chapter 9 Between and : Castoriadis and the Politics of Heterodox

Simon Tormey

I can always project a volume onto a plane, a figure onto an axis, the opera- tion leaves me with some result in my hands; I cannot project social-historical­ life onto one its ‘axes’, for the operation leaves me with .1

In her paper, ‘The postmodern imagination’, Agnes Heller outlines what to her are the characteristic differences between what she used to describe as ‘forms of historical ’, in this case between ‘the historical consciousness of unreflected generality’ and ‘the historical consciousness of reflected gen- erality’, or, more simply, between the ‘modern’ and ‘postmodern’ manner of thinking about ourselves, who we are and where we are going (if anywhere).2 As Heller goes on to explain, the key difference between these forms of think- ing is their respective stance on the formation of the subject under modern conditions. To the modern the subject is always-already known: enframed, enclosed by categories of , human need, essences and brute ‘’ or ‘necessity’. The point of social critique is thus primarily to grasp a master code or metanarrative, to explain and account for and the World within an overall account of the ‘totality’. For the postmodern ‘mind’, on the other hand, the ‘’ of our ‘contingency’ or ‘historicity’ as subjects of ensures that all such attempts at closure are doomed to fail. The modern sub- ject eludes categorisation, definition, , or, to employ a banal but help- ful formula, ‘type casting’. As she notes: ‘Postmoderns think and act as though (every historical event) were contingent in the strongest sense of the word (without plan, necessity, basic tendency, and so on), but they do not refer to contingency in ontological/metaphysical terms. They would never say that the essence of is contingent.’3

1 Castoriadis, C. (2005). Joyce, P. (ed.). The Imaginary of Society, p. 220. (Electronic publication). 2 Heller, A. (2000). ‘The postmodern imagination’ Politics at the Edge. In C. Pierson and S. Tormey (Eds.). The PSA Yearbook 1999. pp. 1–13. London: Macmillan. 3 Heller, ‘postmodern imagination’, p. 4.

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‘Postmodern’ in this sense has nothing to do with the ‘ after’, with posthistoire or the end of ; far from it. The key phrase above is ‘[p]ost- moderns think and act’. What we are discussing are ways of thinking about the nature of the world and the individuals that compose it, that create it, that make the world what it is. To be ‘postmodern’ is to take a stance on the mod- ern; it is not to think that the modern has somehow ‘ceased to exist’, or that modernity with all its ‘effects’ has been displaced by some other of temporality. It is in particular to think of ‘the subject’ neither as ‘dead’ nor as a mere ‘träger’ of some foreordained or imperative. It is to consider the bearer of his or her own energeia. To ‘be’ postmodern thus implies a particular form of praxis stemming from the recognition of ‘absolute responsibility’ in the here-and-now, a responsibility which as Heller adds is ‘absolute’ because it stems from the in—rather than of—the contingent nature of action and our place in the world. Attempting to grapple with the vexed issue of the legacy of Castoriadis it occurs to me that Heller’s description of the dominant forms of conscious- ness of modernity as we live it help us to come to terms with the puzzling or disconcerting manner in which his political relates to his and account of subjectivity. Castoriadis is very obviously a libertar- ian thinker: ‘’ shines off every page and word he ever wrote. Yet there sometimes seem to be two kinds of libertarianism present in his work, one of a ‘modernist’ kind and one of a ‘postmodernist’ kind—in the senses used by Heller in the passages above. Another way of putting the same point is that there is a libertarianism that speaks to the contemporary subject of ‘the political’ and there is another that speaks to those who cannot detect the irony present when political theorists outline in precise terms what it is to be ‘free’, how ‘free’ people live, and what kind of and structures ‘free’ people need or want. In Castoriadis, we see both an ‘archaic’ (both literally and metaphorically) form of political theorising juxtaposed with the most extraor- dinary prescience which allows him to foreshadow developments and issues in contemporary social and political critique. One form of libertarianism is of interest insofar as it represents a contribution to the literature of libertarian socialisms (or perhaps classical anarchisms); the other represents a resource for careful scrutiny, reflection and contemplation by all those who wish to develop and enhance a left radical critique of the ‘social-historical’ a priori. I take The Imaginary Institution of Society to be the principal resource for the development of the latter which is why it forms the centre-piece for discussion in this paper. It should be added immediately that in advancing this reading, (a modern/ postmodern Castoriadis) I do not want to claim that this makes Castoriadis