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Article

New individualistconfigurations and thesocial imaginary:Castoriadis and Kristeva

Anthony ElliottFlinders University, Australia

AbstractThe broad purpose of this article is to explore the theoretical conditions for under-standing the new individualist configurations of imagination and identity in contemporaryculture and critical discourse. The article begins with a sketch of recent debates in socialtheory on identity, individualization and new individualism, focusing on the work ofGiddens, Beck, and Bauman, as well as Lemert and Elliott. The second part of the articleturns to consider, in some detail, the path breaking contributions of Cornelius Cas-toriadis on the demise of the social imaginary in conditions of advanced capitalism orwhat he termed the spread of ‘generalized conformism’. Whilst making the argumentthat the notion of ‘generalized conformism’ is of key importance in grasping the sub-jective and cultural dynamics promoted by the global electronic economy, the article alsounderscores the limitations of Castoriadis’s psychoanalytic and political position. Thethird section of the article offers a pathway beyond such constraint by examining therecent 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 thework of both Castoriadis and Kristeva are essential to grasping contemporary shifts inthe new individualism.

KeywordsCastoriadis, identity, imagination, Kristeva, new individualism

Corresponding author:

Anthony Elliott, School of Social and Policy Studies, Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Flinders Uni-

versity GPO Box 2100, Adelaide 5001 South Australia, Australia

Email: [email protected]

European Journal of Social Theory15(3) 349–365

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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 pro-

cesses of self-actualization and self-invention. In Fundamental Problems of Sociol-

ogy, 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). Sim-

mel’s 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 reconsti-

tuted as a work of self-assembly, self-construction and self-invention. Shift for-

ward a hundred years and one finds contemporary social theorists likewise

underscoring the profoundly inventive aspects of self-constitution within the dis-

tinctive features of a globalizing age. Recent efforts to generate a new theory of

invented identities span a number of rubrics—‘individualization’, ‘reflexive self-

identity’, ‘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 ana-

lytical attention devoted to the profoundly imaginary dimensions of such self-

constitution 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, indivi-

dualization and new individualism, spanning a range of highly influential recent con-

tributions. The second part of the article turns to consider in some detail Castoriadis’s

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 econ-

omy, the article also underscores limitations of Castoriadis’s psychoanalytic and

political position. The third section of the article offers a pathway beyond such con-

straint 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.

350 European Journal of Social Theory 15(3)



Recent social theories of identity, individualization and newindividualism

Recent social theory has identified various institutional forces operating at a global level

promoting novel trends towards ‘individualization’, ‘reflexive self-identity’, ‘new indi-

vidualism’ 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 that—in conditions of intensive globalization—individuals are increasingly

required, or called upon, to become the ‘architects of their own lives’, to engage in con-

tinual 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.

Giddens’s 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 ‘reflex-

ivity’, 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 process—primarily 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 sub-

jective, 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.

Elliott 351



Like Giddens, Beck (2002) has also been concerned with tracking the complex, con-

tradictory 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, Beck’s subsequent work

came to focus on the possibilities and perils of identity in conditions of intensive globa-

lization. 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 dis-

appearance of tradition and the disintegration of previously existing social models—

fixed gender roles, inflexible class locations, masculinist work models—compels 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 life—all 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 indivi-

dualization 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 today’s individualiza-

tion might be tomorrow’s 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 uncertainty—uncertainties concerning the condition of the self, the moral geogra-

phy of interpersonal relationships and the future shape of the world. According to

Bauman, identity, including identity politics and its expression in new social move-

ments, 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 col-

lapse 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 Bauman’s insights into liquidity) that




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 today’s global electronic economy of short-term contracts, endless down-

sizings, just-in-time deliveries and multiple careers, the capacity for self-

transformation and self-reinvention is increasingly fundamental—certainly in cities

throughout the West, but this rise in individualism is also increasingly global in scope.

The growing cult of reinvention—of social practices driven by, and geared towards, flex-

ibility, 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.

