Bachour Omar M 202008 PHD

From Alienation to Self-Realization:
Pathologies of Late Modernity, Work, and the Successful Life
By
Omar Bachour
A thesis submitted to the Graduate Program in Philosophy
in conformity with the requirements for the
Degree of the Doctor of Philosophy
Queen’s University
Kingston, Ontario, Canada
August 2020
Copyright © Omar Bachour, 2020

Abstract
The “promise of modernity”—the capacity of individuals to lead successful lives comes under
severe strain in late modernity. Adopting a formal “appropriative” model of alienated labour which
is responsive to individuals’ own conceptions of the good, desires, goals, ground projects, and needs,
I identify two principal obstacles to the self-realization of late-modern subjects: (i) social pathologies,
which, I argue, contemporary political philosophy is unable to adequately diagnose and (ii) the
tyranny of work, which remains peripheral to modern political theory. Both of these factors impede
the ability of subjects to establish successful relationships to others, to themselves, and to the world
and hence their capacity to lead successful lives. After exploring these in some detail, I put forward
four proposals aimed at recapturing the broken promise of modernity beyond the realm of necessity.
After laying out the theoretical foundations of the alienation critique (Chapter 1), the dissertation is
divided into chapters that follow its novel application across the four tasks of ethical critique: (i)
symptomatology and (ii) aetiology (Chapter 2), (iii) diagnosis (Chapter 3), and (iv) prognosis/therapy
(Chapters 4 and 5). Chapter 1 makes the case for the appropriative model of alienated labour as the
most promising candidate for the alienation critique and the one best suited to overcome the
difficulties that plague traditional accounts of alienation.
Part II is concerned with the critical-diagnostic dimension of the alienation critique. Chapter 2
provides an overview of the “malaises” of late modernity and discusses the aetiology of these
symptoms. Chapter 3 diagnoses three social pathologies missed by current theories of justice:
pathologies of individual freedom, pathologies of de-synchronization, and pathologies of organized
self-realization.
i
Part III is concerned with the prescriptive dimensions of the alienation critique. Chapter 4 argues
that the appropriative model issues in a call for the “refusal of work” which attempts to chart a
course beyond the work-based society and its productivist values. Chapter 5 makes the case for four
proposals that aim to provide late-modern subjects with a measure of security and stability,
decommodify labour, and pave the way to the realm of freedom beyond the tyranny of work.
Keywords: alienated labour; alienation; appropriation; ethical critique; labour; Marxism; post-work;
self-realization; social pathologies; work.
ii
Acknowledgements
For Lily:
Blithe, languorous days
when she visits redolent
of jasmines and myrrh.
This work, like every other, is a product of the “general intellect,” without which it could not have
come to fruition or seen the light of day. To that end, I wish to thank the following individuals:
To my supervisor, Christine Sypnowich, for her unstinting generosity, guidance, and support. If I
may be permitted a minor anecdote: When I was taking part in a pilot Ph.D.-Community Initiative,
as part of our final presentations, an invitation was sent out across a wide array of disciplines to all
the supervisors of the students participating in the initiative. Given their demanding schedules and
commitments, there was little expectation that the supervisors would be able to attend the
ceremony, scheduled at a busy time at the end of the semester. Much to my surprise, however,
Christine not only made time to be there; she sat in the front row, took pictures of our group
presentation, and congratulated us warmly upon receiving the Special Dean’s Award. The gesture—
her attendance and kind words—although simple, is a testament to her dedication to her students,
and would be repeated many times during my Ph.D. I could not have hoped for a better supervisor.
To the members of committee, David Backhurst and Will Kymlicka. If I have succeeded in bridging
the continental-analytic divide and re-actualizing the alienation critique it is in large part due to their
critical input, interrogations, and patience.
iii
To the members of the “Justice League,” a group of students working under the supervision of
Christine Sypnowich who meet bi-weekly to share their work (articles, papers, thesis chapters, etc.):
Arthur Hill, Brennen Harwood, Jeremy Butler, Joanna Tinus, Jonathan Astras, Jonas Monte, Kyle
Johannsen, Leigh Clark, Michael Luoma, Owen Clifton, Rileigh Jackson, Ryan McSheffrey, Sean
Davidson, Sung Han, and Xiaojing Sun. Without their critical feedback, comments, and suggestions
this thesis would not be what it is today. Having sat through numerous chapter drafts, I hope they
see many of their recommendations in its strengths, and only my intransigence in its shortcomings.
To Judy Vanhooser, Marilyn Lavoie, Sheena Wilkinson, and Susanne Cliff-Jungling for their
convivial conversations, indefatigable support, and tireless work in the department.
To my Queen’s colleagues, friends, and peers along the way (both human and “other-than-human”):
Aggeliki Psimenatos, Alexander Cousins, David Campbell, Frédéric Côté-Bourdieu, Jacqueline
Davies, Jared Houston, Kurt Mertel, Kyle Curran, Lauren Van Patter, Nga-Yin Tam, Paulina
Siemieniec, Racha Al Abdullah, Ryan Wilcox, Sue Donaldson, Timothy Skulstad-Brown, amongst
countless others, including but not limited to the members of the Animal Reading Group, Animals
in Philosophy, Politics, Law, and Ethics (APPLE), Kingston Interspecies Community (KISC), and
Queen’s Animal Defence (QAD), as well as Balou and Bobby; Bella; Daisy; Docson; Felix and Luna;
Finnigan and Jasper; Hypatia; Isabella; Jay; Molly; Patch, Solomon, and Xena; Rain; Rosie; and
Thumbelina (Lina) and Tiger Lily (Lily).
To my parents, May Alabdalla and Moukarram Bachour, without whom this would not be possible:
the weight of filial piety conspires with the years—I owe them a debt of gratitude that cannot be repaid.
iv
This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada
(SSHRC) in the form of a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship.
v
Table of Contents
Abstract i
Acknowledgements iii
Table of Contents vi
List of Tables iv
Introduction 1
PART I: THE THEORETICAL FOUNDATION
Chapter 1: The Alienation Critique 19
PART II: THE CRITICAL-DIAGNOSTIC DIMENSION
Chapter 2: The Social Pathology Diagnosis 58
Chapter 3: The Three Diagnostic Fronts 117
PART III: THE PRESCRIPTIVE DIMENSION
Chapter 4: The Politics of Work 178
Chapter 5: Four Proposals 218
Conclusion: 252
Bibliography 263
vi
List of Tables
Table 1.1 Candidates for the Alienation Critique 21
Table 2.1 Modes of Reflexivity and the Self-World Relation 105
Table 3.1 Winners and Losers in the Pathologies of De-Synchronization 172
Table 4.1 The Call for Less Work and the Need for the Alienation Critique 217
vii
Introduction
Resonance remains the promise of modernity, but alienation is its reality.
—Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World1
This dissertation is concerned with late-modern subjects and their relationship to the world,
specifically with the possibility of establishing successful relationships to others, to themselves, and to their
environment. Successful self-world relations are ones that are (i) guided by, and responsive to,
subjects’ own conceptions of the good, desires, goals, ground projects, and needs; (ii) can be realized
by subjects with relative efficacy; and (iii) furnish the conditions for self-realization understood as
the capacity to lead successful lives.
The central argument at the heart of this dissertation is that the “promise of modernity”—
the capacity of subjects to lead free, self-determining, successful lives and to re-enchant the world
that modernization has laid bare, to bring a new world within reach—comes under severe strain in
late modernity. This is because the logic of late modernity “places ever-increasing burdens on how
human beings relate to the world—or even is itself in fact the expression and product of a
problematic relationship to the world.”2 I identify two principal obstacles to the self-realization of
late-modern subjects: (i) social pathologies, which, I argue, contemporary political philosophy is
unable to adequately diagnose and (ii) the “tyranny of work,”3 which remains peripheral to modern
political theory. Both of these factors impede or obstruct the promise of modernity, and hence the
capacity of late-modern subjects to lead successful lives.
1
Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, trans. James C. Wagner
(Medford: Polity Press, 2019), 373.
2
Rosa, Resonance, 26.
3
James W. Rinehart, The Tyranny of Work: Alienation and the Labour Process, 5th ed (Toronto: Thomson
Nelson, 2006).
1
The alienation critique, so understood, is concerned with the blockage of the social freedom
required to realize the broken promise of modernity. Thus, Rahel Jaeggi characterizes the alienation
critique as a way to “gain insight into how demanding the preconditions for being the subject of
one’s own life really are…An alienation perspective allows us to see what kind of social
preconditions we need in order to be free”4—and, conversely, what conditions impede or obstruct
our capacity for self-realization. Let us examine these more closely.
The Problem I: Psychic Ailments and the Unsuccessful Life
In the nineteenth century, roughly 80% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty, a
state characterized by the severe deprivation of the constituents for fulfilling basic human needs
(food, drinking water, sanitation, etc.). By 2020, the number was just under 10%, with the United
Nations and World Bank adopting a goal to eradicate extreme poverty by 2030. Accompanying this
sanguine narrative of material progress,5 “there is a spirit of unhappiness and depression haunting
advanced market democracies throughout the world, a spirit that mocks the idea that market
democracies maximize well-being and the…right to the pursuit of happiness under benign
governments of people’s choosing.”6
For example, the World Health Organization (WHO) found that by 2030 depression would
be the largest contributor to disease burden globally.7 According to the World Economic Forum,
depression is already the number one cause of ill health and disability worldwide:
4
Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism, 134.
5
See, for example, Steven Pinker, Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and
Progress (New York: Penguin Books, 2018).
6
Robert E. Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies (New Haven: Yale University Press,
2000), 3.
7
World Health Organization (WHO), Depression: A Global Crisis, October 10, 2012.
https://www.who.int/mental_health/management/depression/wfmh_paper_depression_wmhd_20
12.pdf
2
It seems our world is an increasingly stressful place—the numbers of people suffering from
mental health issues are increasing as a result. While the anxieties of studying are having
adverse effects on teens, the pressures of the workplace are impacting adults.8
A World Health Survey Initiative carried out by the WHO confirmed a mounting global burden of
mental health disorders.9 Suicide rates have increased 60% worldwide in the past 45 years and now
account for 17.6% of all deaths among young adults (15-29 years of age) in high-income countries.10
Writing in the early nineties, Daniel Goleman noted that
In some countries, the likelihood that people born after 1955 will suffer major depression—
not just sadness, but a paralyzing listlessness, dejection and self-deprecation, as well as an
overwhelming sense of hopelessness—at some point in life is more than three times greater
than for their grandparent’s generation.11
A comparative study found that the average North American child in the 1990s was more
anxious than psychiatric patients in the 1950s.12 A Gallup poll reports that more than any
generations before them, “millennials are a group without attachments”: they do not feel close ties
to their jobs (more on this below) nor to the brands they consume. Although they exist in a complex
network of virtual connections, they remain “disengaged,” cast adrift in the late-modern landscape.13
8
Adam Jezard, “Depression is the No. 1 Cause of Ill Health and Disability Worldwide,” World
Economic Forum, May 18, 2018. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/05/depression-prevents-
many-of-us-from-leading-healthy-and-productive-lives-being-the-no-1-cause-of-ill-health-and-
disability-worldwide
9
Ronald C. Kessler and T. Bedirhan Ustun (eds.), The WHO Mental Health Survey: Global Perspectives on
the Epidemiology of Mental Disorders (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) quoted in R.C.
Smith, Society and Social Pathologies: A Framework for Progress (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 6.
10
https://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/noncommunicable-diseases/mental-
health/news/news/2014/09/suicide-a-leading-cause-of-death-among-young-adults-in-high-income-
countries
11
Daniel Goleman, “A Rising Cost of Modernity: Depression,” New York Times, December 8, 1992
quoted in Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, 21.
12
Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level (New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2010), 34.
13
https://www.gallup.com/workplace/236477/millennials-work-life.aspx
3
Some of the richest countries have seen increases in antidepressant use up to 50%. Canada is the
third highest consumer of antidepressants among the 23 developed countries surveyed. Rutger
Bregman sums up the current situation as follows: “Never before have so many young adults been
seeing a psychiatrist. Never before have there been so many early career burnouts. And we’re
popping antidepressants like never before.”14
In short, as the material conditions have improved in developed countries, collective
malaises and psychic ailments—anxiety, burnout, depression, etc.—have increased at alarming rates.
What accounts for this phenomenon and what are its effects on the capacity of late-modern subjects
to lead successful lives? In addition to these aliments and malaises, there is the pathology of work.
The Problem II: Work and the Unsuccessful Life
A Gallup poll conducted between 2011 and 2012 found that 13 percent of workers say they
are “engaged” (“enthusiastic about, and committed to their work and contribute to their
organization in a positive manner”) in their jobs; 63 percent say they are “not engaged”
(“sleepwalking through the workday, putting time—but not energy or passion—into their work);
and 24 percent report that they are “actively disengaged” (“aren’t just unhappy at work; they’re busy
acting out their unhappiness. Every day, these workers undermine what their engaged workers
accomplish…Actively disengaged employees are more or less out to damage the company”).15 In
short, 87 percent of workers report being alienated from their work. Individuals are twice as likely to
despise their work than to love it.
14
Rutger Bergman, Utopia for Realists, trans. Elizabeth Manton (New York: Back Bay Books, 2017),
18.
15
Gallup, Inc., State of the Global Workplace: Employee Engagements Insights for Business Leaders Worldwide,
http://www.gallup.com, 2013 quoted in Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How
to Find Hope (New York: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2019), 76-77. See also William Davis, The Happiness
Industry: How the Government and Big Business Sold Us Well-Being (New York: Verso, 2016), 106.
4
As André Gorz has observed, the disaffection with work is rampant globally: in the United
States, only 18 percent of those who are employed regard work as the most important thing in their
lives, and in a survey of western European countries, 9 percent of those questioned cited work as
“the main factor for success in life”—the top priorities reported by respondents were having friends
(95 percent), having enough free time (80 percent), being in good physical shape (77 percent), and
spending time with family and friends/having an active social life (74 percent).
Not only is work a source of unhappiness for most people, we are expected to work more,
and longer hours, to the point of physical harm.’. Focusing on Japan, the International Labour
Organization (ILO) cites the following cases of death-by-overwork [karoshi]:
(1) Mr A worked at a major snack food processing company for as long as 110 hours a week
(not a month) and died from heart attack at the age of 34. His death was approved as
work-related by the Labour Standards Office.
(2) Mr B, a bus driver, whose death was also approved as work-related, worked more than
3,000 hours a year. He did not have a day off in the 15 days before he had stroke at the
age of 37.
(3) Mr C worked in a large printing company in Tokyo for 4,320 hours a year including
night work and died from stroke at the age of 58. His widow received a workers’
compensation 14 years after her husband’s death.
(4) Ms D, a 22 year-old nurse, died from a heart attack after 34 hours’ continuous duty five
times a month.16
16
Internal Labour Organization (ILO), Case Study: Karoshi: Death from Overwork, April 23, 2013.
http://www.ilo.org/safework/info/publications/WCMS_211571/lang--en/index.htm
5
It is estimated that 600,000 Chinese workers die each year from overwork [guolaosi], often
while still sitting at their desks17 (the Chinese media has said that once the current pandemic is over,
individuals will have to work Saturdays and Sundays to make up the lost worktime).18 Nor is the
phenomenon of death-by-overwork limited to Japan, China, and South Korea. In 2013, Moritz
Erhardt, a 21 year-old Bank of America intern died after working for 72 consecutive hours. As
Fleming notes, while extreme, these cases “are indicative of an idealization of employment that
affects many people, encouraging them to perceive their jobs as everything. Work has become a
generalizable social insistence…These deadly trends say something more generally about the
intentional conflation of work and life in late-capitalist societies.”19
Traditionally, the alienation critique was used to highlight the psychic ailments and
pathologies of work. However, the concept of alienation, once the bedrock of critical social theory,
now appears hopelessly problematic. The uncritical conflation of its descriptive and evaluative
dimensions, its widespread use across disciplines and overlap with associated concepts threaten to
render the notion meaningless. Varieties of alienation leave us at a loss when it comes to utilizing the
concept. The poststructuralist critique of the subject calls into question its basic presuppositions in
the domain of radical social theory, and Rawlsian liberalism, which dominates the field of analytical
political philosophy, balks at its perfectionism. Even the heirs of the Frankfurt School now decry the
concept as an “overly hasty...hypostatization” of their forebears—“a product of modernity through
17
Shai Oster, “Is Work Killing You? In China, Workers Die at Their Desks,” Bloomberg, June 30,
2014. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-06-29/is-work-killing-you-in-china-
workers-die-at-their-desks quoted in Peter Fleming, The Death of Homo Economicus: Work, Debt and the
Myth of Endless Accumulation (London: Pluto Press, 2017), 133.
18
Slavoj Žižek, Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World (New York: OR Books, 2020), 43.
19
Peter Fleming, The Mythology of Work: How Capitalism Persists Despite Itself (London: Pluto Press,
2015), 51.
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and through—[which] presupposes, for Rousseau no less than for Marx and his heirs, a conception
of the human essence.”20 As Rahel Jaeggi points out, the concept’s
philosophical foundations look outmoded in the age of postmodernity; its political
implications seem questionable in the period of political liberalism; and the aspirations of
[the] alienation critique can easily strike us as futile in the context of what looks like
capitalism’s decisive victory.21
This dissertation takes up the problem of alienation, particularly as it manifests in the world
of work, by critically examining the traditional alienation critique and proposing an alternative
approach. The problem can be summed up as follows: in late modernity, now more than ever, we
require the alienation critique to diagnose and prescribe a way of overcoming the social pathologies
and tyranny of work preventing subjects from leading successful lives, but the traditional accounts of
alienation come with essentialist and metaphysically weighty presuppositions that are not adequately
responsive to the ethical pluralism of modern societies or to subjects’ own conceptions of the good.
In a nutshell, we would like to avail ourselves of the rich ethical dimensions of the alienation critique
without the succumbing to the legitimate criticisms levelled at its traditional formulations.
In The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, in which Robert E. Lane charts the rising tide
of clinical depression, dysphoria, increasing distrust of others and of social and political institutions,
declining belief that the lot of the average person is getting better, and the erosion of human bonds
in developed countries, Lane reflects upon this dilemma: “Have we not traveled this route before:
the prolonged whingeing…about alienation in the 1960s?…[I]n 1968, 45 percent of the U.S.
public…said we were a sick society. I do not wish to return to the themes of these curdled
20
Axel Honneth, “Foreword,” in Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation, trans. Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E.
Smith (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), p. vii.
21
Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation, trans. Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014), p. xix.
7
imaginations.”22 Perhaps it is time that we re-actualized these themes, but not in their “curdled” form;
time that we breathed new life into the alienation critique, the social pathology diagnosis, and the
critique of work in their new historical specificity, and with an eye to the misgivings of their critics.
Novelty of the Contribution
The re-actualization of the alienation critique in Chapter 1 is only the first step in a much
larger investigation. It provides the theoretical foundation for the arguments and claims that follow.
In deploying the concept, the dissertation makes a number of novel contributions.
