@exindy It's a real classic. He puts some effort into discussing definitions of "modernity" that a lot of readers aren't going to recognize -- that's pages 19 and 20 of the text you've linked. But from page 21 onward it should all be pretty clear, especially the periodization he's recommending. There are of course omissions from his discussion, so for instance in the middle of his first period ("the emergence of the West") you have the invention of capitalism, which relied (and relies) upon bloody conquest but was of a different order than the Crusades, which also relied upon bloody conquest.

What's especially true today, however, is the notion that "we live in a period of appalling ideological regression among the literati." This generalization was really quite meaningful in the Eighties and Nineties when Castoriadis was alive to defend it -- it serves to describe Star Wars well too. One would think that the collapse of "Communism" would have meant a freeing-up of creative energies -- that is, anyway, what the writers of the Socialist Workers' Party (or SWP) in the UK thought at the beginning of the Nineties. (I can't remember their names right now for some reason -- my brain is an attic.) But that didn't happen.

Also, this passage rings true, at least for the United States:

The condition for there being a vast audience for this ‘neoliberal’ discourse (in the Continental sense of conservative free-market ‘liberalism’) is a widespread and rising collective amnesia. Two striking instances of this tendency are offered: (1) by the disappearance of any critique of ‘representative democracy’ and (2) by the total disappearance of the devastating criticism the best academic economists of the 1930s—Sraffa, Robinson, Kahn, Keynes, Kalecki, Shackle—had previ-
ously directed at the would-be ‘rationality’ of 20th-century capitalism.

Politics has become reduced to voting, and voting to voting for the "lesser of two evils." One would hope that the general strike participants in France could revive lost traditions of politics toward the end of a general and ongoing resistance to neoliberalism.

But definitely a buzzkill.

There are many of us who lived the decline, embedded in the systems which were lost.

Later today I'll move the pdf that I believe is the essay and downloaded into my kindle. If this isn't the essay you had in mind, please correct my mistake.

The Retreat from Autonomy:
Post-modernism as Generalised Conformism 1
CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS

ABSTRACT This article, after periodising history on the basis of the imaginary significations created by and dominating each period, argues that the period after the Second World War is char- acterised mainly by the waning of social, political and ideological conflict and the eclipse, after the movements of the 1960s, of the project of autonomy. The decadence in the field of spiritual creation, which marks this period, is reflected in the development of post-modernism that simply mirrors and—worse—rationalises the prevailing trends through a high brow apologetics of conformity and banality.

ref 1. Reprinted from World in Fragments by Cornelius Castoriadis, translated and edited by David Ames Curtis, with the permission of the publishers, Stanford University Press. © Copyright
1997 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University.

https://site011.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/castoriadis_postmodernism_co...

Of course the footnote points me to a new document. Something else to find, perhaps in library genesis.

@QMS -- is the US military equivalent of The Rise of Skywalker?

in military terminology. First, Musk saturated the skies with his satellite coverage.
Then, Russia announced they were going to put up 13,000 similar space probes.
US invents The Space Defense Agency, another black hole in the military budget.
Lasers and EMP enabled low orbit weapons are now the most popular launch
payloads. There will be no peace in our stratosphere. Celestial Competition.

Know this to be a bit off course from your essay, but just what appears when I
think of the unfriendly skies. Meanwhile, China is establishing moon bases.
Everything America does is top secret. And the ISS is falling apart. Oh well.

@exindy because, in his view, the primary attribute distinguishing people from other animals (and Karl Marx said this as well, in Capital) was imagination. Now, the first thing we think of when we think deeply about imagination is creativity -- the ability to come up with original ideas and artistic works. But for Castoriadis, most of our imaginative faculties were conformist ones, thus his notion of the social imaginary, the collective imagining of the world which persists over time and is common to societies.

The social imaginary, for Castoriadis, can often be static, thus most societies are characterized by heteronomy -- in such societies people do not choose the laws under which they must live, but rather are externally directed by one or more numinous agencies -- God, often, but also money or social custom or the will of an all-powerful leader among other things. The problem with heteronomy, then, is not that it is stupid, but rather that it is uncreative. Its imagination is entirely conformist and its creativity leads to more of the same. Heteronomy is overwhelmingly normal. It dominates the preponderance of societies both historical and present-day.

The opposite of heteronomy, characterizing a few historical societies and especially the period two of Castoriadis' history (between 1750 and 1950), is autonomy. Autonomy is when we do choose the laws under which we live. Autonomy is connected to collective acts of creativity -- it involves the ability to imagine society differently (which is to say, participatory democracy), the ability to create works of art which are not mere copies of previous ones, and an employment of the imagination to gain control over the social order.

As for Star Wars, there's something in its concepts of the "evil empire" and the "rebellion" that suggest that we would do best not to be satisfied with heteronomy, that we ought to (in word and deed) dissent from that which is bad. That is its bright spot. Disney appears to be clogging the Star Wars universe with "features" which offer an endless repetitions of the same, and which evoke nothing so much as applications of money in hopes of box office returns.

but I disagree with his findings. I can't call them conclusions because I believe his death interrupted the study. That timing was also in the beginning phase of a "work" in progress, the cannibalism of our societal institutions, our commons. 1997 was moderately choppy waters, class III rapids and nowhere compared to our current class V rapids.

To continue the analogy, I fear we are in for even more difficult times. And I believe the scariest part of that is that we have no one entity which can navigate this river. The competent leaders were thrown out.

I like Einstein's version of Hanlon's razor: "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity, but don't rule out malice." In our case, not malice in terms of evil but more in terms of indifference.

Which brings me to Star Wars. I have decided that just about every good idea for a product is really good the first episode or season, the second mostly manages to continue the thought, the third is in the struggling phase.

At that point the thing goes into personality phase. Relies on gossipy stuff and gadgetry. At that point the series can only hang on based upon a personal connection with the characters in the performance.

I've given up on our domestic garbage. I don't even bother looking anymore, try not to throw up on the opening page of an IMDB search. It seems they don't even try, just jump straight into phase 3.

BTW, I don't have cable TV for that reason. I can't even stomach the regular snooze where even the weather reporting is in the personality phase. Their whole schtick is who rather than what and why.

To get more contemporary presentations I lean toward Hoopla. Some of the foreign series are good but they also follow the perversion model, like the Capitaine Marleau series. Good in first season, declining in the second, then I lost interest.

Ahh, I've wasted enough of your time... please try to find some calm waters on your raft ride.