3.6 Generating interest and adherence to free up the radical imagination

Over the course of a little more than two million years, the first hominids have gone through a variety of lifestyles and territorial occupation. For certain social groups, this temporal horizon has meant greater longevity, a low birth rate and significant technological developments, both in terms of “social technologies” and material ones. Compared to other mammals, hominids have thus produced and consumed the essential for survival.

In two million years, humanity’s “elites” have deployed their talents to increasingly sophisticated and comprehensive developmental configurations. We have moved from nomadic bands, coexisting autonomously and independently from one another, to a diversity of Nation-states integrated at the heart of large political, economic, social and cultural networks.

The 21st century saw the culmination of this process. In its lack of well-being experienced by the vast majority of humans, it embodies an “ideal of well-being” promoted by a minority in the name of a utopian dream. Just like the myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus, the 21st century promised eternal perfectibility and its universalization, something that, in fact, can never be achieved, nevermind made universal.

This is our Sisyphean reality and our Castoriadian emancipatory raison d’être : we must escape the “enclosures” imposed by hetronormative institutions in order to overtake the alienating myth and institute realistic utopian lifestyles founded on the radical imagination principles of Buen vivir and the collective.

Becoming aware of overtaking the modern myth : therein lies the upheaval that must be provoked. It is this liberating future to which a concrete proposal for a just social and ecological transition refers and with which it is associated. Such a proposal must be capable of deconstructing old complexity all while allowing for the deployment of a new “ideal and life order.”

Any being-for-itself exists and can only exist in a closure. Thus also society and the social individual. Democracy is the project of breaking the closure at the collective level. Philosophy, creative self-reflective subjectivity, is the project of breaking the closure at the level of thought. But of course, any breaking of the closure, unless it remains a gaping “?” which does not break anything at all, posits something, reaches some results, and, thereby, risks erecting again a closure. The continuation and renewal of reflexive activity – not for the sake of “renewal,” but because this is self-reflexive activity – entails therefore the putting into question of previous results (not necessarily their rejection – no more so than the revisability of laws in a democracy entails that they have to be changed wholesale every morning).

Thus the birth of philosophy is not just coincident but equi-significant with the birth of democracy. Both are expressions, and central embodiments, of the project of ‘autonomy’. (Castoriadis, 1990¹)

The great civilizational transitions of the past have been long and have been effected through a variety of processes and dynamics. With cooperation and struggle, these processes and dynamics have favoured the blossoming of previous configurations of collective living. Our challenge is completely different. We must act, think, test and progress rapidly while we conceive of and test out a new spirit of the times. This time, the horizon and the great narrative cannot be left to emerge slowly. An accelerated form of an upheaval is needed and requires inclusive adherence shared and attained by and from the majority.

Economically, the Awakening’s proposal requires a positive socio-ecological response to the need to generate as much a decent level of socially useful and collectively available energy as equitable modalities for distributing, redistributing, accumulating and disposing of this energy. From this perspective, the logic of a circular relationship with nature, as much as a social and solidarity economy with an ecological dimension, has important qualities from which the Awakening’s proposals can learn.
Politically, the Awakening’s proposal can count on representative democracy’s long-standing tradition of revocable agency, associating it with a political sphere where other democratic modalities – including deliberative and participatory democracy, or even direct democracy – will be put into relevant, legitimate and authoritative practice. This proposition would also benefit from thinking about a collective form of the Habeas Corpus² modus operandi.
Judicially, the proposal requires a re-establishment of the dominant justice system in order to deprivatize logic, “communalize” it and reconnect it with the historical dynamics of research on the extent of Nature, of a reconnection with the elementary forms of the imagination of the living.
Culturally, the proposal must have an aesthetic dimension consistent with the ethical principles of solidarism, democratism, alterity and environmentalism : a relationship with the aesthetic developed and thought out as a function of our humanity and our naturality. Remember what was said by Baruch Spinoza³ : in no case do we strive for anything because we deem it to be good, [usefulness according to Rationality] but on the other hand we deem a thing to be good, because we strive for it [in the Aristotelian sense of good or beautiful in naturality]”.
Socially, it will be important to mobilize historical organizational forms that have had success in finding equity, solidarity, alterity and environmental practices⁴Various works explore such organizational forms like : Clastre. P. (1974). La société contre l’État, Paris, Seuil. Shalins, M. (1977). Âge de pierre, âge d’abondance, l’économie des sociétés primitives, Paris, Gallimard. Testart, A. (2005). Éléments de classification des sociétés. Paris, Errance..
- Association contracts⁵See the works of Ferdinand Tönnies (2010 [1887] on moving from communal societies to associative societies. Communauté et société, Paris, PUF. The theory of Tönnies summed up by Aurélien Berlan : “the tendency of community ties, as sustainable links between people, being constitutive of human life, to dissolve is the central pathology of a society where isolated individuals are no longer connected by these links, ephemeral and impersonal as they are, that are woven between their respective functions, like in a market exchange. And in so far as this evolution leads to a transformation of behaviour, increasingly guided by a calculation of personal interest, it will create a complete upheaval of human nature : the birth of “the abstract man”, cut off from community and reduced to instrumental reason, condemned to maximizing his private interests because there is no collective world left to defend.” (Berlan, A. (2012). Chapter 2. La dissolution des formes de vie communautaires : Ferdinand Tönnies, paragraph 9. In A. Berlan, La fabrique des derniers hommes : Retour sur le présent avec Tönnies, Simmel et Weber (pp. 87 – 157). Paris : La Découverte.) from plural finalities :
  - for human reproduction;for producing the means of existence;for consuming the means of existence⁶; for cognitive and artistic expression;for public services…
- Filiation alliances on multiple scales :
  - predominance of community and local scales ;
  - regionally entwined localism
  - itself entwined in the supraregional up to the global scale
  - all while respecting the developmental logic of naturally inhabited ecosystems.
From a cognitive perspective, we must maintain our capacity to produce critical knowledge that is respectful, emancipatory and promotes extensionism. Raising our awareness is an essential condition for continuing evolution that is not to the detriment of the natural enrichment that comes from the multiplication of beings.

At the heart of this approach, we must find adequate answers to the great civilizational woes of the time. We must do this so that all categories of populations and identities will find their place and be fully recognized. The recourse of a diversified, inclusive and equitable mobilization strategy will base the entirety of the transitional approach on individuals, groups, organizations and institutions heading toward renewed civilizational configurations.

Notes

1
Cornelius Castoriadis (1989), “The ‘end of philosophy’?” in Salmagundi, no. 82 – 83, p. 11.
2
Reference to the notion of liberty presented by Karl Polanyi “La liberté dans une société complexe,” in Cangiani, M. et J. Maucourant (ed.) (2008), Essais de Karl Polanyi, Paris, Seuil, chap. 42 (chapter published in 1957).
3
Ethics, 1677, third part proposition 9.
4
Various works explore such organizational forms like : Clastre. P. (1974). La société contre l’État, Paris, Seuil. Shalins, M. (1977). Âge de pierre, âge d’abondance, l’économie des sociétés primitives, Paris, Gallimard. Testart, A. (2005). Éléments de classification des sociétés. Paris, Errance.
5
See the works of Ferdinand Tönnies (2010 [1887] on moving from communal societies to associative societies. Communauté et société, Paris, PUF. The theory of Tönnies summed up by Aurélien Berlan : “the tendency of community ties, as sustainable links between people, being constitutive of human life, to dissolve is the central pathology of a society where isolated individuals are no longer connected by these links, ephemeral and impersonal as they are, that are woven between their respective functions, like in a market exchange. And in so far as this evolution leads to a transformation of behaviour, increasingly guided by a calculation of personal interest, it will create a complete upheaval of human nature : the birth of “the abstract man”, cut off from community and reduced to instrumental reason, condemned to maximizing his private interests because there is no collective world left to defend.” (Berlan, A. (2012). Chapter 2. La dissolution des formes de vie communautaires : Ferdinand Tönnies, paragraph 9. In A. Berlan, La fabrique des derniers hommes : Retour sur le présent avec Tönnies, Simmel et Weber (pp. 87 – 157). Paris : La Découverte.)
6
In “Socialist Accounting”, Karl Polanyi (1922) identifies two associative modes : production cooperative and consumer cooperative (in M. Cangiani and J. Maucourant (Ibid., 2008)). Since his analysis is limited to economic forms, we are presenting an extension of his approach by integrating other social dimensions.