A while back, I picked up Todd McGowan’s Embracing Alienation.
It’s a catchy title. And the premise is enticing. It’s a counterintuitive advice, at least in the modern West. He notes that most people, even many on the right, have come to see alienation as wrong, problematic, and undesirable. It’s something, we’ve come to believe, that is not our natural state and so that we should seek to overcome.
I too tend to see alienation as a bad thing, based on personal experience, societal observation, and intellectual study. But I was intrigued and interested to be challenged. Part of me even wanted to be proven wrong, to have my horizons expanded. Maybe I was misunderstanding what alienation represents. There is nothing I love more than a thinker who can reframe how I understand and perceive the world.
It’s not hard to understand one possible argument that eschews or extends beyond Karl Marx’s complaint about workers alienated from their own production. If alienation is based on the isolated individual, and if hyper-individualism is fundamentally false, then it’s possible alienation could point us toward our true human nature. In that sense, instead of being a block to our true nature, it would be a guide. So, by paying close attention to it, we might gain important information about what it really means to be human.
I kept hoping that was where he’d go. But alas, quite the opposite. He simply embraces alienation as normal and maybe as normative. That felt false and dissatisfying.
Plus, while he does range about a fair amount in his chosen sources of inspiration and critique, he didn’t come across as all that well informed or else narrowly focused. Some of his examples and other evidence was extremely weak and unpersuasive. It was so easy for me to poke holes in his view using counter-evidence. I was disappointed because I was expecting more. And even as a leftist, I found myself disinterested in his critique of Marxism, not to mention it’s lack of application to the situation we face:
“The book’s flaw is the constant repetition of “a society that aims to transcend alienation will fail” and “we must embrace alienation as key to any political project.” These are paraphrases but are repeated endlessly. Its misstep is that it provides no way to actually cohere this vision or what this vision means for leftist political projects. It feels very vibes-based and easily co-opted. I’m sure the author expects pushback in their Hegel-Marx duel and I’m hardly read enough to do so, but the constant harp on that even though Marx doesn’t use alienation in his later work but the vibe of it is still there hardly feels like any analysis I want to get behind.
“Even though they malign Marcuse for not going far enough I think One-Dimensional Man much better explores what happens to administrative systems that try to act as “one”. I think the book fails to acknowledge the struggle that embracing alienation has already produced since recognizing everyone’s alienation is inherent to class consciousness and thus organizing, movement building, etc. It fails to acknowledge or put forward a coherent argument about what we’re supposed to do when embrace alienation. It feels stuck in terms and arguments from 19th and 20th-century thought without incorporating a concrete set of politics.”
~pkeye’s review, from The Story Graph
McGowan seems to not fully grasp alienation in its complexity. Maybe because it’s a vague word that has been used to describe different experiences and ideas across distinct contexts, areas of study, and theoreticians. It doesn’t refer to any single thing, in the way he wants to treat it. I’m not alone in that assessment. Another reader said that,
“I found it to be sloppy, sorta shallow, and not genuinely engaging in the topic of alienation in its many forms. […] It seems like a position that can only come from focusing entirely on theory and completely disregarding people’s lived experience. The vague political vision that this book puts forth seem very detached from actual life, and McGowan doesn’t offer any sort of way to instantiate it in social and political life.
“[M]y beef is that this type of Hegelian-Lacanian subjective alienation is very different from being alienated from your friends or being alienated from your community or even being alienated from the fruits of your labor, and McGowan equates all of them, as if types of alienation and degrees of alienation were of not import. I agree that you’re never going to fully overcome alienation from your community, but being more or less integrated has a tangible effect on people’s mental health; same with being alienated from what you produce”
~kroxyldyphivic, at Sources for Zizek on alienation
Alienation would include the oppressed, persecuted, and rejected; such as the unhoused, minorities, immigrants, LGTBQIA+, prisoners, refugees, slaves, and the sex trafficked; along with the victims of systemic prejudice, ethnic cleansing, concentration camps, genocide, etc. Additionally, it would include the mentally ill, not only in terms of how they’re often stigmatized, impoverished, and/or institutionalized but also psychiatric states like anhedonia, depersonalization, derealization, dissociation, psychosis, fragmentation, and PTSD.
