Sunday 5 May 2013

Calicoes and capitalism: or why the world was better off wearing Indian clothes



The subject of this post brings together two issues which bother me, to quite different degrees and in quite different ways, but which a reading of three recent books on global and South Asian history has convinced me are actually connected at quite a deep level. Issue no. 1 is - why is most Western clothing so dull? (Especially for men.) And issue no. 2 is - why is the current global economic dispensation so profoundly unjust? The books I draw on are David Arnold's history of South Asia, published in German as volume 11 of the Neue Fischer Weltgeschichte (Fischer Verlag, 2012) - David is professor emeritus at Warwick, and is a family friend since, as it so happens, he used to live in my parents' house; Prasannan Parthasarathi's Why Europe Grew Rich and Asia Did Not: Global Economic Divergence 1600-1850 (Cambridge University Press, 2011); and Giorgio Riello's Cotton: The Fabric that Made the Modern World (CUP, 2013).

I will start with issue 1, before moving gradually on to the heavier debates surrounding issue 2. Anyone who has travelled in Asia has surely been struck by the aesthetic contrast between modern Western clothes, the plain cotton trousers and check or striped cotton shirt that are the typical everyday choice for menswear  among the urban middle class, and the variety and beauty of traditional Asian dress and fabric styles, from Indonesian ikat and Indian saris to Japanese kimonos. The latter tend to be reserved for women, the home, or for special occasions, while the "public sphere" is almost always defined by Western codes of dress.One wonders why Eastern cultures do not make more consistent use of their own types of clothing. Is it a matter of inherent price and production costs? Surely not: many Asian styles require less sewing and fabric treatment than Western shirts and trousers do. Is it convenience? That depends very much on how you define convenience (certainly in terms of adaptability to climate and function, south Indian lunghis are much superior to trousers). Is it a question of manufacturing origin? But so much of the world's clothing is now made in Asia! Why are we in the West not yet following Asian fashions? Perhaps by the time China has reached a position of unchallengeable dominance in the world economy, it will be able to dictate to us, linguistically, culturally and sartorially. And yet as far as clothes go, China is duller and more Westernized than most Asian countries. When I spent a day shopping for clothes on a trip to Kunming in south-west China a few years ago, it was extremely hard to find any men's clothes in interesting colours or patterns.

It is worth looking at this in historical perspective: have Western clothes always been dull? Is it - to adapt the sort of argument that Rousseau and his contemporaries made - another reflection on the utilitarian nature of the cold, Northern countries, serving the needs for warmth and durability imposed by a harsh climate rather than answering the invitation of the warm South to leisure and aesthetic display? If one goes back far enough, then maybe one could find support for such a line of reasoning (Ice-Age furs versus Amazonian tattoos, even). But the argument is somewhat irrelevant, for there have been periods of European history when clothing has been much more overtly appealing. Take for instance an item of clothing now irredeemably historical, but quite easy to recognize as typical for well-off men in paintings from the 17th and 18th centuries: the robe de chambre or house robe, sometimes (misleadingly) described as a "nightgown". Here are three examples, from paintings by Vermeer, Francis Hayman and the Spaniard Jose de Alcibar (the pattern on the Vermeer is only visible in close-up, probably as a result of over-cleaning):

File:Johannes Vermeer - The Astronomer - WGA24685.jpg

Johannes Vermeer, The Astronomer (1668)

Maurice Greene; John Hoadly, by Francis Hayman, 1747 - NPG  - © National Portrait Gallery, London

Francis Hayman, Maurice Greene and John Hoadly (1747)


mulato2.gif

José de Alcíbar, De Español y Negra, Mulato (ca. 1760-1770)

As this blog on costume history points out, robes such as this "appear all over Europe in the later part of the seventeenth century". Despite being predominantly a domestic item of clothing, Richard Steele in 1711 refers to "those who come in their nightgowns to saunter away their time" in coffee houses; and as the intellectual status of at least two of the subjects portrayed above suggests (Maurice Greene, in pink, was a professor of music), such gowns were used as symbols of learning and studiousness.

The plot thickens when we look at the more idiomatic words used to describe such words in Europe at the time: cambay in Dutch, and banyan in English. Both are Indian in origin: Cambay was a historical designation for Khambat, in Gujarat on the west coast of India; banyan or bania(n) is an Arabic and Portuguese word derived from the Gujarati for "trader" or a specific caste of merchants (bania).

