IN SEARCH OF THE RADICAL IMAGINATION1 John P. Clark In recent years, the corporate-state apparatus has vastly increased its domination over the social imagination. A half century ago, a similar acceleration of social domination was a subject of widespread discussion and widespread alarm, as witnessed by the attention given to radical critiques such as Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle and Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man. Yet today, the expanding colonization of consciousness has been assimilated much more smoothly. We have seen the results of the further development of pervasive background conditions of late capitalist society, which include the saturation of the culture with consumptionist images, and state and corporate hegemony over mass communications media. The manipulation of consciousness in times of military crisis has evoked a certain degree of attention. Yet, it must be conceded that thus far the state has been largely successful in vanquishing “the Vietnam Syndrome,” which is another term for critical thinking about war and militarism. While techniques for the manipulation and control by the corporate-state apparatus have advanced enormously, the battle for the social imagination by dissident forces—not only anti-war and anti- militarist movements, but movements for deep social and ecological transformation in general— has become more and more ineffectual. Much as Spanish exiles re-fought the Civil War from Toulouse for the four decades after it ended, the mainstream of the American left has been re- fighting the same imaginary war for over four decades and counting. At the same time, its strategy in the larger imaginary social war has focused primarily on modes of avoiding engagement. During the same period, the corporate-state apparatus has learned how to achieve not only “air supremacy,” but also imaginary supremacy. Despite the plague of political fantasies that overwhelm the collective psyche today, such noteworthy realities as intensifying global social and ecological crisis are crowded out of the dominant imaginary universe. Castoriadis and the Social Imaginary The present moment is certainly a good time to reassess the state of the social imagination and its political implications. And, in any such reassessment, it would be difficult to ignore the significance of Cornelius Castoriadis, for among contemporary social theorists, none has done more to inspire analysis and inquiry in this area. In the years since his death, some have found inspiration in Castoriadis for a radically democratic ecopolitics. In some cases, his thought has been used in defense of a new sectarian “line,” that rather crudely instrumentalizes his ideas, destroying their philosophical depth and radicality. Others reduced his thought to another episode in the burgeoning academic field of “French theory,” neglecting the revolutionary political dimension of his thought. But despite these abuses, anyone interested in a comprehensive, dialectical theory of society, a liberatory, transformative politics, and above all, an adequate politics of the imagination needs to come to terms with both the crucial insights and the limitations of Castoriadis’s thought. 1 This is a revised version of "Cornelius Castoriadis: Thinking About Political Theory," originally published in Capitalism Nature Socialism #49 (2002): 67-74. The central concept in Castoriadis’s reformulation of social theory is the radical imaginary. He begins with the thesis that every society “institutes itself” through the creation of "social imaginary significations." The radical imagination institutes by “constituting new universal forms” that result in shared social meanings.2 Its radicality comes from the fact that it results in the appearance of “something new” in history that arises out of “unmotivated creation.”3 The nature of the creations of the social imagination cannot be predicted (even by the creators themselves) through any “series of logical operations.”4 This imaginary activity results in “the emergence of radical otherness” and “non-trivial novelty.”5 This otherness is radical even in deep epistemological and ontological senses, because the most fundamental elements of social understanding depend on it, and the changing nature of social being arises out of it. Thus, even a society’s conception of the “rational” and the “real” presuppose “the primary and unmotivated positing of areal and arational significations”6 that emerge in the social imaginary. For Castoriadis, the classic example of the revolutionary nature of the social imaginary is the instituting of capitalism by the bourgeoisie. That revolutionary class not only expanded the forces of production and replaced existing relations of production with new ones; it also created “a new definition of reality, of what counts and of what does not count – therefore, of what does not exist (or nearly so: what can be counted and what cannot enter into accounting books).”7 Modern capitalism can be understood both as the further development of a traditional logic of domination that has been central to Western society, and as a historical break in which this logic is developed in a qualitatively new manner. Castoriadis sees the “core” of the traditional Western