How to Scénarise the World
(It's all about the script)
Yves Citton, Mythocracy: How Stories Shape Our Worlds, translated by David Broder (Verso, paperback, London: 2025)
Parisian literature professor Yves Citton investigates 'Mythocracy' as the key to understanding the 'flows of desires and beliefs' as the affects of both rulers and ruled in autarkic, theocratic or democratic societies (the word 'affect' as used here is quite different from 'effect'; affect is used in psychology to refer to a person's emotional expression or state). To make his case, Clitton draws on a host of other studies, inspired (at least initially) by French 'post-structuralist' authors such as Michel Foucault and Paul Ricouer. He refers throughout to Denis Diderot's Jacques the Fatalist and his Master (1780) as an exemplar in story-telling. Citton's analysis of Diderot's classic would on its own make Mythocracy essential reading for students of French literature. Citton is also a huge fan of the ideas of Sun Ra who, in his persona as an exiled musical genius from Saturn, defined the mythocracy as ‘what you never came to be that you should be'
La Scénarisation'
The power of scripting/directing ('scénarisation' in French) is exercised through the mass media as the 'soft power' of myths and charms employed in various genres: game shows (anyone can become rich), talent contests (any karaoke warbler can become a star), TV confessionals (being (in)famous for fifteen minutes beats privacy and dignity), true crime (crime doesn’t pay), reality TV (gossip and lies are the new truth), murder mysteries (an eye for an eye), political election campaigns (game show hosts, Hollywood super-heros and TV clowns trump the swamp), etc.
A narrative, as the structuralists of the 1970s used to define it, is a 'discourse' that tells a story featuring a subject and an object, and dramatises a transformation from one condition into another. To begin with the mythical storyland of Greek Antiquity, Orestes murders his mother (Clytemnestra), who has murdered his father (Agamemnon), who has made a human sacrifice of their daughter (Iphigenia) to appease the gods of war. In Aeschylus's drama Eumenides Orestes is pursued by vengeful Furies. As the subject of the story the Orestes' object is freedom from the curse of the Furies who are driving him to insanity. Zeus counsels Orestes to take himself to Athens, where wise Athena has given her citizens law and justice (as opposed to lawless vendetta). Orestes' salvation depends on the aesthetic grammar of 'enchanting' words which have the magical charm to momentarily seduce and fascinate the audience beyond the limits of one reality into another reality of law and 'democracy', 'thereby enabling us to act out that reality more incisively'.
The power of scripting relies on its ability to capture the flows of desires and beliefs by grabbing the attention of an audience. The narrative involves the use of attractors as bait to hold the attention of the audience. Citton explicates two forms of attractors. The first to be considered is the use of hooks within a genre ('a set of formal characteristics that can be immediately identified'). Citton’s thesis brings to my mind Nordic and Celtic TV crime dramas in which the first scene might depict (as it frequently does) the discovery of the body in the woods and the arrival of the detective at the taped-off crime scene. The audience is assumed to identify with the quest of the detective protagonist to find out 'who dunnit'. The quest may be complicated and made more interesting by the personal issues of the detective (marital breakdown, past traumas, alcoholism or whatever) which are unfolded in the narrative. The hook, to be successful, must be anchored to something 'beyond itself'.
One device to keep the audience engaged from the start is the editing style that cuts shots every two or three seconds: look away and you'll lose track of the plot. The initial attractors are also what 'tends to draw interpretations towards patterns inherited from the past, as an effect of “sticky” social realities'.
The second form of attractor is the series of interconnected narrative elements ('concatenation') 'encapsulated within a story that carries the promise of a schematising form which functions to create a totality. The scripting may attempt to transform this reality by attracting the attractors:
'the attractors define the criteria of receivability endemic within a certain audience, in order to turn them in the direction of new perceptive configuration, new narrative grammars, and new semantic horizons better adapted to our needs of desires'.
In simpler terms, the drama may reflect or even push changes in popular conceptions of such issues as race, gender, ecology and criminal justice.
Typically, from the outset my protagonist detective has to overcome antagonists: especially the superintendent who has been promoted to the job according to the Peter Principle (rising to his level of incompetence). The latter usually wants to wrap the case up immediately, as the initial evidence points to an obvious suspect who is known to have 'form'. He regards the world-weary detective as prone to an over-active imagination as well as 'insubordination' – which always makes for a lively dialogue to strengthen the hooks. The detective suspects that there is more to the case than meets the eye (his suspicions are reinforced after consulting the mordant pathologist at the morgue and the computer key-pushers back at the station).
The detective, having ruled out the 'obvious' initial suspect, is confronted in successive episodes by other potential witnesses and suspects: the 'abnormal' behaviour of the reclusive rustic who lives in a hut in the forest, the trafficked immigrant assigned 'not one of us' status, the dangerous 'rush to judgement’ prejudices of the local racist vigilantes, the disillusioned ex-cop haunted by his failure to crack a homicide case twenty years previously (which resembling the current one, raises the spectre of a dormant serial-killer), the capitalist who wants to desecrate the woodland with a strip-mine, the tree-hugging eco-activists who will stop at nothing to save the planet, etc, etc. All of these episodes are presented not so much as dead-ends but as opportunities to raise 'issues' of public concern and also to provide clues that may turn out to be significant in a chain of evidence which will culminate in the inevitable showdown between cop and culprit.
The scripting may merely be a re-iteration of the pre-existing 'grammar' of the narrative, i.e. a simple re-treading of an already trodden path, leading to a simplistic 'lesson' such as 'crime doesn't pay'. Alternatively, the plot may be a re-configuration of sequences originally presented as grammatical (meaningful and acceptable), so the the 'ungrammatical' may be pushed towards grammatical acceptance, e.g. a character initial presented as passive, timid and fatalistic suddenly shows their 'true colours' by contravening expectations with an act of bravery (or recklessness).
Infra-Politics as Resistance
Drawing on James C Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, Citton distinguishes between four varieties of political discourse:
1.The 'public transcript' corresponding to 'the self-portrait of dominant elites' as they would like themselves to be seen.
2.The 'hidden transcript', a discourse of speeches, gestures and practices that takes place 'offstage', unobserved by the powerholders.
3.In between the public and hidden transcripts lies a practice of disguise: gossip, folk tales, rumour, rituals, jokes and the like, involving micro-subversions such as pilfering, sabotage and shirking.
4.The 'Saturnalia of Power' involves 'the rupture of the political cordon sanitaire between the hidden and public transcript' Such moments can provoke either repression, or the deepening of the rebellion.
Citton says that to conceive power as arising from the circulation of desires and beliefs, implies that institutions, as 'points of leverage', can qualify as hooks, plots and attractors in a 'scénarisation' of subversion. This is because any institution can only function if it is fed with desires and beliefs propagated through stories that uphold conformity and obedience by affective deployment of hopes, fear, hatreds, etc.
In the contested frontier between the public and the hidden transcripts the elementary form of politics is the infra-politics of democratic class struggle. The struggle is fought by applying pressure and thrusts at points of leverage, to redefine what is allowed to said and how we want to say it in the face of the public transcript of conformity to the dominant discourses.
What I have written above isn't a review of Cittons book. With its hundreds of citations and references to other writers and neat summations of their insights it will not doubt get full-length reviews in academic journals. My commentary has been limited to the section on 'Scripting from Up There, Attractors and Infra-Politics', which I imagine will make interesting reading for all combatants for hegemony on the frontiers of the culture wars.