Politica, mito, serie = Politics, myth, series

Abstract

Serial forms, throughout the historical arc of the phenomenon, have continuously intensified, in synergy with the transformations of the media environment. This paper proposes a strategy for constructing a mediological theory of political seriality, starting from a revisitation of Pareto's model of the genesis of myths, historical studies on the nationalization of the masses, McLuhan's observations, contemporary work on narrative seriality, and the research strands that, over the last two decades, have focused on phenomena which make recursivity an increasingly central factor of loyalty-building and persuasion. Recursivity is understood both as the repetition of emissions over time and as the reiteration of tropes and patterns, such as the leader's body, political TV series, and "memetic" communication on social networks. From this perspective, political communication appears as a stratified ecosystem in which grassroots production, the intervention of spin doctors, and broadcast and algorithmic media flows interact, each endowed with its own logics of recursivity, remediation and mythological condensation. In the current situation, the serialization of narrative, audiovisual and digital forms plays a crucial role in shaping the political imaginary, intensifying emotions, rituals, mythologies and polarizations. Within the digital ecosystem, processes of micro-serialization amplify social impulses, simplify complex conflicts and typify subjects and groups through predictive devices, thereby contributing to the construction of unstable and reactive political myths. Research should therefore take into account the systemic framework of flows that participate in the production of the political imaginary and examine the specificities and interactions among different forms of serialization – journalistic, ritual, spectacular, memetic and fictional – which contribute to the creation of myths and symbols, the terrain on which struggles for political hegemony are fought. The ability to decode these serial processes appears to be one of the necessary conditions for confronting the crises of representation and collective vision in the digital age.