This ought to come as no surprise. It is highly likely that all of the robes portrayed above actually came from India, as did an ever-increasing quantity of high-quality silk and cotton clothing from the 17th century (the VOC or Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602) up until the middle of the 18th century. And while silk had long been traded overland via the famous Silk Road, mass imports of cotton were something new to Europe - something that would in the end turn out, as Riello's subtitle implies, to be crucial to the Western economic regime of "modernity". In the meantime, in the hands of Indian manufacturers, cotton was a unique material: light, comfortable, relatively cheap, and most importantly, easy to dye and print, a combination of attributes that none of the fabrics known to the West, such as linen, hemp or wool, could match. The Indian textile industry had built up over centuries a tremendous expertise in dying fabrics, creating intense colours that were fast and did not fade. Riello reproduces fragments of the same vivid red and blue pattern found independently in Egypt and the Sulawesi islands in Indonesia, and produced in Gujarat in the 14th century, showing the antiquity, geographical extent and skill involved in the Indian Ocean textile trade. The V&A Museum's collection of Indian textiles (searchable online) is enormous, and contains pieces of astonishing beauty, among them these cotton ceremonial skirt-cloths (pha nung) for the Thai market:




Panel

Luxury printed cottons for Europe could also be impressively complex in design, on the scale of Turkish rugs. They were used for home furnishings, as bedcovers or wall-hangings, known as "palampores":


As that example demonstrates, with its palm trees surrounded by a more familiar-feeling flower-chain border, the designs of these fabrics were neither exclusively Indian nor European, but a melange or hybrid of motifs and styles, arrived at by a process of aesthetic negotiation between consumers, traders, and producers (Riello, p. 133). One contemporary term for Indian cottons was "calicoes", derived from Calicut, the old name for Kozhikode in the modern state of Kerala, and older histories of the textile trade used to refer to a "calico craze" on the European market (perhaps on the model of the "tulip mania" in the 1630s, also sparked by Dutch imports). This may be an accurate reflection of the popularity of Indian cotton, which was indeed massive; but it tends to make one think of this popularity as a passing fad, influenced perhaps by a curiosity for the exotic which would soon wear off. Recent historians such as Riello and Parthasarathi emphasize instead the slow process of material and aesthetic education involved in Asiatic commercial success: "consumers in Europe had to learn how to integrate cotton textiles into their dress and furnishings" (Riello, p. 6). Samuel Pepys provides an example. He recorded in his diary having "bought my wife a...painted East India callico for to line her new study", but only "after many trialls"; and only gradually did he progress from furnishings to purchasing a "banyan" for himself and a blue calico gown for his wife (Riello, p. 126).

Most importantly, there is evidence that the so-called "calico craze" brought beautifully-printed cottons into the lives not just of the rich and the middle classes in Europe, but also of the poor, right down to the lowest strata of society. The chief source for this is the 18th-century register for the Foundling Hospital in Coram Fields, Bloomsbury, which carefully preserved thousands of scraps of fabric used to identify the "foundlings" or abandoned babies taken in by the institution in case their mothers were ever in a position to come and reclaim them (few, sadly, were). Here are some:





As this Guardian review of a 2011 exhibition at the museum observes, the Foundling Hospital collection may well be one of the biggest archives of 18th-century fabrics in the world - certainly as far as the working class is concerned. Among them were girls so painfully poor that they had had to give up their child - but even they had access to the new world of taste, pattern and colour opened up by Indian cottons: "their dress may not have been a new one, but they had managed to acquire something that pleased the eye and soothed the touch. They had, perhaps, been able to express a preference for spots over stripes or wondered whether blue was more flattering than green. The tokens left behind at the hospital show a remarkable variety of design. Indeed, reports [John] Styles [the exhibition curator], it is rare for the same pattern to recur among the hundreds of different prints". What the author of the review, significantly, gets wrong is the suggestion that this world was opened up by home manufactures - by the Industrial Revolution. As Styles notes, the majority of these fabrics are from the 1740s and 1750s: Arkwright's spinning jenny, the first main technological innovation in the British textile industry, was constructed in 1764. These sorts of textiles were "hand made", either Indian or made in imitation of Indian designs by techniques not the least superior to those used in Asia. At this stage, the British textile industry was still learning from India - both in terms of taste and in terms of technology. It could not yet surpass it.

To answer the question of how English textiles did beat the Indian trade is really to answer both of my initial questions at once. The answer is however complex, surprising, and unfortunately, unlike the textiles above, also extremely ugly: aesthetically, politically, and morally. Its implications are also enormous in economic terms. For although the Dutch and English East India Companies provided key links in the trading network that opened up the European market to the East, and thus made sizeable profits themselves, this did not stop a process which strikingly resembles that by which China has recently grown to a position of economic strength: the gradual transfer of currency reserves from West to East. Today the currency is US dollars; in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was gold and silver bullion, mined in the New World. Parthasarathi quotes Andre Gunder Frank's assertion that, well into the 18th century, "the two major regions that were most 'central' to the world economy were India and China" (Parthasarathi, p. 22). Silver flowed into Asia in vast quantities in exchange for porcelain and silk from China and cotton from India; for Europeans could not pay with anything else. They did not know how to produce anything that the Asian economy wanted. Finding out how to produce things that the Indians and Chinese did want - or could be persuaded to want - and how to make them economically dependent on those goods, would be the secret to reversing the trade deficit and the balance of global economic power.

