Beyond the colonization of human imagining and everyday life: crafting mythopoeic lifeworlds as a theological response to hyperreality
Abstract
This work takes up urban historian Lewis Mumford’s concern for the
phenomena of planned and imposed ordering of human life and societies. Mumford
(and others) suggests the problem consists in the use of external plans, technologies
(and media) to manipulate, dominate, and even coerce forms of life. It is seen at its
worst in war, and even forced systems like Nazism and Stalinism. But these phenomena
also take more attractive and seemingly enriching forms. We will focus (along with
Daniel Boorstin and Umberto Eco in their own way) on forms which have massively
developed in 20th and 21st century society: market and consumer saturation, shaped by
dominating mass electronic media. This situation is developed imaginatively, and
inventively, yet problematically, in Jean Baudrillard’s theory of Hyperreality – a
critique of the Western hyper-consumer and media saturated world. But his methods
and pictures are not followed here. We take up a very different approach and diagnosis;
This approach has become increasingly multidisciplinary: phenomenological,
praxeological, anthropological, and philological. We build it up in a reading of human
lifeworlds in philosophers Martin Heidegger and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and
anthropologist Tim Ingold. This work does not go in for a picture of language (and
cinema) as a system of signification, but as Ludwig Wittgenstein describes it, as tools
always already involved in forms of life. We also offer a unique characterization of
corporeal imagining and the imaginative creation of lifeworlds, paving the way for
what is described as philological resistance: this resistance is seen in the development
of a certain praxeological philology and fully realized in the 20th century author J. R. R.
Tolkien’s mythopoeic concerns. We focus particularly on what we call the double-transfer: the cyclic structure between human artistry and life-world building, each
shaped by the other. We endeavor, along with Mumford and others, to counter
colonization and find various less manipulated and un-coerced forms of life, and their
informal organizing structures. We examine in detail Tolkien’s literary and philological
project; and the 20th and 21st century’s first art form – cinema. Through the
philosophical exploration of cinematic craft in Gilles Deleuze, and in the craft of
Terrence Malick we see, and are taken up in, the inextricable relationship between how
we make, what we make and how we live everyday life.
Type
Thesis, PhD Doctor of Philosophy
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