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The Constitution of Modernity: A Critique of Castoriadis

Karl E. Smith European Journal of Social Theory 2009 12: 505 DOI: 10.1177/1368431009345048 The online version of this article can be found at: http://est.sagepub.com/content/12/4/505

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Copyright 2009 Sage Publications: Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, Singapore and Washington DC

The Constitution of Modernity A Critique of Castoriadis

Karl E. Smith
L A T RO B E U N I V E R S I T Y, V I C TO R I A , AU S T R A L I A

Abstract Every theory of modernity must at least presuppose an implicit ontology of the social-historical. Castoriadis is one of the few who makes these presuppositions explicit. Castoriadiss socio-cultural ontology reveals that the essentially indeterminate nature of the social-historical entails ontological plurality, in the face of which monological or unilinear theories of modernity collapse leaving us with a fragmented eld of tensions. Castoriadiss exposition of the ontological plurality of the social-historical is one of his most important contributions to social theory but when he turns his attention to modernity, he immediately polarizes the eld. The aim here is to offer some correctives to Castoriadiss polarized depiction, primarily by teasing out tensions in his work. Key words autonomy Castoriadis culture modernity social ontology

Every theory of modernity must at least presuppose an implicit ontology of the social-historical. Castoriadis is one of the few who makes these presuppositions explicit. Castoriadiss socio-cultural ontology reveals that the essentially indeterminate nature of the social-historical entails ontological plurality, in the face of which monological or unilinear theories of modernity collapse leaving us with a fragmented eld of tensions.1 Castoriadiss exposition of the ontological plurality of the social-historical is one of his most important contributions to social theory but when he turns his attention to modernity, he immediately polarizes the eld; he then treats the poles asymmetrically, over-emphasizing the project of rational-mastery and treating the project of autonomy as if it has been a culturally suppressed phenomenon. There can be little doubt that modernity is a peculiar, historically unique form of society. Following Arnason, we can understand modernity to be a particular cultural constellation, both somewhat broader and somewhat narrower than any particular society (2001a: 171; cf. 2001b: 115). My aim here is to offer some correctives to the polarized depiction that Castoriadis offers of this particular constellation, primarily by teasing out tensions in his work; that is, by using Castoriadis to argue against himself, at least in part.
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Roughly speaking, critical theoretical approaches to modernity can be categorized as monological, polarized, or pluralistic. Habermass unfinished project belongs to the rst category, as do those that reduce modernity to some Enlightenment-type moment heralding a new mode of reexive being (Touraine, 1989: 7) the so-called man of reason for short. Wagners (1994) depiction of a tension between discipline and liberty is an example of a polarized view, as is Castoriadiss contention that modernity is dened by the tension between the polarized projects of autonomy and rational-mastery. Both Wagner and Castoriadis recognize that the diverse social elds and institutions that constitute modernity cannot be reduced to their respective poles, but nevertheless treat the tension between these poles as the predominant or more strongly, key determinant forces that shape contemporary modern societies. Touraine, Bauman and Arnason, in contrast, offer pluralistic views; although their approaches are signicantly different, each sees a diverse array of social forces pushing and pulling social subjects in myriad directions. Baumans view is perhaps the bleakest of the three, judging at least by the conclusion to Postmodern Ethics (1993: 223ff.), where the postmodern condition is presented as one in which subjects are caught in a vortex of negative social forces, quite without anchor in a world in which it is increasingly obvious that all norms and standards are dened by the powerful the conquerors, the victors thus determining the social context available to act with, within, in accordance to. Touraine reaches quite different conclusions, positing a social actor which he dubs the Subject, who is variously portrayed as a social movement, an individual, an actor who is self-dening, self-created, and created through his or her involvement in a social movement. To put it very simply, Touraine observes the same fragmentation of the social realm as Bauman, Castoriadis, Arnason and others but seems increasingly to interpret this fragmentation as indicative of the disappearance of the social, supplanted by the rise of the Individual Subject (cf. 1989, 1995, 2002). As a social movement, of course, the social is never totally absent from Touraines subject. But this doesnt stop Touraine from declaring the rise of the individual and the end of the social as a mitigating or determinate factor in the Subjects constitution (2002). Touraine manages to reveal very important dimensions of modern subjectivity, but he nevertheless does so primarily through constructing or delineating a prescriptive model of the type of subjectivity that might lead modern subjects out of their current malaises. On one hand, his denial of the social sets him at sharp odds with Castoriadiss deeply social orientation to the human subject. On the other, the Subject that Touraine prescribes bears very strong resemblances to the autonomous subject that Castoriadis prescribes. Central to my argument here, then, is that Touraines model of Subjectivity, contrary to his own denitions, must be seen as a particular mode of beingsubject and that actualizing or realizing such a mode of being requires at least the existence of a society that is similarly orientated. Or in Castoriadiss terms: one can only be an autonomous subject in an autonomous society. Arnasons pluralistic portrayal of modernity as a eld of tensions is built upon Castoriadiss ontology of the social-historical (1989a, 1991). Arnason picks up

