La Geografía en la Obra de Hipólito Unanue

If an ontological hermeneutics allows us to combine interpretation with our being in the world, if the processes of interpretation and critical engagement with politics are not separate activities, exactly what does this activity entail? What this means, for Adams, is that a critical engagement in politics must be one that looks to interpret the meaning of political structures and the world of politics more generally. This means, “questioning the immediate, contemporary, and familiar world of political life might be understood and carried out as an interpretive enterprise, precisely to the degree that a writer is committed to articulating the meanings of political arrangements” (W. Adams 1988, 51). Rather than understanding politics as merely a ‘pragmatic domain’, of means and ends, a hermeneutic approach reminds us that “the political is also an imagined world, a world constructed around and in terms of specific meanings” (W. Adams 1988, 51). Rather than focusing simply on political practices, our investigations must be concerned with the meanings of those practices, they must help us to understand the ‘imaginary’ realm of politics as an indispensable part of this ‘practical’ realm, as well as the relations that hold between the two and the ways in which they both, together, impact our self-understandings of citizenship, obligation and responsibility. We are interested in

understanding the way in which meaning is found within practice and the way in which political practice is also a process of “how in fact we go about defining ourselves…how we say who we are in the midst of everyday thought and action” (W. Adams 1988, 53). What needs to be investigated now is the way in which we can conceive of this imaginary level of politics and its relationship to the more ‘everyday’ understanding of political activity that is buttressed and legitimated by it.

One philosopher who offers a complex and rewarding take on the relationship between the functional organization of society and its ‘imaginary’ component is Cornelius Castoriadis. Castoriadis theorized that for us to understand society, we must first understand that a given society as historically ‘instituted’; that is, each society is produced and made meaningful through the emergence and interaction of specific institutions, all of which contain within them ‘imaginary significations’. As he writes, “the institutions, and the imaginary significations borne by it and animating it, create a world. This is the world of the particular society” (Castoriadis 1991, 146). Although Castoriadis is ultimately interested in understanding a world of meaningful human action we will be able to discuss such a world, and put forward a worthwhile conception of meaningful action, only if we interrogate the relationship between society, individuals, and the presence of these various ‘institutions’ and ‘social imaginaries’.

In his seminal work, The Imaginary Institution of Society, he further develops the notion of ‘the social imaginary’, this “creative core of the social-historical and psychic worlds…the element that creates ex nihilo the figures and forms rendering “this world” and “what is” possible” (Thompson 1982, 674). The idea of the imaginary is developed in

large part because Castoriadis felt that we needed to deepen our understanding of politics and society beyond the merely technical or rational and “he did not consider the goal- oriented, planned moment as the primary component of action because it constitutes only the technical moment of an activity that requires the setting of conditions goals, and means” (Joas 1989, 1188). Rather than focusing on the means/end side of politics and society, he wanted to understand the ‘setting of conditions’ that makes such goal-oriented activity even possible. In this regard, the imaginary is indispensable, as it is, for Castoriadis, the component of the social/political world that “accounts for the orientation of social institutions, for the constitution of motives and needs” (Thompson 1982, 664). According to John B. Thompson, Castoriadis’ idea of the ‘social imaginary’ is not simply a philosophical addendum to politics or society, but instead it is something that “renders possible any relation of object and image…without which there could be no reflection of anything” (Thompson 1982, 664). The shape that the political world takes in the realm of the ‘imaginary’ becomes one of the primary grounds upon which the ‘practical’ realm of politics gets established, it is what makes possible certain rationalities that enable the functioning of one political regime or another.

More specifically, the social imaginary, once instituted, serves as this ground upon which the specific political and social institutions of society can be founded because the imaginary is what allows us to understand ourselves as individuals within a given society. For Castoriadis, it is not enough to understand that we are individuals, but we must understand that we are social and historical individuals; that is, individuals who are inseparable from our relations to other (historical) concepts, objects, and ideas.

Therefore, the ‘social imaginary institutions’ carry out two essential functions. First, the presence of these social institutions ‘creates’ the social individual. According to Castoriadis, “the social fabrication of the individual is the historical process by means of which the psyche is coerced…into investing (cathecting) socially instituted objects, rules, and the world…the social individual is thus constituted by means of the internalization of the world and the imaginary significations created by society” (Castoriadis 1991, 148-9). If we truly accept, as Castoriadis would have us, the notion that we are social and historical individuals, then the process of becoming a social individual is a process which must rely on, our bring profoundly shaped by the historical and social institutions within which we exist.

The second function is intertwined with the first: in addition to creating the social individual, the social institutions are that which allow individuals to search for, and find, meaningful actions and beliefs within a given society. In order for the social institutions to fabricate the social individual, “the institution must offer to the psyche meaning for its waking life” (Castoriadis 1991, 144. Italics are in the original.). That is to say, it is not enough for institutions to ‘create’ us as social individuals, these institutions must also provide individuals with certain relations to other social institutions, from family relations, to law, to political structures. As Castoriadis notes, “Society must define its ‘identity’, its articulation, the world, its relation to the world and to the objects is contains, its needs and its desires. Without the ‘answer’ to these ‘questions, without these ‘definitions’, there can be no human world, no society, no culture…the role of imaginary significations is to provide an answer to these questions” (Castoriadis 1998, 147). This

leads Castoriadis to the idea that the social world exists, fundamentally, as a ‘system of significations’ and that these significations are brought into being as a way for us to understand, not just ourselves, but our relations to the world around us.

