The Telos Student Seminars provide a forum for students around the world to engage with critical theory by discussing a common set of paired texts from Telos—one current essay and one pertinent essay from our archives. In our second cycle of seminars, we are discussing Huimin Jin’s “Cultural Self-Confidence and Constellated Community: An Extended Discussion of Some Speeches by Xi Jinping” (Telos 195, Summer 2021) and an excerpt from Cornelius Castoriadis’s “The Crisis of Western Societies” (Telos 53, Fall 1982). The following reports are from the Telos Student Seminars groups in Budapest, Hungary, and Nanjing, China. For more details about the Telos Student Seminars, including summaries of the two essays under discussion, click here.
From Budapest, Hungary
On “Twilight”: Reading Castoriadis and Xi Jinping
Report of the Hungarian TSS Group
Participants: Zoltán Balázs (Professor), Anna Ujlaki (PhD student), Csendike Somogyvári (PhD student), Szilárd Tóth (PhD student), Dávid Bukovinszki (MA student)
Our group approached the task in a critical tone. The starting point of Castoriadis’s text is that Russia’s goal is nothing less than the expansion of its empire’s borders, with the ultimate goal of world domination. Russia’s ambitions are not without precedent; its political predecessor, the Soviet Union, was also flirting with similar ambitions. As with the expansion of most European empires, Soviet expansion was based on exploiting “strategic niches.” The opportunities provided by these niches could even be called expansionist opportunism. However, while the Western states were on a separate—yet interdependent—development path, the third Rome’s regime holds out the promise of a distinctively separate, forthcoming culture. The dividing line between the Western and Russian spirit is extensively marked. By the time secularization had already taken hold in the West, in Russia the people’s spirit was still very much defined by religious experience.
But this does not alter the fact that Western institutions—which Peter the Great was keen to import into his country—are sufficiently resilient to maintain lasting order, unlike the institutions of the Third World nations referred to by Castoriadis. It is worth pointing out that, in the related analysis of Oswald Spengler, because of the Westernization that began with Peter the Great and the revolutionary politics that infiltrated with it, there is a kind of primordial hatred in the Russian soul, the outbreaks of which are evoked in literary form in the works of Dostoevsky and explicitly expressed in the attitude of Tolstoy’s petty bourgeois. While Castoriadis highlights certain institutions that bear the oppressive mark of the decline imposed on the West (the economy, ecology, and the related energy sources are all listed in a non-exhaustive way), the aforementioned resilience does not allow us to categorically state that the structure of these institutions has collapsed. It is as if they were still standing, despite the apocalyptic tone. The decline of the West, since the Spenglerian spirit, has become a tiredly repeated topos of discourse on the West. One might even say that it has become an unusable general terminology—though the same phrase can be applied to Western optimism.
While on the subject of the economy, it is worth noting that democracy inherently bears the signs of crisis, as it can be seen as a consensual means of redistributing wealth and income. In this redistribution, the system always takes from the original owner and gives to those who do not possess the goods. The incentive to be the original owner is therefore reduced, but this is more a by-product of the system than part of an asymptotic process.
Castoriadis also highlights a certain sterility in the attitude of politicians, by which he means that their ideas and leadership have become incoherent and unproductive. Here, again, we would only refer to the normativity of the system, whereby politicians and the bureaucracy that provides them with support generate a “non-productive” activity in which the “productive person” has little or no regard for the welfare of the supposed “customer.” Rather, the focus is on themselves, on the importance of their own well-being. The study also focuses on culture and values, raising the suspicion that Western man and his society will no longer be able to recreate themselves and thus to function. What is to be preserved, Castoriadis sees well, is that traditional institutions such as culture and our environment are good and must be maintained. Culture in particular is present even among the most “primitive” peoples, for the state of nature is not without culture. The ever-present timeline of the past becomes the reality of the present through the reflexivity of consciousness, and therefore we can always remember it. Perhaps this is what Jan Assmann called cultural memory. Moreover, the family, in Tocqueville’s terms, is the enriched institution of nature, for in it shines a natural order more intimate than that of the outside world. Castoriadis is right that the destructive forces within (or perhaps beyond?) must be kept in mind in order to balance their destructive effects. But what these might be is not clearly stated in the study. Yet the answer is there, though it is not spelled out: the private sphere of postmodern man is invaded by the public sphere, to which we expose ourselves from deeper and deeper layers. Our autonomy is therefore becoming more and more limited.
