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Alienation Ethnicity and Postmodernism
Alienation Ethnicity and Postmodernism
POSTMODERNISM
Edited by FELIX GEYER
Publication Information: Book Title: Alienation, Ethnicity and Postmodernism. Contributors: Felix Geyer
- author. Publisher: Greenwood Press. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 1996. Page
Number: iii.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard
issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).
1098765432
Contents
Preface vii
Preface
This volume derives from the activities of the Research Committee on Alienation
Theory and Research of the International Sociological Association. It was founded in
1972, and by the mid-1970s had developed into the main international forum where
an increasingly interdisciplinary group of alienation researchers, embracing different
theoretical and methodological perspectives, regularly met to exchange and evaluate
research results and discuss priorities for further research.
Since its foundation, the Research Committee has been actively organizing meetings
to facilitate this goal, especially at the quadrennial World Congresses of Sociology.
Between World Congresses, several smaller international meetings were organized,
while communication between the members is furthermore facilitated by the
publication of a regular, now largely electronic Newsletter. The most important
results of these meetings, presenting the most recent developments in alienation
theory and research, were published in five volumes, appearing between 1976 and
1992.
The present volume is the sixth in this ongoing series. It illustrates the recent and
fertile convergence of alienation research with studies on ethnicity and
postmodernism, more fully elaborated in the introductory chapter. As usual, the
contributors form an international and interdisciplinary group, as will be evident
from the following overview.
First of all, thanks are due here to the contributors. They have been extremely
patient, and first produced revised versions of their original contributions on the basis
of my editorial suggestions. These were not only directed at the contents of the
contributions themselves, but were also aimed at increasing the coherence of the
volume as a whole, by suggesting several crossreferences between the different
chapters. Only at a later stage, it became obvious
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that many chapters had to be condensed, some even considerably, in view of the
word limit imposed by the publisher. I therefore want to thank here especially those
contributors who must have had a hard time to keep their line of argument fully
intact as a result of the sometimes severe space limits imposed.
Also, I am grateful to all those contributors who have sent me their often quite
detailed comments and criticisms on a draft version of the introduction; many of their
suggestions were incorporated in that chapter.
Also, professor Irving Louis Horowitz deserves a special word of thanks. He not only
figures here as a contributor, but I also benefited from his advice as a professional
publisher when preparing this volume for publication.
Furthermore, I want to thank here editors Elizabeth Murphy and Nick Street, Kim
Hastings of the production department, and copy editor Nicole Balant, as well as all
others involved on the Greenwood side in the production of this book, for their
excellent and much appreciated support.
Last, but most certainly not least, I want to express my gratitude to dr Johan Sterk,
director of my institute, the Netherlands Universities' Institute for Coordination of
Research in Social Sciences, more easily known under its Dutch acronym SISWO.
He recognized, at an early stage, the importance of alienation as a central concept in
the social sciences, and managed to convince SISWO's successive boards of directors
over the last quarter century to support my activities as secretary, and later as
president, of the Research Committee since its very beginning.
So far, these activities included writing a doctoral thesis on the subject thanks to a
half-year sabbatical in 1975-76, intensive coordination of, and participation in,
Research Committee sessions at five World Congresses and a number of smaller
international conferences, regular and often costly contacts with an international
membership of well over 250 persons, editing and co-editing six volumes on
alienation, and producing and mailing regular Newsletters. A conservative estimate
of the total cost involved up till now might well surpass one million dollars.
Felix Geyer
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Introduction: Alienation, Ethnicity,
and Postmodernism
Felix Geyer
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Not surprisingly, the Marxists among his critics obviously took him to task for
concentrating too much on subjective states of individuals--e.g., their expectancies of
being powerless--without judging their reality content, thus taking attention away
from the meso- and macrosocietal structures that cause these feelings, like actual
conditions of powerlessness in the workplace. The Marxists thus tend to consider a
person alienated when that person is embedded in objectively alienating
environmental conditions, whether s/he admits to being alienated or not; in the latter
case, "false consciousness" is supposed to be at work or, in psychoanalytic terms,
"repression." Social psychologists object that the subject should have some say in
defining his or her own internal state, which can, in principle, be a happy and
unalienated one under conditions of false consciousness.
Both positions seem to be defensible, and they may not even be that far apart but
rather may reflect different priorities; both recognize that alienation is an ultimately
subjective and more or less conscious phenomenon, though brought about by an
often extended process of interaction with an alienating environment. This can be the
macro- or meso-environment of late capitalism, as the Marxists claim, but the
alienating process can also start almost at the beginning of life, by dysfunctional
interaction patterns with the micro-environment (e.g., neuroticizing parents), as
psychoanalysts tend to stress.
measuring alienation: asking subjects how they feel, and taking their word for it, on
the assumption that they are fully conscious of their own feelings and, moreover,
competent to verbalize them. In most Marxist sociology, the individual is often
considered to be unaware of alienation, which either may be masked by false
consciousness or simply never became conscious in the first place, for lack of
reflection. Consequently, measurement in this case follows a Skinnerian-type of
"black box" approach: one cannot look "inside" the subject but can only make
inferences about what goes on there by comparing and interpreting the differences
between the subject's input--like class position or working conditions--and the
output, or manifest behavior.
In modern times, the concept surfaced again in the nineteenth century and owes its
resurgence largely to Marx and Freud, although the latter did not deal with it
explicitly. After World War II, when societal complexity started its increasingly
accelerated rate of change, and the first signals of postmodernity were perceived by
the intellectual elite, alienation slowly became part of the intellectual scene; Srole
was one of the first in the 1950s to develop an alienation scale to measure degrees
and varieties of alienation. Following the 1968 student revolutions in the United
States and Europe, alienation studies proliferated, at least in the Western world.
In the Western world, and especially the United States, empirical social
psychological research on alienation rapidly developed: several alienation scales
were developed and administered to college students (even national samples) and
especially to different disadvantaged minory groups which, not surprisingly, tended
to score high on all these scales. On the other hand, much of the theoretical work was
of a Marxist persuasion and largely consisted of an exegesis
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of the young Marx's writings and their potential applicability to all kinds of
negatively evaluated situations in Western society: the alienation of labor under
capitalism, political alienation and apathy, suppression of ethnic or other minority
groups, and so forth.
Thus, the 1970s were characterized by a great divide with, on the one hand, the
empirical researchers--often, though not exclusively, non-Marxist-administering their
scales and charting the degree of alienation among several subgroups, and, on the
other hand, the (generally neo-Marxist) theoreticians, rarely engaging in empirical
research at all.
During the 1980s, as the postwar baby boomers grew older, and perhaps more
disillusioned, and willy-nilly entered the rat race, interest in alienation subsided. The
concept definitely--and luckily!--became less fashionable, although a small but
active international core group continued to study the subject in all its ramifications,
since the problems denoted by alienation were certainly far from solved--to the
contrary, even.
monopolize people's attention during the last few decades, the hundred-odd local
wars fought since the end of World War II, which were increasingly covered live on
worldwide TV, claimed attention for the opposing trend of regionalization and
brought ethnic conflicts to the fore. 2 This certainly is also evident in the case of the
former Soviet Union, where the end of the Pax Sovietica unleashed dormant ethnic
tensions. It almost seems that if one cannot "keep up with the Joneses" and
"globalize," one has nothing left but to "regionalize." A Dutch satirical television
program, describing the blessings of the Internet computer network, drove this home
recently: "The Internet furthers international contacts among people of different
persuasions and cultures, thus leading to international understanding and mutual
feelings of solidarity and brotherhood. This is clearly proven by the fact that in
nations with relatively few Internet connections--such as, for example, Bosnia and
Rwanda--people have nothing better to do than bash each other's skulls."
Postmodern philosophy has largely been an effort at explaining the effects of this
increased complexity on the individual so far, but while it is largely a philosophy
about the fragmentation of postmodern life, it often seems a bit
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fragmented itself. What else can one expect perhaps, given Marx's insight that the
economic and organizational substructure tends to influence the ideological
superstructure? However, while postmodern philosophy certainly draws attention to a
few important aspects of postmodern living, it will be argued later that modern
second-order cybernetics can offer a much more holistic picture of societal
development over the past few decades (see also Geyer, 1980, 1990, 1991, 1992,
1994, 1995), and provides a metalevel linkage between the concepts of alienation,
ethnicity, and postmodernism discussed here.
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disconnected from its roots in Hegel and Marx, that it has now become part of the
tool kit of social psychology, and that this should be seen as a positive development.
Alienation has become part of the social science tradition rather than the tradition of
social protest; the concept has been objectified and is no longer a footnote to the
ideology of revolution. It has also been neutralized and specified: "alienated from
what?" "integrated into what?" Most important, perhaps, is the fact that both
alienation and integration have now become relational concepts that refer to
processes of interaction rather than steady states. This has opened the way for a
positive evaluation of alienation: it is no longer an estrangement from cruel
industrial-capitalist demands but an "inalienable" right: a source of creative energy--
or an expression of personal eccentricity. Instead of the duty to participate, the stress
is now increasingly on the right not to participate, and to remain happily alienated.
Schweitzer (Chapter 3) agrees with Horowitz's diagnosis but evaluates the changes in
the conception of alienation negatively: he convincingly demonstrates how alienation
has been denuded of its original content by its incorporation in mainstream empirical
social science, especially in industrial sociology. In a selfreferential effort, which is
all too rare in social science, he applies the concept to the alienated "industry of
sociology" itself. Reified knowledge lends itself to the legitimation of
promanagement policies in the workplace, which give the worker only a feeling of
control: these policies include new human relations and job redesign programs,
codetermination policies, quality control cycles, and quality of working life projects.
The ideology of scientific objectivity, with its often implicit value-neutrality,
psychological reductionism, methodological individualism, and survey research
empiricism, has led to a reification and mystification of underlying social
contradictions and is filtering the world in a reductionist fashion to make it accessible
to the methods of science. Schweitzer then discusses the possibility of developing
effective dealienation strategies and discusses what can be learned in this respect
from the early Yugoslav experiments with industrial democracy and the organization
and present problems of the Israeli kibbutzim.
Archibald (Chapter 4) certainly does not study alienation in the alienated way that
Schweitzer describes. He was one of the first to engage in Marxistoriented empirical
research, and he reports here the results of an extensive study among industrial
workers in Hamilton. He managed to first find and then interview many of the
workers who had experienced the Depression of the 1930s, and compares them with
workers interviewed during the economic recession of the late 1980s, for which
processes of globalization and automation, rather than a market crash, were
responsible. Two opposite scenarios exist for economic crises: in the optimistic
scenario, the crisis weakens the bourgeoisie, which causes labor to rebel, while in the
pessimistic one, historic agency may diminish during crises, since interworker
competition destroys classwide organization and struggle. Archibald finds more
evidence for the pessimistic scenario: during crises, there tends to be a lot of fear and
apathy and a regression to lower-order subsistence needs, which makes conceptions
of social inequality and justice less relevant. His
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What Orkin envisages for South Africa actually happened in Monterey Park in the
course of the research: there arose a greater political and community participation of
women, ethnic groups, and immigrants, via voting as well as political action. Three
responses are possible under postmodern conditions of extreme ethnic and racial
diversity: (1) the nativist response, leading to protectionist measures and a "we-they"
dichotomy; (2) ethnic politics, with equally divisive consequences, and (3) the
recognition of differences in ethnicity and nativity as political resources, leading to
political alliances that were practical, situational, and unstable. Horton ends on the
optimistic note that crossing rather than drawing boundaries (see Chapter 15) is to be
applauded and studied, apart from being a condition for the occurence of postmodern
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dealienation.
Kalekin-Fishman (Chapter 8), though also concerned with education in Israel, does
not deal with ethnic tension, but rather takes cooperation for granted. Her focus is on
the alienating effects of the school system in a democratic state. Does schooling
contribute to socioeconomic and political participation (i.e., overall dealienation) or
to isolationism and apathy (overall alienation)? This is not only a practical question
for a democratic society, but also a fundamental issue in social theory. Kalekin-
Fishman describes the results of a large-scale research project, which was executed
in two stages: an analysis of 2,213 school regulations in 34 Hebrew and 18 Arab
schools, followed by interviews with 1,459 students and 749 teachers from 105
schools--28% primary, 72% post-primary; 45% Arab and 55% Hebrew. Basing her
analysis on Erikson's stages of psychosocial development as well as an analysis of
her detailed data, she concludes that not all these stages are conducive to good
citizenship: trust, industry, and the role identity of a "good student" encourage
passivity; while autonomy, initiative intimacy, and generativity are often expressly
excluded in the rules, which try to make the student into a dependent of a
bureaucracy, thus encouraging powerlessness and conformity rather than furthering
an adult potential for selfrealization.
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Gergen (Chapter 10) argues that alienation theory up till now has departed from three
assumptions that are no longer valid under conditions of postmodernity: (1) the
existence of an autonomous self, to be repaired by therapy if damaged; (2) the
possibility of authentic action, implying a coordination between that autonomous self
and personal action; (3) a unified structuring of society: while one should not be
alienated from organized society, one also should not be too much at one with it, as
this carries the risk of self-alienation. Nowadays, postmodern forms of alienation are
emerging that question these premises: (1) the fully autonomous agent would be an
empty self; all that was natural and autonomous is now viewed as cultural and
relational, as Foucault and the social constructionists stress; (2) authentic action, too,
cannot be conceived without an identifiable state of "natural mind," beyond social
interpretation; (3) there is no unified structure of society anymore, if there ever was
one; it has been replaced by images of fragmentation, disorganization, and diffuse
forms of relatedness. Postmodernism deconstructs everything, including not only
alienation, but also itself Gergen is against such total deconstruction and proposes a
revisioning of alienation theory by shifting the locus of theoretical concern from the
individual to relatedness, thus taking not only into account the more classical forms
of alienation, but also those that are brought about by the newly emerging forms of
social life. He considers a nomadic sense of rootlessness inevitable and views
alienation as a signal of immersion in at least two conflicting relational realms.
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humanist interest in socialism and the possibilities for dealienation. However, they
both bridge secular and sacred solutions to the problem of alienation, and they
converge in their later works from an exemplary, respectively emissary, prophetic
mode towards an inner-worldly mysticism, in spite of their quite different
beginnings. Wexler argues that a resacralization of culture is emerging, which is
represented by several New Age movements, was analyzed by Buber and Fromm,
and centers on a social psychology of presence, attention, and being.
Ahponen (Chapter 15) is interested in the frequent "border crossings" one inevitably
has to make in a postmodern and networked risk society, as described by Beck and
Luhmann: How are the features of familiarity versus strangeness classified when
foreign, alien, and anonymous people are encountered, and what happens to the
personality of the individual who crosses the borders of familiar, secure and
trustworthy circles? Questions of social justice will be increasingly difficult to
answer since civil rights are based on the majority principle, while social minorities
increasingly stress their political demands. Luhmann ( 1993), who concentrated his
interest on the reflexive organization of the network of human communication, has
little to say about the position of the increasing number of economically and
otherwise marginal people. Postmodern society increases chances to meet strange
people and circumstances, which also furthers chances for the emergence of a
reflexive self and offers the possibility to realize that differences are not necessarily
barriers, but rather signals of complexity. For an increasing number of people, being
"on the road" toward new experiences also means that possibilities to become deeply
rooted somewhere are being lost--or at least that new and more flexible personal
identities have to be developed, since fixed personal identities are only possible to
maintain within a secure and limited social space.
Augusto (Chapter 16) also deals with changes in culture and the selfrepresentation of
societies and how these relate to personality changes, although she prefers to speak
of modern rather than postmodern society. Since the Enlightenment, two, often
contradictory, ideas have been the basis of societal self-representation: on the one
hand, the belief in progress, knowledge and technology, increased mastery over
nature, and so forth; on the other hand, the belief that increasing individual and
collective freedom will become possible as the result of an emancipatory or
revolutionary movement toward democracy. These two ideas have contaminated one
another, as did the correlated rational versus romantic conceptions of the individual,
and both have recently been weakened. The unilinear rather than cyclical
conceptualization of time bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment has caused a
profound alteration in the meaning of death, which has become an inexorable end,
thus forcing us to fill the available time up to that point with a maximum of events
and deeds. This need to use time with maximum efficiency has been internalized and
leads to an emphasis on the instantaneous, a hyperindividualism, and the tendency to
live in the here and now without much regard for either the past or the future. In a
way, since life has lost its deeper meaning and has been reduced to a frenzied
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Wexler (Chapter 14) concentrates on what he terms "New Age social theory," which
is a theory of dealienation and a collective reassertion of the life force against the
postmodern culture of death. Postmodernism has not succeeded in obliterating the
drive to overcome alienation. To the contrary, alienation, and especially self-
alienation, has deepened under postmodern conditions: apart from a loss of agency,
there has been a loss of feeling and organic sensation and an increase of boredom and
anxiety. Wexler analyzes what a few classical social scientists--notably Durkheim,
Weber, Norman O. Brown, and Reich--have to contribute to New Age social theory
and then concentrates his discussion on Buber and Fromm. Buber is more the
romantic, being interested in "ecstacism," experience, and, specifically, in Hasidism,
while Fromm has a more Marxist-
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race in order to forget that one is going to die, death has lost its meaning as well--an
extreme example being, perhaps, the public indifference toward the extermination of
street children in Brazil.
For those readers not acquainted with second-order cybernetics, a short overview
follows. A few of its main conclusions, especially those derived from simulation
experiments with neuronal networks, seem to be applicable to the high rate of
present-day societal change and the resulting problems of alienation, ethnicity, and
postmodernism ( Waldrop, 1992):
1. Complexity is in the software, not in the hardware; in the structure rather than in
the elements making up the structure; in the way simple building blocks are
organized as a result of simple and local laws, and not in the building blocks
themselves. Indeed, the complexity of *human software*--the web of
interrelations between individuals and groups--has certainly exponentially
increased under postmodern conditions, with new groups constantly emerging
and interacting, leading to increased interdependence; it is not people (the
building blocks) who have become more complex, but the environment they
have created for themselves (the structure).
2. The emergence of complexity is a bottom-up process--without any central
controller leading it--rather than a top-down one; it is a matter of local units,
acting according to local laws, which produce new levels of complexity by
interacting. With authoritarian systems generally on the decline in much of the
Western world, newly emerging groups there are indeed usually the result of
bottom-up processes; it is their inceased rate of interaction that is, at least
partially, responsible for the increased complexity of present-day society. This is
not to deny that, once new and higher levels of complexity have emerged, they
tend to exercise hierarchical control over the lower levels--as one can observe all
the way from physiology to sociology.
3. Experiments with the simulation of neural networks make it clear that the more
densely they are interconnected, the less likely they are to cycle through a
limited number of states or to ever repeat the same state; this probably holds for
human networks as well. With more dense and varied interconnections between
individuals and, especially, groups, they indeed no longer tend to cycle anymore
through a limited number of states; under present conditions, history--at least in
its concrete details--repeats itself less and less often. Again, this is not to deny
that for the majority of the world's population, life continues as it always has
been: a virtually unbreakable cycle of economic exploitation, powerlessness,
poverty, joblessness, ethnic prejudice, lack of access to means that could
improve living conditions, and other assorted miseries.
4. Complex systems do not exist in isolation; it is always complex adaptive systems
that are at issue, undergoing co-evolution rather than evolution. Indeed, while
increasingly complex groups, institutions and alliances thus emerge, it should be
clear that they do not do so in isolation but that their increased complexity is
largely the result of an adaptive co-evolution.
5. Neuronal networks have many agents acting in parallel and their control is
highly dispersed, with any coherent behavior resulting from competition and
cooperation among the agents themselves. This trend can especially be
recognized in the so-called new social movements.
6. They have many levels of organization, with agents at one level serving as
building blocks for the agents at the next higher level; this can clearly be seen in
the accelerated process of nation building since World War II, and actually
already since medieval times: from local fiefdoms all the way to the United
Nations, and from village economies to the present world economy.
7. These building blocks are rearranged constantly as a result of what one might
call either learning, experience, evolution, or adaptation. This also seems to be
applicable to human societies, though admittedly these processes are often
agonizingly slow, as is evident in the many cases of mutual alienation under
conditions of ethnic conflict (Chapters 5-7 and 9).
8. They all have many niches they can exploit, whereby filling one niche often
opens up new ones that can be filled; complex adaptive systems always create
new
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Applying all this to Seeman ( 1959) five alienation dimensions, one might say that
they have been "speeding up" in the postmodern situation, which has been
characterized by Luhmann ( 1968, 1970) as implying the growth of an increasing
"complexity differential" between the individual and its environment. In order to
manage environmental overcomplexity and to close, at least somewhat, the
individual-environment "complexity gap," the postmodern individual is forced to
increase his or her own internal complexity--with obvious consequences for his or
her personality structure. With the accelerating throughput of information, for
example, meaninglessness is not a matter anymore of whether one can assign
meaning to incoming information, but of whether one can develop adequate new
scanning mechanisms to gather the goal-relevant information one needs, as well as
more efficient selection procedures to prevent being overburdened by the information
one does not need, but is bombarded with on a regular basis. Likewise, a new type of
powerlessness has emerged, where the core problem is no longer being unfree but
rather being unable to select from among an overchoice of alternatives for action,
whose consequences one often cannot even fathom.
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any reaction is forthcoming. The more complex one's environment, the later one is
confronted with the latent, and often unintended, consequences of one's actions.
Consequently, in view of this causality-obscuring time lag, both the "rewards" and
"punishments" for one's actions increasingly tend to be viewed as random, often with
apathy and alienation as a result.Another psychologically normal situation, derived
from small-group interpersonal interaction, is spontaneous immediacy; however, to
engage succesfully in action in the intricate web of an increasingly complex and
interdependent environment, its opposite--a calculated "internal simulation" or
planning--is mandatory if one wants to further one's goals--which themselves
become increasingly long-range. Like a chess player, one has to calculate several
moves ahead if one's actions are to have success, and often, counterintuitive rather
than spontaneous behavior is required to obtain the desired results.An effort has been
made here to argue that the sciences of complexity, with cybernetics at their core, can
provide a more or less holistic picture of the reasons for what is viewed as the
fragmentation of modern life, which is so much deplored by postmodern philosophy.
The phenomena described by postmodern philosophy (Chapters 11-16)--the
fragmentation, the "death" of the autonomous subject, the impossibility for
"authentic action," the loss of "essence," the reduction of realities to simulacra and
virtual reality--are viewed here as, hopefully, temporary adaptation problems of
individuals, confronted by the objective effects of an accelerating societal complexity
and interdependence that they have subjectively not yet been able to
master.Confronted with this "complexity differential" between environmental
complexity and the individual's internal complexity, basically two reactions are
possible:
1. one can indeed try oneself to "become more complex" and to adapt in an
increasingly self-referential way to a fast-changing world, to go ahead rather
than retreat, to at least analyze what happens and take the consequences, as
postmodernism tries to do, or:
2. one can try to maintain, or withdraw to, a supposedly simpler past, and deny the
inevitable developments by which one is surrounded, as especially
fundamentalist movements do.
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one still generated by most ideologies, educational systems (Chapter 8), and
especially religions, which often remain replete with agricultural imagery from a
simpler past. Even Marx retained had the ideal of an unalienated laborer, rearing
some cattle on the side in the evening.Of course, the world itself is not fragmented,
as postmodernism claims, although its fragmentation was already deplored millennia
ago, 4 and will continue to be deplored by those who cannot integrate their image of a
complexifying environment--which they are consequently almost forced to view as
fragmented. With worldwide interdependence reaching unprecedented peaks,
however, the world is less fragmented and more interconnected than it ever was. It is
one's image of the world that has become fragmented, owing to the overload of
information with which one is confronted as a result of a horizonwidening process
set in motion by increased communication and the overload of possibilities from
which one can barely choose using the antediluvian selection mechanisms still
promoted by much of present-day education.To the extent that alienation is viewed
by some as a disturbance somewhere along the way of a "normal" socialization
process toward everwidening horizons--from primary groups all the way to
macrosocietal contexts like the nation and even world society--some degree of
alienation has indeed become inevitable, as Schacht (Chapter 1) stresses. One cannot
identify with one's total environment anymore but instead has to select certain
aspects of it that offer concrete and rewarding possibilities for identification.To be
well adapted to postmodern, nonmonolithic multigroup society, some degree of what
second-order cybernetics considers self-referential metalearning is imperative, for
example:
-- one needs to learn to unlearn under conditions of fast environmental change;
-- a high degree of tolerance of ambiguity is not only required, but one should
even thrive on it, rather than feel frustrated by it--in view of the increasing
number of "fuzzy" situations one encounters in postmodern life;
-- to fully utilize the possibilities the world offers, there must be a willingness to
take more or less calculated risks--that is, to perform internal mental
simulations--and concentrate on their inherent opportunities rather than their
chances for failure;
-- likewise, a relatively high degree of self-knowledge is required nowadays, in
view of the frequent need to "reprogram" oneself under fast-changing
environmental conditions;
-- in order not to be lamed by such self-knowledge, one needs to develop the
ability to differentiate intellectually between what can and what cannot be
steered, as well as the requisite emotional attitudes of involvement and
resignation, in order to prevent unnecessary alienation;
-- one should be willing to pay the price of anticipatory socialization toward new
groups: inevitable alienation from old ones.
This list is far from exhaustive, and it certainly poses heavy demands with which few
can comply. Nevertheless, it should give a fair idea of the personality traits that
should be furthered by present-day formal and informal education and are required in
order to thrive in postmodern society. Obviously, such
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personality traits do not add up to a fixed identity, though they certainly help to
develop a many-faceted personality. A fixed identity, if there ever was something like
that, is just as absurd as the total lack of identity and personal continuity often
claimed to exist by postmodernism. A relatively fixed identity could only be
developed when much simpler environmental conditions obtained (Chapter 15). The
age-old and, for many, frustrating question "Who am I?" cannot be answered
anymore, although many still try; or rather, it should be answered differently from
one day to the next, and especially from one context to another.
The quest for identity--something one supposedly simply just had in earlier times,
but now apparently needs to look for feverishly--is an understandable one for
disadvantaged, but reasonably integrated subgroups within Western society, and it
can give highly needed self-esteem where previously there was none (Chapter 11). In
the periphery of the Western world, however--and increasingly within it, as in
Bosnia--this quest for identity often takes on fanatical overtones, along nationalistic
or ethnic lines. It is often mistakenly viewed as a protest against the encroachment of
Western civilization but should perhaps rather be seen as an effort to withdraw from
personalitythreatening processes of globalization. As Bien argues (Chapter 7): when
one is unable to function optimally in the present, one tends to withdraw to the past
and a culture that was, but already is no more.
The above has, hopefully, clarified the assertion that second-order cybernetics can
indeed be a fertile metatheoretical framework to illuminate the linkages between the
problems of alienation, ethnicity, and postrnodernism. To summarize, an important
underlying cause of these problems is the increasing complexity of the human-made
environment, which feeds on itself to produce more complexity. Perhaps it is a
dealienating thought that it is indeed humanmade, in a bottom-up process resulting
from cumulative and intricate interactions over many generations of self-referential
and self-organizing actors, who pursued their own goals. Nevertheless, the single
individual's confrontation with the complexity of this human-made environment can
indeed be a highly alienating experience; it takes concerted action, which is difficult
to organize--as can be seen in the case of the slow rise in ecological awareness--to
make it change course.
-xxvi-
However, there is no longer an urgent need to discover who the alienated are, as was
the case in the 1970s when empirical alienation studies were charting the terrain: this
is well known by now. It is quite something else to lay bare the often macrosocial
structural roots of alienation in early life--as opposed to its microsocial
psychoanalytic causes in the personal history of the individual. In this respect,
Kalekin-Fishman's research (Chapter 8) on the alienating effects of the educational
system in a democratic state should be quite an eye-opener. The same goes for
Schweitzer's account (Chapter 3) of how the alienation concept has been reified, how
alienation has even pervaded the alienation researchers themselves, and how their
research helps to continue objectively alienating working conditions for the subjects
of their research. Horowitz (Chapter 2), however, presents a more positive evaluation
of the transition from alienation as a Marxist, normative, and critical concept to one
that has become more neutralized as an operational tool in the hands of empirical
researchers.
Empirical research on alienation as connected to problems of ethnicity has only just
started, but already it presents interesting leads from which dealienating strategies to
reduce ethnic tensions might be derived, as especially the chapters by Bien (Chapter
7) and Horton (Chapter 6) demonstrate. However, much more research is needed,
especially in situations where the situation is extremely complex and still rather
volatile, as in Orkin's area of study, presentday South Africa (Chapter 5), and all the
more so in situations where interethnic violence has already erupted and tends to
continue indefinitely, although conducting empirical research surely will not be easy
under those circumstances. The need for more research on the reasons for increasing
racist violence against ethnic minorities--and not just within politically backward
Third World dictatorships, but right in the center of the Western world--is amply
demonstrated by Macey (Chapter 9).
Work on the connections between alienation and postmodernism is very recent and
generally still of a theoretical nature. Here, the terrain may not yet be ready for
sophisticated empirical research, but the chapters represented in this volume certainly
give useful pointers for future empirical studies. They all describe and analyze the
effects of recent and accelerated societal change on the individual and discuss
possible coping strategies. It does not even matter terribly whether one talks about
postmodernism, prefers to call it modernism, like Augusto (Chapter 16) in her
analysis of the effects of the introjection of unilinear time, or is squarely against it,
like Vandenberghe (Chapter 13) in his incisive comparative analysis of "post-al"
theories and theories of reification.
-xxvii-
Many of the authors indicate what should be done, in their opinion, to further the
individual's adaptation to the postmodern condition. Gergen (Chapter 10)
demonstrates how new and more relational conceptualizations of alienation are
necessary, and-like Ahponen (Chapter 15)--views a certain degree of nomadic
rootlessness as inevitable and even desirable. Langman and Scatamburlo (Chapter
11) argue against "ludic" postmodernism. They have more sympathy for what they
call the postmodernisms of resistance (feminism, postcolonialism) but finally opt for
a dialectical approach, in spite of postmodern objections against "master narratives."
Gottdiener (Chapter 12), in line with Lefebvre, views many ostensibly postmodern
phenomena as signs of alienation rather than as proof of postmodern fragmentation.
Wexler (Chapter 14) draws especially on the work of Buber and Fromm to present a
solution to the disadvantages of postmodernism that goes in the direction of a New
Age sociology, which is centered on innerwordly mysticism and "being there."
Ahponen stresses the possibility of an adaptive personality change as a result of
frequent and open contact with totally different others.
This summing up clearly demonstrates that many authors reject the often extreme
positions of postmodern theory, though recognizing the symptoms it describes, and
they often advance their own recipes for living in the present world, whatever it is
called. Alienation--whether "classical," ethnic, or postmodern--will certainly be with
us well into the next century; however, the struggle against it will continue as well,
hopefully supported with at least a small contribution from the theoretical and
empirical research results of the social science community.
Notes
1. For example Adam Schaff in Poland, Agnes Heller in Hungary, and Zagorka
Golubovi and Mihailo Markovi in Yugoslavia.
4. Shoham ( 1979) mentions the ancient Jewish myth of the "breaking of the
vessels" in this respect.
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1
Alienation Redux: From Here to
Postmodernity
Richard Schacht
Nietzche's Warning
A point made much of by Hegel, which would seem to ring importantly true, is that
once a certain rather modest level of self-consciousness has been attained, human
beings come to have a profound need for some sort of identity that they can affirm. 1
The varieties of identity that may suffice to satisfy this need are highly diverse, and
they are by no means invariably individualistic; but the absence or loss of any such
positive self-conception would appear to be as dire a state of affairs as there can be in
human life, as it brings a host of individual and social pathologies in its train.
I believe that certain developments at work in the world today are rendering traditional
ways of thinking about these matters outmoded and making something like the basic
anti-essentialist and historicist premises of
-1-
postmodernism come true. Thus we find ourselves confronted with the apparent
paradox of simultaneous tendencies toward both homogenization and pluralization in
social and cultural life, accompanied by what might be called the deconstruction of
definition and normativity in the scripting of socialization and acculturation. This
dynamic renders old models of the "individual-society" relation increasingly
questionable. It also has profound implications for the notions of human identity,
autonomy and community. The ideas of alienation and self-alienation have long been
employed to mark out certain sorts of relations in which some sort of avoidable
separation obtains. However, one consequence of this new dynamic is to transform the
conditions of the possibility of making sense of many such separations and of the forms
of unity with which they are to be contrasted.
In what follows I shall explore some of these issues in an attempt to begin to come to
terms with this phenomenon, the importance of which can hardly be overstated. I shall
take as my point of departure an observation of Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw it
coming--even as he also saw dangers along the way that could result in other and far
sorrier fates for humanity than postmodernity.
What is dying out is the fundamental faith . . . that man has value and
meaning only insofar as he is a stone in a great edifice; and to that end
he must be solid first of all, a "stone"--and above all not an actor!
To say it briefly (for a long time people will still keep silent about it):
What will not be built any more henceforth, and cannot be built any
more, is--a society [Gesellschaft] in the old sense of that word; to build
that, everything is lacking, above all the material. All of us are no
longer material for a society: this is a truth for which the time has
come. ( Nietzsche, 1974, sec. 2).
Nietzsche is best known for his proclamation that "God is dead"; but God is not the
only fatality on his list of casualties of earth-shaking proportions. In the abovequoted
passage, which is from a section of The Gay Science entitled "How Things Will Become
Ever More 'Artistic' in Europe," he points to another: the kind of society "in the old
sense of the word" that has a discernible, distinctive, coherent structure and content, or
what Hegel had called "substance." It was societies of this sort that Hegel had regarded
as the Weitgeist's finest flower and as the true "individuals" and loci of spiritual identity
on the human scene.
Such societies are on their way out, Nietzsche contends, as the human conditions of
their possibility cease to obtain. To be sure, their demise may be as slow and agonizing
as the deaths that he heralds of religions and moralities that have long been embraced
and relied on; and their last gasps may even give the appearance of new leases on life.
But Nietzsche urges us not to deceive ourselves in wishful thinking about all this. The
real question, he insists, is, or ought to be: what are our options, if we are unwilling to
console and delude ourselves with impossible dreams? Nietzsche may have
overestimated the extent to which people are "no longer material for a society." He also
may have underestimated the tenacity, and even ferocity, with which many will cling to
some version of the "fundamental faith" to which he refers, fearful of losing the
-2-
"value and meaning" it bestows upon their lives. But the problem he poses here is a
profoundly serious one; and I believe that we must find a large-scale solution to it if
humanity is to have a chance of making it through the next century without sinking into
a new, barbarous Dark Age. I say this because I believe that Nietzsche and Hegel were
both right to stress that human beings have a profound need for something like the kind
of value and meaning that the sense of being "a stone in a great edifice" can give.
Moreover, as Nietzsche darkly warns, "Man would rather will nothingness than not
will" ( 1967, 3rd essay, sec. 28).
Hegel likewise may have given an overly mystified account of human life, as Marx
complained; but he understood something of great importance about human nature that
Marx seems, rather disastrously, to have missed (even though Marx has had a lot of
company in this respect). Employing the admittedly opaque language of his
philosophical interpretation of human life in terms of Geist, Hegel gave abstract but
emphatic expression to what may well be a fundamental anthropological truth: human
beings are so constituted that they require social identities involving both identification
and differentiation, beyond the levels of purely particular (physical or psychological)
existence and merely affective bonds, and yet narrower than the identities associated
with their common biological, rational, or human natures.
Hegel's way of putting this point was to conceive of the Volk, or "people," as a kind of
middle term between the twin abstractions of human particularity and universality and
to emphasize the importance of unity with the Volksgeist or life of one's people. There is
nothing mysterious or mystical about such unity; it is simply a matter of living in
inward and outward accord with that which gives one's people its identity: its language,
rules, customs, practices, and institutions. Relations of identification with, and
participation in, some such "social substance"--either immediate and unreflective or
self-conscious and comprehending--were for Hegel crucial to our human/spiritual self-
realization. Withdrawing from them, on the other hand, meant self-alienation as well as
social alienation; and the generalized collapse of such relations was for him a recipe for
chaos and a prelude to disaster.
True as this may be, times have changed; and Hegel's solution has been rendered just
about impossible. Ours is a world in which monolithic societies are sustainable only by
totalitarian means. The globe has shrunk, economic life has become internationalized
and popular culture is following suit, tourism is everywhere, travel is routine, and great
numbers of people are on the move, for reasons both good and dismaying. Successive
waves of developments in communications technology are further rapidly eroding the
conditions of isolation upon which the local acculturation process has long depended,
updating the old song, "How're ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen
TV?" The sun is setting on the day of Hegel's "peoples" and their distinctive
sociocultural identities, even if its mythology persists.
-3-
The Identity Question
Events in many parts of the world in recent years, particularly in the aftermath of the
collapse of the self-styled Marxist world and its universalistic ideology, have given new
impetus to a consideration of what might be called "the identity question," The demise
of this ideology, and the emptiness of its comparably universalistic consumer-
capitalistic rival, have led to renewed interest, not only in religiously, racially, and
sexually based forms of identity, but also in those based on nationality and ethnicity.
