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New individualist configurations and the social imaginary : Castoriadis and Kristeva
Anthony Elliott European Journal of Social Theory 2012 15: 349 originally published online 28 March 2012 DOI: 10.1177/1368431012440868 The online version of this article can be found at: http://est.sagepub.com/content/15/3/349

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European Journal of Social Theory 15(3) 349365 The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1368431012440868 est.sagepub.com

New individualist configurations and the social imaginary: Castoriadis and Kristeva
Anthony Elliott Flinders University, Australia

Abstract The broad purpose of this article is to explore the theoretical conditions for understanding the new individualist configurations of imagination and identity in contemporary culture and critical discourse. The article begins with a sketch of recent debates in social theory on identity, individualization and new individualism, focusing on the work of Giddens, Beck, and Bauman, as well as Lemert and Elliott. The second part of the article turns to consider, in some detail, the path breaking contributions of Cornelius Castoriadis on the demise of the social imaginary in conditions of advanced capitalism or what he termed the spread of generalized conformism. Whilst making the argument that the notion of generalized conformism is of key importance in grasping the subjective and cultural dynamics promoted by the global electronic economy, the article also underscores the limitations of Castoriadiss psychoanalytic and political position. The third section of the article offers a pathway beyond such constraint by examining the recent social-theoretical contributions of Julia Kristeva on new maladies of the soul. Like Castoriadis, Kristeva focuses on the atrophy of imagination in contemporary times, but does so from a more complex psychoanalytic prism. The article concludes that the work of both Castoriadis and Kristeva are essential to grasping contemporary shifts in the new individualism. Keywords Castoriadis, identity, imagination, Kristeva, new individualism

Corresponding author: Anthony Elliott, School of Social and Policy Studies, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Flinders University GPO Box 2100, Adelaide 5001 South Australia, Australia Email: elli0290@flinders.edu.au

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Since its earliest formulations, the notion of identity in social theory has been linked to broad social transformations associated with modernity that promote processes of self-actualization and self-invention. In Fundamental Problems of Sociology, for example, George Simmel wrote of a new individualism arising in the wider context of the modern metropolis and money economy. The individual, according to Simmel, seeks his self as if he did not yet have it, and yet, at the same time, is certain that his only fixed point is this self (Simmel, 1950: 79). Simmels self-actualizing individual represented a powerful attempt to theorize the extent to which the logics of modernity penetrate all the way down into the lived textures of personal subjectivity, in and through which the individual is reconstituted as a work of self-assembly, self-construction and self-invention. Shift forward a hundred years and one finds contemporary social theorists likewise underscoring the profoundly inventive aspects of self-constitution within the distinctive features of a globalizing age. Recent efforts to generate a new theory of invented identities span a number of rubricsindividualization, reflexive selfidentity, liquid lives and new individualism. All of these approaches, as I shall examine in this article, confront a conjuncture of transformed social conditions (such as globalization, new information technologies and the advent of an allegedly universalizing consumerism) and concomitant individualizing pressures. In so doing, these approaches underscore how identities today are constantly renewed, revised and reconstituted in day-to-day social conduct, although only rarely is analytical attention devoted to the profoundly imaginary dimensions of such selfconstitution and self-revision. In this article I shall specifically discuss the contributions of Cornelius Castoriadis and Julia Kristeva to these themes of individualism and imagination in the broader context of global transformations. Castoriadis and Kristeva, in very different ways, have wrestled with the question of imagination, locating it within the troubled, and troubling, relation of self and society in critical social theory. In the process they have generated new perspectives on emergent individualizing trends of contemporary societies, offering insights which go beyond many current sociological perspectives. The article begins with a sketch of recent debates in social theory on identity, individualization and new individualism, spanning a range of highly influential recent contributions. The second part of the article turns to consider in some detail Castoriadiss reflections on the demise of the social imaginary in conditions of advanced capitalism, or what he termed the spread of generalized conformism. Whilst making the argument that the notion of generalized conformism is of key importance to grasping the subjective and cultural dynamics promoted by the global electronic economy, the article also underscores limitations of Castoriadiss psychoanalytic and political position. The third section of the article offers a pathway beyond such constraint by examining the recent social-theoretical contributions of Julia Kristeva on new maladies of the soul. Like Castoriadis, Kristeva focuses on the atrophy of imagination in contemporary times, but does so from a more complex psychoanalytic prism. The article concludes that the work of both Castoradis and Kristeva are essential in grasping contemporary shifts in new individualist configurations of contemporary culture.

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Recent social theories of identity, individualization and new individualism

