Aaron Asphar

Following from the previous post looking at alienation in the thought/experience of Hegel, Marx and Keirkegaard, here I look at the developing existential structure of alienation in the twentieth century, as it indicates itself through the increasingly penetrating and urgent analyses/critical intervention/praxis of the twentieth century, and I look mainly at Simmel, the Frankfurt School and the Situationsts, understanding here not a ‘progress of knowledge’ but of a development of the experience/structure of Western self-alienation, and the shifting responses this has made necessary. What I hope to indicate  is the sense in which the experience of alienation emerging in the nineteenth century becomes an increasly settled form of dissociative subjectivity or heteronomy, as the existential distress of alienation itself becomes a structurally integral moment in the functioning of the social order (more elaboration on the functionization of the distress of alienation can be seen in the Honneth post.) For example, fear of aging or anachronism or the dreaded ‘averageness’ drives consumption, economic and identitary insecurity drives ascetic-egoistic (for egoism is today our form of social asceticism) exertions for social recognition, hence drives performance and innovation. However, the subtle inner history of these development mask themselves because they occure within the familiar forms of social life – hence on the level of appearence, things seem historically continuous.

The field that registers all  these subtle shifts is the experience of social and cultural life, and in Simmel crucial parts of this experiential history can be discerned as, newly emergent, are grasped in starker releif. For example, he made strange for me the blase attitude, which he noticed as a new emergence and explained the social processes and experiences producing it. Blasé: “ A life in boundless pursuit of pleasure makes one blasé because it agitates the nerves to their strongest reactivity for such a long time that they finally cease to react at all.” We can see how this apparently marginal aspect of social life festers and then begins to melignify. In existentialism it becomes an existential and social anxiety/insecurity/mistrust, as Camus captures artistically: “Mostly, I could tell, I made him feel uncomfortable. He didn’t understand me, and he was sort of holding it against me. I felt the urge to reassure him that I was like everybody else, just like everybody else. But really there wasn’t much point, and I gave up the idea out of laziness” (L’etranger pdf on scribd).

Henri Lefebvre (2008, pp.167-168) wrote; “In every attitude which tears every man away from what he is and what he can do…criticism will reveal alienation …The drama of human alienation is… profound and enthralling” – yet a radical, dialectical Marxist he had fight in him, and the blase trajectory becomes the more typical one in social life if not social resistance. What Camus registered is closer to the mood of subcultural experience, and much of the critical energy became artistic and cultural-political praxis – more or less intransigent or resigned. Charles Badaowski , poet, gives a much more extreme sense of profound late modern, dissociative alienation:

“I walk through rooms of the dead, streets of the dead, cities of the dead; men without eyes, men without voices; men with manufactured feelings and standard reactions; men with newspaper brains…How can I be concerned with the murder of one man when almost all men, plus females, are taken from cribs as babies and almost immediately thrown into the masher?” (Bukowski, Sunlight Here I Am: Interviews and Encounters, 1963-1993).

Poet Jane Kenyon too: “A piece of burned meat/wears my clothes, speaks”. I now look more closely at Simmel who notices the elements of this subjectivity as they emerge in their subtle ways at the begining of this century.
Simmel

Simmel offers a lucid, subtle analysis of self and reality over the turn of the twentieth century, illuminating features that have been submerged under further layers of historical experience and alienation, and utterly normalised in social experience: I found his work for this reason eye opening, making strange things appear strange: All quotes from him his gigantic and diverse book The Philosophy of Money (on my shelf on Scribd to download). The following captures some of these observations, worth citing at length;