This interest is manifested both in the terrible conflicts that threaten to plunge various
parts of the world into chaos and darkness, and also in disputes of the (happily) more
bloodless variety carried on in the media and academia. So, for example, concerns
about the growing ethnic, racial, and religious divisions in the U.S. have prompted our
National Endowment for the Humanities to schedule a series of televised discussions
exploring "the meaning of American identity," setting off an exchange in the New York
Times Op Ed pages on this topic to which Richard Rorty contributed.
Rorty, it rather surprisingly turns out, remains something of an Hegelian after all, his
vaunted ultra-postmodernism notwithstanding. He actually argues for the great
importance of "a sense of shared national identity." 2 In doing so, he goes beyond what I
would call the "liberal line" on this matter, to the effect that without such a shared
national identity, the ability of members of a large and diverse population to live
harmoniously together will be jeopardized or lost. He seems instead, or in addition, to
subscribe to something like the Hegelian view that those who lack such an identity are
thereby deficient in an important respect as human beings.
It would be interesting to see how someone (like Rorty) who purports to eschew
essentialism of any kind could go about justifying such a position. It also seems to me
that (contra Rorty, and paraphrasing the title of one of his best-known pre-postmodern
essays) national identity is "an identity well lost"--along with ethnic, racial, sexual,
religious, and all other such forms of identity. Rather, they are better played down than
played up to the point of pitting people against each other and overriding other
considerations in human affairs. Indeed, we have ample evidence that a heightened
sense of such identity is itself one of the gravest threats to the ability of members of
populations that are divided along such lines to live harmoniously together. The
"politics of identity" (to give it a name) is one of the plagues of our century. It already
has taken a horrible toll and may instigate further disasters that could prove fatal to
civilization and, along with it, the modicum of humanity we have managed to achieve.
4-
desperation is fertile soil for a fanaticism that is capable of anything. It well exemplifies
what Paul Tillich--with Nazism in mind-called the "demonic," and analyzed as the
special sort of corruption and evil that results from elevating something finite and
contingent to the status of one's "ultimate concern." 3 Fanatics not only ought to know
better, but frequently do-only this does not stop them from making their leaps of faith.
With this problem and danger in mind, I would advance a proposition that may seem
paradoxical but, upon reflection, may be seen to make sense. It, in effect, simply
restates an important Hegelian insight. My proposition is that national, ethnic, and all
other such forms of identity are tolerable only if they are not taken very seriously.
Indeed I would go even further, and suggest that they are benign only if accompanied
and mediated by a counterbalancing sense of alienation. This alienation does not have
to be complete; but it ironically needs to be strong enough to preclude the completeness
and intensity of identification that would be required for them to be the primary means
of satisfying the postulated basic need for a sense of value and meaning.
But if we are not Hegelians through and through, and if we can take seriously only as
much of Hegel as we can de-Idealize, we must modify this picture, removing Absolute
Spirituality. The abandonment of this last vestige of transcendence may be
philosophically commendable; but it costs us Hegel's solution to the problem of how to
give our need for what he called "objectivespiritual" identity its due without being
consumed by it. How can such identities be aufgehoben if we no longer suppose that
there is any higher-order identity capable of subsuming them to which we might
ascend? Moreover, if neither they nor anything beyond them are suitable objects of our
ultimate concern, capable of endowing our lives with value and meaning through our
identification with them and participation in them, what is the alternative?
-5-
laying claim to our allegiance and ultimate concern would be nihilism. He also
recognized that, in what he called this Gtzen-Dmmerung, or "twilight of the idols," in
which all such pretenders are moving toward their demise, there will be many people
who will cling to them and defend them by every possible means. However, diagnosing
these twin pathologies of nihilism and fanaticism was of less interest and importance to
him than trying to think through the problem of how this nihilism might be overcome
and what different way of arriving at an affirmation of life might be possible. He came
to be convinced that this will require a fundamental "revaluation of values," as well as a
thoroughgoing reinterpretation of ourselves and our world in the aftermath of their de-
deification; for we will have to wean ourselves away from craving the kind of value and
meaning associated with the idea of something absolute and unconditioned, with which
we might absolutely and unconditionally identify ourselves.
Can we do this? The passage from The Gay Science cited previously suggests that
Nietzsche thought that we--or at least some of us--are already halfway there. But what
might lie beyond the withering away of all those candidates for our commitment that
promise value and meaning in exchange for our unqualified identification? The
alienation from them that may be necessary to enable us to resist their demonizing
embrace may have the consequence of rendering them not only harmless but bootless as
well, leaving us empty-handed. That surely is also what will happen, however, if we
retain our longing for something to which we could give ourselves unconditionally, and
turn that longing into a criterion nothing can meet. This is a fascinating as well as
worrisome problem, which poses a challenge that surely ranks with the best in the
history of alienation theory.
The long-term future of alienation thus need not expire along with the religious, moral,
social, and cultural gods in relation to which human identity and worth have long been
conceived. It likewise is not limited to the need to learn to hold at arm's length those
communities, practices, and institutions with which we may once have identified
without reservation and in which we may continue to participate. Rather, I would
suggest that a more interesting part of its future will have to do with alternative ways of
conceiving of conditions of the possibility of achieving a human identity worth having.
Downsizing Identity
I shall take it as axiomatic that a type of alienation is a meaningful human possibility
only in cases where a corresponding type of identification is a meaningful human
possibility. I shall further suppose that all human identity or selfhood that is not merely
physiological is grounded in (if not simply a function of) relations of involvement in
one's environing world, ranging from activities involving objects to interactions with
others, participation in sociocultural forms of life, and operations in symbol systems.
And I also shall assume that human beings are so constituted as to need and seek the
sort of
-6-
identity that is only possible by way of participation in social configurations that join
them with others in a differentiating manner.
So far, so Hegelian, but I further consider it necessary at this juncture to turn the
Hegelian approach to social alienation and self-alienation inside out. Hegel thought that
it should be (or, in the best of all possible worlds, would be) possible to specify for
everyone the "social substance" with which they ought to identify (as the objectification
of the Volk of which they are a part) (see Schacht, 1970, ch. 20). I propose to start
instead from the idea that human beings need to participate in, and identify with, some
sort of social reality that is in some way sufficient to satisfy what I shall call the
imperative of selfaffirmation. The force of this notion is that one must be able to affirm
oneself and that, to be able to do so, one must have some sort of self to affirm--which,
perforce, must be relationally constituted. The question then becomes: how can this
imperative be satisfied in a postmodernized world in which "peoples" and their discrete
social substances have been scrambled, and no one is any longer "fit material for
society"? Moreover, what becomes of the notion of alienation under such conditions, in
which there no longer is anything in particular with which any particular person ought
to identify, but rather only a decentered and deprivileged multiplicity of available
alternative reference points and possibilities of involvement?
What are the human alternatives that might be pursued under these conditions, not only
philosophically but pedagogically, politically, through literature and the arts, and in the
other arenas of modern discourse? One might of course simply give up, in the nihilistic
manner that Nietzsche feared would be all too common on the part of those for whom
nothing less will do, in the aftermath of the death of the only gods one knows. . . .
Alternatively, one might take one's cue from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor
and attempt to reimpose a version of a simpler world by totalitarian means or by an
update of the "noble lie." However, these are evasions of the problem I am posing,
rather than serious attempts to confront it.
One way of trying to confront it would be to seek, in each person's past or in the
"givens" of each person's existence, the basis of some sort of community with others of
a similar origin or kind. One might then foster the extraction or elaboration of a shared
form of life, based on this commonality, in which they might participate with these
others. This would come as close as may be possible to giving a postmodern lease on
life to Hegel's model of the integration of individuals into the lives of their "peoples." In
this case, however, it would be the selected common denominators drawn from the
circumstances of life history, physiology or psychology that would serve to individuate,
unite, and differentiate the groups and supply the identities being affirmed. Here the
idea would be to narrow and shift the focus of identity for each person until a
satisfactory fit of some sort is found between something about the person and others of
the same description. Anticipations of this sort are already familiar enough, with
associations and identifications based upon such circumstances college attendance,
military service, religious affiliation, sexual orientation,
-7-
On the other hand, their relative paltriness in the larger scheme of things and their
evident contingency do tend to limit the extent to which those who participate in them
can derive a sense of value and meaning from identification with them; and this raises
doubts about the adequacy of this option, particularly in times of personal and societal
crisis. Moreover, one cannot ignore the more fundamental problem with any such
recourse, upon which the existentialists used to harp: why should any mere
circumstance of either nature or nurture be deemed, or allowed to be, definitive of one's
identity and decisive with respect to the leading of one's life? Identities may be chosen
in this way; but no such choice is mandated by any such contingency.
Nietzsche attempted to mark the distinction between this kind of thing and the
nationalism he despised by giving the name of "good European" to those whose
identities were no longer merely nationalistic, ethnic, religious, racial, or otherwise
superficial. It may be argued that this designation too is problematic in the same respect
and needs to be replaced by something more generic (like "Kulturmensch," cultural
devotee) to be faithful to Nietzsche's intentions; but the basic point should be clear
enough. The fundamental identification he would have us make is with that in and
about ourselves and others that can lend itself
-8-
to the enhancement of human life through the flourishing and enrichment of human
culture. "Be yourself!" may be a sound maxim; but Nietzsche does not leave it at that.
"Your true nature," he writes in Schopenhauer as Educator, "lies not concealed within
you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take
yourself to be" ( 1983, sec. 1, p. 129). He goes on to elaborate on what this requires in
terms of a "consecration to culture," and "a struggle on behalf of culture."
This general way of thinking, when conceived more specifically, becomes a model of
participation in some selection of opportunities for involvement in available aspects
(and occasionally new variants) of human cultural life in the broadest sense of this
expression, as one's abilities and circumstances may permit and as one's choices may
dictate. Its scope is by no means restricted to "high" (or even "popular") culture, but
rather extends to matters as diverse as scientific endeavor, athletic activity, and
professional and public life, all of which provide contexts for the cultivation and
creative application of human abilities and the attainment of forms of proficiency and
excellence. Indeed, the diversifiability of human cultural life in this broad sense is
virtually limitless; and it is not only those who achieve absolute supremacy (for the
moment) or even general superiority in various areas of endeavor who contribute to its
flourishing and enhancement, but all who participate in them and attend to them--rather
like speakers of a language, all of whom contribute to keeping it a living and
developing affair. Their contributions may typically be incremental rather than
substantial; but that is no barrier to identification and need be no impediment to the
satisfaction associated with a sense of value and meaning deriving from it ( Schacht,
1991).
-9-
limits might have to be placed on the operation of institutions and the conduct of
individuals within such a society in the interest of that very vitality; and it is another
whether human motivations would need to be inculcated and educated (and if so how
and by whom) to ensure active involvement.
A large and worrisome question hanging over both options, however, is whether human
beings generally are capable of deriving a sufficient sense of value and meaning from
any such sets of involvements to satisfy their imperative of self-affirmation if they are
clearly aware of the merely human (and often very human), contingent, historically
conditioned, and finite status of any and all of the social formations in which they
participate and through which they attain their identities. If and when that day arrives,
humanity will have matured, leaving behind its immature longing for absolute realities
and guarantees in relation to which to achieve self-esteem. But that day may be long in
coming, for our immaturity has been compounded by long addiction to an all-or-
nothing, "infinity or bust" way of thinking that is intended precisely to render us
unwilling and unable to settle for anything this side of transcendence. Nietzsche was
right to see a crisis and great danger here and to dwell on the magnitude of the
revaluation of values required to surmount it. 4
Postmodern Alienation
However, let us look down the road in the direction Nietzsche points, past the twin
perils of fanaticism and nihilism, to the state of affairs that presumably would obtain if
and when the transition to a postmodern world has occurred. In place of the likes of
dominant cultures, peoples, social substances, and their latter-day remnants, there will
be only a profusion of social and cultural formations, participation in any of which is
optional and normatively neutral. Classical social alienation, as conceived in terms of
the loss or absence of identification with, and participation in, the form of life
characteristic of one's society, will have become meaningless ( Schacht, 1986). But the
closing of that chapter in the concept's career need not be the end of its story. On the
contrary: the new chapter to follow may prove to be an even more interesting one-albeit
perhaps a good deal more complicated, and (I suspect) far from congenial to social
scientists of a quantitative persuasion.
For starters, the human need recognized by Hegel for an identity of social dimensions
surely will not fade away with the dawning of postmodernity. This need, however, will
now have to be met through forms of participation and identification representing a
recognized selection from an array of historically engendered social possibilities,
mandated neither by divine authority nor by anything of a more mundane nature
(including one's own innate constitution). In place of a socially defined conception of
deviance, however, one might substitute the idea of a serious pathology, for if it is the
case that the need in question cannot go unmet without serious consequences for the
kind of self one comes to have, then the generalized absence of relations of social
participation and identification would indeed be something about which to worry; and it
-10-
obviously would make good and important sense to characterize it as a basic form of
social alienation. As for Hegel, moreover, such alienation would have the significance
of self-alienation as well, for it would mean that an important part of what goes into the
development and preservation of human selfhood would be lacking.
It may be observed, in this connection, that one does not have to be a metaphysical
essentialist to talk in this way. There is a good deal of conceptual space between
essentialism, on the one hand, and the idea that things have no natures whatsoever apart
from the contingencies of the moment and the vagaries of interpretation. Human
selfhood, like human nature more generally, may be no eternal verity or immutable
blueprint. However, even if it has come to be the sort of thing it is in the course of a
long, complex, and contingency-driven history, and admits of vastly differing
realizations, it quite conceivably may now have general features that can be identified
and that develop in different ways depending in part upon what transpires in the lives of
those involved. The plasticity of human nature has its limits, in the short run even if not
sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity), and we encounter one of them, I
surmise, in the inseparability of important elements of the kind of selfrealization that is
a central feature of our humanity asit emerges from some significant measure of social
participation and identification.
In any event, it is undeniable that whatever sorts of selves human beings come to have
are relationally constituted affairs and so inevitably will turn out differently depending
on the kinds of relations present in the particular context of which they are constituted.
Because they are dynamic affairs rather than fixed permanently like sculptured forms,
moreover, they depend for their shape on the kinds and patterns of relations within
which they are engendered and so are affected if those relations are significantly
reconfigured. As in the case of interpersonal relations, forms of social and cultural life
in which one comes to be involved do make a considerable difference in the way in
which one turns out. The difference it makes if significant involvements of this sort are
or are not a part of one's life, however, is of a whole different kind and is vast.
-11-
to normative and evaluative judgments have been formed under the influence of myths
of divine commandments and categorical imperatives. We may need to learn to think in
that way and make more of such distinctions, however, if we are to have anything at all
to go on after all such myths have died and the habits of thought they have engendered
have faded.
However, there is a second kind of role that may be envisioned for the notion of social
alienation under the conditions of postmodernity. It is at once more modest and less
problematical, and so may have a greater appeal to our colleagues of the future in the
postmodern world's successors to today's social sciences. In a manner of speaking, it
would involve customizing the notion, along with the idea of the self, so that what
would count as social alienation would be tailored to fit the form of the social-
relationally configured self of each individual. This would parallel the current and
familiar double meaning of the notion of interpersonal estrangement, a term that can be
used either to convey that a person is entirely bereft of interpersonal relationships or to
characterize breakdowns of specific relationships the person has had. In the latter
context, the notion comes into play only if a significant relationship of some sort has
previously developed; and there is no presumption that a particular person will or
should develop such relationships with everyone else. The others in one's world
represent possibilities for the establishment of such relationships, but only a few such
possibilities actually are, or can be, realized. When, and as, they are, however, a part of
the person's identity takes shape, for one's self is partially constituted in this dimension
as well as in the dimensions of other kinds of involvements. Moreover, it is such
involvements that establish the context in which it becomes meaningful in particular
cases to speak of estrangement.
Mutatis mutandis, the same thing can readily be done with the notion of social
alienation on the level of particular possibilities of participation in forms of social and
cultural life. One might think of these forms of life as a vast array of games of different
sorts that are being played alongside each other but relatively independently of each
other, and differing in many respects. There is not just one game in town that everyone
is expected to play, in which everyone may meaningfully be characterized either as a
participant or as a refusenik, and with which it makes sense to characterize everyone
either as identifying or as at odds. Everyone may be deemed to be better off playing
some such games rather than none, but there is no prior presumption with respect to
anyone or any game in particular. The games one starts out playing may be influenced
by those others around whom one happens to favor; but there is no presumption that
one will or should follow suit, and there is ample exposure to alternatives to render their
selection real possibilities.
In this model, no assumptions need be made about autonomy or equality of access and
no choice need be made between what were earlier called the miniaturized Hegelian
and diluted Nietzschean pictures of identity determination. All that is required is the
idea that one may meaningfully be described in terms of social alienation only in
relation to those games, or sociocultural
-12-
formations, with which one comes to identify strongly enough to have a relatively
enduring impact on the configuration of one's self--and only as long as the impact lasts.
This last qualification is important; for as in the case of interpersonal estrangement, it
would make little sense to regard someone as alienated in relation to something that
once mattered enough to the person to leave its mark if the subsequent passage of time
and events has obliterated all but an occasional memory trace of it. Specific contexts in
which it becomes meaningful to speak of such alienation must be established piecemeal
in individual lives, like castles in the sand; and like castles in the sand they may wash
away, even though the lives of those whose applications bring them into existence may
go on with redirected attentions.
The central idea this conception of social alienation seeks to capture (or preserve) is
that one can only be said appropriately and significantly to be alienated from something
to which one has been and remains meaningfully related, but from which one at the
same time has come to be separated. Without a persisting link of some sort, the absence
of participation and identification does not suffice. On the scenario of postmodernity,
that link cannot be supposed to be provided by anything other than what happens to
come to matter to human beings in the course of their lives. The fact that such mattering
is not utterly ephemeral, however, opens up the possibility of phenomena of the
complexity of interpersonal and social alienation, at least in their customized versions.
It is not easy to imagine any way of subjecting them to quantification, statistical
analysis, and nomological explanation. It is easy to imagine, however, that long after
classical social alienation has done its work of ridding the world of the virus of
chauvinist fanaticism and has joined classical religious alienation in historical
retirement, human beings will continue to have their trials and tribulations in their
diverse sociocultural lives as well as in their other involvements, and social
participation and alienation will remain among the salient features of the human scene.
-13-
It thus would be easy and reasonable enough simply to conclude by echoing the
pronouncement of Nietzsche's Zarathustra: "'This is my way; where is yours?'--thus I
answered those who asked me 'the way.' For the way--that does not exist" ( 1954, pt. 3,
sec. 11:2). But I believe that something more can, and should, be said by way of
providing a context within which this construal of social participation and alienation
can be situated and positioned for subsequent consideration and elaboration.
Where do we go from here? How can human life be meaningfully led beyond the death
of God, the advent of nihilism, the end of History, the collapse of ideology, and
disillusionment with respect to the basic articles of religious and Enlightenment faiths
alike? What can be and should be salvaged from previous ways of thinking that might
be of help in this connection, as humanity struggles to come of age? Can significant
sense be made of anything along the lines of Geist naturalized, rationality humanized,
the Obermensch democratized, revolution domesticated, the irrational civilized,
nihilism and fanaticism both overcome, optimism and pessimism alike transcended, and
the good life come true--as something attainable and worth working and fighting for in
the face of the dark forces that will always threaten? Can there be a recovery or
discovery of a vision of humanity, civilization, and culture; of what it means for them to
flourish, and of why or how it matters that they do, despite the absence of any
transcendent justification?
This bootstrapping operation need not start from scratch. Thus, for example, it seems to
me that Hegel was not wrong to celebrate a form of society in which a complex of
institutions and educational strategies would serve to foster, facilitate, and promote
general human welfare, personality, citizenship, and knowledge. Marx was not wrong to
stress the development of economic resources, the elimination of exploitative practices,
the cultivation of human community and aesthetic sensibility, and the full development
and selfexpressive employment of the human powers of each and all. Nor was
Nietzsche wrong to stress the attainment of excellence and the value-engendering
power of creativity, the differences as well as the similarities between human beings,
and the idea of a possible enhancement of human life. For that matter, Immanuel Kant
was not wrong to stress the attainability of a measure of rationality and autonomy in
human thought and conduct, and the dignity associated therewith. These visions do not
stand and fall with the attempts made by their advocates to provide them with firm
theoretical foundations or compelling justifications. They each illuminate human
possibility in ways that deserve and reward serious consideration. Even if they cannot
be said unequivocally to be true, moreover, it is arguable that we have it in us to make
them come true.
One realizable model of human excellence is that of a person who has some particular
endowment and does whatever it takes to develop and employ that ability to the fullest,
perhaps attaining superiority to others devoting themselves to the same pursuit, or at
least contributing to the flourishing and development of that form of endeavor. This
model admits of indefinitely many and diverse realizations, which issue forth in a
profusion of forms of activity
-14-
Another such model is that of one who opts for some combination of forms of activity,
for each of which one has some aptitude, attempting to achieve a rich mix rather than
one particular excellence. This would represent a different, but equally significant, sort
of achievement, which is capable of yielding a different, but comparable, sort of
satisfaction; and it, too, could be realized in indefinitely many ways.
Alternatively, a model of human worth could be developed around the idea of finding
the role or roles in one's community or society that one can best and most congenially
play, and of doing this to the best of one's ability, deriving satisfaction and a sense of
worth by virtue of the contributions one makes. A particular person might either focus
on one role or combine a variety of roles in quite different and unrelated contexts; and
here, too, the possibilities may be many (although they would be limited to the
available options).
This list of (somewhat Nietzschean, Marxian, and Hegelian) models could easily be
extended to include others, reflecting other visions of kinds of human life worth living
and striving for. None of them is the right one; but all of them are available--and all of
them represent ways in which human life can come to be endowed with value and
meaning beyond that of the mere existence and perpetuation of the species. All are
value-engendering and meaning-bestowing; and all are not only compatible with but
conducive to the flourishing and enhancement of human life.
Far from ruling them all out, postmodernity rules them all in--or rather, opens the door
to them all, rendering them all accessible, with no apologies necessary. All are ways of
making something of human life, transfiguring its commonplace features in ways that
may in the long run be more promising in their capacity to sustain us than leaps of
faith borrowing their sustaining power from dreams of transcendence. Nothing eternal
is at stake, either to be won or lost. In the larger scheme of things, no doubt, none of
this makes the slightest difference, but on the scale of humanity it makes all the
difference. And it is in this context, with different attainable models of the human
good appealing to us, that different practical solutions to questions of social
participation and alienation will have to be conceptualized and pursued as humanity
learns to accustom itself to postmodernity. 5
Notes
Author's note: This essay derives from the new Introduction to the reissue of Richard
Schacht, Alienation, a publication of the University of Illinois Press ( 1996), and
appears here with the permission of the University of Illinois Press.
-15-
Table 2
3. I recall this vividly from his lectures at Harvard in the early 1960s.
5. For further discussion of many of the issues raised here, see Schacht ( 1994).
-16-
2
The Strange Career of Alienation:
How a Concept Is Transformed
without Permission of Its Founders
Irving Louis Horowitz
The purpose of this brief exercise is not so much to review the history of alienation--a
turgid undertaking done many times, for better or worse--but to indicate how a concept
as broad ranging as this can survive and live another day, perhaps even another century,
even when the social and intellectual soil which nourished it in origin collapses.
I am suggesting that alienation, which began its rise to fame within the Hegel-Marx
tradition of the contrite separation of fact from conscience, labor from commodity, the
individual from the system, and a host of polarities adding up to a strongly negative
view of industrial-capitalist society, is dramatically transformed into an operational
guidebook for psychology and economy within these self-same capitalist societies.
Moreover, this change in usage takes place without the formal approbation of its
founders.
It is commonly known and appreciated that the concept of alienation owes its currency,
if not its very existence, to the Hegelian tradition in philosophy and the Marxian
tradition in economy. But with the virtual collapse of the communist systems--in
Europe at least--that gave succor and weight to its tradition, it becomes interesting to
explore how key ideas may have outcomes that profoundly differ from their earlier
embodiment in theoretical systems and ideologies.
-17-
In that sense, alienation is now part of the tradition in social science rather than social
protest. This change came about with a broadening realization that terms like being
alienated are no more and no less value-laden than being integrated Sociologists
rightfully began asking the question: alienated from what, and integrated into what? In
this way, alienation became enveloped with notions of the human condition--a
permanent part of the social makeup of each individual personality. Since one could just
as readily speak of social or personal integration in the same way, the concept itself
becomes objectified. That is to say, it lost its special flavor as a footnote to an ideology
of revolution or an element in working class immizeration, and became, curiously, more
useful as a way in which social scientists could talk about the relation of individuals to
groups: the voter in relation to the party; the technician in relation to the product; or the
child in relation to the parent. That did not imply an absence of concern with the status
of workers and the workplace, but just an appreciation that such concerns are part of a
larger dynamic that impacts the overall processes of development and industrialization.
In short, alienation and integration both have become relational concepts. They do not
so much designate states of being as they do processes of interaction. Again, we can see
how a concept that starts out as part of a revolutionary vernacular is not simply made
null and void, but rather finds a new intellectual home in social contexts far removed
from those who think of alienation in particular as a mobilizing device or a deepened
sense of victimization. This is a perfectly reasonable way to think of the natural history
of a concept.
Beyond operational shifts over time are valuational changes, namely, the use of
alienation as a positive rather than negative force. Rather than view alienation as
framed by "estrangement" from a human being's essential nature as a result of a cruel
set of industrial-capitalist demands, alienation becomes an inalienable right, a source of
creative energy for some and an expression of personal eccentricity for others. As in the
work of Czeslaw Milosz, Norbert Elias, George Orwell, or other anti-utopians,
alienation becomes an ethical framework for allowing individuals to move counter to
the crowd, or counter to integration in the social environment as such. Alienation
becomes a critical theme in the civil libertarian belief that privacy is no less an
inalienable right than sociability. Within the social sciences, no one deserves more
credit for this new consciousness of alienation than Lewis S. Feuer ( 1995). By his
rigorous
-18-
opposition to dogmatism in social theory, he pointed the way to save the kernel of
alienation theory from its rotten exterior.
It could be argued that late twentieth-century thought simply, or not so simply, reverses
such meanings: the right not to partake of a social movement--neither to support nor
oppose, but simply not to participate--becomes the touchstone of alienation. In that
sense, the concept becomes a positive legal force, a barrier to incursion by totalitarian
parties or states in the self-defined well-being of the person. This theme, struck by
Dostoevsky and Kafka in literature, only now, finally, becomes part of the common
inheritance of alienation as a social theory within free societies.
In this fashion, and over the course of the twentieth century--with a huge boost
provided by the collapse of Marxism as a worldview and communism as a world
system--social science has incorporated the notion of alienation into its intellectual
stock-in-trade. This has larger ramifications and indicates that the relationship between
systems and ideas is far from unilinear or mechanical. It also indicates the value in not
discarding the baby with the bathwater; that is to say, a concept may have an
unanticipated use, no less than an unanticipated consequence, for its users.
Just as systems may outlive their originating ideas--for example, the neoDarwinian idea
that capitalism can only exist in a world where the struggle for survival between people
is accepted--so, too, ideas may outlive originating systems, as with the Marxian idea
that alienation is some horrific state of mind rooted in the bowels of capitalism and to
be overcome in the establishment of communism. This operational approach to
alienation, which comes perilously close to supporting the very system it was intended
to subvert, is hardly the expected consequence of the idea of alienation by its founding
fathers and mothers. The strange history of alienation as a concept goes to show that
serendipity can, at times, triumph even over the entrenched dogmas of an age. It might
also be the case that this is but a rare example in which chiliastic fervor is transformed
into pragmatic utility. In either event, the career of alienation offers an optimistic hope
for the future of social research as such.
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3
The Fetishization of Alienation:
Unpacking a Problem of Science,
Knowledge, and Reified Practices in
the Workplace
David Schweitzer
This chapter provides a critical investigation into the discourse and practice of science
associated with the empiricoanalytic reconstruction of Marx's concept of alienation in
contemporary sociology. The concept has undergone a fundamental transformation with
the scientific turn in its contemporary career. It has been severed from its intellectual
roots in normative theory, wrenched from its evaluative context of discourse, and
transformed into a variety of seemingly objective analytic categories and empirical
measures. The normative qualities and radical critical powers originally imbued in the
concept have been diluted, bracketed, or completely eliminated from the analysis. This
is associated with a strategic operationalization effort at rendering the concept amenable
to the methods of science. 1 The epistemic implications and practical consequences are
far-reaching. Despite claims to scientific objectivity and value-neutrality, this purging
operation is seen in light of the present investigation as a normative procedure in its
own right, with its own surrogate ethic and immanent practical thrust. The humanistic
grounds and visionary ethical directives for dealienation and social practice are
consequently obscured or subverted in the process.
The epistemic stance of science is examined with reference to reifying tendencies that
are seen to occur in the very process of doing empiricoanalytic work of this kind--from
the production of reified sociological knowledge (including the creation of reified
categories and accounts pertaining to work and alienation) to the ways in which it is
ultimately applied and received in the lay social world. My aim is to uncover some of
the ways in which reified sociological knowledge about work and alienation is
produced within the scientific world of empiricoanalytic sociology and then applied
toward the creation of reified managerial practices in the workplace.
-21-
The investigation points to some of the practical ways in which reified knowledge
about work and alienation lends itself to the legitimization of promanagement policies
in the workplace. The creation of reified practices in the workplace is associated with
the application of new human relations strategies and job redesign programs. While
these measures imply a humane commitment to reducing alienation and improving the
human quality of working life, it is argued that they are, in effect, applied toward the
rationalized control of labor. The focus here is on workplace strategies that contribute to
a manipulative shaping of adaptive behavioral responses among workers to their
existing conditions of work--strategies that are necessarily compatible, in the first
instance, not with the needs and interests of labor but with those of management and
capital. One of the suggestions that emerges from this investigation is that
contemporary practitioners who lay claim to Marx's concept of alienation as well
should not lose sight of its original humanistic meaning and evaluative frame of moral-
practical discourse.
Several alternatives to the new human relations strategies are considered, based on
leads provided by the early Yugoslav experiments with workers' control in self-
managing collectives and the recent Israeli experience with kibbutz communities and
industries. They involve theory-guided strategies to practically attack the problem of
alienation and enhance the human quality of working life according to the integrated
standpoint of all participants in the working community. These efforts are guided by a
dialectical merger of theory and practice and by humanistic principles reflected in
Marx's normative theory of alienation and dealienation. The chapter concludes with an
assessment of minimum requirements for a praxis-centred sociology that attempts to
overcome many of the reifying tendencies associated with the empiricoanalytic
approach to theory, research, and practice.
-22-
grounded instrument for the diagnosis and critique of society. It is a radical weapon of
attack, which is aimed at the dominant values and repressive institutional arrangements
of society. The concept is infused with normative judgmental qualities, radical critical
powers, and moral prescriptions for a practical, humanistic solution. Alienation is
consequently construed by Marx as a normative concept with explicit ethical directives
for dealienation and practical action. But in the course of its secular evolution in
contemporary sociology the concept has undergone a fundamental change. It has been
transformed in intrinsically subversive ways that depart radically from its original
meaning and humanistic intent.
-23-
-24-
name of science. The epistemic stance of science appears as a reified one, or what
Friedrichs referred to as an "anti-metaphysical metaphysic." The calculus of efficiency
materializes as a "surrogate ethic for a science that would draw normative guidelines
from within its own frame of reference" ( 1970, p. 225).
Reifying tendencies in the process of doing scientific work of this sort are manifested in
the objectification, depersonalization, and ultimate reduction of the metaphysically
humane and subjective image of the individual to a thing, an object, or an
operationalized intervening variable. As a transformed scientific object, the human
individual is "denuded of any but external significance," to be used by the scientific
community to satisfy its own interests, namely, "to predict the world of experience with
increasing efficiency" ( Friedrichs, 1970, pp. 235-236). Friedrichs concludes:
Fuchs ( 1986, p. 127) and others (e.g., Harding, 1991) who have focused in greater
detail on the discursive constitution of science have shown how objectivity is
constructed narratively and how "professional knowledge producers" seal their
ownership of that knowledge through the narrative voice of the scientific community.
The narrative voice becomes an integral part of the analyst's epistemic rationale and
commitment to the methods of science. It has methodological implications when it is
used to establish intellectual autonomy and influence credibility with readers ( Cohen
and Rogers, 1994). The epistemic stance of science that is highlighted here is directly
linked to the kind of reified sociological work and consciousness that tends to occur
within some circles of the scientific sociological community. My aim in the section that
follows is to explicate the reifying tendencies associated specifically with the
empiricoanalytic reconstruction of Marx's anthropology and concept of alienation.
-25-
or for a dialectically conceived vision of the direction for ameliorative change and
human growth. The radical, praxis-oriented character of a possible humanistic solution
is thus severed at its very roots.
Horton associates this with reified or fetishized sociological work and consciousness. It
is characterized largely by what it excludes, namely, "any theory and practice which
deals critically with the totality of man and society" ( 1971, p. 184). Empiricoanalytic
sociology of this sort is seen as a burial ground for radical ideas. "In its cemeteries the
critical and human elements of the language of protest have been laid to rest, while their
reactionary ghosts live in the fetishes of survey research" ( 1970, p. 185). For Horton, it
is only from the holistic structural view of the individual that sociology and society can
be sufficiently subjected to radical criticism and change.
The next step in the fetishization process "requires turning alienation, a protest against
the thing-like character of labor, into a thing-like possession of the individual mind"
( Horton, 1970, p. 185). The normative-evaluative dimension of alienation is separated
from its cognitive dimension. Is is then deleted from the scientific research process or
neutralized and reduced to the reported emotions and attitudes of individual
respondents. Alienation, as a total condition of dehumanization, is fragmented,
neutralized, and reduced to psychological characteristics pertaining to the individual's
private world. For Horton, this "leads at best to an abstract theory of individual
psychological discontent and its control" ( 1970, p. 186). This suggests, among other
things, that we would be better off if the term alienation were eliminated from the
scientific vocabulary and replaced with more accurate ones.
Efforts of this sort at empiricoanalytic operationalization are guided largely by the quest
for scientific objectivity and a certain pretence to the ideology and practice of value-
free sociology. These are among the conditions of reified scientific work and
consciousness that have facilitated the ironic transformation of alienation from a radical
weapon of attack on alienated labor and commodity fetishism to a fetishistic,
commodity-like concept in its own right. The point that Horton stressed is that
"alienation as a commodity-like concept is merely a way of reifying the world, not a
way of changing or understanding it through practice in the world" ( 1970, p. 186). As a
commodity-like concept, alienation has become a highly marketable item with a
flourishing career. Theorists and empiricists alike have competed to appropriate it, as a
fashionable label and an intellectual commodity in the academic marketplace. The
preoccupation with these concerns within empiricoanalytic sociology has contributed
not only to the fetishization of
-26-
alienation; it has also helped to divert attention away from the classic concern for a
radical, humanistic solution. The future career of the transmogrified concept is
nevertheless guaranteed because it produces work and money for the intellectuals while
excluding any possibility for a critical sociology that takes into account the totality of
the human individual, society, and their historical development.
It should be noted that empiricoanalytic sociology does not have a monopoly on the
creation and utilization of reified categories and accounts. A certain reifying process is
generally at play in any effort at abstracting the concrete world through words,
categories, concepts, models, or theoretical statements. However, there is an inherent
tendency in the process of abstraction to treat categories and concepts as objects in their
own right rather than referent tools for the description and analysis of concrete social
relations. Reification of this type involves the attribution of thing-like properties to
categories and concepts that they do not, in fact, have. As reified products of
intellectual labor, they not only take on the character of things; they also acquire a
relatively autonomous, hypostatizing, phantom-like objectivity in ways which often
distort or conceal, rather than illuminate, the human and hermeneutic character of social
relations.
Marx also used reified categories (e.g., class) and concepts (e.g., the state) in order to
raise relevant questions. But as Heller ( 1990) pointed out, categories and concepts like
"rational action" or "praxis" are, by definition, nonreified in that the human subject is
treated as the author of his or her action. The main point here is that a theoretical and
empirical sociology that seeks critical knowledge devoted to an emancipatory interest
in uncovering the conditions of constraint and domination in society must operate with
both reified and nonreified (or dereified) categories and concepts. A critical science of
this sort must proceed under the guidance of a philosophical paradigm (or metatheory)
thatwhich allows for the dereification of its categories and concepts. An ongoing
process of critical selfreflection and practical discourse is required on the part of the
analyst engaged in theoretical and empirical work. This is an essential requirement for a
science that proceeds on behalf of emancipatory (as distinct from merely technical)
interests in society in the pursuit of applied critical knowledge.
-27-
material relations between persons and social relations between things" ( Marx [ 1867]
1959, pp. 72-72; see also [ 1857-8] 1973, p. 157; [ 1894] 1967:380-382). 2
Reified thinking by social scientists about themselves, their work, and their society is
often projected in subtle ways that contribute to reifying practices in the lay world. It
lends itself, both deliberately and unintentionally, to apologetic rationalizations and
legitimistic remedial prescriptions that serve dominant interests in society. Reified
thinking emerges as a form of alienated thinking that blurs or masks the extent to which
people operating in both the scientific and social worlds are dependent on hypostatized
social forces of their own making. It consequently disguises and undermines the
dialectical relationship between theory and practice.