First, it argues that Jaeggi’s account of appropriation, which is to be commended for its
formalism since it allows us to bypass many of the objections levelled at traditional accounts of
alienation, is nonetheless problematically narrow or one-sided (Chapter 1). Self-realization cannot be
understood solely as a volitional process of “being active”23 or “giving oneself reality.”24 In addition to
(i) appropriative efficacy, I maintain that self-realization requires (ii) being immersed in a legible or
appropriable world in which the burden of meaning is not shouldered exclusively by subjects, (iii)
the satisfaction of basic needs (before we can even begin to speak of self-actualization beyond the
realm of necessity), (iv) the ability to engage in autotelic activities done for their own sake, that is,
not beholden to the diktats of instrumental reason, production, and self-optimization, and, finally,
(v) the ability to engage in activities that are self-determined and responsive to the subject’s own
conceptions of the good, desires, goals, ground projects, and needs (rather, say, than those of the
workplace). Although a successful appropriation of self and world requires these five constituents,
they are not reducible to the process of appropriation as Jaeggi contends.
Second, the dissertation applies this appropriative model of alienated labour with its
expanded account of self-realization to the diagnosis of the comorbid symptoms plaguing subjects in
22
Lane, The Loss of Happiness in Market Democracies, 4.
23
Jaeggi, Alienation, 206.
24
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late modernity (Chapter 2), the social pathologies underlying them (Chapter 3) and their overcoming
(Chapter 5). Hence, it sheds light on and denaturalizes important contemporary phenomena that are
historically situated, socially produced, and pervasive in modern societies, and which obstruct the
capacity of late-modern subjects to lead successful lives. In addition, it charts a path of de-alienation,
by putting forward four demands or proposals in which these social pathologies might be overcome.
Given the hegemonic neoliberal dispositif championing the “entrepreneurial self,”25 which disposes
over itself as a project, the imperatives of self-optimization, the “selling of the work ethic,”26 and the
co-optation of self-realization, as well as the general ideological obfuscation of life under capitalism,
the need for such an analysis is both pressing and timely.
Third, the dissertation makes a novel contribution not only in providing a topography of the
late-modern landscape and shedding light on the threats to the well-being of its dysphoric subjects
(burnout, depression, overwork, etc.), as we saw above, but it also points to gaps or lacunae in
contemporary political philosophy and especially in analytical political theory, which tends to rely, in
large part, on a justice-based, moral critique that leaves no room for diagnosing many of the
alienating social formations, practices, and structures that prevent late-modern subjects from leading
successful lives (Chapter 2). Thus, my analysis points to a constitutive limitation of moral critique which
explains these oversights in the literature. Moreover, in establishing the need for ethical critique—
understood as a form of social critique that is attentive to the conditions that facilitate the realization of a
successful life—there are two, more specific novel dimensions at play: (i) I argue that ethical critique is
needed to supplement rather than supplant the moral critique. In other words, the distributive
considerations of moral critique play an integral role in self-realization, but they do not settle the
25
Ulrich Bröckling, The Entrepreneurial Self: Fabricating a New Type of Subject, trans. Steven Black
(Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 2016).
26
See, for example, Sharon Beder, Selling the Work Ethic: From Puritan Pulpit to Corporate PR (New
York: Zed Books, 2000).
9
matter—they are necessary but insufficient for self-realization; and (ii) given that the conception of
ethical critique I advance is formal in nature, which is to say, concerned not with the good life per se,
but with the successful life, I argue that it should be of interest to political philosophers of all stripes,
regardless of their political orientations, including but not limited to liberals and libertarians, and not
only to Marxists (Chapter 5). By taking the concerns of analytical political philosophers seriously and
attempting to redeploy a novel account of the alienation critique that is responsive to their criticisms,
to the ethical pluralism of modern societies, and to the ideals of the unfinished project of modernity,
this dissertation contributes to the project of bridging the continental-analytic divide in
contemporary political philosophy and social theory. Its recurring refrain is the following: if we care
about the aspirations of modernity—authenticity, autonomy, creativity, liberty—we need to consider
the socially produced obstacles that disrupt, foreclose, or impede these ideals and how they might be
overcome in order for late-modern subjects to be able to lead successful lives.
A fourth novel contribution lies in the domain of work. The critique of work, which has a
variegated history, from utopian socialists like Charles Fourier to the autonomist Marxist tradition,
has provided a powerful counterpoint to the Protestant work ethic and the valorization of work as
an end in itself, but has lacked a proper theoretical foundation. In the traditional Marxist account, it
has been narrowly focused on exploitation, resulting in calls for “more work” (i.e., full employment),
the democratization of the relations of production, and the efficient mobilization of the workforce,
leaving the critique of labour process largely unaddressed. This oversight is rectified in the humanist
model of alienated labour, but the focus on “better work” still leaves the value of productive labour
in place and, as a result, is easily co-opted into programs of organized self-realization. The alienation
critique provides a way out of this dilemma. By drawing attention to the dual nature of labour/work,
namely the difference between alienated or productive labour and non-alienated or creative labour, it
is able to issue in a call for “less work” or the “refusal of work” (less productive labour) in order to
10
make room for the free creative activity (more creative labour) necessary for self-realization.
Theorists who endorse this conclusion without recourse to the alienation critique are unable to
explain why the labour process, production as an end in itself, and even passive consumption hinder
the ability of late-modern subjects to lead successful lives. To put it slightly differently, the novel
contribution in the domain or work lies in the capacity of the alienation critique to criticize the
labour process, the productivism of the work ethic, and passive consumption as socially produced
obstacles to self-realization. This contribution, in turn, paves the way for my four proposals in the final
chapter—desanctification of work, implementation of a basic income, reduction of working hours,
and invention of post-work imaginaries—which focus on reducing socially necessary productive
labour/labour time as much as possible in order to make room for creative, self-actualizing labour
beyond the realm of necessity (Chapter 5).
Fifth, the structure of the overarching argument which informs the divisions of the
dissertation constitutes a novel application of the alienation critique. Taking as its starting point the idea
that social critique is concerned with the diagnosing and overcoming of social pathologies, after
putting forward the appropriative model of alienated labour in Chapter 1, the structure of the
dissertation follows the four tasks of the social pathology diagnosis (indicated by the chapters)—
symptomatology, aetiology, diagnosis, prognosis/therapy—which, in turn, fulfill the three desiderata
that any successful alienation critique should meet (indicated by the three parts):
Part I: The Theoretical Foundation
Chapter 1: The Alienation Critique
Part II: The Critical-Diagnostic Dimension
Chapter 2: Symptomatology: What symptoms do late-modern subjects suffer from?
Aetiology: What are the underlying causes that give rise to these?
Chapter 3: Diagnosis: What social pathologies do the symptoms point to?
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Part III: The Prescriptive Dimension
Chapters 4, 5: Prognosis/Therapy: How can these social pathologies be overcome?
I will have more to say about the structure of the argument below. For now, it is sufficient to note
that this novel application of the alienation critique allows me to move from the reality of alienation
(symptomatology) to its causes (aetiology/diagnosis) to its overcoming in the form of providing the
necessary conditions for self-realization (prognosis/therapy). This movement or trajectory from
alienation to self-realization encompasses all the novel contributions discussed above and unifies the
dissertation as a whole.
Key Concepts and Terms
A number of concepts and terms play a central role in the dissertation and propel the
argument forward, charting its trajectory from alienation to self-realization. I review them here in
order to clarify their use and to give a clearer intimation of the overarching argument of the project.
The fact that the terms implicate each other should also serve to highlight the unity of the argument.
(a) Alienation/The Alienation Critique
Drawing on Rahel Jaeggi’s work, I redefine alienation as a disturbed or impeded appropriation
of self and world.27 Insofar as it disrupts the self-world relation, alienation interposes itself between
subjects and their self-realization, which is to say, between subjects and the possibility of establishing
a successful relationship to others, to themselves, and to the world. The alienated self is an
“impaired subjectivity” whose self-mediating autonomy and self-realization are subordinated to
second-order mediations. The formal structure of the appropriative model means that it is
concerned not with “what” is appropriated (the content) but “how” it is appropriated (the form),
defusing charges of essentialism, paternalism, and perfectionism that plague traditional accounts of
alienation. By “the alienation critique” I mean the deployment of the concept of alienation in the
27
Jaeggi, Alienation, 36-37, 151-220.
12
following dimensions: (i) the critical-diagnostic dimension—the critique of social formations and
practices based on whether these impede or facilitate successful acts of appropriation (see Part II:
Chapters 2 and 3); and (ii) the prescriptive dimension—the critique of work and the post-work
demands or proposals which enable self-realization understood, once again, as successful
appropriation of self and world (see Part III: Chapters 4 and 5).
(b) Appropriation/The Appropriative Model (of Alienated Labour)
The concept of appropriation is a form of praxis in which something is not merely passively
taken up, but actively transformed and assimilated, altering both what its appropriated and the
appropriator. Thus “appropriation refers to a way of establishing relations to oneself and the world,
a way of dealing with oneself and the world.”28 The basis for this account of appropriation is found
in the Hegelian-Marxist analysis of labour. Throughout the dissertation, I sometimes use the phrase
“the appropriative model (of alienated labour)” to refer to this pedigree and to distinguish this model of
alienation from its existential and humanist counterparts.
(c) Labour/Work
By labour/work I mean the process by which subjects mediate their relationship with the
world. The definition of labour is intentionally broad in order to, first, be able to include the
formative, practico-sensory, ontological dimension of labour (labour as externalization and
objectification of the subject’s essential capacities and powers) and the historically-specific distortion
of labour under the capitalist mode of production, and, second, to be able to encompass alienated
labour on one end of the spectrum and non-alienated labour on the other. Although I retain the
distinction between labour (toilsome activity) and work (creative activity), I use the terms “labour”
and “work” interchangeably throughout the dissertation, opting instead to qualify them with
alienated/productive work, on the one hand, and non-alienated/creative work on the other.
28
13
Whether the work in question is alienated or not depends on whether it allows for a successful
appropriation of self and world.
(d) Moral/Social Critique and Ethical/Artistic Critique
There are two kinds of normative critique: moral/social critique and ethical/artistic critique.
Moral/social critique is founded on the idea of justice, in which a social formation or
practice is evaluated in terms of the fairness of its distribution of goods, privileges, rights, etc.
Moral/social critique is focused on the relevant standing of groups and subjects vis-à-vis each other.
In contemporary political philosophy, the assertion that a socio-economic system is unjust is often
formulated in terms of an unequal distribution which is the result of morally arbitrary differences in
people’s circumstances. Erik Olin Wright argues that moral/social critique comprises three clusters
of values whose fullest realization is impeded under certain capitalist social formations or practices:
equality/fairness, democracy/freedom, and community/solidarity.29
Ethical/artistic critique evaluates a social formation or practice on the basis of whether it
enables or hinders self-realization. Rather than focusing on distribution and employing the language
of just or unjust, the ethical critique targets the general character and development of forms of life
which it views as a source of alienation, reification, and a ruptured self-world relation.
Ethical/artistic critique is primarily concerned with “the successful life” [das geglückte Leben]. There
are four dimensions that form of the basis of ethical/artistic critique: authenticity, autonomy,
creativity, and liberation. Although liable to co-optation by the “new” spirit of capitalism, I argue
that all four dimensions are integral to the subject’s authentic self-realization.
(e) Self-Realization/Successful Life
29
Erik Olin Wright, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century (New York: Verso, 2019), 23-36.
14
Traditionally, in the Marxist tradition, the idea of self-realization has been defined as “the full
and free actualization and externalization of the powers and abilities of the individual.”30 I deploy the
term in a similar way, shorn of its essentialist, metaphysical, and perfectionist presuppositions. Self-
realization, on my account, involves five related components: the first is what I refer to as (i)
“appropriative efficacy” (the capacity for successful acts of appropriation of self and world); (ii)
symbolic efficiency (the experience of an appropriable or resonant world rather than one that is
wholly alien or illegible); (iii) satisfaction of needs; (iv) engagement in autotelic activities (those that
are rewarding in themselves); and (v) the capacity to freely formulate and pursue ground projects
which afford subjects meaning. Given the formal nature of the self-realization, it is tantamount to a
successful life, irrespective of the content of that life—“we can enquire into the conditions of its
success without needing to conceive of that relation as teleologically guided or fully
completable…[or] essentialistically, as the recovery of an essence that is already defined and set prior
to the process itself.”31
(f) Self-World Relation
“Self-world relation” is the shorthand phrase I use to describe subjects’ relationship to others,
to themselves, and to the world. Self-world relations can be alienated, disrupted/disturbed,
estranged, foreclosed, reified, ruptured, or, alternatively, advanced, cultivated, facilitated, fostered,
and promoted. More importantly, self-world relations can be successful or unsuccessful. A
successful self-world relation, as we saw above, is one that is efficacious and guided by, as well as
responsive to, subjects’ own conceptions of the good, desires, goals, ground projects, and needs.
(g) Social Pathologies/The Social Pathology Diagnosis
30
Jon Elster, “Self-Realization in Work and Politics: The Marxist Conception of the Good Life,”
Social Philosophy & Policy 3 (1986), 215.
31
15
In Chapter 2, I define social pathologies as socially produced obstacles to self-realization.
Simply put, these are obstacles that (i) are the product of specific social formations and/or practices
(ii) are pervasive in society, and (iii) prevent subjects from leading successful lives. I consider the
ceaseless demands of self-optimization and (alienated) work to be examples of social pathologies.
The social pathology diagnosis relies on criteria of an ethical nature and involves four tasks:
symptomatology, aetiology, diagnosis, and prognosis/therapy. This dissertation, as we shall see next,
is structured around these four tasks.
Structure of the Argument: From Alienation to Self-Realization
Part I establishes the theoretical foundation for the diagnostic and prescriptive dimensions
of the alienation critique deployed in the rest of the dissertation.
Chapter 1 surveys various kinds of alienation and argues that an interpretation of the
Hegelian-Marxist understanding of alienated labour as an “appropriative” model is the most
promising candidate for the alienation critique and the one best suited to overcome the difficulties—
essentialism, paternalism, paternalism—that plague traditional accounts of alienation within the
Marxist tradition. The chapter is meant to function both as an argument by elimination and, in the
process, as a short conspectus of the concept of alienation. The chapter ends with a defence of the
appropriative model of alienated labour and the connection between successful acts of appropriation
and self-realization.
Part II is concerned with the symptomatology of late modernity and the aetiological and
diagnostic dimensions of the alienation critique.
Chapter 2 is animated by three concerns. First, it aims at situating ethical critique vis-à-vis
moral critique, so that the novel diagnostic contributions of the appropriative model of alienated
labour qua ethical critique can be fully demonstrated and deployed in the subsequent chapter.
Second it defends a conception of social pathologies as “socially produced obstacles to self-
16
realization.” Third, it provides an overview of the symptoms or malaises of late modernity and
discusses the aetiology of these symptoms: reflexivization, dynamic stabilization, and the birth of
achievement societies/self-optimization. Although I locate the primary cause of all three aetiologies
in the capitalist mode of production, the argument does not depend on this explanation (as long as
one admits an “elective affinity” between the three cultural forms).
Chapter 3 utilizes the appropriative model of alienated labour to identify a host of social
pathologies missed by current theories of justice, corresponding loosely to the three aetiologies:
pathologies of individual freedom, pathologies of de-synchronization, and pathologies of organized
self-realization. Pathologies of individual freedom point to the need for self-realization with others.
The pathologies of de-synchronization point to the alienating background conditions of social
acceleration with makes the possibility of establishing successful relationships to others and to the
social lifeworld even more remote. And organized self-realization is the product of the subject left to
found itself by disposing over itself as an open-ended project.
Part III is concerned with the prescriptive dimensions of the alienation critique and the
politics of work. After providing a brief history and critique of work and defending the distinction
between alienated/productive and non-alienated/creative labour, Chapter 4 argues that the
appropriative model issues in a call neither for “more work” (aligned with the traditional Marxist
critique of exploitation) nor “better work” (aligned with the humanist critique of alienation)—but
for the “refusal of work” (inspired by the autonomist Marxist tradition) which attempts chart a
course beyond the work-based society and its productivist values.
Chapter 5 makes the case for four demands or proposals—(i) the desanctification of work,
(ii) a basic income, (iii) shorter working hours, and (iv) exploring post-work imaginaries—that aim to
provide precarious late-modern subjects with a measure of security and stability, decommodify
labour, and pave the way to the realm of freedom beyond the tyranny of work. Only then, I argue,
17
will subjects be able to establish successful relationships to others, to themselves, and to the world,
and to lead successful lives.
18
Chapter 1
The Alienation Critique
The notion of alienation has something about that could be described as a ‘shorthand’ character. It can, legitimately,
comprehend a great deal and, therefore, it is eminently suitable to serve as the purpose of quickly surveying and
summarizing for one’s own use a broad synthesis. But formulating the broad outlines of a synthesis is not the end of the
task, only its real beginning. This outline or preliminary synthesis must be rendered specific enough in every respect,
otherwise the practical realization of the philosophical programme inherent in this synthesis cannot be seriously
contemplated.
—István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation32
As we saw in the introduction, the concept of alienation has fallen out of favour in modern
political discourse at a time when the diagnosis of various psychic ailments and the tyranny of work,
which constitute significant obstacles to the capacity of late-modern subjects to lead successful lives,
is needed most. Traditionally, the concept of alienation was used to diagnose and prescribe a way to
overcome these obstacles to self-realization since it referred to the process through which subjects
experienced a loss of control over their interactions with others, with themselves, and with the world.33
Nevertheless, these traditional conceptions of alienation suffered from metaphysical presuppositions
(e.g., about what it means to be distinctively human) that tended to run afoul of the ethical pluralism
of modern societies. Dan Swain sums up this dilemma as follows:
[T]he idea that there exists some kind of transhistorical human nature has become
increasingly controversial, seen as incapable of addressing the diversity of human societies
and perhaps positing too narrow a view of what it means to be human (as a laboring animal,
32
István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (London: Merlin Press, 1970), 239.
33
See, for example, “Alienation” in The Marx Dictionary by Ian Fraser and Lawrence Wilde (New
York: Bloomsbury, 2011), 23.
19
rather than, say a speaking, writing or political one). To the extent that Marx—and in
particular the notion of alienation—relied on such an idea, it might be seen as suspect.34
In this chapter, I contend that political philosophers and social theorists have valid reasons
to reject these traditional conceptions, but that there is a different way of conceiving of the idea of
alienation in which we can make full use of its rich critical-diagnostic and prescriptive dimensions
without succumbing to the charges of essentialism, paternalism, and perfectionism that have plagued
traditional accounts of alienation. The argument proceeds in three steps.
First, I offer a brief, historical conspectus of the concept of alienation, distilling its
multifarious uses across disciplines to arrive at a general definition of alienation as a deficient or
impeded relationship to oneself, to others, and to the world. This general definition, I argue,
establishes three desiderata of the alienation critique—ethical, critical-diagnostic, and prescriptive—
that any successful account of alienation must be able to fulfill in order to effectively diagnose
socially produced impediments to self-realization and to chart a course of de-alienation through
which they can be overcome. However, at this stage, we still require a full-fledged account of
alienation which is capable of (i) diagnosing and overcoming the pathologies of late modernity, (ii)
defusing the objections that led to the dismissal of traditional accounts of alienation by its critics,
while (iii) respecting the ethical pluralism of modern societies that had fueled many of their
misgivings. The question now becomes: given the myriad varieties of alienation, which is the best
candidate for the alienation critique, that is, which account of alienation best succeeds in fulfilling
the three desiderata?
