THE PHILOSOPHY OF MULTIPLICITY AND INDETERMINACY NIETZSCHE, CASTORIADIS, AND THE POLITICS OF THE REAL (DRAFT NOT FOR

R CITATION) Fouad Kalouche Philosophy Department, Albright College This paper is about the philosophy of multiplicity and indeterminacy. It starts out with a close analysis of Friedrich Nietzsches philosophy of multiplicity and indeterminacy and some of his contributions, including his understanding of the multiple self, that contest the politics of the real. The paper then briefly introduces some of Cornelius Castoriadis philosophical contributions, including his treatment of the social imaginary, and highlights the importance he accorded to indeterminacy in his assessment of politics. The last part of the paper offers revised analyses of the multiple self and the social imaginary and provides an application of the philosophy of multiplicity and indeterminacy by attempting to explain what is termed globalization as a domination of social imaginaries. Nietzsche, 1862, age 18, simple, playful, with an overdose of Guizot and Mundt 1, writes, in Fatum und Geschichte. Gedanken, about monstrous spheres that grow larger around everyone: ones history, history of people, history of society, history of humanity, etc. Each one of these histories determines various conditions and circumstances that are shared by other histories, and where the innermost spheres are englobed by outermost spheres. The particular histories introduced by the young Nietzsche ( Volker, Gesellschaft, und Menscheitgeschichte) englobe each other and are englobed by larger spheres that may extend infinitely to encompass the history of the world, of the universewhich are impossible to conceive by human beings. 2 The singularity or difference at the level of the innermost sphere where are located the histories of particular human beings is called individuality by Nietzsche, but even this spherelike the others cannot be circumscribed for it includes hereditary characteristics that can be traced back to parents, grandparents, ancestors, peoples, etc. As early as 1862, Nietzsche had embarked, without knowing it, on the task of reinterpreting the world from the perspective of multiplicity. Castoriadis. 1964. He purportedly coins the term social imaginary. In 1974, he writes: The imaginary of which I am speaking.. is the ceaseless and essentially indeterminate (socialhistorical and psychical) creation of figures/forms/images upon which anything/everything relies.

1 All references to Nietzsches philosophical writings will be drawn from the Giorgio Colli and Mazzino
Montinari edition of Nietzsche Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (KGW) , except when specified. References to the posthumous fragments and to the posthumous notes will only list dates of the fragments or notes, as per the KGW division, as well as fragment or note numbers. Similarly, references to the letters of Nietzsche will be drawn from the Colli and Montinari edition of Smtliche Briefe: Kritische Studienausgabe (KSB), except when specified, and only letter numbers and dates will be listed throughout. This will make it easier to refer to any Colli and Montinari edition of Nietzsches complete works, including the English edition underway (through Stanford University Press). Since only a few volumes of the English edition are already published, I have had to translate texts that are not yet available in English. I have also taken the liberty to revise English translations of available texts whenever I deemed them unsatisfactory. Walter De Gruyter GMBH & Co., publishers of the KGW, granted permission to reproduce and translate the larger sections of the posthumous fragments and notes included here. 2 Posthumous Notes Autumn 1858-Autumn 1862, 13[6], Fatum und Geschichte. Gedanken. David B. Allison pointed out to me that Richard Perkins has translated into English the two pieces in question here as Fate and History and Fate and Free Will. A French translation by Max Marcuzzi can be found in Philosophie, N. 32, automne 1991, Paris: Editions Minuit, pp. 3-10.

What we call reality and rationality are some of its working(s). 3 Castoriadis works with the triad Psyche, Individual, Subject. He introduces the Social-Historical as the open stream of the collective anonymous, created by a Social Imaginary he equates with the instituting society or with social imaginary significations. Psyche/soma is the representative, affective, intentional flux. While Psyche is created by a Radical Imaginary as the site of creation (through representation, affects, and intention), this psyche is socialized into an individual through the Social-Historical, and in turn produced into a subject through institutions. The act of institution takes place, however, through a magma of significations that can only be grasped by humans through an identitary-ensemblist (ensembliste-identitaire) or ensedic organization. The social-historical, or society (since history and society cannot be distinguished), can only be described as the sum total of legein and teukhein, the first designating the ensedic conditions of the social representingsaying, and the second designating the ensedic conditions of the social doing. Both implicate each other, both are intrinsically inherent and impossible one without the other. The materiality of society/history lies in its indefinite-indeterminate character, apeiron, determined by its privation of determinacy; of always becoming, aei gignomenon.4
PART ONE - NIETZSCHE AND MULTIPLICITY

Singular Individuals and History Nietzsche focuses his attention on the singular individual (der Einzelne) in the late 1860s.5 In a few notes dating back to Autumn 1867-Spring 1868, Nietzsche distinguishes between a history of ideas (Geschichte des Denkens) and a history of drives (Geschichte der Triebe) and limits the role of the singular individual to producing great thoughts and to influencing the multitude: Only the singular individual can produce a great thought On the other hand, the drives of the multitude are much more powerful than those of the individual. 6 [] history is nothing but the history of the multitude, a history on which the singular personality ( die einzeln<e> Persnlichkeit) has no influence except in as much as it acts upon the multitude7 [] Thus the task of the historian is to basically recognize needs (Bedrfnisse), those of the multitude: these needs may sometimes be those brought about by strong minds. The value of 3 Preface, LInstitution Imaginaire de La SocitIISSeuil, 1975.

4 IIS, p. 234: son caractre dindfini-indtermin, apeiron, determin par sa privation de determination;
de toujours devenant, aei gignomenon. 5 These notes as well as other writings of the 1860s, including those used in what follows, have been largely influenced by Nietzsches readings in his earliest period. I reluctantly separate this early period of Nietzsche, extending from 1858 to 1865, from the period following his encounter with Schopenhauers texts (although it would be silly to claim that there is a definite clean cut between any one of Nietzsches period and the other). During this early period, Nietzsche read Goethe, Hlderlin, Byron, Classical Greek and Latin writers, and the Presocratics. The most relevant readings to the following section dealing with singular individuals, personalities, history, and culture are Goethe, Guizot, and Mundt amongst others as supported by Nietzsches notebooks of 1862 on the history of the British Revolution and on the history of culture. Cf., in particular, Posthumous Notes [Nachgelassene Aufzeichnungen] Autumn 1858-Autumn 1862, 12A[4] Guizot, Sebentes Buch, 12A[5], and 12A[6] Geschichte der Gesellschaft von Theodor Mundt. It should also be noted that, around the same time, Nietzsche was reading Emerson whom he quotes in various instances. 6 Posthumous Notes [Nachgelassene Aufzeichnungen] Autumn 1864-Spring 1868, 56[2]. 7 Posthumous Notes Autumn 1864-Spring 1868, 56[4].

