In Mythocracy: How Stories Shape Our Worlds, Yves Citton argues that the left doesn’t just need new policies; it needs new stories. Not better facts, nor sharper critique, but myths, sequences, fragments, rituals that move through us before we know what they mean. The book arrives in David Broder’s translation for Verso at a time when the right is scripting national life with alarming fluency. A flag in one hand, a grievance in the other. Citton wants to know how that happened and whether anything can be done about it.
He calls this kind of power mythocracy, borrowing the term from Sun Ra1. The goal isn’t to debunk myths. It’s to understand how they work. How they organise perception, guide attention, shape what people expect from themselves and the world. Not just ideology in the abstract, but something closer to weather, the cultural atmosphere we breathe. Citton wants to rescue myth from cynicism. He doesn’t mean fantasy, or fiction in the pejorative sense. He means the scripting of conduct through image, mood, and repetition. Not just belief, but pattern. He insists on the ambivalence of myth: it can hypnotise or liberate, conceal or illuminate. The question is not whether myths are true, but what they make us become.
The book is structured in short chapters, or “involutes”, and moves sideways more often than forward. It opens with media theory and ends somewhere closer to speculative politics. In between, there are detours through ancient Rome, French education, Italian media monopolies, and cybernetic theory. What links them is a single proposition: that under late capitalism, power operates less through law or coercion than through scripting. It guides behaviour by setting expectations. You don’t need to be convinced, just cued. Citton argues that attention has become the primary site of struggle, the scarce resource on which both political will and economic value depend. Whoever scripts attention, scripts behaviour.
That work of careful articulation, translating dense, recursive theory into a rhythm an English-speaking reader can follow without losing its texture, is part of what makes David Broder’s translation so effective. His rendering is spare and rhythmic, alert to Citton’s shifting registers without smoothing them over. He preserves the book’s zigzag form—its detours, its hesitations, its recursive loops—and in doing so, continues his quiet but vital project of bringing French critical texts into sharper view for an anglophone left. His translation of Now, the People! Revolution in the Twenty-First Century made Mélenchon’s sprawling populist vision legible without defanging it, a task I grappled with when I reviewed that book. The same attentiveness to cadence, tone and friction is at work here. Later in the book, Citton writes that “We are governed by what we do not see — by what acts in us before we can even begin to say ‘I’. We are scripted by atmospheres. We are modelled by the media milieu long before we formulate opinions about the issues it conveys.” Broder holds the line steady. He lets the rhythm build without interruption, the kind of sentence that teaches you how to read it as you go.
Citton draws from Spinoza, Tarde2, and Deleuze, not as theoretical garnish, but to trace how power flows through feeling, how moods become habits, how attention becomes governance. He’s after a theory of power that accounts for how feeling circulates—how it settles, how it sets the range of motion for politics. His central distinction is between potentia (the immanent, affective force of the collective), and potestas (the channelled, formalised version that comes back down on us as law, command, management). Most of what we call politics today, he suggests, happens at the level of potestas. But the real stakes, the imaginative stakes are elsewhere. He acknowledges his own position in that structure, describing the soft power of educators and librarians, those who shape attention not through force, but through the arrangement of thought. “Don’t believe me,” he warns early on, in a deliberately myth-busting aside. “Test what I’m saying.”
That’s why Mythocracy matters. It’s not a theory of ideology. It’s a theory of atmosphere. Citton is trying to show how late capitalism scripts conduct not by commanding us directly, but by prefiguring what feels real, through interfaces, media loops, predictive suggestion, and the slow erosion of alternatives. If Foucault showed how power disciplines the body, Citton wants to show how it scripts attention, affect, and action. Through media, platforms, rituals. Through story.
Some of the most compelling parts of the book are its case studies, though Citton wouldn’t call them that. Roman religion3, for instance, was not about belief. It was about doing the right thing in the right order. Ritual was everything. If you performed the rites correctly, the world held together. That’s not a million miles from how myth functions in contemporary capitalism, through repetition, protocol, branding. You say the lines, click the box, perform the outrage. The gods are pleased. Or, at least, the interface responds.
Berlusconi is the archetype of this. Not just as a media baron or prime minister, but as a mythographer. He didn’t just deliver policies. He built a televisual imaginary, a saturation of desire and resentment broadcast night after night into the Italian home. He didn’t win because he persuaded people. He won because he made himself the story. A walking script. A feedback loop with a tan.
Then there’s cybernetics4. Citton picks it up not as an historical oddity, but as the deep structure of how control now works. Feedback, adjustment, real-time scripting of conduct. Your phone doesn’t just distract you. It learns your rhythms, sets your mood, scripts your desire.
Power doesn’t shout. It pings.
All of which leads to the book’s central provocation: if the right governs through scripting, what does the left have? Critique, mostly. Analysis. The occasional policy report. But not a counter-myth. Not a practice of attention. Citton argues that the right-wing imaginary, slogans, symbols, memes, half-formed resentments, gains power through its looseness. It’s not a doctrine. It’s a mood. And moods travel faster than manifestos.
He doesn’t propose a new master narrative. Instead, he calls for a “motley assemblage5” images, intuitions, interrupted myths, that might help people reimagine what’s possible. He’s not offering a programme. He’s trying to open a field. Among his examples are the narrative experiments of Wu Ming, the Italian collective who refuse the myth of the lone author and script collaborative mythologies across media. Their work, Citton suggests, shows how myth can be disarticulated and rewritten from below.
