Meme-ocracy: What Remains of Myths

I finished teaching Yves Citton's Mythocracy for the first time this week. It was also during this week that I learned of one of the oddest turns in the intersection of popular culture and politics, and that is Musk, and others on the right making Anakin Skywalker a meme.  What draws these two events together? Whenever I teach, or read, any book that is in some sense focused on the current conjuncture, as Citton's book is, I find myself asking the question as to what extent the conjuncture has changed or transformed. As I have written before, I find much of Citton's book to be incredibly relevant to the current moment, a moment that could be described as an attempt to take many of the myths that have sustained the right (immigrants are destroying the country, foreign aid is too much of government spending, etc.) and actualizing them, making them policy. I think that we are living in an age in which particular myths, myths about politics about the economy, have moved from the outskirts of power, being something for the people to believe, to becoming policy. However, what I find striking about teaching the book now is the contrast between how he understands how myths and the intersection between politics and narrative work, and the increasing literalization and fragmentation of myths in popular culture. To expand the point a little bit, everyone who has argued for the political dimension of popular culture, from Adorno to Citton, never quite imagined something as crude and immediate as the richest man in the US tweeting out references to Star Wars prequels as an attempt to sway an election. 

First, I need to be a little more clear on what Citton means by myth, a word that is often used and abused (as my friend Fouad would say) to mean so many different things. I must admit that my own use above is perhaps formulated in a broader sense. Mythocracy is perhaps better understood in the book as the power of scripting. In formulating it in this way, Citton takes his bearings from a Foucauldian premise, that power is a kind of conduct on conducts. In many ways Citton follows Maurizio Lazzarato in seeing Gabriel Tarde as a kind of successor to Foucault. A successor in the sense that after discipline, in what Deleuze called control societies, is one in which the capacity to act on conducts becomes increasingly abstract and disconnected, from the tower of the panopticon to the broadcasting tower.  In other words, we move from masses, organized and disciplined, to a world of publics, disparate and disconnected. The only way to act on a public is to script it. Scripting works with given fears, desires, and aspirations, on flows of desires and belief, and gives them objects and goals, shaping them.“The art of storytelling aims to know how to seize (preexisting) desires and beliefs attracting and influencing them for its benefit.” 

Every story, every narrative, takes as given particular flows of desire and belief, particular fears, hopes, and so one, these are the hooks that draw people in, but it also transforms these fears giving them new shape and form. In doing so it "channels" them into specific ways of thinking and acting. As Citton writes,

"By scripting various paths for how things could play out, starting from the real, current situation, I project into the imaginary fictional behaviors that solely emanate from my power to establish narrative sequences between actions. Yet this work of the imagination is also doing something else: for, by doing so, I am already carving out the reality of these future developments in the reality of my brain and of the props I thereby produce (battle plans, road maps, messages sent to others, warnings, forward projections). The activity of scripting is metaleptic precisely in that it articulates a (fictional) scenario, imagined for the future, with the actual facilitation of the (real) happening of this fiction."

The power of scripting is a particular metalepsis, a shifting from fiction to reality, as real anxieties and desires are given fictional forms, and those forms in turn act back on the anxieties in forms of action. Returning to Anakin Skywalker we can see how this works. The Star Wars prequels are interpreted as stories about a young man with great talent and potential who is thwarted by a bureaucratic structure, the Jedi council, who denies him the greatness that he is destined. We could add that in this reading the council is perhaps suspiciously DEI in its diversity. (As an aside about Star Wars, the Jedi Council is one of the few times Star Wars looks like a story about a universe of many sentient life forms. For the most part the stories focus on humans with aliens only ever providing colorful back ground in bars and other exotic locales) 

