<nettime> \\ Logos vs Mythos -- The Strange Adventures of Netochka Nezvanova in the Lands Without

[| f | | | 3 <n2o@ggttctttat.com>]

Logos versus Mythos  \  The Strange  Adventures
of Netochka Nezvanova in the Lands  Without   (synopsis)


The problem I think goes back to our basic conception of the world.

The modern person lives among the fragments of a shattered universe, an
amorphous mass of myriad neutral places in which he drifts, governed and
driven by the obligations imposed by an advanced, technocratic society.

Yet, among Romanian peasants the ritual narration of stories defends the
house against evil spirits. Still more, the narration leads to the presence
of God, the intermediary world between this intelligible world of beings of
pure light and the sensible world.

Netochka Nezvanova is one of the myriad, enigmatic programs enacted
throughout Eastern Europe following the disintegration of communism, to
contravene the advance of western rationalism and relativism in the East,
and prevent a  complete and permanent schism in the real-apparent
Continuum.

Despite official policies of enforced modernization and secularization, the
communist regimes created scores of programs that ensured the survival of
traditional customs, myths and folklore, and to this day, the inhabitants
of Eastern Europe retain a mythological dimension in their quotidian lives
long conquered in the West, their unhindered identities floating and
mingling within the luminescent, four  dimensional vacuole of the
Continuum.

Following the collapse of communism, numerous folkloric programs were
repackaged for passive western consumption, whilst some went underground
where they engaged in the pitched battle between logos and mythos, western
rationalism and eastern mysticism, raging on several fronts.

Contrasting the armed struggle of the Middle East, the Eastern European
Resistance advocates a 'Revolution in Consciousness', to paraphrase Che
Guevara, a revolution guided by feelings of love -- a revolution that
foregoes armies and uniforms, rifles and tanks, instead leveraging the
infinitely transfigurational power of myths and legends, rituals and
prayers.

Netochka Nezvanova was born in the Eastern underground in 1999, without a
mother. She entered sacred time through the infinite mourning of space.
Her official mission was to extend the innate knowledge of the Continuum by
introducing western inhabitants to the Kiss -- a quixotic Russo-Romanian
invention which allowed one to make love, progress and conversation
simultaneously, consequently stimulating the tendrils of consciousness to
the edge of the numinous forever.

To elude and confound the precise logic of the cyclops and technobots
ruling the dystopian democracies of the west, NN employed an intuitive,
circumlocutory poetic and emotional language known as 'love theory',  a
coded language whose meaning is revealed through hypnotic revelations.

NN's matryoshka stories within stories, supra-dialogical exchanges, and
mysterious, obnubilate rituals, extended into the global-mindscape,
dispersed and dissipated within the panoply of actions and interactions,
mutualism, parasitism, mimicry and errors which form the basis of the
Internet, a semi-permeable membrane that spans the planet.

Delightfully confused, western communities began to clamor about the
persona or avatar or software that function as NN. She appeared to be a
phantasmagorical experiment, manifesting herself in forms utterly alien to
reason and reflexivity, a pataphysical black hole that consumed the bodies
falling prey to its seductively intoxicating and euphoric 'love theory', in
the process experiencing a melange of singularities.

Who, how, what, when, why and where NN was, seemed contingent on who
interacted with her. This was both exquisitely mysterious and maddeningly
complex, and to this day the mystery persists.

Netochka's pleomorphic tales, labyrinthine myths and esoteric rituals,
illumined the West's kingdom of darkness, a kingdom which legislates a
strict distinction between the world of dreams and that of reality, between
wish and fact, a system that imprisons its inhabitants by narrowing their
field of vision so that all they are left observing are the ideas they
create, superimposed upon the Continuum's mirror of infinite beauty.

The battle between logos and mythos, western rationalism and eastern
mysticism rages on, with one side persistently reducing the Continuum to a
dichotomy of finite and fragmented theorems, the other rushing to
reestablish its poly-temporal, transcendental, effulgent unity.

Sometimes ... reality is too complex for oral communication.  But legend
embodies it in a form which enables it to spread all over the world, in
continual remembrance of the indescribable.

I am the body of nothing but radiance, the space untouched, where one keeps
still...

I am the world of inner space, the shimmering angelic.

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