Castoriadis and Autonomy in the Twenty-first Century

Chris Spannos, Alexandros Schismenos, Nikos Ioannou

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781350199286
• eBook ISBN: 9781350123397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Modern Philosophy

To what degree can the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis help analyze and evaluate our current social reality in relation to the project of autonomy? How meaningful is his political proposition for direct democracy in the 21st century? What significance do the concepts of social time and social space have in the determination of political freedom? Castoriadis and Autonomy in the 21st Century presents basic concepts of Castoriadian philosophy, including the social-historical plane, ontological creativity, and social and individual time that provide the theoretical tools to evaluate the historical phenomena of our era. Drawing from Greece's own turbulent past and the current global crisis to reveal new significances of social freedom, global solidarity and movements of direct democracy, this book explores social autonomy and human freedom today through critical dialogue with Castoriadis' ideas.

PART ONE

Toward a Critical Reflection on the West

1

Our Decisive Moment

We may now be witnessing the beginning of the end of history. Not because liberal “democracy,” “freedom,” and markets are emerging to define the modern global order (Fukuyama 1992), no—they are not. But because for nearly three centuries, since “the Age of Enlightenment,” the West has pursued a relentless project of conquest and unlimited growth which today threatens the planet’s survival. The end of history can make way for a variety of new ways of being, ranging from forms of barbarism, such as fascism and neo-fascism, to forms of autonomy, including collective self-reflection and direct democracy. This book explores the prospects for autonomy as it was proposed by Greek-French philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis, drawing heavily from reflections of practicing direct democracy in social movement spaces in Greece since 2011. In his life, which spanned most of the twentieth century, Castoriadis sought to interpret the world through his philosophy of autonomy while drawing from individual and social struggles to develop his ideas into practical actions aimed at improving lives and deepening democracy. Our book attempts to follow in his footsteps, but in our period, in the twenty-first century. In this opening chapter, we contextualize our lessons within a broader moment that we define as our decisive moment. A moment in which we must choose the liberatory potential of autonomy over the deepening barbarism of our times.

The Western project of violent dispossession and accumulation (of people, land, and resources) kicked off in the fifteenth century, evolved in the mid-eighteenth century, and has gained remarkable momentum since the mid-twentieth century. Now, numerous indicators suggest that we are living through a decisive moment. In 2005, scientists first used the term “Great Acceleration”¹ to describe the era since the Second World War when humanity’s relationship with the natural world embarked upon the most dramatic and rapid transformation “in the history of humankind.”² This transformation has been so extreme that it has caused scientists to warn that if we want to increase our chances of averting global climate catastrophe, we must act now to decrease our greenhouse gas emissions.³ But climate change is just one among numerous combined threats that have pushed the planet as close to self-destruction as during the height of Cold War tensions. When the Soviet bloc fell in 1991, scientists set the Doomsday Clock—a symbol of proximity to global catastrophe—to “seventeen minutes to midnight.” In this century, numerous threats such as climate change, nuclear weapon proliferation, and information warfare have grown giving scientists reasons to push the clock closer to midnight, closer to self-annihilation.⁴ In 2020, the clock inched forward to 100 seconds to midnight. That was before the global Coronavirus pandemic spread, causing millions of people to struggle with Covid-19 symptoms (the disease caused by the virus), resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths by the Spring of 2020. As the world faces simultaneous existential dangers, mortality casts its dark shadow over our collective future.

In this decisive moment, we may, however, also be witnessing the emergence of new history in creation. This is not because governments, corporations, or the market are able to solve the problems of our era. No, in fact, they are often at the root of heartbreaking oppressions.⁵ Instead, it is because social movements of the twenty-first century have begun to shake the yoke of what Castoriadis (1997b: 32–43) called the “retreat into conformism”—the decline of social, political, and ideological conflict that has characterized the West since the mid-twentieth century. In the first decade of this century, the West’s cynical global “War on Terror” chilled critical self-reflection, as the predominant bipolar view that “you are either with us or against us” divided the world into two camps, “Us and Them,” which framed anti-war critics and activists as extremists. Authorities resuscitated this bipolar framing in 2020 when, in May, police murdered George Floyd in the US city of Minneapolis,⁶ sparking national outrage against persistent racism across the country in what may have been the largest protests in US history.⁷ They categorized those revolting as “extremists” and “terrorists.”⁸ But times have changed since the Twin Towers collapsed in 2001 and social movements have continued to confront old oppressions that manifest in new ways.