Taylor ( 1911) influential scientific management policies, which were initiated in the
last decades of the nineteenth century, and Mayo ( 1933) human relations school
provide two prime examples in the early history of industrial relations research which
has proceeded along these lines. The object of these studies was to abolish, not the
objective realities of alienated work and degraded working conditions, but the worker's
awareness of those realities. Taylor's emphasis was on achieving higher productivity,
profitability, and control over the workplace. Mayo and his followers were concerned
more with integrating the worker into the industrial enterprise without altering the basic
penetration of capitalist relations into the workplace. Both shared an explicit interest in
controlling or manipulating the worker on behalf of management. The adherents of
Taylorism emphasized labor rationalization strategies and changes in the top
management of industrial enterprises in order to facilitate the organization and control
of work and production. 3 Mayo's followers emphasized engineered changes in the
production process involving teamwork and cooperation within the
-28-
The literature abounds with other studies that recognize and describe degraded working
conditions in considerable detail, but the focus in many ultimately shifts to an analysis
of adaptive coping practices and informal ways in which workers actually adjust
themselves to their alienated or degraded working conditions. We seldom gain any real
insight into the larger structural character of exploitative relations between workers and
management. As Braverman sees it, "This leaves to sociology the function which it
shares with personnel administration, of assaying not the nature of work but the degree
of adjustment of the worker" ( 1974, p. 29). These studies consequently lend
themselves, often deliberately and by commission, to policies and recommendations
that facilitate adaptive solutions on behalf of management interests and corporate
objectives. 4
The more sophisticated reincarnations of the human relations movement today involve
a variety of advanced job redesign strategies, including the reportedly more humane
quality of working life and sociotechnics programs, job enlargement measures, and
codetermination policies ( Kaufman, 1993, Giordano, 1992). Job redesign strategies of
this sort are created and implemented, not from the standpoint of the worker, but from
that of management. As Rinehart ( 1987, p. 192; see also 1986) put it, job-redesign
strategies and quality of working-life programs are undertaken by management for its
own purposes. These strategies are generally introduced by corporations in ways that
imply a humane commitment to improving the quality of working life. But they are
pursued only to the extent to which they are compatible with management interests and
corporate goals (e.g., cutting costs, maximizing profits, improving efficiency, and
raising productivity). Job-redesign strategies are also used to appropriate workers'
knowledge, dilute shop-floor militancy, insulate management from the prospect of
workplace unionization, weaken the existing power of the labor unions in the
workplace, and co-opt resistant workers into willing collaborators with management
and its policies (cf. Berberoglu, 1993; Giordano, 1992; Story, 1991; Panitch and Swartz,
1988; Wells 1987).
The new managerial style encourages greater employee participation and more personal
and intimate labor-management relations through a variety of formal company
programs, such as quality control circles, participatory management schemes, and
quality of working-life projects. One of the aims is to nurture attitudes and feelings
among workers that contribute to the smooth functioning of the workplace without
actually providing them with any real control over managerial decisions. As Howard
( 1985) study of the "brave new workplace" shows, the purpose of the new corporate
ideology is to imbue work with meaning and to instill in workers a "feeling" of control
while actually obfuscating manipulative managerial practices.
-29-
enlarging the variety of work tasks, or advancing integrative sociotechnical systems and
quality circles in industrial enterprises are not dealienation strategies, as they are not
implemented by management for the genuine humanization of working life. As
Rinehart correctly points out, they are used primarily to intensify labor, reduce labor
costs, and meet production exigencies that a highly specialized division of labor cannot
handle economically. The human relations approach--from its auspicious initiation by
Mayo and his associates to its more sophisticated contemporary practices--has operated
as an arm of management in solving its problems. There is in this evolving science of
human relations "an irreducible element of anti-labor bias and no remedy for alienated
labor" ( Rinehart, 1987, p. 193). The science reflected here is indeed a science for
managers.
Despite protests to the contrary among the proponents of this applied research
enterprise, their top-down remedial prescriptions are formulated in ways that essentially
favor the technical interests of management and capital over the emancipatory interests
of human labor. Applied scientific knowledge is generated and passed on in ways that
lead to the reduction, not of alienated labor, but of workers' dissatisfaction with their
work. The psychologized emphasis on workers' feelings, attitudes, and reactions to
work facilitate adaptive solutions that are necessarily consistent with management
policies and corporate objectives. It should not be surprising that science and
management appear as compatible bedfellows. The science of an intellectual elite lends
itself to the needs and interests of the corporate-managerial elite. An ideological pro-
management disposition is inherent in the very nature of a science that draws its
guidelines for social research from within its own frame of reference. The scientific
commitment to value-neutrality and predictive efficiency takes priority over humanistic
commitments and guidelines for genuinely improving the quality of working life.
Labor's emancipatory interests in the humanization of work are largely supplanted by
management's technical interests in the rationalized control over it.
-30-
Practical dealienation strategies that were developed in the early Yugoslav collectives
revolved around the issue of workers' control over the process of production and the
formation of policy. One of the aims was to ensure that all participants were given more
responsibility in decisions concerning a wide range of work-related matters, such as
hirings, firings, promotions, salaries, safety measures, and working conditions. These
efforts at democratizing the decisionmaking process were channeled through elected
workers' councils, the highest body of authority and the central vehicle for
implementing direct workers' democracy. Managers were directly subordinate and
accountable to the council. They were normally bound by the council's decisions and
tended to earn the same income as workers. Organized efforts were also aimed at
enhancing communal participation, social solidarity, and consensus-building programs
regarding the collective's basic needs, goals, and policies ( Horvat, Markovi, and
Supek, 1975; Markovi, 1981, 1989).
A note of caution is in order regarding some of the problems and limitations associated
with these experiments in light of the current crisis in the former Yugoslavia and the
changing conditions in Israeli society. Self-managing collectives must regularly take
into account the ultimate impact of external societal conditions on their internal
operation. Perhaps the most serious obstacle in the Yugoslav case came from outside
political interference and state penetration into the internal affairs of the collectives.
Despite egalitarian participation in the management of the collectives, they were
ultimately faced
-31-
The specific problems confronted by the collectives included the subversive infiltration
of technocratic and politicobureaucratic interests associated with the authoritarian
apparatus of state power. Hegemonic state control extended to most spheres of human
activity under the state-sponsored ideology of economic rationality. The very notion of
workers' self-management--the Yugoslav trademark for four decades--emerged as the
official top-down ideology of the party-state. As Golubovi put it, "This so-called self-
governing socialism, proclaimed in the 1950s by the Yugoslav leadership, became little
more than a facade." It served "to mask the persistent and determined authoritarian one-
partyrule" and "the continued subversion by the state of both the functions and the
rights of self-management bodies" ( 1992, p. 30). The ideology of workers'
selfmanagement and self-governing socialism functioned as a tool for the legitimization
of monopoly political power in the post-Tito era.
In the Israeli case, the problem of outside interference lies more in the cultural sphere,
where kibbutz autonomy and identity are threatened by the penetration of a hegemonic
capitalist culture and subversive system of external values ( Rosner and Mittelberg,
1989). Internal kibbutz problems are linked to basic external changes in the larger
economic, occupational, and social structures of Israeli society. According to Rosner
and Mittelberg, this has had a subversive impact on the transition from small,
homogeneous communities of young people to larger, multigenerational communities
with more marked age differences and a greater variation in cultural backgrounds.
These ensuing internal changes have had a weakening impact on the original value
consensus and social cohesion of the communities. The rising standard of living and
changing consumption patterns are among other factors contributing to an increasing
internal complexity in kibbutz communities. More recently, excessively high inflation
rates and costly national security policies generated by the Israeli state have had a
profound impact on the financial survival of most kibbutzim.
Recent studies of worker participation in other countries point to other strategies for
democratizing the workplace. 5 For example, Sandberg et al. ( 1992)
-32-
highlighted the political and organizational impact that unions can have on worker
participation and the decentralization of workplace authority structures in Sweden. This
is associated with the enactment of national laws that have been instrumental in
legitimizing increased union and worker participation in managerial decisionmaking.
Others point to opportunities provided by the new technologies and computerized
production strategies. However, Giordano concludes in her study of a California aircraft
manufacturer that the new industrial relations measures (e.g. quality circles and
computerized machining) are ultimately "part of the historical continuation to control
production, enlist labor cooperation, and reduce uncertainty in the marketplace" ( 1992,
p. 210).
A distinguishing feature of the early Yugoslav and Israeli experiments with workplace
democracy should be highlighted in conclusion. These experiments are grounded in a
praxis-centeredmerger of normative theory, humanistic philosophy, and applied
empirical research. The feasibility of empiricoanalytic survey procedures and job-
redesign strategies is considered within the normativeevaluative frame of these
collective experiments. A certain political-practical engagement in the applied research
process is required on the part of the analyst in the continuing search for humanistic
solutions to new and changing forms of alienation in the workplace. An important
aspect of the Israeli kibbutz experience, which distinguishes it from its Yugoslav
counterpart, lies in its broadly integrative and comprehensive character. While the
Yugoslav experience is restricted to a specific domain of human activity and social life
(i.e., that of work and organizations), the kibbutz experience involves a broader, far-
reaching, holistic integration of almost all aspects of social activity. This includes an
organized effort at overcoming alienating divisions between mental and manual labor,
between the workplace and the home, between urban and rural life, and between work
and leisure. 6
Despite the numerous and often insurmountable problems that confront the Yugoslav
and Israeli experiments (see also, Flaherty, 1992; Stanojevi, 1990), significant
practical advances have been made. They provide important leads for a dialectical
synthesis of theory and practice. A fundamental point of contrast to reifying
promanagement practices associated with many of the new industrial relations
strategies lies in the radical reorganization of work and a sustained effort at humanizing
working life on behalf of all participants in the labor process.
Concluding Remarks
This inquiry into the reifying process of applied empiricoanalytic work in contemporary
sociology underscores the call for a revitalization of sociology's classic moral-practical
tradition. Marx's concept of alienated labor was singled out for special attention with an
eye to "unpacking" the empiricoanalytic process associated with the production and
application of reified sociological knowledge about work and alienation. The reifying
process begins with a strategic effort at transforming the classic concept into a
fragmented set of objectified analytic categories and empirical measures that are
amenable to the methods of attitudinal
-33-
survey research. The normative thrust and practical humanistic intent of the original
concept are seriously undermined by this scientific turn in its contemporary career. The
guidelines for reified sociological work of this kind stem from within the scientific
sociological community--a community of professional knowledge producers with a
narrative voice and a self-sustaining discourse that stresses the ethic of value-neutrality,
scientific objectivity, and predictive efficiency.
The consequences are far-reaching when reified scientific categories and accounts are
projected from the scientific world onto the practical world of work. Reified scientific
knowledge about work and alienation in the workplace lends itself to a manipulative
shaping of adaptive responses among workers to their existing, and often degrading,
conditions of work. Objectified, "dedialecticized" knowledge of this kind is applied, in
the first instance, not toward the reduction of alienation or the genuine humanization of
working life, but toward regulatory practices in the workplace. The dominant technical
interests of capital (e.g., improving efficiency, raising productivity, cutting costs, and
maximizing profits) are systematically favored over the emancipatory interests of
human labor.
-34-
or her own making (e.g., reified scientific categories, accounts, and practices).
The analyst is cast in dialectical opposition to powerful reifying tendencies associated
with the creation and application of scientific knowledge. Critical science, as such,
serves as a "dialecticizing" check against reifying tendencies and practices within and
between the scientific and lay worlds.
Giddens's notion of the "double hermeneutic" lends further insight into the self-
reflective process in sociological work that cross-cuts the two worlds. A double process
of translation or interpretation on the part of the analyst is required in the interplay
between social science (e.g., the metalanguages and categories invented by social
scientists) and those whose activities compose its subject matter (e.g. the meaningful
social world as constituted by lay actors). The interpretative categories and sociological
descriptions created by the analyst are aimed, not only at "mediating the frames of
meaning within which actors orient their conduct"; they also require "an effort of
translation in and out of the frames of meaning" in the practice of sociology ( 1984, p.
284).
Despite inherent epistemic differences, this conception of a critical social science is not
always necessarily or entirely incompatible with empiricoanalytic strategies and
techniques. For example, survey research methods can be applied toward an empirical
investigation into Marx's theory and concept of alienated labor while at the same time
meeting some of the fundamental requirements for a critical social science (cf.
Bonacich, 1991; Whitehorn, 1989; Greenberg, 1986; Archibald, 1976). Marx ([ 1880]
1956) attempted this to some extent when he focused on the objective conditions of
work, rather than the feelings or behavior of the workers he polled in his own empirical
study. Under certain specified conditions (e.g., kibbutz industries and workers' self-
management collectives), empiricoanalytic procedures and job-redesign programs are
also appropriate to the extent that they adhere to the kind of humanistic premises and
emancipatory value commitments specified by a critical, praxis-centered social science.
This entails a qualified, epistemic subordination of strict positivist logic to the overall
logic of dialectical inquiry and moral-practical discourse. It also involves the
subordination of survey research procedures and job-redesign strategies to a normative
paradigm and an evaluative frame of reference. A balancing emphasis is placed on the
creation and application of knowledge that serves technical, practical, and emancipatory
interests alike. A sustained process of critical selfreflection and moral-practical
engagement throughout the entire research process is required on the part of the analyst,
from the selection and formulation of the research problem to the way in which
scientific knowledge is produced, applied, and ultimately received in the lay social
world.
Notes
Author's note: I wish to thank John Horton ( University of California at Los Angeles),
Menachem Rosner (Institute for Research of the Kibbutz and the Cooperative Idea,
University of Haifa) and Zagorka Golubovi (Centre for Philosophy and Social Theory,
University of Belgrade) for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper,
-35-
3. Lenin ([ 1918] 1965:295) also argued for the study and qualified use of Taylor's
scientific management practices, along with other contemporary capitalist
achievements in science and technology, as part of the programme for building
socialism after the revolution in Russia. Gramsci ([ 1929-35] 1971:279-318), on the
other hand, was considerably more apprehensive. He saw Taylorism as a
hegemonic ideological force and precursor of the most sophisticated mode of
domination under capitalism. With the implementation of scientific management
practices and the increasing diffusion of technobureaucratic norms in the
workplace, he foresaw that workers would be subordinated to machine
specialization and reduced to obedient automatons in the name of efficiency. This
involved strategies for increasing productivity by regulating the entire moral-
psychological being of the worker, with the ultimate aim of creating a routinized
psychic structure for work (see Boggs 1976:47). For Gramsci, the rationalization of
work and production occurs in ways which undermine not only the capacity of
workers for creative and critical thinking but also the de-reifying impulse for
counter-hegemonic resistance to their conditions of domination and exploitation.
4. See Kaufman ( 1993) and Brown ( 1992) for a more comprehensive historical
discussion of industrial relations theory and research pertaining to the present
inquiry.
6. A more extensive comparative analysis of the Yugoslav and Israeli experiments and
the numerous problems associated with these experiments appears in Schweitzer
( 1993).
-36-
4
"But What Can 'One' Do?": Agency
and Alienation in Economic Crises
Peter Archibald
In Karl Marx's relatively early writings, economic crises are perhaps the major
sources of working-class action for reform and revolution. On one hand, crises
deprive workers--to such an extent that they eradicate any interest they might
have had in the political economic system--and provoke them to rebel; on the
other, crises expose, weaken, and delegitimate the bourgeoisie and its state to the
point where workers turn toward socialism and become favorably situated to
bring it about. 1 However, in Marx's late writings, crises by themselves become
considerably less important as direct sources of working class action. Indeed, at
least successful historic agency by the working class may actually lessen during
economic crises, especially because competition among workers for
employment destroys and prevents much classwide organization and struggle. 2
In two earlier article 3 I indicated how these two diametrically opposed views
characterize many claims regarding the Great Depression of the 1930s, and then
attempted to "test" them on Hamilton, Ontario, workers during that period;
Hamilton's local economy, which centered heavily around iron and steel
production and the manufacture of capital and consumer goods and construction
with these as raw materials, having been especially hard hit by the Depression.
Drawing from archival materials and in-depth interviews with 200 retired
workers who lived and worked for pay in Hamilton for at least two years during
the 1930s, I in fact found evidence supporting both the optimistic and
pessimistic scenarios, which suggests that we should pay more attention to
additional circumstances that lead economic deprivation to produce either
rebellion/agency or conformity/alienation. Nevertheless, there was much more
support for pessimism than optimism. Thus, overt conformity and covert,
pragmatic "deviance" predominated over collective rebellion, even among
workers whose
-37-
subsistence needs were deprived. Furthermore, within the decade of the 1930s,
strikes and political protests decreased rather than increased as the economy
worsened and competition among workers increased. Strikes and protests
undertaken in poorer economic times were more likely to be met with repression
and fail, and failure was more likely to lead to fear, withdrawal, and apathy than
further rebellion. The interviews indicated that deprivation was far more likely
to lead to individual or familial self-preservation than collective frustration and
aggression against employers and governors; and to preoccupation with,
"regression" to, and "fixation" on lower-order subsistence needs than with those
having to do with social inequality and injustice.
These conclusions are consistent with the proposition that economic crises
usually shift the balance of power toward ruling classes and make workers feel
more powerless, such that they retreat rather than go on the offensive. The same
is true for my finding that deprived workers who did rebel tended to have
employers who were especially dependent on their individual skill or experience
and/or more social support for rebellion from family members, workmates, or
political comrades. On the other hand, consciously expressed feelings of
powerlessness were not taken up in a concerted way in the earlier articles.
I begin the present analysis by filling the latter lacuna. Having done so, I then
ask whether the responses of Hamilton workers to the "Great Recessions" of the
early 1980s and 1990s have been similar to, or different from, those of earlier
generations to the Great Depression. Finally, I briefly take up some of the
theoretical, practical, and ethical implications of these analyses.
"There was an open shop, no contract. We were getting 95 [cents an hour], and
the [electrical] contractors offered us 85, and everybody was insulted. So we
went on strike, and we ended up getting 75, and no contract." 6 "They wouldn't
say nothing [to managers about poor pay and working conditions at International
Harvester, Westinghouse Electric, or Firestone (tires)]. They wouldn't have been
there five minutes. They weren't complaining. The gate was full of people trying
to get in." 7 "From '31 to '39, it was nip-and-go, all the time. . . . If you had a job,
you didn't complain[.] I had a job [at the Steel Company of Canada, "Stelco"] I
didn't like at all, but I held on to it. . . . In those days, you were more
-38-
acceptable; [you took] whatever you could get. . . . No, there wasn't [any Wk of
unions in the 30s.] But later on [in the 40s], when things got busy, and the
workers got together, it was fixed. The union had no trouble organizing." 8
"Tammie" felt that her employers at Mercury [a maker of hosiery] Mills were
dependent enough upon her experience and skill that she could not only
complain when new employees were taken off the street and given the same pay
as her, but participate in several strikes, and lead one. However, "There was no
union. We were trying to get one in, but they [management] never give us a
chance to form. [I] was a member, [but] I guess I would've been out on my ear if
I had [admitted it to managers.]" As for the strikes, her workmates often did not
trust each other--there was animosity especially among different ethnic groups--
and they "got scared, see; scared of their job. . . . They were scared to death."
The strikes were all lost. For that matter, as the sole provider for her parents and
siblings for a number of years, even fearless Tammie had her limits. She
attended the biggest demonstration of the period and called the police bullies,
but she would not identify herself and instead melted into the crowd. 9
-39-
reforms. 12
However well these paradigms may have applied to the postwar period, they are
now "history." Even large private corporations became highly subject to markets
and competition, attempts by them and their unionized employees to return to
the protectionism of the 1930s were not very successful, and capital's
subsequent strategies--closing or technologically transforming and "downsizing"
plants in the developed West, transfering production to low-wage areas and
subcontractors, and/or extracting various concessions from smaller numbers of
remaining employers--have shifted the balance of power greatly toward capital
and against labor. Furthermore, rather than being in a position to even contain,
let alone rectify, these problems, states have been "held for ransom" by
multinational corporations prepared to move unless they get concessions from
workers and states. Indeed, even social democratic governments have now
disemployed thousands of workers and drastically cut back the very services that
are supposed to have led to decommodification. 13
Workers in Hamilton have been very much subject to these recent recessions and
restructurings. In 1983, those temporarily or permanently laid off in the
Hamilton region represented 21.3% of those in the province of Ontario as a
whole. Most had worked for Stelco and Dofasco, the two largest steel producers.
Between 1983 and 1985 two more of Hamilton's "Big Five" employers,
International Harvester and Firestone (tires), downsized and then shutdown
operations altogether. Employees of the fifth, Westinghouse (electric), were not
subject to such massive layoffs, but there were enough to make them insecure
well. 14
Hamilton has been a strong union city, and the United Steelworkers' Union
(USW) actually struck against Stelco for 125 days in 1981. However, during and
immediately after the strike, a sizable chunk of Stelco's share of the market was
taken over by Dofasco, which was traditionally much more paternalistic in its
labor relations and was non-unionized. Stelco and its workers suffered greatly a
result, but in the process Stelco managed to create its very own, large "reserve
army." Large numbers of workers were placed on "indefinite layoff" but then
recalled on occasion, most importantly, it appears, to threaten remaining, fully
employed workers. Stelco also served layoff notices to workers who had never
been let go before and who were never let go after receiving the notices, either.
With persistent rumors that the plant would be shut down altogether, Stelco then
restructured. Entire steelmaking processes were fully automated, and some were
completely eliminated. Electricians and mechanics were amalgamated into a
single "supertrade" or "multicraft," and machine operators were often ordered to
train these tradespeople to replace themselves. Workers were then pressured to
work overtime so that laid-off workers would not have to be recalled, and their
benefits paid, even during serious labor shortages.
-40-
their income in general. Some argued that they were going to lose their jobs
after all, or that fellow workers would work the overtime anyway.
Some of those in the 1992 layoff sabotaged their machinery before the end of
their last shift. Many of those in the "pool" have leafleted their still-employed
union brothers, begging them not to do overtime. Some of the employed have, in
fact, refused to do overtime, but others would not even take the leaflets, and
instead laughed in the faces of the unemployed and even threatened their lives if
they persisted in criticizing those who accepted overtime. 17
Divisions and resentment are rife among workers, and there is considerably less
interaction with workmates and participation in the union local. "[Tradespeople]
are now taking them [production jobs] over. This has created a lot of anger."
"These guys [overtimers] are incredibly greedy." "Stelco is doing a very good
job at keeping people divided. . . . There's a lot more tension now on the shop
floor. If the guys in our shop just stuck together, we'd get something done, but
they don't. . . . There's been a real big increase in this since the recession."
"[W]orkers don't socialize with other workers anymore." "The guys don't
support the union. One guy said, 'What's the union ever done for me?'" 18
As for feelings of insecurity and powerlessness, "The guys are very, very
scared . . . about losing their jobs." "[I]n a couple of years these jobs might not
be there. . . . You're always on edge[.]" "It is a company market right now."
"There's not as many grievances now because they don't want to draw attention
to themselves. The union doesn't have the bargaining power they used to have.
The company can do whatever it wants. . . . There's not many jobs out there. You
gotta be careful." "With the recession and places closing down, you have to
work more hand-in-hand with the company. It's not worth it to go on strike
anymore." "None of us are too happy about [multicrafting.] Stelco has all the
power. The union is only able to curb how it abuses its power." "Everybody
knows the company is in financial trouble; otherwise, they'd never get away
with what they're doing." "It's really a world recession." "The biggest thing is
holding on to what you have, not asking for more." "[T]he power of the union
changes with
-41-
the economy. We're not in a position to negotiate for wage increases now." 19
These responses have been still more prevalent among nonunionized workers.
Dofasco overextended itself and by 1993 had permanently laid off 5,000
employees. Most of those who kept their jobs appeared relieved and grateful: "I
feel lucky. I was kinda worried when I heard rumors they were going to lay off
as high as 11 year's [seniority]." "It's scary as hell." Some publicly apologized
for the company's decision: "The company has to do it if we [sic] want to stay
profitable. It used to be that Dofasco could sell everything it made. But that's all
changed." "People are questioning things that have happened. But you can't
ignore it's necessary to keep the company in the black." 21 Not all those who kept
their jobs were as selfish, however. Some lamented the obvious passing of "that
family aspect" and expressed a great deal of anger toward the company, but
these people did not want reporters to publicly identify them, and resignation
was by far more common. 22
Like Dofasco, Procter & Gamble has been one of Hamilton's leading dispensers
of corporate welfare as well as soap and various other products.
-42-
been Quincy." 23
As in the 1930s, in the 1980s Ontario's governments began to freeze or roll back
wages, restrict the right to bargain freely and strike, lay off many workers, and
increase the workloads for those who remained. Then, in 1992 a seriously
unemployed, overworked and overtaxed public threw out a smug Liberal
government and replaced it with Ontario's first social democratic government.
Nevertheless, the latter New Democratic Party (NDP) government came under
capitalist fire right from the beginning and almost immediately scrapped its first,
"pump-priming" budget. It then announced that at least $2 million would have to
be trimmed from the provincial budget and that civil servants, from university
professors to municipal garbage collectors, would all have to "give back" jobs or
income, either directly or through such things as unpaid "holidays" over and
above their yearly vacations. As social democrats, the government was at least
giving local governments and employees the "opportunity" to decide where the
cuts should occur. However, if they would not do so "freely" on their own, the
"Social Contract" empowered the government to reopen contracts and impose
layoffs and rollbacks. Furthermore, unions that struck would suffer severe
penalties. 24
Cries of betrayal and rage were rampant. After all, here was a party funded
mainly through contributions from union dues, which were sometimes
compulsory, and elected in good part through the unpaid labour of union
activists. Union locals and, indeed, Canada's largest union, the Candian Union of
Public Employees (CUPE), refused to reopen their contracts and bargain with
either local employers or the province. Many locals threatened to strike or
perform various other acts of civil disobedience. Various local, provincial, and
national unions withdrew their funding for the NDP. A coalition to fight the
cutbacks was formed, not just among different public sector unions, but between
them and the traditionally antiunion faculty associations and community groups.
25
Meanwhile, the NDP government became more defensive, threatening its own
members who opposed the legislation and expelling from caucus those who
went public with their concerns. Many municipal bodies were not, in fact, eager
to reopen contracts and make cuts. Having already had their provincial funding
lowered in previous years, they did not want to further sour labor relations and a
public already grumbling from cuts in service despite tax increases. However,
when upper levels of government "played hardball," the lower levels had to
follow suit. Furthermore, rifts began to appear among the workers. Most public
sector unions gave in, while a few others held out and became marginalized.
Steelworkers continued to support the NDP, while their occasional rivals, the
Canadian Autoworkers, withdrew both funding and moral support. CUPE itself
became so internally divided that it could neither support nor condemn the
govermnent! 26
Eventually, the volcanic imagery in newspaper accounts gave way to one of, at
best, "simmering," and at worst, "burn out." The president of Hamilton's union
of bus drivers and mechanics initially said: "Something is going to blow up here
sooner or later. People aren't going to take it much longer." However, a week
-43-
later the union was still undecided whether to follow Toronto's lead in talking
strike, and eventually it negotiated cutbacks. Similarly, janatorial staff in the
public schools, having come off a long and bitter strike less than a year before,
were also adamant: "We won't touch a comma in our collective agreement or
negotiate a social contract which breaks those agreements through the back
door." That they had been prepared to strike to the bitter end earlier stood them
in better stead than, for example, library workers, who suffered more in the
finale to the Social Contract. However, more highly paid "professional" workers
such as medical doctors and university professors, although seldom unionized,
usually got off with salary freezes rather than cutbacks, and complaints about
such blatant inequities were infrequent and muted. 27
Presently, despite poor odds, workers have cooperated, both on and off the job,
in the "informal" and "underground" as well as the formal economy, and in the
new social movements as well as the traditional labor movement. Currently,
however, Canada's labor and social democratic movements are again seriously
split, mostly by a rift between the unions of the United Steelworkers (USW) and
-44-
the Canadian Autoworkers (CAW). There are some differences of principle and
strategy between them, yet the two unions have been rivals in attempting to
organize the same workers beyond their traditional jurisdictions; the
Autoworkers' holier-than-thou stance probably rests less on ideological purity
than on the partially protected nature of the Canadian automobile market; and
the highestprofile new movement in which the Autoworkers have participated is
the protectionist movement against free trade. 30
Second, there is surely much truth to the statement of a Stelco worker that "our
power is in our option to strike even if it isn't feasible." 31 In Depression-era
Hamilton, the Woodlands Park incident brought fairly widespread sympathy for
the protesters, and factory occupations in the then-new form of the sit-down
strike also greatly impressed other workers. On the surface, those in power
completely won these battles, yet by such actions, the workers both opened the
field for other such actions, by shifting the ruling-class's strategy from
repression to repressive tolerance, and provoked many substantial reforms, even
in the short run. For example, Hamilton's city council instituted a high
minumum wage for workers employed by private contractors on publicly funded
construction; a large day-care center for the children of "working" mothers, and
its own coal and clothing depots for unemployed workers and their families who
were on relief. 32
Similarly, plant closings during the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s have
sometimes led Canadian workers to temporarily take over their factories.
Admittedly, this has usually been done simply to receive higher severance pay,
but occasionally, such actions have brought such attention to, and examination
of, the owners' motives that they have led to public demands for legal action,
nationalization, or state-aided buyouts and ownership by the workers
themselves. 33 How much worse would matters have been without such a threat?
Presumably because of its strong strike record, the USW's Local 1005 was at
least able to keep layoffs more or less in line with seniority; and, moreover, how
much more extensive and deep would the cuts to public sector workers have
been had they not been heavily organized in relatively progressive unions with
strong ties to the ruling NDP?
Third, there are many other things short of such militant actions that workers
have done and can still do. In Depression-era Hamilton there was "restriction of
output" and other job actions short of unionization and strikes, and in the
political arena there were protests, both parliamentary and otherwise. Some
"ripped off" the relief system or engaged in other forms of crime. Others
attempted to curb the excesses of capitalism through within-system legislation. I
have already referred to informal work-sharing and the provision of relief,
which occurred among neighbours as well as within families, and to movements
to replace capitalist distribution with consumer cooperatives. There were also
lively debates about various socialist alternatives to capitalism in local churches
and newspapers as well as labour halls and political party meetings. 34
Meanwhile, with better market conditions for products and passage of the state-
organized "Autopact" (the Canada-United States Automotive Products
Agreement, 1965) between Canada and the United States protecting a minimum
number of jobs for Canadian autoworkers, the CAW has been able to force
employers to lessen overtime, extend paid vacations, and sweeten early
retirement, thereby recalling many laid-off union members without having to
take on employers' risks for them. It has also been able to extract wage and
benefit increases from employers, which in turn has led the rank and file to
agree not to take as much overtime and work vacations and instead to give the
work to their laid-off brothers and sisters. 37
Public sector workers have been faced with not only cash-strapped and
concession-hungry employers, but tax-weary publics. However, they too have
adapted in creative ways. Thus, tax, unemployment insurance, and welfare
workers have indicated their expertise and importance for keeping governmental
costs down, by publishing pamphlets indicating ways in which clients could
"beat the system" if they had the knowledge of civil servants. Similarly, a
coalition of public sector unions exposed managerial practices whose
eradication could save the public hundreds of thousands of dollars in the cost of
government. Meanwhile, Hamilton's public library workers have appealed to the
public to phone city councillors to complain about cutbacks in service. 38
On the political front, workers appear readier to throw out neoconservative
governments. Unfortunately, the liberal ones that have replaced them have often
had such large majorities that they then "thumbed their noses" at the electors.
For example, Canada's federal Liberal government is calling unemployment
insurance (UT) a "tax" on employment that is so expensive for employers that it
makes
-46-
On the other hand, new, progressive policies are also being explored, and with
them has sometimes come increased recognition that capitalists should not
continue to feed from the public trough. For instance, Bell Canada, the
telephone monopoly, attempted to follow other employers in abusing a UI
scheme that permitted employers to pay their workers from UI funds for a
limited period of time in order to lengthen the period before laying them off for
good. Its permament workers would work five days a week for a year but only
be paid for four days, while the UI fund would pay them for the fifth day. This
was done despite high profits. Public outrage prevented Bell Canada from
cheating the general public in this way, but unfortunately they then cut back
their employees anyway. 40
This discussion merely scratches the surface. Many other potentially successful
strategies could be gleaned from looking at other countries such as Sweden and
Germany, although the greater success of their workers may have been a
function of their healthier economies as well as their better-organized and more
class-conscious working classes. 41 To be sure, there is still a lot to be learned
about when and why, as well as how, workers rebel rather than alienate in the
face of crises. Indeed, whereas severe economic deprivation seems to be more
likely to lead to alienation than rebellion, it is probably true that some
deprivation is more likely to provoke rebellion than is complete gratification.
Obviously, there is still need, and room, for agency by analysts as well as
workers.
Notes
1. Marx 1976, pp. 489-496; 1978a, pp. 52, 67-69, 120-22.
2. Marx 1977a, pp. 531-37; n.d., pp. 408-10, 425-35, 595-99, 612-27.
3. Archibald ( 1992, and 1993).
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29. Ibid.
30. Globe and Mail, November 25, 1993, p. A4.
31. Iacovino ( 1993), IR#7:2-7.
32. Archibald ( 1992).
33. Grayson ( 1985); Stables ( 1991); Corrnan et al. ( 1993), "Conclusion."
34. Archibald ( 1992).
35. For example, on doubts in the East, see Hamilton Spectator,
November 5, 1994, p. A13. On the underground economy, see Hamilton
Spectator, May 21, 1993, p. A1;
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5
Building Democracy in the New
South Africa: Civil Society,
Citizenship, and Political Ideology
Mark Orkin
With the lifting of bans on the ANC and other liberation parties in 1990, these
elements combined to achieve the installation of a transitional authority and
provisions for a first democratic election. The ANC decisively won this election,
but its vote was largely limited to the African population. Moreover, during the
negotiations it conceded that a government of national unity would preside for
the first five years, including ministers in the cabinet from parties to the right of
the ANC.
Constrained in these respects, the ANC now faces the challenges of undoing the
inequalities of apartheid, reversing the repressive style of government, and
integrating the previously segregated population groupings into a nonracial,
nonsexist democracy. The three challenges are linked: as the ANC's program
notes, national development requires the active involvement of the citizenry in
transforming the state and civil society ( African National Congress, 1994, pp. 5-
7).
-51-
pp. 10-113). The sense used here is based on Gramsci's, namely the domain of
nonstate activities encountered, for example, in schools, unions, churches,
women's, youth and cultural groupings or movements, nongovernmental
organizations, and residents' associations Gramsci, 1979; see also Keane, 1988,
p. 14). On this definition, civil society is distinct, on the one hand, from the state
or "political society," namely, the legislative, security, and bureaucratic aspects
of government, as well as the traditional realm of formal political parties
( Gramsci, 1971b, p. 267); and, on the other hand, from the intimate society of
the family.
This chapter combines history, survey results, and political theory in considering
the interplay among the four variables. I recall the contribution of civil society
to achieving social transformation in South Africa; then unpack some statistics,
drawing on a national, all-race survey of South African youth; and last, build on
Gramsci's analysis of the struggle for democracy in considering the subsequent
relationship between state and civil society. The material points to social
movements as a means of sustaining the popular engagement that characterizes
the struggle phase, while synthesizing the diverse agendas of civil society into
democratic national politics.
In mid- 1976, the Soweto revolt erupted. Pupils and students in the BCM
demanded an end to segregated and inferior education, as well as the overthrow
of the apartheid system. Hundreds of youngsters were killed by security forces,
and thousands detained without trial. Others slipped into exile, where they
revitalized the ANC and its armed wing. Inside the country, the black trade
union movement was energized by militant recruits. Student and worker
organizations collaborated in stay-aways. The BCM organizations were banned
in October 1977 ( Kane-Berman, 1978). However, the renascence of progressive
black civil society was irreversibly underway.
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The UDF in due course allied itself with the Freedom Charter, signaling its
affinity with the exiled ANC. It sought alliances across classes as well as races
under the broad goal of a nonracial, united, democratic South Africa. Its
leadership was drawn from political organizations, civic groups, trade unions,
and student or youth congresses ( Swilling, 1988, pp. 90-113).
Other agencies of civil society continued its project. Archbishop Tutu began
calling for disinvestment and sanctions against apartheid. Having been
prominent in the UDF, he was able to function as a spokesperson, but he
occasioned controversy among his white congregants when he supported ANC
policy, and among his black ones when he differed from it.
In effect, although the leaderships of both the church and union federations were
prepared to assume the mantle of the banned UDF and the underground ANC in
publicly representing blacks' national political concerns, they were constrained
by the more particularistic bent of the affiliated members. Meanwhile, the
regime was suffering the cost of sustaining repression, coupled with the
escalating impact of financial sanctions and the arms embargo. By the end of the
decade it had, in economic terms, been brought to its knees ( Orkin, 1989), and
forced to open negotiations.
