Interview of Daniel Mermet with Cornelius Castoriadis

Daniel Mermet — Why this title, The Rise of Insignificance? Is this the characteristic of the time? 

Cornelius Castoriadis - What characterizes the contemporary world are, of course, crises, contradictions, oppositions, fractures, etc., but what is most striking is precisely its insignificance. Let’s take the quarrel between the right and the left. Currently, it has lost its meaning. Not because there is no political quarrel, and even a very big political quarrel, but because both sides are saying the same thing. 

Since 1983, the socialists made a policy, then Balladur came, he made the same policy, then the socialists came back, they made with Bérégovoy the same policy, Balladur came back, he made the same policy, Chirac won the elections by saying: « I’m going to do something else », and he does the same policy. This distinction is meaningless. 

DM — By what mechanisms is this political class reduced to this impotence? That’s the big word today, impotence. 

CC - That’s not a big word and they are powerless for sure. The only thing they can do is to go with the flow, i.e. to apply the ultraliberal policy that is in vogue. The socialists did not do anything else and I do not believe that they would do anything else if they were in power. They are not politicians in my opinion, but politicians, in the sense of micro-politicians, people who chase votes by any means. 

DM — Political marketing? 

CC - It’s marketing, yes. They have no program. Their goal is to stay in power or to return to power, and for that they are capable of anything. Clinton campaigned solely on the basis of polls:  » If I say this, will it pass ? « . Each time taking the winning option for public opinion. As the other said:  » I am their leader, so I follow them.  » The fascinating thing about the times, as with all times, is how they conspire. There is an intrinsic link between this kind of nullity of politics, this becoming null of politics, and this insignificance in the other domains, in the arts, in philosophy or in literature. This is the spirit of the times: without any conspiracy of any power that could be designated, everything conspires, in the sense of breathing, in the same direction, for the same results, that is to say insignificance. 

DM — How to do politics? 

CC - Politics is a strange business. Even this policy. Why? Because it presupposes two capacities that have no intrinsic relationship. The first is to gain access to power. If you don’t get to power, you can have the best ideas in the world, but they are useless; there is an art to getting to power. The second capacity is, once in power, to do something with it, that is, to govern. Napoleon knew how to govern, Clemenceau knew how to govern, Churchill knew how to govern: all of these people are not in my political league, but I am describing a historical type. 

In the absolute monarchy, access to power was what? It was to flatter the king, it was to be in the good graces of Madame de Pompadour. Today, in our pseudo-democracy, access to power means being telegenic, sniffing out public opinion. Once in power, what do we do? What Mr. Chirac is doing now: nothing. We go with the flow. If necessary, one turns one’s back because one realizes that in order to gain power one was telling stories and that these stories are not applicable. 

DM — You say « pseudo-democracy »… 

CC - I have always thought that the so-called representative democracy is not a real democracy. Its representatives hardly represent the people who elect them. First, they represent themselves or special interests, lobbies, etc. And, even if this were not the case, to say:  » Someone will represent me for five years in an irrevocable way », it is equivalent to saying that I relinquish my sovereignty as a people. Rousseau already said it: the English believe they are free because they elect representatives every 5 years but they are only free one day every 5 years: the day of the election. 

And even this is not true: the election is rigged, not because the ballot boxes are stuffed, it is rigged because the options are defined in advance. No one has asked the people what they want to vote on. They say: « Vote for or against Maastricht », for example. But who made Maastricht? It’s not us. There is the wonderful sentence of Aristotle answering the question:  » Who is a citizen? A citizen is someone who is capable of governing and being governed.« Are there 40 million citizens in France right now? Why shouldn’t they be able to govern? Because the whole political life aims precisely at unlearning them to govern. It is designed to convince them that there are experts to whom they can entrust their cases. So there is a political counter-education. While people should be getting used to exercising all kinds of responsibilities and taking initiative, they are getting used to following or voting for options that others present to them. And since people are far from stupid, the result is that they believe less and less and become cynical, in a kind of political apathy. 

THE DISSOLUTION OF IDEOLOGIES 

DM — Citizen responsibility, democratic exercise, do you think it was better in the past ? That elsewhere, today, it is better than in France? 

CC - No, elsewhere, today, it is certainly not better, it can even be worse. Once again, the American elections show this. But in the past, it was better from two points of view. 

