Mythocracy:How Stories Shape Our Worlds

Critical theory tends to focus on the critique of narratives. Once we have picked apart the dominant stories, how do we replace them? That might require some investigation of the social-political life of narrative. That's what Yves Citton offers in Mythocracy: both an analysis of the soft power of story and reformation of political mobilization that puts narrative at its center.

Our lives are scripted, and we continually re-script them in our communicational activities. But for at least four decades, the right has controlled the narrative. Mythocracy explains what the fact-checking left has missed: the formative power of narrative and the creative function of fabulation. Citton delves into the “infra-political” operations of scripting, from literature to social media. He shows how it both reductively formats our lives and, in hands by a renascent left, might offer expansive openings for progressive change. An essential text for our “post-truth” troubled times.

Elegant and persuasive ... if by this point [Hancox] hasn’t persuaded you to switch off the dross you’re binge watching on Netflix and hotfoot it to a festival or football match, nothing will.

Yves Citton reminds us of the power of scriptwriting (potentia) and the need to reappropriate the art of storytelling in order to re-establish its rightful power (potestas). Faced with an idle community, to quote Jean-Luc Nancy, he invites us to engage creation in its mythocratic virtuality, to fight with narrative as a weapon. This was the struggle of the classical poets; today it's the return of the literary, with a vengeance.

Citton's conviction is that it is urgent and possible to "renew the imagination of the left", by giving birth to liberating myths and forging "inspiring stories". Contrary to conventional wisdom, it is essential to "tell ourselves stories". To reclaim the imagination. To foreshadow future behaviour. To thwart conventional questions, and to be able to start saying something quite different from what's agreed, expected and anticipated. Clearly, this is something that deserves attention.

Far from playing the maître à penser who invites revolt from his armchair, he synthesises the most interesting results of the recent French debate by placing at the centre of his discourse the recent reading of Spinoza, the modern classical thinker who first affirmed that all power emanates from the multitude and that all societies are based on political imagination. The fascination of these pages lies in suggesting not the contents but the narrative forms of a counter-power that coincide with its performative reality in a project that re-proposes with the tools of today the role of a political avant-garde that wants to regain cultural hegemony.

Rather than denouncing or lamenting, Citton attempts to understand these logics in order to identify the levers for emancipation.

Combining Spinoza with such diverse sources as Lazarrato’s idea of noopolitics, work on mirror neurons, Stiegler, Diderot, Sun Ra, Wu Ming, and traditional theorists of narrative such as Riceour, Citton argues that attention and affects are shaped, channeled by stories, which in turn attune us to be receptive to the same stories. There is a certain plasticity to consciousness, to the conatus, that makes us receptive to the same narrative elements.

As the subtitle suggests, the main issue of this prolific book, itself driven by a free-flowing game of improvisation, is whether the left needs narratives, and if so, which ones. Following in the footsteps of Rousseau, who asked what the Republic needed in the way of entertainment, Citton has no trouble arguing for the excellence of storytelling, which leads to two questions: where have the storytellers gone? And what kind of storytelling would help the left today?

Finally, Yves Citton's book could be a symptom (in the limited order of "literary theory") of a "well burrowed old mole" on the way: perhaps a crystallisation is taking place from the work of these writers and a few others (and not only in France), in contact with the rage that is rising (the coming insurrection? ), so that a way of telling the story of the class struggle is emerging that has little to do with storytelling.