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on key indicators within Castoriadiss work in such a way as to see a multi-polar constellation of diverse social forces and factors pushing and pulling and intermingling with each other. Revisiting Castoriadiss ontology of the social-historical from the perspective of a eld of tensions provides a better understanding of some of the implications of this approach for pursuing Castoriadiss prescriptive project of autonomy.2 More specically, to foreshadow my conclusion, Castoriadis tends to treat democracy and capitalism in polarized terms, closely parallel to the polarized relationship between the projects of autonomy and rational-mastery. That is, for Castoriadis, democracy can be understood to be a manifestation of the project of autonomy, while capitalism is derived from the project of rational-mastery. From this perspective, democracy and capitalism are not natural bed-fellows, but are mutually incompatible.3 One aims at self-limitation, the other at unlimited expansion, or unlimited accumulation of knowledge, power, material comforts, etc. My argument is that adopting a pluralistic view such as Arnasons grounded in Castoriadiss ontology necessarily relativizes the poles that Castoriadis identies. To recognize that the social actions that constitute this diverse cultural constellation called modernity are shaped, inuenced and motivated by a plethora of poles (of power, values, interests, concerns, etc.) is necessarily to reduce the relative impact of the quest for autonomy and the pursuit of rational-mastery. From this perspective, they cannot be seen as mutually opposed or even intrinsically contradictory projects. By removing the bias that treats them as mutually opposed we can see their intermingling, e.g., the ways that rational-mastery is pursued in the name of the project of autonomy. This opens a path to understanding how the project of autonomy might be pursued with and within the institutions of capitalism, rather than viewing these institutions as intrinsically antipathetic to the project. The Social-Historical Castoriadis introduces the concept of a magma to refer to a complex entity that is not reducible to the sum of its parts, nor to any sub-sets, and whose magmatic character is reproduced in each and every sub-set (Castoriadis, 1987: 182, 343, 353). He says:
Let each person think of the totality of representations she is capable of making: everything that can present itself, can be represented, as present perception of reality, as memory, as fantasy, as reverie, as dream. And let each try to reect upon this question: could one, within this totality, truly go about the task of separation, of carving up, arranging, putting in order, counting up or are these operations both impossible and absurd with regard to what we are dealing with here? (1997a: 291; cf. 1987: 2234)

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The term magma thus refers to entities that escape or exceed the limitations of inherited thought, which Castoriadis argues almost invariably takes the form of identitary-ensemblist (ensidic) language, where the world is separated into distinct

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entities, that are identied (arranged, ordered) with clearly dened boundaries and characteristics. He then reconceptualizes the magma in an effort to explain society, whose inherent ontological plurality parallels the possible sets within a magma. We only speak of society as such, he says, because of a logical error, for the entity we are concerned with is better understood as the social-historical:
The social-historical is neither the unending addition of intersubjective networks (although it is this too), nor, of course, is it their simple product. The social-historical is the anonymous collective whole, the impersonalhuman element that lls every given social formation but which also engulfs it, setting each society in the midst of others, inscribing them all within a continuity in which those who are no longer, those who are elsewhere and even those yet to be born are in a certain sense present. It is, on the one hand, given structures, and, on the other, that which structures, institutes, materializes. In short, it is the union and the tension of instituting society and of instituted society, of history made and of history in the making. (Castoriadis, 1987: 108)

Society is thus inseparable from history, the creation of total human forms (Castoriadis, 1997a: 269). But history has for too long been erroneously understood as something that happens to a supposed entity called society. In recent decades there has been a tendency to avoid discussing society per se, preferring to dene it as something akin to the institution of particular modes of sociality (cf. Touraine 1989: 11). Sociality in this context refers to a property of anthropos, but approaching the question of society from the perspective of sociality is to treat society as an artefact of the doings of its constituent parts. From Castoriadiss perspective, this is begging the question, for sociality is itself instituted by the social-historical that it supposedly constitutes. The social-historical might be seen as a magma of institutions, but the social is also the instituting-instituted dimension of anthropos. Any given society is the institution of its history, and institutes itself on this basis. The social-historical, Castoriadis argues, cannot be understood in the terms of inherited logic precisely because the dominant modes of ensidic thinking in the modern world insist that any complex entity is reducible to its parts, which are themselves independently denable, and having been dened, can be re-assembled to constitute the whole. This, Castoriadis says, is the approach of all theories of intersubjectivity with intersubjectivity being posited as another way of discussing the institution of sociality (1991: 144). Intersubjectivist theorists have attempted to break out of this loop, irting with the deeper relationships involved, but remaining trapped in ensidic thinking, albeit in different ways and to different degrees. They essentially contend that society is the sedimented institution of social relationships between human subjects. The problem that intersubjective theories are dealing with is the attempt to explain the relation of one subject to another while recognizing that it is the other that constitutes the subject, and is thus the subjects problem and its possible solution (Castoriadis 1987: 108). But as Castoriadis puts it, existence with others is not mere intersubjectivity. It is social and historical existence . . . In a way, the intersubjective is the material out of which the social is made but the material only exists as a part and a moment of the social, which it composes

