Ingerid S. Straume
Abstract
Among the many parallels
between Hannah Arendt and Cornelius Castoriadis is their shared interest in the
kind of politics that is characteristic of the council movements, revolutionary
moments and the political democracy of ancient Greece. This article seeks to
elucidate how the two thinkers fill out and complement each other’s thought,
with special attention to political creation—an ambiguous theme in Arendt’s thought.
While critical of the notion of ‘making’ in the political field, Arendt also
emphasizes the importance of building institutions. To take this seriously
means that her analyses of the nature of politics must be modified and, in this
respect, Castoriadis’s understanding of politics as institution-building can
serve as a guideline. However, Arendt’s concept of ‘plurality’ in the public
sphere represents a level of political analysis that is under- developed in the
work of Castoriadis. Taken together, their thought highlights many important
aspects of political creation in a radical sense.
Hannah Arendt and Cornelius
Castoriadis, arguably two of the most original thinkers of the 20th century,
shared a deep interest in political action and the possibility for some- thing
new to appear in the sphere of politics. The parallels in their work become all
the more intriguing in view of the difficulties with which their respective
oeuvres combine with those of other thinkers.1 Owing to their idiosyncrasies,
attempts to discuss their arguments tend to become enveloped in their
respective philosophical universes. Of course, this may not have been entirely
to their dismay, as both were deeply critical towards traditional ways of doing
philosophy (as exemplified by Plato), and, while claiming not to be ‘theory
builders’, they both, more or less explicitly, asserted their own
(anti-foundationalist) alternatives.
The challenges in the case
of Hannah Arendt are connected to style, as well as sub- stance. Her work is
phenomenological at times, categorical at others; her style of prose essayistic
rather than systematic. She would sometimes pursue her themes longer than what
would seem necessary or productive, and cared little whether she was correctly
understood (Canovan, 1994: 3). For these, and other, reasons, she is often
misunderstood (Canovan, 1994; Pitkin, 1998). In the case of Castoriadis, the
challenges are mostly con- nected to his mode of philosophizing, termed
elucidation. Elucidation can be contrasted to definition aimed at determinacy:
where the latter strives toward pinpointing a phe- nomenon in a more or less
unequivocal manner, elucidation means to explore the way phenomena operate in the
world in their various modes of
existence (Castoriadis, 1984, 1987; Whitebook, 1985). The ontological
premise is that the social reality is not describable in an exhaustive manner;
there is always an undetermined surplus of meaning. Thus, elucidation echoes
the ‘magmatic’ nature of thought and of the social-historical. When Castoriadis
works out his thought in chains of (often self-made) concepts, where one is
elucidated, explained and understood through the introduction of another, this
poses a considerable challenge to those who seek to present Castoriadis’s work
and discuss it in a systematic—conceptually distinct—way.
There are also important
biographical parallels between Arendt and Castoriadis. Both spent their adult
life in exile, which meant the loss not only of a mother tongue as a working
language, but also a referential world wherein thoughts can be expressed. For
large parts of their lives, both were more engaged in the public sphere than in
mainstream academia. There are, of course, also major differences between the
two thinkers, as we shall see. The task of the present essay is not, however,
to make comparisons per se, but rather to highlight a spe- cific theme where
Arendt and Castoriadis complement each other, but where productive ten- sions
also lie; namely, the nature of political creation. A guiding idea of this
article is to show how the weaker points of one thinker can be used to
elucidate the strengths of the other.
In the following sections I
outline what politics means for Arendt and Castoriadis respectively. In my
discussion I am particularly interested in the challenges they pose for each
other, such as whether Arendt’s critique of the use of the notion of poiesis
(‘making’) in political matters applies to Castoriadis’s project of autonomy
and, conver- sely, whether the latter can inform Arendt’s stark divisions
between the human spheres of activity, which has been strongly criticized. I
also discuss Arendt’s concept of ‘plur- ality’ and argue that it represents a
missing level in Castoriadis’s philosophy. To round off, I turn to the
contemporary global scene, with its on-going social revolts and financial and
political crises, and consider in what sense the thought of Arendt and
Castoriadis can elucidate these socio-political phenomena.
Politics and poiesis
There is no doubt that
Castoriadis has studied the works of Hannah Arendt, whereas it is unlikely that
Arendt ever read Castoriadis.2 A common ground is their deep fascination for
the notion of politics that first emerged with the ‘twin birth’ of politics and
philoso- phy around the 5th century BCE (Arendt, 1989; Castoriadis, 1991,
1997a). While empha- sizing different aspects of the political impulses of the
Athenian polis, both made active use of the Greek case to further their own
political thought. A further parallel is their active engagement with the
political events of their time, which crystallized in their respective
political analyses of the USSR, totalitarianism, revolutions, the Cold War and
the growth of modern bureaucracy. A special status was given to various
historical initiatives of self-organization, such as the Hungarian workers’
councils, which inspired both of them (Arendt, 1990; Castoriadis, 1988). Like
the Greek polis, they saw the councils as rare instances of ‘genuine politics’,
which, for Castoriadis, would be manifestations of the project of
autonomy, while for Arendt they
signified moments of power and spontaneous action.
What is the nature of the
politics that was born in ancient Greece and reborn in mod- ern revolutionary
moments, such as Hungary in 1956? One central characteristic is the
communicative aspects of politics: public discussion, questioning, deliberation
and debate. But a more distinctive and important feature is self-organization:
when people take it upon themselves to create institutions that regulate their
own active participation in the running of society. The terminology varies, but
Castoriadis and Arendt are fasci- nated by similar phenomena. What Arendt calls
‘politics proper’ (as well as ‘genuine’ or ‘authentic’ politics), Castoriadis
calls ‘true politics’, or just ‘politics’ (la politique). Cas- toriadis sees
‘politics’ as distinct from ‘the political’ (le politique), which refers to the
political field, such as institutions of explicit and regulative power. In
mainstream polit- ical theory, however, it is the latter notion that is most
often elaborated under the term of ‘politics’.3 For both thinkers, failing to
distinguish between the political field and politics proper means to cover up
the radical potential of politics, where practices of freedom, action,
spontaneity (Arendt) and creativity (Castoriadis) can take place.
