“Storytelling and Spectacle in an Age of Populism”
On March 19, 2025, Professor Guy Spielmann (Department of French and Francophone Studies), organized and moderated the panel “Storytelling and Spectacle in an Age of Populism”, co-sponsored and hosted by the Georgetown Humanities Initiative and part of the LCL event series “Books in Times of Crisis.” Guest speakers were Yves Citton (Université Paris VIII) and Stephen Duncombe (NYU).
Recent political events in various countries–the U.S, Italy, France, Germany, Argentina, among others–have brought to light a tendency towards populism that opponents have found difficult to counter. The panel focused on politics, populism, and spectacle–issues emerging from the two speakers’ scholarship.
Yves Citton’s book Mythocracy (originally published as Mythocraties. Storytelling et imaginaire de gauche) examines the narrative mechanisms that script our lives through the stories we tell one another. Digging beneath common anxieties about fake news, Citton looks at the attention economy, which organises our political perceptions around affective attractors. These, Citton argues, are much more powerful than the truth value of any given narrative; and the time has come for the left to reclaim the power of myth from reactionary populism, especially in a period where social media unleash the spectre of widespread conspirationism, as he analyzes in an Afterword to the 2025 English translation of his book.
Stephen Duncombe’s Dream or Nightmare (initially published in 2007 as Dream) argues that progressives cannot depend on reason and hard facts to prevail; they must also learn how to communicate in today’s “vernacular of the spectacular,” invoking symbol and emotion themselves, as well as truth. Hailed by Slavoj Žižek as “A must for anyone who wants the Left to overcome its purist shame,” Dream or Nightmare sketches out what Duncombe calls a politics of “ethical spectacle” as an effective countermeasure to the practice of conservative populism.