The first factor in the British success was simple, and in fact morally quite neutral, though it is regarded as heresy by most economists today: protectionism. The flood of Indian textiles was threatening to ruin English weavers, who could not compete. They protested, in print and on the streets, often violently, in favour of an import ban. The litany of complaint was more extreme than one might expect to hear today, but in at least one respect it was familiar: the English accused Indian weavers of undercutting them, of accepting impossibly low wages simply to ruin the competition. A 1719 pamphlet by J. Roberts entitled "The Spinster" inveighed against "a tawdrey, bespotted, flabby, ragged, low-priced thing called callico...made...by a parcel of Heathens and Pagans that worship the Devil and work for a half-penny a day" (cit. Geoffrey Turnbull, A History of the Calico Printing Industry of Great Britain (Altrincham: J. Sherratt, 1951), p. 21). Daniel Defoe, who had at first been employed to write propaganda in favour of the East India Company's interests in calico, later wrote on behalf of the English wool industry, "The People who make all these fine Works [calico] are to the last Degree miserable, their Labour of no Value, their Wages would fright us to talk of it, and their way of Living raise a Horror in us to think of it...the Wages they get cannot provide better food for them; and yet their rigorous Task-masters lash them forward as we...sometimes do our Horses" ("A Plan of the English Commerce" (1728), cit. Parthasarathi, p. 34). 

As logical as such accusations might have seemed, they were unfounded. As Parthasarathi convincingly demonstrates using primary sources, Indian cottons in most global markets were "by no means the lowest-priced cloths" (p. 35), simply the best-quality ones in a medium price-bracket; and the standard of living among Indian weavers was high, certainly quite comparable to that of their European counterparts. They ate a varied diet, and the more successful of them bought luxuries such as ghee and lived in multi-storey stone houses, the marks of rich villagers (Parthasarathi, p. 44). This particular global system of textile trade - the "old cotton system", which Riello calls "centrifugal" or distributive, rather than "centripetal" or exploitative, and into which the Dutch and British had to fit carefully, to begin with, rather than being able to dominate or transform - was not based on undercutting or the unjust treatment of labour. It was instead based on diversification, co-operation, and high quality.

In any case, the fact that the Indian textile industry was competing fairly was not common knowledge in Europe, and might not have changed the course of events even if it had been. The furore about cotton imports grew into possibly the largest issue in English politics in the decades around 1700, and parliament responded to the weavers' demands in a series of Calico Acts, progressively restricting the import of calico. This is an era not often given much space by historians, and usually summed up in the dull figure of Queen Anne. In fact the Calico Acts were crucial to the Industrial Revolution - and therefore to the course of global history. Unless the British government had protected their native textile industry, and at the same time systematically encouraged both the collection of knowledge and innovative research, British clothes would not have been able to compete with Asian imports. (Illegal imports of calico made things difficult as it was.)

The particular course of development taken by the industry before Arkwright's spinning jenny and the other innovations of the Industrial Revolution would prove almost as important to the future of cotton as the new technologies. One intermediate step was to promote the production of "fustian", a fabric with cotton weft going in one direction and linen threads for the warp that ran perpendicularly to it. Fustian was inferior to pure cotton fabric and everyone in England knew it, because linen did not hold dyes or show patterns to advantage as cotton did (which had been the main reasons for the popularity of calico). However it would do reasonably well as a method of producing striped and check patterns, with dyed cotton threads enlivening a plain linen background. The area around Manchester was already known for fustian, and was also near the major port of Liverpool. This was an advantage because the carefully-struck protectionist balance of the Calico Acts did not ban the calico trade completely (as had been done in France, and would have put the East India Company out of business had it been insisted on in Britain). Rather, it allowed it to continue for the re-export of cottons to Africa and the Americas. Cotton cloth was too important an ingredient in the Atlantic trade to be eliminated. The other ingredient in the Atlantic trade network of which the same could be said was, of course, African slaves.

The connection between industrially-produced cotton and slavery is well-known, but what Riello and Parthasarathi point to is its importance - as a trading rather than labour relationship - even prior to the establishment of the great cotton plantations in the American South. It was precisely the West African market, which was furthest away from the Indian Ocean trade and showed the most demand for lower-grade textiles, that allowed the Manchester cotton trade to expand, by a safe process of what Riello calls "re-export substitution". This is so termed by analogy to "import substitution", in which home industries attempt to manufacture themselves whatever products are being bought in from abroad; here the Lancashire textile industry was trying to substitute its own products for cheap Indian calicos which were imported by the East India Company and then re-exported in exchange for African slaves. Before it became a cotton port, Liverpool was a slave port. The two "goods" became equivalent. Parthasarathi reports that over the 18th century as a whole, two-thirds of British exports to West Africa consisted of textiles (p. 24), thus furnishing the main means of exchange for buying slaves from African slave traders. Between 1752 and 1754, 60% of British cotton cloth exports were exchanged for slaves in West Africa (Parthasarathi, p. 134).

An ugly business, then - in more senses than one. The re-exported cloth was not the English substitute for the kind of printed calico we saw above, for which the London market was primarily responsible, but cheap, dull and nasty fustians in gingham patterns. Riello confirms the connection:

The majority of 'cottons' from Manchester were mixed linen and cotton with dyed cotton yarns being woven as the weft of stripes and checks... Manchester's cotton production boomed in the 1750s when quantities increased and the overall quality of production seemed to have risen. From the mid century the so-called 'Manchester linen checks' became a significant part of the region's production, accounting from 48 to 86 percent of all exported cottons between 1750 and 1774. These products were of sufficient quality to find a market in West Africa, as suggested by...Thomas Melvin, the British governor of Cape Coast Castle (p. 153).