Recent social theory has identified various institutional forces operating at a global level promoting novel trends towards individualization, reflexive self-identity, new individualism and liquid life (Bauman, 2005; Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2001; Elliott and Lemert, 2009a, 2009b; Giddens 1991 ). Notwithstanding the sociological differences between these theoretical standpoints, one general line of consensus in such recent social theory is thatin conditions of intensive globalizationindividuals are increasingly required, or called upon, to become the architects of their own lives, to engage in continual do-it-yourself identity revisions and to plot and re-plot individualized solutions to wider systemic social problems. In the sociology of Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, this trend towards individualization is conceptualized as an outcome of the globalization of risk. In the sociology of Giddens, self-reflexivity is viewed as part and parcel of the logics of modernity. In the sociology of new individualism, by contrast, neither risk nor reflexivity adequately captures the rising significance of identity in a globalizing age. Instead, new individualism is fundamentally tied to reinvention, that is to say to social practices geared towards the goal of instant change (Elliott and Lemert, 2009a, 2009b). Likewise, in Bauman, a sociological focus on the global force-field of instantaneity is underscored to develop the metaphor of liquid lives (Bauman, 2005). Let me briefly draw out the broader subjective and sociological contours of these accounts of identity-formation in recent social theory. Giddenss account (1990, 1991, 1992) of reflexive self-identity is a useful starting point. Against the background of a complex sociology of globalization, Giddens has sought to re-conceptualize the dynamics of self-identity in terms of the notion of reflexivity, a concept of considerable significance for grasping the production of personal and social life today. Reflexivity, according to Giddens, can be defined as a self-defining process that depends upon monitoring of, and reflection upon, psychological and social information about possible trajectories of life. Such information about self and world is not simply incidental to contemporary cultural life; it is actually constitutive of what people do and how they do it. The reflexivity of modern social life, writes Giddens, consists in the fact that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character (1990: 38). In one sense, what is underscored here concerns the richness of the sense-making processprimarily the mixings of certainty and anxiety that allow an individual to read cultural life and its textured flow of social action. This imperative to read cultural signs with some degree of sophistication is an index of a globalized, speed-driven information age, evident in everything from serious social criticism (in which commentary refers to previous commentary, which, in turn, is premised upon prior commentary) to the latest trends in pop music, which routinely invoke parodies of style and genre. In another sense, reflexivity stretches beyond the cultural and subjective, deeply rooted as it is in institutional social life. From mapping the demographic characteristics of cities to monitoring the changing flight paths of aircraft, the intrusion of expert reflexive systems into daily life is pivotal to life in post-industrialized cities.

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Like Giddens, Beck (2002) has also been concerned with tracking the complex, contradictory ways in which human agents increasingly interact with global social forces as a result of processes of reflexivity. Whilst widely celebrated throughout the 1990s in various circles of European social science for his innovative account of the global spread and intensification of risk in social relations and processes, Becks subsequent work came to focus on the possibilities and perils of identity in conditions of intensive globalization. The term Beck deployed to capture this reflexive recalibration of identity was individualization, by which he means to underscore the interplay of deconstruction and reconstruction, or dissolution and reorganization, in everyday life. For example, the disappearance of tradition and the disintegration of previously existing social models fixed gender roles, inflexible class locations, masculinist work modelscompels people (according to Beck) into making decisions about their own lives and future courses of action. As traditional ways of doing things become problematic, people must choose paths for a more rewarding lifeall of which requires planning and rationalization, deliberation and engagement. An active engagement with the self, with the body, with relationships and marriage, with gender norms, and with work: an individualization of social norms is at work everywhere throughout the West. Moreover, the idea of individualization is the basis upon which Beck constructs his vision of a new modernity, of novel personal experimentation and cultural innovation, all of which he sets against a sociological backdrop of risks, dangers, hazards, reflexivity and globalization. Such an unleashing of experimentation and choice which individualization brings is, however, certainly not without its problems. In personal terms, the gains of todays individualization might be tomorrows limitation, as advantage and progress turn into their opposite. Reworking the notion of reflexivity to be found in the writings of Giddens and Beck, Bauman (2005) argues that the emergence of liquid lives in the 21st century are shot through with precariousness and constant uncertainty. The reflexivity which critics, such as Giddens and Beck, celebrate as marking the dawn of new social beginnings is, according to Bauman, increasingly over-determined by anxieties about endless dislocations and painful displacements. In his seminal work Liquid Modernity (2000), Bauman contrasts the solidity and continuity which used to be the trademark of modern identities with the floating and drifting selves of contemporary societies. In present-day conditions of intensive globalism, argues Bauman, the dominant structure of feeling is that of uncertaintyuncertainties concerning the condition of the self, the moral geography of interpersonal relationships and the future shape of the world. According to Bauman, identity, including identity politics and its expression in new social movements, is today experienced as problematic (as open-ended, uncontrollable and, hence, with an overwhelming feeling of uncertainty) precisely because of the breakdown of modernist culture and its political attempts to legislate the world as cohesive, continuous and consistent. Identity politics develops as a preoccupation in the aftermath of the collapse of Western nation-state cultures; current claims for, and the advancement of, racial, ethnic, religious, national, post-colonial or sexual identities are an attempt to probe the many repressed differences of selfhood, differences brutally denied and displaced by the imposition of modernist Western culture on global political space. In my own recent writings on identity with the American social theorist Charles Lemert, we have argued (seeking to extend upon Baumans insights into liquidity) that