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but also presupposes (1987: 108). Yet the subject is, at the same time, a thoroughly social construction, formed through the interpenetration of the singular psychic ux and the social imaginary, which are mutually irreducible, yet inextricably intertwined (Castoriadis 1997b: 1545; 1987: 31112; Smith 2006: 1029; 2005: 10). The process we call socialization the sublimation required by the psyche, the process by which the psyche constitutes itself as a social being already presupposes a necessary social context. The newborn psyche needs the other, the social, in order to form itself into what we understand to be a human being. But to speak of the institution of this necessary sociality is inadequate. The socialhistorical is always and each time the institution of particular forms of social interaction; and these forms precede the beings who embody them even while each is formed by other, similarly formed beings. History, Castoriadis maintains, has been subject to related, but subtly different logical strictures. Either history is understood as the causal unfolding of events, wherein that which precedes causes what follows; or it is seen as the inevitable unfolding of a course of events already determined. In the rst case, Castoriadis points to the logical impossibility of understanding the whole of human history as direct causation, for in the light of the incredible diversity of human societies, one would then have to accept that the same cause has produced different effects. In the second, he argues, history itself is abolished, for the end was already determined from the beginning (1987: 173). Recounting Castoriadiss theory of time is not necessary here (see 1987: Ch. 4, esp. 186ff.); sufce to say that for the concept of time to be meaningful the concept of determination must be abolished at least to the extent that it entails or implies strong causation or teleology (1997a: 26971; cf. Merleau-Ponty 1962: 162). It is on this basis that Castoriadis formulates his conception of creation. Creation explains the different effects derived from the same inputs (nondetermining determinants, causal factors). Creation lies beneath the great diversity of human societies the radical alterity that can be seen everywhere in the social-historical but cannot be explained within the terms of conventional logic. For Castoriadis, we must understand creation as the capacity to posit new forms (1997a: 269), to bring forth that which has never before existed. Only from this perspective can time be understood correctly as otherness-alteration (1987: 195). To make sense of this, Castoriadis delves into the question of logical identity, distinguishing between difference and otherness. In the most basic terms, one sock is different from another sock, while a sock is other than a shoe (p. 194). But of course such simple terms are insufcient for his purposes, so he turns to mathematics and art, noting that a circle, ellipse, parabola and hyperbola are different from one another, in that each can be derived from the other, but the Divine Comedy is other than the Odyssey (p. 195). Different geometrical forms, then, are derivative productions, whereas the work of art is a genuine creation. Castoriadis observes that as far back as Plato, philosophers have attempted to elucidate an idea of creation, but typically, like Plato, have restricted their thought to works of art. But, he notes, capitalist society is other than feudal

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society just as the two texts cited above are other (p. 195). This is the crucial point for the present discussion. The social-historical is an alogical mode of being (contra Searle 2006: 15). It is unique in its creativity and, more importantly, in that it is a self-creation (autopoiesis) (Castoriadis 1997a: 269). Each new form of society is not a simple derivation from what has come before, Castoriadis argues, but the emergence of a form (eidos) that has not previously existed. Politics, he argues, like philosophy, is possible because the world is not fully ordered . . . And if the world were sheer chaos, there would be no possibility of thinking at all (1997a: 274). This fact, that the world is neither fully ordered, nor sheer chaos, underlies the fact and necessity of human creation: in thinking, in politics, in art, and in everyday life. Castoriadiss central concern is that the particular formation of any given society is a non-determined creation of said society (1997a: 267). For my purposes, what is important here are the implications for understanding autonomy. As Arnason (2001a: 171; cf. 2001b: 115) notes, Castoriadiss notion of radical alterity seemingly dependent upon the assertion of creation ex nihilo appears to lead him to a radical polarization of autonomy and heteronomy. Rejecting the notion of creation ex nihilo in favour of a more developmental process facilitates a move towards an understanding that links the two modes of being.4 This reconceptualization has implications for understanding both sublimation/socialization and society. Socialization, Castoriadis argues, is the process by which the human subject is created at the intersection of the psyche and society (1997b: 156). The subject is created as an embodied agent in particular and manifold cultural contexts; and these cultural contexts are always already embedded in broader social-historical contexts. As Castoriadis puts it, It is precisely because history is creation that the question of judging and choosing emerges as a radical, nontrivial question (1997a: 271).
History is creation: the creation of total forms of human life. Social-historical forms are not determined by natural or historical laws. Society is self-creation. That which created society and history is instituting society, as opposed to instituted society. The instituting society is the social imaginary in the radical sense. (p. 269)

He argues that only two societies, ancient Greece and the modern West, have been autonomous in recognizing and articulating their self-creation, and thus their selfinstitution. They alone continue to question their respective institutions (p. 275); which is to say that their institutions are open to critique and transformation. They provide the historical evidence that it is in fact possible to posit relatively open institutions. But, as Castoriadis acknowledges, there is nevertheless something paradoxical about this (at least within the limitations of ensidic thinking):
There never is [can never be] a total rupture of closure. Even in the most radical philosophy there always are an enormous number of things that cannot be put into question, and which probably will be put into question later on. Moreover, a philosophy worth its salt tends to close. It can go on repeating, I do not want to close; it nevertheless closes in its way of not closing . . . And truth is this movement of rupture of one closure after another. It is not correspondence with something. (1997b: 105)

