Philosopher of the imagination: Cornelius Castoriadis

I admit it, I have a secret, almost librarian-like inclination toward obscure and overlooked cultural figures. Especially essayists (Charles Lamb, Oliver Wendell Holmes, G. K. Chesterton), Biedermeier painters (Georg Friedrich Kersting and Carl Spitzweg), eighteenth-century "proto-Romantics" (J. M. R. Lenz, J. G. Hamann, Senancour, Edward Young), fin-de-siecle pianists (Frederic Lamond, Mark Hambourg, Moritz Rosenthal), and just about anyone from Bengal or the Weimar era (Tagore's female relatives, Nirad Chaudhuri, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay; Max Scheler, Paul Bekker, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig, Max Beckmann...) But with the subject of this post I may well be going too far. I asked an acquaintance with a postdoctoral position in a French department and a passion for theory what she knew of Cornelius Castoriadis - the answer: rien de tout! Why should she have done, I hear you ask - he doesn't sound very French...

And of course he wasn't French. Castoriadis was born in Istanbul, to Greek parents, in 1922, and grew up in Athens. He describes his early life and influences in the first part of a Greek TV documentary here (the only segment of the programme with English subtitles, unfortunately: click on the 'CC' button on the toolbar at the bottom to bring them up). His earliest ambition was to be a composer - a significant fact, to which we will return. But it was in Paris, where he moved in 1945 in order to escape political persecution (by both Fascists and Communists) and write a doctoral thesis in philosophy, that he established his reputation. Keeping track of all the different fields and languages which he covered - whilst remaining until 1970 an immigrant potentially subject to deportation by the French authorities at 24 hours' notice - is quite a task. With a student background in Weberian sociology, economics and law, he became a professional economist for the OECD, a trained psychoanalyst, a socialist theorist, activist and member of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie (which also included Jean-Francois Lyotard and Guy Debord), and most importantly, a philosopher, one who knew the key texts of both the ancient Greek and modern German traditions in the original and used his understanding of them to preserve a rigorous intellectual independence, whilst simultaneously living through one of the most creative and competitive periods in the history of French thought. Here's a photo of the man:


Even more than Michel Foucault, to whom in his bespectacled baldness he bore some resemblance, Castoriadis does not look like the kind of character you want to mess with. And in his case, this was true on the intellectual level as well. The other Parisian penseurs were rarely bad-tempered: it is a rarity when Foucault's foreword to the English edition of The Order of Things refers to the "tiny minds" of certain "half-witted 'commentators'" who persisted in categorizing him as a structuralist, and more typical when he continues, with mandarin modesty, "I should be grateful if a more serious public would free me from a connection that certainly does me honour, but that I have not deserved". Castoriadis, however, took no prisoners whatever. Foucault's own work he describes as "Nietzsche warmed over with a Parisian sauce"; postmodernism's "displays of self-contentment are as arrogant as they are stupid"; structuralism is a "pseudo-scientific ideology" and Lacanism a "smoky mystification"; and of one of the holiest of theoretical Grails, Marx's Das Kapital, Castoriadis wrote simply, "It is no accident that the man spent forty years of his life working on his economic treatise without finishing it".

Having lived with two Greeks who once nearly fell out with each other over a point of mathematics, I'm not surprised by Castoriadis's Mediterranean robustness in argument. The humour in the last example is just as typical though; and while we're at it, why not cite some more examples. The first Gulf War was supported by two-thirds of the French public "because of their fascination for the big American airlifted electronic penis". Castoriadis's comment on Chantal Mouffe's appeal to "fight the bureaucratic character of the State apparatus": that would be like trying to "fight the vegetal character of plants". You only need as much French as will get you round the Paris metro system to understand the following anti-historicist pun: "Sartre accused Camus of not seeing that history a un sens [has a meaning/is going somewhere] - it goes to...Bagnolet, Porte-des-Lilas, I forget which subway station...I think some people realized quite a while ago that these expressions are absurd. History has no more sens and no more meaning than 'the gravitational field weighs fourteen kilos'. It is within the gravitational field that something can weigh fourteen kilos. Likewise, history is the field in and through which meaning emerges, created by human beings."

But to go on to the more productiveside of Castoriadis's criticisms, it is probably with his opposition to Marx that we should start in attempting to understand Castoriadis’s own theory of society. Up until the mid-1960s at the latest, Castoriadis was still a Marxist. It is however worth noting that the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie distinguished itself among similar organs of the French left by its detailed critique of Soviet socialism, which Castoriadis in his articles of the 1950s referred to not as socialism but as “bureaucratic capitalism”, or later, as “stratocracy” – a rigidified and fundamentally anti-democratic institutional regime. In 1959, Castoriadis published a “Note on the Marxist philosophy and theory of history” in the journal, a text which would be developed into the extensive reflections of the articles series “Marxism and Revolutionary Theory” in 1964-5, and integrated in this form in 1974 into his most famous book, The Imaginary Institution of Society. Here Castoriadis’s engagement with the philosophical roots and assumptions of Marxism brought him to the point where he no longer honestly wished to uphold one “true” version of Marxism against its rivals, or defend Marx himself against his devotees. It was Marx who was the problem. As he put it early on in the above-mentioned text, “Starting from revolutionary Marxism, we have arrived at the point where we have to choose between remaining Marxist and remaining revolutionaries” (IIS, 14). Castoriadis chose the latter route, and when his articles did not produce the response from their readership that he hoped for, he initiated the dissolution of Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1966. His intellectual career entered another phase.

