Political Fiction

Politics is not played out solely in the arena of budgetary or social decisions, but on the media stage. This staging is not just an appearance; it constitutes the very heart of political action, producing a fiction that profoundly modifies our relationship to reality. I explore here how these political narratives, beyond being simple lies and other propaganda strategies, construct the very conditions of our collective experience.

Politics as media spectacle

Paul Virilio said, with remarkable acuity, that when a head of state visits a country, he first sets foot in the television. Physical, real presence counts for very little compared to the televisual and broadly media image today, which is the only experience most citizens have of it. This observation, which he formulated in The Desert Screen (1991), reveals that political action largely consists of communication actions. Guy Debord also explained this very well in 1967 in The Society of the Spectacle: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.”

Certainly, there are decisions about budgetary choices, social, industrial, and cultural choices, the fundamental work of elected politicians. But the communicational dimension, the presence in the media, the way of addressing the public and occupying media space, particularly social networks, is an integral part of political action. This communication manufactures citizens’ adhesion, not based on the substance of real decisions, but on a skillfully orchestrated political fiction, whose impacts we will now unfold.

Staging, theater, has always accompanied political influence. The media of the 21^st century differ only in technical nature from earlier media, whether those of the 20^th century or the narratives carried from royal court to royal court by the influencers of yesteryear. One might think the goal is consensual, but no: the conveyed image produces adhesion or rejection, these two movements necessarily going hand in hand: the adhesion of some manufactures the rejection of others; this is how engagement and support can be strong.

Narrative radicality against nuance

Thus, political fiction constructs partial characters, never consensual ones. One might think that obtaining the adhesion of the greatest number requires a unifying discourse. But it’s the opposite: radical discourses convince more. In fiction, a simplifying layer of explanation of the world, we want to believe the stories we’re told, the narratives of good guys and bad guys. Hannah Arendt specifies its construction in On Violence (1972): “Factual truth is always related to other people: it concerns events and circumstances in which many are involved; it is established by witnesses and depends on testimony.”

Political discourses are therefore partial, devoid of nuance, and most often mendacious. Politicians utter lies all day long without our truly holding it against them. Their commitments are almost never kept, despite their repeated assurances. Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman analyzed this phenomenon in Manufacturing Consent (1988).

Our tolerance is explained by our immersion in fiction. The rules of the game can change constantly, a character we thought was dead can be resurrected, for example—we accept it because it’s a fiction, far more reassuring than reality, because we know there’s a demiurge behind this story, who takes care of us; we are not alone facing reality (which represents an unbearable anxiety). We take liberties with verisimilitude, because what matters is following a story, as Alfred Hitchcock explained very well. I find this political fiction extremely serious: it disconnects voters’ judgment from the reality of the acts of those they elected. Judgment is based on fiction, not on reality. But what is reality? To access it, someone must tell it to us. And to tell a reality is always to stage it. Let’s go further.

The scripting of collective emotions

Even a reality experienced directly is staged by the subjectivity of the person experiencing it. The person living the real moment chooses, consciously or not, what they pay attention to. And what they choose to look at, to consider as relevant for defining the real, is influenced by the fictions to which they have adhered. Each gaze is filtered, by what we call our culture, our representations, which explain what we are confronted with. This means that certain things perceived by one person may not be by another, and this is completely normal. Political fiction thus inhabits even the concrete experience lived by each person in their intimate perceptions. This staging of the image thus impregnates real space itself, far beyond the images that circulate in media spaces.

Fiction obeys one of the often misunderstood rules. We are often told that a fiction consists of a story with characters, who experience emotions, with whom one can, or cannot, identify. But true scripting, as Alfred Hitchcock demonstrated in his reflections on suspense, concerns our own emotions as spectators. It is we who are the main character of the story. It is our emotions that are scripted, not those of the characters!

