Wokeism in the reading of C. Castoriadis

Wokeism in the reading of C. Castoriadis

The analyses of what is now commonly called "wokism" could be divided into three groups: those that link it to "French Theory", those that derive it from the history of communism and those that detect a para-religious current in it. Salutary and, ultimately, complementary, these approaches focus solely on the ideological angle, which could lead one to believe that the fight against these invasive movements could be limited to this terrain. This is far from negligible but, in addition to opening the door to a return to the old ideological mummies called "right-wing", it ignores the conditions of the emergence of wokism, that is to say, the in-depth analyses of contemporary Western societies. Dedicated to the latter, the work of Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) would perhaps, retrospectively, allow us to shed some light on these contemporary pseudo-subversions, then understood as signs of a "decay of the West" - to use his famous phrase - which is now extremely advanced. It is this that we must confront, otherwise we will wage a battle while ignoring the main lines of force that determine its outcome.

Table of contents

Wokeism in the reading of C. Castoriadis

Article by Quentin Bérard (from Common Places) originally published on the website of Mezetulle.fr November 25, 2024.


In this section:

Intertwining of protest and apathy
The “strange failure” of May 68
The Intelligentsia and the Rationalization of Failure
Aspects of anomic subversion Anticipation of wokeism
Wokeism, a symptom of Western anomie
The impossible return to heteronomy
Reinvention of the autonomy project?

"The idea of ​​wiping out everything that exists

is a madness leading to crime." 1

The analyses of what is now commonly called "wokism" could be divided into three groups: those that link it to "French Theory", those that derive it from the history of communism and those that detect a para-religious current in it. Salutary and, ultimately, complementary, these approaches focus solely on the ideological angle, which could lead one to believe that the fight against these invasive movements could be limited to this terrain. This is far from negligible but, in addition to opening the door to a return to the old ideological mummies called "right-wing", it ignores the conditions of the emergence of wokism, that is to say, the in-depth analyses of contemporary Western societies.

Dedicated to the latter, the work of Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) would perhaps, retrospectively, allow us to shed some light on these contemporary pseudo-subversions, then understood as signs of a "decay of the West" - to use his famous phrase - which is now extremely advanced. It is this that we must confront, otherwise we will wage a battle while ignoring the main lines of force that determine its outcome.

Intertwining of protest and apathy

C. Castoriadis's dissidence from Trotskyism in 1946 begins with an analysis of the USSR ("four letters, four lies"2) as a "total bureaucratic society" leading him, over the years within and then, from 1967 outside the journal group Socialisme ou barbarie, to abandon Marxist economics in favor of a political approach to human societies, that is to say, and ultimately, to their psycho-cultural foundations, which he would call their imaginary institution.3. In the "socialist homeland" as in capitalist societies, the dispossession of workers was then a matter of economic exploitation but revealed itself, much more profoundly and above all, to be a political alienation: the class struggle is above all a conflict between leaders and executors, opening onto the perspective of self-management or direct democracy, structured and organized popular sovereignty claiming as much from modern revolutionary experiences as from ancient Athens, which he would claim throughout his life.

From the 1950s onwards, the end of the major workers' movements, which C. Castoriadis linked to the bureaucratization of workers' organizations and its extension to all areas of life, led him to diagnose the already perceptible depoliticization as a "withdrawal into the private sphere", a "generalized privatization". In 1959, he noted in a review article4 : "This disappearance of political activity, and more generally what we have called privatization, is not specific to the working class; it is a general phenomenon, which can be seen in all categories of the population and which expresses the profound crisis of contemporary society. The harsh reverse of bureaucratization, it manifests the agony of social and political institutions which, after having rejected the population, are now rejected by it. It is the sign of the impotence of men in the face of the enormous social machinery which they have created and which they can no longer understand or dominate, the radical condemnation of this machinery. It expresses the decomposition of values, social meanings and communities. (…) The meaning of this phenomenon is not simple: there is incontestably a withdrawal, a temporary incapacity to assume the problem of society which is anything but positive. But there is also something else and more. The rejection of politics as it exists is in a certain way the wholesale rejection of current society; It is the content of all the “programs” that is rejected, because all of them, conservative, reformist or “communist” represent only variants of the same type of society. But it is also a rejection of the type of activity that politics represents as it is practiced by traditional organizations: separate activity of specialists cut off from the concerns of the population, a tissue of lies and manipulations, a grotesque farce with often tragic consequences. The current depoliticization is as much indifference as criticism of the separation of politics and life, of the artificial mode of existence of parties, of the interested motivations of politicians.

Already largely encouraged by the development of the consumer society that Jean Baudrillard would later analyze, in the wake of Henri Lefebvre's Critique of Everyday Life in 1947, this "withdrawal of people into the private sphere" is therefore a form of implicit protest. At the same time, explicit forms of protest go beyond the institutional framework and overflow the world of work to extend into all sectors of social life, particularly in the student world.5, without really finding channels of expression and undermining social life, as C. Castoriadis diagnosed in 1965:

“People are discontented, grumbling, protesting; conflicts are incessant. Even if discontent takes different forms, this richer and more prosperous society probably contains more tensions than most other societies known in history. (…) At the official level, of the existing powers, of the press, etc., there is only an official hypocrisy which recognizes itself, almost explicitly, as simple hypocrisy and does not take its own standards seriously. And, in society in general, an extremely widespread cynicism prevails, constantly fed by the examples offered by social life (scandals, etc.). The general idea is that you can do anything, and that nothing is “bad”, provided that you can get away with it, provided that you do not get caught. (…) Socialization in the more general sense, the feeling that what happens in society is, after all, also our own business, that we have to do something in relation to society, that we are responsible for it, is deeply dislocated. This dislocation reinforces the vicious circle. It increases apathy and multiplies its effects." He adds: "But there is also another, very important aspect of all these crisis phenomena. Time does not allow me to do more than mention it. When we speak of crisis, we must understand that it is not a physical calamity that has befallen contemporary society. If there is a crisis, it is because people do not passively submit to the existing organization of society, but react and fight against it in many ways."6

But the admission of failure followed shortly after, causing the dissolution of Socialisme ou barbarie in 1967: "We thought that these struggles would also develop in France and, above all, that they could (...) go beyond immediate work relations, progress towards the explicit questioning of general social relations. In this we were wrong. This development did not take place (...). This theoretical reconstruction)... we thought we could do it at the same time as the construction of a revolutionary political organization. This proves impossible today, and we must draw conclusions from it."7.

