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Mythocracy:How Stories Shape Our Worlds
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Our stories shape our worlds. The affective power of narratives can be explained, and realigned for politically progressive agendas.
Our stories shape our worlds. The power of narratives in the attention economy can be realigned for politically progressive agendas. This book analyses the narrative mechanisms that script the way we act through the way they represent other people’s actions, real or fictional. Digging under the common worries about misinformation and fake news, it uncovers the attention economy which organizes our political perceptions around affective attractors, much more potent than the truth value of any given statement. Our conceptions and practices of politics need to be anchored into a deeper understanding of the affective dynamics that infrastructures our perceptions of the world. Through Spinoza and Denis Diderot, Paul Ricoeur and Francesca Poletta, Wu Ming and Sun Ra, literary examples and philosophical concepts are seamlessly weaved into each other to provide intuitive illustrations within a strong analytical framework.
Through its five chapters, the book claims that the Left has underestimated the power of myth (“mythocracy”), abandoning it to the most reactionary political movements. Populism and conspiracy theories have occupied a ground that needs to be reconquered. The time has come to theorize and practice an empowering circulation of myths.
Reviews
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.
Yves Citton is one of the most consistently interesting and inventive of contemporary French thinkers. In this playful yet serious book, he asks: should the left become more gauche? Opt for less arrogance and more awkwardness? Instead of yet more debunking, can we reckon with the inescapability of myth and create more alluring and imaginative scripts?
Yves Citton's ambitious book is nothing less than a call for the re-enchantment of the Left. He scripts his literary myth-making by marshalling a commanding history of thought on the power of story-telling in politics. He seeks not to emulate the myths of the Right but to interrupt them with an abundant democratic imaginary that reclaims the labour of narration and its wealth for those who make it daily.
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Use Yves Citton’s theory toolbox if you believe in the emancipatory force of myths. Do not subscribe to the conspiracy that the left can’t meme. It is not enough to point at hidden transcripts. In Mythocracy you can read how to design hooks, plots and attractors that make a story work. It’s urgent use a compelling style while also explaining the power of scripting. As the meme says: protect the illusions that keep mankind sane.
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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.
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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.
, New Statesman -
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.
, Art Press -
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.
, Le Monde -
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.
, Doppiozero -
Rather than denouncing or lamenting, Citton attempts to understand these logics in order to identify the levers for emancipation.
, Le Monde Diplomatique -
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.
, Unemployed Negativity -
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?
, La vie des idées -
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.
, Libr-Critique