“If one compares our culture with that of a hundred years ago, then one may surely say—subject to many individual exceptions—that the things that determine and surround our lives, such as tools, means of transport, the products of science, technology and art, are extremely refined. Yet individual culture…has not progressed at all to the same extent; indeed, it has even frequently declined….Linguistic possibilities for expression…have become much more refined and subtle in the last hundred years. Not only do we now have Goethe’s language [German], but in addition we have a large number of refinements, subtleties and individual modes of expression. Yet, if one looks at the speech and writing of individuals, they are on the whole increasingly less correct, less dignified and more trivial. In terms of content, the scope of objects of conversation has been widened during that time through advances in theory and practice, yet, none the less, it seems that conversation, both social as well as intimate and in the exchange of letters, is now more superficial, less interesting and less serious than at the end of the eighteenth century…In the purely intellectual sphere, even the best informed and most thoughtful persons work with a growing number of ideas, concepts and statements, the exact meaning and content of which they are not fully aware. The tremendous expansion of objective, available material of knowledge allows or even enforces the use of expressions that pass from hand to hand like sealed containers without the condensed content of thought actually enclosed within them being unfolded for the individual user. Just as our everyday life is surrounded more and more by objects of which we cannot conceive how much intellectual effort is expended in their production, so our mental and social communication is filled with symbolic terms, in which a comprehensive intellectuality is accumulated, but of which the individual mind need make only minimal use”

What was being undermined was autonomy or maturity in the Kantian sense: “the wealth of objective culture increases, but the individual mind can enrich the forms and contents of its own development only by distancing itself still further from that culture.” Indissolubly he recognises, with the divergence of objective/subjective culture, or social heteronomy, a psychosocial (social and ego) hegemony on subjectivity and emotional life, which are subordinated to cognitive ideals that are alien to us.

“The mode of existence peculiar to this cognitive ideal that confronts our real cognitions as a norm or as a totality is the same as the totality of moral values and prescriptions that confront the actual behaviour of individuals. Here, in the ethical realm, we are more aware of the fact that our behaviour corresponds well or badly to an intrinsically valid norm. This norm—which may differ in its content for different people and for different periods of their lives—is not to be found in time and space, nor does it coincide with moral awareness, which is instead conscious of being dependent upon that norm. Ultimately, the formula of our life as a whole, from the trivial practice of everyday to the highest peak of intellectuality, is this: in all that we do, we have a norm, a standard”.

Simmel problematises the possibility of critical self/social reflection under these circumstances. Our rational deliberations are organised by a system of ideas from without, but moreover are innervated by a sense of emotional reward – the essence of what is taken as “truth…[;] “a certain feeling which accompanies a mental image; what we call proof is…the establishment of a psychological constellation which gives rise to such a feeling….[;]the supra-theoretical feeling…this rather indescribable sense of reality.” This is the reality principle of Freud: Simmel illuminates what we might call the “spell” of truth – the irresistibility of the demand for it, something utterly extraneous from the standpoint of sensuous and emotional life/the body.

He spoke, then, of an intellectual and behavioural/communicative heteronomy, an emotional spell and indissolubly, a profound impoverishment in emotional and sensuous content of life as if it is all caught up and transfixed by this spell. Life drains into the dissolute, alienated reality captured by elements of modernism (see post with passage from Fusil for one of many acute literary depictions of this sense of extreme intellectual and perceptual dislocation from emotional life. Simmel relates it to socio-historical observations:

“The process of objectification of culture that, based on specialization, brings about a growing estrangement between the subject and its products ultimately invades even the more intimate aspects of our daily life. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, furniture and the objects that surrounded us for use and pleasure were of relative simplicity and durability and were in accord with the needs of the lower as well as of them upper strata. This resulted in people’s attachment as they grew up to the objects of their surroundings, an attachment that already appears to the younger generation today as an eccentricity on the part of their grandparents. The…sheer quantity of very specifically formed objects makes a close and, as it were, personal relationship to each of them more difficult: a few and simple utensils are more easily assimilated by the individual, while an abundance of different kinds almost form an antagonistic object to the individual self… What is distressing is that we are basically indifferent to those numerous objects that swarm around us…: their impersonal origin and easy replaceability…Cultural objects increasingly evolve into an interconnected enclosed world that has increasingly fewer points at which the subjective soul can interpose its will and feelings.”

Alienation always implies fear: nothing is more real, alien, objective, stark then the threat, and the threat is that which is not recognised emotionally: this is not to say otherness which is an emotional recognition: I’m talking about alienation – the uncanny – which is a proximity to non-life hence death. These sentiments really erupt in the spirit, culture, turmoil and objective reality within about 15 years after he published this work in Germany and I do not think it was hyperbolic of the early Frankfurt School to attribute the events of WW2 and the rise to domination of fascism, and the self-effacing submission to it, as utterly psychosocial – indissoluble from the development of intellectual and social life and the excision of emotional and sensuous life (Adorno’s negativity) from social life. Otherwise we can only think of WW2 as hallucination, aberration – essentially, as non-existent, which is what we do now.