The “strange failure” of May 68

It is customary to mock this disillusioned diagnosis made a few months before the outbreak of May 68, which seems to contradict it: it is to understand nothing of what was intended or of what has happened since. Because this is the nodal point of the socio-political analysis of the "Thirty Glorious Years" made by C. Castoriadis: the organization of society and its functioning increasingly escape the popular will, both cause and consequence of a profound depoliticization at the same time as a generalized underground contestation, both corroding all institutions, social relations and cultural values, without opposing any real political alternative. This tension will grow and deepen over the decades and C. Castoriadis will not cease to return to it.

It is of course this which bursts into the open in the spring of 1968. Analysing "the events" on the spot in a powerful text, C. Castoriadis enthusiastically welcomes the "Student Commune" and describes its first effects while deploring the irrationalism, the arbitrariness, the excess or the inconsistency of the insurgents who do not open up any perspective. It is at the same time the consecration of the analyses of Socialism or Barbarism and the repeated observation that this new type of general contestation of society ultimately gives birth to nothing: neither coherent discourses, nor organs of self-government, nor forms of new organisations, nor consequential projects for society: "Whether society, or one of its sections, is capable of tearing for a moment the veils which envelop it and of leaping beyond its shadow, the problem is not there. There, it is only posed; that is why it is posed. It is not about living one night of love. It is about living a whole life of love. If we find today, facing us, Waldeck Rochet and Séguy respectively general secretary of the PC from 1964 to 1969 and general secretary of the CGT from 1967 to 1982), it is not because the Russian workers of 1917 were incapable of overthrowing the old regime. It is, on the contrary, because they were capable of it - and they were not able to establish, institute their own power.8

This “strange failure”9 of May 68, as he will call it, this self-collapse of the movement, C. Castoriadis attributes it, fundamentally and behind the refusal of French society to go further, to the difficulty of "freeing itself from the representation of politics - and of the institution - as the exclusive fiefdom of the State (which itself continues to embody, even in the most modern societies, the figure of a power of divine right) as belonging only to itself. This is how modernity, politics as a collective activity (and not a specialized profession) has until now only been able to be present as a spasm and paroxysm, a fit of fever, enthusiasm and rage, a reaction to an excess of Power always at once hostile and inevitable, enemy and fatality - in short, as "Revolution" ".10

He would note, almost twenty years later: "In a sense, May 68 only left the stage of revolutionary celebration to enter into decomposition. This observation leads to the most serious question of all today, about the desire and the capacity of men to take charge of their own social existence."11.

The Intelligentsia and the Rationalization of Failure

But this is not the assessment that the intelligentsia of the time draws. Because, much more serious than its simple failure, May 68 marks the real starting point of the ideological-intellectual rationalization of this impotence that the subversive paleo-Marxist, structuralist, post-situationist or Heideggerian "intellectuals" will operate from after the event and up to today. C. Castoriadis will write, fifteen years later:

"What the ideologues provide after the fact is both a legitimation of the limits (of the limitations, ultimately: of the historical weaknesses) of the May movement: you did not try to take power, you were right; you did not even try to constitute counter-powers, you were right again, because who says counter-power says power, etc.; and a legitimation of withdrawal, of renunciation, of non-engagement or of punctual and measured engagement: in any case, history, the subject, autonomy, are only Western myths, this legitimation will moreover be quickly relayed by the song of the new philosophers from the mid-70s: politics aims at the whole, therefore it is totalitarian, etc. (and it also explains its success). (…) for the tens or hundreds of thousands of people who had acted in May-June but no longer believed in a real movement, who wanted to find a justification or legitimation both for the failure of the movement and for their own beginning privatization while maintaining a “radical sensitivity”, the nihilism of the ideologues, who had at the same time managed to jump on the bandwagon of a vague “subversion”, was admirably suited.” This is how the “immense difficulty in positively extending the critique of the existing order of things is hidden, this impossibility of assuming the aim of autonomy as both individual and social autonomy by establishing collective self-government (…)”12

C. Castoriadis will thus correct the title of the book by Alain Renaut and Luc Ferry from 1986, La pensée 68, which dissected the discourses of Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, and Deleuze (the authors specify a posteriori that they could have done the same with Heidegger, Marcuse, Althusser and Lacan)13 : "The misinterpretation of Ferry and Renaut is total: the "thought of 68" is the anti-68 thought, the thought that built its mass success on the ruins of the movement of 68 and according to its failure. The ideologues discussed by Ferry and Renaut are ideologues of the impotence of man before his own creations; and it is the feeling of impotence, discouragement, fatigue that they came, after 68, to legitimize."14. This is the historical role of these "entertainers": "We can search with a magnifying glass in Sartre, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Althusser, Foucault, Barthes, etc., for a single sentence which, from near or far, is relevant either for the preparation of May, or for its understanding after the event. We will not find it. Do our intellectuals speak for the sake of saying nothing? No, not at all. They speak so that people think outside the box."15

Aspects of anomic subversion

The major milestones of this rationalization of impotence are thus laid for the coming decades: all the political-intellectual dead ends encountered by the protest movements of the following years are presented as "lines of flight", to use a Deleuzian expression whose notoriety has never waned.