One after another, social movements and uprisings around the world have been challenging the conformism that characterized the early part of this century. Among recent examples, in the early days of the Coronavirus pandemic, thousands of mutual aid groups, involving hundreds of thousands of people,⁹ mobilized around the world to support marginalized communities. The virus exposed neoliberalism’s underfunding of public health and social safety systems, the ways in which extreme events highlight existing inequities, and—in some countries—the risks that states were willing to take with exposing residents to the virus in order to maintain economic activity. In the UK, the Conservative government had reduced the stock of available emergency personal protective equipment allocated for a possible epidemic by 40 percent.¹⁰ When Covid-19 spread through the UK, some nurses were forced to wear trash bags instead of protective gear, exposing key care providers to heightened risks of catching the virus.¹¹

In the months leading up to the Coronavirus crisis protests against neoliberalism rocked countries in 2019’s “Autumn of Discontent,” from Latin America—Chile, Honduras, and Haiti—to the Middle East—Iraq, Egypt, and Lebanon. Social movements in Hong Kong and Sudan fought authoritarian regimes for deeper democratic participation. Extinction Rebellion championed quick decarbonization, raising concerns long voiced by indigenous peoples, not least with Idle No More in Canada and Standing Rock in the Midwestern US state of South Dakota. Black Lives Matter, Trans Lives Matter, and the #MeToo movements each exposed the violence of racism, gender binaries, and sexism that punctuate everyday life in the West. Omnipresent and intersecting oppressions abound, women and girls led protests against sexism and xenophobia in India, while freedom struggles in Western Sahara, West Papua, Palestine, and elsewhere continued. Earlier in the decade, the Movement of the Squares across Europe, the Occupy movement globally, as well as the Arab Spring demonstrated the power of using public space for civic reflection and deliberation. These and other social movements aim to confront the dangers threatening the world. They inspire hope that the reign of conformity to oppressive ways of being and organizing societies is declining. In this regard, we draw from the reservoir of direct democracy as contemporary social movements have experienced it, but we situate these experiences within the broader political and philosophical project of autonomy that Castoriadis proposed.

Our decisive moment at the onset of the twenty-first century is defined by the vibrance of today’s global social movements, the presence of deepening ideological conflict, the escalating threats to human and ecological survival, and by the increasing difficulty that society’s dominant social imaginary significations (defined in this chapter) face in reproducing themselves. A crescendo of global actors resist conforming to the institutions of power that aim to limit what we can be, in order to institute new forms of direct democracy and self-organization as approaches to collective life that proximate autonomy. To understand our crucial moment, our kairos, the work of Castoriadis is important. The extreme precariousness of our planet urgently demands the type of self-limiting response that he advocated within his exploration of autonomy. The rise of global and local social movements that reclaim public space, deliberate, and, in the process, create a public time consistent with the objective of social and individual freedom present new horizons for the project of autonomy, not as a fully defined or complete model, but as the open-ended, self-reflective, directly democratic, and uncertain project that Castoriadis intended. This project is the opposite of heteronomy, which is defined as the unreflective and deterministic rule by an external force.

In this book, our contribution is the application of Castoriadis’s philosophy to the world as we experience it in the early twenty-first century. We apply his thinking to the West, broadly defined as the Anglosphere and Europe, but more specifically as it exposes the global crisis in heteronomous social imaginary significations currently affecting the United States, the United Kingdom, and the European Union and as it reveals modern tendencies toward the project of autonomy.

The Social Imaginary Significations of Capitalism

The concept of social imaginary significations is one that we apply throughout this book. In simplifying for brevity here, it conveys the process through which society institutes (creates itself in the first instance) its own world of significations. These become instituted and amount to preconditions and sources of meanings which influence individual and social perceptions of the relationship between society and the individual, between the social-historical constructions of our current lives and the horizons of what is possible. In this way, social imaginary significations are an ensemble, shaping the mode of being in an ontological sense. Castoriadis often used language as an example, given that languages, regardless of origin, rely upon the significations embedded in them for the purposes of communication (Castoriadis 1987: 359; Castoriadis 2002: 64–70; Arnason 2014: 31). It is important to note that social imaginary significations can support both autonomous and heteronomous projects and that these projects are deeply related; however, they are not causal. A main thread in the argument that we weave throughout this book is that, on the one hand, the twenty-first century is experiencing a collapse of the predominant social imaginary significations across the multiplicity of economic, political, and cultural heteronomous forms. These significations include the universally accepted goal of economic growth, but also the ubiquitous objectives of unlimited expansion and rational mastery over nature that drives modernism. Our discussion of the crisis of capitalism’s social imaginary significations in this chapter, the Greek crisis in Chapter 3, and Chinese and other capitalisms in Chapter 10 each illustrate how these objectives manifest in our modern world. On the other hand, there has been a simultaneous emergence of new social imaginary significations from below, in the articulation, assertion, and action of public space and public time by social movements. Just as twenty-first-century Greece provides a central reference point for how we perceive capitalism’s diverse heteronomous forms, similarly, we draw from the modern Greek experience of social uprisings and autonomous forms of struggle as our main reference point because it is our own experience, even as we identify diverse and equally important manifestations of autonomy, be they in south-east Mexico or northern Syria. Ancient Greece, specifically ancient Athens,¹² is critically referenced for contrasting modern democratic forms, no matter their electoral and representational variety. Our intent is to explore these examples, not as historical or sociological analyses, but to highlight how the philosophical concepts of autonomy and heteronomy manifest, and to give examples of the more recent Greek social imaginary significations that allow people to traverse the distance between them.

