Loranc, E. 2016. “Labyrinth. A Symbolic Figure with an Architectural Origin as an Element of Contemporary Narrative Space.” Space & Form, 28. DOI: 10.21005/pif. 2016.28.B-05, 106–112. 45 Ibid., 110. 46 Ibid. 47 A curious counterexample is the current fad for “escape rooms” that require the player voluntarily locked inside to employ wit and puzzle-solving capacities in order get out of such spaces teeming with carefully constructed ordeals. 48 Eichberg, H. 2009. “Wandering, Winding, WonderingŚ Moving in the Labyrinth.” Movement for Culture, 9, 223. The Labyrinth: Revisited and Reinhabited … 191 “Today, the old centre, even if architecturally it still exists [...], remains most frequently dead for the quotidianity of urban life. It does not become replaced by the peripheries, but it undergoes a process of disintegration, dispersal, fragmentation for the sake of new objects. It is chopped down, dismembered into many small segments. Sometimes city districts make efforts to create their own quasi-centres; sometimes their role is supposed to be played by small market squares, monuments, sculptures, or memorials. This does not, however, change the fact that these efforts inherit only fragments of the absent whole. The place of the passerby’s contact with the centre is taken by profusion, that is details, things, objects and their elaborate constellations, i.e., exhibitions, decorations, expositions—sometimes a display case, shop or gallery window, sometimes an advertisement or light.”49 This discomforting lack of form, of an integrating centre, and of a designer’s key to the arrangement of space impacts the relationships between co-users of such spacesŚ their coexistence “is not togetherness, defined by time and functionally organised space.”50 However, this disillusionment soon gives way to an appeasing discovery that the deconstructed space has the capacity to deconstruct relationships as reflexive ones, ones that allow self-definition: “[T]he place of verbal dialogue is taken here by silence, a flash, a moment, a community of understanding, an exchange of reality for fiction, and not the other way around: not tension or emotions [...]. The crowd [...] forces the passerby to think about himself in the most uncomfortably and directly empirical manner.”51 At the same time, however, “[i]n this encounter with others, it is not knowledge in the philosophical sense that plays the main role, but recognising in them a positive attitude (or rather a lack of hostility or menace), a welcoming acceptance of our presence.”52 This newly assumed identity of the first resigned and then keen inhabitant of the contemporary Labyrinth—which makes him slightly intoxicated with the pleasant scent of kindness that fills the space with peaceful, lighthearted and unmeaningful coexistence, and enchanted by the micro-narratives of witnessed scenes and events—reminds a careful reader about one of the previously mentioned versions of the myth, written by André Gide. In his narration, written from the perspective of Theseus, the interior of ————————— 49 Kuczyńska, A. 1997. “Agora nasza powszednia” [Our Daily Agora]. In: Pisanie miasta. Czytanie miasta. Zeidler-Janiszewska, A. (Ed.) PoznańŚ Wydawnictwo Fundacji Humaniora,165– 166. 50 Ibid., 166. 51 Ibid., 167. 52 Ibid., 168. 192 Bogna J. Gladden-Obidzińska the Knossos maze was so pleasant, comfortable and sense-numbing that it became the reason why exiting it was so difficult.53 The comforts of the centre, the omphalos, were created in this way in order to keep the beastly Prince comfortable and happy. It was for him that the presence of the periodically passing thirteen men and women, alien and ephemeral, was procured. He would have not been able to build any deeper relationship than those light, unimportant, kind and passing ones. But have we not already established that Western Reason and Intellect, or, metaphorically speaking, Theseus, Apollo’s sworded arm, aided by Daedalus, Apollo’s calculating mind, had truly killed the Minotaur for us? Again, as argued by the post-structuralists, naturalists, feminists and pragmatists, in Western culture Reason has truly killed Irrationality, and our civilisation, this intellectual shell, this social-political edifice, this postmodern Labyrinth, is an empty structure, and it is only the grid that still remains and encompasses most venues of comprehension (in Marquard’s thought, represented by the inevitability of the return of modernist reason). However, as Stanley Sfekas says of Jacques Lacan, “consciousness must open itself to the unconscious: la ou fut ca, il me faut advenir. He thus opposes the standard humanist recommendation that the conscious Ego should triumph over the unconscious Id, thereby controlling and mastering its desires. On the contrary he says, it is the self-contained Ego, Ich, which must give way to the self-dissolving Id, Es.”54 If, as Sfekas claims, our contemporary postmodern culture is indeed