No one has yet to determine what a story can do. Some are
offended by the “myths” that obscure;
others denounce “the histories” that we recount; others still believe in
that it is enough to find the good story that would lead the donkeys to polls,
the sheep to the market, and the ants to their work. More than these
denunciations or formulas, this book proposes an interrogation of the power of
stories, doubled by a narrative on the mythic nature of power: mythocracy.
In order to
do this, one must articulate three levels of reflection, which it would be too
ambitious to pretend to analyze separately, but one hopes to seize in the
process of traversing them. In the first case, it is a matter of following the
imagination of power characterized by recent developments of political thought,
inspired in part by Spinoza, Gabriel Tarde, Michel Foucault, and Gilles
Deleuze. They have made it possible to recount and comprehend the way in which
apparently “soft power” functions, a power which insinuates, suggests and
stimulates more than it forbids, commands, or constrains—a power which is a
“conduct of conducts” circulating through the flux of our desires and beliefs
that channel our networks of mediated communication.
It is also
an attempt to examine the part of our reality played by the fantasies and
emancipatory potential enveloped in our practices of narration and
storytelling. One thinks here of the diverse disciplines (anthropology,
sociology, narratology, and semiotics)which have made sense of the way in which
narrative structure is the necessary precondition of human action, at the same
time that it is the horizon called upon to integrate our diverse quotidian
gestures. This would be the occasion to comprehend how and why the resources of
storytelling have been monopolized by reactionary ideologies (of the right) and
under what conditions they can be reappropriated by emancipatory politics (of
the left).
At the point of encounter between practices of
narration and apparatuses of power, one finally tries to define a particular
type of activity, scripting, [scénarisation]. Recounting whatever kind of story,
it amounts to not only to articulate certain representations of actions along
with certain types causal connections, but ultimately leads to a certain
conducts of conducts on those who listen, following the same connections and
sequences. In placing on the stage the actions of fictional persons in my
story, I contribute—more or less effectively, or more or less marginally—to
script the comportments of the (real) persons to which it is addressed. This
activity of scripting [scénarisation] demands to be analyzed in terms of it
specific virtues, stemming from the nature of the narrative gesture, and in
terms of it effects at the heart of our media apparatuses. Going from the
problem of narration to that of scenarization implies an examination that
traverses several structures of communication with what possible effects a
story can affect the public orienting
its comportments.
The general
institutions that this book tries to define in terms of the power of scripting
[scénarisation] are the most common. We see that their distribution only
partially corresponds to the distribution of political, juridical, and economic
powers. We know that the decisions responsible for the inclusion or not of this
news, this question, or this spokesperson or their perspective plays a role in
the orientation of mediated democracy. We sense that what is said, and what is
thought in out political debates, what is bought in our supermarkets, and what
mobilizes us to work, to obey, to accept, or resist, or to invent another
possible world, depends not just on what we see or hear in the world around us,
but also of the diverse ways it is placed in scene [mis en scène] which define
our world…
What
constitutes this power of scripting? By what taglines does it capture our
attention? What are its points of leverage? What inequalities structure its
distribution? What obstacles exclude the majority of us from its effects of
multiplication. Which new demands of equality would lead to the recognition of
our common imaginative power. How can the emancipatory politics (of the left)
be reappropriated, without cynicism or false shame. How is it possible to
define the left as a particular mode of enunciation, no less than a particular
list of demands. These are the questions that are posed in the six chapters of
this book…
…The power of scripting which is described in these passages
is nothing new in itself. It could easily be traced back to the mise en scène
of royal power attributed to Louis XIV or to the scenography of Roman emperors.
Human beings are being scripted as soon as they speak, seduce, contest or
recount histories. If the power of scripting is as old as humanity its
conditions of exercise, its canals of diffusion, its degree of concentration,
intensity and the precision with which it can hope to influence human
comportments evolve and transform constantly. Our modes of social regulation
are distinguished by the intensity of their power of scripting. In this case
studying the phenomenon of scripting today takes on a particular urgency,
something the can be illustrated by the aid of a short recap of the last two
centuries.