Thus: "This elementary fact (the radical a-sociality of the human psyche), even if it has been placed at the center of our reflection on the subject since Freud and thanks to him, has always been known and has been formulated by thinkers as different as Plato, Aristotle or Diderot. It is only by means of its concealment that for the past ten years, new varieties of confusion and mystification have been able to flourish - the glorification of "desire" and "libido", the discovery of a "mimetic" desire, and the latest junk launched by the advertising of the industry of ideas on the market: pseudo-"religious" neo-liberalism. All of them, and whatever they say about each other, share the same incredible postulate: the fiction of an "individual" who would come into the world fully completed and determined as to the essential, and whom society - sociality as such - would corrupt, oppress, enslave."16

Hence the obsession with "recuperation". In May-June 1968, C. Castoriadis already warned students: "Those who are afraid of recuperation are already recuperated. (...) Recuperation cannot be avoided by refusing to define oneself. Arbitrariness cannot be avoided by refusing to organize collectively; rather, one runs towards it." The insurgents are victims of what he called, ten years earlier, "anti-organizational primitivism."17 based on "the presupposition that any collective organization in the contemporary period is condemned to bureaucratization"18. This is the concrete translation of this fixation on a "recovery" by a "system" that is both omnipresent and omnipotent.19, today so incorporated that it is no longer even expressed: "People have the illusion of being able to escape from the tragedy and risk that is history), and they express it with this request: produce for me an institutional system that will guarantee that this will never go wrong; demonstrate to me that a revolution will never degenerate, or that such a movement will never be recuperated by the existing system."20. And yet: "To say that as long as the regime exists, it recovers everything, is a tautology. But is it because the system recovers or integrates freedom of the press, for example, that we are going to lose interest in it? (…) Here again, we must denounce this pseudo-revolutionary absolutist prejudice, according to which there would be a radical and total break, or else we would be 100% recovered by the system."21.

This posture of "contesting withdrawal" logically leads to "(...) incoherent utopias: we cannot purely and simply evacuate the problem of production, any more than that of the coordination of collective activities. We sometimes have the impression that we are currently witnessing a revival of the mythology of the noble savage, a return to natural states, which are behaviors of flight and helplessness."22

This is how, at the end of the "68 years", C. Castoriadis noted the scattering of protest movements into "groups that were not only minorities, but fragmented and sectorized, incapable of articulating their aims and their means in universal terms that were both objectively relevant and mobilizing."23. This explosion is rationalized in the form of what Castoriadis calls "revoltism" which "(...) seems today to be gaining ground among very honorable and very close people. What is its philosophical "foundation"? It is a thesis on the essence of the social. The father closest to us of this thesis is Merleau-Ponty, who wrote, in The Adventures of the Dialectic: Marxism makes the mistake of imputing alienation to the content of history, while it belongs to its structure (I quote from memory). Therefore, thesis: every society is essentially alienated, alienation is due to the essence of the social. (Immediate consequence: the idea of ​​a non-alienated society is an absurdity.)"24.

If society is alienated and alienating in its very principle, ontologically, what could a minority (inexplicably, let us note) enlightened and lucid do about it? "Deconstruct" it, of course, in the wake of the structuralist fashion that C. Castoriadis will call "the French ideology"?25 and whose posterity is known: "The "genealogies", the "archaeologies" and the "deconstructions", if we are satisfied with them and if we take them as something absolute, remain something superficial and represent in fact an escape from the question of truth - an escape characteristic and typical of the contemporary era. The question of truth demands that we confront the idea itself, that we dare, if necessary, to affirm its error or circumscribe its limits - in short, that we try to put it in its place."26. He deciphers: "For a good part, deconstructionist ideology and mystification are based on the "guilt" of the West: they proceed, briefly speaking, from an illegitimate mixture, where the criticism (made for a long time) of instrumental and instrumentalized rationalism is surreptitiously confused with the denigration of the ideas of truth, autonomy, responsibility."27

C. Castoriadis is no less distressed to see his contemporaries mystify themselves by contemplating, elsewhere, radically better societies, on the side of extra-European cultures, after Stalinist Russia and Maoist China: "The hopes placed by revolutionaries or certain ideologues in the proletariat are weakening or vanishing; however, instead of an analysis and a critique of the new situation of capitalism, these hopes are purely and simply transferred elsewhere. This is the essence of these supremely derisory operations that were, for the intellectuals here, Fanonism, "revolutionary" Third-Worldism, Guevarism, etc. and it is obviously no coincidence that they had the support of these paradigms of confusionism that were Sartre, or other minor scribes who have since, moreover, completely turned their jackets."28. This is, of course, "Third Worldism" and its many and current afterlives, the idealization of non-Western cultures and societies, "derisory operations because they consist in simply taking up Marx's schema, removing the industrial proletariat and substituting the peasants of the Third World."29.