One could also speak of common and/or mundane forms: family estrangement, gaslighting, mind/body dualism, nature deficit disorder, mediated reality, and similar things. Think of how, in research on cultivation theory, repeated media portrayals of violence and crime induce mean world syndrome that involves exaggerated perception of violent crime. Individuals become estranged from the actual world around them, in not recognizing their real situation. A more extreme media example is AI psychosis.
Is he really generalizing all ‘alienation’ as identical and of equal significance? How or why would one embrace any of that?
One reviewer offered an explanation for why he overgeneralizes:
“[I]t seems he falls prey to a dualism of opposing thinkers who want to overcome alienation and those who do not. It is clear, as mentioned earlier, that this follows from his thinking of alienation as an ontological category rather than historical. Thus, for him, any attempt to overcome alienation is necessarily misguided, and he finds this problem in historical sequences or political movements.
“Marx’s alienation is specific to the capitalist mode of production and it is not enough that the worker realises one’s alienation, but this realisation must also lead to action to overcome this specific alienation, which will in turn lead to the realm of genuine human freedom. It is in this context that the author’s suggestion of simply recognising one’s alienation along with that of others for solidarity seems weak. There remains a gap between this realisation and action.”
~Debjyoti Sarkar, at Marx & Philosophy Review of Books
His indifferent and dismissive attitude toward how devastating alienation can be indicates he has had lived in privilege and comfort, safety and security. As a middle class professional, specifically an academic, it’s highly probable that he has never known economic struggle or any other kind of desperation.
His conception of alienation is trivial, while somehow also being amorphous, as he portrays it as our state of being. It’s hard to see how just accepting it applies to real world problems, much less political projects. Similar critiques have been made about McGowan’s take on Hegel in other books, as seen with this review of Emancipation After Hegel:
“[A]lthough McGowan defends Hegel admirably, I’m not sure I buy some of his defenses, such as the articulation of Hegel’s idea of sovereignty and freedom in the Philosophy of Right. McGowan at times seems to defend Hegel to the core, relying on the centrality of contradiction as a sort of ace-in-the-hole answer to everything. This becomes particularly contentious when McGowan criticizes Marx for being a right-wing deviation of Hegel (a stance sure to ruffle the feathers of many Marxist-Leninists). McGowan defends this by arguing that Marx puts faith in a substantial Other through the dream of revolution and establishment of utopian communism in the undetermined future, thus trying to get rid of contradiction.
“This is certainly an interesting critique, and one I think well-worth tarrying with. Yet, this sole focus on the irreconcilability of contradiction seems to preclude most forms of a positive political movement. While this reliance on contradiction helps provide pathways that break through polarization and stagnant discourse, the promise of “emancipation” after Hegel was a bit lacking at the end. McGowan admits that Hegel himself thought that his philosophy resulted in recognition over action, and while McGowan insists that contradiction as a solution is the path forward for the Left, what such a path looks like in practical terms remains rather obscure and vague.”
~J. D. Davis, at JDDavisPoet
To be fair, it’s not that McGowan isn’t offering anything concrete. A key claim is that we are not identical to ourselves or to our communities, and so his perspective follows from that. We don’t belong anywhere specific and so, maybe in a sense, we potentially belong everywhere. The alienated subject can only find value and purpose as part of the public, which is where all the alienated subjects come together in shared space.
His one practical piece of advice is we need to build more public spaces, or what many today are calling third spaces. That is why, I guess, he argues we aren’t natural beings. We don’t belong in nature but in the polis. Humans, therefore, come into their own in civilization. Or something like that.
By the way, he distinguishes the ‘public’ from ‘community’ and the ‘commons’, as he claims the latter two can’t serve this purpose. Only the public represents a collective form and expression of the alienated subject. Some questions, then, follows:
- Were humans a lost cause for the hundreds of millennia prior to civilization and any conception of a public?