The hypothesis of the disintegration of the family is particularly interesting. What does the crisis of the family mean? On the one hand, are there no alternative institutions available to the Western world that can counteract the change in the public structure of the family described above? Castoriadis’s writing predates the advance of communitarian political philosophy, which is a kind of repository of these alternatives. It seems a little as if the author wanted to expose a caricature of libertarianism. Although the welfare state has indeed been in decline, the extent of the decline is not as great as some left-wing political views would have it. Can this claim be empirically verified? We believe that the fault lines are no longer where they were imagined to be, not based on the presence of welfare services, but rather on the reduction of benefits, a move necessitated by what Thatcher (adequately or not, it is not for us to decide) called the welfare freeloaders, meaning those who “get as much on the dole.”
There is a reason for this, and that is that the consensus on state redistribution has shifted markedly to the left in recent decades. The extreme pro-market positions that social democratic parties had to argue with in the middle of the century are no longer present in Europe and have become politically irrelevant. Extremes are always destructive, we think we can agree on that.
The focus of these two texts seems to be—and one could grasp their central theme—that Western institutions are supposedly atrophying, the West is faltering, while the East is confidently forging ahead. In this case, however, we are confronted with a right-wing, often neoconservative myth. The fear of the death of the West is a recurrent topos since Spengler, as we have mentioned before. The metamorphosis of the unipolar world order into a monopolar form brings with it a change in the perception of cultural values and attitudes. Castoriadis’s view that, in an age of mediatization, we are electing poorer quality leaders can be interpreted as such a statement. Mediatization, as implicitly and vaguely alluded to above, has transformed the basic structure of the most fundamental human cultural order, the family, to a rather radical degree, through the restructuring of the outside world, which has become a quasi-private sphere, apparently inexcludable from it. Both the choice of leaders and the questioning of the perceived problems of the family and the crisis of the communities pointed to the vagueness of the text. For what is the basis for choosing weaker leaders? What is the yardstick for good leaders, and how can we measure whether a leader is a good leader? Compared to what do we choose lower quality leaders? We can speculate about the crisis of the family and communities, but once again we are left without a point of reference, since their opposites, i.e., what is the ideal family and community situation, are not clear.
Turning to Xi Jinping’s texts as examined by Huimin Jin, our basic view is that the theme of values is itself no accident, as the Chinese leadership has been fond of using the values under the heading of culture as an axiomatic part of its policy. It cannot do otherwise, since language is a mirror of social relations. By this we mean that language is a means of reasoning, expressing the collective hierarchies of relations for the language user—a phenomenon expressed in the Chinese language until the end of the Qing dynasty, but which has not disappeared to this day. In Tocqueville’s much-quoted work, American democracy—but also democracies more generally—was shaped in terms of the arts, with an eye to the receptivity of the masses. This includes the arts brought to life by letters. Some might argue, along these lines, that the opposite is the case with autocratic regimes: the arts are much more the product of the regime’s desires, which regime is understood as a unified political structure. Language is an instrument of power (at least in this sense), just as power has its own language. Language, as the basis of culture, could be described in this way.
Having said this, to turn to a more concrete analysis, the so-called Chinese Cultural Self-Confidence is an undertaking to create a new Chinese culture, or in Xi Jinping’s words, a whole new nation. Hefty words—but is there substance behind them? Chinese culture will apparently not be able to break out of the otherwise tautologous-sounding assumption that you have to speak a language. For there is no political community without the collective intelligibility of language, so that an individual language, unless its meaning is identical to the collective version, is incomprehensible and amounts to political suicide. But, as we have said, one of the main means of expression of the symbol that is the basis of culture is the spoken and written language, which is why European culture can be understood as a cultural phenomenon, just as Chinese culture is. Is it not possible, starting from such a common ontological position, to expect mutual respect? And respect, like so much else, must be able to be expressed, even if it is difficult.
Now, does it follow from all this—if we can agree so far—that, if someone is hurt in the endless storm of interactions, we should reprimand the aggressor in a spirit of mutual respect? If we look only at the speeches quoted by Xi Jinping, perhaps it is not so clear for China. The understanding of the Chinese nation is not so much “social contract theory–based,” as the public institutions of the political community are legitimated not on the basis of reason but by the traditions of that community, thus making the universal claim to power legitimate. Further reading of the document raised the question that another common concept that might be of interest is the issue of human rights. Xi Jinping believes that any adjective with the notion of universality can be equated with Western imperialism, such as Western capitalism, values, modernity, and the “invasion” of the Chinese nation by them. The fear of Chinese culture is understandable, since we have agreed above that taking things to extremes is harmful, and this is also true of cultural expansion, recalling in our minds the utter failures of exports of democracy. However, our view is that it is legitimate to ask whether, on the basis of self-organization (which, according to the text, and rightly so, is the right of the Chinese people also), can there be a Tibetan or a Uyghur culture? Or is it mutually exclusive? Cultural respect can be judged on the basis of this self-organization, insofar as we can call symbols by their names. Let us also mention economic culture and Western capitalism. Capitalism, as a cultural product of the West, evokes ambivalent feelings among the Chinese people, at least according to the study. But can we forget that it is precisely free trade and consumer culture that has made China the major player it rightly claims to be? Is it part of their identity? It is not for this short paper to decide, but it is telling that the implicit question that hovers there in the text is not clarified.