In order to answer that question, I put forward an “argument of elimination” in which,
beginning at the broadest conceptual level, I rule out, as candidates for the alienation critique, firstly,
34
Dan Swain, “Alienation, or Why Capitalism Is Bad for Us” in The Oxford Handbook of Karl Marx,
ed. by Matt Vidal, Tony Smith, Tomás Rotta, and Paul Prew (New York: Oxford University Press,
2019), 368.
20
subjective alienations (in favour of objective alienations); secondly, existential theories of alienation
(in favour of Marx’s theory of alienated labour); and, thirdly, the humanist model of alienated labour
(in favour of the appropriative model). The argument by elimination is not meant to provide a
decisive confutation of these rival conceptions: I readily admit that forms of the humanist model,
for example, may exist which do not succumb to the charges of essentialism, paternalism, and
perfectionism. Instead, I argue that the formal nature of the appropriative model bypasses these
difficulties with ease, and hence constitutes the best candidate for the alienation critique going
forward. Rather than wading into the philosophical quagmire of the merits and pitfalls of
essentialism or perfectionism, the appropriative model abstracts from the content of the “good life”
to focus on the necessary conditions for leading a successful life, responsive to the subject’s own
conceptions of the good. Table 1.1 below outlines the strategy of the argument by elimination.
Table 1.1 Candidates for the Alienation Critique
Varieties of Alienation
Objective Alienation Subjective Alienation X
Alienated Labour Existential Theories of Alienation X
Appropriative Model Humanist Model (e.g., Fromm) X │ Disavowed Model (e.g., Althusser) X
Must be capable of successfully addressing the following:
• Charges of Essentialism
• Charges of Paternalism
• Charges of Perfectionism
21
In the third part of the Chapter, I turn to the appropriative model of alienated labour.
Drawing on its Hegelian-Marxist pedigree and Jaeggi’s recent work on alienation, the first two
sections are intended to demonstrate why labour/work, understood as a form of appropriative
activity or social mediation between subjects and others, between subjects and themselves, and
between subjects and the world, is fundamental to establishing a successful self-world relation.
Nevertheless, parting ways with Jaeggi, in the third and final section, I maintain that the concept of
appropriation alone is not sufficient for self-realization—that is, a successful life requires not only
what I call “appropriative efficacy” but also a resonant or appropriable world (“symbolic efficiency”),
since subjects always find themselves in medias res, already engaged with the world. Jaeggi, I argue, by
focusing exclusively on the appropriative dimension, revives the spectre of Prometheanism that
haunted traditional Hegelian-Marxist accounts of labour. In addition to these two components of
self-realization, in order to lead successful lives, subjects also need to have their basic needs met, to
engage in autotelic activities (i.e., activities done for their own sake), and to be able to freely pursue
their own conceptions of the good, desires, goals, ground projects, and needs. Although the concept
of appropriative efficacy remains a vital one, without these four additional components, the
possibility of leading a non-alienated or successful life remains, for the most part, unrealized. Let us,
therefore, start with a preliminary definition of alienation in order to chart a course beyond it.
I Towards a Preliminary Definition of Alienation
I.1 Traditional Uses of the Term ‘Alienation’
The term “alienation” traditionally had a number of different uses, established well before
Hegel and Marx. Richard Schacht identifies five such uses. The Latin origins, alienatio and alienare,
meant “to make something another’s, to take away, remove,” and referred to the transfer of
ownership often in connection with property or land.35 A second Latin usage from the Middle Ages
35
Richard Schacht, Alienation (New York: Psychology Press, 2015), 1.
22
spoke of alienatio mentis as the loss of metal powers or consciousness (e.g., “aliened of mind and
understanding”).36 As Erich Fromm notes, the older usage of the term in the domain of
psychology—e.g., aliéné in French and alienado in Spanish—described patients with psychosis and the
world “alienist” was used to refer to a professional who treated mental illnesses.37 A third, more
recognizable, use of the Latin verb alienare meant “to cause a warm relationship to cool [or] a
separation to occur; to make oneself disliked.”38 The term also appears in early theology as means of
expressing one’s separation from God and reappears, for example, in Paul Tillich’s Systematic Theology
as three “marks of man’s estrangement”: unbelief in the place of faith, hubris in the place of
surrender, and concupiscence in the place of love.39 The fifth use of the term can be found in the
works of the social contract theorists, such as Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, and is used to
denote a “transfer” or “divestment” of one’s liberty or sovereign authority to another.40 However
the first systematic use of the term in the way that it is understood today is found in Hegel’s
Phenomenology of Spirit. We look at this usage in more detail in §1.VI. For now, our definition must be
sufficiently broad in order not to rule out any of the rival conceptions of the alienation critique in
advance.
I.2 A General Definition
Historically, the concept of alienation has been understood as “a matter of some sort of
separation, nonidentity, or disunity which ought to be overcome” and consequently deployed by various
36
Schacht, Alienation, 2.
37
Erich Fromm, The Sane Society (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1990), 121. See also Erich
Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud (New York: Continuum, 2009),
41 and Schacht, Alienation, 3, n. 3. The term, “alienist,” although considered archaic, was the title of
a Caleb Carr novel in 1994 and a 2018 television series based on the novel.
38
39
Schacht, Alienation, 7-8, 208-209, 212. See also Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man with Marx’s
Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, trans. T. B. Bottomore (New York: Continuum, 2009), 39:
“[T]he concept of alienation is, in nontheistic language, the equivalent of what in theistic language
would be called ‘sin’: man’s relinquishment of himself, of God within himself.”
40
Schacht, Alienation, 8-13.
23
thinkers as both a descriptive and evaluative tool41—even if they deny, as Hegel, Marx and
Heidegger all do, that their projects have a normative dimension.42 According to Fromm, alienation
means “that man does not experience himself as the acting agent in his grasp of the world, but that
the world (nature, others, he himself) remain alien to him…Alienation is essentially experiencing the
world and oneself passively, receptively, as the subject separated from the object.”43 As we shall see,
Fromm’s characterization of alienation as a disunity between subject and object will prove vital to
the appropriative model of alienated labour. Complicating matters further is the widespread use of
the word across disciplines to denote a host of interrelated concepts and family resemblances:
absurdity, anomie, artificiality, commodity fetishism, detachment, homelessness, inauthenticity,
indifference, instrumentalization, meaninglessness, powerlessness, reification, and rootlessness.
After its slip into the popular vernacular,44 the concept of alienation has also come to
describe generalized feelings of psychological malaise, dissatisfaction, and ennui—leading Sean
41
Schacht, The Future of Alienation, 19.
42
Sean Sayers, Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011),
11-3, 83.
43
Erich Fromm, Marx’s Concept of Man, 37.
44
At the same time, the heyday of alienation produced of some of the best anthologies,
monographs, and scholarly works on the subject. See, for example, Fritz Pappenheim, The Alienation
of Modern Man: An Interpretation Based on Marx and Tönnies (New York: Monthly Review Press, [1959]
2009); Eric Josephson and Mary Josephson, Man Alone: Alienation in Modern Society (New York: Dell
Publishing Co., Inc., 1962); Robert Blauner, Alienation and Freedom: The Factory Worker and His Industry
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1964); Herbert Aptheker (ed.), Marxism and Alienation: A
Symposium (New York: Humanities Press, 1965); Kenneth Keniston, The Uncommitted: Alienated Youth
in American Society (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1965); Ernest Mandel and George Novack,
The Marxist Theory of Alienation (New York: Pathfinder, [1970] 2009); István Mészáros, Marx’s Theory
of Alienation. 5th ed. (London: Merlin Press, [1970] 2005); Ronald V. Urick (ed.), Alienation: Individual
or Social Problem? (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1970); Bertell Ollman, Alienation: Marx’s
Conception of Man in Capitalist Society, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, [1971] 1996);
Walter A. Weisskopf, Alienation and Economics (New York: Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1971); Ada W.
Finifter (ed.), Alienation and the Social System (New York: John. Wiley & Sons, Inc., 1972); Frank
Johnson (ed.), Alienation: Concept, Term, and Meanings (New York: Seminar Press, 1973); Kostas
Axelos, Alienation, Praxis, and Technē in the Thought of Karl Marx. Trans. Ronald Bruzina (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1976); R. Felix Geyer and David R. Schweitzer (eds.), Theories of Alienation:
Critical Perspectives in Philosophy and the Social Sciences (Leiden: Springer Science+Business Media, 1976);
Ignace Feuerlicht, Alienation: From the Past to the Future (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978); Isidor
24
Sayers to complain that “it is one of the few theoretical terms from Marxism that has entered into
ordinary language, and yet it is one of the most misunderstood and misused terms in the whole of
Marxism.”45 Richard Schmitt argues that “global alienation” affects every aspect of one’s existence:
The world is unintelligible to me…Unable to understand myself or the world around me, I
do not know where I am going or what a good life might be for me. My life lacks direction:
it is without guiding projects. Even worse, were I to make plans I would lack the power to
execute them…In a world that is impenetrable to me, I am without power. My life is not my
own.46
In light of these multifarious descriptions (historical, appropriative, psychological, global),
what are we speaking about when we speak of “alienation”? At its most general, the concept of
alienation [Entfremdung] refers to “a deficient relation one has to oneself, to the world and to others.”47
Wallimann, Estrangement: Marx’s Conception of Human Nature and the Division of Labor (New York:
Greenwood Press, 1981); and R. Felix Geyer and David R. Schweitzer (eds.), Alienation: Problems of
Meaning, Theory and Method. (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981), amongst numerous others.
After falling into disfavour, the concept saw a resurgence in the 1990s that continues to this day.
See, for example, Andrew Oldenquist and Menachem Rosner (eds.), Alienation, Community, and Work
(New York: Greenwood Press, 1991); Richard Schacht, The Future of Alienation (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press 1994); Richard Schmitt and Thomas E. Moody (eds.), Alienation and Social
Criticism (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1994); Devorah Kalekin-Fishman (ed.), Designs for Alienation:
Exploring Diverse Realities (Jyväskylä: SoPhi, 1998); Warren Frederick Morris, Escaping Alienation: A
Philosophy of Alienation and Dealienation (Lanham: University Press of America,® Inc., 2002); Richard
Schmitt, Alienation and Freedom (Boulder: Westview Press, 2003); James W. Rinehart, The Tyranny of
Work: Alienation and the Labour Process (5th ed. Toronto: Thomson Nelson, 2006), Lauren Langman
and Devorah Kalekin-Fishman (eds.), The Evolution of Alienation: Trauma, Promise, and the Millennium
(New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2006); Sean Sayers, Marx and Alienation: Essays on
Hegelian Themes (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011); Axel Honneth, Reification: A New Look at an
Old Idea, with commentaries by Judith Butler, Raymond Guess, and Jonathan Lear, ed. Martin Jay
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Jerome Braun and Lauren Langman (eds.), Alienation
and the Carnivalization of Society (New York: Routledge, 2013); Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration:
Towards A Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality. (København [Copenhagen]: NSU Press, 2014);
Richard Schacht, Alienation (New York: Psychology Press, 2015); and Rahel Jaeggi, Alienation, trans.
Frederick Neuhouser and Alan E. Smith, ed. Frederick Neuhouser (New York: Columbia University
Press, 2016).
45
Sayers, Marx and Alienation, x.
46
Richard Schmitt, Alienation and Freedom (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 2003), 4.
47
25
By the “alienation critique,” I mean the mode of critique used from the eighteenth century onwards
“to communicate the ‘uncertainty, fragmentation and internal division’ in humans’ relations to
themselves and to the world that accompanied the growth of industrialization”48 While this is often
described in terms of its psychological components—powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness,
cultural estrangement, and self-estrangement—it is useful to begin with the abstract formulation of
alienation as a “discord” or “relation of relationlessnes”49 and, from there, to narrow the competing
conceptions until we arrive at a satisfactory account of alienation. Before we begin, however, it is
useful to say a little more about what such an account should entail.
I.3 Three Desiderata of the Alienation Critique
The question we are confronted with is the following. How do we retain the critical
authority of the alienation critique—i.e., its capacity to criticize the content of forms of life—and its
rich potential as a diagnostic and perspective tool in contemporary political philosophy, without it
being grounded in strongly essentialist, perfectionist, or teleological presuppositions. In order to
decide between rival conceptions of the alienation critique, what criteria must such an account meet?
(1) Ethical Dimension: The alienation critique must able to provide determinable criteria for what
counts as an alienated life and what counts as non-alienated or successful life. Moreover, it must
offer the means to investigate what prevents late-modern subjects from leading successful lives,
from posing the questions of how subjects want to live—responsive to their own conceptions of the
good, desires, goals, ground projects, and needs, and how these alienating forces can be overcome.
Finally, the alienation critique must be able to respond to charges of essentialism, perfectionism, and
paternalism that have plagued traditional accounts of alienation.
48
49
Jaeggi, Alienation, 1-2, 25.
26
(2) Critical-Diagnostic Dimension: The alienation critique must be able to diagnose the symptoms
afflicting late-modern subjects, the various social pathologies behind them, and offer an account of
their aetiology.
(3) Prescriptive Dimension: The alienation critique must be able to prescribe means of overcoming the
social pathologies obstructing subjects form leading successful lives and to identify the necessary
preconditions for self-realization.
II. Subjective Alienations and Objective Alienations
II.1 Two Varieties of Alienation
At its most general, the concept of alienation as a “discord” can take one of two broad forms:
subjective alienations or objective alienations. Schacht refers to these respectively as S-alienations
and O-alienations.50 Of course, the two forms often coincide and, as we shall see in Chapter Three,
admit of a strong causal relation, but they are conceptually distinct. In our search for candidates for
the alienation critique, which should take priority?
The first thing to note is that alienation, here, does not imply an absence of a relation, but a
deficient one.51 In subjective alienations, which are experiential in character, this manifests itself in
feelings of dissatisfaction or malaise. In the case of objective alienations, which are socio-structural,
it takes the form of deficient or impeded praxis at the level of social relations (to oneself, to the
world, and to others). In short, while both subjective alienations and objective alienations express
relational categories, the former is concerned with a deficiency in how people feel, the latter with a
deficiency in what they can do.
II.2 The Problem with Subjective Alienations as Candidates for the Alienation Critique
50
Schacht, The Future of Alienation, 20-1.
51
Jaeggi, Alienation, 1, 25.
27
There are three reasons for believing that only objective alienations should be utilized for the
alienation critique. First, is the well-known problem, often levelled at proponents of utilitarianism,
concerning our ability to accurately detect and measure the psychological states associated with
subjective alienations. Second, is the fact the subjective alienations are, to borrow Schacht’s term,
“perspective-relative”—that is, feelings of dissatisfaction are partly contingent on the perspective
from which they are viewed and, as such, “inextricably bound up with self-understandings, beliefs,
conceptual repertoires, attitudes, aspirations, desires, and feelings of those who experience them.”52
This means that subjective alienations will (i) vary across individuals and groups, (ii) fluctuate for the
same individual or group across time, and (iii) be constrained by adaptive preferences. Moreover, the
sheer scope of subjective alienations which threatens to render the concept meaningless.
An illustration of this difficulty can be found in Schmitt’s book, Alienation and Freedom.
Schmitt speaks of feelings of alienation from family, from friends and colleagues, from instructors
and managers, from spouses, from various groups, from society at large, and from our own lives,
arguing that “at different times of one’s life, alienation obviously looks different…Human lives are
as different as the persons living them. Generalities about alienation may well not apply precisely to
anyone’s life because alienation takes many forms.”53 Drawing on well-known literary works, Schmitt
maintains that the protagonist of Leo Tolstoy’s story The Death of Ivan Ilych suffers from alienation, as
does the unnamed narrator in Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s
Metamorphosis, Antoine Roquentin in Sartre’s Nausea, Emma in Madame Bovary, and the list goes on.
Schmitt seems to be aware of the problem when he writes,
[W]e need to ask whether the concept of alienation adds anything to the discussion of
suffering in human lives. Yes, people are sometimes depressed, they distrust themselves, they
52
Schacht, The Future of Alienation, 27.
53
Schmitt, Alienation and Freedom, 5.
28
lack confidence in their abilities and do not trust others to love and support them. People
are, sometimes, bored or at loose ends. All of this is familiar. What is gained by gathering up
these different experiences of depression, distrust of self and others, and boredom under the
concept of “alienation”?54
The problem arises for Schmitt because he conceives of alienation in terms of subjective alienations.
Schacht gives voice to a similar worry when he accuses Fromm of “refer[ring] to virtually anything
which is not as it should be as an instance of ‘alienation’”: culture, hope, interpersonal relations,
language, love, thought, ways of life, etc.55 Schacht argues that this promiscuous use of the term
ultimately divests it of meaning. This points to a larger dilemma we should keep in mind as we
proceed: if alienation is defined too broadly, then the alienation critique loses its force and sinks into
sterile generality (“I feel alienated from my onetime friend because I no longer understand him.”56).
If, on the other hand, alienation is defined too specifically, the alienation critique will be unable to
explain many of the social pathologies plaguing contemporary life. At this stage, however, we are still
far from the risk of over-specificity. What concerns us here is that any critical deployment of the
alienation critique must take the form of objective alienations. Next, we explore two such accounts:
existential theories of alienation and Marx’s theory of alienated labour.
III. Existential Theories of Alienation
The concept of alienation is often associated with existential philosophy and, although it does make
an appearance in a number of important works, most notably Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time and
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, it is not discussed extensively nor is it used in a way that the
term is commonly understood. For example, a cursory glance through the index of Being and Time
54
Schmitt, Alienation and Freedom, 14-5.
55
Schacht, Alienation, 113, 116, 126-127, 139-140.
56
Schmitt, Alienation and Freedom, 1.
29
reveals only five instances of the use of the term “alienate” [entfremden] in the main text.57
Furthermore, in works where the concept does receive a more in-depth treatment, such as Sartre’s
Critique of Dialectical Reason, its use is derived almost entirely from Hegel and Marx.58
In what follows I first offer a brief sketch of the use of term in Heidegger’s Being and Time
and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness, and, in the following section, I attempt to assess the merits of the
existential theories of alienation as viable candidates for the alienation critique.
III.1 Alienation in Heidegger’s Being and Time
We can identify two distinct dimensions of objective alienation in Heidegger’s Being and Time.
The first concerns the way that Dasein relates to the world. According to Heidegger, objects in the
world confront Dasein as “ready-to-hand” [zuhanden], namely, as good for or used to do something.
Even when we consider objects passively, we do so on the basis of them being ready-to-hand.59
Thus, we misapprehend both the objects and the world when we regard them as “present-at-hand”
[vorhanden]—as things that stand over and against us, detached from their practical context and use.
Similarly, Dasein as a Being-in-the-world [In-der-Welt-sein], always finds itself immersed in the world,
already acting within it, and related to it practically. It is only because Dasein is a Being-in-the-world
that it is possible to take up a relationship to the world. Jaeggi argues that this “antidualism” and the
“priority of praxis” are both central for understanding Heidegger’s first use of the term alienation:
“The world, in Heidegger’s interpretation, is a structure that overarches and includes within it
subject and object. The separation of the two sides—ontologically considered—is alienation, the
separation of what belongs together.”60
57
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York:
Harper Perennial Modern Thought, 1962), 222-223, 224, 298, 399, 448.
58
59
60
30
The second dimension of alienation is associated with Heidegger’s concepts of “falling”
[Verfallen], “inauthenticity” [Uneigentlichkeit], and Dasein’s “potentiality-for-Being” [Seinkönnen].