ontology in a mode of thought and valuation that he calls “identitary or ensemblist logic.”8 This logic conceives of all objects, whether in the natural world, the theoretical world, or the world of subjective experience, as distinct and well defined. Furthermore, it takes all realities as consisting of elements that can be assembled into wholes, disassembled and reassembled into new wholes.9 The paradigm for such thinking is obviously mathematics. Castoriadis attributes the compelling quality of this logic in large part to the fact that it is an inescapable element of any society, and is necessary for language, social practice, and indeed survival.10 However, beyond its social utility, this logic contains within itself the seeds of domination of humanity and nature. It is capable of becoming a kind of “madness of unification” that seeks to 2 Cornelius Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, trans. and edited by David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 131. 3 Cornelius Castoriadis, Political and Social Writings, vol. 1, trans. and edited by David Ames Curtis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), p. 30. 4 Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, p. 180. 5 Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of Society (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987), p. 184. 6 Political and Social Writings, vol. 1, p. 30. 7 Political and Social Writings, vol. 3, p. 179. 8 Imaginary Institution, p. 175. 9 Cornelius Castoriadis, Crossroads in the Labyrinth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984), p. 209. 10 Ibid, p. 208. annihilate all difference and otherness and reduce all realities to its own terms.11 The project of economic, political and technological domination initiated by the bourgeoisie has over the past several centuries been inspired by this very madness, which has defined rationality and “the end of knowledge” in terms of “the mastery and possession of nature.”12 From Alienation to Autonomy For Castoriadis, this modern project of domination is a specific instance of a generalized condition of social alienation that has spanned history. Social alienation in all its forms is a process in which “imaginary significations” become autonomous. Society loses awareness of the fact that its social institutions are the free creations of human beings, and these institutions take on an aura of sacredness and inherent authority. Yet, social alienation and heteronomy cannot be traced entirely to disordered or restrictive social practices and forms of false consciousness. For Castoriadis, “an institution of society which institutes inequality corresponds much more ‘naturally’ . . . to the exigencies of the originary psychical core, of the psychical monad which we carry within us and which always dreams, whatever our age, of being all-powerful and at the center of the world.”13 Thus, social hierarchy builds in some ways on foundations within “the individual’s psychical economy”14 Despite Castoriadis’s break with classical Marxist analysis, his central political project is in an important sense the development Marx’s concept of the End of Prehistory. For Marx, world history has thus far been the history of collective self-alienation in which the products of human creative activity have become alien forces that fetter humanity. The End of Prehistory will signal not only the reclaiming by humanity of the alienated products of its own activity, but also the reclaiming of the creative activity itself. Castoriadis develops this theme by focusing on the necessity of reappropriating what he sees as the deepest dimension of this creative activity—the radical imaginary. Castoriadis contends that there are two imaginary poles that have structured the Western societies in recent centuries. First, there is “the capitalistic nucleus,” which consists of “the imaginary signification of unlimited expansion of pseudorational mastery over nature and over humans,” and, secondly, there is another nucleus centering around “the project of social and individual autonomy.” This latter nucleus can also be called “the emancipatory project,” “the democratic movement,” or “the revolutionary movement.”15 Castoriadis claims that this later nucleus is part of an “autonomy project” that has its origins in ancient Athens, and “has dominated Western 11 Imaginary Institution, pp. 299-300. 12 Ibid, p. 272. 13 Cornelius Castoriadis, Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), p. 135. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid, p. 221. Political and Social Writings, vol. I, p. 31. European history since the end of the Middle Ages.”16 Its modern history begins with the bourgeois revolt against feudalism, spans the period of the great revolutions and the workers movement, and continues into recent times in the social movements of women, gay people, students, and ecologists. The goal of this project, according to Castoriadis, is a society in which the community realizes that the fundamental rules by which it organizes itself do not come ready-made from God, from Nature or even from any historical necessity or inherent structure of rationality within history, but from the community’s own creative choice. Post-revolutionary society, according to Castoriadis, “will be a society that self-institutes itself explicitly, not once and for all, but continuously.”17 The Roots of the Imaginary Castoriadis is certainly one of the preeminent modern theorists of both the imagination and of social liberation. However, an examination of his analysis of the imaginary and his formulation of the “autonomy project” reveals certain deep problems. While his often-incisive analysis seeks to undercut the imperious Prometheanism of the “capitalist nucleus” with its “identitary logic” and the accompanying project of economic and technological domination, his formulation of the autonomy project seems to retain a certain residual element of “heroic will to power.” Castoriadis seeks to avoid the decentering and loss of integrity of the self (and of the social collectivity as historical subject) that would come from tracing the roots of the imaginary in larger social realities. His solution is the theory of imaginative creation ex nihilo and the attribution of autonomous creation to individuals and to the collectivities they constitute. But there is a basic inconsistency between such a conception of autonomy, which locates agency within the subject, and radical creation, which always finds the sources of agency elsewhere. In reality, the radical imagination has always demolished the illusions of autonomy, and Castoriadis was not prepared to come to grips with this challenge. However, one of the strengths of Castoriadis’s theoretical project is his often-successful effort to avoid two errors. On the one hand, the imaginary has been looked upon reductively as a mere superstructural phenomenon, while on the other hand, it has been interpreted abstractly and idealistically as the spontaneous product of individual consciousness. For Castoriadis, the imaginary is something much greater than either of these views can conceive of: it is an instituted social reality that operates as a material force in history. However, although Castoriadis affirms this materiality of the imaginary and thus escapes some forms of idealism, his autonomy project nevertheless succumbs in some ways to this snare. For example, he fails to offer an adequate mediating link between the reality of the imaginary as a form of collective social creation and the concrete historical project of creating an autonomous, self-managed society. One has no reason to believe that merely pointing out (and to whom—certain political theorists?) that humanity can autonomously create imaginary significations and that culture can be the free expression of human 16 Ibid. Castoriadis’s insights concerning the crucial contribution of Athenian society to the development of democracy and critical thought, and his neglect of the contributions of other pre- modern cultures, are both worthy of attention. 17 Political and Social Writings, vol. 1, p. 31. creativity will motivate large numbers of human beings to struggle concretely for communal autonomy or engage in revolutionary cultural creativity. Nor does it indicate why, indeed, they ought to. Castoriadis implies that a realization that society makes its own rules according to its own free decision will somehow have revolutionary implications. But late capitalist, late modern “cynical reason” also has no illusions about the existence of preordained social rules, and yet it has no authentic vision of liberation. The idea of autonomous value-creation was also at the core of a certain fascist conception of an elite of Übermenschen who are “beyond good and evil.” And it is a notorious fact that Sartre thought that the existentialist conception of free self-creation might lead to Communism—or perhaps Maoism—or perhaps mote plausibly, anarchism, but the connection with any of them was never made quite clear. Something more was needed. It is difficult to find this something in Castoriadis either. Castoriadis’s conception of the imaginary is at once too radical and not radical enough. It is radical in grasping the irreducible, creative dimension of the imaginary, but not radical enough in overlooking its rootedness. It is true, as Castoriadis notes, that there are cultures in the Pacific, for example, “whose technical ensembles are closely akin, but which differ among themselves and greatly as our culture differs from that of the European fourteenth century.”18 And this refutes any technological or other reductionism. But how much of this difference can be attributed to the radical imaginary? A great deal can be correlated with the existence of either patriarchal or non- patriarchal social structures, which have material and not only imaginary determinants (patriarchy was not created ex nihilo and diverse patriarchal cultures show considerable institutional continuity). An adequate understanding of such cultures requires attention both to those elements that are irreducibly unique and seemingly “unmotivated,” and to those that can be explained through an investigation of social determinants. And these determinants, including the imaginary ones, must be investigated in all their complexity. An Ecology of the Imagination Despite Castoriadis’s major contribution to theorizing the social imaginary, one does not find in his work a great deal of careful empirical investigation of the imaginary. We might compare his work with that of Gilbert Durand, who, in his magnum opus, The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary,19 investigates the rich content of the social imaginary over history in minute empirical detail. Though Durand was engaged in a structuralist theoretical project more than a politically liberatory and socially transformative one, any success in the latter undertaking will depend on a similar immersion in the phenomena. 