singular personalities lies in just that: some of them exhibit the needs of the multitude, while a few of them create new needs.8 Nietzsche considered that great ideas either contribute towards the control of the masses or towards embellishing the sea of history. Politics is specifically about the needs of the masses, about leading people through certain drives towards the accomplishment of an idea. 9 Since history is but the drives and needs of the masses, only drives and needs can affect it: one has to extirpate need with need and that is why religion, which is based on intuitions that are produced by drives, which means by needs [], can be a more effective historical force. 10 On the other hand, philosophy, the natural sciences, and other such occupations are mainly useful in keeping human beings from experimenting with other human beings, with social reforms, or the like.11 Philosophy and science are not expected then to intervene in politics that alone sets norms and traditions to lead the masses. Politics is the predominant force that, through certain drives and needs of the masses, controls the masses and leads them towards a specific goal associated with the accomplishment of an idea. Mere conceptions or ideas, however great they may be, cannot have any effects on history unless they are couched in needs. Thus any new creations can have little effect on politics, unless they can create strong drives built on the needs of the masses that can oppose the stabilizing forces at workforces that control the masses and that set goals for them along with the institutions that make the attainment of such goals the predominant way of living. To make the point clearer, let me quote Nietzsches definition of historydeclared in a language close to the proclamation of the will to power: What is history other than the struggle of infinitely diverse and innumerable interests for their own existence? 12 Such diverse and innumerable interests are not very different from forces at the basis of the world as later described by Nietzsche. This definition of history sheds a light on the earlier discussion of the relation of the singular individual to culture; the singular individual represents a force within culture, a force that may have different degrees of effectiveness in shaping or transforming the dominant forces associated with politics. But at this stage of his life, Nietzsche doubted the extent to which singular individuals can actually affect the predominant culture, and that is partially why he was so interested in the Pre-Platonic philosophers. What would become a struggle between culture and philosophy was nonexistent in the healthy culture of the Hellenes before Plato, according to Nietzsche. Even if one can reduce the whole issue of a healthy culture to wishful thinking, there is something to be said about what Nietzsche construed as healthy. The unity of style of a healthy culture, as imagined by Nietzsche, is related to an aesthetic valuation, and it is the creative effects of singular individuals contributing towards embellishing the world that interested him the most throughout this period extending from about 1865 to 1875. The following is the passage in which Nietzsche describes the possible effects of great ideas, where he highlights the aesthetic effect and includes the effect on politics: What is history other than the struggle of infinitely diverse and innumerable interests for their own existence? The great ideas, in which some believe they can take control (aufzufassen) of this struggle, are the weakened reflexes of great or small geniuses swimming on the surface of a troubled sea. They do not dominate the sea, but they sometimes embellish the

8 Posthumous Notes Autumn 1864-Spring 1868, 56[5]. 9 Posthumous Notes Autumn 1864-Spring 1868, 56[2]. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid., 56[7]: Was ist Geschichte anders als der Kampf unendlich verschiedner und zahlloser Interessen
fr ihre Existenz?

waves in the eyes of the spectator. But whether the light comes from the moon, the sun, or from lamps, it is indifferent: at the most the wave itself is somewhat more or less lit. The problem is to make out of the light a fire that consummate the waves; that is to transform in will the great visions. Which may also be madness 13 This paragraph exemplifies the difference between a political effect and an aesthetic one. The fire that can consummate the waves indicates a transformative force that can change the course of history, a great vision that can be realized in will and thus have political implications, becoming a force that can lead the masses. Such a transformation is not only rare, it is also described as madness, a madness that will haunt Nietzsche throughout the next period of his life when an ethics associated with this kind of political transformation would drive him. On the Way to Multiplicity: Nietzsche contra the Politics of the Real The infinite, writes Nietzsche in 1873, is the primordial fact: the only thing to explain would be the origin of the finite 14 and that is the task that Nietzsche will embark on. While the infinite is located in nature, the finite is attributed to humans. 15 Nietzsche sees anthropomorphism everywhere, from the Greeks to Kant: The human being discovers only very gradually how infinitely complicated the world is. At first he conceives it to be wholly simple, that is, as superficial as he himself is. [ ] the human being is acquainted with the world to the extent that he is acquainted with himself: that is, its profundity is disclosed to him to the extent that he is amazed at himself and his own complexity. 16 But this anthropomorphism is not opposed to a truth by Nietzsche; it is but a means to exemplifying the relationality and interconnectedness between humans and the world, between how humans relate to themselves and how they interpret the world. Humans project their own limits onto the world, and it is only through exploring and discovering ones complexity that one can relate to the complexity of the world. The finite at the basis of human beings has been constructed through a history of errors that Nietzsche attempts to untangle. The more humans are reduced and limited, the more the world is reduced and limited. It is precisely this doubled reductionat the basis of which lies the distinction between finite and infinite, definite and indefinite, eternal and ephemeralin which religion, morality, and metaphysics have been engaged. If religion contributed towards the division of interior and exterior, between an inner and outer world, it must have contributed towards the projection of form onto nature: there is no form in nature, because there is no distinction between inner and outer. 17 Similarly, morality must have participated, through its imposition of limiting valuations and its separation between good and bad, acceptable and unacceptable, in the coming about of making of all knowledge [] by means of separation, delimitation, restriction. 18 It is particularly words that are the most misleading since in most cases, the unity of the word does not guarantee at all the unity of

13 Ibid., 56[7]. 14 Posthumous Fragments Summer 1872-Winter 1873-1874, 19[139]. 15 Ibid., 19[133]. 16 Ibid., 19[118], translated by Richard T. Gray, in The Complete Works of Nietzsche, Unpublished
Writings from the period of Unfashionable Observations, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995, pp. 40-41. References to anthropomorphism abound in Nietzsches writings of the period (cf., for example, Ibid., 19[37], 19[116] and 19[125]). 17 Ibid., 19[144]. Also cf. The Anti-Christ and Beyond Good and Evil, Part Three. 18 Ibid., 19[141]. Also cf. Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil, Part Five.

the thing19 and it is metaphysics that led, through the belief in absolute substances and in identical things, to the affirmation of a world where things are isolated and unconditioned.20 Nietzsche is not separating what is here called religion, morality, and metaphysics from their historical development. These are nothing but forces that became dominant through an inevitable process, and what Nietzsche wants to achieve by attacking them is to undermine their effects and to try to replace them with drives that he considers to be more concordant with the drive for life. The main problem he confronts is the separation of the drive for knowledge from the drive for life through the imposition of truth as value, undermining any value to life through the development of what he calls ascetic ideals enforced by religions such as Christianity and a reactive slave morality associated with the mentality of the herd. 21 Philosophy, according to Nietzsche, can no longer restrain the unleashed drive for knowledge, which increasingly judges according to the degree of certainty and seeks ever smaller objects. 22 The drive for knowledge has unleashed reductive processes that have been targeting the multiplicity and flux at the basis of life. In addressing the historical development of such a state, Nietzsche highlights the organic development of humans, but he believes that it is only through this development that one can arrive at seeing complexity and multiplicity. 23 In a way, he is ascribing to fatum the possibility of unveiling the complexity that is hidden and forbidden. Fatum is the necessary conditions pertaining to ones individual fatum and to the conditioning circumstances within which one flourishes. The individual fatum is the stratification and the permeation of conditions that make ones conditioning and that include psychophysiological and inherited conditions as well as the particular experiences and means of evaluation and interpretation acquired by the innermost circle or sphere of personal history via the englobing circles or spheres of various histories. The conditioning circumstances are the outermost circles or spheres that englobe the innermost ones and that include but are not limited to the dominant forces that provide common means of evaluating and interpreting experiences and of relating to the world. The innocence of becoming as it applies to ones individual fatum is associated with a becoming fatum whereby one is actively engaged in reassessing and transforming acquired means of evaluation and interpretation while accepting ones fatum as a becoming what one is. Becoming what one is entails liberating ones personal history from the chains of common opinion and dominant traditions and relating to the multiplicity at the basis of the universe through an approach that accentuates flux and change but that is rooted in ones conditioningan approach from different perspectives. The innocence of becoming as it applies to the conditioning circumstances is associated with a destruction applied to the dominant conditions that have historically been able to set a value outside the realm of becoming and that provided means of interpreting and evaluating the world based on a foundational being built on an illusory (or rather transposed) immutability, distinctness, and identity at the basis of the universe. Such dominant conditions associated with various human institutions (such as religion, morality, metaphysics) controlled by a drive for knowledge can be reassessed in such a way to reveal an infinite horizon of values and interpretations that were hidden and forbidden, and to privilege a drive for life that can better serve humans in a universe at the basis of which a multiplicity of forces is constantly transforming it, making it become what it is. But in order to

19 Cf. Human, All Too Human I, #14 and Posthumous Fragments Summer 1872-Winter 1873-1874,
30[30]. 20 Cf. Human, All Too Human I, #16 and #18. Also cf. Beyond Good and Evil, Part One, and Twilight of the Idols, Reason in Philosophy and The Four Great Errors. 21 Cf. Genealogy of Morals and Beyond Good and Evil, Part Five and Part Nine #260. 22 Posthumous Fragments Summer 1872-Winter 1873-1874, 19[37]. 23 Cf., for example, Human All Too Human I, #18; Human All Too Human II, The Traveler and His Shadow, #11 and #67; and Posthumous Fragments 1876-1878, 23[26].