The lifting of bans on the liberation movements and the release of their leaders
allowed the ANC to assume the role of the dominant progressive political
movement. The UDF disbanded, and the civic groups within it regrouped.
Meanwhile, an alliance was set up between the ANC, COSATU, and the small
South African Communist Party. COSATU's Reconstruction and Development
Program (RDP) became the main election platform of the future governing
party.
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In addition, as the ANC's civil society counterparts, COSATU and the civic
groups participated alongside it in a host of negotiating forums with the
outgoing regime and organized business. The forums were in sectors like
metropolitan government, housing, and electrification. They signaled a new and
relatively structured interpenetration of state and civil society. We will return to
this relationship after introducing the survey evidence.
There were 2,224 respondents from all four main population groups, in a
nationwide stratified sample. The face-to-face interviews were conducted in
December 1992 and January 1993. An upper age limit of 30 years captured
those who as teenagers would have been affected by the 1976 revolt described in
the previous section. The lower limit of age 16 meant that younger respondents
would have been in their teens during the insurrection of the mid-1980s. Some
10.7 million young people fell into this age range: 77% were African, 10%
colored, i.e., of mixed race, 2% Indian, and 11% white.
The third relevant attitudinal variable was political party affiliation. Africans
overwhelmingly supported the ANC, and whites divided between the National
Party and the racist, white, far right. Indian and colored youth scorned the far
right but were likelier to support the NP than the ANC. Other parties received
single-digit scores.
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their right, notably the former ruling Nationalist Party and Inkatha (plus the
"none" response, which was evidently conservative on balance).
Among people belonging to union and church, the high-C proportion improved
somewhat. However, the improvement only became substantial when
respondents reported membership of a political organization, on its own or
alongside other memberships. Figure 5.1 shows that political unionists were
slightly higher, and political congregants slightly lower.
From one viewpoint, these findings are almost tautologous: political activity will
obviously be better than nonpolitical activity at enhancing political efficacy and
engagement--which are the two ingredients of the citizenship index, C.
However, when looked at another way, the findings warn us that nonpolitical
activity--of the sort traditionally held to define civil society--will not, of itself,
enhance people's sense of citizenship.
When one looks also at the darker bars in Figure 5.1 , referring to high
democratic commitment, D, the pattern is less marked. This makes sense, since
D includes broad social as well as specifically political values. But the basic
similarity is there: only when respondents reported a political involvement,
either on its own or with other involvements, were high-D proportions of more
than 60 percent encountered.
These prima facie contrasts within both C and D suggested that the seven-part
organizational variable could be simplified into "no organization,"
"church/union only," and "political" (only or with church/union). 5 In this more
convenient form, organizational involvement is labeled O.
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Figure 5.1 Citizenship C, and Democratic Commitment D, by Organizational
Mix OOrganizational mix
may apply more among parties of the right than the left. Log-linear analysis
guides one through the plethora of possible effects among the four variables.
The usual selection procedure among possible models showed unequivocally
that the four-variable interaction OPCD could not be dispensed with.
The next move was to ascertain the bearing of demographic variables. Based on
my previous experience with the index C in the South African context, the likely
differentiae would be population group or "race," class as approximated by
respondent's education, and gender. These were suitably categorized, yielding R,
E and S respectively. The simplest model that would fit all seven variables
simultaneously proved to be RO RP EO SO SC OPCD RE SE. 6 In other words,
the full interaction was retained between O, P, C, and D, together with several
two-way associations to the three demographic variables (and a couple of
associations among the latter).
We can bypass the cross-tabulation corresponding to the OPCD term in favor of
the pattern displayed in Figure 5.2 . Concentrate first on the pair of solid lines,
which ignore P to depict the OCD interaction. They display the proportions of
respondents who are high on democratic commitment D, i.e. high-D,
corresponding to the three kinds of civil society involvement O.
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The solid line on the left covers low-C respondents--those who scored low on
citizenship C. Among them, the proportion of high-D respondents increases
slightly as one moves through the categories of O from those who had no
organizational involvement (38%) to those involved in church/union only
(47%), and then increases markedly as one moves to those with some political
involvement (65%). Look now at the solid line on the right, reflecting high-C
respondents. In their case, by contrast, organizational involvement did not make
much difference: the high-D respondents are roughly constant around the mean
value (57%), across no organization, church/union only, and some political-
organization membership.
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We now examine how P modulates the OCD interaction to yield OPCD. First
notice that, in Figure 5.2 , the dashed lines displaying respondents of liberation
orientation are above the mean profile (the solid lines), namely, they show larger
high-D proportions, whereas the dotted lines displaying those of conservative
orientation are below the mean profile. In words, respondents of liberation
orientation were generally more likely (58%) to endorse democratic values than
conservative respondents (41%). This is hardly surprising in a context in which
right-wing parties resisted the idea of nonracial democracy before 1990.
There is little space to mention the terms that relate the demographic variables
E, S and R to the OPCD interaction. For instance, RO shows that Africans are
likelier than the minority groups to belong to a union and/or church as well as to
a political party. EO shows that less-educated individuals are less likely to
belong to a political party. Likewise, SO indicates that women are likelier than
men to belong to a church, but less likely to belong to a union, and
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-59-
p. 102).
By contrast, it has been argued of the UDF that, under the duress of repression,
it partly mutated from movement to party. In some regions, elite cabals took ad
hoc decisions, and at the grassroots, some impatient Charterist activists were
somewhat premature in concluding, because popular revolt had rendered certain
townships "ungovernable" by the authorities, that the entire state was on the
verge of capitulation ( A. W. Marx, 1992, pp. 171-72). (In fact, we have seen
that they were only a couple of years early in reading the conjunctural crisis, to
which their efforts had made a major contribution.)
A last point to note is that the attractions of civil society activity--its diversity,
immediacy, and affective nature--also pose a danger: precisely because civil
society is constituted of interest groups (unions, churches, and civic groups were
noteworthy in our context), mobilization toward democratic transformation may
be impeded by divisive interests. As the means of transcending this
particularism Gramsci urged two closely related requirements.
Firstly, our diverse civil society commitments have to be infused with the
unifying ideal of political citizenship (i.e., of individual self-realization achieved
through active participation in communal political activity). Second, sectional,
and especially economic, consciousnesses must be integrated into an essentially
political challenge of the state. The struggle must be both popular and national
for democracy to emerge ( Boggs, 1976, p. 83).
These two central recommendations coincide with the key aspects of the OPCD
interaction uncovered in the data. There too, the importance emerged of
citizenship, and of the primacy of the political in the building of democracy.
First, in conditions of low citizenship, commitments to democracy diverged
among supporters of opposing political orientations; in conditions of high
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citizenship, they converged. Second, among those low on the citizenship index,
the data showed that church and/or union membership only mildly improved
democratic commitment; among those who were high on the citizenship index,
and especially conservatives, church/union membership appreciably diminished
democratic commitment. The data affirm Gramsci's expectation that particular
or local interests may be counterproductive as bases for democratic mobilization
unless they are melded into comprehensive national aims by left-oriented
mobilization in civil society.
Gramsci's critics correctly object that this underestimates the extent of legitimate
dissent among the agencies of civil society, or between them and the state:
strikes and lockouts, gun lobbies and peace marches, anti- and prolifers. This
hubbub, they contend, can best be accommodated by liberal democracy, with its
provisions for majority rule, electoral competition, and civil liberties ( Gramsci,
1971, p. 167). Both the regulated society view and its weaknesses have been
canvassed in South Africa. On behalf of the former, civil society activists argue
that the organizations developed in the struggle phase, and notably those
associated with the UDF, were "typically anti-statist, decentralized, community
and/or worker controlled, democratic, non-profit, well-organized, and
exceptionally creative." They have now comprised a progressive alliance that
will drive development more effectively and transparently than the new state or
the business sector ( Swilling, 1990, p. 157).
Against this view, it is contended that in reality, these organizations are often
unaccountable or unrepresentative;, that the majority of citizens living outside
the metropolitan areas tend to lack access to them anyway; and that there are
many other legitimate elements of civil society that are neutral, or even resistant,
to their newly hegemonic Charterist ideology. The argument concludes that only
a representative democratic state, "in which outcomes are subject to control by
elected representatives," can "guarantee the rights and entitlements of all against
special interests" ( Friedman, 1991, p. 17; see also Friedman, 1992, and van
Wyk, 1993).
The civil society activists reply that representative democracy 'is, as Boggs
warned early, fundamentally alienated, referring to "the elite, particularistic,
nonpublic and depoliticized form of democracy in modern societies" ( Arato and
Cohen, 1993, p. 167). However, there is another form of democracy--
participative government--in which political citizenship need not be confined to
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marking a national ballot every few years. On the one hand, there is local
government, "building a 'voice' at the grassroots level" ( Swilling, 1992, p. 81).
On the other hand, there are the exercises of democratic procedure in the
nonpolitical contexts of civil society: the school, the cultural association, and
especially the workplace. "Civility" is what Walzer calls this nonpolitical
counterpart of citizenship ( Walzer, 1992).
The problem with the local government substitute is seen from our South
African evidence: the crucial achievement of the UDF was to move through
local grievances into national political claims. The problem with the nonpolitical
substitute is that it runs counter to the data: the nonpolitical contexts of civil
society seem to be areas where democracy threatens to wither, not flourish.
Moreover, both proposals abandon the vigor of the Gramscian national
challenge. Civil society participation is permitted to be political provided it is
not national, or national provided it is not political.
However, I contend that between the two extremes there is a notion, developed
in the South American literature on democratization, of politicized civil society (
Arato and Cohen, 1992). On the one hand, it conceives political parties in an
extended form, functioning not as sporadic electoral instruments, but as lively,
ongoing means for gathering and disseminating opinion on issues of government
and development, from bottom to top and back again.
On the other hand, politicized civil society includes social movements, which
may be more or less long lived, issue driven or sectoral, drawing together
various civil society elements, in which parties may, or may not, participate
from time to time. Movements might, through organized lobbies or non-
governmental organizations, seek politically to influence governance on issues
that formal parties are neglecting or avoiding, such as the environment, or gay
rights. In this way, the mobilization of civil society can narrow the gap between
the affectively motivated concerns of the individual citizen and the more formal,
intermittent political processes of the state and the elite-driven political parties
( Geyer, 1990).
There are exciting contemporary examples in South Africa, building upon the
ferment between civil and political society in the last two decades. Social
movement unionism "engages in alliances in order to establish relationships
with political organizations on a systematic basis" ( Lambert and Webster, 1988,
p. 21). The Women's National Coalition, a cross-party, nonracial movement, has
lately resolved "to build organizations, structures and lobbying power to ensure
that women's equality becomes a reality," including "how women are going to
be represented in the RDP structures." 7 Indeed, the Reconstruction and
Development Program itself envisages development to be
The implications are profound. Both the leaders of the social movements and the
bureaucrats in the government of national unity may initially be uncomfortable
with this unruly relationship between the state and civil society. As Keane
insists, "the development of new democratic mechanisms is likely to increase
the frequency of surprises for all groups, movements, parties and governments"
( Keane, 1988, p. 26; see also p. 15).
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Notes
Author's note: This chapter was first published in Review of African Political
Economy, No. 66 ( 1995), pp. 525-37, and is reproduced with permission of its
authors.
1. My thanks for the extensive financial sponsorship to the JEP; and for
helpful insights and detailed comments to CASE (Community Agency for
Social Enquiry) Deputy Director Dr. David Everatt, who managed this project,
and to our collaborator, Dr. Ros Hirschowitz.
2. The item pairs for citizenship, C, were as follows: each was asked as a
five-point Likert scale, running from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree."
They were reversed as necessary in being summed into the indices:
-- Non-sexism: "There are too few women in political leadership," and "Women
are less capable than men."
-- Fair governance: "The future government will fairly represent the interests of
all races," and "Nothing will change except the country's leaders will be black."
4. Most respondents were black, and most black union members are in
COSATU.
5. Categorical automatic interaction detection (CHAID), confirmed that the
organizational-mix variable behaved like a trichotomy when considered as a
predictor of C or D.
6. Terms were regarded as unnecessary if the deterioration in chi-squared
caused by their removal was significant for p < .01. This stringent crierion
yielded this model as the most parsimonious (chi-squared = 297, d.f. = 337, p
= .95).
7. "Coalition Lives on to Fight," The Star, Johannesburg, June 21, 1994.
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6
Immigration, Alienation, and
Political Change: A Positive Case
from Los Angeles
John Horton
Introduction
Drawing on six years of ethnographic and electoral research, this chapter
describes a case study of political relations between Chinese immigrants and
established "Anglo" (white), Latino, and Asian Americans. The site is Monterey
Park in Los Angeles County, transformed by a new wave of immigration into the
first majority Asian city on the U.S. mainland. The chapter outlines:
1. establishment-resident alienation from a local community dramatically
transformed by Chinese immigration and resistance to the newcomers, as
expressed politically in Anglo-led, "Official English" and slow-growth
movements;
2. the decline of nativist alienation and anti-immigrant resistance and a process
of dealienation spurred by the increased incorporation of ethnic minorities
and immigrants into a local political and social life once dominated by
Anglos;
3. the context of the change from a politics of exclusion to a postmodern
politics of inclusion on the foundation of diversity and difference.
Change was facilitated by:
1. material conditions: the large size of the immigration and the middle and
upper middle class economic and educational resources of the newcomers
that tipped the city toward an Asian majority and undermined both the
economic and demographic base of Anglo hegemony;
2. political conditions: the entrance of new political players--women, grass-
roots activists, and, increasingly, elected officials who opposed the old boy
network and generally played a mediating role; minorities fighting against
the white establishment for empowerment; and progressives and
multiculturalists pressing for interethnic
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connections and alliances in a situation where no single ethnic group could gain
without support from others.
Postmodern Alienation
Focusing on exploitation and loss of control over the labor process, Marx
observed that the alienated worker "is at home when he is not working and when
he is working he is not at home" ( 1977a, p. 80). However, the separation
between work and home, or public and private life, is an illusion. There are no
safe havens from the global movements of labor and capital. Workers and the
middle classes who cannot afford the gated ghettos of the rich are no longer at
home in the suburbs, their fantasy escape from the unruly and colored crowds of
the inner city. During the booming 1980s, the sprawling suburbs of Southern
California became sites of established resident alienation and resistance to
unwanted and seemingly uncontrolled economic development and immigration,
postmodern conditions of instability and uncertainty.My research concerns
established resident and immigrant responses to the rapid and dramatic
globalization of everyday life. The place is Los Angeles County, which was
made more non-white than white and more non-European than European by the
post-1965 wave of immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and Asia. Within
the county of Los Angeles, my site is Monterey Park, a multi-ethnic bedroom
city of about 60,000, which was made more Asian than non-Asian by Chinese
immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, the People's Republic of China, and
Southeast Asia. The story of Monterey Park is important as one chapter in the
restructuring of the demography, economy, and local politics of Los Angeles,
and the United States, within an increasingly integrated Pacific Rim and world
economy.In this chapter, I focus on the uneven movement from established
resident resistance to immigrants to their increased political and social
incorporation during a period of rapid demographic and economic change from
the late 1970s to 1994. This movement is analyzed in relation to the intersection
of three types of alienation experienced by established residents and newcomers:
1. alienation from home--the local and lived environment. Some long-
established residents experienced alienation as a sense of estrangement from
a once-familiar and homogeneous "American" environment, now made
foreign by the "colonization" of often prosperous Chinese and Asian
newcomers. For their part, newcomers often experienced alienation from the
local community as a sense of being outsiders, who were excluded by
established resident hostility and nativism;
2. ethnic alienation--the sense of being disenfranchised from local citizenship
on the basis of ethnicity which was a problem shared by established Asian
Americans, Mexican Americans, and "Anglos," as well as Asian
immigrants;
3. economic or class alienation--for home owners and land users, whether
immigrants or established residents, a sense of powerlessness in face of land
use decisions made by developers and their friends in City Hall.
The research for this study, which was conducted from 1988 to 1994, was
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Demographic Transitions
Located about 10 minutes by an uncongested freeway east of downtown Los
Angeles, Monterey Park was sold by developers in the postwar decades as a
tranquil suburban refuge. Predominantly an Anglo town in 1960 (85% Anglo,
12% Latino, and 3% Asian), the city was slowly integrated with the in-migration
of native-born Mexican Americans and Japanese Americans. The population
changed dramatically after the mid-1970s with the rapid immigration of Chinese
people and capital from Taiwan, mainland China, Hong Kong, and Southeast
Asia. By 1980, the ethnic map of the city was almost evenly divided between
Anglos (25%), Latinos (39%), and Asians (35%). There was only a small
population of African Americans--about 1% in 1980. 2
Between 1980 to 1990, the number of Asian residents in the city increased by
91% to become 56% of the total population, while Anglos declined from 47% to
12% of the total, and Latinos declined by 10%, to 31%. Today, Monterey Park
has become America's first "suburban Chinatown" and a major financial and
service center for an expanding regional Chinese and Asian population. The
immigration represents an altogether new pattern of Chinese diaspora away
from the traditional urban Chinatown into the middle-class and ethnically mixed
Mexican-American, Asian-American, and Anglo suburbs of eastern Los Angeles
County.
The physical transition of Monterey Park was initially unplanned and uneven.
The city looks unfinished, as if caught in a time warp between a postcard-perfect
Middle America of parks, a civic center, and neat single-family dwellings, and
the encroaching restaurants, banks, supermarkets, condominiums, and traffic of
a Chinese boomtown. The sights and the sounds of the 1960s and 1990s clash on
the major commercial streets. On North Atlantic, one encounters, in succession:
Ai Hoa supermarket (the words, untranslated into English, meaning "Loving the
Chinese Homeland," might shock old-timers); more Chinese signs with enough
English to identify Little Taipei Restaurant, Red Rose Hair Design, Flying Horse
Video, Cathay Bank, Remax Realty, and Bright Optical Watch, all patronized by
a large, regional, mostly Mandarin-speaking population; and empty lots--
formerly Fred Frey Pontiac and Pic N' Save--awaiting Chinese capital. Hughes
Market and Marie Callender's Restaurant remain as clues to a "Western" past.
Political Transitions
The political transition occasioned by the new immigration has been painful.
Residents, newcomers and established residents never intended to be neighbors,
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but finding this to be the case, they faced the task of either fighting each other or
rebuilding a sense of community at the points where their lives collided and
intersected under conditions of great ethnic diversity. The first responses were of
resistance and defense as political structures were challenged and changed.
Throughout the 1980s, newcomers were met with resentment and resistance by
the old-timers, particularly whites. They blamed Chinese newcomers for the
enormous changes that had taken place in Monterey Park since the 1970s--the
massive immigration, unplanned economic development, crowding, congestion,
and, above all, their sense of alienation from home and neighborhood
transformed by Chinese people, signs, and businesses.
The sense of alienation was shared by many established Latino and Asian
American residents. For example, a Latino resident who was in his 30s and
marginally employed, echoed the theme of displacement when asked by a
campaign worker whether he would support a Latino candidate in the next city
council race:
It's too late. There aren't many of us left. This was a nice Latino
neighborhood once. Now the Chinese-run parts store on the next
corner doesn't want my business. Look at the two
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Damn it, Dad, where the hell did all these Chinese come from?
Shit, this isn't our town anymore.
Newcomer Alienation
While established residents tended to legitimate their claim to citizenship in
Monterey Park in terms of years of residence and participation in local
organizations, immigrants tended to base their claim to inclusion on the
American experience of change, free enterprise, and immigration. For example,
a Burmese-born Chinese doctor legitimated his own claim to being American as
a hard-working immigrant, a participant in the revitalizing cycles of
immigration, diversity, and change--precisely the qualities nativists associate
with the disintegration of America. Reflecting on the discrimination against
Chinese in Southeast Asia, he argued that the greatest danger for America would
be to become nationalistic, hinder ethnic diversity, and stop the process of
change:
Slow Growth
Slow or controlled growth was a populist protest against the developers who had
turned the once-peaceful suburb into a mass of mini-malls, condominiums, and
traffic-congested streets. Monterey Park became, in fact, one of the most
militant and successful centers of the controlled-growth movement, which began
to sweep Southern California in the 1980s. Supported largely by home owners,
the movement represented a rejection of the once-unquestioned Californian faith
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The second expression of alienation from the home environment was more
overtly and consistently ethnic rather than economic. In the mid-1980s, nativism
began to appear on the bumper stickers of cars: "Will the last American to leave
Monterey Park please bring the flag?"
The local Official English movement was expressed in attempts to limit Chinese
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language signs in public places and Chinese books in the local library. In 1986,
the slow-growth-dominated city council passed a resolution declaring Monterey
Park an "Official English" city and not a sanctuary for refugees. This nativist
tendency could also be seen in the revival of patriotic festivals like the Fourth of
July and the largely white Monterey Park Historical Society. The leaders of
these movements were mainly white and politically conservative, although they
enjoyed widespread support from established Latinos, Japanese Americans, and
Anglos of various political persuasions.
Thus, the alienation of established residents had both a class base, which was
anti-big capital and anti-big government and a nativist base, which was anti-
immigrant. The linking of racial/ethnic and class factors was built into the
contradictory character of the two movements and the close relations between
their leaders. Leaders of Official English tended to be on the side of no
economic growth; and many leaders of controlled growth were sympathetic to
the cause of Official English. As a result of these connections, the movements
overlapped in practice and were often classed together as anti-immigrant and
racist by an uncomfortable mix of developers, Chinese immigrants, and citizens
who were advocates of minority and immigrant rights.
Thus, the direction of recent political movement was away from nativism and
toward greater political and community participation of women, ethnic groups,
and immigrants in local politics at the levels of both voting and direct political
action. Demonstrations at city council meetings have become especially
important political tools for the many immigrants who are not citizens.
What were the factors behind this turnaround and, in particular, the movement
away from confrontations between newcomers and established residents toward
what could be described as a connective politics of diversity? They were both
material and political.
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Ethnic Politics
Increasingly in Monterey Park, as a direct result of the changes brought by
immigration and the nature of entitlement in the United States, ethnicity has
become a primary principle of political organization, which tends, under certain
circumstances, to override divisions based on nativity. Before the new
immigration, the pattern of political control was white-sponsored diversity--that
is, minorities were not locally organized for political action and had to depend
on white support to attain office and political influence. By the mid-1980s,
however, Latinos, Asian-American, and Chinese immigrants had begun
establishing their own political groups and organizing for action. We also found
in our analysis of exit polls for the 1988 and 1990 Monterey Park City Council
elections that ethnicity overrode education, income, immigrant status, and other
characteristics in determining voter choice. That is, Asians tended to vote for
Asians, Latinos for Latinos, and Anglos for Anglos (see Table 6.1 ).
Replicating a major finding of the 1988 poll, in the 1990 election we found that
ethnicity was the single most important determinant of candidate choice in
Monterey Park. Knowing a voter's ethnicity was a significant predictor (at the .
001 level) of candidate choice. The result was obtained by simultaneously
controlling for seven independent variables: ethnicity, education, income,
gender, length of residence in the United States, opinion on bilingual education,
and position on a ballot "Measure S" favoring control over residential develop-
ment. Table 6.1 presents a profile of the social and political characteristics of the
major ethnic voters.
The important point for understanding the shift away from nativism was that for
certain political purposes ethnicity could override divisions between immigrants.
For example, in a situation where Asian Americans generally lacked political
representation and few Asian candidates were running for office, diverse Asian
groups united as Asian Americans around a Chinese-American candidate. Thus,
in 1988 and 1990, established Japanese-American residents, although native-
born and very much like Anglos in their levels of nativism, voted for Chinese-
American candidates.
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council. Ethnicity was a major factor in city politics, but the meaning of
ethnicity was highly situational and changed over time.
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Our analysis of exit poll data collected during the 1988 and 1990 elections
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and of previous voting trends indicated that the majority of voters favored some
kind of growth controls. Established residents, whatever their ethnic
background, were more favorable than newcomers. However, this distinction
bluffed when we examined the effect of length of residence on immigrants. The
longer they had been in the United States and in Monterey Park, the more likely
they were to support the goals of controlled growth, that is, to adopt an
established resident profile. In this instance, the alienation of residents as
property users from property developers and speculators overrode divisions
based on nativity and ethnicity, at least for that small but influential group of
voters. Table 6.2 shows that established and native-born Chinese were more
likely than newcomers to support a slow-growth measure, Proposition S, and to
select candidates across the ethnic spectrum.
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Americans and Latinos, rather than Anglos, became the leaders of an inter-
ethnic alliance opposed to development.
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The nativist response to alienation was to deny the reality of diversity except as
a divisive ideology. Nativists wanted to reassert their order by calling for
restrictions on growth and immigration and by reaffirming the dominance of the
English language and Euro-American traditions. The effect of these strategies in
Monterey Park was divisive, drawing an ever narrower and sharper division
between "them" and "us." Another response to diversity has been the
development of an ethnic politics and the ethnization of everyone, including
Anglos who preferred to see themselves as Americans without qualification.
This result could also be divisive, essentializing differences and turning politics
into a zero sum game of ethnic competition.
However, there was one response that fostered dealienation and cooperation--
recognizing differences of ethnicity and nativity as political resources and
mobilizing them into alliances for representation and controlled development.
To gain a sense of power and identity in an ethnically fragmented environment
and achieve greater control over the quality of local life, newcomers and
established residents were learning to form alliances across the divisions of
nativity and ethnicity.
Our research offers no easy models for achieving greater harmony under the
postmodern conditions of immigration and diversity. What we can show,
however, is the complexity and fluidity of a local political process that lessened
established resident alienation and nativism, moving away from xenophobia and
toward a more international conception of home and citizenship. In a world of
immigrant bashing and ethnic cleansing, crossing rather than drawing
boundaries is an accomplishment to be applauded and studied.
Notes
1. Parts of the text originally appeared in John Horton with the assistance of
Jose Calderon , Mary Pardo, Leland Saito, Linda Shaw, and Yen-Fen Tseng,
The Politics ofDiversity: Immigration, Resistance, and Change in Monterey
Park, California
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Generous financial assistance was provided for our research by the National
Board of the Ford Foundation funded Changing Relations Project and the
Asian American Studies Center, the Institute of American Cultures, and the
Academic Senate of the University of California, Los Angeles.
2. In this paper I employ the terminology generally used by local residents for
the major ethnic groups: Anglos or whites (terms reluctantly used by the
one-time ethnic majority who prefer to think of themselves as Americans
without qualification); Latinos--Americans of Mexican and Latin American
descent, whatever their racial phenotype; Asian Americans; and African
Americans. Wherever possible, I refer to more specific groups like Mexican
Americans, Taiwanese, etc. By using ethnic labels, I did not intend to
essentialize socially constructed categories. On the contrary, a major finding
of our study was the situational and fluid character of ethnic identities in an
internationalized and diverse community.
3. The middle class and suburban situation in Monterey Park can be contrasted
to that of poorer sections of Los Angeles that have also been dramatically
changed by immigration. For example, in South Central Los Angeles poor
African Americans may feel in competition for housing and jobs with Latino
immigrants, and both have been in conflict with middle class Korean
immigrant shop- keepers. Their alienated relations under conditions of
poverty and urban neglect created the material conditions for riot in the
spring of 1992. Accommodation requires a political struggle for diversity
within a framework of equality and social justice.
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7
Ethnic Revival and Conflicts: The
Challenge of the 1990s
Yehuda Bien
It seems that the result of these processes must be the replacement of the present
system by something else. We are finding ourselves in the middle of a
worldwide rebellion against the irrationality of rulers, who have oppressed
groups and continue to do so in the name of holy traditions or universal logics
and ideologies. Contradictions built into the political and economic structures of
the dominant system are evoking counterculture, religious fundamentalism,
racist, and antiracist movements. Social scientists are therefore obliged to
rethink their conceptual apparatus, question fundamental premises, reinterpret
the meaning of basic ideas, and propose alternative conceptions.
Theoretical work on the concepts of nation and state is often confusing and
problematic. Traditional views have restricted social sciences to a rational and
empirical assessment of means, distanced from the quality of outcomes. In
contrast, a theoretical approach is proposed here that emerged from the
collective adventures of Israeli citizens--Jews and Arabs--and focuses on the
collective management of human affairs.
The verification of goals in human life is a social process characterized by
fluidity, which requires communicative action. The actors in the process
interpret the common goal from different and changing perspectives and thus
reshape it.
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They reflect on their action and search for a multiperspective view; They strive
to "overcome their at first merely subjective views and, thanks to the mutuality
of rationally motivated convictions, to create simultaneously the objective world
and the intersubjectivity of their life-world" ( Habermas, 1975, p. 98). They are
constructing alternatives to existing social arrangements. That reconstruction is
not always the outcome of a conscious and critical behavior, but it has a deep
impact in the sphere of consciousness. People in unique historical processes and
social circumstances therefore create alternative theories about nation and state (
Znaniecki, 1952; Fals Borda, 1981).
Is the primary task of a social scientist in such steady processes of social and
human change to analyze past and current events in order to provide facts and
clarifying data, or to ". . . look behind the front . . . for some consistent but not
so visible currents explaining the diagnosis . . . [and] drawing up alternative
pictures of the society . . ." ( Lochen, 1990). Are recent developments in the
former USSR and Eastern Europe, as well as the revival of ethnicity in the West,
a destructive force or an enriching resource?
When communist rule ended in Poland, people requested the Roman Catholic
Church to participate in replacing the old system. Many expected that the church
would fill the ideological gap. Another segment adored the "New God" of the
free market economy. A combination between the "old" God and the "new"
became the most attractive alternative for the majority of people in Poland and
other East European countries. However, this "double-facing God" has not saved
ethnic minorities from harmful impacts. Nationalistically oriented leaderships in
Yugoslavia tried to create a mixture between the new "spiritual" phenomenon
and authoritarian approaches, which caused a bloody confrontation and the
nation's destruction. The Russian leadership responded with similar approaches
in order to protect the unity of the Russian Federation.
It seems that Western European societies are also suffering from growing signs
of disintegration which are very harmful for the communities of guest workers,
who are largely excluded from political participation and from the provision of
equal rights in the welfare institutions, while many are victims of violent
attacks.
With the Polish scientist Kwasniewski ( 1990) we must ask: what are the
perspectives of a real European integration, if national identities are not
respected and preserved as a valuable and pluralistic enriching factor? If
contradictory tendencies among some 55 ethnic entities will prevail, then a
federal and functional connection between them is questionable. Responding to
such doubts
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Similar questions can be posed regarding the conflict between Jews and Arabs in
Israel, which represents a relationship between a national majority and an ethnic
minority. This chapter describes the efforts made to use the educational system
as an instrument to promote "Democracy and Coexistence" in Israeli society, as
well as the theoretical and practical approaches used and the insights gained
from that experiment.
However, national societies that include ethnic minorities differ in terms of the
degree of promotion or avoidance of change. There are societies in which
historical change takes place through a controlled modification of relationships
between ethnic communities, while in others, such change is abandoned, the
autonomy of social actors weakened, and confrontation with conflicts is
avoided. Marshal Tito's Yugoslavia represents this second option; it has not
considered "conflict" a valuable subject for research by social scientists.
In Israel, a well-designed decision-making system and dozens of voluntary
organizations have been engaged in attempts to modify ethnic relationships by,
for example, arranging meetings for the parties in conflict. Such confrontation
included a process of dialogue and a mutual clarification of strong emotions of
anxiety and aggressiveness. It facilitated an analysis of controversial issues and
produced a mutual understanding of conflicting vantage points. The aim was not
to resolve the conflict, but to learn how to live with it and to cooperate
nevertheless ( Bien, 1993).
From the observation of such processes we gained new insight into ethnic
obstacles, the limited possibilities for bridging gaps, and the surprising variety
of personal ethnic or national definitions. Initially, Jews and Arabs reacted
differently. Arabs tended to explain their attitudes and political conceptions
without referring to any personal differences. They seemed well informed about
the whole spectrum of Jewish approaches and attitudes, which indicated that
knowledge of the majority is a vital necessity. However, the position of a great
number of Jewish participants was quite different. For many it was the first
opportunity to become acquainted with their neighbors. They presented a variety
of attitudes and responses.
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The analysis indicated something else: people relate to two variables. One
represents the "past" and its cultural, religious, and historical heritage. The other
describes the relationship to the territory, the state, and the contemporary
"present." People from different ethnic backgrounds relate to these two continua
and place themselves somewhere inbetween. Everybody creating their unique
personal point, which depicts their personal alternative of an abstract idealized
model. In this model, the strength of one variable depends on the other, and the
personal places are the functions of both (see Figure 7.1 ).
In our scheme the vertical axis points to the past and represents the accumulated
values of the heritage of ethnic and national identity. The horizontal axis
represents the weight of values emerging from the "present," as incorporated in
personal identities, as well as the orientation toward the "future." Ethnic
personalities outside their homeland relate only to the heritage. Their location is
therefore outside the interrelated area.
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Figure 7.1 Personal Relations to Past and Present
If indeed both the "past" and "present" shape ethnic identities, it is necessary to
discover their relative contribution. An observer of tendencies in those countries
characterized by ethnic revival can easily conclude that its main feature is a
departure from a "present" that was dominant for decades. If the present is
crushed, then the "past" is called to replace it. People then adopt the spiritual
base of former generations without any effort at renewal. Ethnic revival seems
to be a revival of the past and a turning point from rationality to irrationality,
from something "profane" to a devotion to the "sacral," and from a doubtful
existence to a struggle for survival. Most important--the "past" becomes the
formulating force of the new "present."Relying on Habermas's theory of
communicative action ( 1981), the usual behavior of actors in modern society
and the behaviors of actors involved in a process of ethnic revival can be
distinguished and analyzed. Anyone observing the daily actions of individuals
and groups can easily detect contradictory relationships to the surrounding
world. Daily life is a steady confrontation with new experiences, facts, and
norms; people use competencies already tested in analogous circumstances,
trying to apply them again.Two resources nourish these competencies: the
tradition assimilated during the process of socialization, and the personal
insights and conclusions drawn from successful experiences. Both are utilized in
our rational and irrational responses. The steady confrontation with new events
necessitates a balance between "old" and "renewed" responses, although often,
people fail to develop an effective control of their new environment.The feeling
of unsuccessful performance manifests itself in a great variety of symptoms:
A. Loss of confidence in accumulated personal knowledge-practical wisdom
becomes meaningless or looses its legitimation;
B. Loss of confidence in collective approaches and ideas--which undermines
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personal ability to make such a selection, interpret traditional elements, and test
and elaborate them.Individuals differ also in their relationship to the surrounding
world of action, where they carve their "micro" world from the "macro"
environment, according to their personal interests, orientation, and level of
education. Everybody adheres to their personal definitions of problems and
solutions and overlooks those of the others. However, when normative
consensus is lacking, a tendency toward conflicting designs and plans of action
prevails, which has a harmful impact on organizational and social fabrics. It
often causes divisions, which form a breeding ground for organizational, social,
and political alienation. In designing our coexistence program, we tried to
challenge such social and ethnic malaise.
Attitudes: Religious versus Secular, and
Particularistic versus Universalistic
Israel is also a society in steady transition, and one may wonder whether the
Israeli case is similar to cases of ethnic conflict elsewhere. In searching for
answers, we invited many groups of Arabs and Jews to a "maze" exercise,
during which they were exposed to the fundamental social, cultural, and political
controversies in Israeli society. The "maze" presents simulated life dilemmas
and invites the participants to face basic problems of a society in change.
Similar to real-life situations, individuals are limited in choosing between
alternative options that might resolve the presented dilemma. According to their
personal concept of democracy, ethnicity, faith, and education, they select their
favorite. Oriented by their own preferences, they are each making their unique
way in the network of the "labyrinth." During the final stage of the exercise, the
participants compare their different solutions and explain the reasons for
selecting them.The participants' selection of alternative options indicated that
two pairs of interrelated forces shape personal attitudes and personal behavior
when individuals are confronted with social and political controversies. One pair
represents the psychodynamic aspects of human behavior:
A. The "social consciousness" of human beings, which can be placed on an axis
denoting magic vs. critical consciousness, with the naive and the fanatic
inbetween ( Freire, 1972).
B. The need to either escape from or confront political and social controversies.
Our observations indicated that persons who tend to escape from a real
confrontation are mainly locked into magic or naive consciousness. The
confrontation-oriented personality is motivated by a critical or fanatic
consciousness.The second pair represents conflicting forces:
A. The religious or secular relationship to spiritual and cultural heritage.
B. The particularistic or universalistic concept of social life.
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Figure 7.2 Alternative Options for Personal Behavior and Attitudes
1. Religious nationalism emerges from extreme particularistic attitudes,
combined with religious beliefs; it leads to fundamentalism, racism,
xenophobia, and theocracy.
2. Secular nationalism combines particularistic and secular attitudes; such an
approach tends to deny ethnic pluralism and to support uniformity or
legitimation of one dominant culture.
3. Secular liberalism combines universalistic and secular attitudes; it confirms
ethnic pluralism and recognizes the rights of minorities, and it represents the
belief that the principal historical movements emerge on behalf of the
people and their freedom.