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In other words, Castoriadis recognizes the logical paradox of speaking about an open institution when an institution is by denition a sort of closure. The autonomous society is one in which such closure is always subject to rupture to reopening, re-institution. An autonomous institution is one that is instituted by a society that clearly and lucidly recognizes this institution as its own creation, and accepts that further experience/knowledge/change may necessitate its rupture. Once it has moved from instituting to institution it has moved towards closure. To fully comprehend the possibilities and limitations for an autonomously instituted society, we must recognize this unavoidable tension between openness and closure (Castoriadis, 1997a: 272; cf. Arnason, 1989b: 28; Gauchet, 2002; Smith, 2005). Given all of this, autonomy, in principle and in practice, can never be complete or nal. Society, Nature and Autonomy Although Castoriadis (1997a: 361) directly rejects Honneths suggestion that he does ontology by way of saving the revolution, the trajectory of his work suggests that his philosophical concerns stem from his political concerns, which in turn stem from his social and anthropological concerns (although ultimately, these concerns are inseparable). To be sure, he does not argue that being determinacy (1987: 184) in order to establish that the particular forms instituted in the social-historical are not determined. But the concern with the possibility of instituting a different form of society clearly drives the trajectory of his work long before the ontological concern becomes explicit. Nevertheless, once his ontological, political and social-historical concerns have fused he is able to clearly delineate between heteronomous and autonomous societies. A heteronomous society is dened as one in which the nomos, the law, the institution, is given by another (Castoriadis, 1997b: 86). Such societies are always in a sense self-deluding, for the law never really is given by someone else, it is always the creation of the society in question (p. 86). His claim, then, is that all societies in all times and all places institute their own laws for themselves (1997a: 340). But except for the two ruptures, all societies have attributed their laws to some extrasocial source: God or the gods, the ancestors, founding heroes, or Nature, Reason, or History (1997b: 86). These last three sources are quite important in the context of my later discussion of modernity, for while a crucial dening characteristic of modernity is the rupture of closure and the embracing of autonomy, this project of autonomy is continually challenged by myriad attempts to attribute social laws to natural laws, the law of reason and/or to explain modernity as the determined outcome (teleological result) of History.5 Castoriadiss conception of autonomy refers to specic modes of being-subject and of the social-historical. The subject the social individual is created in the intersection between the psyche and the social-historical, wherein the psyche requires form, and forms itself by sublimating what it encounters in and receives from the social-historical. We may speak of a heteronomous subjectivity when

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the psyche has formed itself in accordance with the other, and an autonomous subjectivity when the individual has been able to instaurate another relation between its Unconscious, its past [and] the conditions under which it lives (the social-historical) (Castoriadis, 1997b: 87, emphasis added).6 A brief detour is warranted at this point to highlight a distinction between an animal logos the world-of-its-own of the living-being and the world created in and through social imaginary signications, that is, the cultural world posited by the social-historical. One of the ways that Castoriadis discusses this is to say that the social-historical leans on the rst natural stratum the world that precedes and underpins social institutions and socialized subjects but, importantly, the very thing which is leaned on is altered by society by the very fact of this leaning on (1987: 354; cf. Arnason, 1989b: 25). From this perspective, the distinction between the natural and the social is blurred the interpenetration of the two realms is such that whatever was natural is no longer merely so. This is especially relevant to the social and political level of instituting laws, social norms, and political society. But Castoriadis also recognizes that there are conditions of being that are outside of, and antecedent to these realms. Mortality, for instance, is outside of the realm of being that is self-posited; beyond the nomos that may be self-instituted (1997b: 978; 1995: 100). He occasionally refers to the law of creation/destruction (e.g., 1997b: 99), a law which is clearly beyond the control of the socialhistorical in other words, a natural law that conditions our mode of being: Being is creation and destruction (1997b: 101); Human time, like the time of being, is the time of creation/destruction (1995: 106). This fact does not determine the social law, or the imaginary signication posited by any given society. But just as no society can create a world in which bulls can naturally bear calves; neither can it create a world in which death and destruction are wholly avoided. In effect, then, while an autonomous society is one which determines its own limits, it must do this within limits beyond its self-determination (choosing/ control). Importantly, recognizing that some imaginary signications are delusional or fallacious is sufcient to demonstrate that societies not only can, but often do institute themselves in ways that ignore these external limits. In other words, to fail to recognize that there are things in the world beyond human control is to at least implicitly accept a delusional self-understanding of the type depicted here. It is perhaps (mis-)recognition of these limitations that has led philosophers to search for the natural laws by which society should institute itself. Which might, in turn, suggest a failure of the imagination, including an incapacity or refusal to separate the natural and the social realms of being. Conversely, the delusional project of (the unlimited expansion of ) rational-mastery may be seen to arise precisely from the failure to accept such limits; to accept that the world in which humans construct a social-world is governed by laws beyond human control. My point in stressing this animal dimension (these extra-social limitations) is not meant as a disagreement with Castoriadiss argument that this animal or