In modern societies, say from the American and French revolutions until about World War II, there was still a living social and political conflict. People were opposed. People were demonstrating. They did not demonstrate for such and such a line of the SNCF, I do not say that it is despicable, it is nevertheless an objective, but in the past the workers demonstrated or went on strike for political causes and not only for small corporatist interests. There were major issues that concerned all employees. These struggles have marked the last two centuries. But what we are seeing now is a decline in people’s activity. And this is a vicious circle. The more people withdraw from the activity, the more a few bureaucrats, politicians, so-called leaders, take over. They have a good justification:  » I take the initiative because people don’t do anything ». And the more these people dominate, the more the others say, « There’s no need to get involved, there are enough of them to take care of it, and there’s nothing we can do about it anyway. » That’s the first point of view. 

The second point of view, linked to the first, is the dissolution of the great political ideologies. Ideologies that were either revolutionary or truly reformist, that really wanted to change things in society. For a thousand and one reasons, these ideologies have been discredited, they have ceased to correspond to the times, to the aspirations of the people, to the situation of the society, to the historical experience. There was this huge event, the collapse of the Soviet Union and of communism. Can you point to a single person among the politicians, not to say the left-wing politicians, who has really thought about what happened and why it happened, and who has, as they say, learned from it? While an evolution of this type, first in its first phase the accession to monstrosity, totalitarianism, gulag, etc. and then in the collapse, deserved a very deep reflection and a conclusion on what a movement that wants to change the society can do, must do, must not do. Zero reflection! How do you expect the so-called people, the masses, to come to their own conclusions when they are not really enlightened? 

You were talking about the role of intellectuals: what do these intellectuals do? What did they do with Reagan, Thatcher and French socialism? They brought out the pure and hard liberalism of the beginning of the 19th century, the one that had been fought for 150 years and that would have led society to catastrophe because, finally, old Marx was not entirely wrong. If capitalism had been left to itself, it would have collapsed a hundred times over. 

There would have been a crisis of overproduction every year. Why didn’t it collapse? Because the workers fought. They imposed wage increases, creating huge internal consumer markets. They imposed reductions in working hours, which absorbed all the technological unemployment. Now we are surprised that there is unemployment. But since 1940 the working time has not significantly decreased. We are currently nitpicking:  » 39 hours », « 38 1/2 », « 37 hours 3/4 », it’s grotesque! So, there has been this return of liberalism, and I don’t see how Europe can get out of this crisis. The Liberals tell us:  » We must trust the market ». But what these neo-liberals say today, academic economists themselves refuted in the 1930s. They have shown that therecan be no equilibrium in capitalist societies. These economists were not revolutionaries, nor were they Marxists! They have shown that all the talk by liberals about the virtues of the market guaranteeing the best possible allocation of resources and the fairest possible distribution of income is nonsense! All this has been demonstrated, and never refuted. But there is this great economic-political offensive of the governing and dominant layers that can be symbolized by the names of Reagan and Thatcher, and even Mitterrand, for that matter! He said, « Well, you’ve had your fun. Now, we’re going to lay you off, we’re going to streamline the industry, we’re going to eliminate the « bad fat », as Mr. Juppé says, and then you’ll see that the market, in the long run, will guarantee your well-being. « In the long run. Meanwhile, there is 12.5% official unemployment in France! 

DM — Why is there no opposition to this liberalism ? 

CC - I don’t know, it’s extraordinary. There has been talk of a kind of terrorism of the single thought, that is to say of a non-thought. It is unique in that it is the first thought that is an integral non-thought. A single liberal thought that no one dares to oppose. Currently, there is a kind of victorious discourse of the right that is not a discourse, that are affirmations, an empty discourse. And behind this speech, there is something else, which is heavier. 

What was the liberal ideology in its heyday? Around 1850, it was a great ideology because people believed in progress. « Get rich!  » These liberals believed that progress would lead to the elevation of economic well-being. But, even when one did not get rich, in the exploited classes, one went towards less work, towards less arduous work, to be less stultified by the industry. This was the big theme of the time. Benjamin Constant says: « The workers can’t vote because they are dumbed down by industry (he says it outright, people were honest back then!), therefore it is necessary a censal suffrage. « But later, the working time decreased, there was literacy, there was education, there was enlightenment, which is no longer the subversive Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, but still enlightenment, which spreads in society. Science develops, humanity becomes more human, societies become more civilized and, little by little, asymptotically, we will arrive at a society where there will be practically no more exploitation: this representative democracy will tend to become a true democracy. 

