Not the financial crisis

This is Cornelius Castoriadis in 1989:

we may say that there cannot not be a crisis of the identification process, since there is no self-representation of society as the seat of meaning and of value, no self-representation of society as inserted in a history that is past and to come, itself endowed with meaning not 'by itself' but by the society that is constantly reliving it and recreating it in this way. These are the pillars of an ultimate identification with a highly cathected 'we', and it is this 'we' that is today becoming dislocated. Society is now posited, by each individual, as a mere 'constraint' imposed on the individual - a monstrous illusion, but one lived so vividly that it is becoming a material, tangible fact, the indicator of a process of desocialization - and yet, simultaneously and contradictorily, it is to this society, illusorily lived today as an external 'constraint', that the individual also addresses uninterrupted demands for assistance. And with this contradictory attitude toward society comes the complementary illusion that history is, at best, a tourist attraction to be visited during a vacation.

Castoriadis is not necessarily putting forward a wholly novel argument (particularly not for us, 19 years later), but this has some similarity to Dufour's argument in (the much more recent) The Art of Shrinking Heads. What differences there are mostly stem from their theoretical attachments - Castoriadis to Freud, Dufour to Lacan. But the shape of the argument - the dwindling meaning of a big Other (Dufour) or social imaginary significations (Castoriadis) - responds to a similar interest: locating a reason, beyond mere reference to "neoliberalism" but certainly within the processes it unleashes, for the decline of social attachments and the upswing in pseudo-individualism. ("Pseudo," for Castoriadis, because he argues that we actually see a stronger conformism now, despite the language of individualism.) Castoriadis argues that there is no "meaning lived as imperishable by the men and women of today."

What Castoriadis says in this piece can be taken in a number of different directions - and the question time which followed the spoken version of this paper (all reprinted as "The Crisis of the Identification Process" in Thesis Eleven, n49, 1997) certainly does engage Cornelius on a few different topics.

Nevertheless, the year is interesting to me. 1989. In Germany, a few months later, we have a notionally reunified/reunifying nation. At this point, a whole sector of the population come into a society in which, according to Castoriadis, socially instituted meanings and values are displaced. As has been documented and mentioned regularly, the intial euphoria of this westward pouring soon turned sour for many. I need to do further research on this, but I have an early hypothesis that at least one explanation for this disappointment would lay in a strong disjunct between the social imaginary significations of these two places (the GDR and the FDR). Even if the GDR was going to shit in its final years, one of the arguments strongly made by Alexei Yurchak is that right up until the end, many within the communist populations held strong attachments to the values of the communist idea (or hypothesis, as Badiou/Sartre might have).

This was the case even as they bought sly copies of Western rock music and dressed themselves up in Levis. As such, the very things that held the GDR together (or Soviet society, in Yurchak's case), are those significations which that the society makes together, sometimes in spite of itself. As Castoriadis himself relates in response to a question, "Totalitarianism certainly failed in reality, but nothing guaranteed that it had to fail. This is undoubtedly what Orwell, too, had in mind when, at the end of 1984, totalitarianism's greatest triumph is achieved not through violence but through the fact that Winston Smith cries because he loves Big Brother - that is, he has internalized Big Brother completely." There's a dynamic at work between the communist systems of surveillance (predicated, of course, on a deep mistrust) and the actual attachment to a certain portion of the party-state's envisoned future (gleaming, communal, modern, progressive etc).

"Every society creates its own world in creating the significations that are specific to it," Castoriadis says. "Indeed, it creates a magma of significations, such as the...significations that go with the emergence of capitalist society (or, more exactly, of the capitalist component of modern society)." Or the communist system.

For Castoriadis these significations have three roles or functions (hold the 'functionalism'):

1. "They are what structure the representations of the world in general, without which there can be no human beings. These structures are each time specific: our world is not the ancient Greek world, and the trees we see beyond these windows do not each shelter a nymph; it's just wood, we say, which is a construction characteristic of the modern world."
   
2. "These significations designate the finalities or ends of action; they dictate what is to be done and not to be done, what is good to do and not good to do. One should, for example, adore God or, perhaps, accumulate the forces of production - whereas no natural or biological law, nor even any psychical one, says that one must adore God or accumulate the forces of production."
3. And the most difficult to grasp, he admits, "these significations establish the types of affects that are characteristic of a society. For example, there clearly is an affect that is created by Christianity, which is faith. We know or believe we know what faith is, this nearly indescribable sentiment that establishes a relationship with an infinitely superior being whom one loves, who loves you, who can punish you, all of this steeped in a strange psychical humidity, and so on and so forth. This sort of faith would be absolutely incomprehensible to Aristotle: for, what can this idea really mean, that one might love the gods or be loved by the gods in this fashion, be possessed by these affects, the undeniable expression of which can be seen on the faces of the true faithful in Bethlehem on any given Christmas Eve? This affect is social-historically instituted, and one can point to the person who created it: the apostle Paul. With the de-Christianization that has occurred in modern societies, it is no longer as present as it once was. But there really are affects that are characteristic of capitalist society, too. Without entering into a description that would risk taking a merely literary turn, allow me to recall that Marx described these capitalist affects very well when he spoke of a perpetual restlessness, constant change, a thirst for the new for the sake of the new and for more for the sake of more - in short, a set of socially instituted affects."
   

There is much more to be said about this - if not done with it: particularly with the idea that nostalgia may well be one of the affects of our age, as one could take Jameson to suggest. But I think it's striking enough to warrant this provisional post.

In a sense, Castoriadis is trying to have it both ways in this paper, suggesting that the crisis of identification is both an outcome of neoliberalism in the West and a more dispersed global phenomenon. The West, I think it's safe to extrapolate from his three page spray at contemporary Europe toward the end, is held by Castoriadis to be leading the way: "we are living the society of 'hobbies and lobbies'." (Zing!)

Consequently, to make this analysis work in the post-communist or 'transition' context, a certain amount of careful navigation needs to happen. In particular, one should be particularly mindful to maintain in view - as the horizon, even - Castoriadis' strong emphasis on the subject's capacity for creativity. That is, to steer away from simply quoting the bracing social critique without due reference to Castoriadis' complex theoretical schemata.