Alienation-as-inauthenticity concerns Dasein’s relation to itself and its decisions. The possibility of
being authentic or inauthentic is rooted in the fact that Dasein is an entity that has its own Being as
an issue for it and comports itself towards its Being as its own possibility. When Heidegger writes
that Dasein has “in each case mineness” or that it is “in each case mine” he means that Dasein must
lead its life, decide on its projects, and make its own choices. It follows from this that Dasein can
“‘choose’ and win itself” or “lose itself and never win itself; or only ‘seem’ to do so.”61 Alienation,
for Heidegger, refers to the way that Dasein’s “ownmost potentiality-for-Being is hidden from it.”62
Schacht identifies three phenomena associated with this loss of authenticity.63 The first is one
in which Dasein “falls away” from itself into the world of the “They” and becomes dispersed in its
entanglements and relations. “Fallenness” is an absorption in Being-with-one-another characterized
by idle talk, ambiguity, curiosity, temptation, tranquilization, and self-entanglement.64 Dasein loses
sight of its non-relational potentiality-for-Being and identifies itself with its preoccupations.
Decisions are taken to be self-evident in so far as they are interpreted by the anonymous They.
Future-oriented projects are supplanted by a complete absorption in the past or present, a Being-in
which is both “everywhere and nowhere,” a “falling into groundlessness.”65 And, in extreme cases,
Dasein comes to regard itself as present-at-hand, i.e., as a thing rather than an entity from whom
Being is an issue. Self-alienation, according to Heidegger, arises when the individual fails to
apprehend the impossibility of having her life represented by someone else: it is a “mode of being of
the They.”
61
Heidegger, Being and Time, 68.
62
63
64
Heidegger, Being and Time, 219-224, 399.
65
31
As its ownmost, non-relational potentiality-for-Being, Dasein cannot outstrip the possibility
of death which is disclosed to it through anxiety. The everydayness of the They, however, provides
“a constant tranquilization about death”66: death is regarded a mishap which is constantly occurring,
someone or other dies, people die on the news, one dies sometime, but not right away, and so on.
By speaking of death in this manner, dying belongs to no one in particular. The tranquilization and
alienation which are distinguishing marks of falling, mean everyday Being-towards-death is a
constant evasion or fleeing in the face of death that serves to conceal it. According to Heidegger,
this neutralization of anxiety and the cultivation of an indifferent or cavalier attitude towards death
“alienates Dasein from its ownmost non-relational potentiality-for-Being.”67
Finally, Dasein can achieve an ersatz self-understanding, which it parades as enlightenment,
through restlessly “synthetizing” knowledge about different cultures. In his attempt to show that
inauthentic Being does not merely seduce Dasein into stagnation and inactivity, but drives it into an
“uninhibited ‘hustle’” Heidegger stresses that this achievement is alienating in two senses: it is both
superficial, since the knowledge it gains remains vague, indefinite, and disconnected from its own
potentiality-for-Being, and hopelessly self-referential, since it can take the form of the “most
exaggerated ‘self-dissection’” replete with various characterologies, classifications, and typologies
that entangle Dasein in itself. In each case, he argues, this pretense of knowledge is deeply alienating
because it “closes off from Dasein its authenticity and possibility, even if only the possibility of
genuinely foundering.”68
III.2 Alienation in Sartre’s Being and Nothingness
66
67
Heidegger, Being and Time, 296-299.
68
Heidegger, Being and Time, 222-223. In the same section, Heidegger writes, “When Dasein,
tranquillized, and ‘understanding’ everything, thus compares itself with everything, it drifts along
towards an alienation [Entfremdung] in which its ownmost potentiality-for-Being is hidden from it.”
32
Sartre’s uses the term alienation in Being and Nothingness to express the emergence of the
objectification of an individual’s self and world through the mediation of the “Look of the Other.”
The notion is illustrated in his well-known example of being surprised by another while peering
through a keyhole: “Let us imagine that moved by jealousy, curiosity, or vice I have glued my ear to
the door and looked through a keyhole…But all of a sudden I hear footsteps in the hall. Someone is
looking at me! What does this mean?”69
Sartre holds that, in the look of the Other, I am fixed as an object in the world rather than a
free subject. All of a sudden, I am conscious of having my foundation outside myself, of being a
pure reference to the Other, of being an object-for-the-Other. Leaning over the keyhole, I am
“stripped of my transcendence.”70 Echoing certain aspects of Heidegger’s analysis of alienation71 as
the concealment of Dasein’s own potentiality-for-Being, Sartre argues that “I grasp this Other’s look
at the very center of my act as the solidification and alienation of my own possibilities”72—
“solidification” because my transcendence becomes for those who make themselves witnesses to it a
given-transcendence, one that is conferred from the outside; and “alienation” because “my
transcendence [is] transcended” by the look of the Other: “Of course I still am my possibilities…But
at the same time the look alienates them from me.”73 My possibilities now take the form of
“potentialities of instruments”: hiding in the dark hallway, fleeing, opening the door, etc. This
explains why, for Sartre, the “alienation of myself, which is the act of being-looked-at [also] involves
the alienation of the world which I organize”74 and why Sartre regards the Other’s look as both
69
Jean-Paul Sartre, Being and Nothingness, trans. Hazel E. Barnes (New York: Washington Square
Press, 1966), 317, 319.
70
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 319-322.
71
For a view that denies any similarities between Heidegger’s and Sartre’s accounts, see Schacht,
Alienation, pp. 223-224.
72
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 322.
73
74
33
spatializing and temporalizing.75 I am fixed as an object in the midst of a world that flows towards
the Other. As a result of this alienation through the look of the Other in which I apprehend myself
as a fixture in the world, I know neither what I am nor my place in the world.
It is worth noting, as Jaeggi does, that there is a “constitutive ambiguity” in Sartre’s
account.76 Despite its objectifying nature, it is only through the look of the Other that I become
aware of myself as a subject. Peering through the keyhole, alone and without interruption, there is
no self to inhabit my consciousness. “I am my acts” and hence “a pure consciousness of things.”77
Only when I see myself mediated through the look of the Other is there an “irruption of the self”:
“I see myself because somebody sees me.”78 While fixing me as an object in the world, the Other’s look
simultaneously dirempts me from my absorption in the world and orients me towards my own
possibilities. However pessimistic Sartre’s theory of intersubjectivity may have been, by opening up
possibilities of action, of understanding one’s choices, practical engagements and self differently,
Jaeggi rightly maintains that the look of the Other “is as much reifying as dereifying or enabling.”79
This dual nature of objectification will play a key role in our discussion of the appropriative model.
III.3 Problems with Existential Theories of Alienation as Candidates for the Alienation Critique
There are three main reasons for rejecting existential theories of alienation as candidates for
the alienation critique. First, they do not locate the provenance of alienation in any eradicable or
historical phenomenon; instead alienation is considered an ontological feature of human existence.
As such, it is both ahistorical and not amenable to political change. Heidegger, for example,
explicitly warns against any reading that attributes political significance to the concept of falling or its
overcoming: “We would…misunderstand the ontologico-existential structure of falling if we ascribe
75
Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 323-328.
76
77
78
79
34
to it the sense of bad and deplorable ontical property of which, perhaps, more advanced stages of
human culture might be able to rid themselves.”80 Moreover, Heidegger insists that authenticity and
inauthenticity are both “modes of Being” and that the inauthenticity of Dasein “does not signify any
‘less’ Being or any ‘lower’ degree of Being.” He goes on to argue that “even in its fullest concretion
Dasein can be characterized by inauthenticity—when busy, when excited, when interested, when
ready for enjoyment.”81 This means that while existential theories of alienation do provide criteria
for distinguishing alienating states from non-alienating ones, these states are ineradicable since they
are built into the fabric of human life. The ineradicability of existential theories of alienation is
captured well by A. E. Housman’s bleak refrain:
The toil of all that be
Helps not the primal fault;
It rains into the sea
And still the sea is salt.82
Another problem, related to the first, concerns the “reflexive character of reification”83 and
its deployment in existential theories of alienation. In History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukács
argues that the concept is itself susceptible to reification by bourgeois thought. Rather than
understanding reification as a process rooted in the capitalist mode of production, or in a specific
historical stage, it is transformed into a universal phenomenon and fixed eternally as a feature of
social relations. Here the social character of reification assumes the form of a natural relation.
Earlier we saw that the second criteria for a successful theory of alienation was the ability to
determine the necessary social conditions for individuals’ self-realization (§I.3.) A third problem with
80
81
82
A.E. Housman, “VII” in A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems: The Collected Poems of A. E. Housman, ed.
Archie Burnett (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), 145.
83
See Timothy Bewes, Reification, or the Anxiety of Late Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2002), 93-98.
35
existential theories of alienation is that not only is social life not a guarantee of authenticity; it is
often the site of inauthenticity. According to Heidegger, Dasein has in the first instance “fallen away”
from itself as an authentic potentiality-for-Being into the public “we-world”84 and has the character
of “Being-lost in the publicness of the ‘they’.”85 This takes the form of a “downward plunge” into
the “groundlessness and nullity of inauthentic everydayness,” into the inauthentic Being of the They.
Dasein is “torn away from the projecting of authentic possibilities” and “sucked into the turbulence
of the ‘they’s’ inauthenticity.”86 Moreover, this plunge remains hidden from it since it gets publicly
interpreted as a matter of “ascending” or “living concretely.”87 This is all to say that the overcoming
of alienation-as-inauthenticity in existential theories of alienation is largely an individual undertaking
rather than a sociopolitical one. Sartre’s own view of intersubjective relations in Being and Nothingness
notoriously denies the possibility of recognition or mutual self-realization, leaving individuals locked
in a state of intersubjective strife. The radical “inwardness” and subjectivity championed by
existentialists is arguably one of the symptoms plaguing contemporary society and not its remedy.
For that we have to look elsewhere.
IV. Alienated Labour
IV.1 Marx’s Fourfold Account of Alienated Labour
In the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Marx outlines four types of alienated labour,
from which we can draw, with the help of “Excerpt-Notes of 1844,” a vision of the unalienated self.
84
85
86
87
36
In alienated labour, the product of labour stands opposed to the worker as an alien object: the
more she produces, the poorer she becomes. The sensuous world of objects appears foreign and
hostile.88
In alienated labour, the process of production is a torment for the worker. Her work “is not
voluntary, but coerced, forced labor.” She “feels miserable and unhappy,” at ease only outside work.
Moreover, the activity of production belongs not to her, but to another.89
In alienated labour, the worker’s species-life, the basic capacities and powers of humankind, is
subordinated to individual life, making her essential nature a means for her physical existence. The
worker is alienated from her “spiritual nature,” her “human essence,” her “own body” and (d) “nature
outside [herself]”.90
In alienated labour, a “direct consequence” of the worker’s alienation from the products of
her labour, from her life activity, and from her species-existence—is her alienation from other
human beings, who confront her as hostile workmasters, competitors or mere instruments for the
satisfaction of her immediate needs.91 This gives rise to a “mutual alienation.” “No one is gratified
by the production of another.” Production is a “battle and the one with more insight, energy, power
and cleverness is the winner.”92
By contrast, in non-alienated labour, the worker affirms her “individuality and its particularity”
in her product; and, in viewing her product, experiences “the individual joy” of knowing her
personality “as an objective, sensuously perceptible, and indubitable power.”93 The act of labour, for the
worker, is the “self-satisfaction and the realization of natural dispositions and spiritual aims.”
88
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simon (Indianapolis:
Hackett Publishing Company, 1994), 58-62.
89
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Selected Writings, 61-2.
90
91
92
Marx, “Excerpt-Notes of 1844,” Selected Writings, 50-1.
93
37
Production is the “free manifestation [and] enjoyment of life.”94 In non-alienated labour, the worker
immediately confirms and realizes her “true human and social nature.” In satisfying the needs of
others, she acts as a “mediator” between them and the species, experiencing their true common life
as part of herself.95 Lastly, the worker enjoys the “direct and conscious satisfaction” that her product
satisfies a human need. In creating an object “appropriate to the need of another” the worker is
“affirmed in [their] thought as well as [their] love.”96
We can sum up Marx’s account as follows: in alienated labour, the worker is estranged from
the products of her labour, the process of production, her species-being and other human beings.
David Leopold identifies four additional features of alienated labour that Marx discusses. These are
(i) overwork, (ii) one-sided labour, (iii) machine-like labour, and (iv) intellectually-stunting labour.97
For example, Marx maintains that the division of labour under capitalism “makes man as far as
possible an abstract being, an automaton, transforming him into a spiritual and physical monster.”98
Consequently, the more value workers create, the worse off they become.
What emerges from Marx’s fourfold account of alienated labour can be subsumed under two
more generalized forms of alienation: (i) alienation as a lack of self-realization and (ii) alienation as a
lack of autonomy. A complete explanation of how Marx arrives at these generalized forms requires
an exploration of the Hegelian pedigree of Marx’s claims, which we will return to in our discussion
of the appropriative model.
For now, it enough to note that the Marxian emphasis on active self-realization involves the
self-directed cultivation and deployment of human powers, capacities and drives and can be defined
94
Marx, “Excerpt-Notes of 1844,” Selected Writings, 48, 53.
95
96
97
David Leopold, The Young Karl Marx: German Philosophy, Modern Politics, and Human Flourishing (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 232.
98
Karl Marx, “Excerpt-Notes of 1844,” Selected Writings, 49.
38
as “the full and free actualization and externalization of the…abilities of individuals” through labour
(Elster 43). Elster maintains that notion of self-realization can be decomposed into self-actualization
and self-externalization, the first involving the development of the potential ability, the second its
deployment.
The reasons Elster provides for valuing self-realization also track these two elements.
Contrasting self-realization with consumption, he argues that activities of self-realization, although
difficult, become increasingly rewarding over time whereas acts of consumption, although enjoyable,
become “satiated and jaded” with repeated consumption.99 As for self-externalization, Elster
contends that doing things that are esteemed in the eyes of other, while not itself a direct source of
happiness, is “a basic condition for deriving happiness and satisfaction from other sources” and one
that ultimately precludes consumption.100 A more fundamental argument for the role of self-
externalization is provided in Hegel’s account of work.
Marx’s idea of commodity fetishism in which the social relation between individuals assumes
the form of a relation between things and the relation between commodities assumes a living power
despites its impersonal nature can be understood as an account of social domination in which
“deliberative choices are ineffective because the market compels agents to fall in line with the social
division of labour , which is not and cannot be the an outcome of deliberative choice.”101 Not only
does Marx argue that autonomy is severely compromised under capitalism, but he maintains that the
very desires necessary for autonomous choice are one-sided, compulsive, and in the thrall of passive
consumption.
99
Jon Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 45.
100
Elster, An Introduction to Karl Marx, 45.
101
William Clare Roberts, Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital (Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2017), 83.
39
How does Marx’s fourfold account of alienation issue in his conception of alienation as
impeded self-realization and autonomy? Marx clearly employs the concept in a critical manner, but
what kind of criticism does it entail? There are three models which are found in the literature. I shall
refer to these as the disavowed model, the humanist model, and the appropriative model.
IV.2 The Disavowed Model
The first model is put forward by structuralist “anti-humanists,” of whom Althusser is the
most prominent, who argue that Marx abandoned the concept of alienation in his later work.
According to Althusser,
The untenable thesis upheld by Marx in the 1844 Manuscripts was that History is the History
of the process of alienation of a Subject, the Generic Essence of Man alienated in ‘alienated
labor’. But it was precisely this thesis that was exploded [in Marx’s later works]. The result of
this explosion was the evaporation of the notions of subject, human essence, and alienation,
which disappear, completely atomized, and the liberation of the concept of a process…without
a subject.102
Relevant to the debate is the relationship between the “early” Marx and the “late” Marx
which is still the subject of ongoing controversy. There are, broadly speaking, three main positions
in the debate. The first, which Althusser subscribes to, is that the mature Marx abandoned his
youthful theories, including his account of alienation, when his own views were fully developed. The
second accepts the first account but maintains that the real Marx is to be found in his youthful
“humanistic” works and that the later works degenerated into economism. Finally, there are those
like Bertell Ollman and István Mészáros who argue that alienation remains a central theme
throughout Marx’s work even if it is no longer referred to directly in Marx’s later works.
102
Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1971),
120-1.
40
Of course, even if Althusser is correct, this does not threaten our ability to deploy the young
Marx’s theory of alienation as a diagnostic and critical tool if we find it useful to do so, but
fortunately the view that the mature Marx rejected the concept of alienation is, according to Sayers,
“now discredited and with few proponents; even Althusser came to abandon it.”103 Although Marx
does not use the term “alienation” frequently after abandoning the Hegelian language of his youth,
Sayers is right to note that “the concept of alienation is implicit throughout Marx’s work, and it
continues to provide a major basis for his understanding of capitalism and for his critique of the
market.”104 This is not only evident in the Grundrisse (an early draft of Capital), but also in various
passages from Capital. For example, in Karl Marx: A Reader, edited by Elster and divided by topic,
under the heading “Alienation” we find lengthy passages from Comments on James Mill, The Economic
and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844, Grundrisse, and Capital I.105
IV.III The Humanist Model
The humanist model, the model most commonly associated with the alienation critique,
celebrates Marx’s theory of alienation in the 1844 Manuscripts as adding an ethical dimension to his
thought. However, this ethical dimension is often thought to be based on the idea of a universal
nature or human essence which we are alienated from. Such textual claims are widespread in the
literature. Consider the following two examples from introductory texts on Marx:
“[T]he workers [under capitalism] live in a way that does not express their essence.”106
“Alienation is estrangement from…the essence of our human nature.”107
103
Sayers, Marx and Alienation, xi. See Louis Althusser, Philosophy of the Encounter: Later Writings, 1978-
1987 (London: Verso, 2006).
104
Sayers, Marx and Alienation, xi.
105
Jon Elster (ed.), Karl Marx: A Reader (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 29-78.
106
Jonathan Wolff, Why Read Marx Today? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 30-31
107
Alan Ryan, On Marx: Revolutionary and Utopian (New York: A Division of W. W. Norton &
Company, 2014), 53.
41
This is certainly an attractive model, but one which is haunted by the charge of essentialism:
if alienation is a mismatch between social life and human nature, a return to an unalienated state is a
return to essence, a return to an “authentic” or “true” self. We are our authentic selves when we
exist in conformity with our essential nature and we are inauthentic when our nature has been
distorted by external conditions or concealed and distanced from us.
Jaeggi outlines two problems with this essentialist picture. The first concerns the reifying
nature of essence-based views; the second the presupposition of inwardness that motivates the
inner-outer metaphor.108 In the first case, an essentialist conception of the self “hypostatizes the
authentic self into a kind of person inside the person”—with the paradoxical result that a person
who is alienated from their essential core simultaneously partakes of it and does not partake of it.109
More fundamentally, Jaeggi argues that this account misrepresents the structure of human existence.
It conceives of persons as objects in the world that we can investigate in order to discover their
essential properties rather than actors that the lead their lives and shape them through their actions.
There is a second worry that attaches to the essentialist model. It regards the “authentic” self
as something inside, waiting to be expressed, that exists independently of its expression, i.e., a self
that has determinate content prior to its realization in any activity. But, as Jaeggi rightly points out,
this is “highly dubious.” What we are must be externalized in order for the self to acquire reality.
