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Blake, Castoriadis and the Radical Imagination

Blake, Castoriadis and the Radical Imagination

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 [Imagination is] that in virtue of which an image occurs in us.Aristotle, De AnimaHistory is essentially poiesis, not imitative poetry, but creation and ontological genesis in and through individuals doing and representing / saying.Cornelius Castoriadis, The Imaginary Institution of SocietyBack in August 2024, I interviewed Joe Ruffell about the revolutionary career of the Greek / French activist, Cornelius Castoriadis, founder of the workerist group, Socialisme ou Barbarie (1949-1965), who broke with Marxism in the mid-60s in order to develop a theory of political autonomy which increasingly drew on his insights into the central role of the creativity of the producers under capitalism.Castoriadis generalised this insight into arguably the most radical theory of the imagination known to either politics or philosophy, though there are traces of it in Aristotle, Kant, Heidegger and others. The radicalism and depth of Castoriadis’s idea of the imagination has long been of interest to us here at The Traveller in the Evening as an analogue of Blake’s similarly radical idea of the imagination, according to which “The eternal body of Man is The Imagination /God himself / that is [Yeshua] Jesus.”The overlap and connection between Blake and Castoriadis is suggestive at least, and hints at deeper symmetries. It is the long-term ambition of the Traveller in the Evening to explore these mirrorings and affinities, and to that end we thought it time to follow up on Joe’s podcast interview with a follow-up Q&A with Castoriadis scholar, Stephen Hastings-King, author of Looking for the Proletariat: Socialisme ou Barbarie and the Problem of Worker Writing.The ultimate aim of such an exploration is to find what support there is in Castoriadis for illuminating how Blake’s idea of the imagination is fuel for more than the plastic arts, but underlies the construction of social reality itself, so that a revolution in the imagination would revolutionise society.Topics discussed: introduction to Castoriadis | the Marxist imaginary | Pattern Recognition Research Collective | Castoriadis vs. fascists and communists in Athens | Zinovievites and syndicalists in the PCI | bureaucratic capitalism or degenerated workers state | Socialisme ou Barbarie formed 1949 | Maurice Brinton, Ken Weller and Solidarity | Castoriadis after Marx | the project of autonomy | wildcatting | 1956 Hungarian uprising | post-Marxism | on the content of socialism | direct democracy | psychoanalysis and the imaginary institution of society | Guy Debord and Jean-Francois Lyotard | democracy and philosophy born together in Greece | Billancourt | interlocked workers councils | auto-nomos | reason and energy, imagination and the instituted imaginary | imagination as the devil | heteronomy as determinism, as Urizen | visions eascape the instituted imaginary | no desire without imagination | magma | society unable to recognise its own auto-institution | the unspoken sets of preconditions that enable desire | hellenophilia, against hellenophilia | Athenian germs | Sparta and Cybele | on Heidegger’s Greek | the so-called Dark Ages | the voice of honest indignation | neither perception nor reason | Wordsworth’s fancy | the unspoken, unformalizable dimension on which those things that are formalized depend | Western philosophy lacks the imagination | relaunching philosophy | aggressively constructing dialogue | autonomy or original sin | human perfection and the Council of Nicaea | church against Galileo | Milton, the light and the dark | Communist Histurians Group, Blake and the Ranters | implosion of the Marxist imaginary | a huge humanizing factor for Western capitalism | diamat dy’in out | competitions for symbolic capital in various academic contexts | the cognitive geography of financeMan is all Imagination God is Man & exists in us & we in himWilliam BlakeEnergy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is The bound or outward circumference of Energy. Energy is Eternal Delight.WIlliam BlakeThis is not the place to discuss Blake’s concept of imagination in detail, except to say that when he describes the imagination as “the body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity,” we are being invited to see the imagination as the primum mobile of mind, the unmoved mover, that which is not determined elsewhere within mind. In this conception, the imagination is at the basis of the totality of mind. This is a scandal to rationalising philosophy, which wants the seat of reason to be within reason itself, not in imagination. In Castoriadis, on the other hand, the imagination is at the root of the entire social imaginary. These two positions may amount in practice to the same thing, or something much the same as far as the implications for politics go.Final Thoughts Before Closing the Meetingfrom Comrade CardanI think we are at a crossroads in history... One path… leads to the loss of meaning, the repetition of empty forms, conformism, apathy...
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