4. Religious liberalism combines universalistic and religious attitudes. It
emphasizes tolerance and coexistence. It fosters also a master identity of
citizenship with opportunities for a secondary nationality of minorities.
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personal heritage. They can learn to live together despite the conflict ( Bien,
1993).
However, such "prospects for the future" are obstructed by "domains of power
and control" which consider the schools as their battleground ( Kousez and
Mico, 1979; Bien, 1986). Policy makers, supervisors, officials from munici-
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palities and unions, and others seek to influence the quality of schools and fight
actively to maintain stability between their domains.That bureaucratic game
obstructs goal clarification and the emergence of a systematic order of priorities.
Inconsistencies of goals and goal ambiguity impose on teachers a "survival
game" ( Miles, 1980). In order to survive, teachers are preoccupied with issues,
materials and programs created and imposed by superior authorities. To
summarize: the "institution of schooling, as parentally conceived and operated,
is not capable of providing large numbers of our young people with the
education and this democracy require now and in the future" ( Doodlad,
1994).In the face of such statement one may wonder whether there is any hope.
However, if we want to avoid pessimism, we must recognize "that there are
intraas well inter-group variations in educational outcomes and some autonomy
among schools and teachers. . . . Many teachers and others may wish to see
activities of classroom and school as apolitical, ideologically neutral and
isolated from life beyond their doors, [but] the reality is inescapably different"
( Reid, 1986). Moreover, there are historical conclusions to the effect that
teachers and other culture bearers in society can take the risks of change. They
are likely to reshape major aspects of the structure of their organization and their
society, if they are supported by processes of social interaction ( Eisenstadt,
1985).My personal involvement in many experiments and programs in Israel
taught me that managing major targets for educational change requires
collaborative approaches ( Bien, 1976, 1982, 1986, 1987). It demands also a
scope-analysis range--from the study of interaction between two people to the
examination of a system--and a linkage between micro- and macrotheories
( Archer, 1985).Teachers can effectuate changes if they perceive a combination
of perspectives, each one corresponding to basic organizational elements and
domains and aligned, one to another, in a mutually supporting way. It is
necessary to link what seems contradictory and to create a new approach that
combines a "human resources" perspective with political, structural and
symbolic perspectives, making them a meaningful vehicle for analysis and
change ( Lawrence and Lorsch, 1976; Cohen and March, 1974; Argyris and
Schon, 1978; Alderfer and Smith, 1980). Despite the constraining forces in the
context of the Israeli education system, there seems to be reason for optimism.
Reactions to Educational Policy Changes
The first issue of feedbacks from the activities of the "Democratic Year" caused
a change in Ministerial policy formulation. The main conclusion was that the
responsibility for "Education for Democracy and Coexistence" must be handed
over to a ministerial unit. We proposed that the activity of this unit should
combine policy making with action-research-oriented activities, especially to:
1. provide cooperative frameworks of in-service training for Jewish and Arab
principals and staffs;
2. design diverse processes of experiential learning, with a permanent
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Arab teachers added doubts about the relevance of a "democratic" message for
their population, while the Jewish teachers expressed disbelief in the
possibilities of a meaningful coexistence. A minority among both communities
drew positive conclusions and was already convinced that the new goals are a
vital necessity.
Previous experiences led to the conclusion that dominant figures within the
Ministry should be involved, in order to overcome the traditional resistance of
the different "domains of power" within that body. It was necessary to convince
them that it is about time to start a confrontation with painful social, cultural,
ethnic, and national conflicts. It is therefore necessary to learn: (1) how to deal--
and how to live--with such conflicts; (2) how to introduce political controversies
in schooling and education; and (3) how to prepare staffs for the new challenge
and arrange cooperative in-service training for staffs from the different sectors
of the Jewish and Arab communities.
This was reflected in the new policy declaration of the minister, which was
announced to a convention of top officials and supervisors. After this meeting,
study days were arranged with ministerial teams and teams of voluntary
organizations. However, this process of persuasion and optional involvement in
the new adventure evoked steady resistance among some parts of the traditional
"domains."
Being aware of those countervailing forces, we assumed that the double aim of
the new policy--education for democracy and coexistence--might facilitate the
participation of increased numbers of staff members. They could choose
between the goals and respond autonomously to actual events.
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We were familiar with the doubts about the possibility of installing a resource
exchange rationale into existing human service organizations, on grounds that
"formal organizations in the human services are self-serving, deliberately
uncoordinated, destructively competitive entities, impermeable to change and fit
objects for change only by those people with fathomless reservoirs of unfulfilled
masochism" ( Sarason, 1979).
However, it was concluded from the experience with the League of Cooperating
Schools that collaboration based on resource exchange can vitalize schools
( Bien, 1982). The league tried to advance Arab education only, but during its
final stage, most of the participants proposed a network with Jewish neighbor
schools, an idea that, at the time, policy makers and supervisors were reluctant
to implement.
Now, this idea corresponded with the announced policy. We envisioned a new
collaborative framework, called Eshkol (in Hebrew: a "cluster of grapes" or,
synonymously: "a person of eshkolot"--a wise person). It was intended to
represent the pluralism of Israeli society and Israeli schools, and was designed
as a formal and informal meeting place of neighbors who had never before
cooperated. The rationale of this pattern looks substantially different from the
description of usual school innovations, most of which are subject-matter
oriented, and provide the means for carrying out well-designed objectives. In the
usual innovations, the teachers' job is to apply what has been designed by
scientific teams. In our "intensive" pattern, however, action precedes particular
goals. It invites the staffs to create and invent new approaches and to draw
conclusions from their own experiential learning and mutual relationship. Most
importantly: the focus was on the process and not the product; the first subject
of change was the teacher and not the student.
Three annual stages of action were designed. The first stage tried to serve a
"core team"--the principal and leading functions within the staff--while the
entire staff became involved during the second stage. The third and final stage
served the students and their parents in an innovative and experiential learning
process.
It was assumed that the unique mixture of personal styles of individuals and
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In other words, the mutually positive feelings prevalent in the new solidarity
group created a collective rational decision-making model without eliminating
the deeply rooted ethnic decision-making model. Both complemented each other
and were significant in individual attitudes and actions. The collision between
the different models became an efficient learning process. Its final outcome was
a step forward in "learning how to live with ethnic conflicts" ( Bien, 1993, pp.
243-253).
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Three years of observation and research indicated that the new setting is not
only providing new knowledge, it is also proving responsive to events in the
schools and the surrounding society. However, its most important contribution to
the individual participant is to increase awareness of the components of his or
her identity. The Eshkolot process required from the participants a reassessment
of their professional and organizational functions, and also of their relationship
with their political and ethnic environment. We composed a new instrument,
based on Seeman's instrument of five dimensions of alienation ( 1959) and
Geyer's concept of political alienation ( 1990), which presented four ladders of
personal growth relative to the profession, the organization, and the ethnic and
political environments (see Table 7.1 ; see also Bien, 1990).
Table 7.1
Ladders of Exit from Situations of Alienation
Professional Organizational Ethnic Political
Experimental
Creation of Cooperation Learns to live
political
material and with students with conflicts
learning in
methods and parents and lifts masks
classroom
Exchange of Common
Focus on personal growth and Political edu-
ideas within identity
team cation tested
the Eshkol components
Open doors-- Methods
New definition of Reassessment
and mutual applied to
professional role of identities
exchange controversies
Experiences
Takes additional Tests mutual Emotional
political
responsibility contributions confrontation
dispute
Focus on Avoidance of Alienated to Anxious to
professional task school problems ethnic problems face politics
The participants marked their personal baseline when joining the program as
well as the position to which they ascended. In their responses they displayed a
great variety of personal positions and combinations between the different
ladders. The duration of their involvement in the program, the development of a
new atmosphere in the staff room, and the moral power exerted on the whole
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staff influenced the progress of the individual participants. They shaped their
unique paths, with some moving easily and others in a steady rush. However, the
newly created mutual relationship contributed to a synchronistic advancement;
in that process the assistance of the principal and the core team was decisive.
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8
Tracing the Growth of Alienation:
Enculturation, Socialization, and
Schooling in a Democracy
Devorah Kalekin-Fishman
There is, however, little convincing evidence that democratic objectives are
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There are reasons why this attempt is not always crowned with success. Some
have to do with the mechanics of production. Plans have to be "filtered down" to
the level of performance and are likely to be carried out in diverse ways. Other
reasons relate to the intricacies of socialization. Proffered meanings-in-use are
not automatically internalized by students. Instead, learning depends on the
mesh of the selected elements of culture with each person's particular trajectory
of growth. It is possible to grasp some of the difficulties by referring to Erikson
( 1950) extension of Freudian theory.
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a kind of trial encounter with a medley of cultural options.
What Erikson does not allow for is the likelihood that what seems appropriate to
therapy may not be socially or politically desirable. Not all the resolutions that
he defines as eugenic facilitate the attainment of the goals valued in a
democratic society. In the next section I will describe some of the snares.
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From among the challenges that attend different stages of development, those
that promote "autonomy" and "initiative," like experiences that adumbrate
challenges of "intimacy" and "generativity," bolster dealienation and
participation. On the other hand, what Erikson denoted as success in achieving
"basic trust," demonstrating "industry," and embracing a well-defined "role-
identity" actually favors tendencies to alienation. The thrust of the latter is
toward "normfulness," "social isolation" and "self-estrangement." The impact,
however, can only be decided through empirical investigation.
"Integrity," the desirable resolution of the last stage of adult development, is not
an indicator of either participation or non-participation. Success in evading
"despair" depends on the degree to which resolutions that the individual has
achieved match socially sanctioned expectations. "Integrity" may not necessarily
be related to democratic behavior.
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Since schools serve developing individuals, the issue at hand is one of how the
implementation of the educational habitus meshes with maturation to lead to
participation/dealienation or to alienation/nonparticipation in the widest sense of
the word. To the extent that school-based challenges are dealienating, they will
encourage role incumbents to be independent, take risks, perceive their true
needs, and be creative according to their own potentials. A dealienating
education will encourage people to participate, that is, to test personal
constructions of their life conditions by spontaneous confrontation with the real
world ( Kelly, 1955). Sets of encounters that are alienating will, on the other
hand, foster dependency and conformism, and impose accepted contructions of
reality and identification with the collective. By isolating a specific aspect of the
habitus, the researcher can gain insight into the life experience at school and into
the guidelines it supplies for adulthood.
I will summarize findings from two studies related to aspects of the pedagogical
habitus as embodied in school regulations in Jewish and Arab schools in Israel.
The studies are part of a project designed to look at the cultural elements
selected for transmission in schools and how these elements are organized to
affect socialization/development. 2
The Research
Background
In Israel, schools are designed and administered from the center by a state
Ministry of Education. "Guidelines for regulations about school routines" were
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In the first part of the study data were collected from the regulations of 52
schools in the north of Israel, 34 in which Hebrew is the medium of instruction
and 18 in which Arabic is used. I also conducted exploratory interviews with 20
teachers or principals responsible for enforcing the regulations.
Altogether, there were 2,213 provisions in the documents, with a mean of about
50 per school in the Jewish schools and 32 in the Arab schools. With the help of
a research assistant, I analyzed the content to see which resolutions of cultural
challenges were encouraged. By referring to the style of presentation, the topics
covered, the "recipes" for action and interaction, and the exposition of norms,
we could work out how the content of the documents intersects with cultural
challenges. The following is an overview of the resolutions implied for each
developmental stage.
The wide variety of topics to which regulations refer indicates that all
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aspects of school life fall under some rule. These include detailed instructions on
how to behave and to dress. There are 543 items that relate to orientations to
study, of which about 80% deal with technicalities of achievement such as
exams, quizzes, and grades. There are also rules about school property and
interpersonal relationships including safety precautions and rules for the
prevention of violence. All the provisions are presented as approved perceptions
of universalistic principles.
The content analysis shows that the successes of stages in adult life are not
furthered in the schools. "Intimacy" is perceived to conflict with academic
achievement specifically and with the atmosphere of school as a whole. Instead,
pupils must learn to be isolated individuals. In the role behaviors that are
described and lauded, there is no hint that the impulse to "generativity" is
advantageous. Moreover, neither creativity nor novelty are mentioned in any of
the documents.
Constraints that enable a person to achieve the accolade of "good pupil" cue us
to the type of "integrity" adumbrated in the regulations. The attainment of
"integrity" seems to be contingent on accepting conformity with the objective
demands of the system, which are funneled through the school.
Stage 2
In the second stage of the research, teachers and pupils from 105 schools were
interviewed individually about their perceptions of the regulations. Of the 1,800
student and 850 teacher protocols, 2,074 (1,459 students and 749 teachers) were
analyzed. Of these, 28% were from primary schools and 72% from
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The analysis included calculations of scores on each measure for the entire
population and separately for the Arabic-speaking and Hebrew-speaking sectors.
Subgroups were defined in terms of role (teacher or pupil), school level, and
gender. Spearman correlations were calculated to assess the independence of the
indices. We used the chi-square statistic to compare scores of the subgroups. For
reasons of space I will summarize only some salient findings.
Although respondents knew about the school's regulations, few could remember
whether the knowledge had come from reading a document or from some other
source. A full 95% thought that the principal made them up, while less than 15%
(including teachers) felt that they could influence their formulation. In the Arab
sector, the perception that information about school regulations is unreliable and
that nobody but the principal who formulates them really knows all the details
was more pronounced.
There was a good deal of uncertainty about the consistency with which stated
sanctions were implemented. More than 90% of the pupils could, however, cite
specific actions for which punishments were always meted out. All the
respondents knew the proscriptive and prescriptive rules that applied to
deviations in dress, unjustified absences, lateness, breaches of discipline, and
damage to school property. In Arabic-speaking schools, there was a wider
agreement that sanctions were applied consistently.
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Discussion
This study of regulations and their implementation in Israeli schools was
undertaken to assess how they are likely to influence pupils' orientation to
participation in a democratic community. I analyzed documents and their
implementation on the assumption that schools produce acceptable citizens by
intervening in students' development. The mechanism is that of devising
challenges that accord with a hegemonic sociocultural consensus. The
theoretical basis was Erikson ( 1950) construal of human development and the
explication of its possible connections with objective and subjective dimensions
of alienation.
From the analysis of documents (stage 1 of the research), we learned that the
challenges presented to pupils frame conditions of alienation. From responses to
the individual interviews (stage 2), it was possible to draw conclusions about the
differentiated impact of the regulations on respondents' perceptions. These
findings index consequences of an objectively alienating framework on the
subjective affect and the orientations to action of those involved in schools. The
discussion relates to both phases of the research.
The content analysis of the regulations disclosed that schools intentionally set up
objective conditions that are alienating and designed to induce nonarticipation.
Relating them to socialization, I found that schools do not allocate equal
significance to all the developmental successes that Erikson's theory defines.
The accomplishments emphasized in the regulations in the form of "trust,"
"industry," and the "role-identity" of an obedient student encourage passivity.
Resolutions such as "autonomy," "initiative," "intimacy," and "generativity" are
neglected or expressly precluded. Thus, the rules and
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regulations that govern Israeli schools are slanted toward what Erikson
characterized as the "positive" resolutions of the challenges that turn a person
into a dependent of a bureaucracy--the school organization. At the same time,
regulations are biased toward the "negative" resolution of those challenges that
promise full self-realization in the praxis of adults.
These findings raise theoretical paradoxes. Success in adopting the identity that
the school regulations define signals identification with a stereotype.
Theoretically, this should lead to discomfort at the resulting excessive
normfulness and feelings of self-estrangement. In school practice, however, such
conformity is likely to impart a sense of being able to do things (the negation of
powerlessness), as well as a feeling that one can understand what is going on in
the school surroundings (the negation of meaninglessness). In the framework of
the school, "industry" is the legitimate means to the goal of scholastic success.
Diligence entitles pupils to extrinsic rewards. However, in contrast to Heinz
( 1992) theoretical understanding, the pupil is led to accept these as congruent
with self-interest rather than self-estrangement. The fundamental lesson
imparted by the documents is the Orwellian "Newspeak" principle that
submission is autonomy and self-actualization. This principle is the core of the
systematic inculcation of false consciousness of self ( Marx, 1967; Orwell,
1951).
When all is said and done, then, the aspects of alienation that are, in fact,
perceived by the people involved cannot be determined theoretically. Stage 2 of
the study was designed to check on the immediate affective consequences of the
objective alienating conditions and their significance to teachers and pupils.
Pupils are content to ignore the regulations insofar as possible. They construct a
world of their own--a world of mutual involvement, even of intimacy, in which,
as their responses to the interviews show, the regulations are recognized as a
knotty setting that one takes care not to brush up against. Real life--the cosmos
of childhood and adolescence--is taking place where children meet and construct
situations in which they play and play out roles, finding ways to circumvent
unpleasantness. However, children also sense the contradictions.
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As the regulations make clear, and as the pupils demonstrate in their responses,
private interests and personal quirks are a nuisance in the school context. Pupils
are plucked out of their natural context and consigned to identical pigeonholes
by rule of the personal file and grade. It is accepted, moreover, that part of being
a good student is sticking to the rules, whether or not you have participated in
formulating them and whether or not you feel that a given rule is in the interest
of your unique individuality. The total endorsement of the regulations as
inevitable demonstrates that schools manage to impart the moral that self-
estrangement in the theoretical sense actually serves self-interest in the
organization. Role incumbents who recognize this central metanorm are
rewarded handsomely.
The disjunctions explain the disorder that seems to be held in abeyance only
temporarily despite the bias of the regulations toward orderliness, predictability,
and normative role behaviors. Strangely enough, the staff agree that they have to
cope with meaninglessness; teachers reported that the rules are revised every
year because "circumstances change." Perpetual monitoring is needed because in
principle, the "cracks" are inherent to the conception of how schools should be
run.
There are good grounds for questioning these conclusions. For one thing,
alienation stubbornly refuses to disappear as a problem, even in the fin de sicle
postmodern climate. It is, however, questionable whether pen-and-pencil tests
are
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Furthermore, a key failure of the Seeman studies, furthermore, is, in our terms,
their gross inattention to the educational background of the workers apart from
logging years of schooling. Although the sheer quantity of schooling is no doubt
of some importance, the quality of those years is a more important indicator of
the tendency of workers in a study to use "making do" as a viable and satisfying
strategy for conducting their lives.
On the basis of the studies I have carried out, I would claim that any serious
examination of alienation has to consider the preparation for work embedded in
the structures of school life, as well as its effects over time. The impact of the
pedagogical habitus on pupils as discerned in my researches can be interpreted
as evidence that the process of forcing people to enjoy life as a series of
"remarkable, if trivial, small occasions" is integral to institutionalized
educational interventions. Manipulations of terminology, of rewards and
punishments, and of their diverse combinations, as driven by hegemonic
relations, at once induce nonparticipation and inculcate ways of managing an
alienated existence.
The analysis of documents generated hypotheses about the effects of rules and
regulations on pupils. Further analyses have distinguished some of the
differentiated effects on pupils of different backgrounds. The findings from this
project indicate that there is leverage in mapping other structural components of
the school system in order to see to what extent they support the bias of
intervention toward alienation. The crowning aim is to elicit the potential for
participation or nonparticipation that enculturation--socialization--andeducation
impart to the individual personality over time.
Notes
1. Seeman ( 1967) adds the category of "cultural estrangement." I interpret this
as an extension of "social estrangement" rather than as a separate
phenomenon.
2. Details of the choice of schools, procedures, instruments, and steps in the
analysis are available from the author.
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9
Alienation and Racial Discrimination in the European Union
Marie Macey
This chapter examines the links between economic globalization, alienation, and
racial discrimination in relation to the European Union (EU). It argues that there
is a relationship between the increasing levels of racism in the EU and alienating
processes at the global, international, national, local, and individual levels. 1
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Other features associated with global competition include a general shift to the
right in the economic policies of EU member states ( Tsoukalis, 1991); the
relocation of labor-intensive industries in areas where labor is cheap and
plentiful and social costs low ( Abrahamson, 1991); and the reduction or loss of
welfare benefits ( Burkitt and Baimbridge, 1993; Kennett, 1994). These
exacerbate the tendency toward dual societies and labor markets. Gimenez's
criticisms of the privatization of state enterprises, the dismantling of
protectionist regulations, and the general delegitimation of union and working-
class demands were made about Argentina but apply equally to many countries
in the EU, as do her comments that such policies unavoidably deepen alienation
( 1992, p. 185).
Gimenez suggests, "It is in the sphere of the struggle for survival that the
political effects of alienation can surface in the popular consciousness with
potentially disastrous consequences" ( 1992, p. 190). One such consequence is
the growing tendency for white majorities to perceive visible minorities, not
only as
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competitors for scarce resources, but as responsible for that scarcity. This
scapegoating, in various formats, is currently taking place at the international,
national, local, and individual levels and has been exacerbated by the spread of
an ideology emphasizing the supremacy of market forces and the primacy of
individualism. It can be seen in policies that marginalize and exclude minorities;
in political discourses that define them as "the problem"; in the discriminatory
practices operating to limit access to social wealth; and in the organized,
streetlevel violence that is increasingly practiced against minorities.
The history of racism in Europe is not pretty. Its most evil and
grotesque manifestation--the Third Reich--falls easily within
living memory. This last attempt, by force of conquest, to remove
European boundaries was of a very different nature from the
Treaty-making processes currently underway. But a disturbing
thread of brutal disregard for the human rights of ethnic minority
people settled in the continent runs through the two endeavors.
( Boateng, 1989, p. ii)
Discrimination against minorities, particularly visible ones, takes place on a
number of dimensions at the EU level, including agreements, conventions, and
policy decisions. 2 For example, one convention introduced at the Dublin
meeting of interior and home affairs ministers in 1990 ruled that if a third-
country national is refused entry by one member state, this is tantamount to
refusal by all the others. 3 A second convention ruled that the country of first
entry must assume responsibility for the foreign national concerned ( Ford,
1992). These rulings will encourage both the development of restrictive
immigration policies and more rigorous checks at borders as member states
move to avoid being seen as lax on immigration and/or having to accept
responsibility for entrants ( Baimbridge, Burkitt, and Macey, 1994).
Another example is the completion of the single internal market (SIM) of the
EU in January 1993. The SIM is designed to remove boundaries between
member states to form an area without frontiers in which the free movement of
goods, persons, services, and capital is ensured. Two aspects of this could
impact negatively on visible minorities. First, as internal frontiers between
member states are dismantled, external boundaries between the EU and other
countries are being progressively strengthened (a process that has led to the use
of the term Fortress Europe). This could lead to more stringent checks on
immigration statuses at borders and to random checks when, for instance, people
request housing, health care, or other forms of social welfare ( Flynn, 1989).
Second, Western Europe seems to be redefining its identity in a way that
excludes black citizens. Both these processes could have adverse consequences
for individuals and groups labeled outsiders in the new Europe, whether non-
Europeans or EU residents of ethnic, or other, minority origin. This is
particularly problematic in a context
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where the discourse has become racialized to the point where immigrant and
black are virtually synonymous.
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In almost every case, such controls appear to be directed toward restricting the
entry of black, rather than white, people. The European Commission warned
that these policies could contribute toward structural discrimination ( European
Commission, 1988); the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights linked them to
the growth of fascism and racism (Netherlands Institute of Human Rights,
1988), and the Human Rights Division of the Council of Europe expressed grave
concern over the tightening of policies on asylum seekers and refugees
(European Parliament, 1985). Notwithstanding these cautions, EU member
states are developing ever more stringent entry criteria for potential immigrants,
refugees, and asylum seekers. Boateng commented:
This situation is unlikely to be improved by the shift toward the right that has
taken place in Western European local and national politics in recent years. In
France and Germany, political parties of the far right (campaigning on an overtly
anti-black, anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant ticket) have gained in electoral
popularity in recent years. In Italy in 1994, over 150 right-wing National
Alliance representatives were elected, 5 of whom are now government
ministers. In Britain in 1993, a British National Party (BNP) candidate was
elected in a local election and, though this candidate was subsequently
deselected in 1994, the fact remains that in some localities, BNP candidates
received up to 30% of the vote. Baimbridge, Burkitt, and Macey ( 1994) carried
out an econometric analysis of the results of elections to the European
Parliament between 1979 and 1989, which demonstrates rising electoral support
for parties of the far right in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy
and Spain. They point to a clear association between economic recession,
unemployment, and votes for the far right, a finding confirmed by Mayer
( 1995) with respect to France.
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contexts (European Parliament, 1985, and 1990). Amin and Oppenheim's
description of the structural location of minorities in Britain applies to many
other states in the EU. This is partly the legacy of postwar migration in Europe
when an expanding economy led to the recruitment of foreign workers to fulfil
the needs of the labor market. Migrant workers were generally located in the
lowest socioeconomic groups in particular sectors of the economy; they had few
employment rights, earned low wages and were often disenfranchised and
nonunionized ( Brown, 1984; Cohen, 1987; Ogden, 1991). In consequence, they
had only limited access to such social rights as adequate education, health care,
housing, social security, disability and sickness allowances. Subsequent
economic contraction and a decline in the manufacturing, transport and
communications industries (in which large numbers of minorities were
employed) resulted in high levels of unemployment or low-paid, casualized
work ("disguised unemployment") since they were unable to gain the skills
necessary for redeployment in the expanding service sector.
Violence in the EU
Young people who commit racist crimes do not fall out of the
sky. They are children of our society. This society is marked by
competitiveness and by a tendency which promotes "I virtues"
rather than "We virtues." It is a society which idealizes the
performance of the individual, rather than social or ethical values.
( Voigt, 1993)
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Gypsies (Roma) are the object of verbal and physical abuse. Muslims suffer
assaults on their persons and property, including their mosques. Asylum seekers
and refugees are the target of violent attacks, including firebombings of hostels,
reception centers and private homes. Turks are subjected to physical violence
and murder. Of grave concern is the authorities' failure to act: in Germany, for
example, the police at best ignored, and at worst encouraged, ferocious neo-Nazi
attacks on foreigners in May 1994.
Thus far, I have argued that the process of globalization has led to intensified
competition in the EU, resulting in wide-scale economic and social
restructuring. This has been accompanied by the development of an ideology
prioritizing free market mechanisms, individualism, and competition, and it has
influenced the development of right-wing economic and political policies of
privatization, reduction of welfare benefits, and deregulation. The outcome has
been polarization within, and between, member states, groups, and individuals
as people are forced into a degree of poverty that marginalizes and alienates
them. This, in turn, has led to the targeting of minorities as scapegoats at the
international, national, local, and individual levels.
The concept of alienation can be seen to underpin all the spheres identified here.
At the international level, one of the major issues confronting the EU is that of
human movement, whether migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers. In 1992, the
number of refugees worldwide was estimated at 17.6 million, 1 million more
than in 1991 and over twice the figure of 10 years previously (not including
internally displaced people). 5 Moreover, as Gimenez ( 1992) observed, the
alienation of labor power underlies internal and international migration as
people with only their labor power to sell are forced out of their communities.
Much north-south migration has its roots in the gulf between the wealth of the
north and the poverty of the south, which shows no signs of decreasing. The
other main direction of migration of concern to the EU is that between East and
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West Europe, which also has its roots in material inequality. One of the
consequences of the massive disparities in wealth at the global level is that
migration and refugee movements are likely to continue to grow beyond their
already extremely high levels. In the present economic climate, it is probable
that the EU will close its borders ever more firmly to those defined as
"outsiders," many--though by no means all--of whom are black. This has
consequences, not only for the people excluded, but for minorities within the EU
as distinctions fail to be made between, for example, Third World refugees and
black EU citizens.
At the national level, governments are confronted by the question of how to deal
with increasing applications for entry from refugees, asylum seekers, and
migrants. In a socioeconomic climate of near recession and high unemployment
it seems likely that for the foreseeable future, governments will continue to
restrict entry and ration citizenship entitlements ( Mitchell and Russell, 1994). In
the process, there has been a tendency for politicians (notably in France, the
United Kingdom and Belgium) to whip up anxiety among already alienated
people by eliding asylum applications with grossly exaggerated statistics on
(black) illegal immigration.
At the local level, it can be suggested that as long as people are forced to
compete for scarce social resources, they will define others as a threat and act
accordingly. When competition is for that most crucial resource--a job--the
struggle for survival is likely to lead to a focus on minorities as "the enemies"
who are taking jobs away from local people. Nor is this entirely without
foundation, for though racism in employment practices is clearly documented,
the rampant competitiveness of the global market has encouraged employers to
engage in practices that disadvantage workers of both majority and minority
status. In Germany, for example, as many as half a million (mainly Eastern
European) workers are estimated to be employed illegally on building sites,
where they are paid less than half the official rate. At a time when labor is
becoming increasingly disorganized, this situation is likely to exacerbate
hostility between groups. This is an example of intergroup alienation whereby
competitors are defined as enemies instead of victims of the structures that
induce the competition. Levy terms this "structure blindness" and identifies it as
". . . a basic mechanism in xenophobic reactions and other forms of
discrimination" ( 1992, p. 69).
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Conclusion
Discrimination, social injustice, fear of social decline and
concern over jobs and housing have always resulted in a search
for a scapegoat--the root of much of our present-day aggression
and violence. ( Voigt, 1993)
In this chapter I have concentrated on what might be termed the material base of
discrimination against visible minorities in the EU and have suggested that a
considerable amount of racism has its roots in economic globalization and its
exacerbation of poverty and inequality. Globalization creates an apparently
unbreakable chain which links the international, national, local and individual
levels in ways that are not always apparent. In terms of the EU, this chain
connects the community, local states, organizations, and individuals so that
policies adopted at the EU level (such as the Maastricht Treaty) have
consequences for each level of linkage. For example, individual member states
are pushed toward the exclusion of "outsiders" and the implementation of right
wing economic and social welfare policies; employers are pushed toward
practices that, in different ways, disadvantage both migrant workers and the
indigenous population; and workers (and/or the unemployed) are confronted by
a struggle for survival that pushes them toward defining visible minorities as
competitors for scarce resources and scapegoats for the ills of society.
The entire process both is rooted in, and leads to, alienation, which is
increasingly expressed in various forms of racial discrimination. The alienation
is economic in origin, and it is in this sphere that action needs to be taken to
achieve what Addy ( 1994) termed a "humane economy," without which there
can be little hope of racial amity.
Notes
1. The term racism is highly problematic. It is used in this chapter to refer to
discrimination by one group against another on the basis of ascribed
biological inferiority.
2. An ethnic group is a segment of larger society which is seen by others to
differ in some combination of language, religion, race and/or culture and
whose members perceive themselves in that way ( Yinger, 1986). Minorities
are subordinate segments of complex state societies ( Wagley and Harris,
1958). Visible minorities are groups that are recognizably different from the
majority of the population, frequently in terms of phenotypic characteristics
such as skin color.
3. A third-country national is a citizen of a state that is not a member of the
EU.
4. The mandate of the Trevi group is to examine terrorism, radicalism,
extremism, and international violence. The Schengen group (of countries)
has agreed to common policies on visas and "firm" border control; members
keep and exchange computerized information on asylum seekers and
"undesirables."
5. European Consultation on Refugees and Exiles, 1993.
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10
Postmodern Culture and the Revisioning of Alienation
Kenneth J. Gergen
Inquiries into alienation have long been significant entries into deliberations on
cultural life. In this respect, 20th century discussions of alienation have drawn
importantly on well established traditions of humanism (for example, Rousseau
Kierkegaard ), romanticism (e.g. Fichte Schiller), German idealism (e.g., Hegel),
and classical economic theory (e.g., A. J. S. Mill Smith). Although the particular
configurations of twentieth-century writings offer much that is new and
different, much of their challenge has continued to rely on assumptions of
historical long standing. In particular, I propose that most of the major theorists
of alienation in contemporary times share with many of their predeccessors one
or more of the assumptions discussed in this chapter:
The central drama for much alienation theory thus results from positing the loss
of the natural condition of selfhood, that is, an alienation from one's own core
being. Because this loss cannot be originated within the self--i.e. there is no
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reason for the human agent in his/her natural state to become self-alienated--the
source of the deterioration is typically traced to the environment (e.g., defective
economic or work conditions, urban life, consumerism, social influence).
Although not the exclusive palliative, a very common means of alleviating
selfalienation is some form of psychotherapy. Therapy has served as a common
solution, from Paul Schilder's work on self-spectatorship in 1914 to Frederick
Weiss's discussion of the dynamics of self-alienation in 1964, Bugental
existential account in 1965, and the contemporary existentialist theorizing of
Muller ( 1987).
2. Authentic Action
Closely associated with these arguments, it is common among twentiethcentury
theorists to presume a naturally preferred state of coordination between the
autonomous self and personal action. Again drawing primarily from humanistic
and romanticist resources, individual agency is presumed to be realized through
action. When one's actions are consistent with one's intentions and one's
intentions are grounded in the experience of one's true nature, one is operating
as a fully functioning or authentic human being.
Here the drama of alienation analysis is generated by sounding the alarm for the
loss of this preferred state of being--the alienation of the self from action. In
Marx's account of alienated labor, we find that
the more the worker exerts himself, the more powerful becomes the world of
things which he creates and which confront him as alien objects; hence the
poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less belongs to him as his own. . . .
The greater the worker's activity, therefore, the more pointless his life becomes.
Whatever the product of his labor, it is no longer his own ( 1964, p. 71 ).
As Lewis Mumford ( 1934, p. 6 ) wrote in regard to the impending influence of
machine technology in our lives, "With the successive demands of the outside
world so frequent and so imperative, without any respect to their real
importance, the inner world becomes progressively meager and formless;
instead of active selection there is passive absorption, ending in a state of addled
subjectivity."
Such views have also been reflected and extended variously in the works of
Erich Fromm, Ivan Illich (in the case of schooling as alienated activity), and
more recently, Oldenquist and Rosner ( 1991). While therapy has been the
preferred solution to problems of self-alienation, forms of revolution (e.g.,
economic, cultural, educational) have more frequently been championed as
means of returning to the natural condition of authenticity.
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It is also worth noting here the underlying irony inherent in much alienation
writing, to wit, that while it is essential for the individual to belong to (to feel
part of or be at one with) organized social units, it is the social world that
simultaneously splits the self from its original base, destroying the natural,
agentive inclinations as they are appropriated, obligated, or otherwise ensnared
by the demands of the social. In effect, as alienation theories are wont to argue,
immersion in the social is both essential and self-destructive (see, for example,
Fromm ( 1941) on the "escape from freedom," Whyte ( 1991) on the
"imprisonment in brotherhood," Riesman ( 1973) on "other-directedness," and
Pappenheim ( 1968) on the "inauthenticity of the anonymous crowd"). One
should not be alienated from organized society, but simultaneously, to be at one
with the social group is to risk alienation from the self.
Nonetheless, these waning years of the twentieth century are also an auspicious
time for reflection, for the latter half of the twentieth century in particular has
brought with it an important range of new and challenging conditions. As it is
surmised, with increasing frequency we are shifting from a period of cultural
and intellectual modernism to the challenges of a postmodern condition. To the
extent that such surmises are sensitive, it is no longer clear that the presumptions
of traditional alienation theory remain serviceable. The conceptual resources that
are redolent with rhetorical potential and fit for effective cultural work may be
historically situated. In the same way that concepts of melancholy, mal de
sicle, anomie, and identity crisis reached their nadir and slowly vanished from
cultural
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In the remainder of this chapter I would like, first, to focus on several significant
intellectual developments of recent years and their implications for theories of
alienation. As I shall propose, to the extent that these lines of argument achieve
credibility, traditional alienation theory loses its capacity to compel. Then, I
wish to consider briefly several emerging conditons of culture that seem
congenial to these various forms of argument. In effect, this will be done to
propose that traditional theories of alienation may be losing their relevance to
our emerging conditions. Finally, rather than abandoning the concept of
alienation, I propose a revisioning. Specifically, I propose that by shifting the
locus of theoretical concern from the individual to relatedness, we may refigure
the concept of alienation. In its altered semiotic matrix, the concept may
continue to speak importantly and critically to our postmodern condition.
A Tradition in Question
Let us again consider the several presumptions undergirding major forms of
alienation theory, but now in the light of the robust intellectual currents of recent
decades. Here, as elsewhere, my analysis must necessarily be circumscribed.
However, for any intellectualy engaged scholar, the present account should be
sufficient to call forth a host of more elaborated exegeses. First, we confront a
host of writings, from many quarters of the academy, set against the traditional
assumption of an autonomous and naturalized self.
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and therapy invite persons into these realities, so is the professional language of
the individual mind objectified. Thus, as people today commonly speak of
depression, mental illness, occupational stress, burnout, and anxiety, they are
operating as extensions of the hegemonic discourse of the mental health
professions. As they submit themselves to therapeutic treatment, purchase
antidepressants, and develop policies for mental health insurance, they are
submitting to relations of power.
With autonomous subjectivity thus impugned (or the "death of the author" as
postmodernists would have it), we are positioned to consider the second canon
of alienation theory, namely authentic action. As these various incursions make
clear, without an identifiable state of natural mind (i.e., beyond social
interpolation), it is difficult to theorize the authentic. On the one hand, this is to
say that if all that is internal is an installation of the social, then there is no
action that can reflect a state of pure agency. There would be no means by which
we could distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic act, for all actions would
be inauthentic by virtue of their origins in the artificial tissues of the social.