Cape Coast Castle, in case you need reminding, was the principal "slave castle" on the west coast of Africa, a fort extended by the British by the addition of underground dungeons that could hold up to 1000 slaves awaiting transport to America:




It still stands today in modern Ghana, and is as powerful a symbol of the monstrosity of Britain's Atlantic trading enterprise as Auschwitz is of the worst crimes of European anti-semitism. A friend visited in 2011 and wrote this excellent piece on its importance. Cape Coast Castle's operation was supported from 1750 by the sale of Manchester textiles, most in the so-called "gingham" or check pattern now ubiquitous on shirts, tea-towels and tablecloths all over the globe:


I personally find gingham hideous, and as it turns out, there are some pretty good historical and moral reasons for such a reaction. (Incidentally, the word even changed its meaning as a result of the Manchester trade: it originally came from the Malay word geng-gang, meaning "striped". Most earlier ginghams were striped, sometimes quite prettily so, but check patterns gradually took over a larger proportion of Manchester output, and with it, the word itself.) The spiralling exploitation of the English labour-force that went hand in hand with the expansion of the Lancashire cotton mills is the other side of the coin, of course, and was the major source of evidence in Marx and Engels' indictment of modern industrial capitalism.

But the "new cotton system" did not just concentrate labour; it concentrated the entire organization of the industry, orienting everything towards the factory and streamlined mass production (hence Riello's designation "centripetal"). Everything quite literally served the machine, from the deskilled factory operatives to the standardised patterns given to the appearance of the textiles themselves. Riello explores how the factory "brought standardisation: the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century cotton factories inaugurated a notion of production based on predictability and consistency over time. Unlike a putting-out system, the cloth's pattern, its finishing and quality were not left to the decision of individual producers. The product of one factory might be indistinguishable from that of another...in a way quite dissimilar from the idiosyncratic production of individual Indian weavers" (p. 229). The process of aesthetic negotiation and diversification that had formed a natural part of the long Indian supply chains was replaced by a mechanical, centrally imposed series of patterns. Moreover, those patterns were now "protected" by property rights. The aesthetic value of textiles was centralized and legally fixed in order to prevent "piracy" (just as in the 19th century, that of music would also be centralized and fixed in the form of the score and, later, the recording, for much the same reasons). Designs were safeguarded for fixed periods, which "made it possible for those who had invested in the creation and marketing of new patterns to legally retain the right to exploit them against all those imitators who could otherwise steal them 'through a shop window'...as one contemporary put it" (p. 234). (Again, there was considerable irony, not to say hypocrisy in this: in the 17th century British piracy, both real and intellectual, was rampant, and played a major part both in the disruption of Mughal shipping and in the transfer of Indian technical knowledge about cotton production and dying to Europe.)

All this led to massive gains in efficiency, which enabled cotton cloth to be produced far more cheaply than had been possible under the previous system. The global trade in cotton was turned around.  In 1820 the British East India company ceased trading in Indian cottons, and by 1840 British cloth imports exceeded native production. The impact on the Indian weavers was calamitous: even the British Goveror-General George Bentinck opined that the decline in their prosperity "hardly finds a parallel in the history of commerce. The bones of the cotton weavers are bleaching the plains of India" (cit. Riello, p. 273) - a dramatic image quoted by Marx himself in his contemporary writings on the Anglo-Indian economy. But even at this juncture, terms such as "efficiency" and "superior technology", with their implication of an irresistible, inherent trajectory of development whose consequences were simply "unfortunate" for those still "undeveloped", do not fully explain the situation. Subduing the Indian competition would not have been possible without the exploitation of Britain's political and military control over the subcontinent - in other words, without the Empire. The present-day economic and social situation of India is a result of a fatal combination of imperialism and globalized industrial capitalism.

One thing not often realized about pre-colonial India was how different it probably was to the present day. Orientalist stereotypes of the eternal and unchanging East obscure the fact that the advent of European influence had a huge impact, as indeed it has had everywhere else around the globe. India was not always poor; the population was not always either expanding or succumbing Malthusian-fashion to famine or disease; the main support of the Indian peasantry was not always agriculture; the caste system was not always a rigid framework hindering social mobility and progress; even the extended family - so often presented as the key to South Asian social identity - was not always quite so "extended" as it is supposed to be today. As we have seen, India was running up a trade surplus in the 18th century; the population was stable and protected from harvest failures and famines (which were rare) by a system of state-run financial aid, the so-called taccavi; as little as 25% of the peasantry were engaged in agriculture; the caste system was flexible and often helped commerce by promoting trust (because members of the same caste were engaged in the same trade); and surveys of Indian households in the early 1820s found  an average of less than 5 people per family and little more per house (including servants) - a figure entirely comparable to Europe (cf. Parthasarathi, chap. 3). Change across all these areas was primarily a result of colonialization.