For it is, here as almost everywhere, the Marxist millenarian matrix that resurfaces: "It is distressing to see young activists alienate themselves in thoughtless activism and proclaim that what matters to them is action, not philosophy. Because, when we look at what their action consists of and what the ideas of their tracts and posters are made of, we see that they are only by-products of the writings of a German sociologist philosopher of the 19th century, named Karl Marx. And, when we look a little closely at Marx's writings, it is Hegel and Aristotle that we find there."30. Idem, among ten examples, on the side of certain techno-critical currents, which often only overturn Marxist technophilia: "It is nevertheless legitimate to ask whether in them), at the deepest level, there is something changed compared to Marx other than the algebraic sign affecting the same essence of the technical."31[/ref]It is hardly surprising, in this light, that all these movements accompanied the enormous oligarchic counter-offensive of the late 1970s: "Where has the strength of this pseudo-liberalism come from in recent years? I think that, to a large extent, it comes from the fact that "liberal" demagogy has been able to capture the profoundly anti-bureaucratic and anti-state movement and mood that has been stirring society since the early 60s."32[/ref]Ultimately, "the end result is the nullity, the total emptiness of contemporary 'subversive discourse', which has become a simple object of consumption and, moreover, a perfectly adequate form of 'left' ideological conservatism."33 – or, more precisely: “the “dominant discourse” of a certain “protest” milieu today, this horrible hodgepodge that is Freudo-Nietzscheo-Marxism, is rigorously nonsense.”34. This pseudo-subversive "anything goes", it is difficult not to invoke it today in the face of the full contemporary deployment of militant stupidity, to use Pierre-André Taguieff's category.35.

Anticipations of Wokeism

Because how can we not see that each of these characteristics, pointed out forty or fifty years ago, is found today, but still degraded and amplified, in contemporary “wokism”? Glorification of one’s own “subjectivity” and idealized “desire”; refusal of real organizations in favor of affinity groups, networks, gangs, etc.; maintenance of more or less delusional or, in any case, deeply inept utopias; infinite divisions of themes, trends and “sensitivities” according to “small differences”; call for the incoherent addition of each person’s revolts (in a lunar “intersectionality”); determination to “deconstruct” the West – and it alone! – in all its dimensions; passionate self-mystification with regard to extra-Western cultures; wearing down Marxist schemata to the point of the Judeo-Christian messianic cord…[/ref] Nothing of what C. Castoriadis described is missing today and, faced with a society that is increasingly alien to itself, the withdrawal into the private sphere is now part of the most radical and infantile protests. The famous feminist slogan “the personal is political”, for example, should be reversed: politics today is nothing more than the set of personal concerns (including careerist ones):

"(…) 300 demonstrators against Pershing rockets; tens of thousands of demonstrators in Frankfurt against the expansion of the airport; but not a single demonstrator against the establishment of military terror in Poland. We are happy to demonstrate against the biological dangers of war or against the destruction of a forest; we are totally disinterested in the political and human issues linked to the contemporary world situation."36

This is how Castoriadis, analyzing the successive protest moments from the 1950s to the 1990s, also speaks of today's, which Wokism seems to subsume. One will easily find in his work37 multiple statements always lapidarily tearing apart the previous generations of our contemporary insurrectionists, more or less “decolonial” ecologists, neo- and pseudo-feminists and their more or less degendered degenerations, committed artists and activist-journalists, neo-pedagogists, redemptive pacifists, Islamo-leftists or promoters of multiculturalism, etc. To “the society of lobbies and hobbies”38 that C. Castoriadis castigated, we must now add that of “fads”.

"These movements of the 1960s and 70s shook the Western world, they even changed it - but at the same time they made it even less viable. A striking phenomenon but one which, ultimately, is not surprising: because, if they were able to strongly contest the established disorder, they were neither able nor willing to take on a positive political project. The provisional net result which followed their decline was the accentuated dislocation of social regimes, without the emergence of new overall objectives or supports for such objectives. (...) Current "political" society is increasingly fragmented, dominated by lobbies of all kinds, which create a general blockage of the system. Each of these lobbies is in fact capable of effectively hindering any policy contrary to its real or imaginary interests; none of them has a general policy; and, even if they had one, they would not have the capacity to impose it."39

Of course, each of the causes invoked is the heir to a protest movement (to which it can refer) that belonged fully to what C. Castoriadis calls the project of individual and collective autonomy, which was deployed in the West from the early Middle Ages to the Renaissance, then from the Enlightenment to the classical Revolutions up to the workers' movements and their extensions. But its current "eclipse", as he diagnosed it, makes it nothing more than a grotesque caricature and this is not surprising: "Neither "traditionalist" nor creative and revolutionary (despite the stories it tells itself about this), the era experiences a relationship with the past in a way that, for its part, certainly represents as such a historical innovation: that of the most perfect exteriority."40

The important thing here is to understand that these protest movements, of which "wokism" is only the latest avatar, are, for C. Castoriadis, an integral part of our civilizational decay, are both causes and symptoms of this "decay of the West", since they are the other side of a world that is simultaneously techno-bureaucratized and strongly anomic:

"How can we also be surprised that so many young people, who refuse their transformation into logistical animals but most often do not have, precisely because of the system that "educated" them, the possibility of showing the theoretical insistence of this system, often give their revolt irrationalist forms?"41

Wokeism: a symptom of Western anomie

"Wokism" is in no way an imported trend, an anachronistic resurgence of a forgotten past or the passing craze of a tormented adolescence: it is one of the most spectacular and harmful expressions of the collapse of our societies and is one with it. More: it is the rationalization, the verbalization describing this immanent process of authentic decivilization, to use Norbert Elias' term, as a desirable and desired perspective, envisaged as a conscious and deliberate enterprise led by an enlightened avant-garde - which deepens it in return.

