subjectivity – GV Loewen

The Anomie of the People

The Anomie of the People (subjective alienation today)

In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx and Engels outline the four forms of alienated consciousness. In a sense, this quartet of disharmony in turn form the Gestalt of Proletarian unthought, just as they provide for the Bourgeois outlook an odd, even perverse, set of rationalizations for their own continuing alienation. Capital is more complex now than it was in the mid-19^th century, and the failure of the middle classes of our own time has highlighted not so much Marx’s ideas but rather that of his successor in the human sciences, Emile Durkheim. Momentarily, we must admit that the former might well have seen in the latter a yet further decoy, but perhaps not. Subjective alienation, or anomie, is just as real as are the others, objective and structural as they may be. What Durkheim was confronting as a discursive manifest was the same thing that an individual person confronted as a producer and consumer as well as a human being: is it only the case that objectively alienated labor by necessity contributed directly to the anomic existence, or is it more interesting than this?

Let us first review Marx’s conceptions, keeping in mind that in the interim many mitigating factors have been created, for better or worse, to mute at least the effects of the problem at hand. The four forms of alienated consciousness are as follows: 1. Alienation from the product of work: workers produce objects that for the most part they cannot themselves afford or are even ‘meant’ for them. 2. Alienation from other workers: workers are placed in a do or die competition with one another, thereby sabotaging any sense of a wider solidarity. 3. Alienation from work itself: most work is unfulfilling in any deeper sense, ‘its just a job’, and 4. Alienation from human potential: this is by far the most profound of the forms and speaks to our species-being being distanced from its own broader abilities. In this, capital inherits the worst of the religious pre-modern worldview, but without any of the entailing grace or salvation about it; one is born, one works, one dies.

Each of the forms has undergone extensive mutation, some more, some less. 1. For the most part, workers can in fact afford the objects they help produce, and for some, such as contractors and skilled labor, the potential exists for they themselves to construct such objects, such as executive homes, for themselves and more or less by themselves, over time. 2. Unions, which Marx and Engels disdained, have eased the sense that workers are each other’s enemies and only that, though the globalization of labor has heightened the anxiety around finding and keeping a job at a living wage. At the same time, the more skills one has, the less likely an employer can afford to lose, not you yourself, but the class of worker in which you have placed yourself. 3. Much work has been augmented to become more existentially fulfilling, though it remains a servitude in the service sector; Durkheim himself made this first point not long after Marx’s death, and suggested that wages earned could ‘borrow’ from the prestige of wages spent, however frivolously. The journal The Hindu noted some twenty years ago or so that Europeans spent on average about one billion dollars on ice cream products per annum, for instance. 4. We are yet quite unsure of the scope of human potential, and presumably we are far from reaching its nadir. Marx himself stated that capital was the most liberating form of economic organization to date since it did free up some few people to reach their individual potentials and thus display something of the role-model to others. It is an open question whether or not an authentic communism would do as well. Even so, this final and most damning form of objective alienation remains a plague on our species-being, though one could certainly argue that wage labor is hardly the only factor in its ongoing presence.

Durkheim was dissatisfied with the structural explanation of alienated consciousness in the main due to its utter ignoring of the chief locus of perception in Bourgeois relations, that of the individual. In this sense, Marx’s analysis presented itself as a contradiction in terms, and it was not the only one extant in the 1844 manuscripts. One can only be reminded at this juncture that Marx and Engels also ignored the fact that communism, as a still hypothetical mode of production, entailed no alteration in the means of production, unlike every other sea-change of this sort in history. In Marx, communism was simply capitalism bereft of pre-modern sentiments; the symbolic forms of the theistic period would somehow drop off, altering the relations of production but not the technical and industrial means. Communism thus is presented as an exception to the ruling dynamic of history – class conflict – and the only way one can rationalize this odd conclusion to Engels’ historical model is that within communism class conflict does itself end. But this is putting the cart before the horse in logical terms. Beyond this, though often seen as a mere aside, Marx’s analysis of the role of the artist ‘under’ communism also ignores the most profound aspect of what the artist does in society; she works against the grain, most simply, opening up human consciousness by transgressing norms and thus thereby transcending alienation as well. It is unclear how, in the communist mode of production, the artist would have anything to do at all, or if she did, would be able, or allowed, to do it.