And in economic terms, colonialization meant exploitation and unfair advantage. (It is one of the great ironies of history that the English have managed to claim "fair play" as one of our cardinal virtues - from the perspective of the rest of the world, nothing could be further from the truth.) Military power lay at the basis of British policy. It was a year after the battle of Buxar in 1764 - the real turning-point in the establishment of Company power in Bengal, historians now concur, rather than the more famous victory at Plassey in 1757 - that the British received the diwani or right to collect taxes in the provinces of Bengal and Bihar. As David Arnold puts it, "Nominally the British thereby became vassals of the Great Mogul, but in practice this meant they had a licence to prey upon the riches of the province. In this way Bengal became a bridgehead, from which the British could extend their dominion step by step" (p. 337). In his history of Bengal, Land of Two Rivers: A History of Bengal from the Mahabharata to Mujib (New Delhi: Penguin, 2011), Nitish Sengupta highlights how, "as a result of a series of crucial economic changes during the first hundred years of British rule, Bengal, traditionally a prosperous country, was transformed into an economically depressed, low-income country...a typical colonial economy which supplied raw materials for industries in Great Britain and served as a market for British goods" (p. 199).

The first of these changes was the ruthless levying of land taxes accompanied by an almost total lack of interest in actual agricultural development or investment. The system used changed - from private collection to fill the pockets of Company nabobs to the more detached zamindar system (based on the large-scale estate landholding system in England) that appeared with the Permanent Settlement in 1793, but the exploitative character of the arrangement remained. As painfully recollected in the lyrics of Bengali folk songs from the period that are still sung today, rents could be raised without limit and peasants evicted if they were unable to pay. In the south of India the relationship between landowners and peasants deteriorated to the point where the latter were actually physically tortured for non-payment of rent (as revealed by the Madras Torture Commission of 1855 - Arnold, p. 392). Nevertheless, more and more peasants were forced into agriculture because domestic industries were being destroyed by unfair tariffs. The situation did not just affect cotton: Sengupta reports that British silk imports into India received a charged of 3.5% while Indian silks going the other way were charged a duty of 20%; the ratio for woollen textiles was even worse (p. 201). Salt could not be manufactured at all in India and had to be imported (hence the symbolic value of Gandhi's famous "Salt March" in 1930). By the mid-19th century, when the East India Company had been ousted from its monopoly position and duties were reduced, England had acquired political control over most of the country and an unbeatable technological advantage at home, while decimating Indian manufactures and driving native banians or merchants out of trade and into the lower ranks of the British bureaucracy.

Then came the railways. They were not as much of an altruistic investment in local infrastructure as it might seem, for as Arnold points out, their "most important effect was the [further] opening of Indian markets for British industrial products and the facilitation of the export of raw materials" (p. 401). Together with the building of canals, they led to massive deforestation, and their embankments had unforeseen consequences for the drainage of water during the monsoon floods. Arnold's analysis reveals that the British were even to some extent thereby culpable for the growth of malaria to epidemic proportions in the subcontinent, for the areas of stagnant, undrained water that were created in the reshaped Indian landscape proved to be perfect mosquito breeding-grounds.

Malaria claimed even more lives among an undernourished population. From the Bengal famine of 1770 to that of 1943, famines in the province occurred with "unfamiling regularity throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, except for fifteen years between 1880 and 1895" (Sengupta, p. 204). With some exceptions, it is difficult to hold British officials directly responsible for Indian deaths from famine; but there is little doubt that the number of mortalities resulting indirectly from British economic policy over the long period of colonial rule would exceed by some margin the numbers of victims of the Holocaust and the Soviet gulags put together. The so-called Madras famine of 1877 resulted in the death of between 5.5 and 8 million people.

Arnold quotes an estimate of 20 million dead from famine between 1860 and 1910. Many were a direct result of lack of state intervention, of a laissez faire policy that allowed grain exports to double at the height of the 1877 famine and made aid conditional on "relief works", doling out rice only to those who performed a whole day of strenuous labour to earn it.

If you don't think Victorian economic policy could appear any more criminal, well, think again. Parallel to the Atlantic economy in which cotton was structurally connected to slavery, in Asia it became intimately bound up with the opium trade. Opium turned out to be the chief "good" that the Chinese didn't actually want but could be "persuaded" to want, and it came from India (modern Pakistan and Afghanistan), where it was bought in exchange for - what else - cotton textiles from Manchester.

It was by means such as this that the British global trade network was built up - a far more important entity than the "Empire" measured in crudely territorial terms, and also far more durable. We can no longer take a map of the world and colour a quarter of its land surface in pink; but we can still point to the trade exchanges that continue to exploit factory labour and concentrate capital in the hands of wealthy Western urban elites. And the justification for such unjust economic processes continues to be the same given by the Manchester mill-owners and the governors of British India: that trade must be "free", and the market must be left to operate without state intervention. That argument rewrote the realities of 18th-century economic history as if they conformed to Adam Smith's "classical" economic theory. In fact, they contradicted it. Britain's economic success was built on 18th-century protectionism and state intervention - and as far as that went, there was nothing wrong with such policy. The problem was that Britain then prevented Asia from reclaiming her advantage by similar means (until the last few decades, during which, as Will Hutton has shown, Asian industry has been successful precisely because it has protected its markets and invested large amounts of state capital in its industries). The "killer apps" ensuring the "rise of the West" were not science, the work ethic or competition, as Niall Ferguson has argued. Rather - and in this respect they really were "killers" - one should list factors such as slavery, the drug trade, naval and general military power, empire, child labour at home and forced labour abroad, racism, ecological devastation, and moral and political hypocrisy, hypocrisy of precisely the kind that encouraged others to respect absolutely an ideology of economic freedom to which the West only adhered when it suited it.

