9. Ontology and the Political Project: Cornelius Castoriadis

Biographical material cited throughout is adopted from ‘Introduction générale’, in La société bureaucratique, 1 (Paris: UGE, 1973), the 1974 Interview with Castoriadis by the Agence Presse Libération de Caen (translated into English in Telos, no. 23, 1975), and the Interview with Claude Lefort by the Anti-Mythes (Paris and Caen) in 1975. I have also relied on long discussions with Castoriadis and Lefort, as well as with former members of the group, such as D. Mothé, and J-F Lyotard. Where there are several versions of an event—such as the splits in the group—I have tried to present a balanced argument of the alternatives presented.

Jean-Marc Coudray (C. Castoriadis), in Mai 1968: la Brèche (Paris: Fayard, 1968), p. 92. The programmatic part of this essay was distributed as a mimeographed leaflet during May by some of the ex-members; a further discussion was added for the book’s publication.

On Trotsky, cf. Claude Lefort, ‘La contradiction de Trotsky’, originally in Les Temps Modernes, no. 39, déc–jan 1948–9, now in Lefort, Elements d’une critique de la bureaucratie (Genève-Paris: Librairie Droz, 1971). In the Interview with the Anti-Mythes, Lefort stresses his debt to Castoriadis for the economic part of his analysis.

‘Les rapports de production en Russie’, reprinted in La société bureaucratique, 1.

Ibid., p. 179.

An American splinter from the IVth International, in many ways similar to ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, did take this direction. The ‘Forrest-Johnson’ (Dunayevskaya-James) tendency was in close relation with ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’, which translated some of their articles into French. This is not the place to enter into the differences between them, or the split of James with Dunayevskaya; it suffices to note that by the mid-1950s, the distance had become radical.

Cf. Lefort’s ‘What Is Bureaucracy?’ Telos 22 (Winter 1974–1975). In ‘Le totalitarisme sans Staline’, Lefort insists that the transformation effected cannot be called ‘primitive socialist accumulation’, as Isaac Deutscher suggests, because primitive accumulation in Marx’s sense brings about the establishment of relations of domination of Capital over Labor—not socialism. Lefort uses the term ‘state capitalism’ because he still believed that the existence of the proletariat means that Marx’s vision of socialism remains possible. Lefort goes on to suggest that the relations between state and civil society in bureaucratic Russia differ from those in bourgeois society, where competition maintains the separation between civil society and the state. ‘Totalitarianism’, he writes, ‘is not a dictatorial regime, as it appears when we speak summarily of it as a type of absolute domination in which the separation of powers is abolished. More precisely, it is not a political regime: it is a type of society, a formation in which all activities are immediately tied to each other, deliberately presented as modalities of a single universe in which a system of values predominates absolutely, such that all individual and collective activities must necessarily find in that system their coefficient of reality; in which, finally, the dominant model exercises a total constraint at once physical and spiritual on the behavior of the particular individuals. In this sense, totalitarianism makes the pretense of negating the separation characteristic of bourgeois capitalism among the various domains of social life, the political, the economic, the juridical, the ideological, etc. It effectuates a permanent identification of them all. Thus it is not so much a monstrous growth of the political power within society as a metamorphosis of society itself by which the political ceases to exist as a separate sphere’ (Eléments, p. 156).

The role of the party is crucial for this argument; it ‘is the agent of a complete penetration of civil society by the state. More precisely, it is the milieu in which the state changes itself into society, or the society into the state’ (Ibid., p. 157). Individual action is transformed, given a collective meaning. The party claims to be a mediator; but since the society remains divided, in reality the party is just another particular among the particular interest groups, although it pretends that its decisions have universal social validity. Lefort’s interpretation of the 20th Congress of the Russian Bolshevik party in February 1956 argues that it is not a loosening of the grip of the party but its self-affirmation. During the heroic period after 1917, the bureaucracy, like the bourgeoisie of the French Revolution, had to hide its real purpose from itself, draping itself in mythical robes. A quarter of a century later, with the industrialization of Russia, a calming of the passions, ending the violence, became possible. Where the rising bureaucracy needed the Terror and the myth of socialism to forge its own unity, once its base was established, it had to find forms to legitimate its control. This was all the more necessary as, during the same quarter of a century, a working class had also arisen, forged from the ex-peasantry, and laboring in conditions of modern industry. Its needs too had to be addressed, at least partially. The limits of what the bureaucracy can do in this context are—in Lefort’s interpretation at the time—those of the proletariat’s need for self-management, as well as the fact that, to maintain itself, the bureaucracy establishes wage and work hierarchies whose effect appears in the impossibility of making the Plan work, since in such conditions it is not possible to calculate the cost of socially necessary labor power. The inefficiency of the Plan and the new social needs of an industrial proletariat force the bureaucracy to assert its hold through new measures of ‘liberalization’ (as at the 20th Congress), aimed at increasing participation in production and thus raising productivity.

