Alienation (New Directions in Critical Theory, 4)

Understanding Alienation has become essential in todays society.

Jaeggi’s book is interesting and promising, but ultimately fails to deliver. Alienation is surely a concept worth recovering, but she fails to do so, instead offering yet another recycling of the Romantic solution to the dehumanizing and oppressive situation of nascent capitalism.I’ll use her seventh chapter as my primary example, because I think that’s where the problem with her argument is most transparent. She offers an example of an alienated woman, who is a feminist and yet has the tendency to behave like a giggling girl when in the presence of her male lover. The chapter is an attempt to explain why exactly she is alienated, and to offer a solution to that alienation that does not have recourse to the “Archimedean vantage point of a true self.” In this, she clearly fails completely.First, she does, consistently, assume the existence of exactly such an Archimedean vantage point. When she explains that a person is no longer alienated when “I understand myself as the person I am and at the same time I project—or fashion—myself as the person I want to be,” she is clearly making the same mistake we see so often in any attempt to begin from a Lockean individualist concept of the conscious self. That is, who is the “I” doing this understanding, interpreting, and projecting if it is NOT exactly such an Archimedean “true self”? This is the same problem Hume famously faced in his Treatise—although he noticed it later on. And we’ve seen it in every attempt to rescue this model of the subject since Locke, from Hume to the Romantics to phenomenology. There just must be some kind of a homunculus for this to work.So although she objects to Harry Frankfurt’s idea of “volitional necessity” because she (correctly) claims that it ignores the possibility that these “necessities” might be just deeply held ideological beliefs, she must ultimately resort the same concept to save her alternative theory. She assumes that if her alienated feminist were to “adapt herself to the traditional role of a woman” she would have difficulty because she would have to “close off” some of her “fundamental desires and longings.” But “fundamental desires and longings” is no different from what Frankfurt means by “volitional necessities,” and is ultimately just another term for deeply held ideological beliefs. (Not that they are bad ideological beliefs, but they are not the ultimate ground Jaeggi wants them to be...)She cannot conceive of the possibility that the conflict might result simply from inadequate ideology—that is, from the failure of the woman’s particular feminist ideology to adequately provide her with a meaningful life—which is, of course, the task of all ideologies in the Althusserian sense. Instead of having two conflicting desires, we might consider her as having an inadequate ideology. (Not that feminism is an inherently inadequate ideology, but that her particular version of it is incomplete.)Her problem seems to stem from her assumption of the categories of bourgeois ideology, including the idea that all subjects must, in Lockean fashion, first “possess” themselves and then enter into social relations. Also, she assumes a host of concepts central to the capitalist ideology of the subject: emotion, self, love, interpretation, etc. So she winds up constructing another version of the Romantic subject, whose only hope is to adapt to the world through creative imagination, acts of interpretation, and the seeking of an “internal coherence”; essentially, we are to make ourselves into a perfect New Critical poem.She cannot consider that rather than there being some Archimedean true self doing this “understanding” and “interpreting,” there might be a socially produced (ideological) discourse in which this is being done. And so, we are forced to accept that her alienated feminist cannot possibly form “authentic desires” in a world in which she is forced to choose between “emancipation without protection” or “protection without emancipation”: that is, between feminism and the rich boyfriend. But why must we assume “emancipation” and “protection” are the core desires/needs of all humans? What if her “authentic desire” were to alter the social conditions? Why can this NOT be an authentic desire? For Jaeggi, it just can’t. Ideological values just can’t ground a self, she tells us.The major problem, then, is that she leaves us with the demand that we adjust ourselves to the world as it is, instead of altering our social conditions to reduce alienation. And her version of alienation excludes the problem of inadequate ideologies, which is the classic marxist understanding of the term, and instead assumes that there is some “Archimedean true self” that must be satisfied—while at the same time repeatedly insisting that she has escaped the belief in such a true self. We’ve seen this same solution too many times now, it seems, to make these mistakes again. She promises a theory of alienation, and instead offers yet another discursive procedure with which to reproduce the capitalist ideology of the subject.

Jaeggi rehabilitates the concept of alienation through a clearly articulated processual view of the self. Simply put, she doesn't think there is a "real self" that can be alienated, but rather that the "self" is emergent in patterns of interactions with external social forms. Alienation, then, refers to patterns of interactions in which the perceiver (the self) experiences a lack of identification with the roles in which she is involved (and from which she emerges). Jaeggi gives several nice examples: the young academic who has simply stopped being involved in decisions about her own life, a feminist who intensely dislikes her own desire to be submissive, the company man who has so over-identified with an external role that the he experiences no personal involvement in the performance of the role. There are multiple paths to alienation, but the defining feature is a sense that the self has not actively appropriated (claimed) the role it is currently performing. The attraction of this approach is that it puts will front and center without deriving it from an essential self. The translation is superb.