- Wouldn’t alienation, as a hindering spandrel with no adaptive advantage, have been counterproductive to survival of the species?
- If so, why did alienation form and persist as part of homo sapiens thriving, succeeding, and spreading across the earth?
- Is alienation just a variety of Original Sin that is existentially baked in into our broken nature?
McGowan never entertains and contemplates, much less answers, these questions. Along these lines, particularly disappointing in the book was the section “Perverse Satisfactions” in Chapter 1: The Disturbed Subject. The analysis came across as profoundly naive.
In making a moral judgment (“extreme,” “excesses,” “violates,” “deviates,” “horrors,” etc), McGowan takes a subjective and culturally biased view of perversity as demonstrable proof that it couldn’t have a natural explanation in biology and evolution, as one finds in evolutionary psychology. This is taken as necessitating a denaturalized and alienated subject as the motivation for such behaviors.
“[R]ather than theorizing obesity as the result of the subject’s alienation, certain naturalistic thinkers see it as a development of an evolutionary mismatch. […] [C]ultural changes worked faster than natural selection […] Scholars in all fields and most of the public tend to […] accept that we are natural beings rather than alienated subjects” (p. 33).
Instead of surveying the research on the causes of something like obesity, he baselessly speculates and expects the reader to accept it without critical thinking. He simply refuses to engage with experts in other fields who study these issues. As another example, human sexual behavior just doesn’t make sense to him. He argues there is no plausible theory of survival benefit for individuals and the species to be prone — at least under certain conditions — to male promiscuity, non-procreative sex, etc and even humans living beyond reproductive age.
This is sheer ignorance or intellectual carelessness. Many of these kinds of behaviors aren’t limited to humans. Yet he makes no claims of alienation for these non-human species. Nor do these behaviors in humans lack possible explanations, however he might dismiss them out of hand.
After initially having given up on the book, I’ve since continued reading further and grappling with it. I decided to give McGowan another chance and find out if there is something to the argument and evidence for his theory.
What motivated me is that, in recent years, I’ve increasingly seen many other books that make counterintuitive or atypical arguments for reinterpreting and embracing what our culture has tended to criticize, dismiss, and find troubling and contrary. Besides his take on alienation, there are a slew of other topics that have come to be defended in various books:
- silence (Jerome Sueur, Natural History of Silence)
- invisibility (Akiko Busch, How to Disappear)
- forgetting (Lewis Hyde, A Primer for Forgetting)
- non-egoism (Jay Garfield, Losing Ourselves)
- determinism (Robert Sapolsky, Determined)
The modern Western self is being challenged and its justifications interrogated. Admittedly, I’m all for that, the reason for my reading this kind of material, even when my initial response is skepticism and disagreement.
Something about this pattern of writing by public intellectuals seems indicative of our public mood right now, as we find ourselves in a poly-crisis and meta-crisis, maybe even a new crisis of identity, along with what arguably is a paradigm shift and a revolution of the mind, as sometimes precedes a societal, political, and economic revolution. I take it as a sign of a population, society, and culture that’s destabilized, stressed, traumatized, uncertain, anxious, fearful, threatened, etc. It’s reaching the point of existential crisis for the entire civilization.
So, ever more people are questioning if we can go on like this. And if not, what other options are there?
But I see it from another perspective as well. Under such extremely sub-optimal conditions, the human psyche tends to get overwhelmed and so shut down (low ‘openness to experience). When that happens, reactionary mentality and right-wing ideology becomes attractive. Or else the mind skews in odd directions. In any case, the tenets, attributes, and expressions of liberalism and liberal-mindedness become victims of doubt.
Fundamental Western ideas and ideals like progress, individualism, free will, and such feel less persuasive and compelling. All the things we’ve collectively valued and taken for granted seem to have failed, been corrupted, shown to be false, or somehow are compromised and problematized. Hence, much falls under scrutiny, to be held at a distance or to be discarded entirely.