In the case of Greece, where
‘politics’ emerged for the first time, general political par- ticipation was
made possible by the creation of the public sphere, a point elucidated by
Arendt (1989) and acclaimed by Castoriadis (1991: 112). A vital public sphere
is char- acterized by on-going discussion of questions of collective interest.
This shared notion of politics is underpinned by what Castoriadis (1987) calls
an ontology of doing and Arendt calls the active life: vita activa.4 They
reject the widespread tendency to regard politics as a defined set of practices
that can be organized and managed in a bureaucratic fashion once the proper
institutions are in place. Representative democracy, for example, is seen to
have very little political potential. For Arendt and Castoriadis, politics is a
delicate matter that needs to be continually exercised and kept alive through
vital public discus- sion, deliberation and dissent. Above all, politics
signifies freedom. Arendt argues that: ‘The raison d’eˆtre of politics is
freedom, and its field of experience is action’ (2006a: 145), while Castoriadis
tells us that ‘The objective of politics is not happiness but free- dom’
(1997b: 5). Exactly because it is an embodiment of freedom, however, politics
is one of the first things to disappear from a society when, for instance, its
inhabitants stop caring about their common world or cease to question society’s
institutions, laws and foundations (Arendt, 2004; Castoriadis, 1991).
So far, I have presented the
common ground between Castoriadis and Arendt in their respective views on
politics. itself. When the subject is probed further, the question of political
praxis becomes crucial. As we will see, Castoriadis’s notion of political doing
and Arendt’s understanding of action are not redu- cible to each other, but
steer the discussion in rather different directions. This becomes clear when we
consider the concept of political creation: the process whereby a specific
society is created—or creates itself—with its specific institutions, norms and
significa- tions. If we take political creation to mean a politics that aims at
making political insti- tutions, the notion becomes rather problematic for
Arendt, while Castoriadis’s politics is quite attached to such ideas,
especially in his emphasis of ‘the project of autonomy’. In order to explore
these differences, we will make a brief visit to ancient Greece.
In Greece, the co-birth of
politics and philosophy made possible the creation of democracy, which, for
Castoriadis, is an embodiment of the project of autonomy. Auton- omy, in short,
means to posit one’s own laws. But whereas all societies—including het-
eronomous societies—do posit their own laws, only autonomous societies do this
in an explicit, conscious way. According to Castoriadis, the Greeks were the
first to realize that their laws were entirely their own creation, with no
external foundations. The auton- omy in question here is not of the Kantian or
liberal kind, that is individual-based inde- pendence from others, but a
participatory, collective activity: a strong version of what in contemporary
parlance is called ‘active citizenship’. But there is more: autonomy is always
individual and collective; it cannot be practiced by individuals unless it is
collec- tively instituted, which means that there is a collective awareness
that society posits and creates its own laws. Autonomy is, in one of many
formulations, ‘the project that aims .. . at bringing light to society’s
instituting power and at rendering it explicit in reflection’ (Castoriadis,
1991: 174). Autonomy is political freedom, but it is also neces- sarily
self-limiting, as there are no ‘external’ limitations to the project of
autonomy.
It is important for
Castoriadis to conceptualize society’s capacity to create. ‘Society’ here
consists of two aspects: that which creates itself as society, ‘instituting
society’ and that which is created in each case, ‘instituted society’. As
Castoriadis tells us, ‘Society is self-creation. ‘‘That which’’ creates society
and history is the instituting society, as opposed to the instituted society’
(1991: 84). Autonomy means to be aware of this rela- tionship, while heteronomy
means to cover it up. Politics is of the utmost importance here. It means not
only to debate, deliberate and question the instituted laws and norms, but,
more importantly, to create new laws and institutions; in other words, effective
and creative self-rule (autogestion). Thus, political activity concerns the
institution of soci- ety itself: ‘Politics is the lucid and reflective
collective activity that aims at the overall institution of society. It
pertains to everything in society that is participable and share- able’
(Castoriadis, 1991: 169).
Within the project of
autonomy, political ‘doing’ is, for Castoriadis, the creation of societal
forms, while in philosophical terms, doing (faire) is an alternative to
repetition, reconstruction and interpretation, which Castoriadis (1987) saw as
expressions of a reductionist ontology that regarded ‘being’ as
‘being-determined’ and hence not crea- tive.5 Thus, genuine politics for
Castoriadis—democratic politics—is about the con- scious and deliberate,
collective creation of institutions. Hannah Arendt took a different approach to the problem of
determinism (or more fundamentally, foundation- alism) with her concept of
‘action’—an approach that seems to be at odds with Castoriadis. In The Human
Condition, she sets forth a strong critique of the modern idea that human
beings make their history, which was brought to its full expression with Marx,
but whose origin lies with Plato’s political theory:
Marx’s dictum [in Capital]
that ‘violence is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one’,
that is, of all change in history and politics, only sums up the conviction of
the whole modern age and draws the consequences of its innermost conviction
that history is ‘made’ by men as nature is ‘made’ by God (Arendt, 1989: 228).