reassess these conditioning circumstances, one needs to reassess ones own conditioning, and that is why it is impossible to separate a liberation of oneself in relation to the chain of common opinions (becoming a multiple self) from the attack on the dominant values in an attempt to transform them by introducing new values as new needs. In order to start seeing ones complexity and project it onto the world, it is essential to open up the horizon of what has been hidden and forbidden and to allow for that innocence of becoming. It is in the name of an unspeakable complexity that Nietzsche embarks on attacking a knowledge that is falsification of all that is polymorphous and undecipherable, by reducing it to the identical, analogous, and decipherable. 24 He attacks metaphysical concepts and grammatical constructs in the name of a multiplicity that is always chosen and assembled through a reductive interpretation claiming to be explanation. 25 It is the multiplicity of perspectives 26 that led him to declare a perspectivism27 opposed to a causality founded on teleology, 28 opposed to an ontology based on unity and permanencea transposition of human organization, 29 opposed to an epistemology only made possible through a belief in being and in a science that seduces by number and logic.30 He embarks on a critique of big words 31 and links language and communication to consciousness and to the role of morality and religion in setting ideals and imposing values that forbid certain experiencesin the same way that he describes metaphysics as hiding various perspectives and interpretations of the world. Nietzsches ethics of destruction is a path towards a hidden and forbidden multiplicity. It is a path of liberation from ideals inspired by moral and religious values whose aim is forbidding certain ways of living. It is also a reassessment of an ontology and an epistemology inspired by a metaphysics whose sole purpose is simplifying the complex and hiding different ways of relating to the world. Religion and morals instill fear in human beings and require blind obedience to the authority of tradition, and wherever there is a community, there must be morality, according to Nietzsche. It is to this community that one must turn in order to understand the origin of moral and religious valuations.32 Nietzsche continuously claims that consciousness (or selfconsciousness) is but a communal tool developed through communication, a superficial tool that undermines the multiplicity at the basis of the singular experiences of humans. 33 From On Truth and Lying in an Extra-Moral Sense, written in 1873, to some fragments written in the Spring of 1888, he constantly went back to analyzing language, signs, symbols, gestures, sounds, concepts, categories, and whatever relates to communication. In all of these analyses, Nietzsche highlights the chaos that is at work in ourselves, a chaos he didnt know whether he should attribute to thought, to feeling, or to will. He eventually opts for using thought as well as feelings, where thought is as involuntary as passions, feelings, emotions, and impulses, and he attributes chaos to each and every one of those, as well as to many other forces and drives that take place

24 Cf. Posthumous Fragments Autumn 1884-Autumn 1885, 34[252] as well as 34[46] and 34[249]. 25 Cf. Posthumous Fragments Autumn 1884-Autumn 1885, 38[14], 40[20], 40[23], 40[38], 40[39],
Posthumous Fragments Autumn 1885-Autumn 1887, 1[115], and 2[82] and 2[86]. 26 Cf. Posthumous Fragments Autumn 1885-Autumn 1887, 1[128]. 27Cf. Ibid., 1[115], 1[120], and 7[60]. Also cf. Posthumous Fragments Autumn 1884-Autumn 1885, 40[39]. 28 Posthumous Fragments Autumn 1885-Autumn 1887, 2[83]. 29 Ibid., 2[87]. 30 Cf. Ibid., 2[91], 5[10], 5[12], and 5[14]. 31 Cf., for example, 11[135], 11[136] and 11[143]: Critique of big words: Truth, Justice, Love, Peace, Virtue, Freedom, Goodness, Honesty, Genius, Wisdom. 32 Daybreak, Book I, #9, and Posthumous Fragments Summer 1882-Spring 1884, 8[26] and 24[16]. 33 Cf., for example, Posthumous Fragments Summer 1882-Spring 1884, 7[126], 24[16]; Posthumous Fragments Spring-Autumn 1884, 25[168], 25[327], 25[336], 25[359], 25[365], 25[369], 25[405],26[49], and 26[52].

unconsciously but constantly within us and as us. 34 Communication plays a reductive role, fixing and logicizing the world in ways that serve communal organization, Nietzsche argues, and it is that political need, the need for stability and organization that is at the basis of the reduction of the plurality of lifeto representations of the intellect, to reason, and to logic. 35 Ethics against Politics: From Consciousness to Multiple Self Consciousness is described as an organ of control and it is precisely what escapes consciousness, what is not hidden by it, that is the most personal and individual. I will focus in the following analyses on Gay Science #354 and will draw on the fifth book of Gay Science, written in 1887, and on other texts written by Nietzsche around the same time to show the importance accorded to multiplicity as value. Community is the site of the other and the locus of the imposition of dominant values, ethical and political. It is through the need for communication that consciousness developed, that same consciousness that supposedly defines the individual in society. 36 Nietzsches path towards multiplicity entails creating ones own proper path that takes one away from societyalways described as dirty and thus not proper enough for anyone trying to attain the solitude that distinguishes a proper path. 37 Consciousness is acquired through a history of need, that of communicating with others in precarious situations such as the ones human beings had to experience throughout their early history. Knowledge, including knowledge of oneself, evolved in proportion to such need and it is based on the belief in a consciousness that is individual; but Nietzsche claims that such knowledge is limited to what is familiar or what is concordant with a shared experience with others.38 Thoughts, feelings, and any experiences that are essentially individual (incomparably personal, unique, and infinitely singular) are reduced through communication (language, mien, pressure, etc.) to signs from the perspective of the herd. 39 As soon as we translate multifarious personal experiences into consciousness they no longer seem to be and become shallow, thin, relatively stupid, general, sign, mark of the herd. 40 Nietzsche is concerned with how all becoming conscious implies a great and thorough corruption, falsification, superficialization, and generalization. 41 It is not merely the opposition between subject and object, between thing-in-itself and appearance that concern him heresuch a concern with grammar, the metaphysics of the people, he leaves to the epistemologists. 42 What concerns him is the inherent reduction and simplification of a multiplicity at the basis of ones unique experiences that cannot be limited to what is called consciousness and unconsciousness. This multiplicity is described over and over as a continuum of incessant sensations, feelings, ideas, images, signs, etc., that can only be designated through words such as feeling, emotions, sensations, will, ideas, movements, etc. 43 Rather than distinguishing between an I (equated with consciousness) and others (equated with society and external impressions and valuations), Nietzsche wants to proclaim a multiple self as a

34 Cf., especially, Posthumous Fragments Summer 1881-Summer 1882, 11[121]; Posthumous Fragments
Spring-Autumn 1884, 26[92]; Gay Science, #354; Beyond Good and Evil, #268; Posthumous Fragments Autumn 1887-March 1888, 9[105] and 11[145]. 35 Posthumous Fragments Autumn 1887-March 1888, 11[145]. 36 Gay Science, #354. 37 Cf. Posthumous Fragments Autumn 1885-Autumn 1886, 2[186], and Beyond Good and Evil, #284. 38 Cf. Gay Science, #354 and #355. 39 Gay Science, #354. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid.