McGowan and these other authors don’t necessarily or, in many cases, maybe even likely understand the oppressive and harmful conditions that make them prone to a critical and skeptical stance. Such larger societal influences tend to be pervasive and insidious, with few having much knowledge of the social science theory and research that would explain it.
So, the underlying motivations too often go unnoticed and unexplored. And that is precisely what interests me, not so much the focus itself but what’s behind it, the conditions surrounding it.
About McGowan’s coming to the defense of alienation as an underdog, it took me a while to understand what he is positing, for what purpose, and to what end. He is trying to revive Hegel’s belief in an inevitable and totalizing process of alienation as inherent to humanity. As he sees it, we have no choice other than to embrace it. Otherwise, it would be akin to alienation upon alienation. Hence, we must learn to be less alienated toward our intrinsic alienation. It’s just who we are. Deal with it!
In particular, according to this view, education or Bildung is necessary violence inflicted on our natural being to induce alienated subjectivity. It forces us into an awakening of sorts, and so allows a fuller and better expression of who we are and were meant to be. We must be freed from our own false self but also freed from any seeking toward a true self. It’s self-identity itself that is precisely the problem.
“For Hegel, alienation is positive because it delivers us from the stasis of self-identity. Through alienation, the subject enters into what is other than itself and becomes who it is as it transforms into what it isn’t. Alienation rips us out of our natural being and generates subjectivity. Hegel theorizes the subject as an entity that must find itself at home in what is absolutely other to it, and this can only occur through a process of alienation. Dialectics is, for Hegel, a system in which there is no respite from alienation, in which alienation is total” (pp. 88-9).
“Subjectivity, according to Hegel, finds itself through “violence at its own hands [that] brings to ruin its own restricted satisfaction.” We discover the truth of our subjectivity not in what we initially take ourselves to be but in how we end up after we have enacted this violence against ourselves. […] [H]e conceives of education as an act of violence done to the child, a violence that disrupts the child’s inherent tendencies rather than allowing them to blossom according to their own logic. […] the alien violence of education is what initially frees the child from its familial and social situation. In this sense, education is an emancipatory violence” (pp. 92-3).
That is deemed to be the ultimate aspiration and expression. This is proposed as a good thing and, besides, it’s declared there is no alternative. But to my mind, that comes across as ideological realism. And that makes me look for the unstated and likely unconscious assumptions, biases, and prejudices.
Achieving alienation is somehow both essential and impossible to avoid, whereas attempting anything else would be worse than failure, a catastrophe. There presumably is something in our nature that impels us to destroy and go beyond our inborn nature. It’s our telos or destiny. We find our freedom in our fate.
As far as I can tell, this implies a dualism between nature and society, with the latter presumed to be more genuine and/or important. We aren’t fully real and our experience isn’t fully valid until we’ve been civilized, that is to say alienated.
[Side thought: It’s more than a bit confusing. Hegel asserts, “Nature has to be contradictory to give birth to the contradictory subject.”
Querying it, another asked, “if nature really were contradictory yielding but contradictory things wouldn’t it possess the necessity then of producing something contradictory to its contradictory self–i.e., only things noncontradictory?” (jamesbarlow6423’s comment at United We Lack: Todd McGowan‘s Response to Slavoj Žižek).
This leaves me entirely unclear about what this could possibly mean. If alienation from nature is implicit within nature, then denaturalization while not being nature is also inseparable from nature, in which case it too is nature. WTF! Is this just sophistry or is there more to it?
It feels like we’re talking in circles. This supposedly denaturalized alienation is simultaneously a process, as a result, and totalizing, in that it couldn’t be otherwise. Yet it must go against what is, nature, to become something else that is a denial and unfolding of what is, denaturalized.
But if Hegel is himself alienated from nature, as supposedly we all are, how could he even know what is this ‘nature’ from which he is alienated? Am I missing something? Why talk about alienation from something we can’t know? In that case, is ‘alienation’ as a term somewhat of an empty signifier?]