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selfhood is increasingly recalibrated in terms of ever-increasing dynamism, speed, change and reinvention. According to our thesis of a 21st century new individualism (Elliott and Lemert, 2009a), the high-tech culture of globalization and its associated short-termism has unleashed a new paradigm of self-making in which self-reinvention is key. In todays global electronic economy of short-term contracts, endless downsizings, just-in-time deliveries and multiple careers, the capacity for selftransformation and self-reinvention is increasingly fundamentalcertainly in cities throughout the West, but this rise in individualism is also increasingly global in scope. The growing cult of reinventionof social practices driven by, and geared towards, flexibility, plasticity and incessant change gives rise to significant opportunities and dangers at the levels of both personal and cultural identity on the one hand, and organizational and institutional dynamics on the other. Todays culture of reinvention carries profound consequences for reorganizing the relationships between self and society. In sociological terms, new individualism impacts both externally and internally. The triumph of globalization is that it not only operates on a horizontal axis, universalizing the operations of multinational capital and new digital technologies across the globe; it operates also, and fundamentally, on a vertical axis, reorganizing identities, intimacies and emotions into its wake. This is not, it should be noted, an argument about subjective dispositions in relation to the social world, but rather a deeply sociological engagement with the constitution of the self in conditions of intensive globalization (see also Elliott, 2008). In current social circumstancesin which personal lives are reshaped by technology-induced globalization and transformations of multinational capitalismit is not the unique, particular individuality of the individual actor which is most at stake. What is increasingly significant, in fact, is how individuals re-create identities, the cultural forms through which people symbolize individual expression and desire and, perhaps above all, the speed with which identities can be reinvented and instantly transformed (see Elliott, in press). It is this stress on instant transformationand, in particular, the fears and anxieties such practices are designed to displace or lessenthat distinguishes the theory of new individualism from notions such as reflexive individualization. The critical social theories I have been briefly examining have much to contribute to the critique of identities, as well as rewriting the relationship between self and society, and of coming to social and political terms with the hopes and fears of present-day subjectivity and interpersonal relations. The changing cultural parameters of identity politics, with its stress on the articulation of selfhood through processes of social and political location, highlights clearly why the self cannot be made sense of in strictly psychological or sociological terms, nor some blending of the two. What is obvious from current cultural struggles over the fate of the self is the contested, tensional, critical and, above all, political nature of the process of identity constitution and reconstruction. Twenty-first century society is a world (to paraphrase Bauman) of light mobilities and liquid experiences, a world in which people, organizations, institutions, employment, entertainment, images, messages, money and the like are framed and positioned within global flows that undermine national, societal borders. This growing fluidity and liquidization of the social network carries serious implications for experiences of self, identity, interpersonal relationships and intimacy; the fluid state of identity politics is both an

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outcome and potential alternative to this state of affairs and raises new chances and risks for individual autonomy and collective social objectives.

Castoriadis on imagination and the retreat to conformism

The account of contemporary identity formations under the rubrics of reflexive selfidentity, individualization, liquid lives and new individualism, in the work of recent social theorists, is the central component of a political strategy for the critique of what I shall term institutionalized individualism in a social-historical context of fading social norms. This post-traditionalization of identity is about the fate of do-it-yourself lifestyles; the continuously shifting terrain of seeking to re-embed the self in a world of thorough-going disembedding; and, of the sheer amount of cognitive and emotional work required to keep constantly on the move in the 24/7 mediated world of intensive globalism. As noted, some critics view such social changes as transforming identity in potentially positive ways, for example resulting in increasing levels of self-reflexivity. Other critics, however, discern in such transformations a thorough-going liquidization of human bondsone consequence of which has been an increasing emphasis on selfreinvention in daily life as a means of keeping at bay the insecurity that new individualism inspires. This more critical approach to individualization or new individualism can, perhaps, best be theoretically explored and extended through a consideration of Castoriadiss (1990) notion of generalized conformism, which he describes as collective withdrawal from autonomy and subsequent retreat into privatized individualism. At the most fundamental level, the notion of generalized conformism embodies Castoriadiss political preoccupation with processes of de-politicization, privatization and social withdrawal, that is with contemporary forms of heteronomy. In an essay The Retreat from Autonomy (1992), which was Castoriadiss considered response to the post-modernist vogue of the 1980s, he developed a checklist of dominant characteristics associated with post-modern individualist culture. In the aftermath of two world wars, says Castoriadis, the post-modern period of privatized individualism resulted in the waning of social, political and ideological conflict; appalling ideological regression; distrust of established political parties; and cynicism regarding alternative political futures. A grave concomitant and related symptom, writes Castoriadis (1990: 61) is the complete atrophy of political imagination. The intellectual pauperization of socialists and conservatives alike is staggering. Castoriadiss critique of the contemporary era in terms of a de-politicizing and individualizing generalized conformism is also explored in other contributions. The crisis of Western societies, the dominance of technoscience, the fragmentation of social imaginary significations: these are central motifs of Castoriadiss engagement with the contemporary crisis of culture and its consequences (see Adams, 2011; Elliott, 2003). One of his main lines of argument is that the capacity of contemporary society to posit itself as self-representation is becoming increasingly empty, self-contradictory and flattened out. As he remarks in an essay of 1982, The Crisis of Western Societies:
There is a crisis of social imaginary significations, that these significations no longer provide individuals with the norms, values, bearings, and motivations that would permit them

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both to make society function and to maintain themselves, somehow or other, in a livable state of equilibrium (the everyday unhappiness Freud contrasted with neurotic misery) (Castoriadis, 1997: 262).

