Modern Imaginaries and Social Reflexivity: Projects of Collective Self-Determination and Their Tensions

Craig Browne

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Chapter 5 Modern Imaginaries and Social Reflexivity: Projects of Collective Self-Determination and Their Tensions

于Thinking with Castoriadis: Antipodean Essays

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Craig Browne

Craig Browne
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类型:: 章节

Page Range:: 86–109

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004747418_006

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Abstract

The article offers a somewhat ironic reflection on the work of Cornelius Castoriadis and his theory of social autonomy. The essay notes that Castoriadis limits the project of autonomy to Ancient Greece and Western modernity and yet opposes the imaginary of autonomy to the capitalist imaginary. The analysis offered by the article upholds the latter contrast and yet also undermines it. Institutions of shared significations such as science indicate that modernity entails a heightened capacity of society to act on itself. However, such social reflexivity is also evident in a broad range of modern collective subjectivities and forms of collective self-determination including those of class and demos. Moreover, the behavior of these collective subjectivities regularly assumes organizational forms that are more consistent with a capitalist imaginary than with any anti-capitalist imaginary. The essay suggests that, though opposed, modern capitalist and anti-capitalist imaginaries are often interconnected. In modern societies, rational mastery and autonomy, control and self-determination end up being antinomies. That is, they exist together in a state of equal validity. Modernity, in consequence, can be understood as an intertwined, antinomical world of institutions and instituting actions, narratives and norms, subjection and subjectivity, contingency and control, impermanence and durability, and law and bureaucracy. The article concludes with the observation that such antinomies are fundamentally conditioned by the imaginary creation of meaning and the way that the radical imagination integrates deep-going contradictions and turns them into socially effective antinomies.

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Thinking with Castoriadis: Antipodean Essays

丛编： Social and Critical Theory, 卷： 35

ISBN:: 9789004747418

出版社:: Brill

印刷出版日期:: 21 Nov 2025

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- Philosophy
  - Social & Political Philosophy
- Social Sciences
  - Sociology & Anthropology

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Chapter 5 Modern Imaginaries and Social Reflexivity: Projects of Collective Self-Determination and Their Tensions

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