MICHÈLE BERTRAND ON THE IMAGINARY, IDEOLOGY, AND RELIGION

  Our hypothesis is the following: if the imaginary intervenes at the level of the motivation to act, it is thanks to the temporal discrepancy, indeed, the contradiction, between desire and its realization. In militant action, the supersession of the opposition between internal individual need and external social necessity is only prefigured; it is not yet objectively achieved in society but only subjectively lived in personal engagement. This is why its theoretical equivalent is a project, an ideal, indeed, a utopia. The most fantastical utopia, as Marx said, is not devoid of reality. It does not emerge ex nihilo. Its roots are embedded in the present. But its truth is not to be found where it is not. It teaches us nothing about social transformations; it teaches us a great deal about human aspirations at the moment of their history. Such are the two sources of the social imaginary. On the one hand, human beings subjectively represent to themselves their particular existence, and this representation is not the same mode of constitution as scientific theory and objective knowledge. On the other hand, their actions are motivated by other causes and have their own forms of (affective and emotional) regulation. This generality of the imaginary is the formal condition of its ideological usage. Every politics loves to appear to have a grand historical design. And this is not just Machiavellianism. The human beings who propagate these myths are just as often dupes, they really believe them: they need to believe them. Marx said as much for the bourgeoisie in 1789, and one could say it about all those, whether particular individuals or groups, parties or masses, who have engaged in large-scale actions: they need to maintain their enthusiasm at the level of the grand historical tragedy … From this fact, the imaginary acquires a certain objectivity, a certain truth. Because it corresponds to a real need, it is not only an illusion: it is, in a certain way, the language of real life, it contains its share of truth. This is a truth that is not given immediately but that must be discovered, through the analysis and interpretation of its myths and its fantasies. One will object, perhaps, that this function of the imaginary is not universal or universalizable, that it attests to the social alienation of a class, the hijacking of the interests of the greatest number for the benefit of the particular ends of a dominant class. Maybe one will consider that, in the framework of a revolution leading to socialism, the imaginary loses its raison d’être for two reasons. Firstly, because one presently makes use of theoretical tools that are necessary for the analysis of social transformations; therefore, there is no longer any need to resort to inadequate language. Next, because the ends of the proletariat are the very ends of humanity (their realization implies the abolition of human exploitation); therefore, there is no longer any need to give these particular ends the mask of universal ends, they are universal in themselves. This argumentation is actually found in Marx. But it is applied to ideology rather than to the imaginary in general. In fact, instead of a disappearance of the imaginary, Marx proposes a reorientation and a modification of its usage. To make a travesty of the real, to dress it in deceitful rags, is to admit that it is prosaic, that it cannot dream. When colonial expeditions presented themselves as great civilizing missions, the defense of freedoms, etc., there was an ideological usage of the imaginary. Those who adhere to these myths are under the most complete illusion regarding the significance of the activities in which they participate to varying degrees.

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The effectiveness of their personal action is alienated, subject to the will of those who are at the origin of the myth … Religious representations form part of the social imaginary; one must not, obviously, assign any pejorative meaning to this term. Everything up to now tends, on the contrary, to prove that the imaginary contains a truth. But representations are ordered according to a different logic than that of scientific discourse. To this is added the fact that most sacred texts are expressed in the form of parables or myths. It is necessary, then, to interpret them, in order to bring to light their hidden, esoteric meaning. Depending on the epochs and communities to which it is addressed, the message of faith is capable of diverse, indeed, contradictory, interpretations; the very form of the religious message, its indirect, symbolic language explains that sometimes it could be identified with the dominant ideology, and sometimes revolt against it. Faith has been able to incite human beings to resignation, to acceptance of the established order. It has been able to lead them to accept suffering as the very will of God. Marxists have then criticized religion, not as religion, but as ideology. And they are not the only ones to engage in such critique. At the very heart of the Church, priests, theologians, philosophers have periodically risen up against what they regarded as being a hijacking of the Gospel message for the benefit of the established order. Religion is far from having a univocal content from the social point of view. (And what one says here about Christianity could in practice say equally about other religions.) Of course, by exhorting human beings to resignation, religion permits the reproduction of society. But it has also served to support protest and revolt; revolutions even have been carried out under the banner of religion, as testifies the Peasants’ War of the 16th century. This is why Marx and Engels made antireligious struggle a revolutionary objective neither in theory nor in practice. On the contrary, they dismissed the militant atheism of certain socialists and the Bismarckian Kulturkampf. (Excerpted from Michèle Bertrand, Le statut de la religion chez Marx et Engels [Paris: Éditions sociales, 1979], pp.17-19, 21-22.)