This education which no longer educates, for example, C. Castoriadis described it in 196542 and he often returns to it: "The Western educational system has entered, for about twenty years," he wrote in 1982, "into a phase of accelerated disintegration. It is undergoing a crisis of content: what is transmitted, and what must be transmitted, and according to what criteria? (...) it is also experiencing a crisis of the educational relationship: the traditional type of authority has collapsed, and new types - the master-buddy, for example - are unable to define themselves, assert themselves, or propagate. (...) In the past - not long ago - all the dimensions of the educational system (and the values ​​to which they referred) were incontestable; they have ceased to be so."43 The cause, here again, is "the crumbling and disintegration of traditional roles - man, woman, parents, children - and its consequence: the formless disorientation of new generations. The ambivalent aspect of the movements of the last twenty years also applies in this area (although the process, in the case of the family, goes back much further, and is already three-quarters of a century old in the most "developed" countries). The disintegration of traditional roles expresses the drive of individuals towards autonomy and contains the seeds of emancipation. But I have long noted the ambiguity of these effects. The more time passes, the more one is entitled to ask whether this process translates more into the blossoming of new ways of life than into disintegration and anomie."44

This anomie has gradually established itself throughout the social body, embodied in what C. Castoriadis calls the "anthropological type", the type of human being manufactured by his society and which he shapes in return, and of which he diagnoses a "mutation" (which Marcel Gauchet will later take up45) : "Here we touch on a fundamental factor (…): the intimate solidarity between a social regime and the anthropological type (or the range of such types) necessary to make it function. These anthropological types, for the most part, capitalism has inherited from previous historical periods: the incorruptible judge, the Weberian civil servant, the teacher devoted to his task, the worker for whom his work, despite everything, was a kind of pride. Such characters become inconceivable in the contemporary period: we do not see why they would be reproduced, who would reproduce them, in the name of what they would function. Even the anthropological type which is a creation of capitalism, the Schumpeterian entrepreneur (…) is disappearing"46

The new anthropological type – as well described by a Jean-Pierre Le Goff as by a Philippe Muray, for example – is distinguished by the superb ignorance of its social-historical inscription, making it loudly reject any attachment and at the same time nourish a guilty gregarious passion: “The character of the era, both at the level of daily life and that of culture, is not “individualism” but its opposite, generalized conformism and collage. Conformism which is only possible on condition that there is no important and solid core of identity. (…) it is this “We” which is dislocating today, with the position, by each individual, of society as a simple “constraint” imposed on him – a monstrous illusion but so lived that it becomes a material, tangible fact, the index of a process of de-socialization –, and to which he addresses, simultaneously and contradictorily, uninterrupted requests for assistance.”47. Monstrous illusion of an individual who no longer wants to “make society”, believes himself to be free from it – this is the most intimate promise made by consumer society as well as by “woke” dynamics – and therefore gives himself up to it, bound hand and foot: “(…) it is immediate that the greatest conceivable power is that of preforming someone so that of his own accord he does what one would like him to do without any need for domination or explicit power to bring him to… It is just as immediate that this creates, for the subject subjected to this formation, both the appearance of the most complete “spontaneity” and the reality of the most total heteronomy possible.”48 – or an almost complete voluntary servitude.

Joint disappearance of the individual in the strong sense of the term and of society as collective self-representation, "the present society does not want to be a society, it undergoes itself. And if it does not want to be, it is because it can neither maintain or forge a representation of itself that it can affirm and value, nor generate a project of social transformation to which it can adhere and for which it wants to fight"49.

Here we find the rejection of a community in which individuals no longer recognize themselves, a rejection noted as early as the 1950s and to which he returned twenty years later: "This generalized contestation meant ipso facto - product and cause - the progressive dislocation of both the system of rules of established society and the internalized adherence of individuals to these rules. Briefly speaking, and in magnification: not a single law currently observed for reasons other than criminal punishment. The crisis of contemporary culture - like that of production - cannot be seen simply as an "inadequacy" or even as a "conflict" between new forces and old forms. In this too, capitalism is an absolute anthropological novelty, the established culture is collapsing from within without it being possible to say, on a macro-sociological scale, that another, new one is already prepared "in the flanks of the old society."50 He explains: "Until the beginning of the 70s, and despite the obvious erosion of values, this society still supported representations of the future, intentions, projects. The content did not matter, and whether for some it was the revolution, the great evening, for others progress in the capitalist sense, the rise in the standard of living, etc. There were, in any case, images that appeared credible, to which people adhered. These images had been emptying from the inside for decades, but people did not see it. Almost suddenly, we discovered that it was wallpaper - and the next moment even this wallpaper was torn. Society discovered itself without a representation of its future, and without a project - and that too is a historical novelty." 51.

The paradox is that this void is valorized, self-sustained and rationalized by the radical and all-out criticism that the mobilizations of recent decades have operated, with no other goal than themselves: "The idea that social meanings are simply contingent seems to be at the basis of the progressive decomposition of the social fabric in the contemporary world."52 ; "Everything happens as if, through a curious phenomenon of negative resonance, the discovery by Western societies of their historical specificity ended up shaking their adherence to what they were able and wanted to be, and, even more, their desire to know what they want to be in the future."53. Here reappears the convergence, already mentioned, of the generalized contestation with the mechanisms of "bureaucratic capitalism" since its "most formidable means has been the destruction of all previous social meanings and the instillation in the soul of all or almost all of the rage to acquire what, in the sphere of each, is or appears accessible, and for that to accept practically everything"54. It should be noted in passing that this last formulation is the basis of the contemporary union strategy which only speaks in terms of financial compensation and means, whatever happens, whatever comes, whatever happens.