According to Arendt, the
idea that history is made rests on a conflation of action/ praxis with
fabrication/poiesis, or, rather, the occultation of action altogether: an oper-
ation that has set its mark on the ‘whole terminology of political theory and
political thought’ that ‘indeed makes it almost impossible to discuss these
matters [politics and history] without using the category of means and ends and
thinking in terms of instru- mentality’ (Arendt, 1989: 229). To understand the
depth of her argument—which under- pins a comprehensive critique of the
organization of modern societies, the social sciences and
political–administrative thought—we need to briefly recapitulate her theory of
labour, work and action as the three modes of the vita activa, the active life,
which, she claims, were operative in the polis of ancient Greece.6
For Arendt (1989), the most
primitive of the three activities is labour. She under- stands labour as the
activity of the life processes (bios), the everyday tasks, such as the
production and consumption of food, that can neither be abandoned nor
terminated, but which repeat themselves, day after day, year after year, by the
cyclical logic of necessity. These processes and activities are of no (political)
interest for Arendt: they belong to the oikos, the private sphere, that is the
household and the economy.
The next activity is work,
which is concerned with making and fabricating objects, such as more or less
durable artefacts. The guiding principle of fabrication is the ‘means–end’
category mentioned above. The process of fabrication starts from the idea of the
end product and means are chosen as the best way to realize it. Fabrication
always implies a certain ‘violence’, a manipulative use of the material out of
which the product is fabricated. Its ‘logic’ is poiesis, which, for Arendt,
characterizes the making of a world of objects and things, a ‘human artifice’
which constitutes a common world for inhabiting and living together. This
common world is necessary for the exercise of pol- itics, but it is not in
itself political. This isolation of poiesis from political action reflects one
of her most disputed ideas: her critique of bringing ‘the social question’ into
politics.7 For Arendt (1989, 1990), ‘social’ matters, such as material needs
and poverty, were destructive to political life—they should be regarded as
technical mat- ters (matters of making, fabrication) and kept outside of
politics proper (Pitkin, 1998; Villa, 1996). I will return to this below.
The third activity—which
needs a public space to occur—is what Arendt calls action. The term denotes human
affairs that have no ends, nor are they mere (life) processes. Action
designates spontaneity, coming together, beginning—but beginnings whose ‘ends’
or ‘products’ are unforeseeable and therefore not really ends or products at
all. The main activity of action is speech and its ‘logic’ is spontaneity.
Action is meaningful in itself and, as such, the only activity that can make
human beings into unique and distinct beings: ‘In man, otherness, which he
shares with everything that is, and distinct- ness, which he shares with
everything alive, become uniqueness. Speech and action reveal this uniqueness’
(Arendt, 1989: 176). The general meaning of ‘action’ is to begin, to set
something into motion, but in Arendt’s sense ‘action’ is not the beginning of
some- thing, it is the beginning of ‘somebody, who is a beginner himself’
(Arendt, 1989: 177). In fact, Arendt only speaks of action in connection with a
‘who’, the doer or actor who comes forth as a speaker of words: ‘though his
deed can be perceived in its brute physical appearance without verbal
accompaniment, it becomes relevant only through the spoken word in which he
identifies himself as the actor, announcing what he does, has done, and intends
to do.’ For ‘[i]n acting and speaking, men show who they are, reveal actively
their unique personal identities and thus make their appearance in the human
world’ (Arendt, 1989: 179). This disclosure of who, in contradistinction to
what someone is, is of great political
importance to Arendt, who is deeply critical of political regimes and theories
that are only able to conceptualize anonymous (life) processes, the extreme
case being totalitarianism, but also strongly represented in Marxism.8
According to Arendt, the
Marxian idea of history as mere realization of historical laws, or politics
understood as the making or fabrication of new societal forms, conflates the
politically important distinctions between labour, work and action. As a
result, there is an occultation of the most fragile of the three activities,
action: the only activity whereby agents become humanized as unique individuals
(or persons). On Arendt’s account, such veiling of the actor characterizes the
construction of all utopias and polit- ical theories that are supposed to be
implemented, administered and realized on the basis of principles thought out
in advance. Such thoughts have been ‘among the most effective vehicles to
conserve and develop a tradition of political thinking in which, consciously or
unconsciously, the concept of action was interpreted in terms of making and
fabrication’ (Arendt, 1989: 228). And even though other readings of Marx are
valid, and he certainly inherits a lot of these problems from Hegel (as Arendt
also points out, cf. Forti, 2006), Marx’s thought does offer itself as a prime
example of such instrumentalism, especially the mainstream Marxism that was
prevalent in many Western countries around the 1950s, when The Human Condition
was written. Not only did this type of Marxism con- tain an end product,
classless society, but it aimed at figuring out (by ‘logical’ deduction) the
necessary means to achieve this state, some of which were violent. Or perhaps
more precisely, any means that were seen to approach the end state were deemed
necessary, and hence—for Marxism-Leninism at least—logical.
Besides Arendt’s rejection
of an instrumentalism that clearly rules out all delibera- tion,
problematization and questioning in the strong sense, there is also another
reason why it is so urgent for Arendt to conceptualize politics as a non-instrumental
activity. When we speak and act, and thus show ‘who we are’, this always
implies speaking, act- ing and appearing for someone else; someone who is
different from oneself. A defining condition for action, therefore, is what
Arendt calls plurality, meaning that individuals that are different from each
other relate to each other in a free and acknowledging man- ner. This does not
necessarily imply that they agree, but rather, and more importantly, that they
make themselves recognized as equals. Their uniqueness and distinctness makes
individuals relate to each other as subjects that form a ‘common world’. In one
of her most quoted phrases, Arendt notes that: ‘The hope for man in his
singularity lay in the fact that not man but men inhabit the earth and form a
world between them’ (1990: 175). For Arendt, the frailty of singular
individuals is contained by worldly relationships and institutions.