What was Castoriadis’s problem with Marx? One could say it was Marx’s theory of historical knowledge, his project in Das Kapital (which Castoriadis, unlike Erich Fromm and others, did not believe could be circumvented by a return to the “early” Marx) – a project of understanding the development of history according to the lawful application of economic categories of thought. Castoriadis no longer believed that the history of human society could be understood through a framework of economic determinism. In the opening pages of The Imaginary Institution of Society he points out the totalizing error in the Marxist assumption that the social life of man is always determined fundamentally by the structures of labour and production, structures that only change, according to a “progressive” and teleological model of history, as a result of technological development (IIS, 29). The error consists in the projection of categories that have grown dominant within Western society over the past 200 years onto the variety of all other human societies – categories which are “capitalist”, in the sense that modern capitalism is the principal object, though not the goal or ideal, of Marxist analysis: 

“When, as in the cultivation of maize by certain Indian tribes in Mexico, or in the cultivation of rice in Indonesian villages, agricultural labour is lived not only as a means of providing food  but at the same time as the cult of a god, as a festival, and as a dance, and when a [Marxist] theoretician appears on the scene and interprets everything in those gestures that is not specifically productive as no more than mystification, illusion, and the cunning of reason, it must be forcefully asserted that this theoretician is a much more complete incarnation of capitalism than any boss... Nothing allows us to assert that the framework of gestures comprising productive labour in the narrow sense is ‘truer’ or more ‘real’ than the ensemble of meanings into which these gestures have been woven by those who perform them. Nothing, if not that the postulate that the true nature of man is to be a productive-economic animal...a postulate which implies, if it were true, that socialism is forever impossible.” (IIS, 28)

Revolutionary socialism in Castoriadis’s view could not fall back on the historical materialist demand that we see past the obscuring veils of culture and ideology to what is “really going on”, since “what is really going on” must include an account of culture, ideology and much else which would appear insubstantial or irrelevant from the strict standpoint of economic production. This sphere of human activity Castoriadis summed up under the heading of the “imaginary”. And as the title of his book communicates, it was the “imaginary” which Castoriadis saw as the founding stratum and origin of society (he was incidentally the first theorist to transfer the term from the psychoanalytic field, within which it was used by Lacan, into the field of sociological analysis, where it is now an accepted term in a number of different theoretical traditions). Only in terms of the imaginary, to return to his above anthropological example, could one explain why societies at the same technological stage and with the same relations of production could differ from each other so radically on the plane of culture, social and ritual organization, and identity. Each society was subject to different “social imaginary significations”, organizing nodes of social meaning, which do not have a fixed denotative sense themselves but serve to orientate or frame that society’s beliefs and values. The institution and particular elaboration of these social imaginary significations is original with each society, not deduced from some natural, rational or historical model: it is an imaginative act of purely human and collective creativity, of whose status as such the society may or may not be aware (a distinction Castoriadis regards as crucial, as we will see). And though the scope and nature of these organizing significations may be rather different in the different social contexts of, say, a remote Amazonian tribe or the modern French state, they are not necessarily any less symbolically powerful, or more rational, in the latter case than in the former. As Castoriadis explains it: 

“I hold that human history...is in its essence defined by imaginary creation. In this context, ‘imaginary’ obviously does not signify the ‘fictive’, the ‘illusory’, the ‘specular’, but rather the positing of new forms... Each society creates its own forms. These forms in turn bring into being a world... At their core are to be found, in each case, social imaginary significations, which also are created by each society and which are embodied in its institutions. God is one such social imaginary signification, but so is modern rationality, and so forth. The ultimate objective of social and historical research is the restitution and the analysis, as far as possible, of these significations for each society under study.” (World in Fragments, p. 84)

Though such an approach is clearly no longer (vulgarly) materialist, it might be hard at first to see what separates these significations and accompanying “forms” from the equivalent analytical categories of contemporary structuralist and post-structuralist theory (which however, as I mentioned, Castoriadis despised): Levi-Strauss’s myths (and their application to modern bourgeois culture by Barthes), Foucault’s epistemes, Derrida’s transcendental signifieds, and so forth. The difference is that Castoriadis's analysis is anti-determinist. Castoriadis believed that the real challenge of analyzing society and history was not one of tackling a complex but logical, determinate, and finally inescapable structure of causes and distinctions, as a thinker like Foucault believed, but of remaining faithful to the imaginary, creative, and self-instituted – in a sense, arbitrary, indeterminate – essence of society’s fundamental ideals. It was, for him, essential to see that everything around one could be otherwise, if people would only collectively imagine it so. This was the central insight of his radical philosophy, and combined Castoriadis’s commitments to revolution and (as a Greek) to democracy.

