Decolonizers of the Imaginary

Decolonizers of the imaginary Christoph D. D. Rupprecht1* [email protected] Ayako Kawai1,2 [email protected] 1) FEAST Project, Research Institute for Humanity and Nature, Kyoto (Japan) 2) Fenner School of Society and Environment, Australian National University Note: This manuscript represents a pre-peer-review version / preprint of the paper submitted to ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies on October 8th, 2018. It is based on presentations at and generous feedback from participants of the AAG 2017, Degrowth Malmö 2018 and Degrowth Mexico City 2018 conferences. Keywords: degrowth, decolonization, more-than-human, radical imaginary Abstract The human radical imaginary, or the capacity to see in a thing what it is not (Castoriadis 1987), determines the possibilities we consider when we think about how the world should look like. Sustainability research pioneer Donna Meadows has thus called the power to transcend mind sets or paradigms out of which a system arises the most potent leverage point for interventions. One barrier to such interventions is the colonization of the imaginary by capitalism, the root cause of environmental destruction and addiction to economic growth. Latouche argues as part of the debate on degrowth that the colonized Western imaginary must thus be decolonized. In this paper, we ask how this might be achieved and propose (re)introducing human traditions of seeking knowledge that transcend established Western norms and conventions. Drawing upon concrete examples, we describe four types of decolonizers and how they might help decolonize Western imaginaries: 1) Future generations; 2) past generations; 3) non-humans, and 4) spiritual beings and concepts. We conclude by briefly outlining ways to invite these decolonizers of the imaginary individually and institutionally. Introduction It seems easier for us today to imagine the thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; and perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imaginations. (Jameson, 1994, xi) Another world is not only possible, she's on the way and, on a quiet day, if you listen very carefully you can hear her breathe. Arundhati Roy, Confronting Empire, World Social Forum 2003 Industrialized societies and people socialized in their contexts are struggling to find modes of being less destructive for the environment, the people exploited through global capitalism locally and afar. Alternatives to capitalism have been proposed since its early stages. The violent oppression of attempts to implement them, for example of Chile’s Allende government, suggest these alternatives are not without appeal. Yet socialists, anarchists, communists, degrowthers and other proponents of alternative economic and political orders often struggle to gain sufficient political support for large-scale system changes. This can only partly be explained by historic experiments and their sometimes-disastrous outcomes. But what if we could envision a better world, a world enticing enough to radically change the goals and shape of the industrialized societies responsible for the majority of environmental damage? Imagining alternatives to the current system is surprisingly challenging. Meadows (1999) proposes a list of leverage points, places to intervene in a system. Those most malleable to change, such as subsidies, taxes or standards, she argues, are also the least effective. Instead, more effective places to intervene are the goals of systems and the mindset or paradigm out of which the system arises. The most effective one in Meadow’s list is the power to transcend paradigms. Paradigms she defines as “the shared idea in the minds of society, the great big unstated assumptions – unstated because unnecessary to state; everyone already knows them, [… the] deepest set of beliefs about how the world works” (1999, 17). With Thomas Kuhn, she suggests working with active change agents and “the vast middle ground of people who are open-minded” to change paradigms. The power to transcend paradigms in turn entails “to let go into Not Knowing, into what the Buddhists call enlightenment”, because “if no paradigm is right, you can choose whatever one will help to achieve your purpose”, and “it is in this space of mastery over paradigms that people throw off addictions, live in constant joy, bring down empires, found religions, get locked up or ‘disappeared’ or shot, and have impacts that last for millennia” (1999, 19). Yet she also cautions that with increasing effectiveness of a leverage point, the resistance of the system to change likewise rises. What holds us back from letting go of our belief in particular paradigms? Fukao (2012, 90) identifies what she calls the colonization of the soul, something that occurs when “the process of learning works to suppress as much as possible the affect that is directly coupled with our own feelings, or when the process of learning is malevolently used for this purpose, […] in the context of the home, the workplace, a rural community, a circle of friends, or through the media in the form of ‘education’ or ‘propaganda’”. She holds this process responsible for economic development as well as environmental destruction. Like a curse, it forces individuals to act against their own interests without allowing them to escape and take a different action (Fukao, 2012, 88f). To escape, Takebata continues the argument, means to remove ones framework of reference (2012, 143). This requires a profound change of mind that is difficult to achieve, as not questioning the assumptions underlying everyday life is the choice requiring less effort. However, this choice unconditionally and uncritically reinforces one’s worldview, which in this case is identical with Fukao’s curse that forms one’s frame of reference. Fukao here uses the metaphor of a lid on the colonized soul that isolates and oppresses it, while the persona above the lid reproduces the curse by rejecting the possibility of change (Fukao, 2012, 22; Takebata, 2012, 167). Similar to Meadow, the goal is then to recognize the fatalistic worldview as nothing more than one possible worldview, striving to open the lid on the soul, and achieving a meta-recognition to act in a way oneself can be at peace with (Takebata, 2012, 167). How do the dynamics of transcending paradigms and decolonizing the soul play out on a societal scale? Castoriadis provides insight by examining two additional questions: “What is it that holds a society together?” and “What is it that brings about other and new forms of society?” (1984, 148f). He argues that societies are held together by the “institution of a society as a whole”, including its norms, values, language, tools, procedures and ways of doing things, in addition to individuals themselves (Castoriadis, 1987, 1984, 149). Validity is ensured sometimes by coercion and sanctions, though more often by adherence, support, consensus, legitimacy, belief. These reflect a more fundamental process, “the formation (fabrication) of the human raw material into a social individual, in which they and the ‘mechanisms’ of their perpetuation are embedded” (Castoriadis, 1984, 149f). Society is thus an ever-shifting “magma of social imaginary significations, […] spirits, gods, God; citizen, nation, state, party; commodity, money, capital, interest rate; taboo, virtue, sin”(Castoriadis, 1984, 150). The imaginary quality of the significations is derived from their independence from elements existing in reality, as well as from their dependence on being instituted and shared by a collective. The key leverage point or escape from the curse, however, for Castoriadis lies in the radical imaginary – “the capacity to see in a thing what it is not, to see it other than it is”(Castoriadis, 1987, 81). It creates the imaginary significations that institute society (the social imaginary, or for individuals the actual imaginary). Castoriadis thus answers his second question about changes in the form of societies by arguing that it happens through a process of creation of new significations (1984, 157f). He uses the rise of capitalism as an example, and notes how what he calls a neo-Darwinian approach would expect to find a large number of random social varieties that are eliminated, with only capitalism as the fit social form left. Noting that this does not represent what happened historically, he identifies as the actual cause “the emergence of a new social imaginary signification, the unlimited expansion of ‘rational’ mastery (instrumented, to begin with, in the unlimited expansion of productive forces)” (Castoriadis, 1984, 158). Latouche (2015) then draws upon the anthropological critique of imperialism to point out that this obsession with economic growth can be read as a colonization of the imaginary by capitalism. The colonization of the imaginary can thus be understood as a society-scale process echoing the colonization of the soul as described by Fukao. The use of the term colonization here is not unproblematic. Latouche’s colonization of the imaginary must not be conflated with the very concrete, historical violence of colonization and its physical, psychological and systemic traumas, continuing to this day in many places around the world. Colonization as a concept, however, can help understand how the effects of Westernized, industrialized lifestyles cause suffering for humans, and for the non-humans the capitalist system excels at isolating those living such lifestyles from. Indeed, one could argue that regardless of location,

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