#06 Solo Show: Sauron's Mythopoeic Eye and Perspectivalism

The inaugural solo show is finally live! I recorded this not long after my talk with Dr Becca Tarnas (episode 4). Glad it’s finally out there.

CONSTELLATING “FIGURATIONS” OF MEANING

Illustration by J.R.R. Tolkien

In this episode, I’m linking Gebser’s insights on the phenomenology of awakening consciousness (Bewusstwerdung phänomenologie) to some of the existential problems of the hyper-mediated self, and how this all ties to the important mythopoeic image in J.R.R.’Tolkien’s Middle-Earth: Sauron’s eye.

Facebook and social media seems only to rev up the cultural fragmentation of communities into smaller and smaller siloed identitarian groups in a “post-truth world” (which, alone, is worth discussing in another solo show). In the age of networks, why is it that communication is breaking down? As I argue, and as Gebser points out, or Douglas Rushkoff has been articulating in his recent Team Human book (and elsewhere, such as Life, Inc), much of this has to do with the underlying structure of consciousness we’ve been leaning on since the Western Renaissance: perspectival consciousness and its potent but immoderate capacity of ratio, to divide. Extractive capitalism, deficient mental-perspectivalism’s spatialized “eye,” and the mythopoeic image of Sauron’s eye all offer us different ways of looking (pun intended) at the phenomenology and crisis of culture (kulturphilosophie) in our own mediated moment.

Illustration by J.R.R. Tolkien