Alienation: Autonomy:: Dislocation: Recovery
Castoriadis and the politics of recovery from addiction
A Post-Marxist Imagination
I want to return again to the question of recovery as a politics of resistance (see: previous posts on this topic), this time with the help of a philosopher of imagination: Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis’s work, especially his magnum opus, The Imaginary Institution of Society, describes a post-Marxist revolutionary politics which seeks to intervene in society’s always ongoing process of self-creation with the aim of expanding individual and collective autonomy.
By “post-Marxist,” I mean that Castoriadis was once a Marxist but diverged from the Communist movement to develop a new theory of history. Marxists treat culture as a side effect of society’s mode of production, claiming, for example, that all features of a capitalist culture—its art, politics, religions, etc—arise to express and rationalize the capitalist way of making and selling things. In this view, material and technological progress determines all else in history.
Against this view, Castoriadis argues that the social-historical process is itself radically creative in ways that are not strictly determined by material causes. Societies experience change not only when technological progress enables new methods of extraction and exploitation but also when new forms of social relations emerge spontaneously. Changes of this second type arise from complex interactions within the social imaginary, which in turn have unpredictable consequences for a culture’s material practices (like the way they make and exchange goods).
For example, Marxists might look at the emergence of large language models (LLMs) as an innovation within capitalist production that will determine (indeed, is already determining) the forms of culture that emerge to rationalize its existence and its accompanying forms of exploitation. In contrast, Castoriadis would likely recognize the emergence of LLMs itself as the undetermined and unpredictable byproduct of already instituted practices of symbolic exchange within the culture that invented it. We have arrived at this technology in this form at this time as a result of unforeseen (even unknowable) events that arose spontaneously within the social imaginary.
For Castoriadis, there is a potent, creative force at the heart of the social-historical that makes revolution thinkable. Radical change—the emergence of new forms of social relation—is only possible if novelty can arise independently of material causes. Otherwise, we are doomed to live out our lives within an imaginary determined by the tools we build to extract surplus value from the earth and from each other.
Alienation, Dislocation, and Addiction
For Marx and Castoriadis both, the problem that arises in society is one of alienation. Marx described this problem in terms of a worker’s relationship with the product of their labor. Prior to industrial capitalism, artisan basketmakers, for example, controlled their tools and the baskets they made. As a result, they enjoyed a meaningful relationship with the fruits of their labor and could sell, trade, use, or gift their baskets however they pleased. But the wage laborer in an industrial basket factory controls neither the tools for basket making nor the objects they produce. At the end of the day, they are left with only their wage and a fundamental separation from any meaningful, agentive relationship to their work. In this way, they are alienated from the product of their labor.
But for Castoriadis, Marx’s sense of alienation is too narrow. Any normalized way of doing labor is only one of many institutions that make up a society. Societies also create institutions that govern their ways of doing courtship, marriage, child rearing, education, religion, defense, cooking, arts, gender norms, gender relations, lawmaking and enforcement, language and language usage, collective identity, public speech, group assembly, and all the many other things that people do, including (especially important for Castoriadis) inventing new ways of doing any and all of the above.
Just as workers can become alienated by the institution of capitalist production, any society can become alienated in relation to one, some, or even all of its institutions. In fact, there is a kind of gravity to institutions which, over time, tends to cause societies to become alienated in exactly this way:
Once an institution is established…it possesses its own inertia and its own logic…it outstrips its function, its ‘ends’ and its ‘reasons for existing’. The apparent plain truths are turned upside down: what could have been seen ‘at the start’ as an ensemble of institutions in the service of society becomes a society in the services of institutions. (Castoriadis 110)
In this way, the problem of alienation is more or less baked into the nature of social relations. Societies express themselves and have their being through institutions, which have a tendency to become rigid, fixed in place, and operate according to their own logic rather than serving the needs of the society that created them: “Alienation therefore appears as instituted” (109).
Those of you familiar with Bruce Alexander’s “dislocation theory” of addiction may already be drawing connections between it and Castoriadis’s view of alienation (for a primer, see this video and this one). Briefly, dislocation theory suggests that addiction is a symptom of “social dislocation,” a condition in which one finds oneself adrift, without a meaningful role to inhabit in one’s own society. Dislocated individuals have a tendency to compensate for this lack of meaningful relations with substance abuse and other compulsive behaviors.
The connection I draw between Alexander and Castoradis is this: Dislocation is alienation at a point of personal crisis. As the instituting of alienated relations progresses through a society, more and more of its members will find themselves unable to integrate their inner lives into an increasingly rigid and inhospitable social world. In a state of dislocation, individuals fixate on available sources of pleasure—”available” here referring to those pleasures a society enables, even if it also makes them criminal or taboo.
And so, like alienation, addiction also appears as instituted. Addiction is a regular and regulated way of living and being within an alienated and alienating society.
Personal Autonomy
Castoriadis’s antidote to alienation is something he calls “autonomy,” which has both personal and collective features. At the personal level, autonomy means establishing and maintaining a new relationship with the social imaginary as it presents itself from within the individual’s unconscious.
Anyone raised in a society naturally internalizes the norms and standards of its institutions. Once these norms are internalized, we are generally unaware of how they influence our thinking, feeling, and behavior. For example, when I was a child, I took for granted that being a boy meant not crying, that being straight meant not holding hands with other boys, that being American meant not being a Communist, that being Christian meant I was ‘saved’ whereas other religions were in big trouble, and that being Baptist meant I was actually saved whereas other ‘so-called-Christians’ were headed to hell. These imaginary contents, internalized from social institutions, still lurk in my unconscious mind even though I am now able to hold them in awareness and reflect on them.
