Castoriadis: Imaginary and Imagination at the Crossroads (long)

[Gany]

§Imaginary and Imagination at the Crossroads

Cornelius Castoriadis

Language, customs, norms, and technique cannot "be explained" by
factors external to human collectivities. No natural, biological, or
logical factor can account for them. At the very most, they can
constitute their necessary (most of the time external and trivial)
conditions, never their sufficient conditions. We therefore must admit
that there is in human collectivities a creative potential, a vis
formandi, which I call the instituting social imaginary. Why has
philosophy been unable to recognize this necessity, and why does it
still now recoil with horror and irritation before this idea? I am
always being asked, What is this instituting imaginary? Whose
imagination is it? Show us the individuals who . . . or the factors
that . . . , and so on. But we have here precisely a constitutive
faculty of human beings and, more generally, of the social-historical
field. What in this affair ruffles and irritates the representatives
of the inherited philosophy, as well as those of established science,
is the need to recognize the collective imaginary, as well as the
radical imagination of the singular human being, as a potential for
creation. Here creation means creation ex nihilo, the making be of a
form that wasn't there, the creation of new forms of being.
Ontological creation: of forms like language, the institution, music,
painting—or else of such and such a particular form, this or that
musical, pictorial, poetical, etc. work. Why does the inherited
philosophy find it impossible to recognize the fact of creation?
Because this philosophy is either theological, therefore reserving
creation for God—creation has taken place once and for all, or it is
continual divine creation—or rationalist and deterministic and
therefore has to deduce all that is on the basis of first principles
(and upon what basis then will one deduce first principles?) or else
produce it on the basis of causes (and upon what basis then does one
produce first causes?). But creation appertains to being in general—I
won't go on at more length about that since today we are not in a
philosophy seminar—and creation appertains in a dense and massive way
to social-historical being, as is attested to by the creation of
society as such, of different societies, and the slow or sudden
incessant historical alteration of these societies. How is one to
detail this work of the instituting social imaginary? It consists, on
the one hand, in institutions. But a look at these institutions shows
that they are animated by—or are bearers and conveyors of—
significations, significations that refer neither to reality nor to
logic; that's why I call them social imaginary significations. Thus,
God, the God of monotheistic religions, is a social imaginary
signification, borne and conveyed by a host of institutions—such as
the Church. But so also are the gods of polytheistic religions or
founding heroes, totems, taboos, fetishes, and so on. When we speak of
the State, we're talking about an institution animated by imaginary
significations. The same goes for capital, commodities (Marx's "social
hieroglyph"), and so on. Once created, both social imaginary
significations and institutions crystalize or solidify, and that's
what I call the instituted social imaginary. The latter assures a
society's continuity, the reproduction and repetition of the same
forms, which thenceforth rule men's lives and remain there so long as
a slow historical change or a massive new creation doesn't come to
modify or radically replace them with other ones.
Let us consider the imagination of the singular human being. Here we
have the essential determination (the essence) of the human psyche.
This psyche is radical imagination first of all inasmuch as it is flux
or incessant flow of representations, desires, and affects. This flow
is continual emergence. You can try to close your eyes, stop up your
ears—there will always be something. This thing happens "within":
images, recollections, wishes, fears, "spiritual states [états d'âme]"
surge forth in a way that sometimes we can understand or even
"explain," and other times absolutely not. There is here no "logical"
thought, save by way of an exception and discontinuously. The elements
are not bound together in a rational or even reasonable fashion; there
is surging forth, indissociable mixture. There are above all
representations without any functionality. One can think that animals,
in any case higher animals, have a certain representation of their
world, but this representation—and what composes this representation—
is regulated in functional fashion; it contains essentially what is
necessary for the animal to live and to continue its species. But in
the human being, imagination is defunctionalized. Humans can be made
to kill for glory. What's the "functionality" of glory? At most, it
will be a name written on a monument, itself eminently perishable.