DM — Not bad? 

CC - Not bad. Except it didn’t work and it doesn’t work like that. The rest has been achieved, but men have not become more human, society has not become more civilized, capitalists have not become more gentle, as we can see now. It is not the fault of the men, it is the system. The result is that, from the inside, people no longer believe in this idea. The mood, the general disposition is one of resignation. Today, resignation dominates, even among the representatives of liberalism. What is the big argument right now?  » That may be bad, but the other side of the alternative is worse.  » It all comes down to this. And it’s true that it froze a lot of people. They say to themselves,  » If we move too much, we’re headed for a new gulag. » That’s what’s behind this ideological exhaustion of our time. I believe that we will only emerge from this situation through the resurgence of a powerful critique of the system and a renaissance of people’s activity, of their participation in the common good. It is a tautology to say that, but we must strive, we must hope and we must work in this direction. 

DM Political elite reduced to serving as stooges of the World Company, watchdogs, media that have betrayed their role of counter-power, these are some of the causes and symptoms of this rise in insignificance. 

CC - But at the moment, there is a sense of renewed civic activity. Here and there, we are beginning to understand that the « crisis » is not a fatality of modernity to which we must submit, « adapt » on pain of archaism. Then arises the problem of the role of the citizens and the competence of each one to exercise the democratic rights and duties in the soft and beautiful utopia goal to leave the generalized conformism. 

EDUCATION AND PARTICIPATION 

DM — Your colleague and compère Edgar Morin talks about the generalist and the specialist. Politics requires both. The generalist who knows almost nothing about a bit of everything and the specialist who knows everything about one thing but nothing about the rest. How to be a good citizen? 

CC - This dilemma has been posed since Plato. Plato said that philosophers should rule, they who are above specialists. In Plato’s theory, they have a view of the whole. The other term of the alternative was the Athenian democracy. What were the Athenians doing? Here is something very interesting. It was the Greeks who invented elections. This is a historically attested fact. They may have been wrong, but they invented elections! Who was elected in Athens? Magistrates were not elected. Magistrates were appointed by lot or by rotation. For Aristotle, remember, a citizen is one who is capable of governing and being governed. Everyone is capable of governing, so we draw lots. Why is this? Because politics is not a matter for specialists. There is no science of politics. There is an opinion, the doxa of the Greeks, there is noepisteme⁽¹⁾.

education of citizens, which does not exist at all today. 

Recently, a magazine published a statistic indicating that 60% of MPs admit that they do not understand economics. Deputies in France who decide, who decide all the time! They vote on the budget, raise or lower taxes, etc. The truth is that these MPs, like the ministers, are subservient to their technicians. They have their experts, but they also have their biases or preferences. And if you follow closely the functioning of a government, of a big bureaucracy as I have followed it in other circumstances, you see that those who lead rely on experts, but they choose the experts who share their opinions. You will always find an economist to tell you,  » Yes, we need to do that. » Or a military expert who will tell you, « Yes, we need nuclear weapons » or  » We don’t need nuclear weapons. » Everything and its opposite. It’s a completely stupid game and that’s how we are governed now. So Morin’s and Plato’s dilemma: specialists or generalists. Specialists serving people, that’s the question. Not in the service of a few politicians. And people learning to govern by governing. 

DM You said « education ». And you say, « That’s not the case today. More generally, what kind of education do you see? How to share knowledge? 

CC - There are many things that would have to change before we could talk about real educational activity on a political level. The main education in politics is active participation in business, which implies a transformation of institutions that encourages and enables this participation, whereas the current institutions push people away, away, away from participating in business. But that is not enough. They must be educated in public affairs. But if you look at education today, it has nothing to do with that. You learn specialized things. Of course, we learn to read and write. That’s fine, we need everyone to be able to read and write. Besides, among the Athenians, there were no illiterates; almost everyone knew how to read and that’s why laws were written on marble. Everyone could read and therefore the famous adage  » No one is supposed to ignore the law » made sense. Today, you can be convicted for committing an offence when you cannot know the law and you are always told: « You are not supposed to ignore the law ». So education should be much more focused on the common thing. We should make people understand the mechanisms of the economy, the mechanisms of society, politics, etc. We are not able to teach history. History as it is taught to children bores them when it could fascinate them. We should teach a true anatomy of contemporary society: how it is, how it works. 