Thursday 2 May 2013

Philosopher of the imagination: Cornelius Castoriadis

I admit it, I have a secret, almost librarian-like inclination toward obscure and overlooked cultural figures. Especially essayists (Charles Lamb, Oliver Wendell Holmes, G. K. Chesterton), Biedermeier painters (Georg Friedrich Kersting and Carl Spitzweg), eighteenth-century "proto-Romantics" (J. M. R. Lenz, J. G. Hamann, Senancour, Edward Young), fin-de-siecle pianists (Frederic Lamond, Mark Hambourg, Moritz Rosenthal), and just about anyone from Bengal or the Weimar era (Tagore's female relatives, Nirad Chaudhuri, Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay; Max Scheler, Paul Bekker, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, Stefan Zweig, Max Beckmann...) But with the subject of this post I may well be going too far. I asked an acquaintance with a postdoctoral position in a French department and a passion for theory what she knew of Cornelius Castoriadis - the answer: rien de tout! Why should she have done, I hear you ask - he doesn't sound very French...

And of course he wasn't French. Castoriadis was born in Istanbul, to Greek parents, in 1922, and grew up in Athens. He describes his early life and influences in the first part of a Greek TV documentary here (the only segment of the programme with English subtitles, unfortunately: click on the 'CC' button on the toolbar at the bottom to bring them up). His earliest ambition was to be a composer - a significant fact, to which we will return. But it was in Paris, where he moved in 1945 in order to escape political persecution (by both Fascists and Communists) and write a doctoral thesis in philosophy, that he established his reputation. Keeping track of all the different fields and languages which he covered - whilst remaining until 1970 an immigrant potentially subject to deportation by the French authorities at 24 hours' notice - is quite a task. With a student background in Weberian sociology, economics and law, he became a professional economist for the OECD, a trained psychoanalyst, a socialist theorist, activist and member of the group Socialisme ou Barbarie (which also included Jean-Francois Lyotard and Guy Debord), and most importantly, a philosopher, one who knew the key texts of both the ancient Greek and modern German traditions in the original and used his understanding of them to preserve a rigorous intellectual independence, whilst simultaneously living through one of the most creative and competitive periods in the history of French thought. Here's a photo of the man:


Even more than Michel Foucault, to whom in his bespectacled baldness he bore some resemblance, Castoriadis does not look like the kind of character you want to mess with. And in his case, this was true on the intellectual level as well. The other Parisian penseurs were rarely bad-tempered: it is a rarity when Foucault's foreword to the English edition of The Order of Things refers to the "tiny minds" of certain "half-witted 'commentators'" who persisted in categorizing him as a structuralist, and more typical when he continues, with mandarin modesty, "I should be grateful if a more serious public would free me from a connection that certainly does me honour, but that I have not deserved". Castoriadis, however, took no prisoners whatever. Foucault's own work he describes as "Nietzsche warmed over with a Parisian sauce"; postmodernism's "displays of self-contentment are as arrogant as they are stupid"; structuralism is a "pseudo-scientific ideology" and Lacanism a "smoky mystification"; and of one of the holiest of theoretical Grails, Marx's Das Kapital, Castoriadis wrote simply, "It is no accident that the man spent forty years of his life working on his economic treatise without finishing it".

Having lived with two Greeks who once nearly fell out with each other over a point of mathematics, I'm not surprised by Castoriadis's Mediterranean robustness in argument. The humour in the last example is just as typical though; and while we're at it, why not cite some more examples. The first Gulf War was supported by two-thirds of the French public "because of their fascination for the big American airlifted electronic penis". Castoriadis's comment on Chantal Mouffe's appeal to "fight the bureaucratic character of the State apparatus": that would be like trying to "fight the vegetal character of plants". You only need as much French as will get you round the Paris metro system to understand the following anti-historicist pun: "Sartre accused Camus of not seeing that history a un sens [has a meaning/is going somewhere] - it goes to...Bagnolet, Porte-des-Lilas, I forget which subway station...I think some people realized quite a while ago that these expressions are absurd. History has no more sens and no more meaning than 'the gravitational field weighs fourteen kilos'. It is within the gravitational field that something can weigh fourteen kilos. Likewise, history is the field in and through which meaning emerges, created by human beings."