With respect to the heteronomous social imaginary significations of capitalism, our analysis is concerned with how

1. economic significations dominate over other spheres of social life. Five centuries of capitalist expansion has resulted in the displacement of the totality of prior social imaginary significations to the extent that economic significations have assumed unprecedented importance.

2. capitalism produces its own temporality that supports the significations of indefinite progress, unlimited growth, accumulation, and the pursuit of exact knowledge for the conquest of nature in our time. Capitalist temporality institutes chronometric time, calibrated in hours, minutes, and seconds, allowing for the organized discipline of society, such as production and consumption, for example.

3. capitalist consumption operates to perpetuate a semblance of meaning through the use of economic incentives to learn, train, work, obey, produce and reproduce capitalism (Smith 2014: 160–5).

We explore these themes throughout the book. One observation, in short, is that, for the vast majority capitalism appears to be the only “rational” economic system (Straume 2011: 27–50). The problem is not simply that there is no alternative, as Margaret Thatcher infamously declared. The problem, as it was considered by cultural theorist Fredric Jameson, can be glimpsed by admitting that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.¹³ That is because the ideologies rationalizing capitalism’s existence, from its inception, had been working to establish capitalism as an object occupying a place in the natural order of history and society, emerging from and operating on “natural laws” (Mirowski 1992).¹⁴ Its “naturalization” has contributed to it being a dominant signification to such an extent that capitalism appears as a “total social fact” (Mauss 2002: 100–2). In this sense, it is worse than Jameson suggests because the underlying, yet unstated, problem is really that capitalism is assumed to be eternal.

When the Eternal Trembles

The various forms of society that we have known throughout history are, as Castoriadis proposed, in essence defined by imaginary creation. This does not mean that societies are a figment of the imagination, but that they create their own forms, and that these forms bring into being their own world by constituting networks of norms, institutions, and values that shape orientations and goals for collective and individual life (Castoriadis 1987: 117, 146–7, 160; Castoriadis 1993: 102–29; Arnason 2014: 34). We mentioned language as one example before, but religion is another example of a social imaginary signification. When these created norms, values, institutions, and their outcomes begin to fail systematically, there is a crisis in the reproduction of the social imaginary. The failure of the West to reproduce its social imaginary, and the consequences for the project of autonomy, is introduced in the chapters that make up Part One of the book, while the remaining parts explore these aspects in more depth. It is our view that this crisis can help clarify the possibilities for the contestation of significations that define and dominate societies. Or to put it another way, the crisis can open new opportunities for the project of autonomy.

Long before the 2007 global financial crisis, positive attitudes toward capitalism began falling in the United States. In 2002, four out of five people in the United States (80 percent) viewed capitalism as the best economic system for the future.¹⁵ By 2014, people living in China, India, South Korea, and Vietnam all held stronger positive beliefs in capitalism than the US public.¹⁶ Since then, perceptions in the United States have continued to fall so that, by 2018, only a slight majority (56 percent) held a positive view of capitalism.¹⁷ Polls in early 2020 found that public perception of capitalism as a system changed very little in the United States.¹⁸ This trend also appears elsewhere in the West. For instance, a 2016 poll showed that in Britain 39 percent viewed capitalism unfavorably (versus 33 percent favorably).¹⁹ This shift occurred in parallel to rising global social movements challenging extreme inequalities—not least th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• PART ONE Toward a Critical Reflection on the West
• PART TWO Past—Time and Politics
• PART THREE Present—Politics and Crisis
• PART FOUR Future—Autonomy, Direct Democracy, and Limited Economy
• Notes
• References
• List of Contributors
• Index
• Copyright