There is no self apart from its realization.110
There is another way, however, that the humanist model can conceive of alienation without
an appeal to an essentialist core or a “container model of the self.” Marxist perfectionist arguments
are those that envision an unalienated or flourishing life as one that promotes the realization of
distinctly human potentialities and excellences while discouraging ways of life that inhibit these.
108
109
110
42
Perfectionist arguments so conceived are not motivated by the realization of a human essence, but
by the idea of human perfectibility.
What are these “distinctly human potentialities and excellences”? As Will Kymlicka notes,
any perfectionist argument must be able to explain (i) what constitutes these distinctive excellences
and (ii) how they relate to human self-realization.111
The capacity for free creative labour or productive activity is Marx’s answer to the first
question, but how does this translate into human self-realization according the perfectionist
humanist model? The appeal to “species-being” [Gattungwesen],112 based on Marx’s differentia specifica—
the doctrine that what distinguishes human beings from other species determines what is most
111
Will Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2002), 190-1.
112
The vexed concept of “species-being” continues to be the subject of controversy. For a small
sample of the debate in the literature see Paul Santilli, “Marx on Species-Being and Social Essence,”
Studies in Soviet Thought 13 (1973): 76-88; Thomas E. Wartenberg, “‘Species-Being’ and ‘Human
Nature’ in Marx,” Human Studies 5 (1982): 77-95; Kit R. Christensen, “Human Nature and the
Fetishism of Concepts,” Studies in Soviet Thought 34 (1987): 135-71; Richard Schmitt, “Marx’s
Concept of Alienation,” Topoi 15 (1996): 163-76; Barbara S. Krasner, “Alienation of Persons and
Tensions in Community: A Feminist Critique of Hegel’s and Marx’s Conceptions of Alienation,” The
European Legacy 2 (1997): 283-9; Hamid Sarfraz, “Alienation: A Theoretical Overview,” Pakistan
Journal of Psychological Research 12 (1997): 45-60; Stephen Mulhall, “Species-Being, Teleology and
Individuality, Part I: Marx on Species-Being,” Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 3 (1998): 9-27;
Sean Sayers. “Creative Activity and Alienation in Hegel and Marx,” Historical Materialism 11 (2003):
107-28; Nick Dyer-Witheford. “1844/2004/2044: The Return of Species-Being,” Historical
Materialism 12 (2004): 3-25; Nick Dyer-Witheford, “Species-Being Resurgent,” Constellations 11
(2004): 476-91; John Roche, “Marx and Humanism,” Rethinking Marxism 17 (2005): 335-48; Marcia
Klotz, “Alienation, Labor, and Sexuality in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts,” Rethinking Marxism 18 (2006):
405-13; Mark Cowling, “Alienation in the Older Marx,” Contemporary Political Theory 5 (2006): 319-39;
Jacob M. Held, “Marx via Feuerbach: Species-Being Revisited,” Idealistic Studies 39 (2009): 137-48;
Nishad Patnaik, “The Question of Alienation in Marx,” Social Scientist 37 (2009): 48-71; Marcello
Musto, “Revisiting Marx’s Concept of Alienation,” Socialism and Democracy 24 (2010): 79-101; Kevin
M. Brien, “Marx’s Radical Humanism,” International Critical Thought 1 (2011): 186-203; Om Bakshi,
“Marx’s Concept of Man: Alienation, Exploitation and Socialism,” International Studies 48 (2011): 85-
111; Sayers, Sean. “Alienation as a Critical Concept,” International Critical Thought 1 (2011): 287-304;
Dennis Lunt, “World Spirit as Baal: Marx, Adorno, and Dostoyevsky on Alienation,” Journal of
Speculative Philosophy 26 (2012): 485-95; James M. Czank, “On the Origin of Species-Being: Marx
Redefined,” Rethinking Marxism 24 (2012): 316-23; Chris Byron, “The Normative Force behind
Marx’s Theory of Alienation,” Critique 41 (2013): 427-35; Jan Kandiyali. “The Importance of Others:
Marx on Unalienated Production.” Ethics 130 (2020): 555-587.
43
essential to us—risks lapsing back into the essence-based views critiqued above. Additionally,
Kymlicka convincingly argues that the “argument is a non-sequitur,” since asking what is best in a
human life is not a matter of biological classification, but an ethical question.113
Even if we set aside the conceptual difficulties with the Marxian notion of species-being and
how free creative labour translates into human self-realization, the aspect of the alienation critique
that appears problematic above all from the perspective of liberal theory is the idea of unalienated
labour as an objective good, i.e., one that exists independently of the individual’s own conception of
the good, desires, goals, ground projects, and needs. Liberals concede the notion that unalienated
labour is preferable to alienated labour but reject the idea that it is an overriding good that outweighs
all competing goods. Instead, unalienated labour is simply one good among many. Kymlicka offers
three variations of this argument:
(i) I may value leisure more than unalienated labour;
(ii) I may value consumption more than unalienated labour;
(iii) I may value personal relationships more than unalienated labour.114
In each case, the individual values some good (e.g., playing tennis, owning the latest
computer or spending as much time as possible with one’s children) above unalienated labour and is
willing to accept alienated labour in order to acquire it. In short, some people might view
unalienated labour as central to their lives, while others might not. Given the different values they
attach to labour, “a prohibition on alienated labour…would unfairly privilege some over others.”115
Kymlicka sums up the objection as follows: “The issue is not whether unalienated labour is a good,
113
Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, p. 193.
114
Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, pp. 191-4.
115
44
but whether it is an overriding good, a good which is necessary to any decent life…I see no reason
to think unalienated labour is such a good.”116
Behind this criticism lies a deeper liberal worry about perfectionist arguments, which,
according to the critic, threaten the sovereignty of the individual to decide how to lead their own
life. For example, in his article “Meaningful Work and Market Socialism,” Richard Arneson poses
the following question and reply: “Could perfectionist arguments justify abolition of division of
labor or acceptance of a right to meaningful work? I think not…If one rules out the grounding of
premodern metaphysics and theology, the prospects for a rationally compelling perfectionism look
dim.”117 Jon Roemer agrees: “A perfectionist defense of nonalienation seems remote.”118
Insofar as it relies on dubious metaphysical claims, the perfectionist humanist model runs
afoul of the ethical pluralism of modern societies, which regards such metaphysical loading with
suspicion. This is not to suggest that the ethical account is entirely mistaken—only that if the
alienation critique is to succeed it must be able to offer an account of species-being that (i) is
responsive to the individuals own conception of the good and (ii) does not rely on an
anthropological given or completable process and (ii) able to show why this criteria is necessary for
self-realization.
V. The Appropriative Model
V.1 Hegel’s Account of Alienation in the Phenomenology of Spirit
The appropriative model, on the other hand, argues that Marx’s concept of alienated labour has its
origins in Hegel’s account of work. Marx acknowledges his debt to Hegel as follows:
116
117
Richard Arneson, “Meaningful Work and Market Socialism,” Ethics 97 (1987), p. 524.
118
Jon Roemer, “Should Marxists be Interested in Exploitation?” Philosophy & Public Affairs 14
(1985), p. 52.
45
The importance of Hegel’s Phenomenology…lies in the fact that Hegel conceives the self-
creation of man as a process, objectification as loss of object, as alienation and supersession
of this alienation; that he therefor grasps the nature of labour and conceives objective-man—
true, because real man—as the result of his own labour.119
The concept of alienation [Entfremdung] as it appears in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is deployed by
Hegel in two distinct senses: the first is one of “separation”; the second is one of “surrender.”120
Hegel maintains that the world in which human beings live, i.e., the social, political, and cultural
institutions that constitute the “ethical substance,” is the product of centuries of human activity and
hence a “spiritual entity” (understood as the result of the “interfusion of being and individuality”).121
According to Hegel, “[t]his substance is equally the universal work produced by the action of all and
each as their unity and identity…it is the movement and soul of substance and universal being.”122
The ethical substance can be understood as the objectification of Spirit [Geist] and the site of
universality [Allgemeinheit], which “knows and wills the substantial” as opposed to particularity or
individuality [Einzelheit], which “knows and wills for itself.”123 It follows from this that, for Hegel, (i)
the essence of human consciousness lies in its universality and (ii) the ethical substance transcends
the particularity of individuals. Thus, it is only in the substance or “ethical realm” that individuals
“actually possess their own essence and their inner universality.”124
However, for human beings to become fully conscious of themselves as distinct individuals,
Spirit must advance through complex stages in the social world by dirempting itself from the
119
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Selected Writings, p.
120
121
G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press,
1977), 294, §484. See also Schacht, Alienation, 31-32.
122
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 264, §439.
123
G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, ed. Allen W. Wood, trans. H. B. Nisbet
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 287, §264.
124
Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, 196, §153.
46
immediacy of ethical life through various oppositions.125 Although the unity or identity with the
ethical substance is lost—its world “rent asunder”—Hegel views this development positively since it
is part of the movement towards the actualization of the “self-consciousness of absolute Spirit.”126
Until a new unity is established, individuals now regard the ethical substance as “alien,” i.e.,
as something both external and opposed to them.127 This is Hegel’s first use of the term alienation.
Spirit is self-diremptive: “It obtains its existence through self-consciousness’s own externalization and
separation of itself from its essence.”128 It is only through this process of externalization and
separation, in which the original unity with the ethical substance is dissolved, that a higher,
conscious unity may emerge.
Hegel also uses the term in the first sense to indicate the loss of essence or universality that
comes with attempts to withdraw from the ethical substance. These can take one of two shapes: a
flight from the social world into the certainty of the particular self, resulting in a atomistic multitude
of individuals, a “lifeless…equality, in which all count the same”129 and a “Stoical self-consciousness”
that renounces the social world, placing its essence and independence in the unity of pure thought.130
Both are instances of abstract universality, lacking in determinate content. Hegel refers to this
disparity between individuals’ self-conception and their essential nature as one of “self-alienation.”131
Furthermore, since the ethical substance is the objectification of living Spirit, individuals are
“alienated” from the former in so far as they do not recognize it as an activity of their own doing.
The ethical substance as a product of their own creation confronts them as an alien power.132
125
126
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 265-266, §§442-443.
127
128
129
130
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 290-291, §479.
131
132
47
Finally, Hegel uses the term alienation in the second sense as “surrender” to refer to a
“renunciation”133 that is necessary for the separations outlined above to be overcome. In order for
self-consciousness to actualize itself in the world it must not only alienate itself from itself; it must
also relinquish its willful particularity, which it clings to at the expense of universality, by
“conform[ing] itself to the universal.”134 Put differently, for Hegel, the “activity whereby substance
becomes actual is the alienation of personality, for the self that has an absolute significance in its
immediate existence, i.e., without having alienated itself from itself, is without substance.”135 For
Hegel, the first sense of alienation-as-separation (from the ethical substance and hence the essential
self) can only be overcome by the second sense of alienation-as-surrender (of the particular self).136
The triadic movement of Spirit in the Phenomenology from unity, to self-alienated separation,
to a higher unity is repeated in Hegel’s and Marx’s theory of labour in the form of externalization,
objectification, and reappropriation. We turn to this next.
V.II Hegel’s and Marx’s Theory of Labour
Following Hegel, Marx defines labour as
a process between man and nature, a process by which man, through his own actions,
mediates, regulates, and controls the metabolism between himself and nature. He confronts
the materials of nature as a force of nature. He sets in motion the natural forces which
belong to his own body, his arms, legs, head and hands, in order to appropriate the material
of nature in a form adapted to his own need.137
133
134
135
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 294-295, §484.
136
137
Karl Marx, Capital Volume 1 (London: Penguin Books, 1976), 283.
48
The individual is a species-being, according to Marx, “in that he practically and theoretically
makes his own species as well as that of other things his object.”138 Humanity, therefore, is not
simply a matter of species membership, but a result of our historical and practical engagement with
nature.
Therefore, for both Hegel and Marx, the labour process is conceived of as the
externalization and objectification of essential powers and capacities. This has a material and social
aspect. By objectifying ourselves through our products, we come to recognize our will, goals and
capacities as real and objective, since they are made material through our labour. At the same time,
by transforming the natural world we come to feel at home in it, relating not only to the products of
our labour and to the world, but also to those in it. For Hegel, the labourer “impregnates the
external world with his will. Thereby he humanizes environment, by showing how it is capable of
satisfying him and how it cannot preserve any power of independence against him. Only by means
of this effectual activity is he no longer merely general, but…actually aware of himself and at home
in his environment.”139 “By acting on the external world and changing it, [the labourer] at the same
time changes his own nature.”140 The is done “in order, as a free subject, to strip the external world
of its inflexible foreignness and to enjoy in the shape of things only an external realization of
himself.”141
However, Marx’s theory of alienation differs from Hegel’s in that Hegel treats the concept of
alienation as a universal characteristic of self-conscious Spirit (albeit one that takes different form at
various historical stages), Marx differentiates between objectification [Vergegenständlichung], which is a
138
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Selected Writings, p. 62.
139
G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, Volume 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Claredon
Press, 1975), 256.
140
Marx, Capital, Volume One, Selected Writings, 345.
141
Hegel, Aesthetics, 31.
49
feature of all work, and alienation [Entfremdung], which is specific to work under capitalism. This
allows him to utilize the concept in a critical way.
V.III The Appropriative Model
Rahel Jaeggi describes the emergent appropriative model as follows:
The human being produces herself and her world in a single act. In producing her world, the
human being produces herself and vice versa. And, insofar as this process is successful, she
makes the both the objective world and herself her own. That is, she recognizes herself (her
will and capacities) in her own activities and products and finds herself through this relation
to her own products; she realizes herself, therefore, in her appropriative relation to the world
as the product of her activities.142
The concept of appropriation is a form of praxis in which something is not merely passively
taken up, but actively transformed and assimilated, altering both what its appropriated and the
appropriator. Thus “appropriation refers to a way of establishing relations to oneself and the world,
a way of dealing with oneself and the world.”143 Overcoming alienation, then, cannot be understood
essentialistically as the recovery of a lost nature; nor as the realization of a true human essence; nor
teleologically as a completable historical process—but as successful or unimpeded acts of
appropriation.
The shift from the content of appropriation (“what” is willed) to the form of appropriation
(“how” it is willed) means that the appropriative model is not concerned with willing something in
particular, but rather with the capacity to will and appropriate one’s self and the world in a free and
self-determined manner. On this view, an unalienated life
142
143
50
is not one in which specific substantial values are realized but one that is lived in a specific—
unalienated—manner. The belief that everyone should be able to live her own life no longer
stands in opposition…to the project of [the] alienation critique. Rather, the absence of
alienating impediments and the possibility of appropriating self and world without such
impediments is a condition of freedom and self-determination.144
Abstracting from the content of appropriation, the charges of essentialism, perfectionism,
and paternalism that afflicted the humanist model are neutralized. The central question becomes:
what material conditions, socioeconomic structures, ideological regimes, etc., prevent successful acts
of appropriation? Modes of life are pathological in so far as acts of appropriation are impeded or
foreclosed altogether.
The appropriative model is concerned with the ability of individuals to experience
themselves as effective agents in the world and to make themselves at home in the world. According
to the appropriative model, humans duplicate themselves in the world: “Things in nature are only
immediate and single, while man…duplicates himself, in that (i) he is as things in nature are, but (ii) he is
just as much for himself.”145
More importantly, according to Sayers, Hegel “conceives of different kinds of labour as
different forms of relation of subject to object (nature)…the different forms of labour are arranged
on an ascending scale according to the degree of mediation they establish between subject and
object.”146 It follows from this that the appropriative model is not only able to account for a wide
spectrum of work from alienated labour on one side of the continuum to free creative praxis on the
144
145
Hegel, Aesthetics, 31.
146
Sayers, “The Concept of Labour” in Marx and Alienation: Essays on Hegelian Themes (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 33.
51
other, but the more mediation that labour establishes between subject and object, the less alienated
the subject.
V.IV Parting Ways with Jaeggi: The Five Constituents of Self-Realization
The novel contribution of Jaeggi’s appropriative model, as I have portrayed it, lies in her
formalization of the alienation critique, that is, in abstracting from the content of the “good life.”
Under the appropriative model, alienation is disruption in the process of relating to oneself, to others,
and to the world. In short, alienation is a deficient or impeded appropriation of self and world. This
allows us to deploy the rich ethical, critical-diagnostic, and perspective desiderata of the alienation
critique while neutralizing the charges of essentialism, paternalism and perfectionism that have been
levelled at traditional accounts of alienation. So far so good. I think Jaeggi is correct in claiming that
successful appropriation of self and world is a necessary condition for self-realization. But Jaeggi’s
account also suffers from its own limitations.
For one, it retains a problematic productivism and self-constructivism which makes its
suspectable to charges of individualism and Prometheanism. For example, Jaeggi understands
alienation as “not having oneself at one’s command” and insists that self-realization is to be
understood as “a process of ‘giving oneself reality’.”147 This leads her to a wholesale rejection of
“passive identification”:
Calling the process of appropriation productive should be understood in the following way: the
self that is capable of being alienated first emerges in the process itself. There is nothing that
exists already as something outside this process itself. What is appropriated does not exist apart
from the process of appropriation.148
147
148
52
Despite Jaeggi’s assertion that the self is always relational, the claim that nothing exists outside the
process of appropriation risks lapsing into voluntarism, if not outright solipsism. On the one hand, I
think Jaeggi is correct to stress that the self is always immersed in the world, that the self qua subject
never confronts the world qua object as an ontologically distinct entity, but this should not
understood as the absence of a world outside the process of appropriation itself. Self-realization
cannot be a process of giving oneself and the world reality alone.
The appropriative model, under my reading, is a form of social mediation through which
subjects mediate the metabolism between themselves and the world. Self-realization, so understood,
cannot be reduced to the process of appropriation alone. In order for the appropriation of self and
world to be truly successful, it requires that five conditions be met. These five constituents of self-
realization are generated by the appropriative model but not reducible to it.
(a) Appropriative Efficacy
What I refer to as “appropriative efficacy,” namely, the capacity for successful acts of
appropriation of self and world. Without appropriative efficacy, the potential for a successful life is
either foreclosed or severely undermined; the opposite of appropriative efficacy is powerlessness.
Appropriative efficacy is of vital importance to an analysis of how late-modern subjects relate to the
world, both individually and collectively, since it establishes the scope and limits of what can be
successfully accomplished and shaped by them—including but not limited to: “having oneself at
one’s command” (to borrow a phrase from Jaeggi); realizing one’s capacities and ground projects in
the world; pursuing one’s conception of the good; controlling the course, progression, and trajectory
of one’s life; and so on. As Rosa points out, “there seems to be a correlation between low
expectations of self-efficacy and nearly all of the classical symptoms associated with alienation:
feelings of impotence and powerlessness; a lack of relationships and other attachments; absence of
53
intrinsic interests and…emotional involvement.”149 It should come as no surprise, then, that the
socio-psychological concept of alienation-as-powerlessness is the dimension that has received the most
attention by sociologists.
(b) Symbolic Efficiency
Appropriative efficacy is only one component or dimension of self-realization. Since
individuals qua subjects always find themselves “thrown” [geworfen] in—and “in the throw” [im Wurf]
of—the world qua object, that is, always already acting in the world, and related to it practically,
subject and object never confront each other as ontologically distinct entities. The separation of the
two, as Heidegger has repeatedly demonstrated, is itself a form alienation—the estrangement of what
belongs together. It follows from this that appropriative efficacy alone is insufficient for self-
realization—it is but one side of the equation: since we always find ourselves in medias res, already
engaged with the world, we require that the world be appropriable or resonant, that it meet us halfway.