Glory is the subjective corollary of a social imaginary value that
constitutes one pole of the activity of humans, of some of them at
least, and that brings into existence a desire directed toward it. Or,
what are the various human affects, in particular the less banal
affects—for example, the affect of nostalgia? This is a creation of
the psyche's radical imagination. If human beings were given over
fully and exclusively to this radical imagination, they would not be
able to survive; they would not have survived. This flow is not
necessarily bound either to logic or to reality; at the outset, it is
entirely alien to these, and the desires that surge forth don't bear
the subject toward a life lived in common. One of the most powerful
affects that is encountered there and that manifests itself or doesn't
manifest itself for all to see, is for example the affect of hate,
which can go as far as a desire for murder. I often say in joking that
someone who hasn't felt at least once a year a death wish toward
someone else is seriously ill and ought to go consult a psychoanalyst
as soon as possible. The "natural" reaction when someone poses an
obstacle to us is to wish for him to disappear—and that, as one knows,
can go as far as acting upon the wish. This radical imagination of
human beings must therefore be tamed, channeled, regulated, and made
to conform to life in society and also to what we call "reality." That
is done via their socialization, during which they absorb the
institution of society and its significations, internalize them, learn
language, the categorization of things, what is just and unjust, what
can be done and what is not to be done, what must be adored and what
must be hated. When this socialization takes place, the most important
manifestations of radical imagination are, up to a certain point,
stifled, its expression is made to conform and becomes repetitive.
Under these conditions, society as a whole is heteronomous. But
heteronomous, too, are the individuals of such a society, who only in
appearance exercise judgment; in fact, they judge according to social
criteria. Besides, we shouldn't overly flatter ourselves. Even in our
societies, a huge quantity of individuals are in fact heteronomous;
they judge only according to conventions and "public opinion."
Societies in which the possibility of and the capacity for calling the
established institutions and significations into question are a tiny
exception in the history of humanity. In fact, we have only two
examples of such societies: a first example in ancient Greece, with
the birth of democracy and philosophy, and a second example in Western
Europe, after the long period of the Middle Ages. A very important,
and key, phenomenon for our discussion today is that the history of
societies is marked by "pulsating" processes: phases of dense and
strong creation alternate therein with phases of creative sluggishness
and regression. Examples are numerous. Obviously, all these examples
belong to historical societies, since we cannot say much about the
other ones. It's possible that the disappearance of "Homeric"—Minoan
and Mycenaean—civilization might not be due solely or even essentially
to invasions or earthquakes but to processes of "domestic"
disintegration. We don't know anything about that, at least for the
moment. One case where a society, after an epoch of rich and intense
creativity, entered into a period of decline is that of ancient Greece
and, notably, the city of Athens. The truly creative era unfolded
until the end of the fifth century, until the end of the Peloponnesian
War, when philosophy, democracy, and tragedy—not to mention the other
arts and sciences—emerged. Then, starting in the fourth century,
nothing much happened any longer. Certainly, society continued to
forge ahead with creation, and there is notably the paradox that two
of the most important philosophers ever to have existed, Plato and
Aristotle, belong to this same fourth century, yet they come after the
great period of creation. This is, moreover, the probably unique and,
in any case, flagrant case that offers an illustration of Hegel's much-
talked-about phrase that philosophy appears only when the works of the
day are ended, like Minerva's bird taking flight only at nightfall.
(Literally speaking, this statement is false: philosophy took flight
in Greece at nearly the same time that Greek political creation began,
and things didn't happen otherwise in Modern Times. The phrase
expresses only Hegel's wish that the history of humanity in the strong
sense of the term might draw to a close with his own system.) In any
case, after the victory of Macedonia, of Philip and of Alexander, came
the appearance of Hellenistic or Alexandrian civilization—which is
rather comparable, if I may be allowed to look ahead from there, to
our own situation: no great creation, just eclecticism, endless
commentaries (which are, moreover, quite precious); the philology and
the art of the grammarians developed then, and various technical forms
and forms of knowledge continued to "progress," but (with the
remarkable exception of mathematics) there was no great manifestation
of truly innovative radical imagination. An analogous case is that of
the Roman Empire after the first century of our era. Decisively
conditioned by the internal evolution of imperial Roman society and by
the decomposition of the social imaginary significations that underlay
its institutions, its fall was merely facilitated by the Germanic
invasions. The barbarians had been knocking at the gates of the Roman
dominion from the first century before our era, but they had
successfully been driven back until the end of the second century. The
Empire's domestic decline at that moment is too flagrant for one to
contest its existence without a lot of quibblings.