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natural dimension is always rendered meaningful by being interpreted and instituted in a magma of imaginary signications (1987: 232). However, we can accept that Society cannot exist except by creating signications (1997b: 102) without concluding that human experience is reducible to signication. As Merleau-Ponty made clear, human experience includes preconceptual modes of engaging with the world (1962: 79); embodied engagement in the world often occurs prior to conceptualization in imaginary signications, entailing forms of knowledge that exceed the limitations of signication. In this sense, focusing on self-consciously reexive political actors as Castoriadis does denigrates the myriad ways in which the concerns of everyday life are the overriding political concerns of many social actors. But more fundamentally, Castoriadis acknowledges that every society must institute at least a minimum heterosexual desire if it is to reproduce itself, yet any attempt to reduce this (or other similar) desire to mere reproduction Freud made this clear will manifest in unintended and frequently pathological expressions. As with mortality, there are dimensions of animal nature that remain beyond the limits of social signication, even though such things do not determine the manner in which they will be instituted within any particular set of social imaginary signications. It is clear, then, as Castoriadis argues, that social norms, social laws that is to say, nomos are in each instance instituted by a particular society and are not reducible to natural laws. This is the de facto dimension of society. Except in Greek and modern society, wherein the nomos has been called into question, there have been prolonged attempts to identify the extrasocial principles upon which society ought to posit its norms, laws, standards, institutions and so on. It is against this background that Castoriadis advocates the project of autonomy a project that aims to clearly and lucidly posit the laws/norms, etc. of society on the basis that these are the ones that we choose. Before we can adequately address this, however, a few more dimensions of socio-cultural ontology must be elucidated. Culture First, it is worth briey exploring the concept of culture, especially to clarify the relationship between culture and society. As discussed, society has a mode of being that disqualies it from being dened as an entity within the terms of ensidic thinking. Culture is perhaps even more problematic to conceptualize. Kroeber and Kluckhohn (1952: 291) compiled 164 denitions of culture in Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Denitions. Agnes Heller observes that culture is an undenable anthropological universal that can be thematized and analysed from different angles (cited in Arnason 1989b: 33). It is nonetheless worth attempting to achieve some conceptual clarity in order to better understand the complexities, tensions and discontinuities of modern society and the difculties that modern subjects face in constructing a reasonably coherent and meaningful identity.

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For Castoriadis, to create means to give form to the Chaos of Being. The form in question is meaning, or signication, which he comments, must bind together . . . representation, desire and affect (1997a: 343). Such forms must be invested with value. Reproducing forms previously given to Chaos tends to obscure/occlude/cover over the Abyss. The given meaning soon comes to be imagined as the true meaning, whose veracity is derived from some extra-human source, thereby occluding the perpetual meaning-giving activity of human creativity. The echoes of Heideggers notion of authentic being are quite pronounced here, where living authentically requires clearing the occlusions of the Abyss, living boldly in the face of the Abyss/Chaos/Groundlessness (cf. Castoriadis 1997a: 3434; 1995: 100). But such authenticity, for Heidegger, was highly individualistic; in contrast, Castoriadis argues that the human being is essentially a social and historical being (1997a: 344). Which also means that it is a cultural being. Culture and society are not synonymous but they often are used as such. Both refer to things that cannot be rigidly delineated within the terms of ensidic thinking, and both occasionally refer to an a-logical entity that has the form of a magma. But there is also a sense in which the term culture refers to distinguishing characteristics of particular entities referred to as societies. In short, the horizons of meaning of the two terms signicantly overlap, but do not coincide. When Castoriadis explicitly addresses the question of culture, he denes it as less than the anthropologists conception of the whole of the human world, yet more than works of the spirit (1993: 301). He says, I intend here by culture everything, in the institution of a society, that goes beyond its ensemblistidentitarian (functional-instrumental) dimension and that the individuals of this society positively cathect as value in the largest sense of the term (1993: 3012; 1991: 220; 1997a: 339). Yet this use of the term value demands a broader sense of the term culture than Castoriadis allows. For example, Taylors understanding of the centrality of value-orientation to identity formation (1989) requires that we interpret culture in the largest sense of the term. This means a conception of culture that recognizes that value is also cathected in ensidic dimensions of saying and doing. Nevertheless, while Castoriadiss explicit approaches towards dening culture are found wanting, we nd within his philosophy of meaning a richly illuminating conception of culture that redresses many of his own analytic missteps. For Arnason, Castoriadiss notion that society has the characteristics for-itself, which among other things means that it creates a world-of-its-own (1997a: 3089; 1987: 2323), provides a strong insight for understanding culture. Arnason reinterprets Castoriadiss problematic formulation through Merleau-Pontys conception of culture as a mise en forme du monde, probably best translated as articulation of the world (1989b: 27). Such an interpretation, Arnason notes, casts culture in the tension between openness and closure: the tendency to articulate a totalizing world, closed to alternatives, and the ever-present possibility of openness to new meanings, new interpretations, new articulations (p. 27). From this perspective, Castoriadiss distinction between production and creation might best be understood as a difference in degree rather than kind (Arnason, 1996: 12), opening a space for further discussion of the polarization between rational-