That sounds abstract, but it’s not. Or it doesn’t have to be. Some of that counter-scripting is already happening. It just doesn’t look like what we’ve been trained to recognise as politics. Some of the most powerful counter-scripts today are being told not from pulpits or platforms, but in film and television.
Ken Loach, for example, has been building working-class mythologies for decades. His final film, The Old Oak, returns to a former mining village in County Durham, where a closed pub becomes a fragile meeting point between locals and newly arrived Syrian refugees. There’s no moralising. Just damage, hospitality, ghosts. The film isn’t about conflict. It’s about ritual, the slow, stubborn gestures of solidarity that remain when history has emptied out.
James Graham’s Sherwood, broadcast on the BBC, performs a similar excavation. It starts with a murder in a former pit village and ends up somewhere deeper, older. The 1984 strike isn’t backstory. It’s infrastructure. Every relationship, every silence, every path through the woods is shaped by its aftermath. The past doesn’t return. It never left.
The past doesn’t return. It never left.
Then there’s Adolescence, the Netflix series co-created by Jack Thorne and Stephen Graham. I wrote elsewhere that it’s “the new Lost Boys”, and I still think that’s right. A teenage boy—Jamie, thirteen—is accused of murdering a classmate. The show doesn’t turn him into a monster or a cipher. It keeps the camera on him. Literally. Each episode is a single take. No edits, no escape.
Jamie isn’t radicalised in any grand ideological sense. He’s shaped, by silence, by online masculinity, by state scripts that don’t see him until it’s too late. He mimics the only masculinity he can find, and when it breaks, so does he. The show doesn’t explain. It performs. It scripts experience. What you’re left with isn’t a message. It’s a mood.
None of these works—The Old Oak, Sherwood, Adolescence—are movements. But they understand something the official left has forgotten. People don’t join politics because they read the platform. They join because something made them feel seen. Myth, in Citton’s sense, is how we rehearse a sense of possibility. Not through reason, but through form.
Journalism can do this, too, when it wants to. John Harris at The Guardian is one of the few who has kept faith with the listening class. His Anywhere but Westminster series walks the streets others write off. He doesn’t editorialise. He films. He makes space. And in doing so, he lets people narrate their own undoing, in their own voices, with all the confusion, dignity and contradiction that implies.
Jeff Sharlet, in the US, does something altogether darker. His book The Undertow: Scenes From a Slow Civil War doesn’t just map the far right. It inhabits its landscape. Truck stops, roadside vigils, Instagram live feeds from the evangelical abyss. Sharlet understands that American fascism isn’t a policy platform. It’s a yearning. A mythos of collapse, with romance and fire. He doesn’t debunk it. He tries to write against it, sentence by sentence, myth against myth.
Kerry Howley’s Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughs is another kind of counter-mythography. It follows Reality Winner, the whistleblower, but refuses the logic of heroism or causality. It’s about surveillance, yes, but more than that, it’s about narrative breakdown. How the state scripts attention, and how that script can glitch. Her prose fragments. Her scenes dissolve. The book leaks in every direction. It doesn’t explain. It feels like something’s wrong.
Harris, Sharlet, Howley. None of them offers a solution. But maybe that isn’t their job. They aren’t politicians, organisers or programme writers. They’re viewers, recorders, people who walk into rooms and listen. What they offer isn’t a plan, but a vantage point. A way of noticing. They don’t impose coherence, they register friction. And they remind us that politics lives in scenes, not spreadsheets. That attention is a battleground. That story is a form of power.
In the end, Mythocracy doesn’t tell us what to do. But it does something just as important. It reminds us that politics doesn’t just happen in argument, but in atmosphere—in what’s felt before it’s thought.
If the left is to win again, it won’t be because it shouted the truth louder. It will be because it told a story someone was already living, and made it feel like the beginning of something else.
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FOOTNOTES
- Sun Ra is an unexpected source for a term like “mythocracy,” but that’s exactly the point. The jazz composer, mystic and self-declared alien from Saturn used the word not as a warning, but as a manifesto, a call to remake reality through sound, image and story. Citton lifts it knowingly, half in homage, half in critique. The idea that myth can be both tool and weapon, oppressive and liberating, is baked in from the start. ↩︎
- Gabriel Tarde, I admit, was not a name I knew before reading Mythocracy. Citton draws on him as an early theorist of imitation and social contagion, someone who saw society not as a structure to be obeyed, but as a web of repetitions, moods and borrowed gestures. It’s easy to see why the poststructuralists loved him, and why Citton turns to him to think about how myths move through a population without ever needing to be believed. ↩︎
- Citton lingers on Roman religion not to historicise belief, but to show how myth operates as protocol. The rituals mattered less for what they meant than for the fact that they were done, and done in order. That’s myth as interface: you act, the system responds. The world holds because the pattern holds. It’s one of the clearest illustrations of his point, that narrative power lies not in truth claims, but in repetition, rhythm, enactment. ↩︎
- I wrote about this in my review of Nick Dyer-Witheford and Alessandra Mularoni’s Cybernetic Circulation Complex, where feedback isn’t just a system but a planetary condition—predictive, pre-emptive, tuned to crisis. Citton’s use of cybernetics is looser, more conceptual, but the rhythm is familiar: control through loops, platforms, mood. Power no longer disciplines. It nudges. The Doge Days Are Here. ↩︎
- Citton’s phrase “motley assemblage” might sound like a shrug, but it’s doing something more radical. He’s not calling for unity or coherence. He wants fragments, mood swings, myths that interrupt themselves. It’s an anti-programme on purpose, an attempt to resist the seamless, sentimental scripting of the right. The left doesn’t need better answers. It needs better glitches. ↩︎