The Jedi Council and its DEI hires denying a white man his due 

Two things about this, two things that I am saying define the memeification. It seems to me that Citton's metalepses are always indirect and at a distance. For example in my book The Double Shift, I argued that we can find a kind of mythocracy of work in such narratives as Breaking Bad and Fight Club. The idea that work, work understood as an isolated activity and not a collective activity, is powerful way to remake oneself and control one's destiny. This does not mean that one aspires to become a drug kingpin or start making soap from human fat. There is a gap between the narrative fiction and the mythocracy it establishes. It seems that the Anakin memes are much more invested in the figurative story, in the fantasy. This is perhaps another aspect of what Anna Kornbluh calls immediacy. Second, Citton's focus is on narrative understood as a story, something that happens to a subject with a beginning, a middle, and an end. The Anakin memes seem to replace the trajectory with the image, fragmenting the story into a few affectively charged images. This might explain why they have so little scripting power beyond a particular audience who is already immersed in the "very online world" of online memes.  To most people who are ignorant of this audience Anakin Skywalker is the tragic figure of the prequels, that is if the prequels had a sense of the tragic. He is not the hero. This is what makes the image at the top of this post so confusing. I must admit that I was utterly baffled by Musk's post on the eve of the elections. I actually thought that it was a complaint against the sequels with their diverse casts. I thought it was a point about popular culture (which of course is not without its political effects). The question that I am left with is are we seeing some sort of shift in the scripting of ideology away from narrative towards memes, away from stories to isolated images that are recontextualized and transformed into their own language. 

This brings me to my second point about Citton's book. Citton argues that the task of "the left" today is "the rejection of the given." To explain this he offers a history of the left that starts with a rejection of divinity, of God or transcendent powers as the basis of society, continues to a rejection of Sovereigns, of potestas over potentia, of the state over the people (both of which can be found in Spinoza). To this history Marx adds a third rejection, a rejection of appropriation. As Citton argues "In this case what aroused indignation was not the abusive oppression exercised by the representatives of political power but rather an intolerable inequality or a revolting injustice in the appropriation and distribution of goods and services." All of these still remain pertinent now in the twenty first century, but he adds a fourth rejection that of the given. As Citton writes,

"This rejection of the Given involves a dimension of auto-affection. Indeed, it presupposes that a certain alteration (intentional or otherwise) takes place within me, before it has consequences for power-structures or the prevalent logics of appropriation in the outside world. The rejection of the Given is based on a self-refusal of my own sensibility. Recognizing this allows us to get a better understanding of what separates this last type of move from the previous there. While these others had to do with opposing external and objective characteristics of reality (the power of priests, and what they say, the actions of a government, the principles underlying the distribution of goods) this fourth move consists of fighting against one’s own self (hence the dimension of self-refusal), against one’s own habits, some of one’s own desires, one’s spontaneous emotions, one’s likes and dislikes. Before they can result in demands concerning the social structure which organize our interactions, these (self) refusals, at first sight, appear to remain at the surface of our contact with the things that surround and constitute us: they do not overthrow any visible target, but settle for making us feel or think differently."

I do not want to entirely discount this perspective. After all, much of Citton's book is framed around a reflection of Sun Ra, who powerfully refused the script America imposed upon him to rewrite another story, another sensibility. I would argue that there are many of us, myself included, who struggle with the scripts that they have inherited, that make their very way of making sense of the world. However, it is very hard to sign onto this project of rejection of the given as a left project, when people like Musk (and Trump) circulate memes and points of view, that seem to have departed from the given and established basis of reality (I got into a little bit of discussion of Citton about this here, in this interview). Which is perhaps to say, by way of closing, I understand how we have to reject the given sensibilities and narratives which construct the ruling mythocracy, but such rejection cannot be the extent of a left politics, especially in light of a right which has rejected so much of what we take for reality. (Although, as I argued with Citton in that interview, and elsewhere, I think that the right rejects the given but does so within the ruling forms of myth, maintaining ideas about the individual and society, while challenging particular aspects). It is not enough to reject the world as it is given to us, but we must also create a new world, a new sensibility, one predicated more on solidarity than individuality.