At the beginning
of this examination, it is necessary to be a precise as possible, of course power has not always been soft. The following chapters would be legitimately
accused of naivety or idealism if they were taken as a theory of power. Power
as it exists in the third millennium, is also and (always) the bombs that
destroy homes and lives in the name of security of the state; the soldiers and
the police firing at crowds; the resisters who fight and are imprisoned without
process; the unilateral closing of businesses that do not meet the profit
requirements; the exclusions imposed upon women (and even more so gays) under
the cover of religion; neo-slavery conditions of labor that workers without
papers are subjected to; the physical, legal, and symbolic violence that
marginal and alternative modes of life are subjected to; not to mention the
bullying, humiliations, rigidity, and absurdity that are our daily lot under
bureaucratic apparatuses. Without a doubt it is this—this hard power—which would
be necessary to speak of first if one claimed to speak of power as such (in
general and under all of its forms.)
It is not a matter of denying, relativizing, or declaring
obsolete this massive reality of hard power, but of simply remarking how it is
often relayed by other forms of power, apparently more soft. In fact the power
of scripting often doubles the forms of “hard” power: the spectacular
deployment of “antiterrorist” commandos against a farm occupied by a ten or so
unarmed youth in Tarnac, the imprisonment of one of them for over six months on
the basis of empty charges, the revelation of several months of surveillance
the months before, all of which were meant to prevent a “crime” the essence of
which would seem to be the desire to be “autonomous”—here there is at one and
the same time a traumatic violence, imposed by the force of submachine guns on
several individuals in particular, and a work of scripting addressed to the
entirety of the population, to reassure the obedient and frighten the
insubordinate.
Such a history of the “Tarnac nine” has effects beyond the
little village of Corrèz: according to the very fact that it is told, depending
on the channels that diffuse it, according to the sensibility of those
listening, it could serve as a call to order, a revelation, or the confirmation
of a vector of indignation. Beyond the play of powers and counter-powers,
juridical or economic which intersect and transform each other, the modalities
of scripting determine a place of intervention which, far from annulling or
surplanting this interplay, adds to it a level of complexity, which has
multiple and constant points of intersection with economic and juridical
conflict, but nonetheless merits to be analyzed according to its proper logic.
It is the proper logics which will be clarified in the following chapters.
We hope to hope to show that it is not only inevitable but
often beneficial “to tell stories” and that the society of the spectacle must
be less an object of lamentations than efforts of counter-scripting. The last
decades have been characterized in effect by the incapacity of the political
forces of the “left” to tell convincing stories. For reasons that we must
comprehend, the “right” (security, neoliberal, xenophobic) has become a
widespread, open, but relatively coherent story of images, various facts, information, statistics,
slogans, fears, and reflexes and objects of debate that mutually reinforce the
heart of one and the same “imaginary of the right.” The (soft) force of this
imaginary has been its ability to rapidly colonize the discourse of number of
leaders of parties that are supposedly officially left. How has this “imaginary
of the right” been able script large sections of our political life. On what
bases is it possible to reinvigorate an imaginary of the left capable of taking
charge of the powers of scripting. These questions are on the horizon of what
follows.
The related hypothesis is that the current disarray of “the
left” (official) is due to a blockage and deficiency at the level of its imaginary
of power which it has not reinvented. The pathetic disorientation of the
leaders and collective organization, in France as well as other European countries,
contrasts strongly with “para-political” invention and resistance can be
largely attributed to the lack of an imaginary glue which makes it possible to
collect together, sensibilities, sentiments, evidences, hopes, beliefs, slogans
and demands of which there are isolated experience but nothing that gives them
the strength of shared experience.