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ized institutions and creative cultures. We can then say that institutions have their own cultures, and cultures manifest in institutions. In this sense, then, culture is a basic component and co-determinant of the social-historical world in its entirety, rather than a specic and relatively isolated region within it (Arnason, 1989b: 38). While this is a broader conception than Castoriadiss explicit denitions of culture, it is entirely consistent with his theory of social imaginary signications, which, as a theory of meaning, is also a theory of culture. Like language, the tension between openness and closure is intrinsic to culture. Culture thus has the characteristics of an instituting-instituted; it is a dynamic trans-subjective magma operating within relatively constant frameworks (Arnason, 2001c: 143). Culture is an articulation of the world, or an articulation of a world. Modern culture is, in many respects, characterized by tendencies towards particular forms of rationalization. Many have argued including Castoriadis that modern Western culture has become overly burdened by the instrumental/functional, and thereby void of the capacity to create new forms and cathect new meanings. But rationalized institutions are not outside of or other than culture (Weber, 1949: 55). It follows that modernity must be understood as a culture, including its imaginary, instrumental and functional dimensions. One of the more important, and least disputed, dening characteristics of modernity is its rupture of earlier forms of sociality and the rise of the atomistic individual as the dominant mode of being-subject. Modernity The ontology of the social-historical helps us to understand that any societys self-denition is not sufcient for understanding its constitution. That is, imaginary signications, although constitutive, are never exhaustive. It follows that modernitys self-denition as self-constituting is not sufcient to understand the constitution of modernity. That there are dimensions of being that are, and will forever remain, beyond human control, has serious implications for the effectiveness of self-denition in shaping society. As Arnason notes, interpretive constructs and frameworks have a logic and an efcacy of their own, but they acquire new meanings and develop in new directions as the potential is selectively realized in changing contexts and there are always unavoidable discontinuities due to unforeseen transformations (2001c: 151). Although imaginary signications represent a surplus of meaning which transcend all determinants, foundations, and presuppositions, the double sense in which they articulate the world . . . imposing form on it and giving access to it (Arnason 1989b: 28) is not sufcient to totally represent the world being articulated. That is, the world in-itself remains in excess of the world articulated by any for-itself as a magma of imaginary signications. Such magmas, by denition, remain incomplete; they are always inadequate to fully articulate the world of experience.

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Modernitys constitutive self-denitions are signicantly but not sufciently denitive of what modernity is. No matter how many elds are contaminated with the imaginary of rational-mastery, such mastery will forever remain beyond reach and all too often a dangerous delusion. No matter how many socialindividuals embrace and attempt to embody the imaginary of the man of reason, their respective societies will continue to be plagued by what Montaigne called the extravagant chimaeras and fantastical monsters (cited in Taylor, 1989: 178) of the radical imaginary (the psychic ux). But such problems are not peculiar to modernity the pluralism of modernity must, in many respects, be seen as progress from dogmatic traditions that have attempted by myriad means to control human subjectivity, including controlling imaginary signications and rigorously defending institutional closure. As Castoriadis repeats ad tedium, the project of autonomy can only exist for social individuals in a society in which institutional and signicatory closure has been ruptured,7 and repeated ruptures have become acceptable. At the same time, this very plurality denes the conditions that prompt identity crises (Castoriadis, 1993: 115; Taylor, 1991): without strong sources for identity, which entail strong social sanctions of particular modes of being rather than others, modern individuals are beset with a unique set of problems chaos, fragmentation in their quests for a meaningful orientation to the world. My aim here is to clarify some of the dening characteristics of the modern world, with the unique set of challenges that these pose to modern subjects. But Arnason cautions against attempting to produce an inventory of dening features of modern societies, observing that previous attempts at such an inventory have failed to reach any agreement on either the necessary contents or criteria (2000: 62). He notes a threefold context of reference for the notion of modernity itself: rst, an historical period; second, a specic regional entity (Western Europe and its overseas offshoots), and; most importantly for this discussion, the structural aspects of . . . a set of salient and durable traits (2000: 623). Among the traits he identies as indisputable is self-consciousness of the historical epoch (2001c: 1489). As mentioned, Castoriadiss strengths lie in having exposed the ontologicalplurality of the social-historical. Central to Castoriadiss concerns is that modern society does not live up to (or according to) its own high ideals, and this largely because its constitutive structures are contradictory. He sees modernity as constituted by two dominant poles: the projects of autonomy and the unlimited expansion of rational-mastery. On the one hand, modernity embodies the capitalist imaginary signication of the unlimited expansion of (pseudo-)rational (pseudo-)mastery; on the other, it is dened by the simultaneous deployment of the project of individual and social autonomy (1997b: 43). In challenging this polarized depiction, Arnason describes modernity as a loosely structured constellation rather than a singular or polarised system (2000: 64). This constellation is constituted by cultural orientations or horizons of meaning embodied in institutions but not reducible to them (p. 65). He equates these horizons of meaning with Castoriadiss social imaginary signications, and notes