singularity immersed in a multiplicity he calls life. The time has come to squander the reductive capacity of communication, 44 especially its functions of ex-communication. For throughout history, the merely average and common experiences have been set as the measure by which human beings who were more similar and ordinary have had an advantage over those more select, subtle, strange, and difficult to understandwho ended up succumbing to accidents, being isolated, and rarely propagating. 45 It is thus in the name of everything excommunicated (not humans per se, but the singular experiences that are either hidden or forbidden) that Nietzsche wants to reassess communication by undermining consciousness as the measure of creative or productive experiences. The directing forces associated with dominant politics, and that entail linear causality, teleology, and purposefulness, need to be reassessed to privilege the driving forces associated with a quantum of excess energy that is waiting to be used up somehow and, specifically, anyhowrather than in a particular way, in a particular direction, with a particular goal. 46 In order to reveal what was hidden and forbidden and to allow for the world to become infinite, 47 it is imperative for Nietzsche to squander the hold of consciousness and to reassess communication. Stating that the desire for destruction, change and becoming can be an expression of an overflow of energy, Nietzsche is not talking about abolishing communication but of making it possible for the overflow of energy associated with noble spirits to choose and select an audience, even when that means erecting barriers against others.48 Nietzsche explains what it is that he wants to accomplish in reassessing communication by describing how a few incomprehensible ones (a projection of himself) are constantly transforming themselves in order to relate to the world in multiple and complex ways quite different from the limited, categorized, and generalized ways imposed through the dominant politics: We incomprehensible ones. Have we ever complained because we are misunderstood, misjudged, misidentified, slandered, misheard, and not heard? Precisely this is our fate oh, for a long time yet! Let us say, to be modest, until 1901it is also our distinction; we should not honor ourselves sufficiently if we wished that it were otherwise. We are misidentifiedbecause we ourselves keep growing, keep changing, we shed our old bark, we shed our skins every spring, we keep becoming younger, fuller of future, taller, stronger, we push our roots ever more powerfully into the depths into evilwhile at the same time we embrace the heavens ever more lovingly, more broadly, by imbibing their light ever more thirstily with all our twigs and leaves. Like trees we growthis is hard to understand, as is all of lifenot in one place only but everywhere, not in one direction but equally upward and inward and downward; our energy is at work simultaneously in the trunk, branches, and roots; we are no longer free to do one particular thing, to be only one particular thing.49 Such multiple ways of relating to the world necessitate a way of approaching communication that would allow for the complexity at the basis of human experiences by reconsidering (without necessarily reinstating) what is hidden and forbidden. To this end, Nietzsche presents in his writings, from the fifth book of Gay Science to his last fragments of

44 Ibid. 45 Beyond Good and Evil, #268. Kaufmanns translation in Beyond Good and Evil, New York: Vintage,
1989 (1966), pp.216-217. 46 Gay Science, #360. Kaufmanns translation in The Gay Science, New York: Vintage, 1974, pp.315316. 47 Gay Science, #374. 48 Ibid., #370 and #381. 49 Gay Science, #371. Kaufmanns translation, op. cit., pp.331-332.

1889, bits and pieces of a project of reassessment of communication from the perspective of multiplicity, describing it in terms of varying levels and degreesthus proclaiming multiplicity as the measure or value of forces in flux that can only be assessed according to a non-linear hierarchy of momentary dominance. Thus, the finality of communication is important for determining its complexity or simplicity. Nietzsche repeatedly affirms that communication and consciousness have always been associated with utility, that of the social being or the genius of the species, because they always involve reduction and simplification. He does not reject communication altogether, nor does he dream of a return to animal consciousness or to nature; he attempts to proliferate rather than simplify and this strategy brings multiplicity to the forefront since he is not proclaiming an impossibility of communication but calls for the hidden and forbidden possibilities of such an impossibility. It would be inconceivable to establish multiplicity as the actuality that communication needs to concord with; rather than falling into the metaphysical trap of everything or nothing, jumping from an extreme to another, Nietzsche brings levels and degrees into play. He does not opt for limited and constrained categories of understanding but for the free play of levels and degrees where different ways of understanding can be offered (perspectivism). He displaces communion from community (with others, with God, with the world, with nothing, or with oneself) and implants it in a multiplicity that can be assessed in terms of levels and degrees. What he describes as the basis of such communion is not commonality but singularity, the multiplicity of singular experiences or happenings at the raw level that surpasses consciousness and that he associates with a multiple selffor which a great liberation from the chain of common opinion, the chains of the communion imposed through the dominant morality and religion, is necessary. The great liberation is an attempt at transforming how one relates to oneself: the question of self is no longer understood metaphysically, as an opposition between subject and object for example, but is lived and experienced as the site of the multiplicity of happenings (feelings, sensations, ideas, images, etc.) that make up a multiple self. 50 Through practices of deconditioning that include changing personalities and wearing masks, the self is approached as a continual appropriation and expropriation of masks and personae (that are drawn from the multiplicity at the basis of ones individual fatum).51 There would be no self proper but a self that is continually appropriated, re-appropriated, and expropriated. The great liberation leads away from the unicity of the self towards a multiple self but it is still part of ones conditioning and of ones fatum, for it is the ladder upon which one has been climbing 52that same ladder referred to in Schopenhauer Educator as the measure of assessing who one is and is becoming, which in turn is the same as the individual fatum referred to in the Fatum and History and Freedom of the Will and Fatum of 1862. Freedom seems to be about that path towards what one is becoming; and in the case of the free spirit, it is about becoming a multiple self that can relate to the levels and degrees and that can feel the injustice of the for and the against: You must become master of yourself and master of your own virtues as well. Previously, they were your masters; but they should simply be tools among your other

50 On this subject, refer to the following: Daybreak, #115; Human, All Too Human, II, the traveler and
his shadow, #67 and #171; Posthumous Fragments Beginning 1880-Spring 1881, 6[349]; Posthumous Fragments Summer 1881-Summer 1882, 11[121], 11[156], 11[268], and 12[35]; Posthumous Fragments Spring-Autumn 1884, 25[21], 26[47], and 26[73]; Beyond Good and Evil, #2, #12, #17, #24, #40, #292; Posthumous Fragments Autumn 1887-March 1888, 9[119], 9[140], 10[19], 11[48], and 11[226]1; Posthumous Fragments Beginning 1888-Beginning January 1889, 14[64], 14[157], and 15[117]. 51 Cf., in particular, to Posthumous Fragments Beginning 1888-Beginning January 1889, 15[117] and some of the references cited in footnote #194, as well as Posthumous Fragments Fall 1884-Fall 1885, 36[17]. 52 Human, All Too Human, I, Preface, 7.

tools. You must acquire power over your For and Against and learn how to take them out and hang them back up according to your higher aim. You must learn how to grasp the perspectival element in every valuationthe displacement, distortion, and seeming teleology of horizons and everything else that pertains to perspectivism; and also how much stupidity there is in opposed values and the whole intellectual loss that must be paid for every For, every Against, injustice as inseparable from life, life itself as conditioned by perspective and its injustice. Above all, you must see with your own eyes where injustice is always the greatest: namely, where life has developed in the smallest, narrowest, neediest, most preliminary ways and yet still cannot avoid taking itself as the purpose and measure of things and, out of love for its own preservation, secretly and meanly and ceaselessly crumbling away and putting into question all that is higher, greater, richer53 This self mastery is a reiteration of the self-determination of ones individual fatum but from a perspectival approach and with multiplicity set as the measure of valuation. The great liberation is a liberation from all the old valuations and interpretations imposed through ones conditioning on how one lives and relates to the world. The free spirit is liberated from the old system of evaluation based on oppositionson affirmation and negation, on For and Against, etc.and has now climbed high enough (height for Nietzsche is always the measure of distance and difference) the ladder to be able to see the problem of hierarchy and the levels and degrees inherent in a life that is innocence of becomingand not a small, narrow, needy life inseparable from injustice. 54 Justice itself is set in relation to multiplicity, for it is multiplicity that is revealed though the problem of hierarchy and through the perspectival approach to life.55 And as one is climbing the ladder, becoming what one is, following the proper path towards multiplicity, a mission has been coming into the world and is being embodied. This mission presents itself to the liberated spirit, after a long and unconscious pregnancy, as what he can do, what he now for the first time is permitted to do.56 The multiple self has acquired, through the great liberation, a desire for destruction, change, and becoming as well as a way of relating to the world from the perspective of levels and degrees where multiplicity is set as value. While these were applied on ones own conditioning, it is time to apply them to the conditioning circumstances: the force and energy accumulated throughout a long tortuous path are ready to consummate the waves of history and the child of a long unconscious pregnancy is a fire forceful enough to become a fatum that can break the history of the humanity in two halves! The Politics of Madness versus The Politics of the Real: Fire that Consummates the Waves The riddle of the great liberation reveals itself to be a mission. 57 A mission that Nietzsche himself undertakes right after the 1882-1884 period and that he follows through with his publications and writings from 1886 to 1889. References to this mission (or great task) start around 1882, in a project for a letter to his friend Malwida von Meysenburg written in June;58 but the references become more intensified in 1887 and reach their highest level in Ecce