Closely related to the human
condition of plurality is the notion of human power, which, for Arendt, is a collective
matter, based on plurality. ‘[P]ower comes into being only if and when men join
themselves together for the purpose of action, and it will disappear when, for
whatever reason, they will disperse and desert one another’ (Arendt, 1990:
175). And when actions are set into motion, the condition of plurality makes
the results of action unforeseeable, as acts work upon acts in the complex web
of beginners. Thus, to eradicate plurality also means to veil or forget history
and tempor- ality (Forti, 2006).
Politics, for Arendt,
represents contingency, finitude, temporality, plurality and dif- ference
(Forti, 2006: 116). It is worldly, as opposed to philosophical or theoretical.
In The Human Condition especially, she sees ‘authentic politics’ as the antithesis
to poiesis, while stressing the emergence of the actor who appears to others
and reveals who he is. Thus, Arendt frames the discussion in an expressivist,
phenomenological and agent- oriented notion of political action, where the
point of the activity is not to create some- thing, but rather to stand out as
unique individuals for each other. Thus, when describing and judging political
matters, Arendt tends to use aesthetic, rather than moral, arguments (Kateb,
2006: 140ff).
Arendt’s great achievement
is to elucidate the importance of an autonomous public sphere for modern
societies where public administration, technocracy, economism and scientism
threaten to occult politics, and where political liberalism confuses the
political framework with politics itself. But her use of sharp
distinctions—where the sphere of necessity (labour) excludes freedom (action),
and where ‘the social question’ is excluded from politics proper—have deep
consequences for her political thought. It means, among other things, that her
conceptualization of authentic politics does not include institutio-
nalization, such as the positing of laws. She is not opposed to such
institutionalization, of course, but she treats it as part of a different
context, in discussions of what she calls moments of constitution and
foundation, whose logic is ‘covenanting’ and ‘the making and keeping of
promises’ (see, especially, Arendt, 1990).
A significant portion of the
literature on Arendt is devoted to saving her political thought from its
weaknesses and blind spots. In ‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of Democracy’
(1991), Castoriadis addresses some of the problems that emerge from Arendt’s
analyses, for example that it is very
hard to defend democracy on the basis of her conception of
the Greek polis.9 In a less generous remark, he points out that her criteria
are not enough to distinguish politics from other activities, as ‘surely Hitler
and Stalin and their infamous companions have revealed who they were through
deeds and speech’ (Castoriadis, 1991: 122), yet they destroyed politics. And
even if it can be objected that Hitler and Stalin do not fill Arendt’s
prerequisites of appearing before equals in a public space, the point still
remains that Arendt’s notion of politics at this point is both too narrow and
too unspecific. Politics must also be about something (other than itself) and
the content of utterances, issues and causes should also qualify as polit- ical
or apolitical (Castoriadis, 1991; Torgerson, 1999; Villa, 1996). Moreover,
Arendt’s scheme cannot account for the fact that political changes have
historically been instigated by agents whose motive was precisely the—for
Arendt, unpolitical —‘social question’. Castoriadis rightly points out that
even though ‘social’ questions about eco- nomic distribution and material
conditions may not be political in themselves, they could (and should) still be
treated and decided upon in political processes. Questions about dif- ferent
ways to organize oneself as society, ‘judging and choosing between different
insti- tutions of society’ is, after all, the political question par excellence
(Castoriadis, 1991: 101). Nor is it granted that to treat social questions
politically necessarily leads to the instrumentalization of politics, as Arendt
claims (1990: 57, 59ff, 112). In his comments to Arendt, Castoriadis clearly
thinks that politics can have goals, although in other texts he also stresses the open-ended
character of political activities (Castoriadis, 1987: 71–114, 1997c: 125–36).10
The struggle for influence by the working class, for example, is an obvious
case of genuine politics for Castoriadis, but not for Arendt, who would exclude
from ‘politics’ all kinds of struggles on behalf of particular ‘interests’,
poverty included.11 Castoriadis also disagrees with Arendt’s thesis that
legislative activity was a secondary aspect of politics in ancient Greece,
pointing out that Aristotle counts 13 ‘revolutions’ in Athens; that is, changes
in the fundamental (‘constitutional’) legislation (Castoriadis, 1991: 102).
When Arendt (1989) claims that the Greek political framework and legislature
were something that was constructed before the political activity itself took
place, i.e. fabricated, or erected, like housing, this is simply ‘misleading
for communities whose constitution-building was part of their own politics and
no less political than any of the actions it was supposed to house and
regulate’ (Waldron, 2000: 204). Finally, when Arendt denies that politics can
have goals beyond itself, defining all social and economic questions as
belonging to the outside of genuine politics, her account of historical events
simply becomes unacceptable to professional historians (Hobsbawm, 2006;
Waldron, 2000).
But let us not forget that
there are other strands in Arendt’s work than the rigid dis- tinctions worked
out in The Human Condition which have been the focus so far. I am thinking of
the insistence throughout her work on the importance of institutions. In On Revolution and Between Past and Future
she highlights this dimension through her discussions about the meaning of
‘tradition’, ‘authority’ and the ‘making of promises’ which serves to
constitute ‘a common world’. The existence of an institutional frame- work is
of the utmost importance for Arendt: it is what makes action, politics and even
revolutions, possible (Arendt 1989, 1990, 2006b). We can therefore say that
there are two essential aspects in Arendt’s political thought: the
expressivist, performative dimen- sion presented above and the (less discussed)
political framework, such as constitutions and councils. In the following
passage, the relation between them is made explicit:
The grammar of action: that
action is the only human faculty that demands a plurality of men; and the
syntax of power: that power is the only human attribute which applies solely to
the worldly in-between space by which men are mutually related, combine in the
act of foundation by virtue of the making and the keeping of promises, which,
in the realm of pol- itics, may well be the highest human faculty (Arendt,
1990: 175, my emphasis).