Similar major instances will be found everywhere one knows about
societies' evolution: in Egypt, in the Middle East, in India, in
China, and as far away as Meso-America. The important thing here, from
the standpoint of elucidating history, is the failure of
"explanations." That isn't surprising. No more than there is any
"explanation" of phases of creation in history, or of the moment they
arise, or of the content of this creation can one "explain" the
appearance of phases of decline, the moment they supervene, the
content they take on. A host of partial facts can be assembled that
seem to make these alternations more comprehensible, yet that won't
furnish a true "explanation" of them. There are no "laws" governing
the radical imaginary, its phases of blossoming or the phases when it
fades away. And obviously no "explanation" is furnished by Oswald
Spengler's biological and botanical images. I have already noted above
that, during the Hellenistic period as well as during the late period
of the Roman Empire, there continues to be a certain amount of
technical development (and also that this reminds us of what is going
on today). We are thus led to posit a distinction that forces itself
upon us for other reasons, as well. That is the distinction between
culture in the strict sense of the term and the purely functional
dimension of social life. Culture is the domain of the imaginary in
the strict sense, the poietic domain, what in a society goes beyond
what is merely instrumental. Obviously, there is no society that would
be without culture. No society is reduced to the functional and the
instrumental. No human society is known of that lives like bee or ant
"societies." We always find therein some songs, some dances,
decorations, things that "serve no purpose." These primitives, who had
so much difficulty just living, succeeded in finding time for such
"stupid nonsense." As we know, some prehistoric paintings have just
been found in Portugal on the walls of Paleolithic caves that are
probably among the oldest known. They whiled away their time in these
ill-lit grottos doing cave paintings. That was more important for them
than developing the forces of production or maximizing the yield of
their capital. The distinction between what I call the poietical and
the functional is obviously not in things; it is to be found in the
relationship between the way in which things are made and the goal
assigned to them [leur finalité]. A vase can be simply functional—a
plastic vase, for example, serves its purpose—but it can equally be an
admirable art object, like so many ancient Chinese or African vases.
In the latter case, an essential dimension of what constitutes the
vase eludes finality or goes beyond it: the beauty of a vase is
"useless." These two creations, the poietical and the functional, do
not march at the same rhythm or in the same direction. Poietic
creation can subside without that affecting creation in the functional
domain: new inventions can be made, technical or even scientific
development can continue. That's what, as was already said, happened
during the Hellenistic period aswell as after the end of the
culturally creative phase of Roman history. In other cases, for
example after the collapse of "Homeric" civilization or during the
true European Middle Ages (from the fifth to eleventh century C.E.),
poietical and functional regressions occur simultaneously. It is also
possible for there to be periods of major poietic creation when the
functional component of a society remains nearly stable; at least,
that is what we are led to think in examining a number of archaic
societies whose cultures are profoundly different, whereas the way
they are functionally instrumented seems roughly identical. This
differentiation, which Hegelo-Marxism completely covers over, adds
still another dimension to the immense question of the unity of a
society. How is one to think through the fact that two parts of the
same body can walk with different rhythms? How can two—or several—
sectors of the life of one and the same society live with
temporalities that are so different? I can only raise here these
interrogatory questions, without attempting to elucidate them. After
Greece, the project of autonomy emerged anew with the birth of the
bourgeoisie in Western Europe, this emergence starting to manifest
itself in the eleventhto- twelfth century. That was the beginning of
the "modern" period in the broad sense. From that moment on, one
notices that cultural creation gains, expands, and accelerates with a
richness and with rhythmic variations that render it incompressible
and almost uninspectable. It is practically impossible to write a
history of European culture. It takes place everywhere: in Italy, in
Spain, in Portugal, in France, in England, in the Germanic countries,
in the Scandinavian countries, in the Slavic societies of Central and
Eastern Europe; at different moments, different activities develop in
different countries, and all that cross-pollinates and interbreeds.
