The non-rational and ambiguity?

There are other more substantial posts waiting in the wings -- checking themselves in the mirror, brushing their shoulders off, preening their hair -- but a passing observation...

I think the appeal of Castoriadis clicked when I read this article abstract:

Neither Habermas nor his communitarian and poststructuralist critics sufficiently explore the non-linguistic, playful, and performative dimensions of contemporary public spheres. I argue that the approaches of Castoriadis and Touraine can inform a theoretical understanding of the history and current resonance of this public sphere of performance. Their concepts of the social imaginary, the autonomous society, and subjectivation highlight the role of fantasy, images, individualism, and other non-rational factors in late modern public life. (From the Imaginary to Subjectivation: Castoriadis and Touraine on the Performative Public Sphere by Tucker, Kenneth H., Jr in Thesis Eleven, Nov 2005; vol. 83)

Other non-rational factors in late modern public life. Snap! Memory or, more particularly, nostalgia is a non-rational encounter with the past -- and with the present. It follows no logic, other than, perhaps, this very shapeshifting rascal: the paradigm of non-rationality. It can be experienced in Proust's involuntary memory or the willful voluntary reminscience of pulling a family photograph from out of the draw. In both, however, the tracks of logic aren't traceable -- memory doesn't work by deductive or inductive argument but in fragments, frustrating as these are to analyse.

Castoriadis's imaginary fits more neatly with this than the dry circuits of Habermas. This is precisely the problem I've had with Habermas (the crypto-liberal, as my housemate put it the other night) and Beck (the crypto-liberal, if I may extrapolate). While doing well on describing various factors in the conditions of life under post/reflexive/cosmo-modern (Western) societies, they both fail to acknowledge the realm of ambiguity fundamental to human anthropology -- at the general level and particularly at the current conjuncture. Call it the social scientist impulse. Life, though, doesn't fit into a table, graph or series of bullet points. Much to no one's chagrin...

No doubt the lack of engagement with these non-rational factors is partly the very difficulty of talking about them in the academic argot. The strut and pose of the academic journal, monograph and conference loses its shimmer when one introduces doubt, uncertainty and ambiguity into its movement. A sign of weakness, it's whispered.

The nascent field of Memory Studies, for all its many faults (as spelt out by Radstone, Klein, Kansteiner and others), seems in its better moments to want to address this drive to will away ambiguity. Of course we must generally retain something like the apparatus of rationality and reason if we want to convey something to a reader -- as Habermas himself argued in his "performative contradiction" criticisms of Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment -- but the point is to acknowledge the unknowability of certain things, the ambiguity of certain feelings, the strangeness of certain impulses. That sounds vague. And it is. But the will-to-explanation, as we might call it, seems like a stiff, macho academic pose. Memory is fuzzy. That is the challenge to academics everywhere engaged in saying something useful and enlightening about it. Castoriadis and other thinkers interested in the subject and imagination offer some nice ways of confronting this challenge.