Finally, there is the question of cultural values: the text seems to perceive these values, which we know thanks to Western democracy, as a cultural phenomenon. Whatever ideology may work somewhere, it may not work a hundred meters away. So the question arises, are the values of democracy culture-dependent or is it possible to have an integrationist discourse about it? Or how does culture become identity? What is the culture of the Chinese community: is it an autonomous sphere or is it influenced by exogenous factors? Cultures are different, and they become different if dialogue is possible between them, that is certain. Perhaps this is not explicit for the elite of the Chinese Communist Party, which has built its own power system on the ideology of a German Jew and yet has a certain attitude of fear and protection regarding its identity. The text speaks as much outward as inward. Xi Jinping uses the West’s failed export of democracy as a starting point to explain why they have not imported the ideology. It speaks to the West as it speaks to the United States, it speaks to the confidence of both, and it speaks to the Chinese people, explaining that their political culture is such because the time of the aforementioned liberal democracy seems to have passed. It does not, however, address the Chinese cultural elite, and the discord between them is lost in the obscurity of the text.
In our view, there is little realism in the study, although it undoubtedly acknowledges the many thousands of years of Chinese culture, but what relevance does it have to the present? The coherence of the text and what it says is not clear to us—again we are shooting in the dark when we say: as if the text offers some kind of explanation to the potential Chinese reader as to why the liberal democracy of the allegedly declining West has not been imported into their country. The issue of introspection is scarcely present. We ended the study with more questions than we had anticipated. The rest is silence.
From Nanjing, China
Report of the Chinese TSS Group
Participants: Li Yuying, Yang Chen, and Zhao Hengfeng
On March 26, students of the Hopkins-Nanjing Center (HNC) and a professor held an online discussion on Cornelius Castoriadis’s and Huimin Jin’s articles, mainly about the social context of cultural crisis and confidence.
The discussion of Cornelius Castoriadis’s article covered three main topics: pluralism, the construction of self in society, and the relationship between historical moments and politics. One participant related the liberal identity in Francis Fukuyama’s theory to pluralism, which the author mentioned as a cause of the crisis in Western society. He compared it with the strictly regulated social identity in feudal Chinese society and questioned why pluralism should be regarded as the root of a social crisis rather than a benefit. Another reminded us that there were still other anti-modernist options stemming from history other than pluralism. Still another participant offered an observation about two possible accounts of the nature of the crisis of personal identity in this moment: one is that real freedom in constructing one’s own meaning in life is constrained in new ways by conformist or material pressures; the other is that the resources for doing so, even amid freedom, are too impoverished with the loss of tradition and thus leave individuals easily impressionable. He mentioned a saying that “One of the most dangerous things is not that people end up believing nothing, but they end up believing anything.” Mencius also was quoted in the warning that believing everything in books is worse than having no books.
How are subjectivity and society related? Castoriadis pointed out that society is not going to reproduce itself and that rival subjectivities play a key role in upholding it in a traditional mode or shifting it toward a new ideal. This reveals two attitudes to history, involving continuity versus revolution. Castoriadis affirmed the ongoing relevance of tradition, without which individuals more easily sink into crisis. The growing social distance resulting from the fast pace of modernization may also accelerate the coming of the crisis. As one participant noted, however, perceptions of political crisis are often disrupted by other changes that are already gathering momentum and only become clear in hindsight. Shortly after Castoriadis wrote at the beginning of the 1980s, Reagan and Thatcher rebuilt elements of Western confidence among segments of both elites and publics.
Participants interpreted the second article, about Cultural Self-Confidence, by Huimin Jin, from different angles. Culture may be formed and maintained organically, or imposed by governments. If the latter, it is difficult to distinguish between culture and ideology. Culture will become assimilated to ideology and thus a tool of political propaganda and social control. Culture shaped top-down by governments can have practical use in enhancing national pride and cohesion. Yet an instilled sense of cultural superiority can arouse xenophobia. Therefore, we need to find a balance point, which strengthens our own cultural self-confidence but in ways that also improve our tolerance for other cultures. Some participants believed that cultural self-confidence contains seeds of radicalism. Cultural self-confidence may be conducive to self–other binaries and ambitions to eliminate other evil and decadent cultures, if culture is fixed and foundational to political identity. Participants pointed out that while cross-cultural communicative rationality is attainable, curbing freedom of speech in the name of cultural self-confidence abets cultural centralism. On a similar note, participants discussed social conditions necessary for cultures to evolve toward cosmopolitanism and ways of deflecting China from ultra-nationalism by reinventing modernity out of Chinese-ness.