Simmel goes on:

“the economy necessarily establishes more and more relationships and obligations that are not directly reciprocal. It is obvious how much this objectifies the whole character of transactions and how subjectivity is destroyed and transposed into cool reserve and anonymous objectivity once so many intermediate stages are introduced between the producer and the customer that they lose sight of each other…[:] the specialization of objects themselves contributes no less to the process of their alienation from human subjects, which appears as an independence of the object, as the individual’s inability to assimilate it and subject the object to his or her own rhythm.”

We have something of an expansive and socially historically integrated grasp of elements of alienation as they were emerging, and in his wide ranging studies Simmel explored this in various ways – in the dialectics of style/fashion/attitudes, emergent forms of anxiety and distress, and in the structures of economic and social life, a confident economic theorist as well as cultural, aesthetic and psychological/social analyst. This is the kind of interdisciplinary vision that lay behind the Frankfurt School, essentially to keep the whole, increasingly complexifying human within the purview of human knowledge, which only exists as knowledge in a living constellation, not in myopic, dispersed disciplines – and without this human graspability human knowledge could no longer be humane.

Before looking at the Frankfurt School, the problem of theorizing the social and the real during and after the war is I think the reasonable point to Adorno’s criticism of existentialism. “Being” is taken as a substance outside/prior to determination – but what can this mean, when we see how extreme suffering or pleasure are indissoluble always from being – they are “being” – and the complete “truth” of “being” thus includes the “truth” of feeling, e.g. suffering, which is utterly at the mercy, overall, to the conditions of life we are borne into. Although it gestures to the non-reducible of the immanent experience “being”, it conceives it as an empty abstraction, “being”, when it tries to think it into an ontology, hence as being-in-something, in a scheme, hence in abstraction from being hence not being as experience. Moreover, when being is pain or pleasure we cannot say the latter is an addition or an accrual of being, something from without: it is being, and it is utterly sensitive and reactive to social history thus utterly shaped by social history: yet not by any means passively or predictably but radically and antagonistically. Pain is a gunshot into objectivity because it produces something utterly asocial into the social – a radical reaction. However, in the context of an ever expanding social order in which, as Adorno said, “every mouse hole is blocked” (MM), suffering becomes the objective location of social injustice, convicted in its immanence.

Early Frankfurt School

Adorno wrote:

The personal consciousness of the individual can be seen to be illusion. Not only does the bearer of personal consciousness owe his existence and the reproduction of his life to society. In fact, everything through which he is specifically constituted as a cognitive subject, hence, that is, the universality that governs his thinking, is…also social…The individual considers himself the legitimate basis of truth.

Hence what passes for autonomy – egoism – is, in the manner Simmel indicated, heteronomy or immaturity. Horkheimer expressed his bleak assessment of social life as follows in The Eclipse of Reason (scribd):

“Although most people never overcome the habit of berating the world for their difficulties, those who are too weak to make a stand against reality have no choice but to obliterate themselves by identifying with it. They are never rationally reconciled to civilization. Instead, they bow to it, secretly accepting the identity of reason and domination, of civilization and the ideal, however much they may shrug their shoulders. Well-informed cynicism is only another mode of conformity. These people willingly embrace or force themselves to accept the rule of the stronger as the eternal norm. Their whole life is a continuous effort to suppress and abase nature, inwardly or outwardly, and to identify themselves with its more powerful surrogates—the race, fatherland, leader, cliques, and tradition. For them, all these words mean the same thing—the irresistible reality that must be honoured and obeyed. However, their own natural impulses, those antagonistic to the various demands of civilization, lead a devious undercover life within them.”