Social life, says Castoriadis, has become increasingly superficial and incoherent, communal relationships increasingly sterile and brittle. Underlying this is the thesis of the privatization and de-politicization of modern culture. Privatization, according to Castoriadis, involves a kind of closure of individuals that view themselves as creative agents of social life. He explains this in terms of a shift from the battle cry of liberalism, The State is evil, to the cynical and ego-centered battle cry of post-modernist culture, Society is evil. As a consequence, people now live their lives as an odious chore, without collective prospects or projects and locked into the logics of individualism and consumerism. The notion of generalized conformism carries potential significance for any appraisal of institutionalized individualism, but needs to be set in the wider context of Castoriadiss social-theoretical emphases on the complex dialectic of creation and closure, or autonomy and heteronomy. Castoriadiss central theoretical innovation derives from his claim that historical society is the work of creative imagination, the eruption of a radically new that did not exist in any prior form. Each Society, writes Castoriadis (1987: 3) is a construction, a constitution, a creation of a world, of its own world. To grasp the centrality that Castoriadis accords to imagination in the broader context of socialhistorical creation means understanding the persistent misinterpretations of human imagination in traditional philosophical and sociological discourse (see Elliott, 2004). The core of the problem, according to Castoriadis, is that philosophy has too often assumed that the imaginary is a mere copy, a reflection of the outside world. Rejecting this standpoint, he argues that human imagination is what actually renders possible a relation of minds, the inter-subjective domain, as well as the social-historical world itself. The imaginary, he writes is the subjects whole creation of a world for itself. The impact of psychoanalysisor, at least, Castoriadiss reinterpretation of Freudis fundamental in this connection. For Castoriadiss theory of the social imaginary is not only profoundly innovative (stretching the term imagination well beyond the narrow meaning accorded to it by the doyen of French psychoanalysis, Jacques Lacan), but significantly opens a pathway for understanding closures of imagination (for example, the generalized conformism of institutionalized individualism) in a different light. One of the most important consequences of such an account of creation is that, in Castoriadiss hands, imagination becomes the basis for a full-blown theory of the social field; yet, this is a kind of imaginary foundation to society that is, paradoxically, nonfoundational. For Castoriadis, the imaginary tribulations of the unconscious are utterly fresh, primary fabrications founded purely in themselves, erupting out of nothing and nowhere, and sprung ex nihilo from a disorderly chaos of representational flux (Castoriadis, 1987). While recognizing that the psyche cannot produce everything out of itself, otherwise there would be no reason for the human subject to open itself to other persons and objects, Castoriadis claims it is meaningless to see psychic reality as simply a receptacle of the external world. For there can be no social practice without a human subject; with individuals there is psychic organization and emotional experience. Instead, the

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question of representation, for Castoriadis, centres on the capacity of the psyche itself to instantiate representations. Inherent in the Freudian problematic, he writes:
we can say that the first delegation of the drive in the psyche is the affect, in particular that of displeasure. But we can find nothing in an affect, whether of pleasure or unpleasure, that could account for the form or the content of a representation; at the most the affect could induce the finality of the representative process. It is therefore necessary to postulate (even if this is only implicitly) that the psyche is the capacity to produce an initial representation, the capacity of putting into image or making an image. This may appear selfevident. But this image-making must at the same time relate to a drive, at a time when nothing ensures this relation. This may well be the point of condensation and accumulation for all the mysteries of the bonding between the soul and the body. (Castoriadis, 1987: 282, my emphasis)

Thus, Castoriadis is perhaps the first major modern intellectual to place at the centre of his reflections on the social the abstract category of psychical representation itself, both at the levels of the individual (radical imaginary) and society (social imaginary). The imaginary, contends Castoriadis, is not just a question of the creation of images in society, but rather of the productive energies of self-creation, which, in turn, generates social imaginary significations and the institutions of each particular society. What is radically imaginary about the psychic process of every individual is precisely the representational pleasure of the unconscious monad, initially closed in upon itself and subsequently forced to shift from self-generating solipsistic fantasy to the shared meanings of society (see Elliott, 1999). To the radical imaginary of the psychic monad corresponds the collective order of the social imaginary, an aesthetics of imagination that holds together the primary institutions of society (language, norms, customs and law) and the form of relation through which individuals and collectivities come to relate to such objects of representational and affective investment (Castoriadis, 1987). Where then does radical imagination originate? What is the condition of possibility for its eruption? Castoriadis contrasts his position on imagination with the Lacanian emphasis on the scopic dynamics of the imaginary, thus:
I am not fixated on the scopic; one of the gross inadequacies of Lacans conception of the imagination is his fixation of the scopic. For me, if one is speaking of stages that are worked out, the imagination par excellence is the imagination of the musical composer (which is what I wanted to be). Suddenly, figures surge forth which are not in the least visual. They are essentially auditory and kinetic for there is also rhythm. . . . Nor is there anything visual in the social imaginary. The social imaginary is not the creation of images in society; it is not the fact that one paints the walls of towns. A fundamental creation of the social imaginary, the gods or rules of behaviour are neither visible nor even audible but signifiable. (Castoriadis, 1997: 182183, my emphasis)

Castoriadiss reflections on the imaginary principally concern, one might say, the ways in which a world (at once emotional and social) somehow or other comes to be ordered and organized from groundlessness or chaos; about the creation of imagination from dull mass; about creation and invention as a consequence of an explosion that digs

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into this mass a hole. The constitution of these imaginary determinations manifests the creativity that appertains to the psyche as such and that opens an interior space within it. That said, there are various limitations to Castoriadiss account of creation which constrain, in turn, grasping the contours of institutionalized individualism (see Adams, 2011; Elliott, 2003). Castoriadiss notion of generalized conformism is developed in only the very broadest terms. Is the notion of generalized conformism always and everywhere operative across global political space, that is equally at work in New York, Singapore, Havana, Budapest, Beirut and Islamabad? Such a global diagnosis is surely unconvincing. It is true that Castoriadis concentrates especially on the theme of privatization when discussing generalized conformism. However, apart from underscoring that individuals today are increasingly psychically closed off from genuine autonomy based on human creation, there is very little psychoanalytic investigation of the personal, emotional or interpersonal consequences of such a privatization of individual life-strategies. Part of the difficulty here, I think, stems from Castoriadiss tendency to deploy psychoanalysis in mostly broad-brush strokes, capturing the Freudian emphasis on unconscious civilizational processes but at the cost of displacing or neglecting specific forms of social pathology or cultural inhibition arising as a consequence of the global age.