Like Hegel, McGowan claims that we need to escape our natural state in order to achieve emancipation, whatever that might mean. Hence, alienation, as rupture, is the only mode of freedom. Is this rupture an emergence of something genuinely new and unique?
Assuming I’m correct about the undertones, my sense is this is a philosophical secularization of the theological belief in a fallen human nature, but where the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is idealized. That is what it means to embrace alienation. There is no return to the Garden of Eden. The gates are permanently shut and the lock can’t be picked. To my mind, it feels like a reified abstraction that’s being imposed on all of humanity. I’m not persuaded — intellectually, morally, or psychologically — to accept this religious-like conviction and doctrine.
By the way, McGowan is taking his argument a step further. It’s not only that alienation happens but that we want to be alienated. It’s fun and enjoyable. It’s tiresome, dissatisfying, and pointless to go against our contradicted and alienated subjectivity.
He claims that, for example, destruction of the natural world is enjoyable. Accordingly, we don’t want responsibility. But this misses something. Unlike the Mad Men scene he describes, most indigenous people show no indication of wanting to or enjoying environmental destruction.
How can he take a fictional scene portraying middle class whites in mid-20th century United States as the standard of all humanity?
This is where McGowan’s analysis is ultimately philosophical, specifically ontological but with what feels like an existentialist impulse. There is no escape or none that is worthy and desirable. Rather, what we really long for is ‘a way out’ (The Gesture of Tank Man):
“Kafka’s ideas on imprisonment, catastrophe, freedom and ways out are not as simple as they might seem on the first reading of, for example, The Trial . The short story ‘A Report to an Academy’ provides further insight into the type of freedom that Kafka had in mind. The hunting expedition of the Hagenbeck Company captured an ape. To train him, they put him in a very small cage on the company’s steamboat, a cage that was too low for him to stand up and too small for him to sit down. At the same time the sailors tormented him. The ape realizes that if he wants to live he has to find a way out. But he does not contrast his distressing situation with freedom: ‘No, it was not freedom I wanted. Just a way out; to the right, to the left, wherever ; I made no other demands ’., The way out is not directed so much to a specific goal, i.e. freedom or return, but is simply a way out.”
~Anke Snoek, Agamben’s Joyful Kafka, Kindle Locations 358-375
That is supposedly what embracing alienation accomplishes. Our struggles end, if our alienation does not.
More generally, even as he styles himself as an intellectual renegade, part of the reason his book fails is proscribing his thought almost entirely to conventional, mainstream thought, largely Hegelian philosophy, in the Western tradition. As such, he never goes beyond his WEIRD bias to explore other possibilities. He appears to have little familiarity with the social sciences, particularly not anthropology; with only brief mention (in a single note) of the likes of David Graeber and David Wengrow.
The argument for alienation feels like the product of siloed academia and so feels prone to intellectual masturbation. One doesn’t get the sense that he is seriously engaging with other views, in offering them up as straw men.
Let’s consider the anthropological literature. I can think of examples, such as the Piraha, that seem to generally lack alienation and seem to be fine without it. The only exception that comes to mind was when, after killing someone in another tribe, one Piraha tribesman banished himself. That is to say he embraced alienation as social death, certainly not to transform himself into a member of the public.
The reason for this suicidal action was that it was a common understanding that Piraha don’t kill. There was no law against it, nor punishment. The murderer, in feeling alienated from his own former Piraha identity, banished himself to the jungle where he soon after died alone. The thing is this is a rare experience. It was the only time it had happened in living memory. It’s the exception that proves the rule. The Piraha don’t embrace alienation. Neither would they see value in it, assuming they could understand it. Alienation is simply the precursor to removing oneself from the community and from the genetic pool.
Such tribal dividuals appear to have all the traits of a functioning unalienated community that McGowan believes cannot exist:
“The security the community provides is always illusory. No symbolic identity can ever relieve one of the problem of alienated subjectivity. Even within the comforts of a community and the identity that it offers, one remains an alienated subject. The problem persists. The community gives me a symbolic identity, but that identity ends up being at odds with itself. Its security is ultimately insecure” (p. 120).
