Risk and Extortion XXXVII: The Critique of Cultural Marxism 3:

Alienation and Abstraction

The affective impact of the blinding of electricity is also a play on the enlightenment as a negative dialectic. The language of the Enlightenment is that of objectivation, analysis, diagnosis, clarification, progress and empowerment. However, these words also connote corruptions. The history of Enlightenment is also the history of imperialism, racism, antisemitism, misogyny, precarization and disenfranchisement. Whereas champions of the enlightenment tend to highlight reason as an autonomous, self-referential value, the realization of the enlightenment is just as much embedded in practices of the unreasonable. An example of this is public relations which is exactly a practice of manipulation, deception and seduction and therefore not distinguishable from advertising.

Negative dialectic is a term that can be used to describe this process, but also risks obscuring the mechanisms that make this work. It is my intention, that if we want to align The Culture Industry Thesis more with the established tradition of Historical Materialism, it may be useful to take a closer look at the concepts of alienation and abstraction in relation to each other (rather than separated by an epistemological break, as Althusser had argued). Moreover, this should include a critical reflection of Freud’s conception of neurosis in Civilization and its Discontents, as well as his conception of the Uncanny (but perhaps more here as worked through by Julia Kristeva). To balance this out, we need to take Deleuze & Guattari’s Schizoanalysis into account and also a broader engagement with the concept of Libidinal Economy.

With such a treading list, a blog is perhaps not the best medium to work this through. It will thus be quite superficial. The importance of commodification as a means to align culture as problem-solving with the needs of capitalism. The bridge to real abstraction is easily accomplished with reference to commodity fetishism. My first argument is that we should read Marx in a reverse chronology: real abstraction precedes alienation. I would also agree with Althusser, that without this premise, Marx’ earlier work lacks a firm grounding in a materialist dialectics. Hence, simply put, real abstraction engenders alienation through commodity fetishism.

Using Freud, but not taking his psychoanalysis as a starting point, we can see how the rhetoric of civilization as embedded in the imperial project of European nation-state building and radicalized through fascism and National Socialism, engenders a neurosis. Of course, we do not need the psychoanalytic framing of the “Holy Family” (e.g. Oedipus Complex, Castration Anxiety) to understand the association between nationalism and patriarchy. The neurosis is embedded in the realization of alienation through abstraction. In the language of psychoanalysis, abstraction is the formation of a Superego that is rooted not in everyday life practices of labour, but in the consequences and mimesis of bourgeois individuation.

This is where the Culture Industry becomes very useful. Bourgeois Individuation is engendered by practices of spectating, such as reading a newspaper, listening to radio or watching television. In the German Ideology, Marx & Engels had criticized Feuerbach for using spectatorial materialism as the implicit epistemological practice of his philosophical critique. A century later, this became the condition of media consumption in the USA as well as Europe. The Superego of Bourgeois Individuation is an epiphenomenon of alienation. That is, there is a growing rift between actual experiences (Ego) and normative-moral demands (Superego) which is engendered by abstraction and can be diagnosed as alienation. The reason why Freud was particularly keen on emphasizing neurosis without invoking a historical-materialist analysis of alienation, may itself be explained as a consequence of Bourgeois Individuation. This is easily remedied if we understand neurosis as one possible manifestation of alienation that has become dominant because of the Culture Industry’s primary concern with mass deception.

Neurosis can be invoked to explain, for example, racism, xenophobia and malignant narcissism. These two phenomena are easily understood as examples of alienation: racism relates to repressing strangers as enemies from the outside, xenophobia relates to repressing strangers as enemies-among us, malignant narcissism relates to repressing strangers as enemies-within-ourselves (Kristeva, 1988). Estrangement is a specific interpretation of alienation that highlights two dimensions that Marx mentioned in the Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844: the alienation from fellow workers and the alienation from one’s own humanity. These are the social and mental components. The other two types of alienation: from the product of one’s labour and from one’s labour itself highlight the material and practical components. The Culture Industry Thesis shifts attention away from production to consumption but not from the alienation of matter and practice. They are just extended to incorporate the historical transformation of the life world of the working class in western capitalist nation states into becoming worker-consumers.

Neurosis resonates really well with Bourgeois Individuation because the triadic structure of estrangement includes the intra-subjective node of self-formation. As we know, the formation of ego/self is a typical bourgeois concern, and it is therefore also logical that the more an industrialized mimes focuses on bourgeois issues such as identity, self and appearance, the more likely neurotic disorders will affect the relationship between abstraction and alienation. It is therefore justified, to ask the question of neurosis is the only type of estrangement we need to take into account. Deleuze and Guattari have argued that Capitalism should be paired with schizophrenia rather than neurosis, while schizophrenia is the more generic resonance of alienation (rather than estrangement). That is, schizophrenia also enables an incorporation of a broader sense of (embodied) material practices and is very conducive to understand this in terms of a libidinal economy.