Imagination and Organization: A Review of The Imaginary Institution of Society, C. Castoriadis. Polity, Cambridge (1975/1987), 418 pp.
... His opus magnum, The imaginary institution of society (1987), roughly consists of two parts: an elaborate critique of contemporary Marxism; and the development of a social theory based on the idea of the social imaginary. While organizational theory has tentatively engaged with the latter (Wright et al., 2013;Klein Jr., 2013;De Cock, 2013;Shukaitis, 2008;e.g. Hasselbladh and Theodoridis, 1998), the former has been largely absent from recent research, according to Memos. ...
The recent proliferation of Web 2.0 applications and their role in contemporary political life have inspired the coining of the term ‘open-source politics’. This article analyzes how open-source politics is organized in the case of a radical political party in Denmark called The Alternative. Inspired by the literature on organizational space, the analysis explores how different organizational spaces configure the party’s process of policy development, thereby adding to our understanding of the relationship between organizational space and political organization. We analyze three different spaces constructed by The Alternative as techniques for practicing open-source politics and observe that physical and digital spaces create an oscillation between openness and closure. In turn, this oscillation produces a dialectical relationship between practices of imagination and affirmation. Curiously, it seems that physical spaces open up the political process, while digital spaces close it down by fixing meaning. Accordingly, we argue that open-source politics should not be equated with online politics but may be highly dependent on physical spaces. Furthermore, digital spaces may provide both closure and disconnection between a party’s universal body and its particular body. In conclusion, however, we propose that such a disconnection might be a precondition for success when institutionalizing radical politics, as it allows parties like The Alternative to maintain their universal appeal.
The focus of this article is on processes of social control and the role that images and processes of identification play in effecting such control. The article begins by schematically tracing the history of the new paradigm of control firstly within the managerial literature as a move ‘from control to commitment’, then through critical accounts of ‘employee subjection’, through to more recent discussions of the nature of resistance. This history and its various puzzling inversions are then reviewed through Lacan’s account of the ‘imaginary’, and Butler’s associated re-reading of oedipal identifications. These offer an account both of the constitution of a humanist, interiorized sense of self—of the self as a discrete, autonomous, independent entity—as well as of the illusions or misunderstandings of this humanist conception of the self. It is suggested that the power of the imaginary lies in the power of recognition and the way in which this acts as a lure or trap in which we seek and find ourselves. It is this desire for existence confirming recognition that founds our interest in the control of others and leaves us vulnerable to control by others. Understanding the misrecognition involved in such processes of identification allows clearer sight of the conditions for effective resistance.