Today’s 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 ver-

tical 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 circum-

stances—in which personal lives are reshaped by technology-induced globalization and

transformations of multinational capitalism—it is not the unique, particular ‘individual-

ity’ 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 transformation—and, in particular, the fears and anxieties such practices

are designed to displace or lessen—that 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 sub-

jectivity and interpersonal relations. The changing cultural parameters of identity poli-

tics, 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 psy-

chological 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 liqui-

dization of the social network carries serious implications for experiences of self, iden-

tity, interpersonal relationships and intimacy; the fluid state of identity politics is both an

Elliott 353



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 self-

identity’, ‘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 bonds—one consequence of which has been an increasing emphasis on self-

reinvention in daily life as a means of keeping at bay the insecurity that new individu-

alism inspires. This more critical approach to individualization or new individualism

can, perhaps, best be theoretically explored and extended through a consideration of Cas-

toriadis’s (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 Castoriadis’s

political preoccupation with processes of de-politicization, privatization and social with-

drawal, that is with contemporary forms of heteronomy. In an essay ‘The Retreat from

Autonomy’ (1992), which was Castoriadis’s 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 concomi-

tant and related symptom’, writes Castoriadis (1990: 61) ‘is the complete atrophy of

political imagination. The intellectual pauperization of ‘‘socialists’’ and conservatives

alike is staggering’.

Castoriadis’s critique of the contemporary era in terms of a de-politicizing and indi-

vidualizing ‘generalized conformism’ is also explored in other contributions. The crisis

of Western societies, the dominance of technoscience, the fragmentation of social ima-

ginary significations: these are central motifs of Castoriadis’s engagement with the con-

temporary 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 pro-

vide individuals with the norms, values, bearings, and motivations that would permit them




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 crea-

tive agents of social life. He explains this in terms of a shift from the battle cry of lib-

eralism, ‘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 individu-

alism and consumerism.

The notion of ‘generalized conformism’ carries potential significance for any apprai-

sal of institutionalized individualism, but needs to be set in the wider context of Castor-

iadis’s social-theoretical emphases on the complex dialectic of creation and closure, or

autonomy and heteronomy. Castoriadis’s central theoretical innovation derives from his

claim that historical society is the work of creative imagination, the eruption of a radi-

cally 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 social-

historical creation means understanding the persistent misinterpretations of human imag-

ination 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 stand-

point, 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 ima-

ginary’, he writes ‘is the subject’s whole creation of a world for itself’. The impact of

psychoanalysis—or, at least, Castoriadis’s reinterpretation of Freud—is fundamental

in this connection. For Castoriadis’s theory of the social imaginary is not only pro-

foundly 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 Cas-

toriadis’s 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, non-

foundational. 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 (Castor-

iadis, 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 ‘recep-

tacle’ 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

Elliott 355



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’ repre-

sentation, the capacity of putting into image or making an image. This may appear self-

evident. But this image-making must at the same time relate to a drive, at a time when noth-

ing 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 soci-

ety’, 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 repre-

sentational pleasure of the unconscious monad, initially closed in upon itself and subse-

quently 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 Lacan’s 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 soci-

ety; 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: 182–183, my emphasis)

Castoriadis’s 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




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 Castoriadis’s account of creation which con-

strain, in turn, grasping the contours of ‘institutionalized individualism’ (see Adams,

2011; Elliott, 2003). Castoriadis’s 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 under-

scoring 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 Castoriadis’s

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 con-

sequence 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 globa-

lization. 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 satis-

faction 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 dead-

ening 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 contempo-

rary culture—the jamming of autonomous creative thought, as it were—with 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 inter-

subjectivity. 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 sur-

rounding 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 pro-

duces 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,

Elliott 357



semantic shifts—Kristeva 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 sym-

bolic 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 typi-

cally 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,

Marx’s thought, Freud’s unconscious, not to mention Zola J’accuse 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 genu-

inely courageous intellectual rebel and also an energetic campaigner for women’s rights.