An alienated relationship to unconscious contents like these is one in which the individual simply accepts them as natural and true, obeying their dictates and living within their strictures, without ever stopping to question what they are doing or why. Castoradis puts it this way: “The subject is ruled by an imaginary, lived as more real than real, yet not known as such... What is essential…to alienation…on the level of the individual is the domination of an autonomized imaginary which has assumed the function of defining for the subject both reality and desire” (103).
These internalized norms sit very deep within the structure of our psyches. Without personal, internal work, they remain invisible to us, determining not only how we see the world but also what we want from it. Notice, too, that these norms are, by nature, dislocating. Consider the norms I internalized: If boys can’t cry, they can’t share their feelings, and so they cannot form meaningful intimacy with their peers, which is further restricted by the inability to hold hands with other boys. Believing that “American” and “Communist” are incompatible terms separates an individual not only from other ways of thinking but also from other ways of being and from people who think and live in those ways. The same is true of the religious contents I internalized. Being “Christian” and “Baptist” kept me separated from other ways of thinking and being, and from other people, Christian and not. Because alienation appears as instituted, our internalization of institutions is immediately alienating.
It might be tempting to think that autonomy would mean the abolition of alienating contents from the unconscious or else the attainment of total awareness and control over them, but Castoriadus describes this temptation as “an incoherent reverie, an unreal and unrealizable state” (111). No subject can ever become entirely conscious of everything in their psyche any more than a fly can swallow the sea. Instead, the autonomous individual should be imagined as:
a real person who would be unceasingly involved in the movement of taking up again what had been acquired, the discourse of the Other, who is capable of uncovering phantasies as phantasies and who, finally, never allows them to rule—unless he or she is so willing…These characteristics do not consist in an ‘awareness’ achieved once and for all, but in another relation between the conscious and unconscious, between lucidity and the function of the imaginary, in another attitude of the subject with respect to himself or herself, in a profound modification of the activity-passivity matrix (104)
In essence, the autonomous person is one who is aware of the aspects of their society’s institutions they have internalized and constantly attends to and renegotiates the ways in which these aspects shape their lives. Autonomy, in this sense, is a verb, a practice. It involves introspection, self-analysis, consciousness raising, and discussion. By decreasing the power that institutions have over them at the level of their own unconscious drives, autonomous individuals become increasingly free.
A Limited (and Limiting) Sense of Personal Recovery
Here members of 12-Step organizations may find themselves drawing connections between “autonomy” as Castoriadis defines it and their recovery practices. After all, isn’t moral inventory a regular practice that involves introspection, self-analysis, consciousness raising, and discussion? And, through this practice, do not addicts become increasingly free?
In short, yes. I would argue that 12-Step recovery practices, especially inventory writing (and sharing) and amends making, are great examples of exactly the kind of autonomy Castoriadis is talking about, with one key difference: like Marx’s view of alienation, the 12-Step view of inventory and amends is too narrow.
Recovery practices focus strictly on addiction and recovery, which makes them very effective at helping individuals achieve exactly one type of autonomy and freedom (i.e., freedom in relation to a substance or behavior), while doing little or nothing to help them continue the pursuit of autonomy elsewhere in their lives. Once an addict has written and confessed all their resentments and fears and so on, they are not asked to further examine the effect of alienating social institutions on their inner lives. Nor are they asked to turn their attention to the broader ways in which institutions produce real harm, including the harms of dislocation and addiction. In fact, they may even be actively discouraged from such pursuits. As a result, the recovering addict does become free, but only in part.
This partial freedom is not always sufficient to sustain long-term abstinence. Many of those who do not relapse end up “switching addictions,” adopting a new substance or behavior to comfort them from the alienating effects of contemporary life, thus beginning the addictive cycle anew.
Autonomy and Recovery as Projects of Collective Imagination
A continued recovery (i.e., a continued pursuit of autonomy) would require both a broader mode of introspection and an additional effort to engage in the public renegotiation of instituted reality with the goal of creating greater autonomy for all. As Castoriadis puts it: “Autonomy, as we have defined it, leads directly to the political and social problem. [It] shows both that one cannot want autonomy without wanting it for everyone and that its realization cannot be conceived of in its full scope except as a collective enterprise” (107).
If I want to be truly free, it is not enough to continually examine the effect institutions have had on me. I must live in a free society, one in which institutions do not alienate me. For this to be true, I must find myself among others who pursue autonomy along with me. We must all be observing the ways that internalized social content shapes us, harms us, and drives us to harm each other. In order for this shared project to take place, we must also engage in exactly the same kind of introspection and renegotiation of relationship that frees us at the personal level—only this time we must perform it together at the level of the collective. We must negotiate the nature of our institutions together. We must become a society aware of itself as instituted and as instituting, attentive to the creative emergence of our norms and values and fully responsible for our capacity to reevaluate and continually change what we do together. Thus, my freedom is intimately bound to yours, and ours to the freedom of all others.
A collective project which broadens recovery principles and practices beyond the bounds of addiction to explore the full extent of alienation in our lives will be our best hope of realizing the role we have to play in “history [as] essentially poiesis, not imitative poetry, but creation and ontological genesis” (3). Simply put, it is our job as addicts in recovery to join together and create new ways of being.
In this way, recovery in its fullest sense requires revolution.