Page Text: Meta-Fiction: The Comic Book (Politics and Narrative, Part Two)
Lets begin with a story, I decided to read Yves Citton's Mythocratie because I was interested in his reading of Spinoza that I encountered in other contexts. It just so happened that soon after I wrote the blog post on that book I also received a copy of Christian Salmon's Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind which Citton cites (actually two copies, but that is another story). As the title suggests, Salmon's book is also about narrative as a tool for marketing, management, and politics. At this time I also started reading Mike Carey and Peter Gross' The Unwritten series based on a recommendation from my local comics shop, which also deals with the stories and their power. Narrative is not something that I am "working on," Spinoza, or post-Spinozist understandings of transindividuality are, but one thread led to another, and ended up intersecting with my reading of comics, something I rarely blog about (no one can confess everything). These two errant threads began to connect in something that suggested more than serendipity when the latest collected volume of The Unwritten was titled "On to Genesis," a pun that would seem to invoke Simondon's ontogenesis. So as my work and entertainment intersected I decided to make a "busman's holiday" of it and write about The Unwritten.