NEITHER GOD, NOR CAESAR, NOR TRIBUNE! 

DM You have spoken and written a lot about the May ’68 movement, which, with Edgar Morin and Claude Lefort, you called the « breach ». Today, this period is a golden age for young people who regret not having lived it. If we think back to that time, we are struck by the blindness, these revolutionary, romantic, absolute, doctrinaire behaviors, without any basis, in complete ignorance. When people say to me today, « You’re lucky, you lived through ’68, » I say, « Hold on folks, the cultural level, the level of knowledge was much lower than it is today. » Am I right? 

CC - Yes, you are right, from a certain point of view which is very important. But it’s not so much a question of knowledge level, I think. It is the enormous domination of ideology in the strict sense and, I would say, in the bad sense of the term. The Maoists, we can’t say that they didn’t know, they were indoctrinated or they indoctrinated themselves. Why did they accept indoctrination? Why were they indoctrinating themselves? Because they needed to be indoctrinated. They needed to believe. And this has been the great plague of the revolutionary movement since the beginning. 

DM — But man is a religious animal. 

CC - Man is a religious animal, and that is not a compliment at all. Aristotle, whom I quote over and over again and whom I revere, said something once that is really a big… well, you can’t say blunder when it comes to Aristotle, but still. When he says: « Man is an animal who desires knowledge », it is false. Man is not an animal that desires knowledge. Man is an animal who desires belief, who desires the certainty of a belief, hence the hold of religions, hence the hold of political ideologies. 

In the labor movement at the beginning, there was a very critical attitude. When you take these two verses from the Internationale, which is still the song of the Commune, take the second verse: « There is no supreme savior / Neither God, nor religion, nor Caesar, nor Napoleon III -, nor tribune », exit Lenin, right? People had this need for belief. They filled it as they could, some with Maoism, others with Trotskyism and even with Stalinism, since one of the paradoxical results of May ’68 was not only to bring flesh to the Maoist or Trotskyist skeleton, but to increase again the recruitment of the CP, in spite of the absolutely monstrous attitude of the CP during the events and during the Grenelle agreements. 

Today, how are we wiser than in May 68? I think that perhaps as a result of both the aftermath of May and the general evolution of society, people have become much more critical. This is very important. Of course, there is a fringe that still seeks faith rather in Scientology, sects or fundamentalism (but that in other countries, not so much here). But people have become much more critical, much more skeptical. This also inhibits them from acting, of course. 

Pericles, in his funeral oration to the Athenians, says:  » We are the only ones in whom reflection does not inhibit action.  » This is admirable! He adds,  » The others, either they don’t think and they are reckless, they commit absurdities, or, thinking, they do nothing because they say to themselves: there is this speech and there is the opposite speech.« We are currently going through a phase of inhibition, that’s for sure. Once bitten, twice shy of cold water. They have tasted all this, they say to themselves: « Great speeches and all the rest, that’s enough!  » Indeed, we don’t need big speeches, we need real speeches. This is what does not exist in a social projection, if I may say so. 

DM — Who do you want to fight with? And against whom and against what? 

CC - I want to wrestle with almost everyone. With the whole population, or almost, and against the system, and therefore against the 3%, the 5% of people who are really staunch and unyielding defenders of the system. This is the division, in my opinion. I believe that at the moment, everyone in society except 3 or 5% has a personal and fundamental interest in seeing things change. 

DM But what would you tell the younger generation? 

CC - If you were asking it as an organizational question, I would say there is no answer. At the moment, this is also the question. One of my friends from the magazine Socialisme ou Barbarie, Daniel Mothé, who is still my friend, had written this extraordinary sentence: « Even the Roman Empire, in disappearing, left behind it ruins; the workers’ movement, in disappearing, left behind it only waste. » How do we get organized now? The question is: « How can we get organized?« This question comes up against the same obstacle, i.e.-that is, that people are not active enough right now to do something like this.