The analyses of the events of 1953 and 1956 in Eastern Europe which were published in Socialisme ou Barbarie remained refreshingly actual long after the events. Their implications for the revised view of capitalism were drawn later, as the ‘bureaucratic string’ was pulled even further. See also ‘Sur le contenu du socialisme’, in Socialisme ou Barbarie (hereinafter SB), nos. 17, 22, 23. Both Castoriadis and Lefort have recently published new essays on the 1956 Revolution in Hungary, in Telos, No. 29, Fall, 1976.

The relation between Merleau-Ponty and the ‘Socialisme ou Barbarie’ group would bear further study, as the essays on Lefort and Merleau-Ponty in this volume also suggest. There are circumstantial overlaps, among them: Merleau-Ponty’s use of Benno Sarel’s manuscript study of East Germany, his indebtedness to Lefort particularly as concerns the discussion of Trotsky, or the (unacknowledged) citation from Castoriadis in Les aventures (pp. 312–13) or Castoriadis’ own citation of Merleau-Ponty’s definition of praxis (SB, no. 38, p. 62) and his use of Merleau-Ponty’s adaptation of Malraux’s ‘deformation coherente’ to describe the imaginaire radical (ibid., no. 40, p. 45), or the return to the ontological problematic of the institution. There is also a more substantial philosophical debt. Worth mentioning here is the edition of the journal, L’Arc (no. 46, 1971), directed by Lefort, to which most of the editors of Textures, including Castoriadis, contributed.

This problem is elaborated concretely in ‘Sur la dynamique du capitalism’ (SB, 12–13, 1953–4) and in ‘Le mouvement révolutionnaire sous le capitalisme moderne’ (SB, no. 31, 32, 33, 1960–1). Castoriadis developed further his critique of Marx’s naturalistic presupposition in ‘Justice, valeur et égalité: d’Aristote à Marx et de Marx à nous’ in Textures, 1976. In this essay, Castoriadis’ political argument looks to the ontological presuppositions that deform Marx’s account of human laboring activity which appears to be both ahistorical and naturalist. Marx’s image of human being as based on labor is shown to reflect the imaginaire of capitalism.

Introduction générale, op. cit., p. 38.

SB, no. 38, p. 85; now in L’institution imaginaire de la société (henceforth L’institution) p. 129.

This analysis is developed clearly in ‘La question de l’histoire du mouvement ouvrier’, which is the Introduction to the first collection of his earlier essays, L’expérience du mouvement ouvrier, 1 (Paris: UGE, 1974) (henceforth ‘La question’). The debates, and quarrels, between Lefort and Castoriadis from the early 1950s, and again from the 1950s, have been reprinted in collections of their work, and each has returned to the problem in the interviews with the Anti-mythes. The crucial point in the present context is that both Castoriadis and Lefort recognize that insofar as their positions were still determined by the problematic of the proletarian revolution, the debate was deformed.

‘La question’, op. cit., p. 78.

Castoriadis makes use of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class to stress this point. Where Thompson avoids drawing the theoretical conclusions from his own work, Castoriadis brings them to the fore. In effect, Thompson recognizes the creative role of the working class in shaping itself as revolutionary subject, but he refuses to draw the implications as concerns the Marxism to which he doggedly held. Thompson combines the most acute historiographical methods with an ultimately dogmatic and unthinking maintenance of what he takes to be (humanist) Marxism.

‘La question’, op. cit., p. 113.

Ibid., p. 112.

It is obvious that human need is a factor in history; a starving society can establish no social formation. As will be seen in Section IV, Castoriadis deals with this problem under the heading of an always present ‘natural stratum’. For the moment, it suffices to add here the observation that the same supposedly natural needs have given rise to a dizzying multiplicity of forms of satisfaction, implying that their explanation in terms of need is either trivial or practically useless.