All this aside, Durkheim’s’ main interest was complementing the structural model for the personal level. All very well to bandy about large-scale factors, at the end of the day, real people bore the results of their world-historical confluence. If revolution was consciousness in the making, how then could it occur at all without individuals processing their perceptions of their own alienation? Indeed, they do so, and the means by which they do Durkheim called the anomic relations of production. Anomie is subjective alienation; its symptoms are anxiousness, angst, embitteredness, resentment, and even neurosis and ressentiment. In a word, anomie is a most serious affair, and even it be seen as a mere symptom of objectively defined alienated consciousness within Bourgeois relations, what it presents to us is a full-blooded symptomology of the entire mode of production. Durkheim’s genius lay in his ability to take the most minute moment and see in it the whole of the relevant Zeitgeist. Witness his analysis of deviance in his 1893 The Division of Labor in Society, perhaps still the most famous example of inductive thinking in the human sciences. But anomie and its further effects – as in, suicide – appears as a working conception four years later. Part of another four-term model, the anomic person is alienated from his own selfhood. To him, this is a more present form of inexistence than any structural item could be. A job is a job, it is not a life. To be fair, we speak from our own time, and Durkheim, whether or not he was a critic of the fact that capital had augmented in significant ways its panoply of distractions by the fin de siecle period, had the vision to understand that this relatively free mode of production could not survive its socialist detractors for any length of time if it had not become more appealing to the worker himself. Nonetheless, in doing so, the symbolic life of the pre-modern period abruptly slipped away, leading to disenchantment, something that Durkheim’s major sibling thinker, Max Weber, became famous for analyzing. But for the former, Entzauberung, the loss of the ‘magical’ quality of and in the world, was not an end in itself, but rather something which had rather been transposed, with a variety of plausible substitutions taking the place of the once religious-inspired worldview aspects. Instead of a local sect, a local sports team, instead of a pilgrimage site, a sports stadium. Instead of a saint himself, a Taylor Swift herself, and so on. For Durkheim, all of these transpositions involved the perennial career of the concept of the sacred, something that Marx and Engels ignored, and something that Weber stated, rather perfunctorily, could not truly exist in modernity, just as he so claimed for authentic charisma. But we can compare Joan of Arc to Tiger Woods along such lines, Durkheim might have said. The sacred was for Durkheim a kind of meta-conception, something that survived even shifts in the mode of production, from subsistence to agrarianism to industry and perhaps yet to intelligent technologies. For Engels, such shifts were all inclusive, so concepts such as the sacred, or ideas such as archetypes, for that matter, were inadmissible to his modeling. This is clearly an oversight at best, especially in light of what we have already mentioned regarding his apparently incomplete premises for the ‘final’ shift from capital to communism. The only way to make one kind of sense of such a model is, aside from the usual inability to predict the future, which all human analytics fall short of, is that communism ends symbolic forms and in their entirety. As Marx put it, distinguishing his much more radical ‘atheism’ from that of Feuerbach, ‘For the communist man, the question of God cannot arise.’

Needless to say, Durkheim’s vision of the sacred was much broader and deeper than any of this. He was aware, as was Engels, of cosmologies which had no Gods at all, but unlike his German compatriot, he used this knowledge in his own analyses. By 1912, with the publication of the legendary The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, appearing in the same year as the first essays of both Scheler’s Ressentiment and Freud’s Totem and Taboo, Durkheim had formalized the dialectic between trans-historical concepts such as the sacred, ritual, or the archetypes and their contrasting historical forms, such as specific pantheons or godheads, rituals in their ethnographic detail, and beliefs. Once again, as a clearly sibling analytic to Weber’s distinction between historical and ideal types, the sense that any specific mode of production would be immune to alienation in general, and anomie in particular, might be called into question. Durkheim had, somewhat ironically, somewhat painted himself into an analytic corner. At the same time, his understanding of that which can transcend historical alterations of world-orders and even worldviews was, akin to art itself, indeed the chief anonymous manner of initiating those very shifts themselves!