53 Human, All Too Human, I, Preface, 6. Handwerks translation. 54 Ibid. 55 References to Justice as multiplicity can be found all over the Nietzschean corpus. Cf., for example,
Posthumous Fragments Beginning 1880-Spring 1881, 6 [239]. 56 Human All Too Human, I, Preface, 6 and 7. Also cf. notes to the preface in The Complete Works, Volume Three, Human, All Too Human, I, op. cit., pp. 312-313. 57 Ibid., Preface 7. 58 Cf. Oeuvres Philosophiques Compltes, Tome V, Dates et vnements, pp. 591-592, note 2. This

10

Homo. To Peter Gast, Nietzsche writes on April 18, 1887: I feel that I have reached a stage in my life where the great mission that is mine is totally in front of me! In front of me and, even more, upon me!59 To Malwida, he writes on May 12, 1887: What living still means for me, a serious and unusual mission.60 In a letter to Reinhart von Seydlitz, written on February 12, 1888, he describes his mission as: my unrelenting and underground struggle against everything humans have honored and loved until now (for which my formula is revaluating all values).61 In Ecce Homo where he looks backwards on his life and reassesses his works, he claims that he started his war against morality with Daybreak and with it his mission of revaluating all values, a liberation from all moral values. 62 The same thing is said of Beyond Good and Evil, Genealogy of Morals, Twilights of the Idols, and the Case Wagner: they all are linked directly to the revaluation of all values, 63 Nietzsches mission, starting with the reassessment of Thus Spoke Zarathustra which is equated with a work of destruction: My mission [or task] for the years to come was pretty much set in advance. Once the saying yes part of this mission was accomplished, the saying no and doing no part was here: the revaluation of all previously existing values, the great war. 64 Nietzsches mission consists of revaluating all values and that necessitates a destruction since he who want to be a creator, in good and in evil, must first be a destroyer and break values [into pieces].65 So he embarks on this mission and he wages a war on old values; he actually wages many wars, on many fronts, including wars against morality, against religion, and against metaphysics. Beyond Good and Evil represents a condensed plan of action, for it contains attacks on metaphysics, religious values, moral values, and political values. 66 While Genealogy of Morals focuses more on a war against moral values and ascetic ideals linked to Judaeo-Christian values, and while The Anti-Christ concentrates its battles against religious values, Nietzsches posthumous fragments of the period reveal how intertwined all these battlefields are. Nietzsches destruction inspired a systematic critique, a war, or a skepsis, that applied itself to dissect and strip the old dominant values and traditional beliefs. Why is he analyzing great politics, culture, and history in the last few months of 1888 and the first month of 1889 (just before he collapses in Torino)? 67 While the great liberation transforms ones own conditioning, Nietzsches mission specifically deals with the
reference occurs before Nietzsches break up with Salom and Re, and thus contradicts those simple and simplistic biographical or historical interpretations that focus on personal traumas or specific events and links them with a so-called intellectual development of personsNietzsche, in this case. It would be ridiculous to look for clear and distinct reasons or causes for anything Nietzsche did or did not do. One should refer to Nietzsches work to learn of a different historical approach that would consider fatum as indeterminate sets of stratified and permeated multiple necessary happeningsall contributing towards the singularity and unknowable character of an individual fatum. 59 Letter to Heinrich Koselitz, April 18, 1887, #834. 60 Letter to Malwida von Meysenburg, May 12, 1887, #845. 61 Letter to Reinhart von Seydlitz, February 12, 1888, #989. 62 Ecce Homo, Daybreak, 1. 63 Ecce Homo,Beyond Good and Evil, 1; Genealogy of Morals; Twilight of the Idols, 3; The Case Wagner, 4. 64 Ecce Homo, Beyond Good and Evil, 1. 65 Ecce Homo, Why I am destiny, 2. 66 Cf. Beyond Good and Evil: On the Prejudices of Philosophers, The Free Spirit, What is Religious, Natural History of Morals, Peoples and Fatherlands, and What is Noble. 67 Cf. Posthumous Fragments Beginning 1888-Beginning January 1889, 19[10], 19[11], 23[1], and especially 25[1], 25[5], 25[6], 25[15], and 25[19].

11

conditioning circumstancesthat is with the dominant circumstances within which everyone is immersed. The great liberation could be related to an ethics, what could be called an ethics of destruction. The mission of revaluating all values, involving a skepsis applied to metaphysics, morality, and religion, can only be attributed to an attempt at a political transformationa transformation of the politics of reality!

PART TWO CASTORIADIS AND INDETERMINACY

Rethinking Marxism It would be a mistake to consider Castoriadis as opposed to Marxism but, as he claims himself, he was merely continuing the revolutionary Marxist tradition that he and others were breathing (as he lived in an era in which Marxism impregnated language, ideas, and reality) in a way that brings Marxist theory to coincide with the social and historical practices from which it should not be dissociated.68 What Castoriadis attempts to provide is a leap for Marxist revolutionary theory from the 19th century to the 20th century, through a reassessment that infuses indeterminacy as the basis of his analyses. While the impetus of the theory and its basis in history remained unquestioned, it is what history could mean and how it should be approached that Castoriadis addresses and attempts to revise in order to effectuate a kind of adaptation of Marxism to 20th century discoursesthat are themselves indebted and permeated by Marxism. Castoriadis stands against the primacy of the infrastructure and the relative importance of superstructure (Engels); he declares that there is no distinction between theory and practice and that history is the indeterminate domain of significations. The separation of the juridical, political, economic, etc., is itself is a child of historical development. The actions of individuals, conscious or unconscious, is indispensable to the forces/laws of history. The existing economic meaning is neither unique nor primordial nor purely related to economic satisfaction in the capitalist-western sense: the world of signification and values is created by the culture where an individual lives. History is the domain of human creation and cannot be approached from a determinist or simple dialectical relation: it is contingency becoming necessity where significations are created and remain irreducible to linear causality. It is the praxis of humans, individual and collective, that gives meaning to human life (and not pre-assigned meaning associated with Marxist historical necessity or Hegelian Reason). Nonetheless, Castoriadis wanted to hold on to certain aspects of Marxism, especially its revolutionary element whereby the radical transformation of society is done through the activity of humans and sets politics as a conscious transformation of society by the autonomous activity of people whose social reality leads them to fight it. That is what he calls revolutionary praxisa praxis he believed could transform the dominant politics of the real! Society Must Be Defended Society socializes (humanizes) the wild, raw, antifunctionally mad psyche of the newborn and imposes upon it a formidable complex of constraints and limitations (the psyche must renounce absolute egocentrism and omnipotence of imagination, recognize reality and the existence of others, subordinate desires to rules of behavior, and accept sublimated satisfactions and even death for the sake of the social ends). But in exchange, as it were, the psyche imposes upon the social institution an essential 68 IIS; 13-14.