This extraordinary profusion reaches a sort of pinnacle during the two
centuries stretching between 1750 and 1950. This is a very specific
period because of the very great density of cultural creation but also
because of its very strong subversiveness. I connect this explosion to
the fact that the social historical project of autonomy invaded
society and haunted all its aspects. It took the form of the
democratic movement, the revolutions of the seventeenth, eighteenth,
and twentieth centuries, the workers' movement, more recently the
movement of women and youth. But what really matters to us here is
what happened in the properly cultural domain. There, one witnesses
the creation of new forms and new contents that had the quite explicit
intention of effecting change, and this at a pace hitherto practically
unknown in history, except perhaps in ancient Greece during the period
around the fifth century. As one knows, there was at the same time an
enormous acceleration in technical inventions, incomparable to what
could have been experienced in other phases and in other regions of
the history of humanity. I am speaking about this here independently
of the many-sided destructive effects such technical development was
able to have. But this technical progress could not have "caused" the
cultural upheavals that concern us. Such progress itself depended upon
changes of capital importance in the scientific imaginary. It was
during this period that the form chemistry, the form electricity, the
theory of heat and thermodynamics, field theory (Michael Faraday,
James Clerk Maxwell), as well as the theory of relativity and quantum
theory were, in the main, "created"; likewise, progress in medicine
and applied biology are to be correlated with the emergence of a new
biological science. And certainly the creation of new disciplines in
the human domain, like sociology and psychoanalysis, is connected with
the movement of society as a whole, not with technical developments.
This is even truer for the great philosophical movements of the
Enlightenment and then of German Idealism. The general movement toward
the liberation of society, the questioning and the overthrow of the
old political forms didn't halt at the gates of particular activities
and disciplines, in art as well as in philosophy and science. One will
perhaps be surprised if, in speaking of the deployment of the
poietical, I include therein not only philosophy but also science.
Don't they both express a movement of "pure" Reason? I do so because,
contrary to received ideas, the creative imagination plays a
fundamental role in science as well as in philosophy. Every great
philosophical work is an imaginary creation; it is creation of these
particular significations that are philosophical significations. The
latter are not "rational" products. The idea of idea, for example,
doesn't proceed from an empirical induction or from a logical induction
—these latter two, rather, presuppose it. The same goes for ideas like
potentiality and actuality, cogito, monad, or transcendental. These
are great inventions, upon whose basis a set of facts concerning
being, the world, nature, human thought and its relation to the other,
and so on, are made clear. But the same goes for science. The great
scientific advances proceed from the creation of new imaginary
schemata; these are formed under the constraint of available
experience but don't "follow" or "result" from that experience. By
definition, a logical deduction cannot give birth to a new hypothesis.
("Induction" is only a nonrigorous deduction made on the basis of an
incomplete set of facts combined with already existing rules,
conclusions, and so on. A "new" fact can—though not necessarily—
invalidate the prevailing hypotheses; it doesn't furnish even one
ounce of new hypotheses. It's in this respect that Karl Popper's
conception of "falsification" is fundamentally flawed. Falsification
by a new observation can simply "refute" an existing conception, and
even that isn't always the case: "falsified" theories persist for a
long time, sometimes wrongly and often rightly. The situation will
change only with the invention of a new hypothesis.) A physicist
cannot formulate just any hypotheses; the new theories must account
for known facts (that's the constraint) and, if possible, predict new
categories of hitherto unknown facts. That's what happened when great
new imaginary schemata were posited, such as the Newtonian image of
the universe, Faraday and Maxwell's idea of field, the successive
schemata formulated by Albert Einstein, and so on. There exists a
profound kinship between art on the one hand, philosophy and science
on the other. Not only does one see here and there the creative
imagination at work, but both art as well as philosophy and science
try to give a form to the chaos: to the chaos that underlies the
cosmos, the world, that is behind the successive strata of
appearances. There is an indetermination to being in its depths that
is the corollary of its creative potential, the infinite layers of the
cosmos embodying its successive determinations. The institution of
society also aims at covering over this chaos and at creating a world
for society, and it does create that world, but in this creation it is
impossible to avoid there being some big holes, some large conduits,
through which the chaos becomes evident. One of these conduits, for
the human being, and no doubt the most difficult one to stop up, is
death. All known institutions of society have tried to give it a
signification: one dies for the fatherland; one dies in order to
become one of the ancestors who will come to be reincarnated in the
newborn child; one dies in order to attain the kingdom of heaven. And
in this way the intrinsic non-sense of death is covered over. Art on
the one hand, philosophy and science on the other, try to give form to
the chaos, a form that can be grasped by humans. Art does so in its
own manner; philosophy and science do so in theirs. In both cases, we
have a creation of forms. The difference is that art, in giving—in
order to give—form to the chaos, creates a new world and new worlds,
and this it does in relatively free fashion. It doesn't labor under
the constraint of experience; the constraints to which it must face up
are of another order, an internal order. But philosophy and science
aim at elucidating the world such as it is given to us, and that
imposes upon them a very strong constraint, the constraint of
available experience. Of course, science does so in its own manner and
in a restricted domain, that of our physical experience, and it
attends to what in this experience offers an essential regularity and
can be rendered explicable. For philosophy, it's not a matter of
explaining or even, truly speaking, of understanding (when it comes to
disciplines involving the human domain); it's a matter of elucidating.