To take on an organization like this, you have to be willing to sacrifice more than an hour on a Saturday night. This involves a lot of work and very few people are willing to do it at the moment. That is why I have been describing the era since 1960 as one of privatization. People are withdrawn into their small environment, the nuclear family, not even the big family. In May 68, we used to say  » Métro-boulot-dodo « , now it’s  » Métro-boulot-télé-dodo » .

DM — And no job ? Can we erase work? 

CC - Metro-work-television-sleep and ANPE. 

DM — And fear of losing the job! General panic. It’s, « I don’t have any more or I’m not going to have any more. » 

CC - Yes, absolutely. 

THE IRREDUCIBLE DESIRE 

DM : The richness of your thinking is also this psychoanalytical view of the world. It is not so common to have several perspectives. Raoul Vaneigem has published a book with the title: We who desire without end.

CC - We who are delusional? Oh, yes! We who are delirious! (laughs)

DM — What do you think of this irreducible desire that makes history continue ? 

CC - But, in any case, there is an irreducible desire. Really… This is a big chapter. Moreover, this has not always been true, it is a relatively modern phenomenon. If you take archaic societies or traditional societies, there is no irreducible desire. We are not talking about desire from the psychoanalytical point of view. We talk about desire as it is transformed by the socialization of people. 

Now, precisely, in the modern era, there is a liberation in every sense of the word, in relation to the constraints of the socialization of individuals. For example, we say:  » You will take a woman from this clan or that family. You will have one woman in your life. If you have two, or two men, it will be on the sly, it will be a transgression. You will have a social status, it will be that and not something else. » 

There is something wonderful about Proust’s world of Combray. In Proust’s family, someone from the very good bourgeoisie, the family he describes who married a duchess or a princess, was fallen. Even if he had money, even if he became someone who went out of his caste to climb higher, he became a gigolo. And to go any higher was to fall. But today, we have entered an era of unlimitedness in all areas and we have the desire for infinity. But this liberation is, in a sense, a great conquest. There is no question of going back to rehearsal societies. But we also have to learn — and this is one of my very big themes — to learn to limit ourselves, individually and collectively. And capitalist society today is a society that, in my eyes, is heading for the abyss in every respect because it is a society that does not know how to self-limit. And a truly free society, an autonomous society, as I call it, must know how to limit itself .

DM — To limit is to prohibit. How to forbid yourself? 

CC - No, not prohibit in the repressive sense. But to know that there are things that you can’t do or that you shouldn’t even try to do or that you shouldn’t desire. For example, the environment. We live in a free society on this planet, I think for example of the Aegean Sea, of the snow-capped mountains, I think of the view of the Pacific from a corner of Australia, I think of Bali, of India, of the French countryside that is being demolished and desertified. So many wonders in the process of demolition. 

I think we should be the gardeners of this planet. It should be cultivated. Cultivate it as it is and for itself. And find our life, our place in relation to that. This is a huge task. And all this could absorb a large part of people’s leisure time, freed from stupid, productive, repetitive work, etc. But this, obviously, is very far, not only from the current system but from the current dominant imagination. The imagination of our time is the imagination of unlimited expansion, the accumulation of junk : a TV in every room, a micro-computer in every room… this is what must be destroyed. The system relies on this imaginary that is there and that works. 

DM : What you are talking about here, all the time, is freedom ? 

CC - Yes.

DM Difficult freedom? 

CC - Oh yes! Freedom is very difficult. 

DM — Difficult democracy? 

CC - Democracy is difficult because of freedom, and freedom is difficult because of democracy. Because it is very easy to let go, man is a lazy animal, as we said. Here again, I return to my ancestors, there is a wonderful sentence from Thucydides:  » You have to choose: rest or be free.  » I think it was Pericles who said this to the Athenians,  » If you want to be free, you must work. » You can’t rest. You can’t sit in front of the TV. You are not free when you are in front of the TV. You think you are free by zapping like a fool, you are not free, it is a false freedom. Freedom is not just Buridan’s donkey choosing between two piles of hay. Freedom is activity. And it is an activity that at the same time is self-limiting, i.e. it can do everything but it does not have to do everything. This is the big problem, for me, of democracy and individualism. 

DM Freedom is the limits? To philosophize is to establish limits? 

CC - No, freedom is activity, and activity that knows how to set its own limits. To philosophize is to think. It is the thought that knows how to recognize that there are things that we do not know and that we will never know… 

November 1996.