12

requirement: the social institution has to provide the psyche with meaning.69 What Castoriadis is pointing out to is how psyche/soma has to become socialized in order to become an individual that is part of society. Building on Freud and Lacan, Castoriadis elaborates on how the flux of representations, intentions, and affects that is psyche has to be made determinate through social-historical institutions, providing it with particular social imaginary significations in order for it be able to live. 70 Determinacy is what society imposes on psyche in order to transform it into an individual. And that is done through the imposition of the ensemblist-identitaty, or ensidic, scheme, that Castoriadis associates with the ensemblistensemblizing dimension of social representing/saying or legein (distinguishing, choosing, positing, assembling, counting, speaking) and with the ensemblist-ensemblizing dimension of social doing or teukhein (assembling, adjusting, making, constructing)both being intricately dependent one on the other.71 Determinacy sovereignly reins in, through, and for legein: all that can be/all that can have value is only that which is distinct and definite that which is necessarily and sufficiently separated/united with respect to , that which is always in a well-ordering, that which is indifferent with respect to time and with respect to matter, or that whose matter indeterminably lends itself to determination (namely, to being said), that whose modes of valuepossible equivalences and possible usesare fixed, given, unambiguous. Teukhein separates elements, fixes them as such, orders them, combines them, unites them into totalities and organized hierarchies of totalities within the field of doing. And in this field, it operates under the aegis of determinacy and as actual determination and the condition for all determination.conversely, legein intrinsically implies teukhein, is in a sense teukhein.72 Psyche can never, however, be entirely reduced to a complete and total socialized individual, since it will continue on positing, creating, bringing-into-being what is always part of the radical imaginarywhich exists as the irreducible social-historical, the open stream of the anonymous collective, and as psyche/soma, its representative, affective, intentional flux. Similarly, the magma or magma of magma of social imaginary significations are never reduced to the inherited logic that only permit us to think in terms of a determinable ensemble of clearly distinct and well-defined elements 73 since they are interminable, undetermined, apeiron, indefinite.74 This foundational approach does have many problems from the perspective of many other philosophies of multiplicity and indeterminacy, for Castoriadis psyche is originary both as the untamed Freudian unconscious and as the Lacanian lack/object of impossible desire, and his radical imaginary, while indeterminate, does provide the potentia necessary for Beingeven though always becoming and multiple. But what interests us here is how the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real, in their interdependency (with a privileged place for the imaginary, of course) rely on an inevitable struggle between an imposed social reality inescapably based on determinacy and an imaginary that is inevitably purely indeterminateand pure indeterminacy. For the struggle between the instituted society and psyche could not be resolved, 69 The Social-Historical in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, tr. David Ames Curtis, pp. 41-42. 70 Cf. LEtat du Sujet Aujourdhui in Le Monde Morcel, Seuil, 1990, pp. 189-225. 71 IIS, English tr. Blamey, MIT Press, 1998 (1987), p. 238. 72 IIS, tr. Blamey, p. 257 and p. 260. 73 IIS, tr. Blamey, p. 182. 74 IIS, tr. Blamey, p. 280.

13

not even by the ground-power the institution of society wields over the individuals, 75 since the instituting societyin which the irreducible psyche participates as the representational, intentional, and affective fluxis always there. The social reality cannot overtake the indeterminate reality in which time as being is otherness, creation, and destruction 76 and where the magma of imaginary significations are a radical multiplicity, irreducible, and indeterminate. That struggle is not resolved precisely because of the multiplicity and absolute otherness at the basis of being, which makes history possible, according to Castoriadis. However this struggle resolves into a different politics of reality (social reality, that is), a set of defensive mechanisms on the part of the instituted society that is always threatened and that is always looking for ways of establishing defenses and protections. Let me generously quote some of Castoriadis analyses dealing with the limits of the instituting ground-power: 1.Society creates its world; it invests it with meaning; it provides itself with a store of significations designed in advance to deal with whatever may occur. The magma of the socially instituted imaginary significations resorbs, potentially, whatever may present itself, and it could not, in principle, be taken unawares or find itself helpless.The a-meaning of the world is always a possible threat for the meaning of society. Thus the ever-present risk that the social edifice of significations will totter. 2. Society fabricates individuals with the psyche as raw material. I do not know which of the two is more amazing: the almost total plasticity of the psyche with respect to the social formation that shapes it or its invincible capacity to preserve its monadic core and its radical imagination and to thwart, at least partially, the incessant schooling imposed upon it. 3. Society is but exceptionallyor neverunique or isolated. It just so happens (sumbainei) that there is an indefinite plurality of human societies as well as synchronic coexistence and contact among them. The institution and the significations of the others are always a deadly threat to our own; what is sacred for us is for them abominable, what is emaning for us is for them the very figure of nonsense. 4. Finally, and principally, society can never escape itself. The instituted society is always subject to the subterranean pressure of instituting society. Beneath the established social imaginary, the flow of the radical imaginary continues steadily. All these factors threaten societys stability and self-perpetuation. And against all of them, the institution of society establishes in advance and contains defense and protections. Principal among these is the virtual omnipotence, the capacity of universal covering, of its magma of significations Alien societies and people are 75 Cf. Castoriadis, Power, Politics, Autonomy, in Philosophy, Politics, Autonomy, op. cit., pp. 149-150:
If we define power as the capacity for a personal or impersonal instance ( Instanz) to bring someone to do (or to abstain from doing) that which, left to him/herself, s/he would not necessarily have done (or would possibly have done), it is immediately obvious that the greatest conceivable power lies in the possibility of performing something in such a way that, of his/her own accord, s/he does what one wants him/her to do, without any need for domination (Herrschaft) or of explicit power (Macht/Gewalt) to bring him/her to (do or abstain from doing something). Equally obvious, a being subject to such shaping will present at the same time the appearances of the fullest possible spontaneity, and the reality of a total heteronomy. Compared to this absolute power, any explicit power and any form of domination can be seen as deficient, for they betray the markings of an irreparable failure This ground-power, or primordial power, as manifestation of the instituting power of the radical imaginary, is not locatable. It is never the power of an individual or of a nameable instance. It is carried out by the instituted society, but in the background stands the instituting society; and once this institution is set in place, the social as instituting slips away, puts itself at a distance, is already somewhere else. 76 Time and Creation, in Chronotypes: The Construction of Time, ed. Bender and Wellbery, Stanford, 1991, p. 58.

14

posited as strange, savage, impious. The enemy against which the defenses of the society are feeblest is its own instituting imaginary, its own creativity. This is why it is also against this danger that the strongest protection has been set up It is the denial and the covering up of the instituting dimension of society through the imputation of the origin of the institution and of its social significations to an extrasocial source. Extrasocial here means external to the actual, living society.. 77 It was necessary to quote such a long passage in order to show how Castoriadis believes that it is through societal powerand in its defensethat the creation of extra-social meaning and the ascription of social signification to difference or alterity usually take place. Added on to his understanding of the political dimension of societal explicit power (legislative, executive, etc.),78 one has to acknowledge the importance of indeterminacy, also in terms of meaning and signification, in political power and in what he calls politics. His understanding of politics is related to auto-determination and particularly, the determination of ones meanings and laws what he associates with autonomywhere creativity and imagination play a big part in such a project. Notwithstanding his late careless historical chauvinism (when he attributes historical emergence of numerous new projects or forms to Greece), Castoriadis offers a singular way of looking at politics as a project that needs to start by reassessing the politics of the real imposed through social determination and to bring back indeterminacy and multiplicity not only into life but also into our ways of attempting to understand and theorize life (e.g. psyche, social imaginary, magma). His privileging of meaning and signification, and their control, interpretation, and circumscription, in his analyzes of social and political power may hide a few potentialities. His constant exhortation to go beyond the inherited logic was supported by his unique style, abrupt or tortuous sometimes, insightful and revealing always, and constantly struggling with the limits of communicability. One of his interesting exercises was to attempt to give an intuitive understanding of magma through an accumulation of contradictory metaphors. That effort will conclude this part of the paper, which will be left to be done ( faire): We have to think of a multiplicity which is not in the received sense of the term but which we mark out as such, and which is not a multiplicity in the sense that we could actually or virtually enumerate what it contains but in which we could mark out in each case terms which are not absolutely jumbled together. Or, we might think of an indefinite number of terms, which may possible change, assembled together by an optionally transitive pre-relation (referral); or of the holding-together of distinct indistinct components of a manifold; or, again, of an indefinitely blurred bundle of conjunctive fabrics, made up of different cloths and yet homogenous, everywhere studded with virtual and evanescent singularities. And we have to think of the operations of identitary logic as simultaneous, multiple dissections which transform or actualize these virtual singularities, these components, these terms into distinct and definite elements, solidifying the pre-relation of referral into relation as such, organizing the holding-together, the being-in, the being-on, the being-proximate into a system of determined and determining relations (identity, difference, belonging, inclusion), differentiating what they distinguish in this way into entities and properties, using this differentiation to constitute sets and classes. 79