But a philosophy doesn't remain standing if it doesn't try to account
for the totality of human experience. I note here, without being able
to linger over it, that there exists a marvelously mixed domain, that
of mathematics, which in the most important cases creates new worlds,
but in doing so contributes to the elucidation of the world as it is
given to us.
I now come to what is, properly speaking, our topic today. It's the
contemporary period, starting from 1950—a date that obviously has no
pretensions to exactitude. The brutal observation I make is that this
great movement of creation is in the process of wearing out. This
exhaustion extends beyond the domain of art. It touches both
philosophy and, I think, even true theoretical creation in the
scientific domain, whereas technical development and technoscientific
development are accelerating and becoming autonomized. This evolution,
this drop in creativity, goes hand in hand with the triumph, during
this period, of the capitalist imaginary and an ever more marked drop
in the democratic movement, in the movement toward autonomy, on the
social and political plane. I begin with the domain of philosophy.
Heidegger seems to have succeeded in turning his—erroneous— diagnosis
of the "end of philosophy" into a sort of selfrealizing prophecy. With
but a few exceptions, there are no more philosophers; there are some
very erudite commentators and very scholarly historians of philosophy,
but hardly any new creation. The sole experience to which philosophy
can henceforth face up is that of its own history. It is condemned to
nourish itself by feeding upon itself, by devouring its own flesh.
Perhaps in this case at least one can discern an internal factor that
has contributed to the way things have evolved—but without that
sufficing, certainly, to "explain" it. I am talking about the
influence of the two great philosophers of German Idealism, Kant and
Hegel. The influence they have had has no doubt played a part here on
the basis of considerations that are contradictory, yet ones that have
led to the same result. The radical break Kant tried, under cover of
critique of metaphysics, to instaurate between philosophy and science—
philosophy being reduced, in the domain of knowledge, to a "critique
of theoretical reason"—has led to the idea that the domains of science
and of philosophy were separated by an abyss that could be cleared
only under penalty of falling into the chasm of metaphysical
speculation. In a symmetrical and opposite fashion, Hegel's
elaboration of a "system" that claimed to encompass all knowledge,
including science's, and the proclamation that this (scientific as
well as philosophical) knowledge has just found its completion in this
system, seemed to demonstrate, via the failure of said system, that
theoretical philosophy was thenceforth to be confined within the
domain of the theory of knowledge if it didn't want pathetically to
repeat this vain Hegelian bid. Looking closely at the matter, one sees
that the two effects are found again in Heidegger's proclamation of
the "end of philosophy in technicized science." But this watertight
separation between philosophy and science, powerfully aided by the
growing specialization and technicalness of contemporary science,
couldn't help but have catastrophic results for philosophy. For, that
separation condemned philosophy to leave aside an enormous patch of
human experience (everything that concerns inanimate and living
nature) and either to become itself a particular discipline of no
great interest (as witness the domination of logical positivism and
"linguistic philosophy" in the Anglo-Saxon world) or to claim to be a
pure "thought of Being," which is both empty and sterile, since one
can say nothing of Being outside of beings. Yet this factor was able
to play only a secondary role, since an analogous evolution was
noticeable in all other domains. Thus it was in the case of science
itself. Some important scientific advances are certainly still being
made, but in both cases—Relativity between 1905 and 1916, quantum
theory between 1900 and the 1930s—the major theoretical forms upon
which science has relied were created more than three quarters of a
century ago. Both of these theories are nevertheless at once
contradictory with respect to each other and, each of them, full not
of puzzles, to use the terminology of Thomas Kuhn, but of veritable
aporias that should have challenged the theoretical paradigms
themselves. It's true that new schemata are being proposed (string
theories and superstrings, an inflationary universe, and so on), but
up till now none of them satisfy the constraints of experience. The
last great basic discovery in biology, that of DNA, took place in
1953, and besides it itself followed from Max Delbrück's research in
molecular biology, which dates back to 1943. Perhaps, by way of a
possible exception, we should mention the theories of self organization
— which are based, however, upon the theory of automata created by
Alan Turing and John von Neumann between 1935 and 1955. It is worth
dwelling for a moment upon the situation created by the post-1900
advances in mathematics and in physics as these relate to philosophy.