18 Crossroads in the Labyrinth, p. 248. 19 Gilbert Durand, The Anthropological Structures of the Imaginary (trans. of 11th French edition; Brisbane: Boombana Publications, 1999). Much of the most important contemporary work on the social imaginary in France has been done not under the influence of Castoriadis, but rather in relation to the intellectual lineage George Bachelard-Gilbert Durand-Michel Maffesoli or in political readings of the legacy of Jacques Lacan. Thus, we must ask, not only in regard to the vast expanse of history, but also in relation to our own society, to what extent there is “a” social imaginary and to what extent there is an “imaginary of imaginaries.” We must recognize that the imaginary is regional, not territorial, and devote careful attention to the various imaginary regions that are interrelated and mutually determine one another in very specific, and very complex, ways. An understanding of the contemporary imaginary requires a detailed inquiry into the dialectic of many imaginary regions. These include the productionist and consumptionist imaginaries, the statist and nationalist imaginaries, and the patriarchal imaginary, to mention some of the most important ones. When Castoriadis approaches the phenomena most concretely, he focuses very heavily on the technical dimensions of the dominant imaginary—those elements that relate to the ensemblist- identitary logic and to productionist images of a powerful, rational, and effective technological system. These are very crucial aspects of the system of domination. But it is essential to realize that consumptionist ideology and the consumptionist imaginary also perform a powerful legitimating function, and that this is carried out ever more insidious in late capitalist society, since they are able do it through ideas and images such as “environmentalism,” “good corporate citizenship,” “green consumerism,” and “caring for nature.” In the consumptionist imaginary utopia, we can, in more senses than one, recycle ourselves into oblivion. In Castoriadis’s analysis, it is “the economy that exhibits most strikingly the domination of the imaginary at every level—precisely because it claims to be entirely and exhaustively rational.”20 Once again, Castoriadis points out an important truth about the system. But it is a truth about only (at most) half of the picture. In the productionist and technical realm, such “rationality” reigns supreme, in the form of instrumental, technical, and bureaucratic reason. But in the consumptionist sphere, it is a rationality of the irrational that rules. The realm of consumption is the realm of fetishism, of mysterious, quite irrational powers, and of the harnessing of desires that are neither rational nor transparent, often even to those who exercise the rational techniques of manipulation through all these means. Moreover, there is in the economic sphere as a whole (which increasingly means “in society”) a perverse dialectic between this irrational rationality and this rational irrationality.21 In late capitalism, the means sometimes appear sane while the object appears mad. At other times, the means appear mad while the object appears sane. Yet, in all cases, means and ends are all elements of a larger madness. And what of the motive? Whether mad or sane, it is indispensable for purposes of ideological mystification. One last point cannot be ignored. Despite his movement in the direction of political ecology in his later work, Castoriadis never fully reformulated the central themes of his philosophy in the light of ecological thought. Had he done so in regard to his theory of the social imaginary, he might have undertaken a comprehensive ecology of the imagination. This would then have taken him back in the direction of the tradition of dialectical social thought that he largely abandoned in his 20 Imaginary Institution, p. 156. 21 See Joel Kovel, The Age of Desire: Reflections of a Radical Psychoanalyst (New York: Pantheon, 1981) for what is still the best detailed analysis of the consumptionist, productionist and other fundamental institutional, ideological and imaginary dimensions of society, as exhibited in contemporary subjectivity. formulation of the radical, unconditioned nature of the imaginary. We can, however, setting out from Castoriadis’s illuminating insights and oversights, undertake exactly this project. In doing so, we will find it necessary to engage in a careful exploration of the various regions of the imaginary, to pay close attention to the phenomena of the imaginary, to investigate the material basis for imaginary transformations, to explore the politics of the imagination as a concrete social practice, and to analyze the dialectical interaction and mutual determination between the imaginary and other realms of social determination.