In speaking (wrongly) of the end of ideology, regretting or
celebrating the belle époque of grand and structural antagonisms, we miss what
the specificity of today: it is not a matter of constructing a system of ideas,
coherent and totalizing, strongly anchored in the rigor of the concept,
reassuring the restless spirits by the pretension of a answer to everything (an
ideology), but more to the point a heteroclite bricolage of fragmentary images,
of doubtful metaphors, of debatable interpretations, vague intuitions, of
obscure sentiments, crazy hopes, partially stories and interrupted myths, which
taken together constitute the consistency of an imaginary, held together less
by there logical coherence than by the interplay of common resonances that
traverse their heterogeneity in order to affirm their fragile singularity. It
is towards the emergence of such an imaginary that the present essay would try
to make a modest contribution.
The title of this book is written under the influence of the
African American musician Sun Ra (1914-1993), who invented at the same time
musical oeuvre of premier importance, that remains well know (from the post-bop
compositions to collective improvisations relevant to experimental music), and
a common creative mode of life, that he and his Arkestra maintained for almost
a half, and a myth, such that he claimed to be originally from the planet
Saturn. In the USA during the second half of the twentieth century Sun Ra,
lived, embodied, and illustrated the emancipatory force of myth: changing his
name, investing in an extraterrestrial identity, regarding Earth societies from
an interplanetary point of view, all of which participated in an effort of
counter scripting and resistance to racist oppression, classism, conformity,
and anti-intellectualism that structured US society.
The term mythocracy does not refer solely to the political
regime in which fairy tales are used to
lull infantilized citizens to sleep. It designates also the capacity of
myth—which acts as a simple enunciation (according to Greek etymology) or as a
foundational story (according to its modern usage)—to give rise to new
becomings, individual and collective. To try mythocracy, to respond to the
citation of Sun Ra, which is the exegesis of this book*, is precisely to
confront the ambivalence that permits myth (speech, history) to at one and the
same time to be our sleep and that which wakes us from our sleep, we push from
our premier place in the imaginary to “what you never came to be that you
should be.”
Last introductory precaution: this book comes from someone
who is becoming a professor of literature, from the knowledge of someone who is often
confronted with the soft power of librarians more than the batons of riot
police, someone who himself exercises an institutional power that has its own
bad and perverse effects, and someone who is paid to say and believe that
words, forms, stories and stagings [mises en scène] count as much as the facts
that they find, represent, or express. Whether this deserves to give him authority
or if, on the contrary, it must place everything under great circumspection—caveat
lector!
*I’m telling people that they’ve tried everything, and now
they have to try mythocracy. They’ve got a democracy, theocracy. The mythocracy
is what you never came to be that you should be.”
Updated 8/27/2024
With news that this book is coming out in English next April I decided to add the following report on the book that I wrote years ago.
I am going to start off by stating that Citton’s Mythocratie is in my view one of the most important contributions to French Spinozist Marxism of the last ten years, perhaps second only to Lordon’s Willing Slaves of Capital. These texts both reflect a profound engagement with Spinoza that exceeds a simple interpretation to spill over into a general rerorientation of thought. While Citton’s book is grounded in a Spinozist consideration of the imagination and its power, its implications extends much broader, not just to include other theories of power and society, Deleuze, Foucault, Stiegler, and Tarde, but also literary and artistic experiments, most importantly the Italian literary collective Wu Ming.
Citton begins his book with three intertwining provocations, one philosophical, one political, and a third which is the conjunctural intersection of philosophy and politics. The first concerns the role of stories, narrative, and myths. As Citton argues in the opening sentence, invoking Spinoza, “No one has yet to determine what a story can do.” Stories, narratives, are sometimes seen as the foundations of mystification, of myths and illusions, and sometimes they are seen as the necessary condition of political transformation. As for the latter point, consider the constant attempts to tell the story of revolution, The ambiguity of attitudes towards narratives, bemoaned and celebrated, stems from the fact that no one knows what a story can do, how a story or narrative captures attention, shapes understanding, and alters thinking and feeling.