These advances have challenged categories until then (and still now)
deemed basic for an intelligible understanding of the physical world:
causality, locality, separation, and so on. Starting in 1930,
astonishing results in mathematics—the theorems of Kurt Gödel, Turing,
and Alonzo Church—pulverized hitherto prevailing conceptions about
mathematical foundations and possibilities. This situation desperately
calls for a philosophical elucidation. But there has been nearly
nothing to that effect, as if philosophy had resigned its role as
elucidator of our experience. There is, then, this exhaustion of the
imagination and of the imaginary in the domains of philosophy and of
science, and there is also, manifestly, exhaustion of the political
imagination and of the political imaginary. One cannot help but notice
the degeneration of the workers' movement and, more generally, of the
democratic movement. Both on the "Right" and on the "Left," present-
day political discourse is completely sterile and repetitive; one
doesn't even know in what way "Right" and "Left" differ from each
other. To take just the example of France (but one could under the
same heading talk about the United States, England, Spain, and so
forth), there are no remarkable differences between the successive
governments during President François Mitterrand's two seven-year
terms and the governments that have preceded or followed; certain
details are different and not without their importance (for example,
policy on the question of immigration), but the broad outlines remain
the same. But what matters most for our point is the exhaustion of
creativity in the domain of art. When I began to write about this
question—my first formulations on this topic date back to 1960, in a
text entitled "Modern Capitalism and Revolution," where I observed
that the novel had arrived at an impasse, and then in a text from
1978, "Social Transformation and Cultural Creation," —I was told,
"You're exaggerating" or, "You are starting to get old; what's being
done now isn't what was being done when you were young, so you hate
the contemporary age and you look with nostalgia upon the time of your
youth." Almost twenty years have passed, and I have the sad pleasure
of observing that even the "official" critics—who for a long time were
devoted to the worship of the "avantgarde"— are saying the same thing,
perhaps with the sole exception of the novel. What has been the
situation of art during the last forty years? There first was a false
"avant-garde" and a simulacrum of subversion. What is the avant-garde?
There was, during the prior two centuries, already with Romanticism
but in any case with Charles Baudelaire and with Édouard Manet, a
large-scale and new phenomenon: a rupture between the creative artists
and the established society, "bourgeois" society. Official opinion
begins by rejecting for a long period novations of form and content
created by art in all domains. Contrary to what some might have told
you, this phenomenon was historically new. Young creators might have
had some difficulties in other periods; such difficulties remained
phenomena of clans and of jealousy. But starting in the nineteenth
century, there really was a rupture in almost all domains. I have
mentioned Baudelaire; one can add Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé,
and Lautréamont in France as well as similar cases in other countries.
In painting, there's the gap created by Manet, the Impressionist, and
all that followed. In music, this began already with Richard Wagner,
then IgorStravinsky and the Vienna School. Now, this avant-garde
really seems to have exhausted itself after the Second World War. And
one is witness, in a first phase, to the appearance of a fake
avantgarde, a succession of artificial efforts to do something new for
the sake of the new, to subvert for the sake of subversion, whereas
one has nothing new to say. This is flagrantly the case in painting
and music. Then, in a second phase, there are no longer even these
gesticulations of subversion. Already before Postmodernism, but
especially with it, one enters into the era of conformism, that is to
say, the unscrupulous practice of eclecticism and collage. One
imitates the creations of previous times by mixing them up; one puts
together the most heteroclite kinds of plagiarism. So, too, in the
domain in philosophy, does one see "weak thought" glorified, that is
to say, the glorification of resignation before the task of
philosophy. Sterility triumphs. Postmodernism is the ideology that
attempts to theorize and glorify these practices; more generally, it
tries to present the stagnation and regression of the contemporary era
as the expression of maturity, of an end to our illusions. It
expressly champions the rejection of novation and originality, and
even of the coherency of form. In 1986, in New York, I heard one of
the most famous postmodern architects pronounce, during a speech, this
memorable line, "Postmodernism has delivered us from the tyranny of
style." In people's mind, style is a tyranny, whereas style is the
coherency of form, without which there is no work of art, at the same
time that it is the expression of the creator's individuality. Let's
try to give all this a bit of detail. Let's take a look at what
happened for example in music. After the atonal and twelve-tone
school, there were various experimentations that didn't culminate in
anything viable. Presently, the music that is produced (that's the
word that fits) boils down to imitations and compilations of the
musics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Luciano Berio, for
example, has been seen inserting long citations of Beethoven
symphonies into his music. The first half of the twentieth century had
seen the marvelous creation of two new and popular forms of art, jazz
and cinema. Now, the creative period of jazz in my view—or in my ears,
if you prefer—ends with the deaths of Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk.