A common world is that which
lies between people, separating them and at the same time holding them together:
To live together in the
world means essentially that a world of things is between those who have it in
common, as a table is located between those who sit around it; the world, like
every in-between, relates and separates men at the same time. The public realm,
as the com- mon world, gathers us together and yet prevents our falling over
each other, so to speak (Arendt, 1989: 52).
The common world consists of
‘words and deeds’, but, of course, also institutions in a wide sense of the
term. In fact, ‘instituted society’ (to use the Castoriadian term) is of the
utmost importance to Arendt: it needs protection for the sake of protecting our
humanity. And even though she does not see institutions as the product of
‘politics proper’, it is hard to see why the creation of institutions,
especially constitutions, should not be
a political matter.
Dichotomy and plurality
I now want to discuss how
the respective works of Arendt and Castoriadis can help us form an inspiring
and constructive understanding of political creation. The previous section
related Arendt’s critique of Marx and the modern tradition. A question yet to
be addressed is whether this critique can also be aimed at Castoriadis’s
project of autonomy, because, as we have seen, politics for him is largely
about creating institutions while Arendt is deeply sceptical about this notion,
which for her occludes genuine politics. The question, which merits some
consideration, requires an introduction to Castoriadis’s social ontology. On
the one hand, like Arendt, Castoriadis is critical of theorizing not only
politics, but also ‘society’ and ‘history’. On the other hand he clearly thinks
that political activities can (and should) have goals, and he also thinks that
autonomous societies are preferable to hetero- nomous ones; thus, he has a
certain ‘vision’ for politics. In the first part of The Imaginary Institution
of Society, called ‘Marxism and Revolutionary Theory’, Castoriadis criticizes
both the idea of founding praxis upon a theory, and the idea that as a theory
of the social is impossible, praxis must be blind (Castoriadis, 1987: 71ff).12
He writes:
To be sure, praxis is a
conscious activity and can only exist as lucid activity, but it is some- thing
quite different from the application of prior knowledge [ .. . ]. It is based
on knowl- edge, but this knowledge is always fragmentary and provisional. It
is fragmentary because there can be no exhaustive theory of
humanity and of history; it is provisional because praxis itself constantly
gives rise to new knowledge [ ... ]
The theory can never be
given beforehand, because it constantly emerges out of the activity itself. The
clarification and transformation of reality progress together in praxis, each
con- ditioning the other (Castoriadis, 1987: 76).
This critique resembles and
expands Arendt’s critique of Marx. Castoriadis’s notion of politics combines
rationality with anti-foundationalism and lucidity with radical creation
(creation ex nihilo). On his account, there can be no political
expert-knowledge, since:
If a full and certain
knowledge (episteme) of the human domain were possible, politics would
immediately come to an end, and democracy would be both impossible and absurd:
democracy implies that all
citizens have the possibility of attaining a correct doxa and that nobody
possesses an episteme of things political (Castoriadis, 1991: 104).
Instead of theory and
certain knowledge Castoriadis sees the history of human soci- eties as a matter
of creation: ‘self-creation deployed as history’ (1997c: 13). History is the
creation of social forms: complex, irreducible forms that do not accord to laws
or principles. But as traditional thought is by and large oblivious towards
notions such as ‘the imagination’ and ‘creation’, philosophy has been unable to
conceptualize the true nature of the social-historical, according to
Castoriadis:
Here, inherited ontology and
logic are helpless: they are bound to ignore the proper being of the
social-historical. Not only is creation for this ontology and logic a dirty
word (except in a theological context [ ... ]) but also this ontology is
inevitably driven to ask, ‘Creation by whom?’ Yet creation, as the work of the
social imaginary, of the instituting society [ ... ], is the mode of being of
the social-historical field, by means of which this field is. Society is
self-creation deployed as history. To recognize this and to stop asking
meaningless ques- tions about ‘subjects’ and ‘substances’ or ‘causes’ requires,
to be sure, a radical ontological conversion (Castoriadis, 1997c: 13–14).
To theorize the
social-historical, as Marx did, is therefore a way to cover up these dis-
turbing notions.13 History, for Castoriadis, is not something that happens to a
given soci- ety, nor is a society a kind of embodiment of something outside of
itself. This is a problem for traditional philosophy, since:
.. . the inherited way of
thinking has never been able to separate out the true object of [the question
of the social-historical] and to consider it for itself. This object has almost
always been split into a society, related to something other than itself and,
generally, to a norm, end, or telos grounded in something else, and a history,
considered as something that happens to this society, as a disturbance in
relation to a given norm or as an organic or dialectical devel- opment towards
this norm, end or telos (Castoriadis, 1987: 167).
But Castoriadis is not an
advocate of ‘the unpredictable’ as pure contingency. In a text published in the
midst of the uprisings of May, 1968, ‘La revolution anticipe´e’ (‘The
anticipated revolution’), Castoriadis names the challenges for what he sees as
a possibly revolutionary movement.14 In his view, a movement should ‘posit
itself’ and declare its intentions, as to abstain from doing so means to
abstain from political power. He espe- cially warns the students against
existing dichotomies posed as mutually exclusive options, for instance, when
there is either the imagination or the organization; creativity or reality.
This warning is worthy of some consideration as it also applies to Arendt’s
conception of ‘authentic politics’ which halts before the act of making.
The ideological dichotomy is
set between reality and the imaginary: ‘The revolution- ary students feel an
antinomy between action and reflection: between spontaneity and organization,
between truth of act and coherence of speech, between imagination and project.