The second provocation is political. The dominant narratives of contemporary politics are primarily on the right, dominated by security, austerity, and competition. As Citton writes,
The last decades have been characterized in effect by the incapacity of the political forces of the “left” to tell convincing stories. For reasons that we must comprehend, the “right” (security, neoliberal, xenophobic) has become a widespread, open, but relatively coherent story of images, various facts, information, statistics, slogans, fears, and reflexes and objects of debate that mutually reinforce the heart of one and the same “imaginary of the right.” The (soft) force of this imaginary has been its ability to rapidly colonize the discourse of number of leaders of parties that are supposedly officially left. How has this “imaginary of the right” been able script large sections of our political life. On what bases is it possible to reinvigorate an imaginary of the left capable of taking charge of the powers of scripting. These questions are on the horizon of what follows.” (My translation)
The third provocation concerns the nature of power, or, more specifically what Citton calls, “soft-power”. As Citton argues, the development of new forms of mediation and dissemination have given rise to an increase in the importance and role of “soft power,” the power of ideology, imagination, and affects. It is not just the quantitative increase of soft-power that demands theorizing according to Citton, but its qualitative change. Soft power appears to be increasingly democratic, open to the participation of the individuals that read it, watch it, and consume it--it as is the case with social media and internet forms of attention. Whereas the stories told by older forms of media such as the television news broadcast show the marks of their “scripting” by the “ruling class,” the trending topics that structure attention on twitter and facebook seem to arise spontaneously from the interest of those viewing and watching. However, as Citton argues this supposedly democratic dimension is all the more pernicious in that it conceals how power functions. As Citton argues, the central philosophical problem, the one that ties in all of the provocations, is to reconsider the power of the imagination by reconsidering both the power of the imagination and our imagination of power.
These three intersecting provocations structure the book. The first three chapters (“Reformulating our imaginary of power,” “Modeling the circulation of power,” and “The activity of scenarisation,”) primarily deal the intersection of reimagining the power of imagination and the imagination of power. As Citton argues, this new imagination of power has its foundation in Spinoza’s assertion ‘that we neither strive for, nor will, neither want nor desire anything because we judge it to be god; on the contrary we judge something to be good because we strive for it, will it, want it or desire it’ (EIIIP9Schol). As we have seen this reorientation of desire does not so much constitute a Copernican revolution back to the self, but explodes it into a universe of causal connections and an eternity of relations. Citton argues this assertion radically undermines any attempt to make desire the degree zero of autonomy, and to make the will of individuals the foundation of politics. Desires must be understood as produced. Spinoza’s attentiveness to the production and historicity of desire becomes even more timely in an age in which the conditions for producing desire, for constituting new affects, have only increased and multiplied. The mixture of democracy, consumer society, and marketing that defines contemporary society demands that we move beyond thinking in terms of repression and consent as the basis for politics. It is necessary to theorize the forms of “soft power” that produce and constitute desires and consent. It is not a matter of creating an opposition between transcendent and immanent forms of power, between hierarchy and spontaneity, but in understanding how hierarchies are reproduced in apparently spontaneous relations, and how transcendence captures immanent desires.
In short middle section Citton turns to Diderot’s Jacques le fataliste, or rather the specific story of the vengeance of Madame de La Pommeraye, to demonstrate this intersection of transcendence and immanence. As Citton argues Diderot’s story functions as a kind of meta-fiction in that it demonstrates how narrative shapes and transforms the existing desires, hopes, and fears of its audience, capturing and channeling what it takes as given. What is supposedly spontaneous exists only in and through its organization, and what is transcendent exists only in and through its organization of immanent forces.
The second half of the book then turns more explicitly to politics. As Citton argues it is first necessary to comprehend the rise of the right wing meta-scenarization of politics, to understand how myths of the “welfare queen” and the job stealing immigrant draw from and transform existing anxieties and fears. From this it is possible to then construct a new politics of myth and narrative. With respect to the latter Citton turns to Wu Ming’s reworking of the historical novel and Sun Ra’s mythopolitics.
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