Kristeva on imagination and revolt

Like Castoriadis, Kristeva has powerfully addressed the issue of a novel precariousness in human bonds, as well as the demise of human creativity in an age of intensive globalization. For Kristeva, globalism produces new, and dramatically escalating, forms of suffering, both at the level of individual lives and national cultures. One consequence of what Kristeva calls the global entertainment society is that people have lost access to symbolic discourse and have retreated inwards. This turn to empty narcissistic satisfaction she describes as new maladies of the soul; today more individuals than ever before have retreated to privatism, to a denial of community and rejection of public engagement. Such denial of the connection between the self and others reflects a deadening of public discourse, a jamming of dialogue. In several works, notably Black Sun (1989), New Maladies of the Soul (1993), and Crisis of the European Subject (2000), Kristeva analyses the psychic crisis of contemporary culturethe jamming of autonomous creative thought, as it werewith reference to the themes of depression, mourning and melancholia. In depression, says Kristeva, there is an emotional disinvestment from the symbolic power of language and intersubjectivity. The depressed person, overwhelmed by sadness (often as a result of lost love), suffers from a paralysis of symbolic activity. In effect, language fails to fill in or substitute for what has been lost at the level of the psyche. The loss of loved ones, the loss of identity, the loss of pasts: as the depressed person loses all interest in the surrounding world, in language itself, psychic energy shifts to a more primitive mode of functioning, to a maternal, drive-related form of experience. In short, depression produces a trauma of symbolic identification, a trauma that unleashes the power of semiotic energy. In the force field of the semiotic silences, rhythms, changes in intonation,

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semantic shiftsKristeva finds a means to connect the unspoken experience of the depressed person to established meaning, thereby permitting for a psychic reorganization of the self. Kristeva does not think that the semiotic or affective realm can simply replace symbolic or rational law; however, she does hold that rationality in itself is insufficient for genuine social creation. Thus, the cultural field holds special significance for grasping the free play of creation in her writings. In much recent social theory, the social has been cast as peculiarly culturalist, rather than only as normative systems of rationalized action. But, for Kristeva, what is culturalist about the social field is not that it penetrates to the core of preconscious dispositions and practical forms of knowledge, but that it is deeply interwoven with the deeper affective textures of lived experience. In Crisis of the European Subject, Kristeva argues that contemporary multicultural societies are typically mixtures of normative structures and rationalized identities on the one hand, and affective and unconscious significations on the other. One way in which she does this is by considering the socio-cultural textures of contemporary Europe. Europeans are cultured, writes Kristeva in the sense that culture is their critical conscience; it suffices to think of Cartesian doubt, the freethinking of the Enlightenment, Hegelian negativity, Marxs thought, Freuds unconscious, not to mention Zola Jaccuse and formal revolts such as Bauhaus and surrealism, Artaud and Stockhausen, Picasso, Pollock, and Francis Bacon. The great moments of twentieth-century art and culture are moments of formal and metaphysical revolt. For some considerable period in France, Kristeva has been widely hailed as a genuinely courageous intellectual rebel and also an energetic campaigner for womens rights. The terrain on which Kristeva thinks societal rebellion can best be approached, however, is that of psychoanalysis. Kristevas recent work develops, through a psychoanalytic lens, a series of reflections on the spread of global political apathy (shouldnt we just be content with entertainment culture, show culture, and complacent commentary?), and contrasts this with a more radical impulse, an intensively politicized imagination (what she terms the necessity of a culture of revolt in a society that is alive and developing, not stagnating). Symbol, scene, play, pleasure, text: these are, for Kristeva, the central psychical and aesthetic forms in and through which the society of revolt is produced. Revolt is historical for Kristeva in so far as it is all about the twists and turns of society as creative unfolding. Tracing the historical trajectories of rebellious ideologies (from socialism to existentialism), Kristeva maps how the radical political impulse has time and again veered off in either utopic or utilitarian directions. So it is that Kristeva traces the notion of revolt as a series of reversals, curves, upheavals and unfoldings, calling upon various European intellectuals of great distinction along the way to fathom what guarantees our independence and our creative abilities. In attempting to solve the riddle of contradictions between societal reproduction and cultural revolt, Kristeva draws from her highly influential notion of semiotic displacement of symbolic forms, a notion she considers fundamental to the analysis of identity and society alike. In an earlier path-breaking work, Revolution in Poetic Language (1984), Kristeva contrasted the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacans account of the symbolic orderthe social and sexual system of patriarchal Lawwith those multiple

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psychic forces she terms semiotic. The semiotic, according to Kristeva, is prolinguisticsemiotic processes include libidinal energies and bodily rhythms experienced by the child which arise in the pre-Oedipal stage of infancy (Elliott, 1999; Kristeva, 1984). For Kristeva, these pre-Oedipal forms undergo repression with entry to the social and cultural processes of the symbolic order. That is to say, the flux of semiotic experience is channelled into the relatively stable domain of symbolization and language. However, Kristeva contends that the repression of the semiotic is by no means complete; the semiotic remains present in the unconscious and cannot be shut off from culture. And it is precisely this lurking of the semiotic, the bubbling away of pre-Oedipal affective forces, which provides a creative substratum to the functioning of the social. Creation, one might argue, is at once particular and general, or subjective and universal. Kristeva outlines the creative dimension of the unconscious, thus:
The unconscious or preconscious fantasy is present in all psychic activities and behaviours, so much so that the fantasy is an active presence of fantasy scenes. Such a fantasy is, strictly speaking, bound up with motivity, taste and food aversions, the sharpness of the perception (particularly the visual perception) of the primal scene, the image of the body, voice-songand-speech, sporting activities, concert-show-and-film attendance, educational and intellectual activities, neurotic symptoms, and, in the end, the entire organisation of the personality. Not only is the totality of psychic life impregnated with fantasies, but in the child whom Klein listened to and analysed, the fantasy that is, the fantasy that preceded repression is united with psychic life, because this fantasy and this life, the representative of the earliest impulses of desire and aggressiveness, are expressed in and dealt with by mental processes far removed from words and conscious relational thinking. (Kristeva, 2001: 140, my emphasis)