Consumption and protest, contradictory the day before yesterday, echoing yesterday and inextricable today55, leading to a generalized crisis, unprecedented in its nature and scale:

"However, what is precisely in crisis today is society as such for contemporary man. Paradoxically, we are witnessing, at the same time as a hyper or over-socialization (factual and external) of human life and activities, a "rejection" of social life, of others, of the necessity of the institution, etc. The battle cry of liberalism at the beginning of the 19th century, "the State is evil", has today become: "society is evil". I am not talking here about the confused pseudo-philosophers of the time (who, moreover, express on this point, without knowing it, a historical movement that goes far beyond them), but, first of all, about the "subjective experience" increasingly typical of contemporary man."56 He asks: "Does contemporary man want the society in which he lives? Does he want another one? Does he want a society in general? The answer can be read in his actions and in his lack of actions. Contemporary man behaves as if existence in society were an odious chore that only an unfortunate fate prevents him from avoiding."57

The impossible return to heteronomy

This strange relationship between the individual and his society is that of contemporary man, constantly oscillating between the passionate desire to blend into the crowd and the infinite need to stand out, to which the standard of living and class consumerism respond as much as the pseudo-subversive affirmation of identity and militantism. The origins of this historical curiosity lie in the concomitant processes of the end of the workers' movements, which aimed at a refoundation of society, and the liberation of social, political and economic institutions that no longer seem to be accountable. The very formulation of the problem by C. Castoriadis therefore prohibits any "reactionary" or simply "conservative" temptation seeking to "return" to a previous order, more reasonable, more normal, more traditional. Humanly understandable, this easily predictable pendulum movement collides with the invasive political void of the "withdrawal into the private sphere" that C. Castoriadis mentioned in 1986 in the company of Christopher Lasch:

"'One day at a time,' if I use this beautiful expression, is what I call the absence of a project - both in the individual and in society itself. Thirty years ago, sixty years ago, people on the left were talking to you about the great night of the revolution, and people on the right about infinite progress, etc. And now no one dares to express a grandiose or even moderately reasonable project that exceeds the budget or the next elections."58[/ref]indeed, he asserted in 1978: "Conservation stricto sensu, the maintenance of things rigorously in the state in which they are, has obviously been, for a long time, the purest form of utopia. So the Right is necessarily reformist. Even when they continue - rarely - to call themselves conservative, its parties are not, more precisely they are only so to the extent that, today, conserving implies constantly reforming. If we want to be more explicit and specific, we will note that the Right was contaminated by the Left - after the Second World War. It is only since then that it no longer dares to present itself for what it is, and that almost no one calls themselves "right" anymore. "59. He states: "It is clear that the traditional ideologies of the "left" are bankrupt, and that people are increasingly realizing this. This is what gives, in some cases (Reagan and Thatcher are the most obvious and important), this renewed strength to a right that is just as ideologically bankrupt, just as incapable of having a new "reactionary" idea. But it is equally clear that these are only symptoms of something much deeper, which is the crisis and decomposition of Western societies."60

The cries of alarm about "the return of fascism" that the "left" intones in the face of the ghost of a return of the "right" therefore seem profoundly vain to him:

"At most, we could have a kind of soft authoritarianism, but to go further, something else would be needed. The crisis is not enough; to create a fascist or totalitarian movement, we need a capacity to believe and a triggering of passion, connected to each other, one feeding the other. Neither the first nor the second exist in today's society. This is why all the sects of the extreme right and the extreme left are condemned to derisory gesticulations. They play small roles, marginal puppets in the global political spectacle, but nothing more."61

Ultimately, calls to "re-establish" collective beliefs can only fail:

"(…) there is the idea that only a myth could found society's adherence to its institutions. You know that this was already Plato's idea: the "noble lie". But the matter is simple. As soon as we spoke of the "noble lie", the lie became a lie and the qualifier "noble" does not change anything. We see it today with the grotesque gesticulations of those who want to manufacture, to order, a renaissance of religiosity for so-called "political" reasons. I assume that these mercantile attempts must provoke nausea in those who remain truly believers. Some peddlers want to place this profound philosophy of a libertine police prefect: I know that Heaven is empty, but people must believe that it is full, otherwise they will not obey the law. What misery!"62

The anthropological foundations of heteronomy have been undermined for the average Westerner, caught in anomie for two or three generations, blocking any possibility of reestablishing an indisputable traditional order. C. Castoriadis points out that this is not the case for extra-Western anthropological types, notably Muslims, who are introducing into European territories an ethnoreligious social regime virtually unknown in historical Europe.63.

Reinvention of the autonomy project?

The margin for a restoration, or refoundation, of the autonomy project is narrow. C. Castoriadis does not maintain any of the dogmas of "progressivism", which he fundamentally criticizes in all their historical, political, cultural, techno-scientific and especially philosophical dimensions. On the contrary, he has never ceased to advocate, like any consistent revolutionary, a reappropriation of the past, of history, of traditions, of civilizational roots, and particularly those of Greco-Western origin:

"I cannot conceive of a new historical creation that could effectively and lucidly oppose this formless mess in which we live, if it does not establish a new and fruitful relationship with tradition. Being revolutionary does not mean declaring from the outset, as Sieyès did, that the whole past is a "gothic absurdity". (...) It does not mean restoring traditional values ​​as such or because they are traditional, but a critical attitude that can recognize values ​​that have been lost. I do not see, for example, how one can avoid re-validating the idea of ​​responsibility, or, dare I say, the value of very attentive reading of a text, which are in the process of disappearing."64. This is how "We have to oppose to false modernity as to false subversion (whether they are expressed in supermarkets or in the speeches of certain misguided leftists) a recovery and a recreation of our historicity, of our mode of historicization. There will be radical social transformation, new society, autonomous society only in and through a new historical consciousness, which implies both a restoration of the value of tradition and another attitude towards this tradition, another articulation between it and the tasks of the present/future."65. More concretely: "A true liberation of energies, in France and elsewhere, requires the marginalization of all existing political parties, the creation by the people of new forms of political organization, based on democracy, the participation of all, the responsibility of each with regard to common affairs - in short, by the rebirth of a true political thought and passion, which would at the same time be lucid about the results of the history of the last two centuries. Nothing says that this is inevitable, nothing says, either, that it is impossible."66