This undrcover life is egoism: an ego hegemony with conditions, a kind of unstable contract: but both Horkheimer and Adorno were alive to the possibility of intervention – and despite what is often said, it was Adorno who was less pessimistic – Adorno’s negativitism was not pessimism but absolute seriousness and urgency: both were always open, circumspect, questioning, critical, as comes through in this dialogue they had which they recorded for the development of their thought:

Adorno: Our disagreement is about whether history can succeed or not. How are we to interpret the ‘can’? On the one hand, the world contains opportunities enough for success. On the other hand, everything is bewitched, as if under a spell. If the spell could be broken, success would be a possibility. If people want to persuade us that the conditional nature of man sets limits to utopia, that is simply untrue. The possibility of a completely unshackled reality remains valid. In a world in which senseless suffering has ceased to exist,

Schopenhauer is wrong.

Horkheimer: In the long run things cannot change. The possibility of regression is always there…Neither the good nor the bad remains, but the bad is more likely to survive…a more or less worn-out version of the American system [how true]. The difference between us is that Teddie [nickname for Adorno] still retains a certain penchant for theology…My own thoughts tend to move in the direction of saying that good people are dying out. In the circumstances, planning would offer the best prospect.

Adorno: If the result of planning was that beggars would cease to exist, then planning itself would shed its rigidity, and decisive change would be the result.

Horkheimer: Perhaps, but a relapse into barbarism is no less conceivable.

Horkheimer objection of Adorno was the reverse of that of the later FFS – Habermas, Honneth and most commentators today I think, who talk of the “lapse of critical theory into the negativism of Adorno” (Honneth). The one quote I found of Adorno (who I really admire) and Habermas (who I hate) was in an interview he did with someone called “Spiegel”, and he answers this objection decisively:

Spiegel: So far, as your friend Habermas once put it, your dialectic has, at it’s ”blackest spots” of resignation, surrendered to ”the destructive pull of the death drive.’”

Adorno: I would rather say that the compulsive clinging to what is positive stems from the death drive.

His commitment was not to affirm anything of a social order that permitted extant suffering in himself or others, and the strength of Habermas/Honneth’s objection to his negativism is a measure of an acceptance by dint of blindness to this suffering. However, Adorno/Horkheimer concerned themselves with a critique of the negative and not an identification of the positive precisely because they recognised that the positive is the outcome of autonomous subjectivity – and hence is creation ex nihilo, and cannot be determined in advance. “Intolerance of ambiguity is the mark of an authoritarian personality.” Wrote Adorno, and Horkheimer: “We are in favour of the chaotic, of that which has not been included.” The model of immanent critical-theoretical praxis in Adorno is aesthetic-empathetic-intellectual: immanent and utterly engaged in the materiality/sensuality (in society, pain and negativity) of the situation. He was meek in emphasising this himself but he seems less guarded in interviews;

Spiegel: Then, would it be the virtue of philosophy to look the negative in the eye but not to change it?32

Adorno: Philosophy cannot in and of itself recommend immediate measures or changes. It effects change precisely by remaining theory. I think that for once the question should be asked whether it is not also a form of resistance when a human being thinks and writes things the way I write them. Is theory not also a genuine form of praxis?

What he says of art I think can be taken as less guarded explanations of his own work. In Minima Moralia he wrote: “the task of art is to bring chaos into order” – to humanise the inhuman. However, he recognised that art was also an “uncommitted crime”: and so too philosophy which he said, in Negative Dialectics, had “missed its moment of realization”. His philosophy was praxis – an emotional/intellectual craft of bringing humane embodiment into thought and philosophical experience and hence never to theoretically impose or close down in advance but to find the contours of the human situation.

Suffering or emotionality, destruction and violence, Fascism and the Reich are to be understood in there non-identity not just in their identity: in their negative actuality, their emotional reality: violence and suffering, two sides of the same thing, are not reducible to one another but incomprehensible apart: they are non-identical: and Adorno insisted that we do not identify suffering but recognise it in its non-identity – its actuality, its emotionality, hence understand the authoritarian personality in the emotionally real way that it presents itself, to make emotional sense of it. Grasping the non-identity of the objectivity and the emotionality completes “truth” – which for Adorno is absolutely not absolute but entirely immanent. The reality of alienation is only that which is felt – existentially or empathetically and hence immanently. The last great effort to preserve this kind of “truth” and find it a life within thought, was made by the Frankfurt School, by Horkheimer and perhaps with greatest devotion, Adorno: the Situationsts judiciously saw the utter eclipse of this historical opportunity and we cannot call any of their work theory, practice or even praxis because it is precisely self-identical, immanent, particular, situational. In a sense this is Adorno’s negative dialectics ignited as a form of being, radically elastic and reflexive, immanent. This emancipatory “positivity” is also the social “negativity”, engaged in real life “creation ex nihilo”.