But to go on to the more productiveside of Castoriadis's criticisms, it is probably with his opposition to Marx that we should start in attempting to understand Castoriadis’s own theory of society. Up until the mid-1960s at the latest, Castoriadis was still a Marxist. It is however worth noting that the journal Socialisme ou Barbarie distinguished itself among similar organs of the French left by its detailed critique of Soviet socialism, which Castoriadis in his articles of the 1950s referred to not as socialism but as “bureaucratic capitalism”, or later, as “stratocracy” – a rigidified and fundamentally anti-democratic institutional regime. In 1959, Castoriadis published a “Note on the Marxist philosophy and theory of history” in the journal, a text which would be developed into the extensive reflections of the articles series “Marxism and Revolutionary Theory” in 1964-5, and integrated in this form in 1974 into his most famous book, The Imaginary Institution of Society. Here Castoriadis’s engagement with the philosophical roots and assumptions of Marxism brought him to the point where he no longer honestly wished to uphold one “true” version of Marxism against its rivals, or defend Marx himself against his devotees. It was Marx who was the problem. As he put it early on in the above-mentioned text, “Starting from revolutionary Marxism, we have arrived at the point where we have to choose between remaining Marxist and remaining revolutionaries” (IIS, 14). Castoriadis chose the latter route, and when his articles did not produce the response from their readership that he hoped for, he initiated the dissolution of Socialisme ou Barbarie in 1966. His intellectual career entered another phase.

What was Castoriadis’s problem with Marx? One could say it was Marx’s theory of historical knowledge, his project in Das Kapital (which Castoriadis, unlike Erich Fromm and others, did not believe could be circumvented by a return to the “early” Marx) – a project of understanding the development of history according to the lawful application of economic categories of thought. Castoriadis no longer believed that the history of human society could be understood through a framework of economic determinism. In the opening pages of The Imaginary Institution of Society he points out the totalizing error in the Marxist assumption that the social life of man is always determined fundamentally by the structures of labour and production, structures that only change, according to a “progressive” and teleological model of history, as a result of technological development (IIS, 29). The error consists in the projection of categories that have grown dominant within Western society over the past 200 years onto the variety of all other human societies – categories which are “capitalist”, in the sense that modern capitalism is the principal object, though not the goal or ideal, of Marxist analysis: 

“When, as in the cultivation of maize by certain Indian tribes in Mexico, or in the cultivation of rice in Indonesian villages, agricultural labour is lived not only as a means of providing food  but at the same time as the cult of a god, as a festival, and as a dance, and when a [Marxist] theoretician appears on the scene and interprets everything in those gestures that is not specifically productive as no more than mystification, illusion, and the cunning of reason, it must be forcefully asserted that this theoretician is a much more complete incarnation of capitalism than any boss... Nothing allows us to assert that the framework of gestures comprising productive labour in the narrow sense is ‘truer’ or more ‘real’ than the ensemble of meanings into which these gestures have been woven by those who perform them. Nothing, if not that the postulate that the true nature of man is to be a productive-economic animal...a postulate which implies, if it were true, that socialism is forever impossible.” (IIS, 28)

Revolutionary socialism in Castoriadis’s view could not fall back on the historical materialist demand that we see past the obscuring veils of culture and ideology to what is “really going on”, since “what is really going on” must include an account of culture, ideology and much else which would appear insubstantial or irrelevant from the strict standpoint of economic production. This sphere of human activity Castoriadis summed up under the heading of the “imaginary”. And as the title of his book communicates, it was the “imaginary” which Castoriadis saw as the founding stratum and origin of society (he was incidentally the first theorist to transfer the term from the psychoanalytic field, within which it was used by Lacan, into the field of sociological analysis, where it is now an accepted term in a number of different theoretical traditions). Only in terms of the imaginary, to return to his above anthropological example, could one explain why societies at the same technological stage and with the same relations of production could differ from each other so radically on the plane of culture, social and ritual organization, and identity. Each society was subject to different “social imaginary significations”, organizing nodes of social meaning, which do not have a fixed denotative sense themselves but serve to orientate or frame that society’s beliefs and values. The institution and particular elaboration of these social imaginary significations is original with each society, not deduced from some natural, rational or historical model: it is an imaginative act of purely human and collective creativity, of whose status as such the society may or may not be aware (a distinction Castoriadis regards as crucial, as we will see). And though the scope and nature of these organizing significations may be rather different in the different social contexts of, say, a remote Amazonian tribe or the modern French state, they are not necessarily any less symbolically powerful, or more rational, in the latter case than in the former. As Castoriadis explains it: 

“I hold that human history...is in its essence defined by imaginary creation. In this context, ‘imaginary’ obviously does not signify the ‘fictive’, the ‘illusory’, the ‘specular’, but rather the positing of new forms... Each society creates its own forms. These forms in turn bring into being a world... At their core are to be found, in each case, social imaginary significations, which also are created by each society and which are embodied in its institutions. God is one such social imaginary signification, but so is modern rationality, and so forth. The ultimate objective of social and historical research is the restitution and the analysis, as far as possible, of these significations for each society under study.” (World in Fragments, p. 84)

Though such an approach is clearly no longer (vulgarly) materialist, it might be hard at first to see what separates these significations and accompanying “forms” from the equivalent analytical categories of contemporary structuralist and post-structuralist theory (which however, as I mentioned, Castoriadis despised): Levi-Strauss’s myths (and their application to modern bourgeois culture by Barthes), Foucault’s epistemes, Derrida’s transcendental signifieds, and so forth. The difference is that Castoriadis's analysis is anti-determinist. Castoriadis believed that the real challenge of analyzing society and history was not one of tackling a complex but logical, determinate, and finally inescapable structure of causes and distinctions, as a thinker like Foucault believed, but of remaining faithful to the imaginary, creative, and self-instituted – in a sense, arbitrary, indeterminate – essence of society’s fundamental ideals. It was, for him, essential to see that everything around one could be otherwise, if people would only collectively imagine it so. This was the central insight of his radical philosophy, and combined Castoriadis’s commitments to revolution and (as a Greek) to democracy.