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that Castoriadiss theory includes the understanding that such horizons are intrinsically in tension (p. 65). In Arnasons words, Castoriadis implicitly depicts modernity as a eld of tensions, structured around two dominant poles with their respective clusters of derivative principles and perspectives (1989a: 323). The opposing tendencies of autonomy and rational-mastery, Castoriadis maintains, ambiguously coexisted under the common roof of Reason (1997b: 38), where capitalism was imagined to be the rational organization of the economy to produce more and to produce it more efciently. But autonomy also emerged under this banner of reason, and was in a sense the very modus operandi of reason itself at least initially being imagined as a necessary condition for reason to rupture existing institutions of thought and social organization. As Castoriadis observes, the prioritization of reason very rapidly undermined autonomy, which gave way to instrumental calculation. The imaginary of rational-mastery was thus reinforced as reason came to be seen as the self-sufcient foundation for human activity, which otherwise would discover that it has no foundation outside of itself (1997b: 38). Historically, this absence of foundations appears to be an almost intolerable condition, inspiring the institution of an incredible array of imaginary foundations. Seeing modernity as more complicated than Castoriadiss polarised representation suggests, Arnason picks up threads from Castoriadiss own indications of a more nuanced view to tease out the interpenetration of the two projects as well as the broader social context and dynamics involved. He notes that aspirations to omnipotence appear to unavoidably manifest themselves in the singular psyche, and at the social level . . . translate into a push for mastery (2001b: 113). In other words, this tendency of modern capitalism is, according to Castoriadiss analyses, not peculiar to either modernity or capitalism, although they assume a particular form there that is, the form of unlimited accumulation, in contrast to the conquest of territory more commonly seen in pre-modern societies. Putting conicts between Enlightenment and Romanticism at the centre of cultural modernity, Arnason (2001c: 146)8 identies the capitalist economy, the bureaucratic nation-state and the organized pursuit of scientic knowledge as fundamental components of modernity that can be differently weighted in particular social formations (p. 144). These, in turn, exist in tension with other constitutive components, including the romanticist dimensions of nationalism and traditionalism (p. 146). In other words, how these different components are weighted in any social formation is not determined by the intrinsic logic of any single component, or by any overriding rationality such as capitalism or democracy. Castoriadis does observe that particular constellations of signication contaminate each other (1997b: 37), co-existing in such a way that each must somehow compromise its intrinsic rationale but he continues to reduce modernity to the tension between the poles of autonomy and rational-mastery. Although, as Arnason observes, the mutual irreducibility of these poles is beyond doubt (1989a: 327), other constitutive components of modernity are not reducible to either pole. That is, modernity is not bi-polar but irreducibly multi-polar or polypolar a polylogical eld of tensions.9

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The structural characteristics of modernity, Arnason explains, amount to trans-subjective dynamics operating within relatively constant frameworks that are therefore distinguishable from the projects of self-dening actors and from the contingencies of history (2001c: 143). By beginning with an open-ended spectrum of constitutive forces, the question of multiple and alternative modernities becomes a question of different forms of closure (p. 143), where analysis can then be directed at understanding how different societies have, among other things, affected different relationships between differentiation and integration (p. 138). Such an approach also makes allowance for the continuing presence of older institutions, structures and cultural orientations, the persistence of constellations of meaning that monological models construe as superseded. As we have seen, Arnason describes a modernity that is more plural than polar although he also recognizes it as capable of being polarized. He extends Castoriadiss claim that the social-historical is a magma which is not explicable within a simple cause-and-effect logic, and in which no particular development is determined either teleologically, or by reason alone. The unfolding of the socialhistorical, the perpetual institution and re-institution of society, the actions and decisions of social individuals, are not determined by any unifying logic, but occur each time within more-or-less conictual elds of tension. The future emerges through the instituting-institution of more-or-less open ways of weighing and balancing competing logics and conicting values along a multitude of axes. At the same time, recognizing with Castoriadis that the social-historical is not determined by any particular logic or rationality, but is a creation of the social imaginary, underlines the irreducibility of collective patterns of meaning to normative or rational structures (Arnason, 1996: 13). This means that the constitution of any particular social-historical entity cannot be reduced to what Taylor, for example, argues is the essential dimension of an individuals self-identity, an orientation to the good (1989). The range of goods that constitute modernity, and the multi-layered responses to them, are not only in continuous motion, but are chosen/prioritized/valued/ instituted in each instance in response to an indeterminate number of variables/ values. It is in this sense and in this context that the human being constructs a world of his or her own as a social subject. This constructed world is likewise multiple multi-dimensional, multi-contextual. It is an imaginary world of signications and meanings, as Castoriadis has convincingly argued. It is simultaneously a world of psychic phantasies a eld of tensions generated by the otherness of the self to itself, as Gauchet put it (2002: 17; Smith, 2005: 9). It is also a world of meaningful institutions, meaningful relations and social practices; a world in which these institutions, relations and practices are pregnant with potential, but ultimately inadequate and prone to rupture.