Their perception of this antinomy is what consciously or unconsciously lies
behind their hesitations’ (Castoriadis, 1993: 130). In ordinary discourse,
politics is often perceived as something dull, hardened or set; it signifies
bureaucracy and non-creativity [well illustrated by Jacques Rancie`re’s (1995)
concept of la police]. But it also signifies hard reality, that which in the
end must have a final say, the non-eligible. Political insti- tutions and their
keepers seem ‘real’ in a commanding way: ‘You can play all you like, but in the
end we all have to grow up and face reality, i.e., to comply’. If, correspond-
ingly, the political repertoire of actions and ideas is limited to the other
side of the dichotomy, such as happenings, the imagination, the event, the
carnivalesque or ‘show- ing who one is’ (Arendt), we are actually feeding into
the existing political system. To accept the dichotomy and, hence, to restrict
our political activities to just one side out of fear of being captive to the
other means, for Castoriadis, to submit to the (hierarch- ical) structures of
the society in question. It also means saying that only one part of the dichotomy can be real, whereas the
other becomes purely imaginary in the sense
of fictional, non-real.
One thing must be made clear
at this point. As Castoriadis also recognizes, there are good reasons to fear
that a new (proto-political) initiative can be co-opted (re´cupere´e) by
already existing organizations. The students of May 1968 had good reasons to be
scep- tical of the leaders of the existing left-wing organizations, having
experienced how rev- olutionary talk had been turned into sterile dogma;
left-wing organizations turned bureaucratic and routine-driven; projects
replaced by rigid programme and political dis- course having been mystified
(Castoriadis, 1993). Interestingly enough though, Castor- iadis remarks that
those who fear such recuperation are still on the ‘old ground’; they are
talking from within the existing power structures, whereas the ground for a
revolutionary movement must be defined anew, that is, created and defined by
the new movement:
To accept this antinomy as
valid, final, and insurmountable is to accept the very essence of
bureaucratic-capitalist ideology. It is to accept the existing philosophy and
reality. It is to reject a real attempt at transforming the world. It is to
integrate the revolution into the estab- lished historical order (Castoriadis,
1993: 130).
The point to remember is
that it will always be in the interest of the powers that be to facilitate
change in order to swallow it, or use it to renew and refine the existing power
structures. Hence, if one accepts the dichotomies offered by the social order
and choose one side against the other, one is already playing the game of the
instituted power. It is therefore imperative, says Castoriadis (1993), that the
would-be revolutionary move- ment gives itself form. It must organize itself,
give itself a ‘face’ and articulate something to which it is willing to commit
itself (a ‘programme’), albeit temporarily. By giving itself a new form, the
revolutionary movement leaves the old ground with its definitions, dichotomies
and dilemmas. This will also make the movement immune to co-optation, at least
for some time. Furthermore, such self-positing is the only way to transgress
hier- archies and divisions in society that tend to reproduce themselves in
ever new versions. This advice to the would-be revolutionaries demonstrates
that ‘genuine’ politics for Castoriadis here means poiesis, that is to create
institutions in a conscious, explicit and lucid manner. We are now in a
position to consider the question whether Castoriadis’s project resembles that
of Marx (or Marxism) in such a way that Arendt’s critique of ‘work’ (poiesis)
replacing ‘action’ (praxis)15 can also be turned against Castoriadis. Clearly,
the answer is no. Firstly, even if the project of autonomy involves
elucidation, this does not imply that political creation equals transparent or
exhaustively planned actions. Secondly, as we have seen, Arendt herself
recognizes the importance of institu- tionalization, which means that her
notion of politics in The Human Condition is insuffi- cient. Compared with
Arendt’s political expressivism, Castoriadis’s notion of elucidation comes
forth as the more politicized alternative. By naming and de-masking power
relations and taking ‘social’ matters seriously in a theoretical context, his
political thought seems more orientated toward praxis.
Other aspects of Arendt’s
thought, however, pose more of a challenge to Castoriadis, particularly when it
comes to conceptualizing political, collective subjectivity in terms of
plurality. Where the basic unit of Arendt’s socio-political analyses is
ultimately the indi- vidual,16 Castoriadis insists that all analyses of
political and social phenomena must depart from the social-historical ‘level’
and certainly not from inter-subjectivity, of which Arendt’s plurality is an
instance. For Castoriadis, ‘[t]he social-historical is neither the unending
addition of intersubjective networks (although it is this too), nor, of course,
is it their simple ‘product’ (1987: 108). Castoriadis emphasizes the limited
capacity of inter-subjective relations in establishing the social level, since
for him socially instituted meaning is always primary to the constitution of
individuals and, in fact, circumscribes what can be seen as meaningful
activities, including ‘inter-subjectivity’.
Castoriadis makes a
conceptual distinction between ‘the individual’, which is always socialized,
and ‘the psyche’, which is the irreducible counterpart of the
social-historical. In his later years (after the Socialisme ou Barbarie
period), he displayed little interest in discussing philosophy at the
inter-subjective, already socialized-qua-instituted level. This could be a
coincidence rather than a
systematic flaw, but the fact remains
that he did not work out an adequate
conceptual apparatus for dealing with the political con- dition of plurality.
In his philosophical writings, subjectivity is usually related to micro- and macro-levels, not the
in-between levels. In this respect, Arendt’s thought can elucidate a lacuna in
Castoriadis’s thought by bringing attention to the ‘who’ of political
creation—or better, the ‘whos’ that create a ‘world between them’ through
‘words and deeds’ (Arendt, 1989; 1990). Plurality asserts that while the subjects occupy different places in the
world, they are connected. In comparison, the concepts Castoriadis uses to
denote collective agency in his later works—the anonymous collec- tive, the
social-historical, the instituting social imaginary and the instituting
society— are, in my opinion, too abstract for many practical purposes such as
analyses of social phenomena. Thus, Arendt’s concept of plurality represents an
important dimension of the politically active, collective subject (like the
demos of antiquity); a dimension that is lacking in (the later) Castoriadis.