In other words, the way subjects relate to the world is determined both by their appropriative
efficacy (active/intentionalist) and their experience of the world (passive/pathic).150 Consider the
following poem by Thomas Bernhard, in which the speaker is confronted with a mute world:
What will I do
when no barn begs for my presence,
when the hay burns in wet villages
without crowning my life?
What will I do
when the forests grow only in my imagination,
when the streams are but empty, washed-out veins?
149
150
Rosa, Resonance, 124-126.
54
What will I do
when no more messages come from the grasses?151
The agony of the speaker is clear: an illegible or opaque world is one that occludes the possibility of
a successful relationship to it or that, under the best of circumstances, makes establishing such a
relationship a prohibitively arduous and daunting task.
(c) Satisfaction of Needs
Labour/work can only exist as a form of free, creative, self-determining activity when it is no
longer determined by the realm of necessity. Thus, a successful appropriation of self and world
requires the satisfaction of basic needs: food, water, shelter, security, etc. As we shall see in our
discussions of precarity and the precarious late-modern subject, an inability to satisfy basic needs
precludes even the most rudimentary form of self-realization. Moreover, a constant state of
insecurity and uncertainty means that all our appropriative endeavors are aimed at satisfying these
basic needs or spent in states of passive consumption (as an extension of worktime), leaving no
room for autotelic activities or the realization of ground projects. We turn to these next.
(d) Autotelic Activities
Successful self-world relations must involve, as much as possible, the ability of subjects to
engage in activities for their own sake and not merely for instrumental reasons. That is, in order for
subjects to be able to fully express themselves in their creative labour/work and find personal
satisfaction and fulfillment in it, acts of appropriation must be autotelic in nature. Of course, the
extent to which these activities are not hampered by the demands of necessity will depend on a host
of socioeconomic considerations, but we must regard the current situation as one of the hegemony
151
Thomas Bernhard, “What Will I do…” in On Earth and in Hell, trans. Peter Waugh (New York:
Three Rooms Press, 2015), 25.
55
of instrumental reason and the diktats of production and self-optimization to the determinant of
engaging in autotelic activities.
(e) Ground Projects
Finally, in order to truly realize themselves in their acts of appropriation, subjects must be
able to freely formulate and pursue their own conceptions of the good, desires, goals, ground
projects, and needs. For example, one can imagine a world rich in symbolic efficiency in which
subjects are high in appropriative efficacy, but lack all control over the aims, conditions, and nature
of their activities. As we shall see, the co-optation of the ethical critique in the form of organized
self-realization promotes precisely such a situation in which subjects are subject to heteronomous
market forces that orient their activities in the service of production and self-optimization at the
expense of their authentic self-realization.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I was concerned with establishing the theoretical foundation for a new conception
of alienation that would allow us to avail ourselves of three desiderata of the alienation critique—
the ethical dimension, the critical-diagnostic dimension, and the prescriptive dimension—without
succumbing to the charges of essentialism, paternalism, and perfectionism that plagued traditional
accounts of alienation. Working from the broadest varieties of alienation, we arrived at the
appropriative model by an argument of elimination. The formal nature of Jaeggi’s appropriative
model, which is retained in our account of self-realization, means that it succeeds in neutralizing the
charges above. Nevertheless, Jaeggi’s own account, with its exclusive focus on appropriation, puts
forward only one dimension of self-realization, and a problematic one at that. A much richer
conception of the appropriative model is one that outlines five constituents of self-realization as
necessary conditions for a successful appropriation of self and world. Now that we have these in
56
place, we can turn to the critical-diagnostic potential of the appropriative model in Chapters 2 and 3,
and determine the obstacles preventing late-modern subjects from leading successful lives.
57
Chapter 2
The Social Pathology Diagnosis
The very fact that we today are forced to search again for a meaningful language of pathology, and almost against the
odds, having to be apologetic towards the very project, is in itself a serious indication of a deep-bound crisis in our
values and an almost complete overtaking of the pathological view itself; it is a symptom that we have disabled ourselves
from discerning…A healthy civilization must possess a fully articulated vocabulary for pathologies of mind and soul.
A society that does not have it has locked itself into the asylum.
—Bjørn Thomassen, “Modernity as Spiritual Disorder”152
We are the lost people. / Tracing us by our language / you will not arrive where we are / which is nowhere. The wind
/ blows through our castles; the chair / of poetry is without a tenant. / We are exiles within / our own country; we
eat our bread / at a pre-empted table. ‘Show us,’ / we supplicate, ‘the way home’, / and they laughing hiss at us: /
‘But you are home. Come in / and endure it.’ Will nobody / explain what it is like / to be born lost? / We have our
signposts / but they are in another tongue. / […] / The ground moves under our feet; / our one attitude is vertigo.
—R.S. Thomas, “The Lost”153
The flesh is sad, alas! and I have read all the books.
—Stéphane Mallarmé, “Sea Wind”154
152
Bjørn Thomassen, “Modernity as Spiritual Disorder,” The Social Pathologies of Contemporary
Civilization, ed. Kieran Keohane and Anders Petersen (New York: Routledge, 2013), 49.
153
R.S. Thomas, “The Lost,” No Truce with the Furies (Newcastle: Bloodaxe Books, 1996), 14.
154
Stéphane Mallarmé, “Sea Wind,” The Penguin Book of French Poetry, ed. and trans. William Reese
(Toronto: Penguin Books, 1990), 196.
58
At the heart of the appropriative model is a fundamental concern with the subject’s
relationship to the world. The difference between successful and unsuccessful self-world relations
hinges on subjects’ appropriative capacity to experience themselves as effective agents in the world
and to recognize themselves in a resonant world that is responsive to their desires, goals, and needs.
Whether a life is successful or unsuccessful depends on the ways in which the world is experienced
and actively appropriated by subjects.
Alienation is a disturbed or impeded appropriation of self and world. Insofar as it disrupts
the self-world relation, alienation interposes itself between subjects and their self-realization, which
is to say, between subjects and the possibility of a successful relationship to their environment, to others,
and to themselves. The alienated self is an “impaired subjectivity” whose self-mediating autonomy
and self-realization are subordinated to heteronomous, impersonal forces outside its control. Thus,
one of the fundamental insights of the alienation critique is that
the various individually and historically manifested ways in which human beings relate to the
world are controlled and determined only to small extent—and in many cases not at all—by
individuals themselves, and are instead shaped and determined by social conditions that all
arise, solidify, and change behind their backs.155
The appropriative model, which provides us with the formal means of distinguishing between
alienating and non-alienating social conditions, has both a diagnostic and a prescriptive dimension.
In this chapter and the next, I attempt to develop and deploy this critical-diagnostic dimension,
while highlighting its contributions to contemporary political philosophy.
Accordingly, this chapter is animated by four primary concerns. First, it aims at situating
ethical critique vis-à-vis moral critique, so that the novel diagnostic contributions of the appropriative
155
Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World, trans. James C. Wagner
(Medford: Polity Press, 2019), 27.
59
model of alienated labour qua ethical critique can be fully demonstrated and deployed in the
subsequent chapter. In this section, I defend the need for ethical critique in contemporary political
philosophy and attempt to show that it compliments rather than supplants the functionalist and
moral critiques. Nevertheless, I argue that a political theory which considers moral critique as the
only legitimate form of social critique is limited both in its diagnostic and prescriptive potential.
Second, the chapter defends a conception of social pathologies as “socially produced
obstacles to self-realization.” Surveying some of the main rival definitions in the literature, I argue
that these involve either metaphysically “weighty” presuppositions that run afoul of the ethical
pluralism of modern societies or an “organicist” conception of social pathologies pitched at such a
high level of macro-analysis that it fails to be responsive to subjects’ own goals and ends, amongst
numerous other problems, that the definition I put forward succeeds in overcoming.
Third, the chapter is concerned with providing an overview of the symptoms or malaises of
late modernity and thematizing these in a form that any successful social pathology diagnosis must
be capable of adequately capturing. What first appears as a collection of miscellaneous psychic
ailments, upon critical examination, reveals itself to be a cluster of comorbid symptoms centered on
the illnesses of hyperactivity/self-optimisation and the illnesses of inadequacy/self-responsibility.
These antipodal clusters, I contend, constitute two sides of the late-modern Janus. The rest of the
section involves laying out the argument for this connection and, in the process, charting the causes
behind these comorbid symptoms.
Fourth, the chapter aims to show that the aetiological driving forces of late modernity—
dynamic stabilization, reflexivization, and the demands for self-optimisation—severely undermine
the subject’s capacity for successful appropriation of self and world. Although the precise social
pathologies they generate will have to wait for Chapter 3, I attempt to make the case here that the
possibility of a successful relationship to the world comes under severe strain in late modernity.
60
Focusing particularly on the “casualties of the reflexive imperative” and the “viscous losers” in the
surges of dynamization ushered in by the capitalist mode of production, I argue that in each case,
the subject’s self-world relation is either foreclosed, impeded, or ruptured—and alienation becomes
the subject’s dominant mode of relating to the world. Late modernity, I claim, amounts to a
“catastrophe of resonance” or “life out of kilter”—one in which the world, having become
symbolically destitute or mute, is no longer appropriable by the late-modern subject, leading to
disorientation and distress, and in which the late-modern subject’s own appropriative efficacy is
directly undercut by the demands of dynamic stabilization, reflexivization, and self-optimization.
I The Social Pathology Diagnosis as Ethical Critique
I.1 The Task of Social Critique
One of the primary tasks of social critique is the “codification of what is not going well” and
the search for the causes of this dysfunctional state of affairs and the ways it might be remedied.156
For critical social theorists, this involves the diagnosis and overcoming of social pathologies.
According to Axel Honneth, for example, the distinguishing characteristic of social philosophy is
“the diagnosis of processes of social development…preventing the members of a society from living
a ‘good life’.”157 The notion that a society can be “sick” has played a formative role in critical theory
and marks a thicker form of social critique than the traditional liberal framings of political-moral
legitimacy and justice that characterize much of contemporary political theory. As a species of social
critique, the social pathology diagnosis relies on criteria of an ethical nature and involves four tasks:
(i) symptomatology (what symptoms do late-modern subjects suffer from?), (ii) aetiology (what are
156
Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Gregory Elliott (New York:
Verso, 2018), 41.
157
Axel Honneth, “Pathologies of the Social: The Past and Present of Social Philosophy,” Disrespect:
The Normative Foundations of Critical Theory (Malden: Polity Press, 2007), 4.
61
the underlying causes that give rise to these?), (iii) diagnosis (what social pathologies do the
symptoms point to?), and (iv) prognosis/therapy (how can these social pathologies be overcome?).158
Symptomatology is the identification and explanation of the set of symptoms afflicting a
social body, practice, or forms of life [Lebensformen], where the latter is understood as comprising
“clusters or ensembles of social practices.”159 Accordingly, the first task of social critique is the illumination
of social symptoms that are often misdiagnosed, naturalized, or overlooked by the standards of the
current social order (whether this “omission” is ideologically motivated or not). The second task is
to identify the underlying causes that give rise to these. The third task is to diagnose what social
pathologies these symptoms point to. The diagnosis of social pathologies must, in turn, fulfill two
subtasks: it must establish the social conditions for flourishing or self-realization in light of which
phenomena are deemed pathological; and it must show that these phenomena are pervasively
experienced throughout society. That is, it is not enough that these pathologies be socially caused;
they must also be widespread in contemporary society. To this end, the social sciences have typically
employed an empirical epidemiology in the form of statistical analyses, polling data, self-reports, etc.
Although I avail myself of some of these methods, in what follows, I draw on the richer mediums of
film, literature, and poetry as well as recent works in psychopathology and sociology as a means of
capturing the alienation of late-modern subjects from others, from themselves, and from the world.
In this chapter, I attempt to answer the first question (symptomatology) and the second
(aetiology), and although I do thematize the social pathologies of late modernity, the diagnostic work
158
Fabian Freyenhagen, “Characterising Social Pathologies: An Analytic Grid,” Studies in Social and
Political Thought 28 (2018), 15-20. See also Fabian Freyenhagen, “Critical Theory and Social
Pathology,” Routledge Companion to the Frankfurt School, ed. Peter E. Gordon, Espen Hammer, and
Axel Honneth (New York: Routledge: 2019), 410-423.
159
Rahel Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of
Harvard University Press, 2018), 55.
62
identifying specific social pathologies is reserved for Chapter 3. Finally, my answer to the
prescriptive question regarding prognosis/therapy is taken up in the final two chapters (4 and 5).
In addition to the four components of the social pathology diagnosis, there are eight
questions that will aid us in determining whether the conception of subjective alienations as social
pathologies is a successful one:
(1) What is the affected entity: individuals or society?
(2) What are the central cases it needs to capture?
(3) Is something pathological because it is socially wrong, or vice versa?
(4) Is the naturalist vocabulary of “pathology,” “illness,” “degeneration,” and “social
organism”—to be taken literally or metaphorically?
(5) Do social pathologies share a structure?
(6) Does the account help define the distinctive task of social philosophy?
(7) Is social criticism pathological itself?
(8) Is the conception plausible, informative, and helpful?160
Although I will be addressing these questions throughout the chapter, I will return to them in the
conclusion in order to sum up the conception of the social pathology diagnosis I have put forward
and to gauge what we have accomplished so far, before putting our model to the test in Chapter 3.
I.2 Three Forms of Social Critique
(a) Functional Critique
There are three forms of social critique.161 The first is a functionalist critique, which is based on
the idea that a social formation or practice will, in the process of reproducing itself, give rise to
160
Arto Laitinen and Arvi Särkelä, “Analysing Conceptions of Social Pathology: Eight Questions,”
Studies in Social and Political Thought 28 (2018), 21-30.
161
Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi, Capitalism: A Conversation in Critical Theory, ed. Brian Milstein
(Medford: Polity Press, 2018), 115-164.
63
conditions that undermine it. Being intrinsically dysfunctional, it will be self-destabilizing in the long
run. For instance, Marxists hold that capitalism is riven with class antagonisms, falling rates of profit,
crises of overproduction, and other internal contradictions162 that inevitably lead to crisis after crisis,
in which individuals are thrown out of work, labour immiserated, and key industries shuttered as
goods are left to gather dust. Not only do the forces and relations of production come into conflict,
but the capitalist market is punctuated by destructive “trade cycles” of prosperity and recession,
which try as they might, bourgeois economists and politicians are unable to fully predict or avoid.
One of the advantages of the functionalist critique is that it does not require independent standards:
the object of critique undermines itself. However, as we shall see in our discussion of the organicist
conception of social pathologies (§2.III.4), what “function” a social formation or practice serves is
(i) far from clear and (ii) even when specified by social theorists, by no means normatively neutral,
which takes us to the second form of social critique.
(b) Moral Critique
In addition to the functionalist critique, there is also a normative critique, which evaluates a
social formation or practice on the basis of whether or not it is justifiable in terms of criteria that
have to be established independently. There are two kinds of normative critique: moral and ethical.
The moral critique (labelled “social critique” by Boltanski and Chiapello in The New Spirit of Capitalism)
is founded on the idea of justice, in which a social formation is evaluated in terms of the fairness of
its distribution of goods, privileges, rights, etc. The moral critique is focused on the relevant standing
of groups and individuals vis-à-vis each other. In contemporary political philosophy, for example,
the assertion that a social system is unjust is often formulated in terms of an unequal distribution
which is the result of morally arbitrary differences in people’s circumstances. Erik Olin Wright
162
For a modern reworking of the Marxian functionalist critique see David Harvey, Seventeen
Contradictions and the End of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
64
argues that moral critique comprises three clusters of values whose fullest realization is impeded
under certain social formations of practices: equality/fairness, democracy/freedom, and
community/solidarity. Although the I think the last of these is better captured by ethical critique,
what is important for our purposes is Wright’s subsequent admission that
There are, of course, other criticisms of capitalism…for example, that capitalism undermines
human flourishing for everyone—rich and poor, capitalist and worker [who are all] subjected
to that alienating pressures of relentless competition and the market.163
(c) Ethical Critique
The normative critique that we are interested in here is concerned with “the successful life”
[das geglückte Leben]. The ethical critique (or “artistic critique” as it is called by Boltanski and
Chiapello)164 evaluates a social formation or practice on the basis of whether it enables or hinders
self-realization. Rather than focusing on distribution and employing the language of just/unjust,
right/wrong, etc., the ethical critique targets the general character and development of social
formations which it views as a source of alienation, reification, and a ruptured self-world relation.165
Instead of seeking the conditions for a just social order it charts the limitations that forms of life
impose on self-realization. In the process, it relies on “thick ethical concepts” such as flourishing,
the successful life, and so on. These concepts enable the ethical critique to diagnose a host of social
pathologies that its moral counterpart is constitutively incapable of disclosing. Boltanski and
Chiapello sum up the difference between ethical/artistic and moral/social critique as follows:
Ethical/Artistic Critique
163
Erik Olin Wright, How to Be an Anti-Capitalist in the 21st Century (New York: Verso, 2019), 23.
164
For a discussion of social [moral] and artistic [ethical] critique, see Boltanski and Chiapello, The
New Spirit of Capitalism, 38-39, 52, 97, 99, 169, 171, 177-178, 190, 195, 196, 200, 291, 293, 311-312,
324-327, 400, 419-420, 433-434, 469, 503-506.
165
Hartmut Rosa, “Temporary Workers and Active Citizens: What Is Wrong with Late Modern
Capitalism?” Sociology, Capitalism, Critique, Klaus Dörre, Stephan Lessenich, and Hartmut Rosa, trans.
Jan Peter-Herrmann and Loren Balhorn (New York: Verso, 2015), 70-71.
65
(a) capitalism as a source of disenchantment and inauthenticity of objects, persons, emotions
and, more generally, the kind of [alienating] existence associated with it;
(b) capitalism as a source of oppression, inasmuch as it is opposed to the freedom, autonomy
and creativity [i.e., the self-realization] of human beings who are subject, under its sway,
on the one hand to the domination of the market as an impersonal force fixing prices
and designating desirable human beings and products/services, while rejecting others;
and on the other hand to the forms of subordination involved in the conditions of wage-
labour (enterprise discipline, close monitoring by bosses, and supervision by means of
regulations and procedures);
Moral/Social Critique
(c) capitalism as a source of poverty among workers and of inequalities on an unprecedented
scale;
(d) capitalism as a source of opportunism and egoism which, by exclusively encouraging private
interests, proves destructive of social bonds and collective solidarity, especially of
minimal solidarity between rich and poor.166
As we shall soon see (§2.II.5), that the three forms of social critique discussed above are not
mutually exclusive but rather all necessary preconditions for non-alienated self-realization. In other words, the
defence of ethical critique that follows is only meant to highlight a much needed but missing lacuna
in modern political theory. The appropriative model of alienated labour developed in Chapter 1 is a
form of ethical critique. Before we turn to its diagnostic dimensions in Chapter 3, however, we must
address the skepticism towards ethical critique in contemporary political theory. My aim in the next
section is to examine and neutralize this skepticism.
I.3 Against Ethical Abstinence: Ethical Critique, Self-Realization, and the Successful Life
166
Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 37-40.