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Notes
1 We might conceive of these fragments as more-or-less uid, as Bauman does, but then we must remember that some uids e.g., oil and water dont mix. Bear this in mind when I turn to a discussion of Castoriadiss conception of magmas. 2 Here we should note Arnasons distinction between autonomy as a modern imaginary signication and Castoriadiss own philosophical cum political version of the project of autonomy (2001b: 115). 3 Castoriadis does not consider representative democracy to be democratic, but oligarchic (1997b: 84ff.). For a critical discussion of this perspective, see Cohen (2005). 4 As Adams (2005) argues, following Murphy and Arnason, neither the development of democracy nor philosophy was a radical rupture with the immediate past, but a longer and slower emergence of new modes of being, although as new forms of being they are thus new creations. The disagreement is about whether these new forms were created ex nihilo or are interpretations and thus, for Castoriadis, derivations of forms that already existed in the social-historical context of their creators (cf. Arnason 1989b: 40). 5 This counter-trend is apparent in the trajectory of modern philosophy traced by Charles Taylor in the middle sections of Sources of the Self (1989), a current which might be read as a long struggle against the very idea that societies laws can have no other basis than that they were chosen/posited/instituted by society itself. 6 At the level of the individual, Castoriadis denes autonomy as striking a new relationship between the self and its Unconscious not in order to eliminate the latter but to succeed in ltering what of ones desires are to pass into acts and words (1997b: 122). We must also understand autonomy as a new relationship between the individual and society not with the aim of overcoming the separation between them (p. 121), for this separation cannot be overcome except by dissolving one or the other but rather to somehow strike a balance between them. 7 Contra Touraine, again. 8 Curiously, as Arnason notes (1989a), Castoriadis does not explicitly address Romanticisms inuence my guess is that it complicates his bi-polar interpretation; or that, like Hegel, it appears in many of its guises to be anti-modernist, a movement seeking to reinstate some extrasocial ground for social nomos (most particularly, Nature). 9 My intent in substituting polylogical for dialogical as it is used by Taylor (1989) and others is to rene the language used to explicate it so as to make clear that human subjects are not merely embedded in one-to-one dialogue with signicant others, but are always already embedded in one-to-many relationships, wherein they must negotiate their identities not within monological cultural orientations, but rather from diverse and sometimes conicting elds of meanings.

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References
Adams, S. (2005) Interpreting Creation: Castoriadis and the Project of Autonomy, Thesis Eleven 83: 2541. Arnason, J.P. (1989a) The Imaginary Constitution of Modernity, in Giovanni Busino (ed.) Revue europenne des sciences sociales, vol. XXVII1989, No. 86. Geneva: Librairie Droz. (1989b) Culture and Imaginary Signications, Thesis Eleven 22: 2545.

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(1991) Modernity as Project and as Field of Tensions, in Axel Honneth and Hans Joas (eds) Communicative Action: Essays on Jrgen Habemass The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones, pp. 181213. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press. (1996) Theorising History and Questioning Reason, Theoria 87: 120. (2000) Communism and Modernity, Daedalus 129(Winter): 1, Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. (2001a) Autonomy and Axiality, in Johann P. Arnason and Peter Murphy (eds) Agon, Logos, Polis: The Greek Achievement and its Aftermath. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner. (2001b) Capitalism in Context: Sources, Trajectories and Alternatives, Thesis Eleven 66: 99125. (2001c) The Multiplication of Modernity, in Eliezer Ben-Rafael and Yitzhak Sternberg (eds) Identity, Culture and Globalization, pp. 13154. Leiden: Brill. Bauman, Z. (1993) Postmodern Ethics. Oxford: Blackwell. Castoriadis, C. (1987) Imaginary Institution of Society, trans. K. Blamey. Cambridge: Polity Press. (1991) Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, ed. David Ames Curtis. New York: Oxford University Press. (1993) Political and Social Writings, Vol. 3, 19611979: Recommencing the Revolution: From Socialism to the Autonomous Society, trans. and ed. D.A. Curtis, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (1995) The Dilapidation of the West: An Interview, Thesis Eleven 41: 94114. (1997a) Castoriadis Reader, ed. D.A. Curtis. Oxford: Blackwell. (1997b) World in Fragments, trans. D.A. Curtis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Cohen, J. (2005) The Self-Institution of Society and Representative Government: Can the Circle Be Squared? Thesis Eleven 80: 937. Gauchet, M. (2002) Redening the Unconscious, Thesis Eleven 71: 423. Kroeber, A.L. and Kluckhohn, C. (1952) Culture: A Critical Review of Concepts and Definitions. New York: Vintage Books. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962) Phenomenology of Perception, trans. C. Smith, reprint 1994. London: Routledge. Searle, J. (2006) Social Ontology, Anthropological Theory 6(1): 1229. Smith, K.E. (2005) Rethinking Castoriadiss Psychic Monad, Thesis Eleven 83: 514. (2006) Perennial Questions, Contemporary Responses: Exploring Meaning, Subjectivity and Society through Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor, unpublished PhD thesis, La Trobe University, Bundoora. Taylor, C. (1979) Hegel and Modern Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (1989) Sources of the Self. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (2002) Foundationalism and the Inner-Outer Distinction, in Nicholas H. Smith (ed.) Reading McDowell on Mind and World. London: Routledge. Touraine, A. (1989) Is Sociology Still the Study of Society? Thesis Eleven 23: 534. (1991) The Ethics of Authenticity. Cambridge. MA: Harvard University Press. (1995) Critique of Modernity, trans. D. Macey. Oxford: Blackwell. (2002) From Understanding Society to Discovering the Subject, Anthropological Theory 2(4): 38798. Wagner, P. (1994) A Sociology of Modernity: Liberty and Discipline. London: Routledge. Weber, M. (1949) Objectivity in Social Science and Social Policy, in trans. and ed. E.A.

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Shils and H.A. Finch, The Methodology of the Social Sciences, pp. 50113. New York: The Free Press.
Karl E. Smith is Lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at La Trobe University, where he completed his PhD comparing the thought of Cornelius Castoriadis and Charles Taylor on questions of subjectivity and modernity. His most recent publication was Religion and the Project of Autonomy (Thesis Eleven 91, Nov. 2007). Address: Sociology and Anthropology, La Trobe University, VIC 3086, Australia. [email: K.Smith@latrobe.edu.au]

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