Some actions might be indexed as more expressive of self than others, but this
sense of "true expression" would ultimately be deceiving. What is "true" is
simply more rooted in convention and thus, from the traditional standpoint, all
the more alienated.
From the more radical writings of Foucault and the social constructionists the
critique of authenticity is more brutal: there simply is no inner world that is--or
is not--expressed in external action. The inner world is an attributed world, a
construction of the self employed in the marketplace of daily affairs. In this case
the entire dualistic premise that guides traditional alienation theory is thrown
into question. This position is pursued most vigorously, perhaps, in Derrida
( 1976) critique of what he sees as the logocentric tradition in human letters. For
Derrida, all texts are self-referring; they gain their meaning by virtue of their
relationship to other texts. To extend the logic to human action, one's words and
deeds are not rendered meaningful by virtue of their relationship with a
psychological interior. Rather, their meaning is derived from their relationship
with other words and deeds.
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Here I can only scan the intellectual landscape. There are, for one, the writings
of fragmentation, which see the thrust of cultural modernism toward unified and
rational society giving way, first to wholesale fragmentation ( Frisby) and then
to the loss of centralized order ( Deleuze and Guattari). It is in the latter vein that
theorists have variously recognized the replacement of strong institutionalized
power with the capillary proliferation of discourses ( Foucault), the demise of
strong hegemonic orders and the rise of multiple nodules or centers of organized
meaning ( Lauclau and Mouffe), and the endless circulation and transformation
of signs within contemporary technoculture ( Lyotard).
However, these various accounts of disunified society do not take us quite far
enough for present purposes. Specifically we must consider the relationship of
the individual to the social entities--even in their fragmented form. Traditional
alienation literature often posits the individual as separate from the social--as
either cut away from a necesary lodgment or buried within a social sphere that
prevents self realization. However, as much of the literature on the autonomous
self suggests, this view is deeply flawed. As outlined here, this view is
effectively replaced by one in which the individual is inherently a social agent.
To the extent that the world is meaningful at all, the individual is a culturally
interpolated being.
However, there are reasons for resisting this option. The postmodern literature
from which I have drawn succeeds so powerfully in deconstructing the analytic
vehicles of the social sciences (the concept of alienation only the immediate
instantiation) that it runs the risk of full irrelevance. The rush to deconstruction
is everywhere apparent, but to succumb fully to this delicious impulse is to
paralyze the social analyst and indeed, all subsequent dialogue. Rather than
endlessly picking the bones of past articulations, it seems preferable
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Rather, it is the strong sense of a secure base that becomes suspect. Certainty of
self operates as a rigidifying influence, the sense of an autonomous center denies
the forms of interdependence that render "being" possible. Indeed, the
traditional demands for coherence and consistency in self might reasonably be
traced to the influence of hegemonic forces--such as church and state--that
demanded a coherent subject in order to better guard their interests against
competetive ideologies. It is when one moves in a state of ambiguous
multiplicity that realization of relational being is most fully realized.
These arguments also form the basis for reconceptualizing the problem of
alienated action. Rather than viewing certain actions as more synchronous or
expressive of a naturalized or autonomous self, let us consider all forms of
action as culturally interpreted. Thus, for example, whether any particular action
constitutes "work," and whether what we call work is valued or devalued, are
both subject to cultural signification.
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The outcome of such an analysis is not, then, to revolutionize the world of work;
this would be to destroy at least one internally valued realm of relatedness, and
indeed, that realm from which the occupation has germinated. Rather, the
invitation is for significant boundary work that might enable an interpenetration
of the signifiers and the relevant community of users. (See also M. Pecheux,
1982, on "disidentification" in organizations.)
What, finally, can be said about unified social structures and the individual's loss
of (or failure to gain) participation therein? From the present standpoint, the
traditional view of self versus society is deeply problematic and should be
replaced by a conception of the self as always already immersed in relatedness.
On this account, the individual's lament of "not belonging" is partially a
byproduct of the traditional discourses themselves. To experience a sense of
existential isolation is, in this sense, grossly misleading. The experience itself
owes its palpability to a preexisting immersion in a tradition of meaning, which
bestowes on this condition the degree of value and significance that writers
(particularly the existentialists) place on it.
These are, of course, but faltering and thinly articulated moves into a largely
uncharted conceptual space. At the present time we lack a rich tradition of
relational theorizing. However, it is possible that the postmodern turn in the
intellectual world may provide a much-needed opening to new ranges of theory.
However, these resources may be essential tools for grappling with the emerging
conditions of global transformation.
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11
The Self Strikes Back: Identity
Politics in the Postmodern Age
Lauren Langman and Valerie Scatamburlo
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Hal Foster ( 1983, pp. ix-xvi) argued that reactionary postmodernism takes on
an apolitical, ahistorical, and uncritical character in the course of repudiating
modernism, whereas a postmodernism of resistance seeks to deconstruct
modernism and the status quo from critical perspectives. Elaborating on this
formulation, Teresa Ebert ( 1991, 1992- 1993) has termed those approaches to
social theory concerned almost exclusively with signs, signification, texts, and
the discursive as ludic postmodernism. Ludic postmodernism, which often
perpetuates the status quo by reducing history and agency to the
"supplementarity of signification" (celebrating consumption and technology and
the migration of the subject to hyperreality), is, as we argue, decidedly limited in
its ability to interrogate broader social relations of power and privilege. The
distinction between these two differing constellations within postmodern theory
is also significant for an adequate understanding of the various ways in which
the self, the subject, and identity are taken up in regnant trajectories.
Our purpose here is not to provide an exhaustive survey of the assorted views on
the self or of theories of subjectivity and identity formation. Rather, we want to
consider some of the "political" implications of current theorizations of the
subject. In some of the more overzealous efforts to repudiate the essentialism of
the Cartesian formulation, some forms of ludic postmodernism have boldly
declared the "end" of the subject, while others have suggested that the very
concept of the subject implodes in the society of simulations ( Baudrillard,
1983). Still others still have sought to problematize the subject of bourgeois
liberal humanism by producing accounts of an anti-essentialist, decentered, and
mainly
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discursive subject.
These approaches dismiss any conception of the subject as a stable entity and
argue that the parameters of the subject vary according to dominant discursive
practices. Of course, this notion of the subject is indebted, in part, to the work of
Lacan ( 1977), whose post-Saussurean models of language and rereading of
Freud emphatically repudiated the attribution of consciousness to the subject. In
contrast to humanism's primacy of consciousness and its belief in the subject as
the origin and destination of discourse, Lacan's antihumanist stance suggests
that the subject is produced by its entry into language. This entry into the
symbolic order produces a subject that is, rather than being the origin of
discourse, spoken through discourse--a position with which we subsequently
take issue.
Critiques of the subject have also drawn extensively from the scholarship of
Michel Foucault. Against positions that presume a pre-given, unified subject or a
fixed human essence, Foucault suggested that "one has to dispense with the
constituent subject, and to get rid of the subject itself, that's to say, to arrive at an
analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical
framework" ( 1980, p. 117).
Furthermore, in these ludic formulations too little attention is paid to how the
issue of subjectivity can be linked to a notion of human agency in which self-
reflexive, politically capable (rather than merely discursive) selves become
possible. The restrictive focus on discourse within ludic postmodernism also
leaves other spheres of social life and material existence virtually unexamined,
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The postmodern conflation of the social and the experiential to the discursive
condemns us to grasping reality solely through language and carries with it the
danger of a "loss of affect" ( Yudice, 1988). Consequently, gender, race, class,
and sexual specificity are denuded of their historical and ontological existence
and instead textualized as formal categories. Furthermore, despite its ardent
disavowal and repudiation of Enlightenment epistemology and its inherent
dualisms, postmodernism falls short on its promise of abandoning them and has
in essence reinscribed them, albeit in inverse fashion. In other words, the "other"
in binary constructs such as mind/body, universal/particular,
sameness/difference, and culture/nature has simply been exalted. Finally, the
fetishization of textuality and discursivity also attenuates the potential for
agency, undermines the realm of experience and consciousness, elides, ideology
and in many ways has supplanted more radical forms of social theory that
attempt to grapple with relations of power and hegemony.
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up as a mediating influence between social structure and social consciousness.
Identity politics has enabled subaltern groups to reconstruct their own histories
and give voice to their individual and collective experiences. We would argue
that the attention accorded to experience and agency in identity politics serves as
a partial corrective to ludic narratives; however, the rise of identity politics has
been a mixed blessing.
Moreover, like ludic postmodernism, the politics of identity has also failed to
move beyond these dualisms and instead has merely valorized and defended the
devalued member of the binary set, thus inverting rather than subverting or
transcending binary oppositions. In addition, the exclusive emphasis on
experience has been charged with reinstating a liberal humanist conception of
the subject. Here, identity politics is about the (re)discovery of an already
existing identity that is founded on a conception of the subject as centered,
coherent, and self-authored, differing only from classical liberal humanism in its
assumption that identity is plural ( Bondi, 1993). Furthermore, there has also
been a tendency within identity politics of essentializing difference and
psychologizing questions of oppression which, in turn, reduces the political to
the personal and ignores the historical and social situatedness of subalterity.
Finally, the mere declaration that the personal is political, often ensconced in an
"I am, therefore I resist" formulation, is insufficient ground to assume a
politicized and oppositional identity ( Hooks, 1992; Mohanty, 1991).
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How then, and on what basis, can we begin to map out a basis for political
agency if, as Eagleton maintains, the problem we confront is that "almost all of
our models and metaphors of 'transformative' agency belong to the problematic
of humanism, in one or another voluntarist, essentialist or existentialist guise"
( 1987, p. 48). Eagleton's assertions raise a number of perplexing questions, and
while we do not purport to provide definitive answers, we would like to engage
some of them since they are inextricably related to debates around essentialism
and anti-essentialism which are situated in, and mediated by, the broader
contestations between humanism and antihumanism. However, prior to
addressing these tensions and attempting to provide epistemological and
ontological grounds for emancipatory critique that avoids both the totalizing
forms of essentialism and the pitfalls of bourgeois liberal humanism, we first
need to grapple with issues related to the subject.
We would argue that the starting point for rethinking the "subject" must first
articulate the differences between the self(hood), identity, and the subject. In
short, we suggest that selfhood, identity, and the subject represent different
levels of analysis wherein (i) selfhood reflects the realm of actual, embodied
experience; (ii) identity reflects a system of collective narratives that define
culture(s) as well as specific positions and; (iii) the subject reflects an abstract
concept of theoretical analysis most removed from actual experience.
Selfhood can be understood as a mode of reflexive awareness of a concrete
person as she or he participates in social life and enacts the various routines of
the habitus. While notions of an individualistic, differentiated, assertive selfhood
may be uniquely Western, selfhood is everywhere based on embodiment, in
which developmental schedules of cognition and language gradually enable
symbolic self-representations, reflections on past and present experiences, and
anticipated plans for future action. In all societies, preverbal experiences foster
the capacity
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to classify self and not self. With more complex cognitive operations and the
acquisition of language, selfhood includes symbolic capacities to locate itself in
temporal and interpersonal matrices.
It is through these identities that selfhood and, in turn, desire are realized in the
performances and interactive rituals of everyday life. While desire has
unconscious components, it is the association with particular identities that
enables the attainment of certain experiences. Regnant social groups construct
their own "self" identities and impose identities of "otherness" on marginalized
populations--identities which, when internalized by subalterns (the forms of
internalized colonization discussed by Fanon), colonize oppositional desire and
serve to reproduce social relations of oppression. The question that emerges, of
course, is how oppositional desire and forms of transformative agency can be
conceptualized.
In his eloquent articulation of the responsibility of theory, Smith argued that the
task for progressive thinkers is to restore a "dialectical view of the subject" that
does not preclude the "possibilities of resistance." Claiming that the purely
"discursive" subject of post-structuralism reflects a "depressive view of the
possibility of radical change," Smith maintains that in light of such
circumstances, a dialectical view of the subject and its "relation to the social"
must be reformulated as the basis for an adequate theory of agency ( 1988, pp.
158-159). We concur with Smith in this regard and have further suggested that
crucial distinctions must be made between the self, identity, and the subject. We
would add, however, that what is needed in discussions of agency and identity is
a conceptualization of the self and not the "subject" since the exclusive focus on
a theoretical and/or discursive subject abstracts the self from the social world,
occludes the materiality of power relations (i.e., notions such as totality are
rejected as grand narratives), and subverts the potential for agency and political
praxis. Hence, the fundamental dilemma of critics who refuse to forsake the
concept of agency is to devise a mode of conceptualizing agency that does not
fall prey to essentialist traps or anti-essentialist culs-de-sac.
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of human praxis. As Bologh and Mell ( 1994, p. 86) maintain, the dialectical
tradition turns to ontology and the study of being. A dialectic of the "concrete"
acknowledges and encourages the capacity for "reflexivity" and
"selfconsciousness" while seeking to make connections between seemingly
isolated and fragmented aspects of society.
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Mell, 1994, p. 106). Hence, static and essentialist "identities of being" are
replaced with a formulation of identity as an act of "becoming." Identities of
becoming are politically motivated and historically situated--they are not
grounded in essentialist, individualist prerogatives. Rather they are engendered
by a thorough and critical understanding of the social totality and nurtured in
collective struggles.
Humanism Reconsidered
Men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it just as
they please, they do not make it under circumstances chosen by
themselves ( Marx, 1978, p. 595)
The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of
emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule . . .
( Benjamin, 1969, p. 257)
Hence, there are alternative ways to conceptualize humanism that do not depend
on assumptions of (rational) human "nature." There are discourses that speak to
a possibility of working with new problematics of the subject that embrace
humanistic
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principles other than those of bourgeois liberal humanism. Indeed, the critique
of the liberal humanist "subject" began long before the emergence of "postie"
theories and can be found in the revolutionary humanist narratives of Marx and
Gramsci. For example, Marx opposed the bourgeois liberal humanist view of the
subject, and the point of his critique of a pregiven, static consciousness was to
advance the possibility of an oppositional political identity. The seeming
freedom and autonomy of the bourgeois "subject" to act in any way he or she
chooses are circumscribed by the material and historical conditions or
"circumstances" (as Marx deemed them in "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte," 1978b), over which the "subject" (as delineated in liberal
humanism) had little or no control. However, the potential for the abolition
and/or transformation of oppressive circumstances by embodied selves located
in history and seeking to overcome denigration is a recurring theme.
In addition, the work of Gramsci 1 and his own brand of "historical humanism"
which rejected Hegelian notions of transhistorical human nature and forms of
essentialism, were grounded in an understanding of selfhood and identity as
historically contingent entities, which could not be divorced from the lived,
material, and hence, concrete manifestations of embodied subjectivity. In sum,
while much of the "post-al" critique of humanism has rediscovered Nietzschean
and Freudian wheels, humanism as an epistemic and ethical position valorizing
human realization, can take a variety of historical forms besides its liberal
bourgeois incarnation. In addition, the history of ideas has shown a number of
expressions of humanist perspectives since Periclean Athens.
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that, while constantly subject to critique and negotiation, would take as their
starting point concrete praxis, lived experience, and the embodied capacity for
agency. However, the beginning of this new problematic occurs only when the
ludic theoretical and discursive subject of postmodernism is usurped by a
grounded, historical "self" that strikes back.
Note
1. Gramsci [ 1929- 1935] ( 1971) understanding of hegemony was based on his
concerns with self-understandings of the subaltern classes and how these
understandings, when imposed on these classes, blocked human potential. In
his discussions on the National Question, he described how hegemonic
processes that maintained the "backwardness" of the south, "blamed the
victim" by imposing denigrated identities upon the "stupid, lazy, deficient"
Southerners. In a different, yet related vein, Fanon ( 1961, 1967) work
attempted to grapple with similar issues as they related to the process of
colonization.
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12
Alienation, Everyday Life, and
Postmodernism as Critical Theory
Mark Gottdiener
Mike Featherstone ( 1991) observed that cultural analysis has assumed the status
of metatheory for postmodern commentators. He suggested that significant
arguments regarding the advent of "pomo" in advanced industrial societies are
currently derived from remarks about the quality of contemporary culture and
cultural change. Pomo theory, as developed in the writings of Jameson or
Baudrillard, assumes a larger significance for the role of culture in daily life than
the previous level of importance characterizing mass cultural analysis prior to
1970. At present important observations about the entire structure and
functioning of advanced industrial society come from cultural analysis.
In some of the earliest postmodern writings that socialized (see Crook, Pakulski,
and Waters, 1992) the issue of change by relating cultural to generic social
transformations, the intent of analysis was to periodize pomo and claim for it a
certain historical specificity ( Jameson, 1984; Baudrillard, 1983b). This effort
was meant less as a serious desire to establish stages in the development of
society or a demonstration of academic historical analysis than as an argument
for the coherence of social change under the hegemonic sign of an image-driven
and information-processing society whose meaning systems were defined by the
free play of difference. The Marxian variant of this early effort sought to
socialize the pomo question by correlating cultural change to phases of capitalist
development, specifically by correlating pomo to the political economy of post-
fordism and late capitalism ( Harvey, 1988).
More recently a number of social science writers have expressed the desire to
merge pomo cultural analysis with critical theory, or, in other words, to
resuscitate the critical theory tradition through an articulation of, or encounter
with, the metatheoretical implications of pomo cultural change ( Best and
Kellner,
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1991; Agger, 1992; see also Dickens and Fontana, 1994). This kind of inquiry
stands in contrast to both the work of Baudrillard, for example, who assumes a
fatalist, reductionist stance vis--vis cultural change, and also the
deconstructionism of Derrida which, I believe, is not only a form of idealism
and relativism, but possesses a very limited relevance to social science and
political economy ( Gottdiener, 1994).The critical theory of pomo culture takes
for granted the domination of sign value and the representation problematic as
formulated by Baudrillard and Jameson. It seeks, within the context of the new
dimensions of a transformed, previously modernist, industrial society, to relate
issues of cultural change to the question of domination or hegemony. Within this
framework it is acknowledged that postmodern culture has the following
characteristics: 1
1. The erosion of distinctions between what was formerly viewed as high art
and the popular forms of mass cultural expression: this phenomenon was
already known as the "democratization of U.S. culture" by critics of mass
culture in the 1950s.
2. Antifoundationalism and the erosion of totalizing, canonic referents for the
evaluation of artistic and cultural expressions: these have been replaced by
the referents of cultural pluralism and, in the case of the United States, by
multiculturalism as, for example, in the reversal of perspective during the
celebration of Columbus's discovery of the New World when he was
redefined as a fascist, imperialist, and genocidal (white male) "Eurocentric,"
i.e., merely a vulgar promoter of decadent Western civilization.
3. The reworking of all forms of cultural expression to the benefit of sign value
and the hegemony of the image through the transformation of reality into
simulation: along with this change, as discussed by Baudrillard ( 1983b),
comes the domination of culture by the mode of representation and the
problematic raised by representation as the defining characteristic of human
and aesthetic relations ( Jameson, 1984).
4. The ascendancy of a depthless culture based on metonymy (i.e., the
synchronic dimension) and difference as the principal textual figures, with
the consequent loss of the sense of history and antecedent continuity (the
diachronic dimension): this is accompanied by the fragmentation of time
and space to the benefit of the image and the domination of processes of
cultural change based on metonymy and depthless content, such as fashion
and fast capitalism, which are extended to all cultural manifestations,
including the sanctity of personal home furnishings and individual desires
( Baudrillard, 1968; Gottdiener, 1994).
The latter leads to what Baudrillard calls the aestheticization of experience due
to the domination of sign value, that is, according to Featherstone ( 1991, p.
270), the centrality of the commercial manipulation of images through
advertising, the media and the displays, performances, and spectacles of the
urbanized fabric of daily life, therefore, entails a constant reworking of desires
through images. Hence, the consumer society must not be regarded as only
releasing a dominant materialism, for it also confronts people with dream
images that speak to desires and that aestheticize and derealize reality.
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It is only by assessing the quality of daily life through individual and group
practices that conclusions can be drawn regarding alleged cultural changes
associated with either totalizing capitalist mass culture or, more recently,
postmodern society. In sum, I take the position that alleged postmodern changes
should be manifested in actions and not in the interpretations of a single
observer. The quality of postmodern society is not discovered through
interpretations or readings by the academic critic, but in the analysis of actions
and behaviors that can be characterized as embodying or encoding postmodern
qualities.
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This duality of the quotidian is different from the static and unidimensional state
connoted by Habermas Lebenswelt, which stands as some unified vestige of
precapitalist social relations distinguished from the "system" or the reified,
objective forces of social organization. The duality of "everyday life" and the
"quotidian," which encapsulates the ontological dialectic of alienation and
selfliberation, is also different from the concept of the "everyday" deployed by
some recent pomo writers, such as Featherstone ( 1991) or Grossberg ( 1992),
who refer solely to the static, onedimensional state of ideological domination
lacking in liberatory impulses that is most characteristic of Marxist cultural
studies.
In sum, for Lefebvre, the trivial or "everyday" involves the dialectical tension
between alienation and self-liberation, precisely because every quotidian
situation contains the conditions for the self-transcendence of the reproduction
of capitalist (i.e., alienated) commodity relations. Lefebvre's theory was
instrumental in the formation of the ideas of the Situationists ( Plant, 1992;
Debord, 1977; Vaneigem, 1979) and bears a close resemblance to the approach
of the Birmingham School which was based on Gramsci's notion of resistance
( Hall, 1980; Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler, 1992) 7 .
An Illustration
In this discussion I have contended that grasping the nature of alleged
postmodern changes in society requires a praxis- (or action-) oriented
perspective (following Lefebvre) rather than the interpretive, discursive
framework of postmodern theorists. The issue is not one of labeling phenomena
through
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interpretation as "postmodern," but of grasping changes in the organization of
society by studying modes of behavior and interaction. This approach can be
illustrated by considering a recent film which is explicitly about everday life,
namely, Robert Altman Short Cuts. This three hour marathon intercuts the daily
life of over 20 separate subjects against the tableau of Southern California. To be
sure, one can play Baudrillard and argue, quite rightly, that this film is not
everyday life but only a Hollywood representation. This film is a consumer
product produced by Altman, which presents a simulation of quotidian Los
Angeles. Furthermore, the film itself is flawed in several ways, especially by its
androcentrism and the marginalization of Los Angeles's minority groups despite
an explicit depiction of class differences. Short Cuts is nothing more than a
Hollywood simulation of quotidian, and also white and predominently male, Los
Angeles. This milieu undercuts the formation of any class identity.
However, given these terms, what does the film depict about the everyday? Are
there any elements of interaction that illustrate the kinds of observations made
about postrnodern society? Can we point, perhaps, to this or that aspect of the
quotidian that validates the claims of pomos that something new and different
organizes interaction in daily life, namely, that there is, in short, some way of
representing postmodern daily practice?
Altman's characters are also deeply estranged from each other and from the
institutions of society. They fail to communicate at every turn and in every
situation. This failure exists not only at the level of male-female, but also
parentchild, relations. Caring and indifference are simultaneously depicted,
while isolation and loneliness negate intimacy in every social encounter. Finally,
people are, simultaneously, ordinary citizens who work and engage in "escape
attempts" ( Cohen and Taylor, 1992)--that is, leisure activities--and also
potential or actual killers in their everyday statuses as members of society. 8 In
sum, an examination of this particular representation of everyday life uncovers
an "alienation" problematic rather than the postmodern problematic of
"simulation," depthless culture, and behavior in an image-driven society.
In one vignette, a women is so tightly locked into her role of parent consumer
that she makes special arrangements for her son's birthday and is so estranged
from her universal role as parent that she allows the underage child to be
responsible for his own safety while walking to school in a busy section of town.
Altman's universe is guided by benign indifference and the chance
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encounters of powerful forces. Another woman on her way home from work hits
the child with her car as he jumps out into the middle of the street. Connected to
this child only by the random accident, she acquiesces to a false sense that he is
well because he has walked away from the accident and so drives away. The
child goes home and lapses into a coma. His mother takes him to the hospital,
where further alienated encounters occur in an institutional setting. The brain
surgeon follows normal bureaucratic procedures and is more concerned with
nightime socializing arrangements (escape attempts) than with his hospital
cases. The child is a sign of the everyday, of the quality of Los Angeles life. The
child dies, while in the very next room, another child recovers from a different
brain problem, due to the same randomness of good or bad luck, while under the
care of the same bureaucratic and indifferent physician.
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The conclusion of this chapter, however, has a different focus. The media
dreams of Hollywood, while increasingly postmodern from the aesthetic point of
view, nevertheless derive their social content from the formidably high level of
alienation in our society. A critical theory of culture, then, addresses not only the
issues of domination and transformation of needs, as in the Frankfurt School
tradition, but also the pervasiveness of alienation in everyday life. The issue
belonging to a critical theory of contemporary culture, then, is not the one
pursued by left-leaning pomos at present ( Agger, Best, Kellner, Aronowitz,
Jameson), namely, how to articulate a postmodern critical theory based on
hegemony and resistance. Instead, it is the problematic raised by the Lefebvrian
tradition, namely, how to refine our understanding of both alienation and
selftranscendence under the new conditions of declining modernity and
postmodernism.
Notes
1. This list, of course, is simply a generalization for the purposes of my
exposition and by no means claims any total comprehensiveness vis--vis
the emergent discourse of pomo.
2. See Tucker, 1978, p. 413: Capital, Volume 1, chapter 15, section 9.
3. This critique differed from an alternative approach advocated in the 1960s
and 1970s and called the "production of culture" perspective ( Peterson,
1976). The latter also assumed a mass audience that was passive and
manipulable but focused on the process of cultural production using an
organizational approach (see Gottdiener, 1985). As such, it did not constitute
a critical theory of culture or even a critique of mass culture.
4. I am not addressing the case of cultural commentators who ignore the issue
of socializing the question of culture, that is, I am only concerned with those
who, in one way or another, relate contemporary culture to processes of
capitalist development.
5. For an extended discussion of modes of resistance to the alienation of
everyday life, see Cohen and Taylor ( 1992).
6. The power of Jameson's article is exhibited in this case by the fact that he
does, in fact, point to the behaviors generated by the Bonaventura's design,
which are decidedly postmodern. For example, he discusses how this new
hotel, unlike those characteristic of the modernist period, has no main
entrance but rather is designed with the main desk on the third floor. The
path of users is purposely disorienting and decentered, which is another
pomo feature. These are precisely the kind of praxis-oriented comments that
are advocated by this chapter paper for critical theory.
7. There is a great difference between Lefebvre and situationist theory, on the
one hand, and the Birmingham Cultural Studies School, on the other.
Lefebvre, unlike Gramsci, was principally concerned with the alienation
problematic rather than with
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13
Post-ism or Positivism? A
Comparison between Theories of
Reification and Theories of Post-
modernity
Frdric Vandenberghe
Modernity is not a cab one can get out of on the next corner just
when one no longer likes it, as Weber said. 1
Post-ism as Artifact
First, however, let me start with some general observations on this conceptual
construct that is called post-modernism, written here with a hyphen to stress its
highly artificial character. Nobody knows exactly what post-modernism means.
Is it an epochal concept or a counterconcept? Is it a concept at all? Does it refer
to a stage of societal development beyond the modern era or to objects and
discursive practices of contemporary culture? Does it refer to the latest wave
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Assuming for the sake of argument that there is some scholarly position with
sufficient coherence to warrant the label "post-modernism"--in fact, it is not
evident at all that this is so: in France, Foucault, Lacan and Derrida, for instance,
appear much more as rivals than as fellow travellers--I want to limit the
discussion here to the discourse of post-modern social theory, and more
particularly, to its critique of modern social theory.
It is not always clear, however, who is targeted. In the same way as almost any
author can be post-modernized ( Simmel is just the most recent example of such
an endeavor of post-ist recuperation; cf. Weinstein and Weinstein, 1993), any
author can be modernized. Now it is Descartes, Hegel, or Marx, then it is
Comte, Durkheim, Weber, Parsons, or Habermas who are reconstructed as
archmodernists whose oeuvre just deserves to be deconstructed. In any case, it
seems that if one wants to deconstruct, one has to homogenize one's subject first
so that it becomes deconstructible. Take Lyotard, for instance. In order to be able
to attack Habermas for an alleged "violation of the heterogeneity of the language
games" (cf. Lyotard, 1979, p. 8; 1983, p. 187; 1988, p. 10-12), he has to
reconstruct Habermas's theory of universal pragmatics as though the latter were
"a communist juxebox with only one record to play" ( O'Neill, 1995, p. 194).
Alexander's analysis of the post-modernist (meta-) narrative as a semiotic
system is highly revealing in this regard.
The underlying code of the post-ist narrative is simply binary; it just inverts the
modernist code: "In terms of code, modernity moved from the sacred to the
profane side of historical time, with modernity assuming many of the crucial
characteristics that had earlier been associated with traditionalism and
backwardness" ( Alexander, 1994, p. 176). This fusion of the judgmental axis of
"good versus bad" with the epochal one of "before versus after" results in a
simple pseudohistorical plot which is iteratively standardized . 6 just like in any
James Bond film, we know from the very beginning who are the goodies and
who are the baddies (and who will win), so in post-ist discourse we always
already know what is modern, that it connotes evil, that it has to be fought, and,
we expect, that at the end a plea will be held for a radical deconstruction of, and
rupture with, modernity (or pre-post-modernity, if you prefer).
Instead of allowing for continuity and internal correction, instead of seeing post-
modernism as an intellectual project generated from within modernity, and of
recognizing it as a recurrent form of modernist challenge to Enlightenment
universalism and foundationalism, self-styled post-ists always seem to opt in a
quasi-Foucauldian vein for radical rupture and discontinuity. Thus, pseudo-
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Although theories of reification, from the young Hegel via Simmel, Weber,
Lukcs, and the Frankfurt School to the late Habermas, are concerned with the
same issues, they do not treat them in the same way. Their Stimmung is
completely different. 7 They share neither the ideological pathos of the
postmodernists nor their presuppositions about reason and totality. From a
modernist viewpoint that remains faithful to the Enlightenment, post-ism can be
decoded as the cynical play-form of positivism. That is what I would like to
show in this article by means of a comparative analysis of reification theory and
the theories of post-modernity. First, however, I turn to reification theory.
Reification Theory
Georg Lukcs's chapter on reification in History and Class Consciousness
represents the prime exemple of reification theory as it is classically conceived
in Western Marxism (cf. Lukcs [ 1923] 1971, pp. 83-222). The paradigmatic
core of this theory is composed of a grandiose, but brittle and problematic,
synthesis of two somewhat contradictory strands of thought. 8
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Moreover, in the same way as Lukcs tried to "outhegel Hegel" ([ 1923 1971,
"Foreword [1968]," p. xxiii), the theorists of the Frankfurt School tried so to
speak to outweber Weber. Radicalizing his tragic view of bureaucratic
domination and formal-instrumental rationalization, and linking it to Lukcs's
analysis of generalized commodity fetishism, they paint black on black and push
Weber's sense of despair to the extremes. Consequently, they arrive at the
Dantesque diagnosis of "total reification" (sic), a conclusion that is as bleak and
one-dimensional as it is self-refuting.
The iron cage of modernity might be a bit more luxurious and comfortable than
Weber thought, but this does not alter anything about the fact that it remains a
cage. If people revel in the marvels of consumption, it only shows that they are
so alienated that they are not even aware of it anymore. Moreover, as reification
becomes total, social dynamics come to an absolute standstill. "Plus a change,"
says Adorno with a wink to Nietzsche's philosophy of the eternal return, "plus
c'est la mme chose" ( Adorno, 1976, p. xi). The real is indeed rational and
reason is effectively realized, but certainly not as Hegel and Lukcs expected it.
According to Adorno and the late Marcuse, the subject and the object, the
individual and society are indeed identical, but insofar as the object absorbs the
subject and in so far as the subject is thereby suppressed, or "decentred" as we
say nowadays if we want to be la page, this identity is infernal. The
overpowering might of the system and the absolute powerlessness of the
individual corroborate in a dramatic way Hegel's systematic thought. Moreover,
in this perverted sense, one can indeed say that the truth is the whole.
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Alas, to the extent that Adorno has forgotten his own admonition that reification
should not be reified in its turn, 10 his endeavor to cherish the nonidentical could
only fail. Starting from the a priori of the existence of a closed functionalized
system, of a totalitarian social totality that does not tolerate anything external to
it and thus greedily devours what still escapes it, Adorno could only register the
permanent failure of the individual to resist reification. At the end of the day, it
appears that by autonomizing the logic of identity and by hypostatizing
reification, Adorno has himself conceptually liquidated the nonidentical, which
he wanted to preserve at any cost from reification, precisely by reifying it. In
this sense, his "functionalism of the worst," as Bourdieu calls this kind of
Durkheimo-Marxist conception of an overintegrated society, is the symptom of
his own diagnosis ( Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 58).
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metaphysical one, is not a critical theory. Indeed, I think that a theory can only
be critical if it controls consciously and reflexively its basic assumptions in such
a way that is able to conceptualize the transformation of the social system. A
social theory that can only think the alienation of the subject and not its
emancipation is not a critical theory, but a one-dimensional one. I cannot
develop those thoughts here, but I have done so elsewhere ( Vandenberghe,
forthcoming). Here, I would like to argue that a post-modernist social theory
offers no alternative to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.
Post-ism or Positivism?
At first sight, a post-modern approach that stresses, among other things,
contingency and openness, indeterminacy and randomness, difference and
plurality, reenchantment and local resistance to domination might seem to
propose a handy way out of the metatheoretical cul-de-sac of critical theory. I do
not think, however, that this is the case. For a closer look reveals that, in so far
as it uncomfortably combines these themes with an antihumanistic methodology
and a theory of disciplinary normalization ( Foucault), fetishistic
hypersimulation ( Baudrillard), or libidinal territorialization ( Deleuze and
Guattari), it does not offer a solution but rather prolongs the flaws of a critical
theory of reification.
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Be tackling the epistemological and the ideological issues, let me start with the
ontological problem. Semantically, the concept of reification refers to the
illegitimate transformation into a thing of something which is not a thing.
Whether this pseudothing is a concept, a person, an animal, a social relation, a
commodity, or the social world itself, the critical category of reification always
and necessarily presupposes a definite ontology. 12 It is well known by now that
a neopragmatist antiphilosophy "without mirrors" refuses all talk about essences
as metaphysical, and thus as idle talk. Against the traditional philosophy of
presence, "from Iona to Iena," as Rosenzweig would say ( 1979, p. 13), which is
marked by the obsession of a signified behind the words and the appearances, a
deconstructive philosophy will proceed to a "dissemination" of meanings and
referents and show that behind the signifiers there are only other signifiers and
that every endeavor to step outside language to find a transcendental signified is
illusory.
However, the worst is still to come. Insofar as post-ism abandons the moral
sensibility and sense of responsibility that characterizes the modernist protest
against alienation and reification, and insofar as it explicitly says farewell, not
only to the proletariat (which is fine), but also to reason and to the project of
modernity, it succumbs either to an irrational "kunism" or to an "enlightened
cynicism," to use the terms of Sloterdijk's Critique of cynical reason to name the
two main ways to abdicate all moral responsibility cf. Sloterdijk, 1983).
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Apparently without any regret and without any hope, the new Nietzscheans
systematically privilege aestheticism and vitalism over the serene moralism and
commitment for the concrete other that characterizes, for instance, the writings
of the late Horkheimer. In contradistinction to Adorno's melancholy science,
which is still in all its negativity and sadness silently yearning for justice, this
"gay science"--or "happy positivism" as Foucault called it ( 1969, p. 164)--is not
tragic, but ironical. It is, as Derrida says in L'criture et la diffrence, "the
Nietzschean affirmation, the joyous affirmation of the game of the world and the
innocence of the future, the affirmation of a world of signs without faults,
without truth and without origin" ( 1967, p. 427).
Reification, once it has extended its empire across the whole of social reality,
effaces the very criteria by which it can be recognized for what it is and so
triumphantly abolishes itself, returning everything to normality. In the Dialectic
of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer severely criticized the reduplication
of the extant world by the culture industry as the modern version of applied
positivism. 13 Fifty years after the landing of the Allied troops in Normandy and
the liberation of the death camps, the cynics are still playing the same game, and
they even seem to enjoy their relapse into irresponsibility.
Take Baudrillard, for instance. Having poked fun at the carbonized victims
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of the "collateral damages" of the Gulf War ( 1991), he cynically relapses again.
Without any apparent scruples, he describes the hell of Sarajevo in terms of
simulation and hyperreality ( 1995). I don't know whether he is actually working
on a book on the orchestrated genocide of the Tutsis, but I can now confirm the
insinuation contained in the title of this article: post-ism is indeed the cynical
playform of positivism. So, to finish with post-modernism, let me just quote
Jameson: "In fact, what Adorno called positivism is very precisely what we now
call postmodernism, only at a more primitive stage. . . . The question about
poetry after Auschwitz has been replaced with that of whether you could bear to
read Adorno and Horkheimer next to the swimming-pool" ( Jameson, 1990, p.