All of this leads us to Castoriadis’ major assertion about society and the relationships that hold between a given society and the individuals within it. Each individual society, as a particular social and historical construction (or what Castoriadis terms the socio-historical) is an ‘instituted’ society: any society is an historical creation that is held in place and made livable and open to human understanding and experience due to the presence of social institutions. For Castoriadis, an institution “is a socially sanctioned, symbolic network in which a functional component and an imaginary component are combined in variable proportions and relations” (Castoriadis 1998, 132). It is the presence of these institutions, with their combination of the functional and the imaginary, or more presicely, the functional that is predicated upon the imaginary, that both create the social individual, and provide the social individual with purpose and an understanding of social relations, and answers to social questions concerning purpose and desires.

In addition to providing answers to these questions, another invaluable function that the social imaginary institution is involved in is the production of the relations between people in society. “Relations between individuals and groups, behavior, motivations are not simply incomprehensible for us, they are impossible in themselves outside of this imaginary” (Castoriadis 1998, 161). Why is it then, that the imaginary is so important to the literal production of all of these relationships and ideas? It is due to

the fact that the imaginary resolves a fundamental element of arbitrariness that accompanies all networks of social relations, and thus produces a certain amount of social stability. To understand the essential nature of the social imaginary institution, we must understand that “the institution of society attempt to cover over that chaos, at creating a world for society” (Castoriadis 2007, 80) Castoriadis notes this arbitrary element when he writes, “the articulation of society into technique, economy, law, politics, religion, art etc. which seems self-evident to us, is only one mode of social institution, particular to a series of societies to which our own belongs” (Castoriadis 1998, 181). What these imaginary institutions provide is a social answer, or a resolution to that idea of arbitrariness. While it does not eliminate the issue that “there is not articulation of social life that is given once and for all…this articulation…is at every instance the creation of the society in question” (Castoriadis 1998, 180), what it does offer, in the form of social answers to social and political questions, is a self understanding that allows an individual, or a society, to avoid the issue (fear) of arbitrariness by providing an instituted social framework upon which people and groups can understand the social and political institutions as meaningful and purposeful; as part of a society that “operates as if it always were” (Naranch 2002, 69). This connection is indispensable for understanding one of Castoriadis’ major contentions: not just that the political world is ‘rational’ as well as ‘symbolic’ but that the very ‘rationality’ of any given political world is predicated upon a shared and understood ‘symbolic’ nature. Or as Castoriadis himself writes, “society can exist concretely only through the fragmentary and complementary

incarnation and incorporation of its institution and its imaginary significations in the living, talking, and active individuals of that society” (Castoriadis 1991, 145).

In Castoriadis’ estimation, the imaginary institutions that work to ‘produce’ the instituted society in question allow individuals to not only understand themselves ‘within’ that society, but to understand the relations, ideas, and norms that govern it, and that further allow individuals to engage in socially meaningful action: only by ‘understanding’ society can you act within it. Additionally, these institutions (and the imaginary that underpins them) lessen the sense of arbitrariness that Castoriadis sees fundamental to every instituted society. As John Thompson notes, the social imaginary provides for “the projection of an “imaginary community” by means of which “real” distinctions are portrayed as “natural,” the particular is disguised in the universal” (Thompson 1982, 666). This naturalization of norms, laws, and beliefs is crucial; the imaginary is important, if not fundamental, in this regard simply because those answers provide the very means with which the questions of arbitrariness can be skirted and the questions of purpose can be answered.

What ultimately, and intimately, ties the social imaginary to hermeneutics, and why it is helpful in developing our hermeneutic project can be found in the connection that Castoriadis makes between the imaginary and language. Regarding this intimate association, he writes, “a large part of the significations of a society – those that are, or can be made, explicit – are also instituted, directly or indirectly, through its language” (Castoriadis 1998, 238). Although elsewhere Castoriadis refers to language as a ‘second

order institution’,25 _{he asserts that “these second-order institutions…woven together,}

produce the concrete texture of society” (Castoriadis 2007, 100) If the imaginary is the means by which social institutions solidify themselves, language is the most prominent way in which that framework and its symbolic representation is constructed and dissipated through society. For Castoriadis, the social institutions of a society cannot be effective if they lack the ability to become internalized. Further, the ‘naturalization’ of each set of social institutions is impossible without this internalization, and language, as that which can connect these ideas with individual thought, provides the most effective means of allowing the social imaginary to become an internalized element of individual, and social, life. Or, as Dilip Gaonkar notes, “Each society derives its unity and identity by representing itself in symbols, myths, legends, and other collectively shared significations. Language is the medium par excellence in which these social imaginary significations become manifest and do their constitutive work” (Gaonkar 2002, 7). Therefore, if we are to concern ourselves with the creation and maintenance of a ‘social imaginary’ as part of our understanding of politics and citizenship, we must pay further attention to the relationship between the use of language and the deployment of this social imaginary.

Castoriadis work allows us to understand that within, or perhaps beneath whatever practical purposes we attach to various social and political practices, there lies a more

25 _{Here, Castoriadis’ terminology is slightly misleading. ‘Second order institutions’ are contrasted with}

what Castoriadis calls the ‘primal institution of society which is nothing more than the brute facts that all societies use specific ‘social imaginary significations’ to ‘create’ themselves. Hence, for Castoriadis, ‘second order institutions’ are in fact quite important, and include language, an understanding of the individual, an understanding of the family, and business enterprises. Essentially, ‘second order institutions’ are institutions specific to each society to implement (in its own historically specific way) the ‘primal institution of society’.

fundamental one: the production and re-production of the ‘social imaginary’. In order to understand this dual function of political practices – being at once both ‘pragmatic’ and ‘imaginary’ – I would like to offer an interpretation of Pericles’ funeral oration, with specific focus on how we can see this speech not only serving a certain ‘pragmatic’ political function but also serving to create, and re-create a specific set of social imaginary institutions that I, borrowing a term from Nicole Loraux, will refer to as the ‘Athenian imaginary’.