SB, no. 37, p. 45; L’institution, p. 75.

SB, no. 38, p. 50; L’institution, p. 90.

‘Introduction générale’, op. cit., p. 14.

Ibid., p. 32.

SB, no. 37, p. 32; L’institution, p. 61.

SB, no. 39, p. 63n; L’institution, p. 187n.

SB, no. 38, p. 67; L’institution, p. 109.

In Les Aventures, Merleau-Ponty works through the implications of these identical assertions in his lengthy critique of Sartre.

SB, no. 39, p. 28; L’institution, p. 143.

SB, no. 39, p. 37; L’institution, pp. 153–4.

‘Introduction générale’, op. cit., p. 54. In comparison with Lefort’s ‘logic of the political’, it becomes clear that what for him is constitutive of the experience of the political is interpreted ontologically by Castoriadis.

SB, no. 40, p. 63; L’institution, p. 222. Similarities to Lefort’s analysis of the ‘invisible ideology’ are no doubt due to the fact that the two of them were again working together during this period, although not always in full harmony.

In this way Castoriadis avoids the reproach of ‘existentialism’. A cow can be instituted as all sorts of things, from totem to tool; but it can never write a poem or invent the windmill. ‘On ne peut pas dire n’importe quoi’, repeats Castoriadis again and again. He put later his interpretation of psychoanalysis to the practical test as a clinician.

SB, no. 40, p. 44; L’institution, p. 200.

Castoriadis illustrates this point in detail with examples from mathematics and philosophy. The relation instituted by the Legein establishes a set of significations in terms of which the world is presented. To that end it constitutes what Castoriadis calls an ‘identitary-ensemblist logic’. The operators of the Legein—which include relations of separation/identification, distinctions such as with regard to/insofar as, and comparisons of validity as/validity for—can be iterated and combined indefinitely. The Legein brings with it the relation of finality or instrumentality insofar as it refers to what is not yet but could be—is added, the tradition of practical philosophy can be derived as well.

The result here suggests a reformulation of Marx’s insights. Every society has a different finality that is instituted by its Teukhein and its imaginaire central. Revolution properly speaking would be the institution of a new social finality. In fact the revolution that Castoriadis calls for would go further; it does not simply introduce a change in the finality of production, although it includes that. The call for a change in the productivist finality of capitalism remains within the instituted thought of the Legein and the Teukhein. While recognizing the impossibility of doing without these, Castoriadis wants to change society’s relation to them. Reform would be a change in social finality; revolution implies a change in social relations. C.f., the concluding section, below, which examines Castoriadis’ redefinition of revolution.

Ibid., p. 417.

Ibid., p. 420.

Ibid., p. 422.

Ibid., p. 461.

Ibid., pp. 462–3.

Ibid., p. 446.

Ibid., pp. 450–1.

Ibid., p. 476.

Ibid., p. 495.

Ibid., pp. 295–6. Lefort’s criticism on this point should be noted here because it avoids one possible misinterpretation and clarifies what was said about his theses in Chap. 8. He insists that ‘[t]he idea of auto-institution partakes of the most profound illusion of modern societies, i.e. of those societies in which (as Marx observed) little by little the relations of man to the earth, and relations of personal dependence are dissolved; of those societies in which there is no longer the possibility of inscribing the human order, the established hierarchies, in a natural or supernatural order—or better, the two at once—because the visible disequilibria there always pointed to an invisible order … [M]odern societies (and I am obviously not thinking only of the work of theorists, but of the discourse implied in social practice) are busy seeking in themselves the foundation of their institution’ (Interview with Anti-mythes, p. 18). Lefort sees Castoriadis giving in to the illusion of a total theory, in spite of his awareness of the danger. Castoriadis’ reply would no doubt be to point out that Lefort’s phenomenological ontology of experience leaves no room for a political project and hence that he denies the possibility of revolution. Castoriadis would further point out, as noted above (n. 27) with reference to Lefort’s critique of his analysis of the content of socialism, that while Lefort’s description of modern societies is accurate, their search for their own foundation continues to take the form of a traditional ontology based on a rationalism. His own notion of auto-institution does not follow the common-sense image of the consumer consciously choosing guns or butter, nor is it a version of the theme that ‘knowledge is power’. Despite their differences, the two positions seem to me closer to one another than either would admit.

Ibid., p. 483.