243).
Notes
1. Beck ( 1991), p. 193. In fact, Weber borrowed the image of the ( Marxist)
cab from Schopenhauer.
2. Just one critical article by Herpin ( 1993).
3. Edgar Morin, the French systems theorist, smugly suggests that post-
modernism sells as well on the American market as Beaujolais Nouveau.
What the French consider to be "junk" wine is flown overnight in specially
chartered plane to Beverly Hills and elsewhere where it is purchased as a
very distinguished dlicatesse ( Morin, 1986, p. 82).
4. I owe this remark to Alain Touraine (personal discussion, Paris, May 1994).
5. The Foucault revival does not contradict this observation. Being
coincidental with the tenth birthday of his death, it was a media event, and
as such it was largely on a par with the recent rediscovery of Rimbaud,
Voltaire, and Montaigne. The publication in September 1994 of Foucault's
scattered interviews and writings, collected by F. Ewald and D. Defert and
published by Gallimard in four massive volumes under the title Dits et
Ecrits, is of a different order, but by then the French market was already
saturated with two biographies and at least five monographs on Foucault.
6. For a critique of the pseudo-historical character of the post-modernist
metanarrative, see Calhoun ( 1995), ch. 4.
7. On the role of moods in the diagnosis of the present, see G. Lohmann, "Zur
Rolle von Stimmungen in Zeitdiagnosen," in Fink-Eitel and Lohmann
( 1993), pp. 266-292.
8. Cf. the excellent article of Brunkhorst ( 1982).
9. In an early article ( Jay, 1977, pp. 132, and 136), Martin Jay assumed that
Adorno's critique of the idealist "lament on reification" implied his
abandonment of the category of reification. Later, probably under the
influence of Rose ( 1978), he changed his mind and stated correctly that
Adorno did not reject the category of reification as such, but only its
Lukcsian version. Cf. Jay ( 1984), p. 269.
10. "The knowledge of the reification of society should not be reified" ( Adorno,
1973, p. 157).
11. Cf. Habermas ( 1985), especially chapters 5, 9, and 10 on Horkheimer,
Adorno, and Foucault.
12. The phenomenological bracketing of ontological issues which Thomason
proposes necessarily implies the abandonment of reification as a critical
category. Cf. Thomason ( 1980), p. 163.
13. Cf. Horkheimer and Adorno ( 1969), on the culture industry, pp. 128-176.
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14
Alienation, New Age Sociology, and
the Jewish Way
Philip Wexler
Alienation
The way, or practice for overcoming alienation changes historically. Before the
postmodern era, critical social science emphasized the disempowerment of
alienated labor. Although humanistic readings of Marx, from Fromm ( 1956) to
Ollman ( 1971), may have indicated that alienation refers to abstraction and
deformation of species being according to Marx Schweitzer account ( 1992)
correctly focuses on alienation as appropriation, as loss of control, agency, and
power. Alienation is a loss of human powers, particularly through the
estrangement and appropriation of labor in capitalism. The counterhegemony is
a reappropriation of this loss through the establisment of collective social forms
that restore human social agency.
Postmodernism has not, however pervasive its practical mass and elite reflective
cultures, succeeded in obliterating the drive to overcome alienation. That drive
does, however, now take a different direction, just as the character of alienation
has progressively deepened beneath the postmodern smoke screen of
postindustrial, global capitalism. Both the disease and the cure are now more
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extreme.
While it may begin at an organic, bodily level, the counterdrive soon discovers
the social and cultural construction of being and therefore seeks meaning. The
channel for this search for being and meaning has been cleared of modernist
blockages by postmodernism's function as destroyer of modern culture. Whether
moving toward premodern reversion or, as I think, beyond postmodernism to a
new renaissance or renewal, the movement toward revitalization increasingly
occurs within a cultural tendency toward resacralization ( Thompson, 1990).
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Sociology has not yet, however, surpassed the pervasive cultural discourse of
postmodernism to engage wider cultural processes of desecularization and the
simultaneous resacralization of secular cosmologies, including of course,
sociology itself.
The culture that feeds emergent academic theory may itself be part of an
historically new age. The foundation of a sociology of presence first requires a
rereading of social theory from a new, strategic vantage point that identifies the
precursory elements of a new synthesis. As the transition out of Puritan,
Enlightenment sociology is described within a cultural movement, so, too is a
new synthesis also part of a wider cultural process.
A new culture means new ideals and also new ways of thinking about social and
individual life. In its reflective aspect, traditions are brought forward and
renewed, while precursors and antecedents are rediscovered. For me, those
precursors are in the cultural revolts of the 1960s and 1970s, and even more in
the incipient social analyses that diagnosed the repression to be overcome but
were still unable to live and think beyond that regime's hegemony. That is why,
for example, I have described the "new sociology of education" as always bound
to the mainstream that it criticized. The antecedents are not only in the culture
and critical social thought of the 1960s and 1970s (or, ultimately, in the great
core world civilizational cultures), but also in the turn-of-the-century
sociological canon.
The new culture is the culture of the new age. Its ideal state is one that Erich
Fromm referred to in his introduction to the Bottomore and Rubel Marx reader
( 1964b) as "de-alienation." This state or ideal of being is the driving point, not
only for Marx, but also for Durkheim and Weber. Dealienation involves, in
every case, the collective production or release of socially bound energies that in
their unrealized condition are the source of individual and collective distortion,
disease, and historical blockages to the realization of higher evolutionary
potentials. For the radical Freudians like Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, and
for the sociological existentialists like Martin Buber, the overcoming of socially
organized life repression releases collective energies that become reorganized
new modes of individual and collective being.
The social theory of the new age is always, in the first instance, beyond
negation; theorizing, as Norman O. Brown put it, "the way out," surpassing
repressed, commodified, rationalized social existence to the attainment of an
ideal state of "nirvana" ( Marcuse, 1955), "resurrection" ( Brown, 1959),
"orgasmic potency" ( Reich, 1949), "acosmic brotherliness" ( Weber, 1946), or
(largely
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Preliminary Rereadings
Although Durkheim is typically taught as the exemplar of scientific rationalism
in sociology and the exponent of individualism, his later essays make clear that
"the cult of the individual" is a compromise with individualism (as the
historically workable cult), a compromise designed to favor collective ritual and
not individualism. The "cult of the individual" is a transitional commitment, an
acknowledgment of the end of the old order, and an extraction of all that is
valuable in a more centrifugal society.
Durkheim's hope, however, is evidently, not for his time of "moral cold," but for
a "warmer" social existence, in which a collective religion energizes the moral
life, which in turn enables both generative collective representation and the
motivational discipline required for a restrained balancing of what are otherwise
unlimited individual passions. Robert Bellah ( 1973) notably reads the
passionate Durkheim of collective energy and religion as the crux of social and
individual life ( Bellah, 1973, p. xvi).
From our vantagepoint, Durkheim is not a "happy" modern, but rather one who
anticipates the dawning of a new culture, a new age. What gives this
anticipatory hope interpretive power is Durkheim's understanding of society a
field of forces, of creative social energy generated in the religious origins of
collective life.
Against moral "stagnation," Durkheim looks toward the "spiritual" as the "ways
that social pressure exercises itself" ( 1973, p. 171). Religion is a "force" for
occasions of "strengthening and vivifying [emphasis added] action of society."
There is a reciprocal flow of energy between the individual and the collective
that is most evident during intermittent social states of effervescence. Again, he
stresses the religious basis of social energy: "the forces that move bodies as well
as those that move minds have been conceived in a religious form" ( 1973, p.
186). If religion is the "primordial" source of ideas, of collective representations,
it is only because it is the source of social energy.
Weber also felt the necessity of a new age, but tentatively and with a deeply
reserved sense of anticipation. For Weber, too, religion is the source of social
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The culture of the present age links its collective religious origins with a
deformed, "alienated" individual way of life or social character ( Weber, 1958,
pp. 181-182). "Mechanism" and the deadness of a "rationalist way of life"
( 1958, p. 240) leads to the "Personality type of the professional expert," who
supplants "the cultivated type of man." In terms directly reminiscent of Marx's
description of alienated being, Weber explains the consequences of the
"mechanization and discipline of the plant" ( 1958, pp. 261-262). Moreover, in
the "universal rationalization and intellectualization of culture" ( 1958, p. 344),
"The total being of man has now been alienated from the organic cycle of
peasant life." The social apparatus of bureaucratic specialization, which
increases precision, speed, calculability, and profit, also destroys the "cultivated
man," and deadens or "petrifies" life in an "iron cage."
No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether
at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets
will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals.
or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of
convulsive self-importance. For the last stage of this cultural
development, it might well be truly said: 'specialists without
spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity [emphasis added]
imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before
achieved'" ( 1958, p. 182).
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sociocultural spheres of esthetics and eroticism. These spheres, which are "like a
gate into the most irrational and thereby real kernel of life, as compared with the
mechanisms of rationalization," are in tension with the "ethic of religious
brotherliness" (p. 345). Ultimately though, it is the "vocational workaday life,
asceticism's ghost, which leaves hardly any room" (p. 357) for "the cultivation
of acosmic brotherliness."
Brown derives the struggle of "life against death," not from a combined
Simmelian sociology of urban alienation and Jewish mysticism, as does Buber,
but from a Romantic, Christian reinterpretation of Freud's "libido" as more a life
force than, in Freud's terms, a "love force." The alienated state is repression and,
writes Brown: "Therefore the question confronting mankind is the abolition of
repression--in traditional Christian language, the resurrection of the body"
( 1959, p. 307). In opposition to Freud, who saw repression as an individual and
civilizational necessity, Brown calls for the elimination of all repression in a
liberation of the body: "The life instinct also demands a union with others and
with the world around us based not on anxiety and aggression but on narcissism
and erotic exuberance" ( 1959, p. 307).
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Full genitality makes transparent the flow or "streamings" of body energy, which
are repressed in character armors that ultimately derive from the social
pathologies of an authoritarian, patriarchal, antisexual, repressive social order.
By an understanding of both sex-pol--the sociopolitical formation of sexuality--
and of the sex-economy of body and interpersonal energy dynamics, a genitality
of the unrepressed streamings releases body energy for individual and collective
creative self-transformation. Mann and Hoffman ( 1980) recount the path of
Reich's development, from radical sex-pol psychoanalysis to a holistic body
therapy of energy, and then a simultaneously more materialist theory of energy
field in self and environment, on the one hand, and on the other, a more
"religious," or, as they describe it, "spiritual" reawakening.
The trajectories of their work indicate quite different beginnings but also a
convergence of their later works. Buber is very much the Romantic, as
MendesFlohr ( 1989) has convincingly shown in his contextualization of Buber
within German social thought. Buber's engagement with Nietszche and
Kierkegaard is refracted in his mystical interest in Oriental religion, particularly
Taoism, and in "ecstaticism" more generally, but obviously in Hasidism. Buber's
path is one of socializing the Romantic, subjective individualist interest in
Erlebnis or experience, toward an ever-more social and ethical social interest;
first in his work on the interhuman, in dialogue, and then in his emphasis on
utopian community. Still, as Mendes-Flohr argues ( 1989, p. 126), Buber retains
a core of German Romanticism, and, I would add, ecstatic religious interest.
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At first look, Buber's Jewish "way"--both Buber and Fromm come to the Taoist
and Hebrew term, although "halacha" is very much a legal, ethical way--is, in
Max Weber's term, an exemplary prophecy, while Fromm's more ethically based
precepts for living represent the emissary prophetic mode. They represent the
ecstatic and ethical types that were so central in Weber's sociology of religion
and in his interest in claiming that the ethical, ascetic mode has been the basis of
contemporary culture (the "Protestant ethic"). Weber, of course, astutely
acknowledges that in cultural history, the types are mixed ( 1946, p. 291). Still,
the distinction, which appears to fit the central difference, within Judaism, of
Buber's and Fromm's approaches to overcoming modern alienation--despite the
convergence of Fromm's mystical interest and Buber's social commitment--is
crucial to Weber as the palimpsest for modern culture ( 1946, p. 285). Weber's
famous thesis was to show the translation of ascetic, emissary Protestantism as
the cultural foundation of modernity, in part based on the assumption that
exemplary prophecy was, because of its lack of an unequivocal supramundane
Lord of Creation, without an elective affinity for a practical, "workaday" ethic,
and instead ordinarily tried to "escape" or "fly" from the world (p. 289). While
Weber largely ignores the social-psychological consequences of any
innerwordly mysticism--which, I suggest, is precisely the point of convergence
between Buber and Fromm--he does acknowledge it, at least as a logical
possible combination (p. 326):
The contrast between asceticism and mysticism is also tempered
if the contemplative mystic does not draw the conclusion that he
should flee from the world, but, like the inner-worldly asceticist,
remains in the orders of the world (inner-worldly mysticism).
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Buber
In modern Judaism, Martin Buber clearly sets himself against what he sees as
the dualism and rationalism of the historic Jewish mainstream. Not
differentiation, but integration and unity are the hallmarks of Judaism, according
to Buber ( 1967). Not religion, but "religiosity"--the state of experience, in
James's and Weber's terms--is what needs to be understood, and lived. Against
collective practices and interdicting laws and rites of differentiating structures
and spheres of activity, Buber proposes der Helige Weg, the "holy way" of
unified existence. Unlike Durkheim, who sees a separation, or insulation, of the
sacred and the profane as religion's defining aspect, Buber quests for integration
and unity by sanctifying everyday life and thus ending the dualism of
sacred/profane. The Hebrew couplet that begins with "The Lord differentiates
between the sacred and the profane" is followed by, "All our sins will be erased
by Him." In other words, havdalah (differentiation) is a preface to salvation or
redemption.
Unity, hallowing the everyday, is the path through individual consciousness and
decision to redemption of the individual, "the turning," and collective utopia.
While Buber may be seen as the avatar of a mystical, utopian Judaism of unity
and redemption, the so-called "mystical" tradition may offer, more generally, a
dialectic that combines unity or integration with differentiation. Adin Steinsaltz (
1992), in his contemporary "discourses on Chasidic thought," interprets
Kabbalah to speak of the power of division, as well as unity. "Creation" is his
textual basis for a kabbalistic dialectic of difference that begins with a
"separation" or "sawing" of the first androgynous person into male and female
( 1992, pp. 41-42).
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To have as well the "evolutionary" value that Weber hoped for-to be collectively
redemptive--such a culture will have to "stand in the face of" all the current
orders, and in that sense, be not reproductive, but revolutionary.
Like Weber, and in this regard like Durkheim, Buber overcomes alienation by
proposing an ideal "state," which he calls "the-between-people." In this state,
transcendental energies, which originate in a direct, personal, creative religious
encounter, flow over into the intentional self and social regeneration through a
social presence that simultaneously represents both mystical union and care for a
personal other. It is a "living" humanism that combats what Buber sees as the
inertness of both religion and society. Energy is created in encounter, in the
"meeting." Here, too, there is a sociology of presence and energy, which begins
with religious experience and overcomes dead or "I-it" social relations to find
and generate social and individual life energies--a path of renewal, regeneration,
and creativity.
Fromm
More than anyone else, Fromm made the affirmation of life an explicit
foundation of his social theory. Nathan Gover ( 1984) called him a "biophile."
Unlike the classical sociologists and Reich, he openly derived a
counteralienation social theory through a close textual reinterpretation of
religion. Fromm's "radical interpretation of the Old Testament and its tradition" (
1966) sees the paradigmatic case of alienation as equivalent to death in the
biblical struggle against idolatry. The key point about idolatry, for Fromm, is not
the jealousy of a monotheistic god, but the fact that idolatry, which he sees as
"the main religious theme," represents death against life ( 1966, p. 37): "The idol
is a thing, and it is not alive. God, on the contrary, is a living God" He quotes
Psalm 115:
They [idols] have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk;
and they do not make a sound in their throat. Those who make
them are like them" ( 1966, p. 38).
In addition to eternal energy and the messianic time, which is the template for a
"universal historical transformation which forms the central point of the
prophetic messianic vision" ( 1966, p. 109), "it is the life principle and its
affirmation that Fromm carries away from his Old Testament encounter; what he
refers to as "the affirmative attitude toward life" (p. 141 ). This principle is
worth quoting at greater length: "Life is the highest norm for man; God is alive
and man is alive; the fundamental choice for man is between growth and decay"
(p. 142 ). Fromm's
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social solution is: "to recognize this danger and to strive for conditions which
will help bring man to life again" (p. 180 ). For him, that means a "renaissance
of humanism that focuses on the reality of experienced [emphasis added] values
rather than on the reality of concepts and words."
The practice of love shows how traditional humanistic values are justified
experientially as a "path," and intentional "right way of living," a "Tao" or
"Halacha." The practice creates life; by developing the elements of the capacity
to love, it then "demands a state of intensity, awakeness, enhanced vitality"
( 1956, p. 129). Fromm specifies what his solution means as a social practice--
that people should "become as Gods," and so reverses Marx's original model of
God's disempowerment and reduction of human being. Ultimately, it is the
capacity to love that recreates the energy of life.
Like both Sorokin and Csikszentmihalyi, in his later work (e.g., 1976), Fromm
describes movements toward a fundamental civilizational shift, an end of "the
religion of progress," with its "radical hedonism" and "individual egoism"
toward a "new ethic." Socialism is now expressly understood as a "secular
messianism," a derivative of the Old Testament ethic of a socially organized
dealienated being. Like Csikszentmihalyi, Fromm returns not only to Hebrew
humanism (to use Buber's term), but to Meister Eckhart's Christian mysticism
and the Buddhist Four Noble Truths as an ethical guide for the social
psychological practices that constitute both an "art of living" and a neue
Gemeinschaft, in Buber's world of, as Fromm puts it, a "new science of man" to
create a "new society." "If," writes Fromm, "the economic and political spheres
of society are to be subordinated to human development, the model of the new
society must be determined by the requirements of the unalienated, being-
oriented individual" ( 1976, p. 162). The "new synthesis" is "life-furthering" and
in its "humanistic religiosity" aims to create a "city of being." Fromm saw
elements of social renewal in contemporary revitalization movements: "I believe
that quite a large number of groups and individuals are moving in the direction
of being" ( 1976, p. 63).
Conclusion
I have tried to suggest that solutions to the modern, Marxist, and Romantic
problematic of "alienation" emerge now from within an incipient, but profound,
cultural transformation. This transformation is occurring, without salient
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"New age sociology" and "the Jewish way" are elements of this wider
transformation in culture and in social understanding. What remains unfulfilled,
in all the various accounts and premonitions, are the organized, institutionalized
social forms and practices that create and sustain the unalienated, paratelic flow,
transcending selves, dialogical, streaming, resurrected, state of being--in sum,
the "city of being." Sociologists have a particularly knowledgeable role to play
in this social practice of renewal and reconstruction, but they are likely to be
able to do that only to the extent that we are able to surrender the decadent phase
of modernity called now postmodernism--and to accept the emergence and
power of the culture of a new age, and of the core sacred, civilizational cultures,
repressed by modernity, which are now being brought back to collective
consciousness. That is our topic and our resource.
Note
Author's note: Excerpts of this chapter will appear in the author's forthcoming
book, Holy Sparks: Social Theory, Education and Religion, to be published by
St. Martin's Press, New York, 1996.
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15
Cross the Border, Confront
Boundaries: Problems of Habituality,
Marginality, and Liminality
Pirkkoliisa Ahponen
Everything is post now, as has often been remarked, and we have to take into serious
consideration the restrictions effected by this situation. Some analysts ask, as
Baudrillard does, "what to do after the orgy"; others note that "there is something
afterwards, but what it is, and what it looks like, we don't know" ( Beck, 1992, p. 199).
However, there is already a turn in a new direction, toward a confusional order and the
making of a contribution to the "sociology of the orgy" ( Maffesoli, 1993). The
confusionality of the social order, which defines the postmodern situation, reflects the
changes in sociality and its focus.
Now the focus is, as Zygmunt Bauman ( 1992, pp. 190-191, 194) asserted,
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on the habitat inside of which the social agent operates and which itself is constituted
according to the movements of the agent. The processes of self-constitution are
structured by the habitual being while they are also stucturing this living space. Life is
constituted of a series of continuous choices inside the habitat, which offers possibilities
for agency and for the actions that accompany it. The flexibility of the habitat and the
necessity of continuous choices increase the reflexivity of this life space and produce
the confusional order. In this confusing life situation of continuous choices, the moral
self has to encounter the prospect of an inherent and incurable ambivalence, as Bauman
stated in his Postmodern Ethics ( 1993, p. 15). I find the message very crucial, when
Bauman concludes:
The risk tendencies are understood to have been spawned as side effects of the
uncontrolled border crossings of modernity. Now the protagonists of late modernity
seem to propagate a society that increasingly organizes its selfknowledge in terms of
risks, security control, and protection. Devices for reducing, managing, and
compensating for the risks and dangers become extremely important in the risk society,
which is, as Stehr and Ericson pointed out, a knowledge society simply because the
scientific knowledge in this circle
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is "both a source of major risks and the primary basis of security efforts aimed at
controlling them" ( 1992, p. 193).
Luhmann even states that the liberal ideology contains a "hidden programme for
adjusting society to risks" ( 1993, pp. 71-72, 76). According to Luhmann, all
functionaries in the modern system are based on a network model constructed of binary
codes, but not necessarily according to such binary logic that risk and security exclude
each other as alternatives. On the other hand, the development of modernization seems
to depend more and more on its own contradictory dynamics. In this "reflexive turn" the
"society reproduces itself by producing contradictory knowledge about itself," as
Erasaari ( 1993, p. 13) asserts. This means that all possible choices are risky. Thus, only
those decisions are advisable in the risky future that include a determination of the risk
probabilities. This refers to high-consequence risks in the globalizing modernity, which
"interlaces the local and global in complex fashion," as Giddens ( 1990, p. 178)
concludes.
Bruno Latour recently made the polemical statement that we have never been modern-
not yet--nor shall we ever be. The "modern" mind is constructed by separating the
conceptions of the external nature, of human collectives, and of the surrounding
nonhumans as representations of the imagined modernity ( 1993, p. 106). Following
Latour's line of argument, we notice that societies reflect the human mind as natural-
cultural representations--by the culturalization of nature and by the naturalization of
culture, as Maffesoli ( 1991, p. 9) remarked. The focal point here is that the modern
mind was constructed by a strict separation of nature and culture (body and mind), and
now, the conceptual representations of nature and society are produced as increasingly
complicated cultural entities, which follow the logic of this separation.
For interpreting our relationship to these entities, more and better qualified mediators
are needed. "The work of mediation becomes the very centre of the double power,
natural and social," Latour says ( 1993, p. 139). By these means, the "metaphysical
Others" become culturally represented. However, those who have no representatives
have no place in the Parliament of Culture. Modern politics has aimed at extending the
circle of being that is present in the field of democracy. Increasing numbers of marginal
interest groups have emerged with demands for the right to be discursively
represented--to have a vote in the field of cultural power.
It can be expected that in the postmodern political situation, questions of social justice
will be increasingly difficult to answer. In modern democracy, civil rights are based on
the majority principle--in other words, on the justifying principle of social integration.
Now, the political demands of social minorities are presented with increasing frequency.
These demands are problematic for various reasons, not least because they contain and
make visible many ethically differentiative elements, which have nothing to do with the
social class conflict and its potential solution.
The risk-producing tendencies increase the demands for security control, more often
than not for moral reasons. The integrative and differentiative political elements are
entangled with the numerous "recursive" proliferation processes in
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the late-modern network society. Luhmann ( 1993, pp. 108-109) spoke about a
risk/danger syndrome, which absorbs increasing amounts of attention and protrudes
with increasing amounts of communication into the system that aims at integrative
decisions. All decisions are risky in this syndrome and one person's risk is already
another's danger. The problem is how to keep the dangers behind the risk border.
Alternatively, can we sit in peace, believing that the others will keep the situation under
control ( Luhmann 1993, p. 113), or at least bearable? A possible "solution" is to trust
"limiting values," which are situated in an area between the indicators of the forbidden
and the permitted values ( Luhmann, 1993, p. 166).
Luhmann ( 1993, pp. 224-225) himself trusts the recursively organized system-world of
high modernity. According to him, the system can operate by stretching its boundaries
and observing the sequences of the needed operations, by fencing in what belongs to it
and shutting out what does not. However, to those who have an interest in the position
of the "shutout," Luhmann has little to say because he has concentrated his interest on
the reflexive organization of the network of common communication. Being together
will cement a mystical reliance on Us, thus legitimating the connection to the Other
(e.g., Maffesoli. 1991, p. 10). However, if we want to look at the situation of "the
others," we have to take into consideration the "adventure of difference" ( Vattimo,
1993) instead of the "archaeology of integrative knowledge" (cf. Foucault, 1989).
Modern thought was based on the "Great Divide" between culture and nature. Divisions
between human and nonhuman entities, or between those who are included in our
community (us) and those who are excluded from the circle of our presence as strangers
(them), are structured on the basis of the same constitution ( Latour, 1993). All qualities
of Otherness--like nature, as such--are excluded from those entities that are interpreted
as belonging to our common cultural property.
From this viewpoint, Vattimo states that the modern pattern of thought is reaching its
end. His critique is especially focused on Western anthropology and hermeneutics in the
sameness-alterity-belonging circle (see Vattimo, 1988, p. 154). Although anthropology
can still be understood as a discourse of alterity, it can no longer be interpreted as the
locus of alterity itself.
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The problem that Vattimo considers to be intrinsic in modernity is that being as the
foundation of sameness has become the cornerstone of Westernization. Subject-
centricity is the basis of ideal being, and the thought of being happy together is
contained in the strivings for unification and homologization of the human world by
means of continuous border-crossings. The circle of unity stretches its margin in its
strivings to include the qualities that are in the interests of those who are willing and
capable of joining together with our common values.
If being with other humans is based on this understanding, which is, as Zygmunt
Bauman ( 1993, p. 147) says, always the same and thought of only in the singular, it is
comparable to monetary transactions. Therefore, "money provides a common basis of
direct mutual understandings and an equality of directives," contributing in this way to
the "dissimulation of the generally human" ( Simmel 1991, p. 21). Because money is, as
Simmel states, the "absolutely sufficient expression and equivalent of all values," it
becomes "the centre in which most opposing, alien and distant things find what they
have in common and touch
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each other ( 1991, p. 28)." This statement can also be applied to human relations insofar
as the mutual understanding is based on the principles of sameness, equality and
singularity of being.
In this sense, as David Apter ( 1987, p. 18) has remarked, marginality means
"functional superfluousness." In any case, it is even more true for Apter than for
Simmel that modern life, and especially the knowledge thereof, is "transformed from
the solid, substantial and stable form into a state of development, movement and
instability" ( Simmel, 1991, p. 29). We have to tolerate among us increasing numbers of
marginal people, who live in the liminality of the highly uncertain living conditions,
with great personal risks and few prospects for a stable life, threatening the safety of the
"better people." Such individuals must be raised, enlightened, and made useful for us.
Otherwise, they threaten our life with harmful effects.
The chances for the emergence of the reflexive self are increasing. Situational
encounters with strange circumstances and people are always possible and, in today's
mobile way of life, become everyday realities. An ability to adapt to strange situations
also means a willingness to be involved with the Other. These demands for an expanded
competence of mastery lead, paradoxically, to an interplay between mastery and
surrender, as Hannerz ( 1990, p. 240) notes. In
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his recently published book Migrancy, Culture, Identity, Iain Chambers has dealt with
these problems of liminality in an interesting way. Discussing living in a foreign
country, Chambers wrote:
I perhaps learn to tread lightly along the limits of where I am speaking from. I
begin to comprehend that where there are limits there also exist other voices,
bodies, worlds, on the other side, beyond my particular boundaries ( 1994, p.
5).
In the middle of the otherness, we have to learn--step by step--to realize that the
ultimate border is impossible to reach. Situated at the frontier--or in the liminality--I
begin also to seek my own confines.
Therefore, crossing geographical borders always means facing the mental boundaries. It
is a test of the possibilities to maintain a stable identity--or to become another.
Chambers continues (p. 5 ): "Transported some way into this border country, I look into
a potentially further space: the possibility of another place, another world, another
future." Behind the national border, people have different languages, different habits
and also a different habitus from that to which you are accustomed. Your image of
yourself also changes accordingly, as adapted to the circumstances of this strangeness--
perhaps even if you are a missionary or a conqueror. Taking the stranger's position into
consideration, it is possible to problematize how to encounter the world as a world of
differences.
Situated on the margin or totally outside of our presence, the strange is disqualified, but
located on the liminal areas, the strangeness appears from empty space or as a "dead
end" between the places that are categorized as significant or the life spheres that are
characterized as meaningful. Liminal spaces are no-man's lands, situated always
"betwixt and between" some definite entities ( Zukin, 1992; see also Keith and Pile,
1993). Efforts to construct a secure identity in liminality become complicated because
ambiguity and ambivalence are always present, slipped between the global and local,
public and private, foreign and familiar. These uncertain elements of being cannot be
avoided once they emerge.
Tourists visit in the strangeness for only a moment and of their own will. They seek
differences as deviations from their ordinary life and everyday experiences ( Urry,
1990, p. 11). Tourists spend a restricted period outside their ordinary circles to seek
exciting experiences, unfamiliar aspects of life, or ordinary people in unfamiliar
contexts. A tourist's strategy for being the master of strange situations is to pick from
other cultures only those pieces that suit him or her. Another strategy, which can also be
interpreted as a kind of cosmo-
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politanism, as Hannerz pointed out, is to accept the strange things when packed safely
in a vacuum: "he does not negotiate with the other culture but accepts it as a package
deal" ( 1990, p. 240). As far as I can see, this point of view is also included in a
statement of Urry ( 1990, p. 100), that explicitly concerns the fact that the typical tourist
sees named scenes through a frame and emphasizes the gaze as an intrinsic element in
his or her experience.
The more the possibility of return is gradually restricted, as in the case of job seekers,
foreign workers, migrants, refugees, or exiles, the more ambivalent is the consciousness
of being and the more important it is to know in this situation how the transnational
networks are structured. The need to be a master of transnational cultures is becoming
increasingly important nowadays, as people in increasing numbers strive to "feel at
home" in transnational life-areas, whether freely or because they must.
The liminality between these dimensions, these forced movements, and the mobile life
of choices formulates modern living space. Therefore, it is important to remind
ourselves, like Chambers ( 1994, p. 28), that just as the birth of modernism lies in the
heroic history of European expansion, it also lies in the savage expressions of the
ethnic, religious, and cultural alterity, which made modern progress possible. However,
it is true that transnational cultures make the Westernized people in modern societies
feel more at home than any other people. They can use, for instance, their own language
anywhere and also use other means of encapsulating themselves culturally everywhere,
if only they wish to do so.
The migrant, the newcomer to a foreign city, is rootless, living between a lost past and a
nonintegrated present. This might be the metaphor of contemporary nomadism or
neotribalism, using Maffesoli ( 1991, p. 11) term for fusion-like sociality, which
determines a new form of solidarity in today's complex societies. The migrants from
peripheral regions as well as other marginal groups are elements needed to structure
integration in the growing metropolis. However, as Chambers ( 1990, p. 30) notes,
when minorities populate cities, they introduce confusing, fluctuating cultural
ingredients, which change the heart of the city, making it quite unknown to itself. Of
course they can try to build a "home plus" atmosphere ( Hannerz 1990, pp. 241-242)
like so many modern travellers (business-travelers, sunshine-tourists, foreign students,
etc.), who want to have their obligatory or "packaged" journeys as convenient and
home-like as
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possible. At its extreme, this has nothing to do with the meanings of an alien culture,
nor with the strivings of "real" cosmopolitans.
Those who belong to "the ultimate others" are totally excluded from the circle of our
community and the stretching borders of its networks, and must live in exile forever.
Those who are situated outside the ultimate space of togetherness are even beyond the
presence of marginal interests of the "poor," "deviates," or "alienated." The strange, in
this sense, is marked only by a total powerlessness and characterized only by an
anonymity, which Bauman sets "outside of or beyond the social space" ( 1993, p. 149).
So it is also outside and beyond the distinctions that are based on the separation
between nature and culture.
Bauman continues by saying that the outsider is virtually not human at all, in the sense
that all humans are specific persons for us or are classified and identified by certain
categorial attributes. The social space could be defined molded in the liminality
between the poles of intimacy and anonymity. It is inhabited by people who derive their
identity from categories to which they are classified, assigned, and typified according to
what is known of them. The extreme anonymity of the stranger means that this alien
being almost vanishes from my view, whereas at the intimacy pole, as Bauman ( 1993,
p. 148) characterizes it, the nearer to me the Other is, the more I share the biography of
this fellow human.
In the ambivalence of contemporary life, the habitual being between strangeness and
familiarity is the situation where we have to learn to live with differences. This message
was already included in Simmel's analysis of modern city life ( Simmel, 1981). We
learn that differences are not necessarily barriers but are, as Chambers ( 1994, p. 18)
remarks, signals of complexity. This is significant because we find ourselves
continuously "on the road," seeking new experiences. Our life contains conscious
strivings to break the circles of routines. In these strivings, however, the possibilities to
be deeply rooted somewhere are lost. Cosmopolitans never feel quite at home after they
have experienced alien and distant cultures, as Hannerz ( 1990, p. 248) remarks. After
these experiences, nothing in their culture seems absolutely natural any more.
Naturalism is increasingly lost in the life that is structured in a postmodern way, in its
habituality where everything is on the move, in its ambivalent liminality, and in the
floating agencies between "realities" and relativities. Tendencies toward
universalization and globalization oppose stable relationships, loyalities to communal
roots, or even an encumbered self ( Bauman, 1993, p. 39). As Bauman ( 1993, p. 234)
says, we might have a safe and "unproblematic" identity inside a secure social space,
near the pole of intimacy, but it is no longer possible to live in that kind of an
encapsulated community. Even breathing demands that the airtight shell of one's own
world be broken. A living discourse is a contest between togetherness and otherness, a
critical challenge to one's own identity.
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Speaking Together, Listening to the Others
A different language isolates the speakers, while a common language integrates the
discursive parties. However, in social discourses the isolating and integrating elements
of interactions are always relative and movable.
The power balance affects the encounters in situations where we find things in common
and ideas that are understandable. In the modern way of thinking, the illusion of the
existence of a common language, which can be spoken together or sung in chorus is
deeply uprooted. However, those who speak aloud all the time, listening only to their
own voice, cannot notice and grasp the meaningfulness of nuances in the others'
languages. Only by listening to the Other can one hear the differences in different
voices; this makes interpretation possible, although, at the same time, it is an effort full
of the risk of being misunderstood.
Going abroad means that a border must be crossed. This experience might, at best, help
us become receptive to noticing boundaries that must be confronted before we are able
to listen to each other and, at least for a moment, also to hear the voice of otherness.
According to Chambers, this means venturing forward with a weakened and restricted
sense of identity. The collective basis of the modern identity has become problematic
for many reasons, and not least because, as Bauman ( 1993, p. 234) notes, identities
may be safe and unproblematic only inside a secure social space. Bauman continues by
stating that spacing and identity production are two facets of the process that was
projected to meet the demand for a unified, managed, and controlled social space.
Bauman sees that this "cultural product" has now become "the last straw of hope for the
seekers of solid identities in the postmodern world of contingency and nomadism." For
those of us who venture with Vattimo into the adventure of difference and turn toward
the process of Verwindung (weak thought), our hope is anchored on the radical
transformation of our relationship to the Other (stranger). This intrinsic problem of
culture, which exists at its core, has to be problematized seriously. Thinking ethically,
this also means confronting the most inevitable choices of the global future of
humanity.
Notes
Author's note: I wish to express my gratitude to Mr. Timo Cantell, M.A., and
Mrs. Eeva Koponen, M.A., for their fruitful comments on the first version of
this chapter, and to Mrs. Joann von Weissenberg, Ph.D., for helping with the
language.
In other words, the views men and women have of their society are forms by
which it is maintained, for each individual as well as for the whole. We are
dealing here with how society is represented to its members, creating meanings
that are peculiar to it. Members of a given society become social beings by
incorporating these very same representations or meanings. The process of
socialization, by means of which that society's members internalize them, allows
these members "to become human" in a specific manner. At the same time, all of
the institutions that are particular to that society also give a concrete expression
to these meanings.
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society ( Castoriadis, 1990- 1991, p. 125).
The most important of all meanings produced in this manner is that which refers to
society itself, its representation of itself as something: this representation is inextricably
linked to a certain way of desiring itself as this society, loving itself as this society. This
is what allows each individual to identify him- or herself with a "we," a collectivity
that, in principle, is indestructible:
During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, two representations were at
the basis of how men and women saw society and of how society represented itself. The
first referred to the belief in the possibility of unlimited progress guided by human
reason. This progress, which allegedly was provided by scientific and technological
development, involved, in turn, a belief in the possibility of continuous development of
the process of industrial production and accumulation. That vision entailed the prospect
that humanity could emerge from its condition as victim of unknown processes in order
to dominate them. It presupposed a progressive mastery over nature by human beings,
as well as the abandonment of ideas that were considered superstitious and that, as in
the case of religious beliefs, placed their very lives beyond human control. It was taken
for granted that this development would allow them to totally dominate the natural
processes, making possible, in turn, the satisfaction of fundamental human needs
( Castoriadis, 1990- 1991). Human beings tried to subordinate nature to human control,
"the human mastery of the natural world" ( Giddens, 1991, p. 144).