Kristevas reflections are, in one sense, primarily concerned with the presence of fantasy and dynamism of unconscious representation. The psychic work of representation is a universal feature present in all psychic activities and behaviours, by no means restricted to the therapeutic relationship, nor to particular aspects of mental functioning, such as the standard psychoanalytic menu of day-dreaming or erotic imaginings. Rather, it is our ordinary experiencesfrom sporting activities to the practicalities of learning and educationthat are saturated with this originary imagination. All psychic activity, says Kristeva, is impregnated with fantasies. What is clear in Kristevas account of fantasy is that this imaginary domain is inextricably interwoven with the motions of pleasure and un-pleasure, the most primitive impulses of desire and aggressiveness which bring a world of subjectivity into being in the first place. Freud astutely captured the theatrical dynamics of sensational life in terms of the logics of dreaming; it is these affective processes (the dream-work) which, for Kristeva, dominate the mental apparatus from start to finish. Kristeva conceptualizes what she refers to as the proto-fantasy as a kind of oscillation of the imagination, with the human subject internally divided, split between infantile narcissism and the others lack. Strictly speaking, if representation is an active presence of fantasy scenes, this is because desire, for Kristeva, as for Lacan, is the desire of the Other. To desire the Other is a kind of fashioning, an imagining of what the other dreams, an imitating, an identification with the others desire. Notwithstanding that it is the inescapability of imaginary

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misrecognition that leaves the human subject to impute an imaginary fullness to the others desire which, in fact, pertains only to the representation (that is, the imaginary plenitude that the subject itself desires), the point is there would be no meaning, not to say anything of the possibility for self-knowledge, without these imaginative fashionings. None of these psychoanalytical insights in Kristevas work are separable from her politics. The semiotic as a domain of the repressed unconscious is, politically speaking, subversive of the symbolic order, primarily as this architecture of affect is rooted in a pre-patriarchal connection to others. This is clearly of key importance to the political drafting of identity; Kristevas point is that the semiotic functions equally to disturb and disrupt social order. In political terms, Kristevas work takes as its target the globalization of culture, which amounts, in effect, to a history of the drastically shrinking world under the forces of transnational capitalism. Culture is, in a broad sense for Kristeva, the very stuff of politics, and one of her central claims is that a sense of cultural belonging or identity has begun to stall in the face of globalizing social forces. Her political critique focuses on how worldwide social transformationsand particularly European cultural shiftsare becoming more and more suited to the success of the far Right and a general climate of hostility to immigration, and less and less open to voices speaking up for cultural difference, moderation or reason. While it may not be exactly clear which particular globalizing forces Kristeva has in mind, it is evident that she writes, among other things, as an intellectual exile, anxious over the consequences of NATO culture and of transnational political attempts in the wake of 9/11 to legislate the winners from the losers of globalization. Kristevas primary purpose is to return to European national identities a sense of what is missing, or lacking, from much of the recent excited talk on globalization. She is out to probe the unwitting ways in which globalism, and particularly the insidious cultural influence of Americanization, inaugurates new levels of emotional denial and the repression of desire. To this end, her social theory is full of sinuous reflection on the transformative power of grief, mourning and melancholia in public political life, coupled with a detailed examination of cultural memory and the power of imagination. In Kristevas culturalist version of psychoanalysis, nations, just like individuals, must work through grief and trauma. In the same manner that depressed individuals lose interest in the surrounding world, so too may nations become disconnected from their historical past. From this angle, Kristeva argues that the newly constituted European citizen will surely fall short of the political ideals governing the process of globalization unless nations undertake the difficult task of working through specific cultural pathologies, from neo-nationalism to the cult of militarism. This, one might consider, is something of a tall order. But Kristeva makes an urgent plea for citizens to try to think the horror of their specific cultural pasts and national histories. Drawing from her own past, Kristeva reflects on the Bulgarian Orthodox Christian tradition, speculating whether Eastern conceptions of identity and culture might offer an emotional corrective or political supplement to the rationalistic excesses of Western European life.

Conclusion: Individualism, psychic revolt and autonomy

By this point, the conceptual and political yield of the work of Castoriadis and Kristeva within the ambit of recent social theories of institutionalized individualism will once