Hollywood films are tested with different audiences, re-edited and reorganized so that spectators experience emotions that attach them as much as possible to the narrative. Political fiction works the same way: it is not the staging of heads of state, but the scripting of our emotions as spectators of the political spectacle, and all too occasional actors, in those moments of voting when we elect our potential despots, instead of actively and continuously participating in the evolution of laws. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in A Thousand Plateaus (1980), speak of “regimes of signs” that structure our perception of reality, a concept that illuminates this affective dimension of politics.

The example of pandemic theater

Emmanuel Macron’s speech preceding the first lockdown of March 2020 offers an illuminating example of theater. This political fiction deployed the imaginary of war, “being at war” against a virus. It was a powerful inducer of emotions: fear of the unknown, of the invisible enemy. The intense emotion was accompanied by an imaginary of combat. This fiction radically transformed the gaze on daily reality of a large part of the French, of which I was part at the time—I only constructed a critical vision a few months later.

This fiction made us live the state of exception, the loss of freedom, as a positive combat in which we participated. The fiction produced this collective experience. Beyond that, it had considerable real effects. The state of war justified governance in the state of exception, authorized decisions under defense secrecy (which is only lifted 75 years later). Let us never forget that the decisions concerning all of us during the Covid crisis were made under the seal of secrecy, in exception to the democratic process, justified by the fiction of war. We only had access to told stories, but the reality of decisions will only be opened when most of us are dead and buried.

This state of exception permitted autocratic governance, short-circuiting French institutions to entrust decisions to American consulting firms, McKinsey at the forefront, which actually managed this crisis for the political apparatus. It was never managed by democratic institutions. The political fiction of war opened this door. Without this story, or with another narrative, the entire reality of political decisions would have been different. Giorgio Agamben, in State of Exception (2003), had already analyzed how the suspension of legal norms becomes a paradigm of government, democracy being nothing more than a narrative emptied of its substance.

This fiction also allowed, in a year and a half, the doubling of the wealth of major billionaires and investment funds, and also the doubling of the country’s debt to the same capitalist powers, to finance putting an entire nation on life support. Some judge these approaches justified by a real danger, others do not. In any case, it was built on a fiction, whether one judges it useful or not. And it is indeed the fiction that produced the way of governing during this period. I obviously do not deny the reality of the emergence of a dangerous and highly contagious virus, but the ways of managing the crisis could have been completely different, even opposite, in other countries, even Western ones, like Sweden, where there were no mandatory lockdowns, and where the proportion of deaths was 20% lower than in France.

All politics are fictions

I find it important to become aware that politics is above all a fiction, a story we are told. Nicolas Schlumberger, Guy Debord, Gilles Deleuze, Paul Virilio, Noam Chomsky, Hannah Arendt, Étienne Klein, or Laurent Mucchielli have, each in their own way, explored these territories. What particularly interests me is that certain fictions are forbidden. Certain narratives are judged imaginary while others are presented as linked to reality. Covid is a very good example of this; what I wrote in the previous paragraph could be disqualified as “conspiratorial,” even though it is a narrative, of course, but based on entirely official information.

The object of my reflection is to show that no fiction fully reflects reality. There are only different reflections of reality. But fictions modify the reality of those who adopt them. Fictions are proposed to support political choices.

Let us know that there are many fictions in reality. Paul Ricœur, in Time and Narrative (1983-1985), shows how emplotment is constitutive of our temporal and historical experience. Fiction is not the opposite of truth; it is the medium through which we access the world. Recognizing this does not mean falling into relativism, but understanding that our political choices are not based on direct access to an objective reality, but on narratives that configure our perception of the possible.

This lucidity in the face of political fiction does not condemn us to powerlessness. On the contrary, it invites us to become critical spectators, conscious of the emotional mechanisms that pass through us, capable of choosing our fictions with full knowledge rather than suffering them as natural truths. The question is no longer “which politics tells the truth?” but “what political fiction do we want to build together?”