The stress on collective imaginary creation really distinguished Castoriadis from his more famous contemporaries. It was this that made him, alongside the Situationists and surrealists, the guiding theoretical influence on the student uprising of May 1968 (though he kept his writings pseudonymous in order to safeguard himself from the authorities). Castoriadis was a friend of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the most famous agitator during the student revolt, and in a manifesto Cohn-Bendit paid tribute to the ideas of a certain Pierre Chalieu – one of Castoriadis’s pseudonyms. Castoriadis’s reminiscences of those months in the text “The Movement of the Sixties” show how much he identified with the essential creative spirit, the reimagining of society that was going on at the time – “those weeks of fraternity and active solidarity, when one spoke to anybody and everybody in the street without fear of being taken for a fool... the sit-ins and teach-ins of all sorts, in which professors and students, schoolteachers and pupils, and doctors...engineers, foremen...administrative staff spent whole days and nights discussing their work, their mutual relations, the possibility of transform[ation]” (WIF, “The Movement of the Sixties”, 48). And in turn the importance of Castoriadis’s central theoretical category, the imagination, showed itself in the famous graffiti and slogans of the movement, such as "L'imagination au pouvoir", or "Manquer d'imagination, c'est ne pas imaginer le manque". As Castoriadis himself later commented, "one wonders how that could relate to Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, or Lacan!". What the most famous philosophical names of that era really theorized was not the motivating spirit but the failure of ’68: to dissolve the subject or imprison it theoretically within all-controlling networks of language and power was for Castoriadis “a retrospective legitimation of [political] withdrawal, renunciation, noncommitment” (WIF, 53). The other Parisian thinkers were, in a memorable phrase, “ideologues of man’s impotence before his own creations” (WIF, 54).

One might still feel scepticism that Castoriadis’s approach has genuine theoretical power, that it explains or identifies important social-historical issues or currents (rather than contributing to them). Yet the points at which Castoriadis productively exceeded Marxist analysis have proved to be some of the most fertile areas for theoretical research in recent decades. For instance, by developing an idea of Max Weber, he identified the dominant “social imaginary signification” in modern capitalist society as the ideal of “rational mastery” – pursued to the point of irrationality. This irrationality showed itself both in the ultimately self-destructive approach of Western man to the environment – like Cohn-Bendit, Castoriadis was a committed Green theorist and activist – and in the increasingly erratic deregulated organization of the global economy, of which Castoriadis wrote in 1996, more than a decade before the financial crisis, “the absolute freedom to transfer capital is ruining whole sectors of production almost everywhere in the world, and the global economy is being turned into a planetary casino”( “The ‘Rationality’ of Capitalism”, in Figures of the Thinkable, 47). The significant really-existent alternatives to the capitalist imaginary in modern society which Castoriadis mentioned were not, after 1968, those of socialism, but of nationalism and religion – the two forces whose global persistence left-wing theory has had the most difficulty in accounting for (it is notable that the most ambitious and successful contemporary attempt to theorize nationalism, Benedict Anderson’s 1983 Imagined Communities, relies on a framework of ideas remarkably similar to Castoriadis’s, though as far as I am aware, not directly influenced by him). 

I cannot conclude this brief exposition of Castoriadis’s political thought without mentioning his idea of “autonomy”, which for him is the distinguishing mark of those societies which are aware of the self-instituted, created character of their “social imaginary significations”. The existence of such societies is not exclusively a modern phenomenon, though in Castoriadis’s (rather narrow) definition, it is exclusive to the West: the two moments at which (some measure of) true political autonomy has arisen have been in ancient Athenian democracy and its revival in modern Europe (which Castoriadis interestingly dates to the “first Renaissance” of the twelfth century – for reasons that there isn't space to explore here). Autonomy in Castoriadis’s sense means not so much freedom from external power or determination in a literal fashion, though the absence of tyranny or imperialism is certainly one precondition for autonomy in his sense. He means rather the refusal to legitimate or naturalize one’s social ideals permanently by referring them to a stable and non-social level of being, whether that be God in the Judaeo-Christian model, or Reason, or the ineluctable progress of history in Hegel and Marx, or the idea of biological perfectibility and the survival of the fittest in social Darwinism or Nazi racial theory, to take a few examples. By acknowledging that one’s ideas of justice, the Good and so forth are negotiable, rephrasable, reimaginable, because humanly created in the first place, one frees a space for a genuine democracy, as opposed to a struggle between rival intellectual Absolutes.