Even though Arendt does not
think of politics as making (something), her work has several openings towards
creation as spontaneity and newness. The notion of creation can be found in the
spontaneous ‘acting in concert’ that characterizes revolutions (Arendt, 1990).
The capacity to create something radically new is also inherent in the faculty
of ‘natality’, where every person is a new beginning (Arendt, 2006b). On
another level, she notes how thoughts are forced out of their tendency towards
closure when peo- ple ‘go visiting’ other people whose position in the world is
different from their own (another aspect of plurality). This ‘opening’ belongs
to the faculty of the imagination. As people occupy different places in the
instituted world, they also hold different viewpoints and different views from
each other. The idea that one could ‘go visiting’ by using the imagination was
rather brusquely dismissed by Castoriadis (1991), who claimed that in order to
put oneself in another’s position one would simply have to become somebody
else. But Arendt makes a good case for using the imagination on the level of
political inter-subjectivity, not only for remaining open to and interested in
other viewpoints, but in order to position ourselves politically and pass
judgments. Plurality can thus be seen as a precondition for creativity and
creation, as a plurality of viewpoints between people, dissent and
disagreements constitute productive tensions. It does not so much pertain to
what people are—their identities—as to what they do; their contribu- tions in
the political sphere (Ringvej, 2011). Even though Castoriadis could probably
agree with many of these points, he has not elaborated on them. His emphasis is
on ontol- ogy and his preoccupation is irreducibility and
anti-reductionism as exemplified in the relationship between the social-historical
and the psyche presented above. These concerns also affect his concept of
autonomy, which, in his later works, consists of philosophical inquiry and
problematization, elucidation and autogestion, but without the inter-subjective
emphasis that can be found in Arendt’s notion of a common world. Thus,
Castoriadis’s later works become curiously void of subjects. However, I see no
reason why further work on Castoriadis’s conceptual apparatus, for example to
make it more applica- ble to empirical analyses of social phenomena, could not
include a concept like ‘plurality’. A methodology of elucidation would
‘logically’ imply worldliness as plurality and action. In such a
reconstruction, the work of Arendt could be helpful, their similarities taken
into account, and vice versa, as I have already argued.
The import of politics
proper
Both Arendt and Castoriadis
are attracting increasing scholarly interest. This is partly a result of their
inspiring modes of doing philosophy, but there can be little doubt that their
works are also seen as relevant in understanding contemporary issues as an
alternative beyond analytic–liberal and post-modern approaches. The typically
modern tendencies of de-politicization that were identified by Arendt in The
Human Condition are, for example by no means exhausted. There are also relevant
applications for her critique of ‘the
social’, albeit in a tempered form, such as her warning against a situation
where interest groups (alone) define the political field. There are many examples
that such groups have tried to destroy the political openness of modern forms
of democracy, nota- bly lobby groups and corporations. To modify her scheme,
however, we could look to another influential political thinker, Alain Touraine
(2000), and argue that the relevant demarcation is not between social and
political questions as such, but rather between what Touraine calls ‘social’
and ‘societal’ movements. While social movements struggle for their
(particular) interests, societal groups become (part of) political movements
whose concern is society as a whole, not just their own interests. In such a
framework, the instrumental character of the former can be contrasted to the
politicized approach of the latter without sacrificing socio-economic questions
altogether.
To round off, a brief
discussion of the actuality of the two thinkers’ political ideas seems fitting.
For example, in what way can their ideas about politics proper, democracy and
revolutions elucidate the uprisings in the Arab countries, Southern Europe and
beyond that followed the financial crisis from 2008? Just a few general remarks
are possible here. Firstly, it seems clear that political action of the
revolutionary kind is not something planned in advance. At the start of a
revolution, everything happens very fast. For instance, hardly anyone could
have foreseen the speed and efficiency with which the people of Tunisia and
Egypt forced their leaders to resign from power in the spring of 2011. When
large groups of people suddenly cease to fear for their own lives, as did the
Tunisian vegetable seller Mohamed Bouazizi who set himself on fire in a
desperate protest against the authorities—the beginning, if not the cause, of
the Tunisian revolution—tyranny loses much of its grip. With the withdrawal of
popular consent, the institutions of explicit power immediately fail, leaving
two paths possible for the tyrants: escalating violence or resignation. In this
respect, there are parallels between the demise of the North African regimes
and the very rapid crumbling of the Eastern European block (notably the Berlin
Wall and Ceaus¸escu’s Romania). In On Revolution, Arendt asserts that people
‘acting in concert’ represent a greater
power than the force of violence and weapons (Arendt, 1990). This was
indeed demonstrated by the relatively peaceful overthrow of the regime in
Tunisia. Her accompanying claim that brute force does not bring about any real
societal change, has similarly been pro- ven true by several (or all) Western
invasions, for example in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. However, even though
there are similarities in various historical cases, there can be no theory of revolutions as such.
Revolutions and revolts are often expressions of the unexpected will of a
people: spontaneously enacted, and therefore effective. At the time of writing,
there are major demonstrations in regions that have a long tradition of popular
manifestations, such as Greece and Spain, and, most recently, in the USA with
occupation of the financial centre, Wall Street. New initiatives are born every
day, inspired by the so-called Arab Spring of 2011, and there are worldwide
campaigns of solidarity and protest (for example Indignad@s, Real Democracy
NOW!; We Are The 99%). These initiatives have no appointed leaders and a rather
thin agenda. Their indig- nation is aimed at political structures that favour
finance capital over people’s work and
welfare.17 The question is, once again, whether these spontaneous protests can
turn into organized form without losing their political momentum. There are
also reasons to fear a political backlash, as economic and military forces are
more than ready to fill the power vacuums as they emerge.