These considerations, already old, may seem abstract. In particular because, in the face of nihilistic subversions, they seem to call upon non-existent actors. But this is to forget that "wokism" is the work of a minority, both dominant and noisy, urban and well-off, which has asserted itself in universities, the media, "culture" in connection with various oligarchic circles. Outside of this globalized caste, there are peoples, in the process of liquidation, in whom C. Castoriadis easily recognizes the vestigial maintenance of a common decency to use George Orwell's term. This is how we can understand the recent movement of the "Yellow Vests", immediately caught up in an extraordinary class contempt and victim of a massive and almost immediate leftist infiltration, which will have finally discredited and exhausted it.67. It belongs fully to this awakening of the people that the various oligarchic sectors call "populism". The extreme confusion of the latter, its porosity to demagogy, its tendencies towards conspiracy theories, its ideological wanderings are the inevitable products of these last decades that we have just gone through. And all the more so since they are kept far from the "lost treasures of modern revolutions" that Hannah Arendt evoked by a chic radicalism "woven of saliva"68 which is today gradually taking on totalitarian features, opening the door wide to neo-obscurantisms69 (Islamism, racialism, communitarianism) which are surging.

Quentin Berard

January-September 2024

Author

Footnotes

  1. Cornelius Castoriadis, “The Collapse of Marxism-Leninism (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?981-L-effondrement-du-marxisme)”, 1990. In order to lighten the notes of this article and due to the reissues of many texts cited here – original publication, reissue UGE 10/18, then ed. C. Bourgois or du Seuil, etc., then ed. du Sandre, not to mention the “pirate editions” and their wide availability on the internet – the references will be reduced here, unless otherwise, to the title of the article and the date of first publication). Please refer to the excellent exhaustive bibliography developed and updated by Claude Helbling (thanked here): “Detailed bibliography, in French, of and about Cornelius Castoriadis (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?1050-Bibliographie-C-Castoriadis)”.

  2. … he would later summarize in “We are in the era of imitation, of tinkering, of syncretism, of plywood (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?50-nous-sommes-dans-l-ere-de-l)”, 1998.

  3. Title of his seminal work The Imaginary Institution of Society (Seuil, 1975).

  4. “The revolutionary movement under modern capitalism (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?32-le-mouvement-revolutionnaire-sous)”, 1959.

  5. "Student Youth" 1963

  6. "The Crisis of Modern Society (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?55-la-crise-de-la-societe-moderne)", 1965

  7. “The suspension of Socialism or Barbarie (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?85-la-suspension-de-socialisme-ou)”, 1967

  8. "The anticipated revolution (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?104-mai-68-la-revolution-anticipee)", 1968. It will be one of the intellectual trajectories of this period to succeed in formulating that the Russian revolution of February 1917 embodied by its organs of self-government had been interrupted by what will ultimately have been only a Bolshevik putsch carried out in October.

  9. “The movement of the sixties (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?732-les-mouvements-des-annees-soixante)”, 1986.

  10. “The Movement of the Sixties (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?732-les-mouvements-des-annees-soixante)”, 1986, op. cit.

  11. “Are there avant-gardes? (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?47-y-a-t-il-des-avant-gardes)”, 1987.

  12. “The Movement of the Sixties (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?732-les-mouvements-des-annees-soixante)”, 1986, op. cit.

  13. Thought 68, Gallimard 1986 (re-ed. 1988).

  14. “The Movement of the Sixties (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?732-les-mouvements-des-annees-soixante)”, 1986, op. cit.

  15. “The Entertainers (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?684-Les-divertisseurs-1-2)”, 1977.

  16. “Socialism and autonomous society (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?105-socialisme-et-societe-autonome)”, 1979.

  17. "Proletariat and organization, II", 1959, in The Question of the Workers' Movement. Volume 2 (Political Writings, 1945-1997, II), Éditions du Sandre, 2012. On the "question of organization" within SouB and which would be the reason for the break with Claude Lefort, see "Notes on the organization of democratic collectives (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?762-Notes-sur-l-organisation-des)", Lieux Communs, 2015.

  18. “The coordinations of 1986-1988 (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?81-preface-de-c-castoriadis-au-livre)”, preface, written in 1994 to the book by Jean-Michel Denis, “The coordinations”, Syllepse, 1996, p. 9-13.

  19. Cf. “Post-leftism and neo-management (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?300-Post-gauchisme-et-neo-management)”, Quentin and Nafissa, EcoRev' magazine, February 16, 2007.

  20. “An endless questioning (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?1083-Une-interrogation-sans-fin)”, 1979.

  21. "What political parties cannot do (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?720-ce-que-les-partis-politiques-ne-peuvent)", 1979.

  22. “Are there avant-gardes? (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?47-y-a-t-il-des-avant-gardes)”, 1987, op. cit.

  23. “The Crisis of Western Societies (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?67-la-crise-des-societes-occidentales)”, 1982.

  24. “The revolutionary requirement (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?485-l-exigency-revolutionnaire)”, 1976.

  25. “Psychoanalysis: Project and Elucidation”, 1977, in The Crossroads of the Labyrinth I (Seuil, 1978), see also “The Movement of the Sixties (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?732-les-mouvements-des-annees-soixante)”, 1986.

  26. “The Revolutionary Demand (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?485-l-exigency-revolutionnaire)”, 1976, op. cit.

