‘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.’ – Sun Ra 1
Yves Citton’s Mythocracy: How Stories Shape Our World is a book about the nature of power and how storytelling shapes that power. To understand how stories shape power, we need to understand what power really is. This will be a two-newsletter series, the first of which will deal with Citton’s notion of power, and the second will look at the role storytelling can play.
Imaginary of power
Rather than a theory of power Citton provides an Imaginary of power. The reason he calls it an imaginary of power is to “emphasise the continuum that links the images we create of ourselves and the world, the stories we feel swept up in, the understanding and knowledge we develop, and the emotions we feel – without assuming that any one aspect should be prioritised over the others.” (10) That is, to show how power is how we are able to imagine our world through stories, understanding/knowledge, and emotions, and that these are the aspects of power.
That is, three core components make up the images we create of ourselves and our worlds, which together constitute power. It comprises the stories we invest in, “the understanding and knowledge we develop, and the emotions we feel.” This isn’t a way to try to explain power, but rather provide a way of seeing it. (10)
Power doesn’t come from a person; instead, a person gets power from those they have power over.
This at first sounds counterintuitive, so let’s dive in. Even in a democracy, this may sound a bit naive. Yes, people have the power to elect our representatives. Still, given the limitations of democracy and how it is in practice, it may feel that, politically, the people don’t really have the power. If you think about your boss at work, you are unlikely to feel like you have given them power. However, as you will see, this is not as counterintuitive as it seems.
Citton makes two key points about attention and power:
First,
no one can obey an order that he has not taken the trouble to listen to(15)
And second, which extends the first,
that which we do not pay attention to has no power over us. (15)
It is fair to challenge this last point that there are material things that have power over us, like hunger, but it is also true that if we were able to ignore it completely, we would not give it power to influence our choices. It only has that power because we are forced (biologically to pay attention to it. Another example Citton cites is a brick falling off a building and heading towards you. If you notice and pay attention to it, it gains power over you, making you move. If you ignore it, it never really has power over you in the sense that it can make you act one way or the other. (The brick still can kill you, but that isn’t power over you).
Especially today, attention is a rare commodity. Everything is competing for your attention: LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Bluesky, YouTube, Books, TV, Movies, and long-winded management newsletters.
However, it is also clear that our attention follows our desire and that what we desire is “largely the result of [our] attention.” What we desire can only be based on things that we are aware exist or could at least imagine their existence. (17)
This connection between desire and attention means that attention is really about affect, or how things make us feel.  Our affects condition our thoughts and, as a result, drive our actions. (19-20)
We shouldn’t forget that, as I wrote about in my previous posts on Transindividuality2 , affects are not purely individual; there is a social component to how things make us feel. This is easiest to see in young children. Whenever I bring my one-year-old into a new space, he always looks to me or my wife to see how he should feel. He sees how we react and then regulates himself as a result.
As a result
the economy of attention cannot be separated from an economy of affects…To speak of an ‘economy of affects’ thus means, on the one hand, that my various inner emotions constitute a system with its own dynamics and equilibria. But this also implies, on the other hand, that my affective regime is directly articulated, in a transindividual way, around the affective regimes of those around me whom I recognise as akin to me…What I pay attention to (or not) depends on my affects (fears, desires, jealousies), which are in turn conditioned by what I pay attention to. (19-20)
When we see this all as trans individuals, we can see how what a group collectively pays attention to can shift and relate to their fears. It only takes 5 minutes of a news cycle switching between MSNBC and FOX to see that even when they report the same story, what separates these two perspectives is what they focus on; it is what is expected to be paid attention to by their viewers. We can see which stories are talked about or ignored altogether.
Things we have felt, thought, and wanted before become easier to feel, think, and want again. The more we become accustomed to feeling, thinking, or wanting certain things, the easier it is for us to be led to feel, think, or want them.
This two-sided process – clearing a new path and sending subsequent behaviour along this same track, articulating the labour of attention to that of memory – always acts simultaneously both within my psyche and within the social body. According to a logic of communication, what is individuating itself through this forging of paths within me is always a society (a ‘culture’). And, conversely, a society is nothing other than the communicative movement of the transindividual facilitations through which individuals inter-trace their affects on each other’s minds. (22)
This strengthening of pathways does not just happen at the individual level; it also happens collectively. As a society, group, or even team, our patterns of feeling, thinking, desiring, and acting are reinforced by our patterns.
