"enlightenment," ascendency, and Stargate discourse

Positivism, the belief that scientific reasoning will lead to reality, or truth. An ideology founded by and in the period we call the Enlightenment, positivism focuses on human progress through validated versions of science and technology, the teleology of which is infinitely in the future.

Mythologies: Narrative systems that seek to explore the nature of Nature, explain cause and effects, and prevent the breakdown of community (Rene Girard). Rituals do not emerge from mythology, but mythology from rituals; repeated actions meant to alleviate cultural tensions give way to stories that support those rituals. In Girard's formulation, mythology conceals the nature of ritual, which is the gratification of humanity's desire for violence, but Christianity, and the other four "enlightened" religions, reveal (apocalypse) the structure of ritual murder as a destruction of the Other and postponement of mimetic desire. In our post-Christian world, we no longer have the need to scapegoat and have no need to believe in mythologies that conceal the structures of culture. So says Girard.

Stargate: SG-1-- A strange blend of positivism, humanism, and mythology. Dead myths are revived for their misunderstood truth, "gods" are sublimated to aliens (the Other), and human progress (as technology and democracy) is touted as the revelation. There are tensions here, though. Mythology is no longer ridiculed for its primitive notions of gods and goddesses; by making the stories "real," the human relations the rituals and myths attempted to conceal remain concealed--Christianity becomes yet another myth involving aliens.

Whereas Girardian constructions of mythology present a hopeful future for humanity to recognize and thus correct our responses to the Other (human other), the narrative of Stargate presents mythology as yet another aspect of positivism, of human understanding, of Enlightenment. Furthermore, the "other" presented in in the series is problematical--nearly all of the characters from other planets are White English speaking peoples with mythologies stemming from a Western/Hellenic narrative.

This understanding of mythology provides other problematical discourses when we speak of "justice" --the early Daniel-centric episodes feature positivist, "enlightened" arguments for democracy and a sympathetic understanding of the "other;" later episodes (season 5), however, create a new mythology, a mythology of the show itself in its creation of "ascendant" beings, Daniel's own ascendance through his understanding of humanity and the universe, and the pre-ascendant, extent of bodily humanity (the end that postivism seeks to locate) "Lantians," who created humanity in this galaxy.

Why do we (at least a small portion of "we") need this new mythology? If Girard is correct, we should all be too Enlightened to fall back to mythologies--even mythologies that explain mythologies--because these stories are only ways to structure and justify human exclusion and murder of the Other. The shift in SG-1 that occured with the emergence of the "Ancients arc" discontinued the revelation of myth (A Girardian Move) that the first five seasons included. Daniel's increased militarization and his "fall" from ascendency have presented new arguments, new explications of familiar myths, and further proliferation of retrubutive justice.

To further think about: Trials and justice in SG-1, the scapegoat mechanism, rhetoric of anthropology available, arguments for positivism and progress, the Ori in relation to recent religious rhetoric (rhetoric which is definitely NOT "revealed" in the Girardian Christian sense), and the acts of "revelation" narrative naturally requires.