The stress on collective imaginary creation really distinguished Castoriadis from his more famous contemporaries. It was this that made him, alongside the Situationists and surrealists, the guiding theoretical influence on the student uprising of May 1968 (though he kept his writings pseudonymous in order to safeguard himself from the authorities). Castoriadis was a friend of Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the most famous agitator during the student revolt, and in a manifesto Cohn-Bendit paid tribute to the ideas of a certain Pierre Chalieu – one of Castoriadis’s pseudonyms. Castoriadis’s reminiscences of those months in the text “The Movement of the Sixties” show how much he identified with the essential creative spirit, the reimagining of society that was going on at the time – “those weeks of fraternity and active solidarity, when one spoke to anybody and everybody in the street without fear of being taken for a fool... the sit-ins and teach-ins of all sorts, in which professors and students, schoolteachers and pupils, and doctors...engineers, foremen...administrative staff spent whole days and nights discussing their work, their mutual relations, the possibility of transform[ation]” (WIF, “The Movement of the Sixties”, 48). And in turn the importance of Castoriadis’s central theoretical category, the imagination, showed itself in the famous graffiti and slogans of the movement, such as "L'imagination au pouvoir", or "Manquer d'imagination, c'est ne pas imaginer le manque". As Castoriadis himself later commented, "one wonders how that could relate to Foucault, Derrida, Bourdieu, or Lacan!". What the most famous philosophical names of that era really theorized was not the motivating spirit but the failure of ’68: to dissolve the subject or imprison it theoretically within all-controlling networks of language and power was for Castoriadis “a retrospective legitimation of [political] withdrawal, renunciation, noncommitment” (WIF, 53). The other Parisian thinkers were, in a memorable phrase, “ideologues of man’s impotence before his own creations” (WIF, 54).

One might still feel scepticism that Castoriadis’s approach has genuine theoretical power, that it explains or identifies important social-historical issues or currents (rather than contributing to them). Yet the points at which Castoriadis productively exceeded Marxist analysis have proved to be some of the most fertile areas for theoretical research in recent decades. For instance, by developing an idea of Max Weber, he identified the dominant “social imaginary signification” in modern capitalist society as the ideal of “rational mastery” – pursued to the point of irrationality. This irrationality showed itself both in the ultimately self-destructive approach of Western man to the environment – like Cohn-Bendit, Castoriadis was a committed Green theorist and activist – and in the increasingly erratic deregulated organization of the global economy, of which Castoriadis wrote in 1996, more than a decade before the financial crisis, “the absolute freedom to transfer capital is ruining whole sectors of production almost everywhere in the world, and the global economy is being turned into a planetary casino”( “The ‘Rationality’ of Capitalism”, in Figures of the Thinkable, 47). The significant really-existent alternatives to the capitalist imaginary in modern society which Castoriadis mentioned were not, after 1968, those of socialism, but of nationalism and religion – the two forces whose global persistence left-wing theory has had the most difficulty in accounting for (it is notable that the most ambitious and successful contemporary attempt to theorize nationalism, Benedict Anderson’s 1983 Imagined Communities, relies on a framework of ideas remarkably similar to Castoriadis’s, though as far as I am aware, not directly influenced by him). 

I cannot conclude this brief exposition of Castoriadis’s political thought without mentioning his idea of “autonomy”, which for him is the distinguishing mark of those societies which are aware of the self-instituted, created character of their “social imaginary significations”. The existence of such societies is not exclusively a modern phenomenon, though in Castoriadis’s (rather narrow) definition, it is exclusive to the West: the two moments at which (some measure of) true political autonomy has arisen have been in ancient Athenian democracy and its revival in modern Europe (which Castoriadis interestingly dates to the “first Renaissance” of the twelfth century – for reasons that there isn't space to explore here). Autonomy in Castoriadis’s sense means not so much freedom from external power or determination in a literal fashion, though the absence of tyranny or imperialism is certainly one precondition for autonomy in his sense. He means rather the refusal to legitimate or naturalize one’s social ideals permanently by referring them to a stable and non-social level of being, whether that be God in the Judaeo-Christian model, or Reason, or the ineluctable progress of history in Hegel and Marx, or the idea of biological perfectibility and the survival of the fittest in social Darwinism or Nazi racial theory, to take a few examples. By acknowledging that one’s ideas of justice, the Good and so forth are negotiable, rephrasable, reimaginable, because humanly created in the first place, one frees a space for a genuine democracy, as opposed to a struggle between rival intellectual Absolutes.