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more have become apparent. Like contemporary accounts that emphasize the plasticity, liquidity and reflexivity of individualism, both Castoriadis and Kristevain their very different waysare centrally concerned with the constraining, apolitical and illusory features of present-day structures of subjectivity. Following from his magnus opus The Imaginary Institution of Society, Castoriadis came, in his late work, to characterize the development of contemporary societies and their associated patterns of identity-formation in terms of generalized conformism, the retreat to privatism. Similarly, Kristeva, over the period of the last 10 or so years, has delineated new maladies of the soulof loss, mourning and melancholia as central to the psychic turmoil and attitudes of contemporary women and men. Yet, neither Castoriadis nor Kristeva oppose to such repressive forms of self-identity a notion of transcendent or liberated subjectivity. Unlike the widespread tendency in contemporary social theory to wallow in nostalgia for a bygone past, or, alternatively, posit the emergence of novel kinds of post-contemporary or post-political subjectivities, Castoriadis and Kristeva recognize that contemporary forms of individualismno matter how limited or repressiveare necessarily grounded in a presumption of questioning, of transformation and of change. Castoriadis terms this the project of autonomy; Kristeva instead refers to revolt, in terms of acts of rebellion. In these final comments, I want to briefly consider these notions of autonomy and revolt on the grounds that they should arguably be viewed as crucial to the increase and growth of institutionalized individualism in contemporary societies. Placed in a broad sociological context, Kristevas psychoanalytic reflections on the intricate intertwining of psychic representation and revolt alter the stakes of contemporary forms of identity-formation. While it is certainly the case that structures of subjectivity appear repressively constituted in Kristevas writings on new maladies of the soul, the role that she ascribes to the contribution of individuals and the effort of questioning remains crucial nonetheless. In an interview, Kristeva contrasts revolt to the more general norms of new maladies of the soul, thus:
revolt, as I understand it psychic revolt, analytic revolt, artistic revolt refers to a state of permanent questioning, of transformation, change, an endless probing of appearances. . . I want to rehabilitate the microscopic sense of the word, its etymological and literary sense in which the root vel means unveiling, returning, discovering, starting over. This is the permanent questioning that characterizes psychic life and, at least in the best cases, art (2002: 120).

This notion of permanent questioning is particularly significant, I argue, because such a form of revolt appears to be that of tracing alternative possibilities and possible kinds of subjecthood opened in conditions of institutionalized individualism, but which neverthelessfor a myriad of political reasonsbecome displaced or repressed under dominant forms of identity that constitute new individualism. Like Kristeva, Castoriadis keeps one eye firmly on both ontological and institutional possibilities for social change and political transformation. In this connection, he opposes to the notion of generalized conformism not some fully-fledged, hidden kernel of authentic subjectivity but rather what he terms the project of autonomy. Autonomy, writes Castoriadis is not closure but, rather opening: ontological opening, the possibility of going beyond the informational, cognitive, and organizational closure characteristic of

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self-constituting, but heteronomous beings (Castoriadis, 1997: 310, 316). The principle that the possibility of challenging established significations and institutions is central to the attainment of autonomy is reflective of a broader movement in history, a movement away from tradition and the sacred and toward the contingency of the social. This amounts to saying that a conception of society has emerged historically which recognizes that there can be no supracollective guarantee of meaning; the end of foundationalism involves an acceptance of the fact that meaning and its actualization always presupposes a social context. As Castoriadis explains:
if autonomous society is that society which self-institutes itself [sauto-institue] explicitly and lucidly, the one that knows that it itself posits its institutions and significations, this means that it knows as well that they have no source other than its own instituting and signification-giving activity, no extrasocial guarantee. (Castoriadis, 1997: 316).

The other side of autonomy for Castoriadis is heteronomy, which, with the spread of modernity, has unleashed another social imaginary signification which he calls the unlimited expansion of rational mastery. Rational mastery when expanded indefinitely is, for Castoriadis, pseudo-rational mastery and can be detected at work at the individual level in increasing levels of privatization and individualism (that is to say, generalized conformism) and at the societal level in bureaucratic discourse and capitalist ideology. Needless to say, the generalized conformism of institutionalized individualism arises as a version of such pseudo-rational mastery. Again, what emerges of interest here in Castoriadis as in Kristeva is an elaborate conceptualization of utopian pragmatism at the level of institutionalized individualism. Let me briefly expand upon my use of this term utopian pragmatism. Unlike mainstream social science which lapses into either subjectivism or objectivism when exploring the topic of social futures, both Castoriadis and Kristeva make their starting point the theorem that personal and collective autonomy or revolt actually presuppose one another. If the struggle for continuous self-questioning in modern societies is one that involves a radical putting into question of the social-historical world itself, this is so because of the existence of individuals with cognitively and affectively articulated capacities for self-interrogation. That is to say, an open-ended process of engagement with the self and the Other lies at the core of the social networkno matter how strewn with ideological illusions. The kind of self-institution (Castoriadis) or revolt (Kristeva) in question, in fact, is one that runs in both progressive and regressive directions at once. What is at stake, as Castoriadis puts it, is no source other than [the subjects] own instituting and signification-giving activity, but such perpetual self-reconstitution which enables personal flourishing, fulfillment and creativity is also inevitably brought into confrontation with existing symbolic structures of norms, habitus and social practices. Castoriadis and Kristeva, like Freud himself, underscore that idealized hopes and dreams for the good life are not just illusions. The path to critical self-reflection, inexorably intertwined with the illusory forms of ideology, springs from the primordality of desire and the primal chaos of revolt, and thus contains a utopian core. Society must learn to be self-reflective and self-instituting, opening itself to the productive vitality of imagination; however, the possibility of such more creative lives and relationships are always negotiated within the forbidding, oppressive framework of contemporary society and its symbolic structures of ideological distortion.