66
One of the central features of modernity is its ethical pluralism, the notion that no
reasonable consensus on what constitutes the “good life” can be reached in modern societies.
According to the detractors of ethical critique, it follows from this that questions of ethics must be a
strictly private matter, cordoned off zealously from questions of morality, which alone can establish
unconditionally and universally valid claims on social conduct. The argument put forward in support
of the privatization of the good can take one of two forms. In its Rawlsian variant, no
comprehensive view of the meaning, value, or purpose of human life “is affirmed by citizens
generally, and so the pursuit of any one of them…gives political society a sectarian character.”167
Ethical abstinence, for Rawls, is above all a “method of avoidance” in which views of the good life,
which cannot secure a binding consensus, are expurgated from the process of political justification.
Habermas accepts Rawls’s diagnosis of ethical pluralism but draws a further categorical distinction168
between the sphere of universalistic norms (morality), and the sphere of particularistic existential
self-understanding (ethics). With the onset of modernity, as competing and discrepant conceptions
of the good emerge from a once homogenous religious tradition, questions of ethics become
increasingly divorced from questions of morality. While morality provides the benchmark against
which social formations and practices can be evaluated, ethics is not generalizable in this way, and
can claim only particular validity.169 The “ethical use of reason,” according to Habermas, is always a
matter of internal self-clarification, i.e., a matter of values that lack formal universalizability and thus
cannot assume the mantle of context-transcending norms. Questions of ethics are particularistic:
they are historically contingent on the situation of individuals (“ethical-existential”) or groups
(“ethical-political”).
167
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 180.
168
It is only in the 1990s that Habermas begins formally distinguishing between morality and ethics.
169
Rahel Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of
Haravrd University Press, 2018), 12-14.
67
Habermas argues for the priority of the “right” (morality) over the “good” (ethics) on three
grounds: (i) moral norms are the default mechanism for conflict resolution—by removing ethical
values from the justification process, we avoid intractable conflict; (ii) moral norms have a social-
ontological priority over ethical values, since they embody the universalizability necessary for
rational discourse, preserving the communicative structure of the lifeworld and the value-
orientations of all the agents within it; and (iii) according to Habermas’s normative theory of social
evolution, which transposes Kohlberg’s account of the moral development of children to societies,
“post-conventional” modern subjects have abstract self-identities that are not rooted in any
particular tradition. The validity of moral norms does not rest on their identity. In short, the process
of modernization establishes the normative priority of “post-conventional” morality over its
“conventional” ethics-based counterpart.170
In either case, since comprehensive views of the “good life” do not admit of consensus,
rational arbitration, or universality, and ethical pluralism is a permanent feature of modern societies,
a discerning intellect must adopt a position of “ethical abstinence.” To fail to do so is to risk lapsing
into illiberality, internecine strife, and paternalism. This has led many political and social theorists to
conclude that distributive justice alone should be the guiding standard of social critique.
I would like to grant the detractors of ethical critique the first premise of their argument,
namely, that ethical pluralism is a central feature of modern societies. But I think their conclusion—
that we must, as a result, adopt a position of ethical abstinence—is a non sequitur for five reasons.
One of the principal insights of the alienation critique is that a social analysis which addresses only
individual rights and allocations neglects a large number of potential social pathologies in the form
of subjective alienations, epidemics of collective malaise, disordered or ruptured self-world relations,
pervasive and socially produced obstacles to self-realization, and so on, even when a full regime of
170
Finlayson, Habermas, 99-100.
68
rights and equitable distributions obtains. As Rosa notes, “[u]nder such [alienated] conditions,
successful life is rendered structurally impossible, or at least very difficult, by social relations—and
yet no straightforward diagnosis of injustice is made.”171 Therefore, the first diagnostic function of
the alienation critique qua ethical critique is to highlight the constitutive limits of distributive justice.
Josh Cohen captures the need for the ethical critique vis-à-vis its moral counterpart as follows:
[I]n the name of what do we protest neoliberalism’s creation and expansion of social
division, economic inequality, inhumanity and chaos? We can respond to such evils with a
raft of worthy progressive aims and policies: protecting the welfare safety net, redistributive
taxation, living wages and so on. Such policies may rightly seek to improve the conditions
under which we live; but they do not address what we might want to live for.172
Second, standards of justice are not simply trans-historical; rather they are historically
comprised, conditioned, and situated. The content and parameters of moral deliberation derive from
the social lifeworld in which moral actors find themselves. Following Hegel, we can speak of the
“impotence of the moral ought” when viewed in abstraction: deprived of any determinate content,
the putative universality of the moral critique suffers from an “empty formalism.” If this is correct,
then the morality-ethics distinction collapses and questions of morality, like their ethical counterpart,
are culturally contingent on the particularity of the social lifeworld, which takes us to the third point.
Ethical critique is both necessary and unavoidable “not in spite of but precisely because of the
situation of modern societies” (i.e., ethical pluralism). A default position of ethical abstinence means
that ethical life is “produced behind the backs of individuals”: it is neither obvious nor freely chosen.
Forms of life are always “politically instituted from the outset and depend[ent] on public institutions,”
171
Hartmut Rosa, “Capitalism as a Spiral of Dynamism: Sociology as Social Critique,” Sociology,
Capitalism, Critique, 70-71.
172
Josh Cohen, Not Working: Why We Have to Stop (London: Granta Books, 2018), 170-171.
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but this is obscured by talk of political neutrality.173 As a result, ethical concerns and alienating
structural conditions confront individuals as naturalized, heteronomous “facts” about the world
rather than specific forms of life that are bound to a particular horizon of understanding and value.
To put it another way, the blanket privatization of ethical life amounts to a depoliticization of politics.
This is, in my estimation, the most trenchant critique of liberal neutrality—while parading itself as
“neutral,” political liberalism smuggles in the entire liberal edifice, including the cardinal tenets of
the liberal ethos. What is, on the surface, a strategy for avoiding ethical conflict in modern societies
(by securing an “overlapping consensus”) is, in effect, an obfuscation or deferral of ethical
conflict.174 The ethical pluralism of modern societies calls for rather than interdicts ethical critique:
its first task, and the precondition for any emancipatory progress, is to grasp its own form of life as a
form of life.
Fourth, in light of the last two points, the morality-ethics distinction is rendered untenable:
the demarcation is itself a product of established ethical life. For one, the lines of demarcation are far from
self-evident. Consider Habermas’s distinction between cruelty (what is morally objectionable) and
the disconcerting character of forms of life different from our own (what is a private ethical matter).
When is a practice morally reprehensible and when is it merely disconcerting? As Jaeggi points out,
the boundaries of demarcation differ not only within a particular culture across time, but also
between different cultures. For instance, fifty years ago, corporal punishment was regarded by many
as morally obligatory and, among persons, a private, intrafamilial matter. Today, most people believe
that is cruel and cause for intervention. The issue is not one of moral relativism, but rather that the
demarcation itself—e.g., between corporal punishment and cruelty—is of a contested ethical nature.
The morality-ethics distinction tends to essentialize the identities and practices of forms of life instead
173
Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 15-16.
174
Jaeggi, Critique of Forms of Life, 20-21.
70
of grasping them in their conflictual, dynamic, and hybrid character. Moreover, in application, the
distinction issues in unsatisfactory prescriptions: it gives us license to morally condemn specific
social practices like female genital mutilation (FGM), forced marriages, and honour killings, but not
the underlying patriarchal cognitive schemas and understandings that give rise to them.
I.4 Social Pathologies According to What? The Ethical-Formal Criteria
Suffice it to say, I believe the arguments outlined above provide a cogent and forceful case
against the “privatization of the good” but I recognize that many proponents of ethical abstinence
will remain unconvinced. Because I believe their initial premise in support of ethical pluralism is
sound, I would like to put forward an ethical-formal argument that does not rely on any of the
previous ones and which does not run afoul of the reasonable ethical pluralism in modern societies.
Therefore, even if we disregard the four arguments above—the alienation critique need only rely on
the following. The ethical critique can be based either on a particular conception of the good life or
on the conditions that facilitate the realization of a successful life. Only the first of these succumbs to the
worries about illiberality and intractable ethical conflict outlined above. The ethical critique, in our
formulation, follows from the appropriative model and hence is formal in nature in the sense that it
“only normatively emphasizes the social preconditions of human self-realization, and not the goals
served by these conditions.”175 In other words, the ethical critique does not presuppose a human
essence/nature, a given anthropology, or a teleological account of human life that would furnish the
content of a “good life” in advance. It merely says that successful acts of appropriation of self and
world, whatever their content may be, are a necessary precondition for non-alienated self-realization.
As such, it represents an ethical-formal grounding of the social pathology diagnosis. This is not to
175
Honneth, “Pathologies of the Social,” 36.
71
deny that there are tendencies in the writings of Hegel and Marx that may support a sophisticated
ethical perfectionism,176 but as Honneth points out,
even these opposing tendencies can be generously interpreted as being about the social
conditions under which humans can attain self-realization…Thus for Marx, non-alienated
labor doesn’t necessarily signify an ethical human goal, but instead might represent a
necessary precondition that allows individuals to develop a satisfying self-conception.177
Because successful appropriation of self and world is a necessary precondition for self-realization,
social formations or practices that impede the former will undermine individuals’ capacity to realize
their own conceptions of the good life. Accordingly, a successful social pathology diagnosis must (i)
refer to the subject’s capacity to engage in autonomous and efficacious acts of appropriation and (ii)
demonstrate how social formations or practices frustrate this pursuit. Finally, the alienation critique
so conceived (iii) differs from perfectionist arguments. Because it refuses to specify the content of
the good life in advance or to appeal to the notion of “objectively worthwhile lives,” it is concerned
with the successful life, namely, the capacity of subjects to realize themselves, their own ground projects,
and their own conceptions of the good in the world in an autonomous, free, and self-efficacious
manner, on the one hand, and to be able to experience the world as appropriable or resonant, that is,
as responsive to their own desires and needs, on the other.
I.5 The Three Diagnostic Fronts
We are now in a position to recognize the three diagnostic functions of the ethical critique.
The alienation critique is what allows us to diagnose social pathologies that are missed by current
176
See, for example, Christine Sypnowich, “Equality: From Marxism to Liberalism (And Back
Again),” Political Studies Review 1 (2003): 333-343; “Human Flourishing: A New Approach to
Equality” in Political Neutrality: A Re-Evaluation, ed. Roberto Merrill and Daniel Weinstock
(Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan, 2014), 178-209; “What's Left in Egalitarianism? Marxism and the
Limitations of Liberal Theories of Equality,” Philosophy Compass 12 (2017): e12428-n/a., and Equality
Renewed: Justice, Flourishing and the Egalitarian Ideal (New York: Routledge, 2017).
177
Honneth, “Pathologies of the Social,” 36.
72
theories of justice. The advantage of the ethical approach is that is allows for a “thicker” form of
social critique than traditional liberal theories of political-moral legitimacy or justice. The idea is not
that justice is irrelevant to the diagnosis of social pathologies, or that the good takes priority over the
right, but that calling a social pathology an injustice “under-describes it.”178
One way to understand this claim is through the metaphor of a pie to be baked and
shared.179 Society can be said to produce a “pie” of goods, opportunities, positions, social bases of
self-respect, rights, etc. Moral critique is concerned with the way that the pie is distributed. If some
receive larger portions or more pieces of the pie than others due to morally arbitrary reasons, then
the distribution in question is unjust. Most of contemporary political philosophy shares this focus on
resource allocation. It relies on a “Triple-A Approach” to the good life,180 which aims at making
more and more resources available, accessible, and attainable. But there is another form of pie-
critique. According to the ethical critique, the problem is not how the pie is divvied up, but the
“alibility” of the pie as a whole: a pie that is not nourishing (one that distorts our self-world relation)
may be comestible, but it will ultimately debilitate rather than promote the our capacity for self-
realization. And a pie that is rotten or spoiled (one that forecloses or precludes successful acts of
appropriation) will make the community of pie-eaters “sick” regardless of how it is distributed.181
The metaphor is also useful for elucidating the relationship between ethical and moral critique. The
assertion that “the pie is rotten” in no way suggests that questions of justice are unimportant or
subordinate to questions of the successful life. To respond to someone who is dispossessed or
178
Neal Harris, “Recovering the Critical Potential of the Social Pathology Diagnosis,” European
Journal of Social Theory 22 (2019), 47.
179
Hartmut Rosa, “Antagonists and Critical Integrationists, or: What Do We Do with the Spoiled
Pie?” Sociology, Capitalism, Critique, 218-229.
180
Hartmut Rosa, “Available, Accessible, Attainable: The Mindset of Growth and the Resonance
Conception of the Good Life,” The Good Life Beyond Growth: New Perspectives, ed. Hartmut Rosa and
Christoph Henning (New York: Routledge, 2019), 39-53.
181
In fact, as Rosa rightly points out, it will make those who receive larger portions or more pieces
of the pie even sicker.
73
starving by insisting that “the pie is not nourishing” or that those for whom the larger shares are
destined are, as a result, “more alienated” would be an act of ideological mystification at best. What
the ethical critique does point to is that questions of justice alone do not settle the matter; hence a
“thicker” form of critique is required for the diagnosis of social pathologies. What does this mean in
terms of self-realization?
Theories of justice which operate within the parameters of moral critique are necessary but
insufficient for non-alienated self-realization. To put it differently, legal and moral freedom
(subjective rights and reflexive endorsement) are important elements of self-realization, but taken as
the ideal of freedom itself, they are both limited in scope and subject to their own social pathologies.
I develop this idea in detail in §3.I. It follows from this that the ethical critique is intended to
supplement (rather than supplant) the functionalist and moral critiques. I argue that it accomplishes
this in two ways. It points to lacunae in the terrain of contemporary political philosophy, such as
cases of subjective alienations that hinder the pursuit of the “successful life” by undermining the
self’s relationship to the world without necessarily being immoral or unjust. In other words, the
novel contribution of ethical critique lies in its capacity to criticize social formations and practices
based on reasons without this criticism deriving from, or leading to, legal or moral prohibitions and
sanctions. In Jaeggi’s pithy turn of phrase, “[c]riticism of forms of life is not a matter for the police.”
Moreover, it ensures that the “promise of modernity”—i.e., the full exercise of autonomy and
reflexive self-determination—undergirding the moral critique, is realized in practice, since the limits
of moral critique will occlude an analysis of the social pathologies that frustrate self-determination.
Finally, the notion of self-realization that lies at the heart of the ethical critique is subject to
its own social pathology. From the 1960s onwards, the call for individualized self-realization
increasingly takes the form of an organizational demand enjoining late-modern subjects to be
adaptable, creative, daring, enterprising, flexible, innovative, malleable, mobile, polyvalent, social,
74
tolerant, and, above all, to “realize” their “subjectivity” in their work. This “subjectivation of work”
rather than enabling self-realization, confronts individuals as a heteronomous, ineluctable demand.
Co-opted in the service of production, the claims of self-realization no longer arise autochthonously
from successful acts of appropriation of self and world. Rather than reflect the subject’s own
conception of the good life, they are imposed exogenously by a neoliberal dispositif geared towards
consumption, efficiency, and performance. In §3.III I make the case that the alienation critique is
vital for distinguishing between non-alienated self-realization and its pathological variant, what
Honneth calls “organizational self-realization.” Without this deployment of the alienation critique,
the claims of self-realization, I maintain, are easily subverted, or jettisoned altogether, by
demoralized late-modern subjects, leaving them at the mercy of impersonal market forces, persistent
feelings of burnout and depression, and an ideological vulgarization of the philosophy of personal
responsibility.
To anticipate the layout of Chapter 3, the diagnostic potential of the alienation critique qua
ethical critique is operative on three fronts: first, it diagnoses “pathologies of individual freedom”
that arise from regarding legal and moral freedom as the whole of freedom, ensuring that the
promise of modernity is realized collectively in practice (§3.I); second, it diagnosis “pathologies of
de-synchronization” which make the conditions needed to lead a successful life increasing difficult
(§3.II); third, it is indispensable for diagnosing forms of alienated self-realization or “pathologies of
organizational self-realization” that subvert rather than promote autonomous appropriation of self
and world (§3.III).
II. What Are Social Pathologies?
In this section, I survey five conceptions of social pathologies and argue in favour of the conception
of social pathologies as socially produced obstacles to self-realization as the definition that follows
75
from the alienation critique.182 The five conceptions are not meant to exhaust the possible
understandings of the social pathology diagnosis, but to capture the central theories found in the
literature and to classify them in terms of their general features. This means that particular social
pathologies might not fit neatly under each heading and that the definitions may overlap. While
critiquing the other four conceptions on various grounds, I argue that the most persuasive
definition, and the one we should adopt going forward, is the one that views social pathologies as
socially produced obstacles to self-realization.
The concept of social pathologies has its origin in the biomedical notion of pathogenesis
(the development of a disease) and has since evolved to include various social factors as having a
direct causal effect on the susceptibility to illness, and the course and outcome of a disease,
regardless of its nature. From this, it is a short step to the idea at the heart of critical social theory
that what Adorno called the “damaged life” was rooted in structures and social processes that
deformed the subjective life and experiences of the individual.
Rudolph Virchow, the German physician known as the “Father of Modern Pathology,” was
also one of the first to recognize that “disease is not personal and special, but only a manifestation
of life under modified (pathological) conditions.” Social determinants of health (SDOH) are the
socio-economic conditions that shape the wellbeing of individuals and determine whether they
become healthy or ill. SDOH “determine the extent to which a person possesses the physical, social,
and personal resources to identify and achieve personal aspirations, satisfy needs, and cope with the
182
Arto Laitinen, Arvi Särkelä, and Heikki Ikäheimo, “Pathologies of Recognition: An Introduction,”
Studies in Social and Political Thought 25 (2015), 1-24; Onni Hirovonen, “On the Ontology of Social
Pathologies,” Studies in Social and Political Thought 28 (2018), 9-14; Neal Harris, “Recovering the
Critical Potential of the Social Pathology Diagnosis,” European Journal of Social Theory 22 (2019), 45-
62; Arto Laitinen and Arvi Särkelä, “Four Conceptions of Social Pathology,” European Journal of Social
Theory 22 (2019), 80-102; Arvi Särkelä and Arto Laitinen, “Between Normativism and Naturalism:
Honneth on Social Pathology,” Constellations 26 (2019), 286-300.
76
environment.”183 Multiple studies have found the SDOH are the best predictors of health outcomes
trumping both behavioral risk factors and individualized “lifestyle” approaches (e.g., balanced diet,
physically activity, stress management). For example, a study in Canada found that a clear gradient in
poor self-reported health and higher levels of stress emerged with decreasing socio-economic status.
The study also found that poorer health was the outcome of decreasing levels of income, personal
control, and social support. Another Canadian study found that cardiovascular and stroke morality
was related to neighbourhood deprivation, including greater exposure to traffic and air pollution.