This insight is of the utmost. In modernity, art has replaced religious belief, popular art, religious behavior. But the idea of the sacred remains intact, as does the enactment of ritual and the identification with the archetypes, though such lists thereof vary. Finally, we may state with more confidence that anomie, though also likely a local guise of another kind of presence, specific to human consciousness and perhaps even primordial and thence Promethean in its origins – such a sensibility Heidegger casts as Sorgeheit; the dialectical apex or synthesis resulting from the Aufheben of alienation and anxiety – leads mostly not to suicide at all but rather to care or concernfulness, allows us a glimpse of the possibility of a human future wherein alienation is itself overcome.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, religion, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Concept of ‘Value-Neutrality’

The Concept of ‘Value-Neutrality’ (the mundane version of beyond good and evil)

The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, so disturbing to human complacency yet so inescapable, is nothing but a recognition of these oppositions, and of the consequent necessity to accept that every important individual action, indeed life as a whole, if it is not to slip by like a merely natural process but to be lived consciously, is a series of ultimate decisions, by means of which the soul, as in Plato, chooses its own destiny, in the sense of the meaning of what it does and is. (Weber, 1978:84 [1913]).

The contemporary exhortation to ‘own’ one’s own actions cleaves to this same sensibility; that in choosing this or that, I am not only expressing the combined state of both my consciousness and my conscience, but am also developing each of them in this direction or that. ‘Breaking bad’ or ‘good’, I may, in the end, become a very different person than I had been, or that I ever imagined myself to be. And what all of this ‘means’ is thence also decided in a sense for me, even though I was always myself at its ongoing helm.

This individuated ethic of responsibility and self-consciousness is placed, however, in a much wider discussion of the place of value judgments in the social sciences, which is Weber’s topic in his 1913 article. As such, it seems quite out of place, since the ‘moral sciences’ are so not so much because they present a morality of any kind but rather because their chief task is to examine human decisions in the sphere of social interaction and history; in a word, the space wherein ‘morality’ however conflicted and thus denuded of any connotation of the transcendental, plays itself out.

Weber is reacting to the odd conflict between romanticist notions of ‘extra-moral’ acts, those seen to be removed in some way from the spectrum of good and evil, and what at the time were the ultra-modern conceptions of deep structures which, almost by definition, were ‘pre-moral’ in nature. The first is definitively engaged by Nietzsche’s famed conception of acts of love, which ‘always take place beyond good and evil’. The second include the two most important discursive concepts of the 19^th century, evolution and the unconscious. It is well known that Nietzsche regretted Darwin, while at the same time presaging Freud in many of the latter’s most innovative conceptions, a fact spoken to by Freud himself, in a letter to Bickel of June 28, 1931. Nietzsche immediately understood the true radicality of organismic evolution, and while popular commentaries mocked the idea that we should be ‘related’ to apes and the church lamented the loss of creation and design – in fact, evolution does not murder a potential metaphysical God, for it does not account for any definite ‘beginning’ to the cosmic drama – Nietzsche recognized that it was the fact of evolution’s non-teleological basis that constituted its most threatening issue. In a word, evolution has no ultimate purpose. From the perspective of organismic development, consciousness is itself nothing more than a happenstance Gestalt.

In the very same year as Darwin’s ‘The Descent of Man’ (1871), appeared, Nietzsche penned his most important early essay, ‘On Truth and Lie in an Extramoral Sense’, which remains one of the great short pieces of modernity. In it, he brings to full light the intractable ateleology of life itself. His trenchant statements surrounding the sentiment of life having utterly no purpose gained for him a mistaken reputation for nihilism. But Nietzsche, unlike Darwin and much less begrudgingly than Freud – ‘Oceanic feelings? Oh please. Well, maybe in art we can find a temporary salve…’ – spent the rest of his working life, and perhaps even beyond it in his own challenged imagination, trying to create a new morality, a new manner by which humanity, now godless and finite, could embrace with the same spiritual vigour and sense of purpose as it did the ‘old god of morals’ Himself.

Zarathustra is, of course, Nietzsche’s major answer to the forsaken gospels. It is one of the German language’s greatest literary works, and remains a difficult read today, given its alchemy of romanticist and post-modern metaphors. At once it reaches back beyond the new agrarian trinity of world systems, but only to heave with some Über-manic forcefulness this classical sensibility far into an extra-human future. It is the new mythology; at once a demythology of the history of mythic thought and as well a prophecy regarding what cultural evolution would have to accomplish in order to ‘create’ the new Man. Needless to say, the Reich picked up the rhetoric without the ethic, and the result was neither evolutionary nor revolutionary.