The second representation consisted of the belief in human creative capacity, in the
possibility that people would grow in freedom and achieve the common good through
free participation in business, public affairs, and collective processes. This
representation generated a particular meaning that referred to individual and social
autonomy, to freedom and to the possibility of creating forms of collective freedom,
corresponding to a democratic, emancipatory, revolutionary project ( Castoriadis, 1990-
1991, p. 127). Therefore, on the one hand, stood belief in progress; on the other, belief
in humanity and its freedom. We may call these two representations the capitalist
meaning and the meaning of individual autonomy.
The representation that modern society has of itself is thus derived from
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these two interrelated meanings. Modern society views itself as the time and place of
progress and uninterrupted rationalization leading to an enlarged process of production
and accumulation. Simultaneously, it presents itself as a space where, more than in
previous forms of social relationship, the successful realization of the human being is
possible. The sense that results from these meanings is that the convergence of
progress, reason, production, and accumulation implicitly makes possible the existence
of a freer, happier, and more fully realized people.
That representation and the sense it conveyed have, however, suffered setbacks today.
We must understand how this double and contradictory meaning that emerged with
modernity itself is actualized in the contemporary world. Similarly, we must evaluate
the extent to which in today's society the implementation of the notion of time linked to
that representation interferes with the possibility of human realization. Important
changes occurred between the moment in which modern society emerged and the
present; similarly, the then-prevailing sense of life and perception of death have
certainly also suffered alterations.
Other authors have also referred to the presence of two different ways of manifestation
of individuality, at the beginning of modernity, which can somehow approach those
suggested by Castoriadis. Simmel reminds us that once the liberal system of ideas of
the eighteenth century understood that what was common to all belonged to human
nature, it emphasized the fiction of individuals in isolation, equal and free, and the idea
of humanity in general; on the other hand, the romanticism of the nineteenth century,
considering that humanity would be represented in a different way in each person,
accentuated the unique character of individuality, the disparity between people, and the
right to singularity ( Simmel, 1986, pp. 260-261, 275-279). From another angle, Gergen
argued that:
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reason ( Gergen, 1991, p. 6).
We must not forget that human beings are formed by the society into which they are
inserted, as they internalize its fundamental values. The importance of that link is
highlighted in social theory, which holds that society "forges" its members according to
the meanings by which it is characterized, providing itself--and them--with an identity.
Only when the notions of progress, reason, production, accumulation, liberty, equality,
and singularity had acquired such emphasis was it possible to perceive the emergence
of the idea that isolated individuals, independent of their local or family groups, are the
ones who construct the world.
While that notion presupposes human competence for designing life projects, the
concept of the individual also suggests the capability of self-control and self-regulation.
It refers to someone whose potential is not hindered by any ties to the past, someone
capable of creating a personal history that is independent of the group to which he or
she belongs. Simultaneously, it indicates the possibilities of "self-made" persons and of
projecting a future, which requires the belief that human life is not predetermined.
Implicit in this conception are the notions that each person's life is his or her own
possession and that human beings will become whatever they make of themselves.
The historical form of sociability that emerged in the modern world and allowed the
concept of the free individual, as well as his or her empirical existence, to come into
being also produced the experience of a new notion of time, which was no longer linked
to space but appeared independently ( Giddens, 1991, p. 16). At this point, we are no
longer dealing with circular time, but with linear time, which is perceived as a
measurable, divisible, homogeneous, uniform, arithmetized flow. This is also
progressive time, accumulatory, rationalizing, time-conquering nature, as experienced
in terms of unlimited growth and an evergreater approximation to exact total knowledge
( Castoriadis, 1982, p. 244).
This new time makes possible a clear distinction between before, now, and after. This
temporality now supposes, for humans individually as well as for society as a whole,
the existence of a past, present, and future. The present appears simultaneously as a
moment of passage between past and future and the point of departure for new
experiences. Life surfaces as building space--of
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new elements; it implies the idea of project, anticipating what is about to come, with
different characteristics from those "already known" or "already experienced" ( Heller,
1982, pp. 141-142). "The universe of future events is open to be shaped by human
intervention" ( Giddens, 1991, p. 109). In this sense, the process Giddens called
colonization of the future occurs, in which "the 'openness' of things to come expresses
the malleability of the social world and the capability of human beings to shape the
physical settings of our existence" ( Giddens, 1991, p. 111).
Future orientation, which tends to prevail, and the absence of bonds with the past that
this conception involves, are linked to the manner in which humanity came to face
destiny. The latter is not something derived from the will of the gods, nor is it imposed
externally. Rather, it arises from human action itself ( Heller, 1982, pp. 141-162).
Nevertheless, the unique and nonrepeatable history resulting from this process can only
be constructed within a definite period of time: the life span of each person. In order to
be able to trace one's own path and leave one's marks in passing as guarantees that one's
life was successful, there are boundaries beyond which one cannot venture. The growth
of the familiar control of temporal categories is, historically, correlated with the
development of the conscience of finiteness ( Giddens, 1991, p. 50). The notion of the
individual is contemporaneous with changes in the notion of time (and with the
experience of that new temporality), as well as with recognition of life's finiteness.
Recognizing this process, Max Weber stated that, in the modern world, human beings
may feel disgusted, worn out, or weary of life, but never fulfilled by it ( Weber, 1958, p.
140). It has also been said that if death did not exist most people would be honest, for
dishonesty frequently results from lack of time: the fear of losing forever what was not
obtained today ( Heller, 1987, p. 387). In a certain way, consciousness of the end is
what feeds the present. In this sense, one's relationship with death expresses the way in
which one's relationship with life is assumed, as well as its meaning.
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Life and Death Today
After almost two centuries and two world wars, the persistence of misery and hunger,
together with the perception that inequality among people continues, made these
representations that characterize the modern world undergo certain transformations.
Furthermore, we now perceive that the ways in which people establish their relations
and exploit nature are not unrelated. We also perceive that unlimited domination of
nature is impossible since it is not inexhaustible. There is a limit to its exploitation,
beyond which nature begins to revolt: the hole in the ozone layer, the depletion of
natural sources of energy, the consequences of the indiscriminate destruction of forests,
the rise of the earth's temperature, and the climatic inversions we have witnessed all
demonstrate the need to change the ways in which humankind exploits nature.
There is now a divorce between the still existing perception of the possibility of
uninterrupted progress and the recognition that this immense and irrefutable
development does not always better people's lives. We have observed breathtaking
scientific and technological developments that daily achieve wonders which, only a
short time ago, were thought to be unobtainable--and which, in turn, are soon
superseded by new conquests. Nevertheless, it remains clear that while we can develop
the most advanced experiences from the scientific and technical point of view, the
economic, cultural, and social distances separating different social strata are
progressively increasing.
Thus, of the two opposite senses that the representation of modern society sought to
reconcile--the meaning of individual autonomy and the capitalist meaning--only the
latter remains truly present and dominant in the contemporary moment. However, what
it now seems to lead to is the indefinite expansion of the presumably rational matrix,
which has been emptied of whatever humanistic content that gave it vitality in the past.
As a result, today, the very ideology of uninterrupted progress, which guided both
history and projects for the future and provided people with a sense of living a "new
time," is being questioned or, for many, has lost its meaning. On the other hand, the
representation, which presaged the possibility of an emerging free humanity capable of
autonomously constituting a history that would simultaneously provide for individual
happiness and the common good, has been visibly weakened.
Under these conditions, the exercise of reason does not have, as a greater objective,
improvement in the life of humanity but rather is carried out for the sake of greater
wealth or progress for its own sake. Often, what seems perfectly logical when observed
from that angle is revealed as being completely incoherent and/or irrational when its
consequences are analyzed from the point of view of the most immediate human
existence or from prejudices suffered by the environment in the middle and long terms.
It is appropriate for us to ask whether, in many cases, we are really speaking of an
exercise of reason or rather of its negation.
Consequently, the experience of the present moment, for many contemporary men and
women, rather than allowing them to see themselves as whole, or as individuals in the
full meaning of the term, causes them to feel like disconnected
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beings with neither roots nor prospects.
As a result, for most people today--who have lost the feeling of belonging, of
participating in a "we"--the subjective translation of the meaning of individual
autonomy and of the reality that sustains it results in a profound individualism in which
each person turns selfishly to his or her own desires and expectations and will not
recognize a fellow being in the other. The result of this process is none other than the
continuous growth of consumption and leisure--which have become ends in
themselves--the fragmentation of life into an array of meaningless acts and the extreme
solitude that haunts people even though they live in society.
At this point, we need to think about the relation existing between the elements that
have been highlighted. We must emphasize the links that articulate social meanings at
work in the contemporary world, possible individuality, the experienced notion of
temporality, and the perception of death.
People today perceive that "time flies." Time's velocity has made the endeavor of
planning the future obsolete, if not almost impossible. By the same token, the now, as
well as the need to consume it exhaustively, have come to reign absolutely. "Making"
time and not "wasting it" have become an obsession. People are crushed by the rhythms
and programs imposed on them by the variety of social webs, at the workplace and
elsewhere. The need to adequately administer time is internalized, as are all of the most
important social rules. Time is converted into an imperative. Individuals must adjust
their own behavior to the "time" established by the group to which they belong ( Elias,
1989a, p. 135). Personal temporality, whose rhythm does not accompany the swift pulse
of external time, is overpowered by it and converted into its "colony." Men and women
thus become their own internal clocks and the instruments of their own temporal
servitude. The pressure to rigidly program time penetrates daily life, both socially and
individually ( Chesnaux, 1983, p. 40).
This process can be partially explained by the way in which temporality is being
experienced, by the meaning which time assumes today. The characteristics that time
had acquired during the emergence of modern society are carried to their ultimate
consequences, having now been deprived of their transforming potentials. The demands
of the social order and their dominant logic cause time to be seen almost exclusively in
terms of linearity, with a utilitarian emphasis falling on the quantitative, to the detriment
of the qualitative. This is fundamentally a progressive time, centered on efficiency and
on the need to exhaustively drain the present's potential, but which somehow no longer
carries
-187-
the prospect of global domination of nature, the possibility of total knowledge, or the
idea of humankind constructing its own destiny.
Here is the inversion: human beings, having been atomized, become dominated by an
external rhythm and, instead of regulating their own time, are made into its victims.
They no longer see themselves as building their life and their world. Rather, they feel
susceptible to threats whose origins they cannot detect, and whose development they
cannot control. Consequently, they tend to discipline themselves in a complete and
uniform manner, in almost all aspects and on almost all occasions. Discipline presents
itself as a characteristic of contemporary society's model of self-control. Its model of
civilization is represented by the regulation of time typical thereof: it is no longer
punctual and specific but rather penetrates all of human life, without allowing for
oscillations. This feature is uniform and inevitable ( Elias, 1989a, p. 162). This
perception, which was also developed by Foucault ( 1977), was, in a certain way,
questioned by Giddens when the latter stated that "bodily discipline is intrinsic to the
competent social agent; it is transcultural rather than specifically connected with
modernity" ( Giddens, 1991, p. 56). Nevertheless, there is no way to deny the emphasis
on self-disciplining at the present moment.
Alongside this trend, another feature characterizes the contemporary world: in the most
developed societies, people think of themselves as individual and independent beings,
separated from one another by a sort of invisible wall. For them, consequently, their
life, being isolated from the life of others and hermetically separated from the world,
should have meaning in and of itself. When they are unable to find this type of
meaning, human existence will seem absurd to them and they will feel disillusioned.
Nevertheless, according to Elias, it is important that we remember that the "category of
meaning cannot be understood when referring to the human individual or to a universal
derived from this notion. The existence of a plurality of beings, who are interdependent
in some way and communicating with one another, constitutes what we call meaning."
In other words, "meaning" is a social category and the subject corresponding to it is a
plurality of human beings ( Elias, 1989b, p. 68). To the extent that people tend to see
themselves as individual and independent beings, dissociated from and indifferent to
those with whom they live, their life (as well as their death) is lived as if devoid of any
meaning.
Each historical moment and each society creates a specific type of human being.
Considering all the changes that have taken place in the representations that
contemporary society and humankind make of themselves, the typical character of our
epoch has been presented by various authors as the artificial and passing union of a
disperse set of traits that do not quite constitute a clear human profile.
-188-
is filtered through the way they believe others perceive them. It is as if people were
using radar in an attempt to grasp the perception that others have of them, molding
themselves according to external expectations ( Riesman, 1973). In other words, their
yardstick lies outside themselves.
From these points of view instead of that of the autonomous individual, this way of
being in the world results in people's loss of their points of reference next to the
manifestation of generalized conformism. The possibility of controlling their own lives
or providing for their own future and that of their children, of leaving enduring marks
of their passage through the world, becomes ever more distant. Insecurity and the
inability to predict tomorrow prevail in their lives ( Horkheimer, 1976, pp. 168-169). In
this sense, present-day human experience can be viewed as the negation of the notion of
the individual as it was conceived in the early stages of modernity. Nowadays, there is
no further possibility for its manifestation since, under present conditions, none of those
meanings have a way of sustaining themselves--from the enterprising businessperson to
the individual with a romantic viewpoint, from the critical individual to the rational
one. Thus, individual autonomy is impossible, and in its place, heteronomy and
alienation characterize people's behavior.
On the other hand, the "empire of the ephemeral," the emphasis on the instantaneous
(which has become dominant) and the importance of a "now" devoid of meaning, end
up removing the significance of the past while emptying the possibility of a future. The
notion of history--both individual and social--that marked the emergence of these forms
of sociability, temporality, and individuality, as well as the very possibility of
establishing an identity, are devastated, along with the loss of sense that social life
presents, with the evergreater fragmentation of time and the significance that
instantaneousness acquires.
Even agreeing in some points with this way of understanding human life in the
contemporary world (despite having a less negative outlook), Gergen confirmed
significant alterations, albeit subtle, in people's self-conception when one moves from
the way of life that prevailed until the first half of the twentieth century to the way of
life that prevails now at century's end. For this outlook:
where both the romantic and the modernist conceptions of identifiable selves
begin to fray, the result may be something more than a void, an absence of
self. Instead, if this tracing of the trajectory is plausible, we may be entering a
new era of self-conception. In this era, self is redefined as no longer an
essence in itself, but relational. In the postmodern world, selves may become
the manifestations of relationship, thus placing relationships in the central
position occupied by the individual self for the last several hundred years of
Western history. [Thus,] . . . one's sense of individual autonomy gives way to a
reality of immersed interdependence, in which it is relationship that constructs
the self. ( Gergen, 1991, pp. 146-147) 2
To the best of its ability, each historical epoch elaborates its own mechanisms for facing
the problem of death. Consciousness of their very finiteness and of the need to
"eternalize" themselves through deeds realized during their lifetimes provided modern
men and women with their way of confronting death. In
-189-
contemporary society, since life has lost its meaning--to the extent that the sense of
one's own history or even the very sense of history have disappeared--death is also
meaningless. There are various mechanisms that attempt to repel it, as if to deny it were
somehow to keep it away. We are dealing here with the same mechanisms involved in
making life "go by": taking a refuge in the immediate, the generation gap, th loss of the
sense of continuity. In today's world, the individual lives a frenzied race in order to
forget that he or she is going to die and that, strictly speaking, nothing that he or she
does has any meaning. Thus, people succumb as individuals since their sense of
belonging is obscured and the experience of their singularity is annulled.
It is important to emphasize another aspect of that same process. Medical progress and
the social measures to raise hygiene levels instilled the idea in contemporary society
that death should be seen as a "natural process" ( Elias, 1989b, p. 60). However, modern
man and woman see themselves placed before a paradox by science: the more means to
prolong life are developed, the more alienated from one's life one becomes. Not having
control over one's body and over vital processes, all that is left is to respect the good
judgment and knowledge of those who hold the explanation of life and death: the
doctors ( Sanches, 1994, p. 9). Thus, "on apparently acquiring a greater control on life,
technically speaking, by being able to prolong life, avoid the consummation of death, at
least for a certain length of time, man in fact has lost control over his own life"
( Martins, 1983, p. 10; see also Sanches, 1994). While in the past the moment of death
seemed like a moment to be feared, but also a great moment, nowadays, death
withdraws to the silence of hospitals and appears as a lonely and shameful experience.
Simultaneously, and as a consequence, there is ever-greater insensitivity concerning
how life is lived and how death is presented. This is the dominant mode of existence,
even though, in isolated spots, rituals and behaviors recalling old patterns of sociability
remain.
In Brazil, there are gross contrasts between the ways of living life, which are expressed
in significant differences in the ways to understand death. While there is a whole
technological apparatus that serves health institutions and their users, there is also need,
absolute misery, and a total absence of services and assistance. As a consequence of
these two such different means for the availability and enjoyment of society--of fitting
into the world--there also arise different ways of representing death ( Sanches, 1994, p.
17). In distant regions of Brazil (among mestizos and Indians) or in urban shantytowns
and suburbs, funeral rites and conceptions of death rather distinct from those now
prevailing still exist ( Martins, 1983, p. 9). Nevertheless, the latter are insidiously
gaining ground.
-190-
We can perceive in the contemporary world a parallel process. Currently, to the extent
to which society's lack of security has increased, making it ever more difficult for
individuals to foresee and to exert a certain control over their own long-term future--as
was considered possible when modern society emerged--the need for supernatural
protection is resurging ( Elias, 1989b, p. 15).
It is as if a "re-enchantment" of the world were taking place, as can be seen by the great
vitality with which new forms of religiousness surface or resurface and mystic
experiences of all sorts proliferate. For Lipovetsky, the resurfacing of spiritualities and
esotericisms of all kinds does not contradict the principal logic of our time. Rather, it is
a way of enforcing it, "allowing for an individualistic cocktail of realization" ( 1988, p.
119).
Conclusion
What we have presented reveals that we are at a critical moment, characterized by loss
of the sense of life and sense of death, social life without meaning, and individuality
made impossible. Is there some way to remake meanings, to project the senses again
and to reconstruct the promise of free individuals?
Some authors point to redimensioning the present time as a possible route. That
redimensioning demands the rediscovery of the future and a new relationship with
tradition and also with death, as well as a different form with which the individual can
confront time. 3
There are also those who remind us of the need for people's reaction, taking the
"struggle for time" into the field of politics. That reaction should be present in the
workplace--as struggle for internal organization and control over the length of time
worked--as well as in private life through an administration of personal time that makes
room for the unexpected, prevents the imprisonment caused by commitment to a
schedule, and also rejects time-consuming mechanisms ( Chesnaux, 1983, pp. 52-53).
Therefore, it is asserted that a new historical creation capable of effectively and lucidly
opposing itself to this shapeless and kaleidoscopic world, this bazaar in which we live,
is inconceivable unless a new and fertile relationship with tradition is established. This
does not mean restoring traditional values as such or restoring them because they are
traditional, but rather, recovering a critical attitude capable of recognizing values that
have been lost ( Castoriadis, 1990- 1991, p. 135). According to another approach, the
past is the only concrete reference available for us to consider the possibility of other
forms of social
-191-
organization, which means that we can look to the past in search of references for
another future. Here, the idea that the past can help us confront the present is also found
( Chesnaux, 1983, pp. 53-54).
Both these approaches suppose a linkage between past and future by way of the present,
and both recover the observation that Alexis de Tocqueville ( 1945, vol. 2, p. 331) made
in that respect back in the nineteenth century: "Since the past ceased to cast light on the
future, the human mind has wandered in darkness."
Notes
Author's note: A more condensed version of this text originally appeared as "Time and
the Individual in the Contemporary World: The Meaning of Death" in Dimensions of
Time and Life: The Study of Time VIII, eds. J. T. Fraser and Marlene P. Soulsby.
Madison: International Universities Press, 1995.
1. ". . . Sens qui concerne l'autoreprsentation de la socit; sens participable par les
individus; sens leur permettant de monnayer pour leur compte personnel un sens
du monde, un sens de la vie et, finalement, un sens de leur mort. . . ." ( Castoriadis,
1990- 1991, p. 127).
-192-
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Author Index
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Subject Index
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Class, xi, xvi, xxi, 18 , 27 , 32 , 37 , 44 - 91 , 95 , 171 -73, 182 ; participatory, 31 ,
45 , 47 , 56 , 59 , 65 - 67 , 70 - 72 , 74 - 78 , 182
96 . 102 , 109 , 130 -31, 137 , 145 , 148 , Depersonalization, 25
152 , 172 -73 Depoliticization, 142
Commitment, xvi, 6 , 22 , 25 , 29 - 30 , Deprivation, 37 - 39 , 47 , 109 , 115
51 , 54 - 59 , 61 , 63 , 77 , 97 , 157 , 162 , Despair, 97 - 98 , 153
166 , 191 Dialectic, xix, 1 , 5 , 96 , 135 , 144 , 148 ,
Competition, xv, xvii, xxii, 37 - 38 , 40 , 157 , 164 , 167 ; dialectical inquiry, 35
46 , 48 , 61 , 76 - 78 , 105 , 107 -9, 114 - Difference, 1 , 11 , 15 , 57 , 65 , 77 , 128 ,
115 130 -31, 135 , 139 -40, 147 , 152 , 155 -57,
Complexity, xi, xiii, xx-xxiv, xxvi, 13 , 31 166 -67, 172 , 174 , 180
- 32 , 77 , 179 Discourse, xviii, 7 , 21 - 24 , 27 , 34 - 35 ,
Consciousness, x-xii, 1 , 18 - 19 , 25 - 26 , 99 , 111 , 121 , 123 , 127 , 129 , 134 , 136 ,
34 , 52 , 80 , 84 - 85 , 97 , 104 -5, 109 , 117 147 , 151 , 161 , 171 , 174 , 179 ; moral-
, 119 -20, 129 -31, 134 -35, 137 , 152 , practical, 22 , 35 ; practical, 22 , 27 , 34 ,
157 , 160 , 167 , 170 , 178 , 185 , 189 ; 35
social, 84 - 85 , 131 Discrimination, xvii, xviii, 7 , 21 - 24 , 27 ,
Contemporaneity, 192 34 , 35 , 69 , 99 , 107 , 110 -16, 121 , 123 ,
Counter-hegemonic, 36 127 , 129 , 134 , 136 , 147 , 151 , 161 ,
Crises, xv-xvi, 37 - 39 , 44 , 47 - 48 , 84 ; 171 , 174 , 179
economic, xv, 37 - 39 , 44 , 48 Doubt, 15 , 84 , 97 , 100 , 106 , 146
Culture, xix-xx, xxvi, 3 , 9 , 14 , 32 , 70 , Eastern, xi-xii, 80
84 , 86 - 88 , 95 - 96 , 98 , 116 -17, 120 -21, Economic, xiv-xv, xvii, xxi-xxiii, xxvii, 3 ,
123 -24, 130 , 132 , 139 -45, 147 , 149 , 14 , 22 , 32 , 37 - 39 , 44 , 46 - 48 , 50 , 53 ,
157 -63, 166 -68, 170 , 172 -80; cultural, ix, 59 - 60 , 65 - 66 , 68 , 70 - 72 , 75 - 77 , 79 ,
xvii-xviii, 1 - 2 , 6 , 8 - 12 , 32 , 52 , 62 , 70 95 , 107 -9, 112 -19, 128 , 145 , 163 , 169 ,
, 82 , 85 , 87 , 89 - 91 , 96 - 97 , 99 - 100 , 186 ; underground economy, 46 , 49
104 -6, 108 , 117 -24, 128 , 135 , 139 , 140 Education, xvii, xxv, 52 - 53 , 56 , 60 , 72 -
-44, 147 -48, 150 , 159 -64, 166 , 168 -74, 74 , 85 , 87 - 92 , 95 - 100 , 106 , 113 ,
176 , 178 , 180 , 186 ; multi culturalism, 120 , 161 ; for democracy, 88 - 89 , 91 ;
140 educational policy, 87 - 89
Cybernetics, xiv, xxi, xxiv-xxv-xxvi, 155 ; Embodiment, 17 , 132 -33, 164
first-order, xxi; second-order, xiv, xxi, xxv- Empiricism, xv, 23 ; empirico-analytic
xxvi work, 36
Cynicism, 32 , 156 -57 Enculturation, 95 - 96 , 106
Dauerreflexion, 151 Energy, xv, 18 , 87 , 160 , 162 -65, 168
Dealienation, xii, xv, xvii, xix-xx, xxiii, 21 -70, 186
- 24 , 30 - 31 , 65 , 76 - 77 , 95 , 98 - 100 , Enlightenment, xviii-xix-xx, 14 , 127 , 130
161 , 165 , 151 -52, 157 , 161 , 167 , 171 , 192
Death, xviii-xxi, xxiv, 7 , 14 , 26 , 32 , 39 , Epistemology, 24 - 25 , 130 , 156
76 , 113 -14, 121 , 127 , 129 , 157 -58, Eshkolot, 90 - 92
160 , 164 , 168 , 181 -83, 185 -92 Essentialism, 4 , 11 , 128 , 130 , 132 , 134 ,
Decolonization, 136 137
Decommodification, 40 , 48 Established resident, 66 , 69 , 75 , 77
Deconstruction, xviii-xix, 2 , 122 , 151 Estrangement, ix-x, xv, 12 - 13 , 18 , 66 ,
-52, 155 98 , 104 -6, 119 , 144 -46, 159
Dehumanization, 26 Ethic, 21 , 24 - 25 , 34 , 36 , 164 -66, 169 ;
Democracy, xv-xvi, xx, 30 - 31 , 33 , 36 , ethical directives, 21 , 23 - 24
46 , 51 - 52 , 54 , 58 - 63 , 81 , 85 , 88 - 89 , Ethnic, xii-xiv, xvi-xvii, xxi-xxii, xxiv,
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xxvi-xxviii, 4 - 5 , 8 , 32 , 39 , 44 , 65 - 72 , condition, 18 , 22 , 24 - 25 ; nature, 3 , 11 ,
74 - 83 , 85 - 87 , 89 - 93 , 110 -13, 116 , 24 , 134 , 137 , 183 ; relations, xv, 22 , 28 -
178 ; conflict, xxi-xxii, 85 ; groups, xvi, 31 , 34 , 144 , 176 ; relations strategies, 22
39 , 44 , 71 - 72 , 76 , 78 , 86 , 93 ; identity, Humanism, xviii, 13 , 117 , 127 -32, 134 ,
80 , 82 ; revival, 79 , 83 ; inter-ethnic, 71 , 136 -37, 168 , 169 ; humanistic discourse,
76 ; multi-ethnic, 66 24 , 129
Ethnicity, ix, xii, xiv, xvi, xxi, xxvi-xxvii, Humanity, 2 - 5 , 10 - 11 , 13 - 15 , 152 ,
4 , 66 , 72 - 73 , 75 , 77 , 80 , 85 , 102 ; 180 , 182 -83, 185 -86
European, 107 Identification, xiv-xxv, 1 , 3 , 5 - 6 , 8 - 11 ,
Everyday life, xvi, 66 , 133 , 139 , 142 -48, 13 , 84 , 99 , 104 , 111
160 , 167 , 178 Identity, xiv, xvii-xviii, xxv-xxvi, 1 - 10 ,
Evolution, xxii, 18 , 23 ; co-evolution, xxii 12 - 13 , 32 , 77 , 79 - 80 , 82 , 84 , 86 - 87 ,
Exclusion, xvii, 65 , 107 , 109 , 113 , 116 , 92 , 97 - 98 , 103 -4, 110 , 119 , 124 , 127
133 -28, 129 -37, 145 , 152 -54, 172 , 177 -80,
Experience, xix, xxii, xxvi, 5 , 22 , 25 , 30 , 184 , 188 -89; politics, 127 -28, 131 -32,
33 , 38 - 39 , 56 , 69 , 87 , 90 , 99 , 104 -5, 135 , 137 ; quest for, xxvi
113 , 118 , 124 -25, 130 -32, 134 -35, 138 , Ideology, xv, 4 , 8 , 14 , 18 , 23 , 26 , 29 ,
140 , 160 -62, 165 , 167 -69, 178 , 180 , 32 , 34 , 51 , 59 - 61 , 77 , 95 , 108 , 110 ,
184 -86, 189 -90 114 , 130 , 142 , 173 , 186 ; corporate, 29 ,
Familiarity, xx, 172 , 179 34 ; political, 8 , 61 , 108 ; of science, 23 ;
Fanaticism, 5 - 6 , 10 , 13 - 14 of scientific objectivity, xv, 23
Fascism, 112 -13, 137 Individual, ix-xi, xiii, xvii-xviii, xx, xxiii-
Fetishization of alienation, 21 , 24 , 26 xxiv, xxvi-xxviii, 1 - 2 , 9 , 12 - 13 , 17 - 18
Fixation, x, 38 , 84 , 24 - 28 , 34 , 38 , 60 - 52 , 76 , 91 - 93 , 97
Foundationalism, 137 , 151 -52 - 98 , 103 , 106 -7, 109 -25, 131 , 135 ,
Fragmentation, xiii, xviii, xxiv-xxv, xxviii, 140 , 143 , 153 -54, 159 -65, 167 -70, 181
26 , 59 , 103 , 122 , 140 , 156 , 187 , 189 -92
Frankfurt School, xix, 141 -42, 146 -47, Individuality, 105 , 175 , 183 -84, 187 -89,
149 , 152 -53, 155 , 157 191
Freedom, xiii, xx, 52 - 53 , 58 , 86 , 119 , Industry, xv, xvii, 98 , 101 , 103 -4, 108 ,
137 , 169 , 171 , 182 , 184 142 , 157 -58; industrial relations, 28 , 33 ,
Generativity, xvii, 97 - 98 , 101 , 103 36
Globalization, xii, xv-xvii, xxiv, xxvi, Inferiority, 97 , 101 , 116
xxviii, 66 , 107 -8, 114 , 116 , 179 Initiative, xvii, 97 - 98 , 100 , 103
Great Compromise, 39 , 48 Integrity, 97 - 98 , 101
Growth, xviii, xxiii, 22 , 26 , 32 , 34 , 65 , Interaction, x, xiii, xv-xvi, xxii, xxiv, 18 ,
68 - 71 , 75 , 77 , 91 - 92 , 95 - 96 , 112 , 41 , 56 - 60 , 63 , 78 , 88 , 91 , 96 , 100 ,
169 , 184 -85, 187 ; slow growth, 69 143 , 145 -46, 165
Guilt, 75 , 97 , 100 Intimacy, xvii, 97 - 98 , 101 , 103 -4, 145 ,
Habitat, 172 179
Habituality, 171 , 179 Israel, xvii, 36 , 81 , 85 , 87 - 88 , 91 , 99 ,
Habitus, 99 , 106 , 132 , 177 100
Hegemony, 59 , 65 , 130 , 138 , 140 -43, Jews, 79 , 81 - 82 , 91
147 , 150 , 161 Job, xv, 22 , 28 - 31 , 33 - 35 , 38 - 39 ,
Human beings, 1 , 3 - 4 , 6 - 8 , 10 - 11 , 13
- 14 , 85 , 117 , 181 -82, 184 -85, 188 ;
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119 -20, 122 -25, 127 -30, 134 -36, 139 137 ; of resistance, xviii, 128 -29, 131 -32,
-40, 142 -47, 149 , 159 -60, 167 , 171 -73, 135 , 137
176 , 179 -80, 189 , 192 ; politics, 65 Postmodernity, ix, xi, xiii-xiv, xviii-xix,
Postmodernism, ix, xii-xiii-xiv, xviii xix, xxvi, 1 - 2 , 10 , 12 - 13 , 15 , 128 , 166
xxi, xxiv-xxviii, 2 , 4 , 127 -32, 135 , 137 Power, xviii, 14 - 15 , 23 , 29 , 31 - 32 ,
-39, 141 -47, 149 -50, 157 -61, 164 , 166 , 38 , 40 - 41 , 45 , 53 , 60 , 62 , 68 , 76 - 77 ,
170 ; ludic, xviii, 128 -29, 131 -32, 135 , 87 , 89 , 93 , 95 , 108 , 114 , 120 -22, 127
-30, 133 -35, 147 , 152 , 157 , 159 , 162 ,
167 , 170 , 173 , 180 ; domains of, 87 , 89 ; Science, xv, xxi, xxviii, 2 , 6 , 8 , 18 - 19 ,
equalization, 31 21 , 23 - 25 , 27 - 30 , 35 - 36 , 123 , 139
Powerlessness, ix-x, xvii, xxii-xxiii, 31 - -40, 157 , 159 , 163 , 169 , 190 ; epistemic
32 , 38 , 41 , 59 , 63 , 66 , 77 , 97 , 104 , stance of, 21 , 24 , 25 ; scientific, xv, 9 , 21
109 , 153 , 179 - 26 , 28 , 30 , 34 - 36 , 82 , 90 , 156 , 162
Praxis, 22 , 25 - 27 , 33 , 35 , 84 , 104 , 133 -63, 170 , 172 , 182 , 186 ; community, 24 -
, 135 , 137 -38, 143 -44, 147 25
Prediction, 77 ; predictive efficiency, 24 , Self, ix-x, xii, xiv-xv, xvii-xxi, xxiv-xxvi,
30 , 34 1 - 5 , 7 - 14 , 17 , 19 , 22 , 25 , 27 , 30 -
Presence, xx, 156 , 161 , 168 , 170 , 172 , 32 , 34 - 35 , 38 , 60 - 61 , 82 , 84 , 90 , 97 -
174 , 176 -77, 179 , 183 98 , 102 , 104 -5, 117 -25, 127 -36, 138 ,
Prophecy, 163 , 166 144 -47, 150 -53, 157 , 159 , 163 , 165 -66,
Psychological, xv, 23 168 , 170 -72, 176 , 179 , 182 -84, 188 -89
Quality, xv, 22 , 28 - 30 ; control, xv, 29 ; Selfhood, 6 , 8 , 11 , 117 , 127 , 130 , 132
control circles, 29 ; of working life, xv, 22 , -33, 135 , 137
28 - 30 Self-realization, 144
Racism, 75 , 86 , 107 -8, 110 , 112 -16 Shame, 97 , 100
Rationalization, 28 , 34 , 36 , 108 , 152 Simulation, xxi-xxii, xxiv, 140 -41, 145 ,
-53, 157 , 163 -64, 183 158
Reductionism, xv, 23 , 141 ; psychological, Sit-down strike, 45
xv, 23 Social, ix-xv, xvii-xxiii, xxviii, 1 - 3 , 6 -
Refugees, 71 , 111 -12, 114 -16, 178 7 , 9 - 15 , 17 - 19 , 21 - 25 , 27 - 28 , 30 -
Regression, xv, 38 36 , 38 - 40 , 43 - 44 , 46 , 48 - 49 , 52 , 55 ,
Reification, xv, xix, xxvii, 27 , 36 , 149 , 59 - 63 , 65 - 66 , 72 , 78 - 81 , 84 - 85 , 87
152 -58; reified sociological knowledge, 21 - 91 , 95 - 96 , 97 - 98 , 102 , 104 -16, 118
, 33 ; sociological work, 25 , 34 -25, 127 -36, 139 -42, 144 -48, 150 -57,
Remedial action, 23 159 -73, 175 , 179 -91; isolation, ix, 98 ,
Representation, xx, 71 - 72 , 77 , 140 , 145 104 -5; movement, 19 , 60 - 62 ; structure,
-47, 152 , 162 , 182 -83, 186 ; mode of, 140 131
Resacralization, xx, 160 -61, 165 , 170 Socialization, xxv, 2 , 83 , 95 - 99 , 103 ,
Restriction of output, 45 106 , 181
Revolution, xv, xviii, 14 , 18 , 36 - 37 , 108 Society, xii-xiii, xvii-xx, xxii-xxvi, xxviii,
, 118 -19, 146 ; revolutionary, xx, 18 , 48 , 2 , 7 , 10 - 11 , 14 - 15 , 17 - 18 , 23 , 25 -
59 , 136 -37, 163 , 168 , 182 28 , 31 - 32 , 34 , 51 - 57 , 59 - 62 , 70 - 71 ,
Role, xvii, 12 , 15 , 51 , 53 , 65 , 75 , 92 , 80 - 81 , 83 , 85 , 88 , 90 - 92 , 95 - 97 , 104
97 - 99 , 101 -3, 105 , 113 , 136 , 139 , , 107 , 109 , 113 , 116 , 118 -20, 122 , 125 ,
145 , 158 , 160 , 166 , 170 ; identity, xvii, 128 , 130 , 134 -35, 139 -48, 152 -54, 158 ,
97 162 , 168 -69, 171 -74, 181 -88, 190 -91;
Sameness, 130 , 174 -76 societies,
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Contributors
Pirkkoliisa AHPONEN Department of Social Policy and Philosophy, University
of Joensuu, Finland
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Irving Louis HOROWITZ Transaction Publishers and Department of Sociology,
Rutgers University, USA
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