Adorno : the situationists

BBC news presenter – she usually makes me smile, quite scatterbrained like me – but having been reading certain things I had a horrifying intimation. She was sitting there yapping away with her male co-presenter, looking precisely as one should look – behind a desk and compliant – a mouth speaking compulsively and programmatically a bloody history of ideas, each the chiselled by compulsive strivings motivated by suffering and need, with no doubt a more or less undisturbing her own autonomy and agency: autonomy, but not her own – an ego autonomy and a somatic and emotional tyranny, or an overall state of psychosomatic heteronomy. “Alienation as our present destiny is achieved only by outrageous violence perpetrated by human beings on human beings.” (R. D. Laing, The Divided Self, click on my ‘shelf’ on scribd for pdf]

Heteronomy that suits her and her family comfortably enough no doubt: but her unconscious work must also be to organise the insecurities and identitary demands of others, scanning eagerly and unconsciously themselves for clues of how to improve “what one is” – because “those who are too weak to make a stand against reality have no choice but to obliterate themselves by identifying with it”, writes Horkheimer [Eclipse of Reason]. Debord recognises this involuntary identifaction – this synthetic process – has now flooded through into the very structure of subjectivity, reality, experience: “The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images” – experience and reality, imagination, the future – all this now is the unavoidable context of our actual life, and content of our intellectual life. “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into a representation” (Debord)

What links very much the early Frankfurt School and the Situationists is their praxis, which for FFS was more theoretical/critical interventionists, but immanent and contextually formed, and hence conined themselves to the actionable and the really felt, hence the one world of immediacy, rather than the heteronymous world of theory and practice. However, the task of keeping social knowledge and the forms of thought produces humane does seem to have been directed at a historical opportunity that has passed: hence the negative dialectic becomes an existentially anchored form of dialectical thinking/doing/saying – refusal of the future, the method, the idea, all these never-never lands, except as tools of immanent usage – hence the future is a material world to violate, method a social ontological prejudice to play on, surprise, subvert, and social norms and expectations are the vehicle for polemic confrontation. The influence of the early FFS on social theory (and the late FFS) has declined as fast as social theory itself: but the influence in aesthetics, culture theory and praxis is far less doubtful: and the criticism of the Situationsts were no less negative, insistent, polemic, only there were artistic-interventionalist constructing of situations, sloganeering, inciting and decentring – essentially doing what Adorno did in thought, but as a basis for being. Having said that, it is reductive to call Adorno’s praxis thought, and his commitment to artistic subjectivity is one and the same commitment as that of his own critical dialectic. For Adorno art was a praxis vehicle for emancipatory innervations: in “fashion, alienation becomes the living model of a social being-thus-and-not-otherwise to which it surrenders as if in ecstasy. If it is not to betray itself, art must resist fashion, but it must also innervate fashion in order not to make itself blind to the world, to its own substance”.

Survival demands the most extreme, nimble, deft, elastic, immanent interventions: the world of thought and experience, of appearance and reality or essence, must be collapsed into the one immanent world of praxis or sensuous/emotionally engaged doing/thinking/saying/making.

“the more he identifies with the dominant images [as against actual concrete/emotional/ sensuous experience]…, the less he understands his own life and his own desires. The…estrangement…is expressed by the fact that the individual’s gestures are no longer his own; they are the gestures of someone else who represents them to him.”

Emotional, sensuous mimesis or expression becomes social mimesis – morphing into the social, its ossified internality, its demands and images, and becoming those “almost spectral beings” Nietzsche spoke of in All Too Human.