77 Power, Politics, Autonomy, op. cit., pp. 151-153. 78 Ibid, pp. 1154-156. 79 IIS, tr. Blamey, p. 344.

15

PART THREE THE PHILOSOPHY OF MULTIPLICITY AND INDETERMINACY: SOCIAL IMAGINARY, MULTIPLE SELF, AND GLOBALIZATION

Strictly speaking, the multiple self is an englobed site that is multiple and has no set limits. It is immersed in the social imaginary but has and/or is particularities. It is not an individual or a subject but can englobe both thus consciousness is not its boundary. It is a chaos situated in an englobed situation in the social imaginary. The multiple self is a singular bundle or multiplicities of forces (physical, psychological, emotional, motivational, creative, imaginative, etc.) immersed within and interacting with other forces. The multiple self is a specific site of the social imaginary that experiences various affects, feelings, emotions, sensations, ideas, images, etc. Customs and norms are not the social imaginary but manifestations of institutions: these institutions do not necessarily reflect the social imaginary and as a matter of fact many of them are the product of desires to stabilize and control social imaginaries. Nonetheless they do play a major role in social historical conditioning that is part of the overall social imaginary. The mechanism of state control, or the legal applications of certain aspects inevitably reflect, and are reflected, in the social imaginary conditioning of peoples and events. If not reduced to a symbolic order that can only be expressed in terms of legein and teukhein, the sum total of significations (as ways of interpreting and creating the world), would be the social imaginary I am interested in designating. But these significations are neither signs nor symbols, neither meanings nor beliefs, but an indeterminate and immaterial everything within which flourish multiple selves. The multiple self cannot be limited to representation, affects, and intentionality, and the social imaginary cannot be reduced to production of signification. The social imaginary is not driven by anything but its own transformation, chaos and movement due to the arbitrary but contingently determined interaction of forces. The word forces would designate a permeation and intermingling of various particular (but not determinate) sites (and not elements). Forces are not vectorial, neither teleological nor functional, and they cannot be considered positive or negative, active or passive, present or absent, or what have you. The social imaginary is a constant transformation where the arbitrary interaction (for lack of a better word) or intercourse (Verkehr) as Marx puts it in The German Ideologyof forces contingently determines levels and degrees of domination. Domination would be the extent, importance, or relevance of shaping a situation as assessed or represented by multiple selves. Thus domination is a human category related to the assessment of the levels and degrees of the interaction of forces (reduced to power struggles or clashes by an observer who attempts to distinguish differences in an everything). The Social imaginary is the sum totals of actions, ideas, expressions of societies in particular times/places. These actions/ideas and expressions manifest themselves in institutions, of government, of laws, of morality, of sensibility, of taste and judgment, etc. These institutions are thus created through the actions and beliefs of a particular time and place and they are stratified and changed over time according to the changing socio-economic and multiple other conditions. Power shifts affect institutions; social imaginaries are the receptacles of all of these institutions but are not limited to them. All ontological and epistemological pre-suppositions that

16

feed the moral, religious and political aspects of societies are provided by this multiple stratification of conditions and situations injected through institutions and institutional practices as well as by imaginary significations. To determine through positivistic methods the sum total of conditions that shape a multiple self is impossible since not only are these conditions multiple but they also affect through multiple levels and degrees the different singular manifestations of the multiple selves as well as their social institutions and significations/meanings (there are multiple manifestations and not infinite ones of the multiple self, and these are not separate but are a bundle of permeated and stratified forces that cannot rationally, logically, or scientifically be quantified or qualifiedexcept through delusory measures of pseudo-science constructed on reductive schemes that deal with the realm of human affairs as a mathematical or geometrical space). The term social imaginary then attempts to designate what is commonly referred to as immaterial or intangible forces along with what is traditionally considered material or tangible ones, including but not limited to the interrelated forces pertaining to psyche (affects, desires, intentions, representations, etc.), social institutions underlying ethics and norms (beliefs, traditions and customs, values, significations, etc.), political institutions underlying power relations (laws, rules, education, welfare, etc.), and economic interactions encompassing production, consumption, distribution, and exchange, and other aspects of social relations as well as relations with the environment that envelop and determine various ways of living and social practices (climate, diet, etc.). While these so-called sites of effectivity of forces are separated here for analytical reasons only their interrelatedness calls for, and is not purely representative of, a reality associated with multiplicity (both ontologically and epistemologically). The social imaginary is what drives human interactions within a shared time/place. It is not simply a collective unconscious but the indeterminate totality that is shaped by the materiality of human relations, actions, interactions, achievements, interpretations, ideas, imaginations, etc. What we imagine, dream, understand, etc., is provided through our socialization and is always englobing in a material but indeterminate way. The dominant beliefs and achievements of a social-historical intersection (place, situation, or location) are traditionally considered to be passed on to people through habituation, socialization, and education. But the main problem with such a consideration is the distinction between mind and body, theory and practice, ideas and activities. Most of what is called socialization is not material in the sense ascribed to matter as something tangible, physically accessible and/or present to certain limited senses. Generations of philosophies have been critical of this reduction of the real to a presence reduced to physical situatedness and detection by senses in a circumscribed and determinate manner. I shall not elaborate here on the history of such an entrenchment but in order to relate to human affairs as different from the physical sciences as developed by humans it is essential to relate to a complexity and irreduciblity of human lifeas a relatedness between multiple selves and social imaginaries could exemplify. History is approached here as stratification and permeationat varying levels and degreesof multiplicities of layers not only of events and interpretations but of the fabrics of material life, of the conjunctures of crises and of antagonisms, and of other contingencies that become necessary once situated within what makes the social imaginary. The indeterminate elements of any social imaginary are by definition inherently active, always changing, interacting, and affecting and being affected. Transformation is inherent in social imaginaries and methods of analysis that are based on determinacy, linear causality, and teleology are inadequate and inept when it comes to studying historical change. Nonetheless, any social imaginary is formed by permeated elementswhich we arbitrarily designate as forcesand has to be situated within circumscribed social-historical conditions no matter how irreducible these conditions may be. Social imaginaries are situated socially because they are inevitably related to humans in what has been called societies (communities, collectivities, etc.). The word imaginary does not

17

attempt to accentuate imagination, illusion, or identification but rather the so-called immaterial properties of images and imagination. The imaginary is the sea where humans flourish, bodily, intellectually, emotionally, around and within the environment that is theirs (natural, technological, etc.). The imaginary provides ways of understanding and ways of judging and assessing, ways of living in the sense of conscious and unconscious motivation where meaning (sens) is provided. Although the social imaginary does not have a role per se, it is everything and provides meaning and orientation for the multiple selvesand to the imagined agents supposedly endowed with reflection, consciousness, and the like. The imaginary is a history of stratified creations/destructions, permeated achievements (neither positive nor productive), that are situated spatio-temporally in relation to shared experiences, but where the borders are not set. Over time and with the spread of communication and the easiness of travel, social imaginaries became more and more permeated by each other. They kept nonetheless their own singular characteristics even though a global history is a history of the interaction of these imaginaries where some become more dominant than others. There are no strict boundaries for social imaginaries and some may be concomitant with others. Social imaginaries, like multiple selves, are not determinate entitiesand thats why the social sciences do not consider them to be useful. But if we were to approach the real from the perspective of multiplicityontologically, that being is not determinate, and epistemologically, that chaos and movement characterize the state of existencewe need to offer such alternatives and attempt to open up new ways of analyses that do not concord with the existing methods and methodologies of the human and/or social sciences. Social imaginaries are englobing and one cannot dissociate one social imaginary from another since all imaginaries are constantly affecting and being affected, not merely dialectically. Even if we were to take on the social imaginaries of peoples living in particularly isolated geographical locations where there is no contact with other peoples, the environment, the effects of agriculture, food, climate, etc., and a multiplicity of varying factors constantly shape the social imaginary as do the laws and/or institutions of these peoples. The social imaginary is not limited to the human creations (laws, social institutions, belief systems, etc.) but it englobes the sum total, indeterminate and indeterminablealthough determined and always determiningof forces at work, in varying levels and degrees. Certain institutional forces, certain climatic forces, certain dietary forces, etc., may function more effectively in shaping the social imaginary (of a particular social historical intersection) but they do so in concert with other forces for we are not advocating the actual separability of such forces: they are interconnected and woven together in what we describe as englobedness. Arguably, social imaginaries become more and more dominated by the level and extent of social institutions developed by humans and by technological advancements. Production and consumption along with other human activities become more dominant in Capitalist/Modern imaginaries. Social imaginaries are constantly transformed and the forces within them are continually transforming, some being more effective than others (but there is no active and no passive, merely levels and degrees of effectivity that are usually based on arbitrariness and/or contingent determinacy). With time, it seems that human development flourished in ways where social forces became more and more determinant of social imaginaries (but never consciously nor fully). Social institutions depict certain local reactions of multiple selves creating or recreating a place or situation, attempting to shape the dominant conditions of a particular social historical intersection. But it is not the social imaginary that is changed but rather certain of its manifestations that may affect the social imaginary and will never be able to control or to delineate such social imaginary. Social imaginaries flourish on indeterminacy in the sense that no matter how one transforms institutions and analyzes social imaginaries, one is still feeding on that imaginary itself and nothing would have been possible outside that imaginary at any moment. It is useless to look for freedom, resistance, hope, or other delusions by setting up an imagined dichotomy distinguishing between two separate or separable power sites: an overwhelming englobing social imaginary that informs everything and an englobed and overwhelmed multiple