Circulation of Power
If power is related to attention and desire, which are mutually co-creating, then “power is not something that anyone holds, but something whose circulation itself constitutes us.”(29)
This causes Citton to define power as the flows of “desire and beliefs.” Here, Desires are driven by affects, whereas beliefs are driven by knowledge and information. There is undoubtedly a range of desires and beliefs: some are stronger than others, for desires, that strength is more related to intensity. Beliefs range according to how critical and absolute the knowledge is. These flows go through individuals and can be strengthened through imitation or changed through invention. (31) Of course, desires and beliefs are also deeply connected: “I desire certain objects because I believe in the reality of certain representations, and that I develop certain beliefs because I experience certain desires.”(32)
Based on Antonio Negri’s work on Spinoza, Citton defines two notions of power: potestas and potentia.
Potentia is what the multitude of subjects provide the tyrant as they place their vital energy, the competences of their bodies and minds (their eyes, their hands, their feet, their gazes, their vigilance, their actions), in his service. Potestas is what the ruler can turn back on the members of the multitude, as he re-applies to them the forces he draws from their service – which he can do to harm them, as in the case of a tyrant, or to help them better organise themselves, as we can expect from a better form of government. (35)
This perspective sees politics as “capturing, reorientating, and channelling the potentia of the multitude through the institutions of potestas.” (39) We can think of these institutions as systems that we create or that already exist. Those systems and structures are the channels through which power can be captured, arranged, composed, aligned, and channeled. (42)
Power then is less of a controlling force, but rather a driver that “incites us to (want to) do what we want.” (45) All of our choices are conditioned by our context, and our beliefs and desires are part of that. What we see as
free choices are always the result of the ‘conditions’ in which they have to be made. From this it follows that the human power to act resides less in the moment of the choice which triggers the action, than in the configuration of the parameters that will determine future choices (my own, and those of others). (46)
Thus, power manifests in what Citton calls the ability to meta-conduct:
the capacity to influence, to suggest, to induce certain behaviours, by conditioning the voluntary choices that subjects over which the power (potestas) in question holds sway are led to make. (46)
Our circumstances and context condition each of our choices. The things (or people) that have power have influenced how we and others make those choices. Citton gives a great example comparing classical music with free jazz. There is a belief that classical music is entirely scripted. Every detail is written in the score, and a great classical musician can perfectly and flawlessly recreate the music as the composer intended. Free jazz is believed to be completely free, with each musician able to do whatever they want. The truth is more nuanced. Classical musicians need to interpret the score, and free jazz performers are limited and influenced by previous performers, other group members, and even the audience’s expectations. There are even more levels to this when considering that both classical and free jazz performers need to make a living. As we think about each of these levels, each actor is trying to influence the desires and beliefs of those they are interacting with.
What does this mean for managers?
When we think about power from this perspective, we can see how those with more power can better channel attention and the flows of desire. We are unaware of many things and people that have power over us, which condition and influence our choices and actions. Gaining awareness of how this happens can help us change it.
Citton provides a few valuable questions to ask.
Who tells your story? Who is meta-conducting (influencing, shaping) my conduct? (57)
We should also think about these questions as plural and for the group.
‘Who are the we-they, who are telling our stories?’ Based on what (hierarchical) superposition of ‘up there’? By meta-conducting what conducts? In the interest of which strategies? (57)
No one is above or outside of the influence of others; however, we aren’t often aware of it. When we realize that we give power to others through our attention, which controls the flow of our desire and belief, we can start to notice where it is happening and make more conscious choices.
In part two, we will look at how storytelling influences the flow of power and an approach that will allow leaders to use their power to produce more possibilities for collective (and individual) action.
- Sun Ra as quoted in Citton, Yves and David, Broder. Mythocracy: How Stories Shape Our Worlds. London: Verso, 2025. p 189. All future quotes will have the page number in parentheses. ↩
- Stuck in the Middle #26: Transindividuality and Stuck in the Middle #28: How we come to be who we are.↩