Afterward, rock, rap, dance music and techno are certainly important
social phenomena, but they are unrelated to musical creation, for they
display a total rhythmic monotony and a harmonic and melodic
stereotypy that is pathetically impoverished. The other great creation
of the twentieth century, cinema, is in the process of losing itself
in industrialization, facileness, and vulgarity. One can easily cite
dozens of great directors of the previous period, but almost none of
the recent period. In the domain of painting, the basic way of
innovating today, it seems, is to represent in quasi photographic
fashion Campbell's soup cans and ketchup bottles, to return toward
different variants of realism, or to offer poor imitations of Marcel
Duchamp's provocations when, in 1920 (therefore, more than three
quarters of a century ago), he exhibited a bidet. Recently, at the
Pompidou Center in Paris, one could go see Joseph Beuys's piano
wrapped in felt presented as a work of art. The case of the novel is
more debatable. There are no doubt always a good number of excellent
novelists. But do these novels truly contribute something new and
important in comparison with the great novel as we knew it? Can one
place these novelists on the same crest line as Balzac, Stendhal,
Flaubert, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Henry James, Proust, Kafka, Joyce,
Faulkner . . . ? Might the novel form itself be exhausted? I shall
cite only the case of Milan Kundera, who, after having written a
certain number of more or less classically crafted novels, felt the
need in his last two or three books to experiment with new forms. But
I shall leave the question of the novel open. This return to
conformism is a general return to heteronomy. I defined heteronomy as
the fact of thinking and acting as the institution and the social
milieu require (overtly or in subterranean fashion). Now, at present,
just as there is a "uniform thought [pensée unique]" in economics, no
one daring to challenge the absurdities of neoliberalism which are
leading to the ruination of the European economies, no one seems to be
able to call into question the "end of philosophy" or to say that what
is being presented as painting is, in the majority of cases, worthless
trash—of null value, and not mediocre or merely acceptable. If you do
so, you'll hear the response that you're a Boeotian who doesn't
understand anything about art, or else an old man who refuses to
accept the evolution of history. If one accepts these facts as a whole
and agrees even roughly with the interpretation I'm giving of them,
they give expression to a crisis of the institution of society as a
whole and of social imaginary significations. As I have already
indicated, this crisis is not incompatible with continued technical
"progress" and continued "progress" on the levels of production,
scholarship, and even science. For my part, and for reasons I don't
have the time to expound upon now, I doubt that even these sorts of
"progress" would be able to continue for long without the roots that
had nourished them. I think that we are at a crossing in the roads of
history, history in the grand sense. One road already appears clearly
laid out, at least in its general orientation. That's the road of the
loss of meaning, of the repetition of empty forms, of conformism,
apathy, irresponsibility, and cynicism at the same time as it is that
of the tightening grip of the capitalist imaginary of unlimited
expansion of "rational mastery," pseudorational pseudomastery, of an
unlimited expansion of consumption for the sake of consumption, that
is to say, for nothing, and of a technoscience that has become
autonomized along its path and that is evidently involved in the
domination of this capitalist imaginary. The other road should be
opened: it is not at all laid out. It can be opened only through a
social and political awakening, a resurgence of the project of
individual and collective autonomy, that is to say, of the will to
freedom. This would require an awakening of the imagination and of the
creative imaginary. For reasons I have tried to formulate, such an
awakening is by definition unforeseeable. It is synonymous with a
social and political awakening. The two can only proceed together. All
we can do is prepare it as we can, where we find ourselves.