18

self that fights for its singularity and particularity. The singularity of multiple selves lies in their levels of relating to social historical conditions within social imaginaries. It is in no way particular or singular for multiple selves, who happen to be socialized to a certain extent, to develop, shape, or adapt laws and conventions (social institutions) to their needs; these only reveal the levels and degrees of conformity or non-conformity to societal norms and institutions, but not to the social imaginary. The social imaginary is the receptacle within which all of this is taking place. Multiple selves who put social norms, conventions, and beliefs in question have higher levels and degrees of non-conformity, probably through psychological, biological, and multiple other conditionings shaped by their particular experiences. But all of these experiences are embedded in a certain discontent within society itself that is fed through the social imaginary. There are always changes and adaptations, cycles if youd like fluctuating between the stability and strength of social institutions and norms and their decay and disintegration. These changes occur either through transformation due to forces within or due to contact with other social imaginaries that shake the solidity of certain belief systems and identificatory practices embedded within particular institutions. Whenever these changes occur, there will be of course more multiple selves questioning the dominant laws and customs, but they are in no way questioning the social imaginary, for they are the social imaginary. Thus, differences between multiple selves lie at the level of their particular and singular conditionings that determine the varying levels and degrees of conformity to the dominant social historical institutions (norms, customs, laws, etc.). The social imaginary permeates their way of relating to the world and englobes their singular and particular conditionings. The multiple self does affirm itself as independent and autonomous and it does so because of its singular aspects represented through particular levels and degrees of conditions. Those conditionings vary: some of them are total socialization (i.e. acceptance of societal laws and conventions, and ascription to particular dominant institutions of the social imaginary) and others carry various degrees of contestation and rejection of societal norms and conventions and of participation in creating laws, customs, etc. All of this diversity exists within the social imaginary and, notwithstanding the fact that everything the multiple self is comes from that social imaginary and from the personal experiences (sensations, ideas, images, traumas, psychological or otherwise, ingrained sets of beliefs, etc.) and social encounters (such as reaction to particular experiences and the like), the singularity of the multiple self lies at the level of how these encounters and conditionings are processed within the scope of the psycho-physiological and of otherwise interpretative schemes of looking at the world. This singularity that is shaped by varying degrees of socialization and by the multifarious experiences one encounters through life is itself being increasingly engulfed by particular social imaginaries that are becoming dominant. Domination (rather than hegemony), from this perspective, is where things are changed, shaped differently through a set of particular social imaginaries that overcome others. All social imaginaries are fluid and permeable, but there are some that impose their images, their language, their interpretations, their ways of lives, their ways of eating, breathing, drinking, etc., on other social imaginaries. The social imaginary provides for a multiplicity of institutional possibilities but certain institutions are becoming dominant globallyespecially imaginary institutions, those institutions that penetrate every aspect of the unconscious functioning of multiple selves and inform their means of interpretation. We have always been concerned with the state, with the law, with morality, but what lies behind them all is a social imaginary that provides for a critique of these institutions to start with. Within that social imaginary lies a power undeterminable, invisible and that is not in any way, shape, or form, subject to human understanding. The social imaginaries are the background upon which flourish institutions and practices regulated by conventions. What we call globalization can be considered as the effect of various particular forces bringing about the domination of a set of dominant beliefs, values, and imaginary significations that permeate and transform existing institutions and practices of various social imaginaries.

19

Globalization can be associated with a historical intersection whereby people living in different parts of the globe are stripped of their voice, of their epistemologies and ways of understanding the world, as well as the sets of beliefs and values that guided their way of relating to the world. This process started a long time ago, and was consolidated with what is commonly known as imperialism and colonialism. Voice, as a means of power and control, as a tool of expressing oneself has been denied to populations dwelling in various imaginaries. Their voices were different from the dominant voices particular to certain social imaginaries. Structures of knowledge of many peoples have been replaced by dominant structures claiming superiority based on a so-called universality. Certain social imaginaries have imposed their system of rationality on peoples whose epistemologies or ways of understanding the world were undermined as inadequate knowledge. Such people of dominated social imaginaries have been enlightened and were introduced to the science and technology of dominant social imaginaries, setting them on a path of development. But now, even their meaning of life is being taken away from them: their beliefs and values are being transformed and reassessed, permeated by the sets of beliefs and values inherent to a few dominant social imaginaries. The processes by which they lost their voices and epistemologies are now stripping them of their values and beliefsthat they call traditions. It is important to acknowledge how todays social imaginaries are dominated by Capitalist imaginaries. Here domination is different from hegemony, for it is related to a world of power relations where forces that are competing for power are not subsumed and do not disappear. These forces are effectively transforming social imaginaries and their domination consists of levels and degrees of control of such processes of transformation. We are proposing to approach these processes called globalization as an attempt to describe a struggle between imaginariesreflecting what Marx would call antagonistic forcesand to depict the dominance of some over others. Domination consists of ways of control through the permeation and effective transformation of ways of living and relating to the world. This domination does not only function at the level of institutions (laws, morality, etc.) but it targets ingrained beliefs and epistemologies, and ways of relating and interpreting the world. It encompasses ways of living that are the foundation of social relations embedded within social imaginaries that are not always shaped by economic, political, or sociological factors that are considered to be determinate. Our task then is not to attempt to find causes but to describe how dynamic relations are evolving and to differentiate, the best we can, between imaginaries in order to follow the struggles and transformations within them. Imaginaries englobe institutions (laws, politics, education, religion, etc.) as well as unwritten traditions (morality, formality, trends, aspirations, etc.). The latter are like images that are inculcated in the multiple self as ways of understanding, interpreting and relating to the surrounding environment. It is not sufficient to look at how institutions socialize individuals or reproduce subjects, or how economic relations (reduced to production, consumption, exchange, trade, investment, etc.) shape social relations. It is equally important, if not more, to study the imaginary of peoples, what drives them and shapes their needs and desires, or hopes and dreams, and what provides them with ways of understanding and relating to the world they live in. Imaginaries have been increasingly shaped and transformed through media and communication, via television, movies, the internet, but also through permeated influences varying from changing behavioral codes (eating, drinking, dressing, etc.) to modes of engaging with others. Imaginaries are the drive of historyand not culture or productive forces. They are complex and indeterminate, and they provide multiple significations that shape the environment within which multiple selves flourish. It is the analysis of the interaction or intercourse between imaginaries that would allow us to trace the great transformation at play nowadays. This transformation commonly designated as globalization is a process of domination of certain social imaginaries over others.

20