subject to the control of the irrational unconscious, then this explains why the labyrinthian intellectual spaces that our culture constructed now seem to be empty and alien—devoid of Minotaurs, the threat of the wild. On the other hand, if we go back to the original story as the source of this metaphor, we will see only one character for whom the Labyrinth seemed at the same time homely, safe and devoid of Minotaurs: namely, the Minotaur himself. What if the structures seem desperately reasonable, cold and empty to us, and at the same time intoxicatingly, sweetly safe and familiar, because over the last half-century we, contemporary people, have actually obeyed Lacan’s prescription and taken the Minotaur’s place—and now live his life in the Labyrinth? We seem not only to live in it, but we constantly build it bigger and stronger, creatively expand its size, both at its outskirts and inside it, by erecting more and more physical and theoretical walls and divisions within the existing chambers, thus making the pathways ever longer and ever further from the longforgotten and displaced centre. This is why also in our daily perception of reality, the difference between what is outer and what is inner dissipates: everything is inner and everything is ————————— 53 Gide, A. 1950. Two Legends: Oedipus and Theseus. Russell, J. (Trans.). New York: Vintage Books, 77. 54 Sfekas, A. 2015. Dissolvance: The Labyrinth of Mirrors. DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.1.1576.8406, 1. The Labyrinth: Revisited and Reinhabited … 193 outer for a Minotaur. This effect is magnified by the actual physical experience of our cities sprawling into megalopolises due to developments that turn them into ever more intricate and entrapping mazes of urban and architectural structures—which closely represent our mental state, as its hypostases. Set free from having one central structure, kaleidoscopic in re-structuring broken fragments of old patterns, cities represent that instinctive organic creativity which Colli describes as “late Dionysian,” when examining the cult in Attica that made the deity’s beastly side less violent, more serene, tame, and playful.55 If this be the case, if such insight into the Minoan myth leads us to believe that we have accepted the Id-Minotaur so successfully that we learned to be like him, in a safe way, then what could be the problem with this sort of naturalism—one in which rationality seems to be integrated with irrationality in childlike creativity: organic and spontaneous, free of harnesses of idealisms and yet capable of building structures that, as we mentioned before, Krauss sees as regulating girds through which we are also self-conscious, through which “nothing need be repressed—everything can be made visible?”56 Why, then, are there still constant outcries from social philosophers for more naturalism and more unreason? Concluding her essay on the experience of the city, Kuczyńska seems to offer a response, in the form of a subtle warning, saying that we had better hurry to enjoy our decentralised labyrinth, for soon the streets, as we know them, will be taken over by virtuality, by the “lightways,” in lieu of physical spaceŚ “The ontology of a passage, a little street, an agora, and the type of existence it imposes is still a delicious morsel for the careful observer, having not yet given way to the infostradas and become an object of study for historians only.”57 Kuczyńska seems to suggest that by being subject to irrationality as a driving force, what we are in fact doing is continuously and compulsively responding to the demands of now unconscious—unconscious because exteriorized—rationality. For just as Irrationality was being taken out of the unconscious to reside in the conscious, rationality moved out into the world and is preparing an ambush from the outside. We, Asterions born out of wedlock to Reason and Irrationality, are vulnerable to this sword even sharper and more ruthless than that of Theseus: the post-human technological externalised reason. Unless, that is, we start searching for the metaphysical centre that we once abandoned together with narratives from the past. ABOUT THE AUTHOR — PhD in Philosophy; adjunct lecturer and researcher, Institute of Philosophy, the University of Warsaw, str. Krakowskie Przedmie cie 3, War————————— 55 Cf. Colli, 1975, op. cit. D. 2002. Rosalind Krauss and American Philosophical Art Criticism: From Formalism to beyond Postmodernism. Westport, CT: Praeger, 90. 57 Kuczyńska, A. 1997, op. cit., 168. 56 Carrier, 194 Bogna J. Gladden-Obidzińska saw. She is author of a monographic book: 2009. Venus Surrounded by Mirrors: Retrospections in Art. Warsaw: Semper; editor of two books, editor and co-editor of four thematic issues of the Sztuka i filozofia [Art and Philosophy], peer-reviewed journal in aesthetics, and author of several articles in aesthetics. E-mail: Bogna J. Gladden-Obidzinska <b.j.obidzinska@uw.edu.pl>