Is it any wonder then that Weber should be struck with this apparent contradiction? A keen student of Nietzsche himself, unworried that the iconoclastic thinker would pre-empt his own ideas, Weber pursued the problem from a different angle. If the cosmos, and thus all life which emanated from it had no final purpose, no ultimate meaning in itself, this suggested that such abstract conceptions which fulfilled a structural function in human consciousness, including both evolution and the unconscious, could only be value-neutral in themselves. The usual move, a century before, was to elevate the human being into the sole creator of meaningfulness, and this even within the individual life. This is romanticism in a nutshell, and this view still has some smaller merit, given that each of us faces this self-same challenge and yet is alone in the task of fulfilling it. But Weber was much more concerned with the meaning of culture and consciousness alike. The singular person could be left to her own devices, for anyone with half an imagination should be able to become one’s own Schiller or Goethe.

It was a different question for culture. This question became so pressing that it was the Reich, once again, which took it upon itself to answer it once and for all. The ‘final solution’ to the problem of Kultur took on a grotesque form; in its irrational idyll of idealism, a form just as horrific as the death camps were in the material realm. With one exception; the oddly petit-bourgeois taste of the Nazi elites. For Weber, it was the piano itself that was the quintessential bourgeois instrument, and though it had generated many great composer and virtuosos, its inherent limits – mitigated and vastly extended of course by modern synthetic keyboards – created a framework within which art was supposed to not only take place, but thence also to be confined. The ear could not hear that 89^th key. It was as if murdering 88 persons for their ‘degenerate’ status could be justified because the next one just might be the bridge to the Overman. This lurid outlook has its roots in the idea of the elect, the separation of the wheat from the chaff, and the caution regarding throwing pearls before swine. At the same time, we are told not to mock those with ‘little faith’.

Weber was unimpressed with these sorts of exegetical contradictions. He was fully aware of the modern condition, at the very beginning of our own historical period. The very next year after his article appeared in fact saw the end of Bourgeois culture, its dreams of progress and its fantasy of the white man’s burden. And so, at the end of his working career, it is Nietzsche who returns to haunt the newly uncertain future of humanity as a whole. Life in the abstract, Weber suggests, is certainly value-neutral, and so our intent to study it in all of its manifold experience, must also begin with this understanding. But lives as lived by persons are the very crucible of value; we do make our own meaningfulness, even if more obviously, we make what are in fact cultural meanings, not of our own invention but rather bequeathed to us by history, our own.

The advent of subjective meaningfulness in the ethical tradition may be found in the Pauline texts, but there it is encountered out of a rejection of the world, resentment towards its abstract, mythic values and their ability to rationalize unjust valuation in the living world – which is exactly what the Reich repeated in its regression to these values – and thus it is truncated, never truly explored. In Freud, rational subjectivity is sabotaged by an omnipresent depth of psyche, which performs itself in a language that attests to its own value-neutrality. In a casual sense, the unconscious doesn’t ‘care’ about our actions in the world. As an aside, this is also a potential caution that can be issued to the fashionable field of psychedelic therapy, wherein substances are used to temporarily mute the default network which functions akin to the Freudian ego. Is the mind authenticating itself by removing the source of repression or has it merely found a less expensive and more immediate way of experiencing its idiomatic id?

However that may be, it is at least clear that when we attempt to incite or imagine value in the spaces of ateleological thought, the results are grim indeed. Beautification of the world through violence is just one such outcome. Resurrecting ancient social norms as if they could replace the lost morality is another. Fine if the ancient Hebrew whipped his eight-year-old child two millennia ago, we can’t do anything about that; not fine if the evangelist does the same to his fifteen-year-old today. And just there, we can take the same action as we took against the Reich, and for precisely the same reason. What Weber’s analysis shows us is that, at the very least in complementary adjunct to Nietzsche’s extramoral hyper-romanticism, it is rather the mundane sphere with its amoral social locations which are likely more important to critically examine. The personal soul cannot in fact ‘choose its destiny’ amid such meaningless and purposeless options. I would further add that mundanity must be so adjusted well before the quest for the Overman can begin, for no such bridge can be built if the near side of our ethical chasm does not even exist.

G.V. Loewen is the author of over 55 books in ethics, aesthetics, education, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.