It comes down to whether one ascribes to bundle theory of mind or ego theory of mind, whether individualism or dividualism is closer to the evolutionary norm, whether or not our natural state is 4/5E cognition (embodied, embedded, enacted, & extended; + ecological). But that debate goes unmentioned, presumably off McGowan’s radar or even entirely outside his sense of reality.
I still struggle to wrap my mind around his take on alienation. And so I’m not sure, in my negative appraisal, that I’m getting it right or what substance there is to get right. Apparently, it’s not natural but it’s inevitable or near inevitable. He also has a weird mixing of how freedom necessitates fate, in our being confronted by our situation but alienated from it.
All I can say is that, assuming that I’m not confused, it doesn’t match much of the anthropological study of forager tribes and the theories used to explain their cultures and mentalities. Does he consider such people, if they really aren’t alienated, to not be free? And if alienation defines the human condition, are they not fully human or have not fully achieved their humanity? Or what?
In terms of the Piraha, there is no equivalent of education as violence that inflicts alienation. They’re one of the most egalitarian groups I’ve ever come across in that they entirely lack dominance hierarchies, power disparities, authority figures, punishable rules, etc. In their version of dividualism, they simultaneously have immense autonomy of the person and a strong shared identity of the tribal community enmeshed in a sense of place. However, ‘community’ might be too weak of a concept to describe their tight-knit and immersive sense of communal identity and reality.
I just don’t see how alienation fits in, is required, or would be desirable; even as it’s the condition we find ourselves in and within which we feel trapped. Sure, it might be the case that, in modern civilization as is operated up to this point, the violence of the alienating process is necessary for creating citizen-subjects who will comply with authoritarian systems and dominance hierarchies. But dividualistic tribes aside, was that always true for all civilizations? Were feudal communitarians really alienated in the way we understand in capitalism? I remain unconvinced.
McGowan wouldn’t accept that humanity has ever been different, and sees no reason to explain when and how alienation first emerged. He’s content to aver that it’s all we are and can know. He wants an alienation that would apply to all humans. Otherwise, if a single exception exists, it means non-alienation is possible. For some reason, he doesn’t want to allow for that possibility.
“I think the kinds of sophistical and specious arguments McGowan makes are fairly representative examples of how most discourse works today, and not just academic discourse. His task here seems to be to dismiss Marxist, psychoanalytic, existentialist, and any other left-leaning discourse as foolishly naive, and replace them with an updated version of the Romantic ideology, which will finally set us all free.
“This isn’t unusual, of course. English professors have been doing this for as long as there have been English departments, and Romantic poets and philosophers have been doing it as long as there has been capitalism. But most of us still fall prey to this strategy exactly because it is so successful in university departments and with publishers. We are taught all the time to think poorly, and so we think we have found something radical and new every time somebody relabels Romanticism.
“The first move McGowan makes is simply to redefine alienation. […] McGowan suggests that when “leftists” want to “fight against alienation” they are “missing its emancipatory quality” and giving it “a bad rap.” But what he seems to mean by alienation is something else entirely. He simply redefines alienation as what “frees us from our situation,” what “gives subjectivity an ability to act against what would otherwise determine it.” That is, alienation is simply redefined as whatever it is that gives us the capacity to “transcend” the economic, cultural, and even biological determinants that would otherwise limit our action in the world. Okay, we might say, but if that’s what you want to talk about, why use a word that already has an existing definition quite different from this? Surely we would want to embrace this capacity for agency, but why relabel agency with the term “alienation,” which already has a very specific and quite different meaning? [,,,]
“So far, then, McGowan has decided that “alienation” should be redefined as the ability to freely choose; he then goes on to insist that choices are only free when they are in fact not at all in our conscious or rational control, when we “don’t deliberate on a course of action and experience in the course of choosing it.” If this doesn’t strike you as bizarre reasoning…well, you’ve read too much Wordsworth and Blake, I guess. It is, after all, fairly typical of Romantic ideology.”
~Embracing Alienation, from The Faithful Buddhist
Marmalade 