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If autonomous thought involves then, a form of doubleness, so in a different sense is the repressed desire it seeks to unlock. For Castoriadis, the subject must work resolutely against itselfthrough a variety of possible forms, from philosophy and the arts to psychoanalysis itselfin the movement of critical self-interrogation. Grasping the self-instituting activity of the self underpins this striving for genuine autonomy, but such freedom is only meaningful, says Castoriadis, because heteronomous significations are encountered and refused. Autonomous thought is, thus, always a form of work, a struggle or labour. As Kristeva famously put this, the metalanguages of freedom, liberation and autonomy demand a subject-in-process. The political upshot of this is that autonomy does not presuppose some pre-existing, fully-fledged repressed identity simply waiting to be unlocked. Rather, the work of autonomous thought is a work of discovery, of exploring unexamined desires and dreams, and of navigating possible futures. As a form of interplay then between received social meanings and possible social futures, every work of self-interrogation or revolt is progressive and regressive at the same time, promising the individual subject the utopic possibilities of dream, pleasure and desire but only to draw the self back into awareness of the constraints of existing social practice. Revolt for Kristeva is especially ridden with such affective deadlocks and her work is arguably richer in this respect compared to Castoriadis because of the myriad ways in which she has investigated contemporary maladies of psychic life as opposed to Castoriadiss more generalizing account of generalized conformism. Revolt for Kristeva is always a pitched battle between affect and reason, sense and spirit, utopia and dystopia. In the current political context of globalization, the experimental cast of artistic and cultural revolt runs up against a dominative rationality which allegedly celebrates creativity, reinvention and transformation. This globalized rationality for Kristeva, as we have seen, emanates from the show culture of mass media, the instantaneity of the new you and results, she says, in a dispensation of reflective psychic life. Whether contemporary cultural patterns of globalization are as invasive or destructive, as Kristeva suggests, to the interiors of psychic life is a highly vexed issue in social theory. Yet, the value of this analytical concern with imagination and the repressed unconscious surely lies in the attention it gives to the affective dimensions of reflective and autonomous thought and of what should count if these goals are to adequately realized. In this connection, Castoriadis and Kristeva offer a path beyond the quick-fix mentality of new individualist culture, beyond the do-it-yourself world of liquid consumerism. We have to create the good, writes Castoriadis under imperfectly known and uncertain conditions. The project of autonomy is end and guide, it does not resolve for us effectively actual situations (Castoriadis, 1997: 400). This is why the conceptual contributions of both Castoriadis and Kristeva might best be termed utopian pragmatism. In contrast to what might be labelled bad utopianism, in which the future is parachuted in from some metaphysical outer space, utopian pragmatism seeks to grasp possible futures in terms of what is actual. References
Adams S (2011) Castoriadiss Ontology: Being and Creation. New York: Fordham University Press. Bauman Z (2000) Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.

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Bauman Z (2005) Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beck U and Beck-Gernsheim E (2001) Individualization. London: Sage. Castoriadis C (1997) The crisis of Western societies. In: Curtis D (ed.) The Castoriadis Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, pp.25366. Castoriadis C (1987) The Imaginary Institution of Society. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Castoriadis C (1990) Individual, society, rationality, history. Thesis Eleven 25: 5990. Castoriadis C (1992) The retreat from autonomy: Post-modernism as generalized conformity. Thesis Eleven 31: 1423. Castoriadis C (1997) World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis and the Imagination. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Elliott A (1999) Social Theory and Psychoanalysis in Transition. London: Free Association Books. Elliott A (2003) Critical Visions: New Directions in Social Theory. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Elliott A (2004) Social Theory Since Freud. London and New York: Routledge. Elliott A (2008) Making the Cut: How Cosmetic Surgery is Transforming our Lives. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Elliott A (in press) Reinvention. London and New York: Routledge. Elliott A and Lemert C (2009a) The New Individualism: The Emotional Costs of Globalization. 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Elliott A and Lemert C (2009b) The global new individualist debate: Three theories of individualism and beyond. In: Elliott A and du Gay P (eds) Identity in Question. London: Sage, pp. 3764. Giddens A (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Giddens A (1991) Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity Press. Giddens A (1992) The Transformation of Intimacy. Cambridge: Polity Press. Kristeva J (1984) Revolution in Poetic Language. New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva J (1989) Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva J (1993) New Maladies of the Soul. New York: Columbia University Press. Kristeva J (2000) Crisis of the European Subject. New York: Other Press. Kristeva J (2001) Melanie Klein (Guberman R, transl.). New York: Columbia University [Original work in French published in 2000]. Kristeva J (2002) Revolt, She Said. New York: Semiotext(e). Simmel G (1950) Fundamental problems of sociology. In: Wolff K H (ed.) The Sociology of Georg Simmel. New York: Free Press.

About the author

Anthony Elliott was educated at the universities of Melbourne and Cambridge. He is currently Professor of Sociology at Flinders University, Australia, where he has served as Associate Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research). He is also Visiting Research Professor in Sociology at the Open University, UK and Visiting Professor of Sociology and Distinguished Fellow at the Social Science Research Centre at University College Dublin, Ireland. He is a Fellow of the Academy of the Social Sciences of Australia. His writings have been published in 17 languages. He has lectured

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at about 80 academic and professional institutions worldwide. The author and editor of over 20 books and 60 articles in scholarly journals, Professor Elliotts most recent books include Making the Cut (Chicago University Press, 2008), The New Individualism (Routledge, 2nd edn, 2009 with Charles Lemert), Contemporary Social Theory: An Introduction (Routledge, 2009), Globalization (Routledge, 2010 with Charles Lemert, Daniel Chaffee and Eric Hsu), Mobile Lives (Routledge, 2010 with John Urry) and On Society (Polity, 2012 with Bryan Turner). He is the editor of The Routledge Companion to Social Theory (2009) and The Routledge Handbook of Identity Studies (2011). Address: Sociology Program, School of Social and Policy Studies, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences Flinders University GPO Box 2100, Adelaide 5001 South Australia Australia [email: elli0290@flinders.edu.au]

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