The Situationists

Just as Simmel, Nietzsche, Marx, Adorno and Horkheimer realised, for Debord fungibility or reproduction/copies were the other side of sensuous/emotional dissolution – but it was grasped far more on the immanent and existential plane of experience (concrete as against abstract):

“The loss of quality that is so evident at every level of spectacular language, from the objects it glorifies to the behaviour it regulates, stems from the basic nature of a production system that shuns reality. The commodity form reduces everything to quantitative equivalence. The quantitative is what it develops, and it can develop only within the quantitative.”

Debord’s negative criticisms is this negative, radical imagination giving voice to new dimensions of self/social experience, one that was noticed and polemicised by the FFS but which had now not to be criticised but accepted as the concrete, settled reality that it has become: “just as early industrial capitalism moved the focus of existence from being to having, post-industrial culture has moved that focus from having to appearing”: nothing is real but that which is felt, concrete, embodied. “The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point where it becomes image”: and the image of social reality is its workhouse.

“The more he contemplates, the less he lives; the more he identifies…the less he understands his own life and his own desires…The spectator does not feel at home anywhere, because the spectacle is everywhere.” – Debord

Spectators become spectacular, specula. “The spectacle is the map of this new world, a map that is identical to the territory it represents. The forces that have escaped us display themselves to us in all their power.” Reality is dead and to be contested and remade, humanised, radicalised, transcended: Situationists praxis thus attenuates itself to the concrete and commits itself only to its own felt and its own “creative nothing”, only concretized, or to “being”, only actualizing – as “becoming”. Debord’s an attenuation is historically necessary and judicious: it is an attenuation to the actionable, to the artistic tools or those of the bricolure, and artistic forms of Situationists praxis include art and subculture and certainly the progressive and critical momentum lost in the theoretical humanities would seem to have taken refuge in the spheres of subculture and artistic praxis which tend to survive only insofar as they are exclusive or autistic/asocial, hence a severe retardation of possibilities of broad-scale social emancipatory endeavour. However, this changes the terrain, and the problem: and moreover this terrain is fluid and constantly churning. This is the reason why future, method, plan becomes immediately anachronistic once committed to.

Another of the theorists, Vaneigem, had a different kind of dialectical emotional emphasis to Adorno’s suffering, but actually both theorists recognised the importance of pleasure/hope respectively, as well as suffering/reification. All quotes by Vaneigem are from Revolution of Everyday Life:

“The millions of human beings who were shot, tortured, starved, treated like animals and made the object of a conspiracy of ridicule, can sleep in peace in their communal graves, for at least the struggle in which they died has enabled their descendants, isolated in their air-conditioned apartments, to believe, on the strength of their daily dose of television, that they are happy and free. The Communards went down, fighting to the last, so that you too could qualify for a Caribbean cruise.”

However, an ignorance of hope, intransigence, and pleasure is as serious an illness as the wilful blindness of social suffering: we can see how they are the same demand to recognise ‘negativity’ as suffering for Raoul is essentially criminal:

“People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and what is positive in the refusal of constraints, such people have a corpse in their mouth”

Vaneigem rejects “a world in which the guarantee that we will not die of starvation has been purchased with the guarantee that we will die of boredom”:

“The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry.”

However, we are dealing with a time and a context of real radicalism, and a real sense of the possible. I cannot help but feel the gnawing and festering problems of social suffering and alienation today, which leads a quarter of Western adults and 10% of its children to suffer some kind of diagnostically significant signs of mental illness (whatever the hell that is supposed to mean). When the Situationists were writing there had not been Thatcher/Regan, Blaire/Bush followed by the present utter devastation to the lives and security of people throughout the world owing to war and economic crisis. The idea that, as Horkheimer suggested, the social might lapse into barbarism in the manner of the second world war seems to me an eminently healthy and humane kind of circumspection, and that the attenuation to the immanent and actionable rather than the macroeconomic and global gives us the emotionally and humanely relevant world of that which we feel and know both intellectually and existentially. In a sense autonomy is a retracted sphere: but the retraction is the pulling back of the boundaries of knowing to that which is experienced and cared about, which is the only embodied truth in the dialectical sense that we can have. Anything else would depend on consensus truth but in an egoistic, alienated social world consensus is the ideological mask of competition, hence consentuality is gullibility and vulnerability today.

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