Alienation

[Hit The North]

A few weeks ago I had to go along to my local mega shopping mall, Meadow Hall in South Yorkshire. So I'm sitting in the food court, watching all the thousands of little consumer units, clustered in family groups, sitting around eating from polystyrene cartons and sucking through plastic straws, whilst a huge video screen above them pumps out consumer advice.

I turn to the person I'm with and I say, "Now that's what I call alienation."

She raises an eyebrow and replies, "Who, you or them?"

Which raises an interesting question: who is the most alienated, those who engage uncritically in the spectacle or those who feel repelled by it?

[tolstoyevski]

both or none..
in the marxist sense of the word, alienated is used for somebody which is not aware of her roots, causes.
and we observe it mainly on the stage of production rather than of consumption.

for ex, an individual is alienated when she thinks that she has no ties with society, so she can exist all alone. an artist is alienated when she thinks she can build a pure art work free from society. etc.

but there's a different type of alienation used in daily life speech and that is something when you suddenly realize there's something abnormal going on. for ex. capitalism tries to show some habits as if they are very normal. but if you stop and say, "hey that's not normal, it doesn't have to be like that!" and here you're alienated. In your situation, you suddenly realized that it's a very nonsense habit for hundreds of people to go shopping malls and waste time which is very normal for them. But to use the word "defamiliarization" and "defamiliarized" rather than "alienation" is more suitable, i think, for the latter.

[jaycee]

quite a good example i had of alienation the other day was while i was looking out my window into my garden. I was at mu uni home and it has a nice garden with quite a lot of trees and plants. But I realised that I was only looking at my garden and completely shutting off my next door neignours garden, because there was little peice of wood seperating it (the fence). I then just occurred to me that this was completely irrational and i was acting as though I owned the trees in my garden, or the earth they were on.

In a conscious way I knew this already but sub-consciously I still feel this alienated sense of ownership. Therefore knowing that certain thoughts, feeling and actions are irrational and wrong does not mean you are no longer affected by them, it is a much more complex than this.


I posted this in the infants 1-5 thread and cthink its quite useful here as well:


I think that on a directly political level the effect of childhood while important are more easily changed than the sub conscious effects of capitalism.

One example I've been thinking about is cars, everyone I speak to including myself had a lot of nighmares about cars when they were around this age. I think this shows that we often repress how much cars and things of that nature frighten us.

But also simple things like, the existence of private property. This has all sorts of effects on us from a very early age and can be more difficult to change than we presume. For example Marx spoke about how private property "has made us so stupid and one-sided that an object is only ours when we have it – when it exists for us as capital, or when it is directly possessed, eaten, drunk, worn, inhabited, etc., – in short, when it is used by us. Although private property itself again conceives all these direct realisations of possession only as means of life, and the life which they serve as means is the life of private property – labour and conversion into capital. "

"In the place of all physical and mental senses there has therefore come the sheer estrangement of all these senses, the sense of having. The human being had to be reduced to this absolute poverty in order that he might yield his inner wealth to the outer world. "

alienation is not only felt when we work, but also in everyday life because of the way in which private property teaches us to view the world. It teaches us to view it as something alien to us and as dead until it becomes a commodity.

[Raúl Duke]

It seems that the form of alienation refered by Zero in the first post is more of a situationist-type of alienation than the normal marxist type.

However...I'm not much of a situationist so I really can't answer your question on who is more alienated....
maybe both at the same degree? I think I heard that the spectacle can't be escaped (but I suppose it can be rebeled).

[jaycee]

well with regards to who is most alienated, my point was that knowledge of alienation and knowing the roots does not necessarily make the alienation any less significant. It is only a first step in attempting to 'heal' this alienation and change your consciousness. Such a process can only be succesful in very rare circumpstances however, while this present society exists.