  27. "The Rise of Insignificance (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?9-la-montee-de-l-insignifiance)", 1993.

  28. “Third World, Third Worldism, Democracy (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?1070-Tiers-Monde-tiers-mondisme)”, 1985.

  29. Ibid

  30. “Reflections on “development” and “rationality” (https://www.notbored.org/cornelius-castoriadis-carrefours-2-highlighted-errata-citations.pdf)”, 1977, in Domaines de l'homme, Les carrefours du labyrinthe II (Seuil, 1986).

  31. “Technique (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?506-technique-1-3)”, 1973.

  32. "We are going through a low period", 1986, reissued in A society adrift (Seuil 2005), see also "The coordinations of 1986-1988 (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?81-preface-de-c-castoriadis-au-livre)", op. cit.

  33. “The Revolutionary Demand (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?485-l-exigency-revolutionnaire)”, 1976, op. cit.

  34. “Why I am no longer a Marxist (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?108-de-la-dissidence-marxiste-au)”, 1974.

  35. The New Age of Stupidity, ed. L'Observatoire, 2023.

  36. “The Crisis of Western Societies (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?67-la-crise-des-societes-occidentales)”, 1982, op. cit.

  37. … or in our article “Castoriadis and the Do-Gooders” (https://www.mezetulle.fr/castoriadis-et-les-bien-pensants-par-quentin-berard-1re-partie/), Mezetulle.fr website, December 12 and 13, 2023.

  38. “The Vacuum Industry (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?39-L-industrie-du-vide-1979)”, 1978.

  39. “The Crisis of Western Societies (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?67-la-crise-des-societes-occidentales)”, 1982, op. cit.

  40. Ibid

  41. “Modern Science and Philosophical Questioning”, 1973, in The Crossroads of the Labyrinth I (Seuil, 1978).

  42. “The Crisis of Modern Society (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?55-la-crise-de-la-societe-moderne)”, 1965, op. cit.

  43. “The Crisis of Western Societies (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?67-la-crise-des-societes-occidentales)”, 1982, op. cit.

  44. Ibid.

  45. “Essay on Contemporary Psychology (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?421-Essai-de-psychologie-contemporaine)” in Democracy Against Itself, Gallimard, 2002.

  46. "The Rise of Insignificance (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?9-la-montee-de-l-insignifiance)", 1993, op. cit.

  47. "The Crisis of the Identification Process", 1989, The Rise of Insignificance. The Crossroads of the Labyrinth Volume 4, Seuil, re-ed. 2007,

  48. “Power, politics, autonomy (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?1071-Pouvoir-politique-autonomie-1-2)”, 1989.

  49. “The Crisis of Western Societies (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?67-la-crise-des-societes-occidentales)”, 1982, op. cit.

  50. "Why I am no longer a Marxist (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?108-de-la-dissidence-marxiste-au)", 1974, op. cit., see also "The movement of the sixties (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?732-les-mouvements-des-annees-soixante)", 1986.

  51. “Psychoanalysis and Society II (https://www.notbored.org/cornelius-castoriadis-carrefours-2-highlighted-errata-citations.pdf)”, 1983.

  52. “Institution of society and religion (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?784-institution-de-la-societe-et-religion)”, 1982.

  53. “The Crisis of Western Societies (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?67-la-crise-des-societes-occidentales)”, 1982, op.cit.

  54. “The rationality of capitalism (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?790-la-rationalite-du-capitalisme)”, 1997.

  55. We will read, for example, by Joseph Heath, Andrew Potter; Consumed Revolt, The Myth of the Counterculture, Naïve editions, 2004 (reissued by L'Échappée, 2023).

  56. “The Crisis of Western Societies (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?67-la-crise-des-societes-occidentales)”, 1982, op. cit.

  57. Ibid.

  58. “Combating the withdrawal into the private sphere (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?Combattre-le-repli-sur-la-sphere)”, 1986.

  59. What democracy?, volume II, ed. du Sandre, entire passage (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?741-c-castoriadis-extraits-de-illusion) pp. 25-39.

  60. “The “Left” in 1985 (https://www.notbored.org/cornelius-castoriadis-carrefours-2-highlighted-errata-citations.pdf)”, 1985.

  61. “Psychoanalysis and Society II (https://www.notbored.org/cornelius-castoriadis-carrefours-2-highlighted-errata-citations.pdf)”, 1983, op. cit.

  62. “An endless questioning (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?1083-Une-interrogation-sans-fin)”, 1979.

  63. “C. Castoriadis and the Do-Gooders (https://www.mezetulle.fr/castoriadis-et-les-bien-pensants-par-quentin-berard-1re-partie/)”, op. cit.

  64. “The Crisis of the Identification Process,” 1989, op. cit.

  65. “Social transformation and cultural creation (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?62-transformation-sociale-et-creation)”, 1978.

  66. “The “Left” in 1985 (https://www.notbored.org/cornelius-castoriadis-carrefours-2-highlighted-errata-citations.pdf)”, 1985, op. cit.

  67. Cf. “The Yellow Vests Face the Empire (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?999-Les-gilets-jaunes-face-al-empire)”, collectiflieuxcommuns.fr website, December 6-13, 2019.

  68. "The Collapse of Marxism-Leninism (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?981-L-effondrement-du-marxisme)", 1990, op. cit.

  69. Cf. “Wokism and obscurantism: articulations and complementarities (https://collectiflieuxcommuns.fr/?1112-Wokisme-et-obscurantisme)” online magazine Frontpopulaire.fr, July 11, 2020.

What you have left to read
0 %

Maybe you should subscribe?

Otherwise, it's okay! You can close this window and continue reading.

    Register: