Abstract
Since the contributions by D. North [(1990). Institutions, institutional change, and economic performance. New York: CUP] and his Nobel Prize lecture [(1994). Economic performance through time, Nobel Prize Lecture. The American Economic Review, 84(3), 359–368], the relationship between mind and institutions has been increasingly investigated by economists. Mantzavinos, North, and Shariq [(2004). Learning, institutions, and economic performance. Perspectives on Politics, 2(1), 75–84] introduced the expression cognitive institutionalism in order to define this stream of research. In the first part of the paper we discuss some recent findings of the cognitive approach to institutions and its roots in the history of economic ideas. We also claim that in such an approach, no place has yet been found for a crucial faculty of the human mind, imagination. We then explore the concept of radical imaginary developed by Cornelius Castoriadis in his book The Imaginary Institution of Society (1975; 1987). From the perspective of cognitive economics, and on the grounds of Castoriadis’ legacy, we aim at highlighting some basic mechanisms of interaction between imagination, affectivity and institutions.
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Notes
According to North (1994), mental models are formed to explain and interpret the environment. They result from the interaction of both the genetic structure with which human beings are born and their experience through life. They are never defined once and for all, as they continually evolve under the pressure of feedback derived from new experience (North, 1994, pp. 362–363). In such a definition the mechanism through which it is possible to interpret the environment through mental models is not fully explained. In particular, the emotional aspects of such interpretation remain obscure.
Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997), “was born March 11, 1922, in Constantinople. His family emigrated a few months later to avoid Greco-Turkish strife. He grew up in a pre-war Athens marked by dictatorship, world war, occupation, and liberation. A member of the Greek Communist Youth at fifteen, he joined the most left-wing Greek Trotskyist faction, a decision that placed him under threat of death from both fascists and communists” (http://www.agorainternational.org/). After his arrival in Paris in 1945 he was co-founder of the legendary journal Socialisme ou Barbarie, active in the fight against the French-Algerian war, where he started writing as a political thinker and a theorist of revolution while working in the meantime as a professional economist at the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. To avoid deportation from France he signed his political texts with a variety of pseudonyms until he received French citizenship in the late 1960s. “Castoriadis retired in 1970 from his OECD position as Director of Statistics, National Accounts, and Growth Studies, a job that had enabled him to study in depth the major developed capitalist economies. He became a practicing psychoanalyst in 1974 and was elected a Director of Studies at Paris’s École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in 1979” (http://www.agorainternational.org/). As a psychoanalyst he was close to the “Quatrième Groupe”, which split from Ecole Freudienne ruled by Lacan (Ciaramelli, 1998, n. 6). Castoriadis's most original and enduring contribution, is, however, as ”philosopher of social imagination” (Ciaramelli, 1998). His most important book, The Imaginary Institution of Society, was published in French in 1975. Other famous publications in English include: Crossroads in the Labyrinth, (MIT Press, 1984), Political and Social Writings (University of Minnesota Press, 1988, 1993), World in Fragments (ed. and trans. David Ames Curtis Stanford University Press, 1997), The Castoriadis Reader (ed. David Ames Curtis, Blackwell Publishers 1997).
“One can think that animals, in any case higher-level animals, have a certain representation of their world, but this representation—and what composes this representation—is regulated in functional fashion; it contains essentially what is necessary for the animal to live and to continue its species. But in the human being imagination is de-functionalized. Humans can be made to kill for glory. What’s the “functionality” of glory? At most, it will be a name written on a monument, itself eminently perishable. Glory is the subjective corollary of a social imaginary value that constitutes one pole of the activity of humans, of some of them at least, and that brings into existence a desire directed toward it” (Castoriadis, 1997, pp. 127–128). To clarify the point, let us consider, for example, the object K: in a cell the image of K is always built up in the same way, on an exclusively perceptual basis, to satisfy the need of survival. In a human being, the image of K is part of a continuous representational flow which is highly subjective and which is not finalized to a unique and unchangeable goal.
Such position thus not allude in any way to the existence of an originary state of nature in which human beings already exist while institutions have not yet been created.
“We therefore must admit that there is in human collectivities a creative potential, a vis formandi, which I call the instituting social imaginary (...) How is one to detail this work of the instituting social imaginary? It consists, on the one hand, in institutions. But a look at these institutions shows that they are animated by—or are bearers and conveyors of—significations, significations that refer neither to reality nor to logic; that’s why I call them social imaginary significations” (Castoriadis, 1997, pp. 125–126).
“World-image and self-image are obviously always related. Their unity, however, is in its turn born by the definition each society gives of its needs, as this is inscribed in its activity, its actual social doing. The self-image a society gives itself includes as an essential moment the choice of objects and acts, etc., embodying that which, for it, has meaning and value” (1987, p. 149).
“This element—which gives a specific orientation to every institutional system, which overdetermines the choice and the connections of symbolic networks, which is the creation of each historical period, its singular manner of living, of seeing and of conducting its own existence, its worlds, and its relations with this world, this originary structuring component, this central signifying-signified, the source of that which presents itself in every instance as an indisputable and undisputed meaning, the basis for articulating what does matter and what does not, the origin of the surplus of being of the objects of practical, affective and intellectual investments, whether individual or collective—is nothing other than the imaginary of the society or of the period considered” (Castoriadis, 1987, p.145).
Certainly it cannot be seen as limited to perception or to neural activation.
One may suppose that a change in the emotional attitudes of the subject appears, at the beginning, as a more localized form of change which can, however, turn into a revolutionary force when it induces a revision of the meanings underlying social life.
The whole symbolic function presuppose “to see in a thing what it is not, to see it other than it is” (Castoriadis, 1987, p. 127).
As argued by Castoriadis, for example, “a property title, a bill of sale is a symbol of the socially approved ‘right’ of the owner to undertake an unlimited number of operations with respect to the object of his ownership. A paycheque is the symbol of the wage earner’s right to demand a given number of banknotes, which, in turn, are the symbol of their possessor’s right to perform a variety of acts of purchasing, each of which will be symbolic in its turn” (Castoriadis, 1987, p. 117).
“Not freely chosen, not imposed upon a given society, neither a neutral instrument nor a transparent medium, neither an impenetrable opacity nor an irreducible adversity, neither the master of society nor the flexible slave of functionality, not a direct and complete means of partaking of a rational order—symbolism determines the aspects of social life (and not merely those it was supposed to determine) while simultaneously being full of interstices and of degrees of freedom” (Castoriadis, 1987, p.125).
“Vicarious learning is defined as a change in behaviour due to the experience of observing a model; yet it is not a process of mere imitation because learning takes place by means of adaptation implying identification with the model that is going to be assumed” (Rizzello & Turvani, 2002, p. 204).
Recent developments in economic literature have pointed out that path-dependence also has a cognitive and neuropsychological dimension (Patalano, 2007; Rizzello, 2004). As already thought by Hayek (1952), the development of the brain and, specifically, its ability to adapt to the external environment depends on the presence of neural conne ctions which have existed since the individual’s birth. These connections continuously take form in the history of the subject and are influenced both by his/her genetic heritage and his/her personal living They are inelastic (but not rigid) and change according to new experiences. Changes include functional evolution of neural groups, learning how to perform new “tasks” when the individual faces unexplored situations and the recombination of synaptic connections into a configuration that is more suitable for a present situation (Damasio, 1994; Fuster, 1997; Paller, 2001). As a consequence, the past perceptual experience influences the present one, but does not preclude the emergence of new perceptual configurations (Paller, 2001; Patalano, 2007; Rizzello, 2000).
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A previous version of this paper was presented at the III Storep annual conference in Lecce (Italy), June 1–3, 2006. I thank the participants and my discussant Massimo Egidi for their suggestions. I am very grateful to Salvatore Rizzello for his helpful comments and support.
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Patalano, R. Imagination and society. The affective side of institutions. Constit Polit Econ 18, 223–241 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-007-9019-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10602-007-9019-z