The terrain on which Kristeva thinks societal rebellion can best be approached, however,

is that of psychoanalysis. Kristeva’s recent work develops, through a psychoanalytic

lens, a series of reflections on the spread of global political apathy (‘shouldn’t 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 devel-

oping, 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 histor-

ical 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 displace-

ment 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 Lacan’s account of the

symbolic order—the social and sexual system of patriarchal Law—with those multiple




psychic forces she terms ‘semiotic’. The semiotic, according to Kristeva, is ‘prolinguis-

tic’—semiotic 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 expe-

rience 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 univer-

sal. 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-song-

and-speech, sporting activities, concert-show-and-film attendance, educational and intellec-

tual 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)

Kristeva’s 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 experiences—from sporting activities to the practicalities of learning

and education—that are saturated with this originary imagination. All psychic activity,

says Kristeva, is ‘impregnated with fantasies’.

What is clear in Kristeva’s account of fantasy is that this imaginary domain is inex-

tricably 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 other’s

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 identi-

fication with the other’s desire. Notwithstanding that it is the inescapability of imaginary

Elliott 359



misrecognition that leaves the human subject to impute an imaginary fullness to the oth-

er’s desire which, in fact, pertains only to the representation (that is, the imaginary ple-

nitude 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 Kristeva’s 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; Kristeva’s point is that the semiotic functions equally to disturb and

disrupt social order. In political terms, Kristeva’s 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 iden-

tity has begun to stall in the face of globalizing social forces. Her political critique focuses

on how worldwide social transformations—and particularly European cultural shifts—are

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 differ-

ence, 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 intel-

lectual exile, anxious over the consequences of NATO culture and of transnational polit-

ical attempts in the wake of 9/11 to legislate the winners from the losers of globalization.

Kristeva’s 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 repres-

sion of desire. To this end, her social theory is full of sinuous reflection on the transfor-

mative power of grief, mourning and melancholia in public political life, coupled with a

detailed examination of cultural memory and the power of imagination. In Kristeva’s

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 sur-

rounding 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




more have become apparent. Like contemporary accounts that emphasize the plasticity,

liquidity and reflexivity of individualism, both Castoriadis and Kristeva—in their very differ-

ent ways—are 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 ‘gen-

eralized conformism’, the retreat to privatism. Similarly, Kristeva, over the period of the last

10 or so years, has delineated ‘new maladies of the soul’—of 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 transcen-

dent 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 individualism—no matter how limited or repressive—are 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, Kristeva’s 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 Kristeva’s 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 per-

manent 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

nevertheless—for a myriad of political reasons—become 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 authen-

tic 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

Elliott 361



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 con-

text. As Castoriadis explains:

if autonomous society is that society which self-institutes itself [s’auto-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 indefi-

nitely 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 concep-

tualization of utopian pragmatism at the level of institutionalized individualism. Let me

briefly expand upon my use of this term utopian pragmatism. Unlike mainstream social sci-

ence 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 pro-

cess of engagement with the self and the Other lies at the core of the social network—no 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 subject’s] own insti-

tuting 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 Kris-

teva, 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, open-

ing itself to the productive vitality of imagination; however, the possibility of such more crea-

tive lives and relationships are always negotiated within the forbidding, oppressive

framework of contemporary society and its symbolic structures of ideological distortion.




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 itself—through a variety of possible forms, from philosophy and the arts to

psychoanalysis itself—in 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 strug-

gle 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 auton-

omy 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 Castor-

iadis’s 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 cul-

tural 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 destruc-

tive, 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 rea-

lized. 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 con-

sumerism. ‘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 concep-

tual contributions of both Castoriadis and Kristeva might best be termed ‘utopian prag-

matism’. 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.

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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 Uni-

versity, 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




at about 80 academic and professional institutions worldwide. The author and editor of over 20

books and 60 articles in scholarly journals, Professor Elliott’s 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 Austra-

lia [email: [email protected]]

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