What seems certain is that
it is counterproductive to criticize and doubt these move- ments in their early
stages, as they are in the process of creation and mainly driven by young
(often well educated) people. As Castoriadis (1987) has argued, history is
full of forms that are other (not
merely different) to those already in existence. As long as there is politics,
in the strong and explicit sense, new forms will emerge, even though they can
be hard to recognize at first. The open-endedness of the on-going revolts and
the inadequacy of theory to guide analyses seem to point in favour of the perspectives
of Arendt and Castoriadis. At the time of writing, nobody knows whether these
processes of ‘autonomy’ and ‘action’ will result in something entirely new.18
If the people in revolt should manage to name themselves and create new
institutions—beyond the significa- tions of corporate capitalism—great efforts
are required. Therefore, let us hope that ‘the founding moment’ will be kept
open for an extended period of time to allow for reflec- tive discussion about
what constitutes fair and just institutions. In other words, our hope is for a
new ‘constitution’, in a wide sense of the term, which will not look too much
like the recipes of ‘capitalist democracy’ that we already know too well.
Notes
1. Their common interests and philosophical parallels have been
noted by several scholars (see Poizat, 2007; Ramsay, 2003; Whitebook, 1998;
Zerilli, 2002).
2. Castoriadis discusses their shared interests in a talk at an
Arendt memorial symposium in 1982 (‘The Greek Polis and the Creation of
Democracy’ in Castoriadis, 1991: 81–123 and in abbre- viated form in
Castoriadis 1997a: 267–89).
3. ‘The political’ is for Arendt synonymous to Castoriadis’s
‘politics’. To prevent misunder- standings, I use the term ‘the political
field’ to designate what Castoriadis calls ‘the political’. A further benefit
is to stay clear of Carl Schmitt’s notion of ‘the political’, which has a third
meaning.
4. An appropriate question, which cannot be pursued here, is
the influence of the early Heidegger that looms in the background of both thinkers.
See Dana Villa (1996) on how Heidegger served as a (negative and positive)
prerequisite for Arendt’s philosophy of political action.
5. In The Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis set
forth to create a philosophy of doing, but he never really carried through his
intention (Arnason, 1991).
6. The distinctions are operative in Arendt (1989, 1990) and in
the essay ‘What is Freedom?’ (Arendt, 2006a).
7. The critique of ‘the social’, which Arendt set forth in On
Revolution, was largely associated with the Jacobin terror following the French
Revolution, but also the increasing bureaucrati- zation and technocratic
regimes of the 1950s, where an important part was played by the social
sciences. In the French Revolution, a wave of mass slaughtering, censorship and
distrust was unleashed in the name of liberty, equality and faternity. Politics
was destroyed for an allegedly higher purpose, thus freedom itself was
sacrificed for the idea of freedom, that is, a theory (Arendt, 1990).
8. From her analyses in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt
was deeply concerned with the loss of a common world and individuality that
characterized Nazism and Stalinism. This fear made a significant mark on her
political thought (Canovan, 1994; Villa, 1996).
9. Arendt is a rather ambiguous democrat, at best. Her sources
of inspiration such as Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Machiavelli, Heidegger and
Homeric ideals attest to this. Another important source is the existentialist
Karl Jaspers.
10. Castoriadis points out that the Greek term techne¯ had a
double meaning that Aristotle knew, but did not clarify, as both mime¯sis,
imitation, and poie¯sis, creation. Techne¯ and praxis would then meet in
poie¯sis, and through this connection Plato and Aristotle could co-think work
(as techne¯) and action (as praxis). But already with Plato, techne¯ was
reduced to imitation (mime¯sis), thus dividing work from politics (Castoriadis,
1984: 229–59). This occultation could be an important premise for Arendt’s
reading of Aristotle in The Human Condition.
11. This does not mean that Arendt does not care for problems such
as poverty; her point is that they should be dealt with in a different context,
which would probably mean technocratically.
12. This paper was first published in Socialisme ou Barbarie,
1964–65.
13. Where Arendt sees a covering of the agent, Castoriadis sees a
covering of creation. The two points are in essence the same: the covering of
political creation.
14. Castoriadis (1993). First edition in La Bre`che, May 68 (1968,
Paris: Fayard): a collection of essays together with Claude Lefort and Edgar
Morin.
15. More precisely, in Marxism Arendt (1989) saw first a
conflation of work and labour, and then a further occultation of action.
16. Arendt (1989) does not use the term ‘individual’ in this
connection, which for her denotes the ‘mass individual’ of the social sciences.
17. These movements have spread from Spain, starting in May 2011,
when a square in Madrid was occupied for a whole month. Camps were then
established in large and smaller cities and the movement spread to suburban
areas and towns where coordinated assemblies were established.
18. Castoriadis saw very little potential for autonomy in
monotheistic and traditional societies of Eastern or Muslim origin. Autonomy is
for him a Graeco-Western invention.
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About the author
Ingerid S. Straume is a
philosopher of education based at the University of Oslo. The subject of her
PhD thesis from 2010 is Castoriadis’s thoughts on democracy and paideia. She
has published articles on environmental politics, moral philosophy, political
philosophy and education, and edi- ted the anthology Depoliticization: The
Political Imaginary of Global Capitalism (with J.F. Hum- phrey, Aarhus
University Press, 2011). Address: University of Oslo Library, PO Box 1009
Blindern, 0315 Oslo, Norway [email: ingerid.straume@ub.uio.no]
Fuente European Journal of
Social Theory1–17
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