The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion identifies nine social “prerequisites for health”:
peace, shelter, education, food, income, a stable ecosystem, sustainable resources, social justice, and
equity and the York University national conference entitled Social Determinants of Health across the
Lifespan, in its updated form, includes 16 SDOH.184
II.1 Social Pathologies as an Umbrella Term for Social Wrongs
The first conception regards social pathologies as an umbrella term for social wrongs and
other criticizable social formations or practices. For example, when Michael Parenti speaks of the
“profit pathology and other indecencies” of global capitalism, he has in mind, amongst other things,
the monomania for accumulation (what Durkheim called the “disease of the infinite”185),
environmental depredation, exploitation, inequality, oppression, placing profit above people, etc.186
183
Dennis Raphael (ed.), Social Determinants of Health: Canadian Perspectives, 3rd ed. (Toronto: Canadian
Scholars’ Press Inc., 2016), 3.
184
The 16 social determinants of health spawned by the conference are as follows: (i) indigenous
ancestry, (ii) disability, (iii) early life, (iv) education, (v) employment and working conditions, (vi)
food security, (vii) gender, (viii) geography, (ix) health care services, (x) housing, (xi) immigrant
status, (xii) income and its distribution, (xiii) race, (xiv) social safety net, (xv) social exclusion, and
(xvi) unemployment and employment security.
185
Emile Durkheim, Suicide: A Study in Sociology, trans. John A Spaulding and George Simpson (New
York: The Free Press, 1979), 287. In other passages, Durkheim speaks of “the morbid desire for the
infinite” (271). See also David Levine, Pathology of the Capitalist Spirit: An Essay on Greed, Loss and Hope
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 15-30.
186
Michael Parenti, Profit Pathologies and Other Indecencies, (Boulder: Paradigm Publishers, 2015).
77
The list of possible social pathologies is anti-theoretical (evaluated on a case by case basis),
historically malleable, and open-ended, without assuming a specific inner logic or common structure.
Thus, the definition avoids worries about essentialism, since any attempt to force a theoretical
structure on the diagnosis would, according to this view, inevitably result in a distortion of the social
phenomena in question. It also remains open to the possibility of the historical emergence of new
criticizable social formations and practices that cannot be subsumed under a common structure. In
short, as an umbrella term for social wrongs, social pathologies may admit of a “family resemblance”
[Familienähnlichkeit], but there is no essential feature or trait that all social pathologies share.
There are two main problems with this view. First, it offers no account or explication of
“social wrongs.” This is especially problematic in light of the narrowly moralistic origins of the social
pathology diagnosis. Before its critical turn, in the early and mid-twentieth century, the term was
used by social scientists to refer to alcoholism, crime, delinquency, and so-called “sexual deviance,”
lending support to racist and sexist discourses that targeted ethnic, religious, and sexual communities
as “unhealthy deviations” from the norm.187 It is for this reason that the Oxford Dictionary of Sociology
defines “social pathologies,” tersely, as “an early form of deviance theory, no longer in wide use.”188
A conception of social pathologies as an umbrella term for social wrongs is susceptible to precisely
this kind (mis)application, since it regards social pathologies as “social evils” or “wrongs” taking the
prevailing norms as a reference point without critically assessing their content or criteria. Therefore,
even if the definition succeeds in capturing many of the cases that we would consider to be
legitimate social pathologies, it must also include all deviations from social norms, social
187
Keohane and Peterson, The Social Pathologies of Contemporary Civilization, 1-2; Honneth, “The
Diseases of Society,” 683-684; Keohane, Peterson, and Carlehedon, “Introduction: Thematic
Section on Social Pathologies of Contemporary Modernity” 127; Keohane, Peterson, and van den
Bergh, Late Modern Subjectivity and its Discontents, 1-2; and Laitinen and Särkelä, “Four Conceptions of
Social Pathology,” 81.
188
John Scott, “Social Pathology,” Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2014), 703.
78
contraventions, improprieties, transgressions, etc. under its canopy. Rather than denaturalizing
complex social phenomena that prevent individuals from living a successful life such an approach
will serve to naturalize the biases and prejudices of the society in which they live.
One way to circumvent this problem is to define social wrongs as moral or political wrongs,
but this, in turn, ushers in a second difficulty. Earlier we saw the one of the central tasks of social
philosophy was the diagnosis of social pathologies (§3.I.1). If social wrongs are nothing more than
moral or political wrongs, then the definition of social pathologies as an umbrella term for such
wrongs suffers from the same limitations as moral critique, since it is re-inscribed within its bounds.
The diagnostic potential of the alienation critique cannot be cashed out in moral or political lexis
without an appeal to the ethical heurism of social pathology.
II.2 Social Pathologies as Social Disorders Sharing a Common Structure
A second set of approaches defines social pathologies as social disorders sharing a common
structure. The most prominent example of this approach in the literature is Christopher Zurn’s
definition of social pathologies as “second-order disorders.”189 According to Zurn, social pathologies
“exhibit a constitutive disconnect between first-order contents and second-order reflexive
comprehension of those contents, where those disconnects are pervasive and socially caused.”190
Zurn has in mind Honneth’s account of social pathologies in particular, and Honneth has endorsed
this reading.191 The myth of individual responsibility for poverty exhibits such disconnect. It
misattributes the causes of poverty to a failure of personal initiative rather than to specific social
formations. Here we have a first-order belief (wealth in capitalist societies is entirely dependent on a
189
Christopher F. Zurn, “Social Pathologies as Second-Order Disorders,” Axel Honneth: Critical
Essays with a Reply by Axel Honneth, ed. Danielle Petherbridge (Leiden: Brill Academic Publishers,
2011), 345-370; Christopher F. Zurn, Axel Honneth (Malden: Polity Press, 2015), 95-112.
190
Zurn, Axel Honneth, 98-99.
191
Axel Honneth, “Rejoinder,” Axel Honneth: Critical Essays with a Reply by Axel Honneth, 417; See also
Axel Honneth, Freedom’s Right: The Social Foundations of Democratic Life (New York: Columbia
University Press, 2014), 86.
79
person’s own initiative rather than their class position) that is tied to specific social arrangements
which block or distort belief formation at the second-order level by repressing the reflexivity needed
to comprehend the connection between the content of first-order beliefs and the material ordering
of the social world. To put it in simpler terms, as second-order disorders, social pathologies
naturalize what is in fact a product of the way that society is structured. There is a pervasive and
socially caused disconnect between the cultural schemas of cognition concerning the basic
structures, orders, and functionings of the social world (first-order beliefs) and what is
comprehended (second-order critical reflection). Thus, under Zurn’s account social pathologies are
cognitive disconnects that are ideological in nature.
The most obvious problem with this approach is that it (mis)frames social pathologies as
being primarily “in the head.” As Fabian Freyenhagen has noted, Zurn’s characterization
corresponds neatly to Marx’s theory of ideology, but is a poor fit in virtually all other cases with the
exception of reification.192 The view of social pathologies as second-order disorders is too narrow.
According to our account of objective alienation (§1.II.2), something can be non-ideological and a
social pathology if it is (i) detrimental to self-realization and (ii) pervasive and socially caused, even if
the individual is reflexively aware of the former (i-ii). The fault does not lie in a cognitive disconnect
between first-order beliefs and second-order critical reflection, but with social reality itself. There is a
wide array of social phenomena that produce obstacles which hinder or frustrate successful acts of
appropriation and, consequently, impede self-realization. Of course, these social pathologies may
also lead individuals to be disconnected cognitively, motivationally, or practically from the social
lifeworld, but they do not exhaust the list of potential social pathologies.
192
Fabian Freyenhagen, “Honneth on Social Pathologies: A Critique,” Critical Horizons 16 (2015),
136-137.
80
II.3 Social Pathologies as Defective Historical Reason, i.e., as ‘Socially Deficient Rationality’193
An influential conception of social pathologies running throughout the critical theory
tradition and other left-Hegelian currents is that of social pathologies as socially deficient rationality.
A society, according to this view, should live up to the highest standard of accessible historically
effective reason. Social pathologies of reason represent “instances of limitations of rationality within
the social world impeding subjects from attaining self-realization.”194 This diagnosis often takes the
form a distinction between “pathological” and “intact, non-pathological” relations—one captured by
the language of the Frankfurt School critical theorists who speak of an “administered world”
(Adorno), the “colonization of the lifeworld” (Habermas), the “irrational organization” of society
(Horkheimer), and a “one-dimensional society” (Marcuse).195 The interest in the unfolding of
historical reason has its basis in the connection between non-pathological relations and the
conditions of social rationality necessary for self-actualization. In a published letter to Arnold Ruge,
the young Marx utilizes the promise of historically effective reason as a form of critique:
Reason has always existed, only not always in a reasonable form. The critic can therefore
start out by taking any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and develop from the
unique forms of existing reality the true reality as its norm and final goal. Now so far as real
life is concerned, it is precisely the political state in all its modern forms contains, even where it
is not yet consciously imbued with socialist demands, the demands of reason. Nor does the
state stop at that. The state everywhere presupposes that reason has been realized. But in just
193
Axel Honneth, “A Social Pathology of Reason: On the Intellectual Legacy of Critical Theory,”
Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, trans. James Ingram and Others (New York:
Columbia University Press, 2009), 19-42. See also Axel Honneth, “A Social Pathology of Reason:
On the Intellectual Legacy of Critical Theory,” The Cambridge Companion to Critical Theory, ed. Fred
Rush (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 336-360.
194
Harris, “Recovering the Potential of the Social Pathology Diagnosis,” 50.
195
Honneth, “A Social Pathology of Reason,” 22.
81
this way it everywhere comes into contradiction between its ideal mission and its real
preconditions.
For Marx, as well as the first-generation critical theorists, capitalism is (i) a socioeconomic system in
which the “forms of existing reality” prevent the full utilization of rationality already made possible
by history, and, consequently, (ii) a social configuration that simultaneously holds the emancipatory
kernel of a fully rational society in the contradiction between its extant forms and their full-fledged
rational potential. Thus, proponents of this conception of social pathologies all share the view that
“a rational universal is always required for the possibility of fulfilled self-actualization within
society.”196 For example, in Minima Moralia, Adorno argues that
The dialectic cannot stop short of the concepts of health and sickness, nor indeed before
their siblings reason and unreason. Once it has recognized the ruling universal order and its
proportions as sick…then it can see as healing cells only what appears, by the standards of
that order, as itself sick…The dialectician’s duty is thus to help this fool’s truth attain its own
reasons, without which it will certainly succumb to the abyss of the sickness implacably
dictated by the healthy common sense of the rest.197
In order for self-actualization to be successful, it must be interwoven with the self-actualization of
others, that is, it must take the form of an intersubjective self-actualization. In the absence of the
“rational universal” as a guarantor of intact, non-pathological social relations, the conditions for
cooperative self-actualization no longer obtain. This, in turn, blocks or frustrates the possibility of
individual self-realization. A socially deficient rationality leads to “indeterminacy,” “solitude,”198
196
197
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (New
York: Verso, 1989), 73.
198
Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, § 136 Addition.
82
“vacuity,”199 and other “symptoms of disorientation.”200 Under this Hegelian reading of social
pathologies, alienation or estrangement is defined as “reason in an unreasonable form” and marked
by three interrelated features:
1. It is a social condition in which reason is realized in an unreasonable form.
2. It is a condition in which agents unwittingly turn their own agency into a force against
itself, a force that blocks or distorts the realization of their freedom.
3. It can only be eliminated through a kind of social unity.201
The idea of “social pathologies of reason” has much to recommend it. As a way of framing
social pathologies, it is both influential and illuminating, but it presupposes a “metaphysically
weighty conception of [historical] reason,”202 drawn from Hegel’s notion of the Absolute as subject,
in which Spirit unfolds in embodied form through different stages of human history until it arrives
at its fullest self-expression and rational self-awareness in the ethical Substance (§1.VI.1). Combined
with the naïve meliorism of the nineteenth century, this metaphysical conception of historical reason
(even in its attenuated neo-Hegelian variants which do not posit a cosmic subject) runs afoul of our
acceptance of ethical pluralism and the ethical-formal account of self-realization, which eschews
metaphysical conceptions of the good life (let alone metaphysically weighty conceptions) in favour of
an emphasis on the conditions necessary for a successful relationship to the world.
Even if we set aside the metaphysical premises underlying a rationalist account of historical
progress, we are left with the following query: what constitutes a “rational organization of society”?
In societies characterized by reasonable pluralism, answering this question turns out to be a
contentious affair. Political liberals like Rawls may accept that conceptions of the good can be true,
199
200
201
Julius Sensat, The Logic of Estrangement: Reason in an Unreasonable Form (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2016), 4, 12.
202
Harris, “Recovering the Potential of the Social Pathology Diagnosis,” 50.
83
as well as known, but argue that they cannot serve as the basis of informed and willing political
agreement between citizens viewed as free and equal persons.203 According to Rawls, no
comprehensive view of the meaning, value or purpose of human life “is affirmed by citizens
generally, and so the pursuit of any one of them…gives political society a sectarian character.”204
Since comprehensive views do not admit of a rational consensus, and we are wedded to the idea of
ethical pluralism as a permanent feature of modern societies, the idea of “rational social order”
cannot secure an overlapping consensus.
Finally, those who conceive of social pathologies as socially deficient rationality often seem
committed to the view that “only if we win back an integral rationality, this would be the answer to
social pathology.”205 There are good reasons, however, to doubt the efficacy of a singular register in
overcoming the social pathologies of contemporary civilization. While it is doubtless true that reason
needs winning back, there are, as we shall see, other dimensions—legal, moral, social—necessary for
successful acts of appropriation, and hence for self-realization, that may or may not be subsumed
under the rubric of “reason.” Of course, one can expand the notion of reason to capture all these
elements so that any deficit in one is considered a deficit of rationality, but the more this stratagem is
employed the more controversial and metaphysically loaded the concept becomes, re-introducing
some of the central concerns outlined above.
203
See for example John Rawls, “Justice as Fairness: Political not Metaphysical,” Philosophy & Public
Affairs 14 (1985), 230: “[T]o secure…agreement we try, so far as we can, to avoid disputed
philosophical, as well as disputed moral and religious, questions. We do this not because these
questions are unimportant or regarded with indifference, but because we think them too important
and recognize that there is no way to resolve them politically…Given the profound differences in
beliefs and conceptions of the good at least since the Reformation, we must recognize
that…philosophy as the search for truth about an independent metaphysical and moral order
cannot…provide a workable and shared basis for a political conception of justice in a democratic
society.”
204
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 180.
205
R.C. Smith, Society and Social Pathology: A Framework for Progress (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017),
93.
84
II.4 Social Pathologies as Diseases of the Social Organism
The fourth approach conceives of social pathologies as “diseases” of the social organism.
The idea has its roots in Plato’s Republic in which the city-soul analogy is expounded at length,206
freely transferring the political and psychological vocabulary from one domain to the other, and in
Hegel’s characterization of the state in the Elements of the Philosophy of Right. According to Hegel,
The state is an organism, i.e., the development of the Idea in its differences. The different
aspects are accordingly the various powers with their corresponding tasks and functions,
through which the universal continually produces itself in a necessary way and thereby
preserves itself, because it is itself the presupposition of its own production…It is in the
nature of an organism that all its parts must perish if they do not achieve identity and if one
of them seeks independence. Predicates, principles, and the like get us nowhere in assessing
the state, which must be apprehended as an organism.207
In his article, “The Diseases of Society: Approaching a Nearly Impossible Concept,” Honneth
argues that “[w]ithout rehabilitating this organic conception [of society] that has long since been
declared dead…the thesis that societies can also be stricken by diseases cannot be justified.”208
Drawing on biological and medical models of disease, the organicist approach considers society a
living organism that can fall ill. Unlike the previous definitions in which something is pathological
because it is socially deficient, disordered, or wrong, the organicist conception diagnoses something
as wrong because it is pathological. Social organs are pathological or “ill” if they fail to serve the
ends of the social whole, much like a bodily organ is diseased if it does not serve its function in the
maintenance of a biological organism. In other words, social reproduction can malfunction in the
206
Plato, Republic, trans. C. D. C. Reeve (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004), 119-
135.
207
208
Axel Honneth, “The Diseases of Society: Approaching a Nearly Impossible Concept,” Social
Research 81 (2014), 703.
85
same way that the self-maintenance of an organism is disrupted when it is stricken with an illness.
Consider Emile Durkheim’s discussion of the “pathological forms” of the division of the labour.
Unlike those who argue that the growth of the division of labour is inevitably associated with the
disruption of social cohesion, Durkheim maintains that the former ushers in an “organic solidarity”
based on difference, subject to its own moral norms.209 The threat to social cohesion does not lie in
the division of labour per se, but in the fact that with the onset of rapid, large-scale industrialization,
the division of economic functions outstrips the development of corresponding moral regulation.210
The worker is “no longer the living cell of a living organism, moved continually by contact with
neighboring cells, which acts upon them and responds in turn to their actions…and is transformed
according to the needs and circumstances”; instead she becomes “no more than a lifeless cog, which
an external source sets in motion and impels always in the same direction and in the same
fashion.”211 The social “metabolism” responsible for maintaining the organic solidarity associated
with the division of labour is thrown off-kilter. A failure of moral regulation/social reproduction
ensues. Labour becomes “anomic,” where anomie is understood as the consequence of social
changes that happen too rapidly for new forms of morality and solidarity to develop.
The organicist conception, while not without its advantages, targets dysfunctions on such a
“high macro-level” that it seems unable to capture many of the intersubjective social pathologies
that we think an alienation critique should be able to diagnose. Since, on the organicist view,
pathologies are not socially produced individual impairments, nor socially “aggregated” disorders,
nor, ultimately, malfunctioning social organs, but reproductive dysfunctions of the social organism as a whole,
it can only explain individual social pathologies by means of a trickle-down effect in which parts of
209
Emile Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society (New York: Free Press, 2014).
210
Anthony Giddens, Capitalism and Modern Social Theory: An Analysis of the Writings of Marx, Durkheim
and Max Weber (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971), 80.
211
Durkheim, The Division of Labor in Society, 270.
86
the social organism suffer the disparate symptoms of a more general ailment.212 This privileging of
the social organism over the individual weakens the cogency of the social pathology diagnosis which,
as we saw earlier (§2.I), must be responsive to the practices and conceptions of the good life held by
the social actors themselves. This is not to suggest that there are no pathologies or “diseases” of the
social organism, only that “the organicist view tends to become too restricted for concrete diagnosis,
and so to debilitate the critical force of the naturalistic vocabulary it emphatically [seeks] to
revive.”213
The revitalized organicist approach also encounters the same metaphysical difficulties that
plagued the previous account. In transferring the concept of “disease” to various social phenomena,
social organicists are not normatively neutral vis-à-vis the connection between nature and society.
The efficacy of the social pathology diagnosis turns on the ontological commitment that societies
belong to the class of entities that can fall ill. Furthermore, if, for the sake of the advancing the
argument, we bracket the metaphysical presuppositions at play, the organicist approach is based on
an analogy in which the biological organism and society are understood to be structurally similar, but
similarity is not identity. It follows from this that the biological organism and society are not only
similar, but also different in important ways. If this is correct, then absent metaphysical support, the
usefulness of the organicist conception is thrown further into doubt.
The organicist conception suffers from a third problem. In targeting macro-level pathologies
of social reproduction in the form of dysfunctions of societal self-maintenance, the organicist approach (i)
assumes a self-contained and homeostatic conception of society, one in which deviations from the
metabolic equilibrium are automatically deemed pathological and, as such, paradoxically (ii) insulates
the social order from radical critique and social change. If the reproductive ends and parameters of
212
Laitinen and Särkelä, “Four Conceptions of Social Pathology,” 89.
213
Laitinen and Särkelä, “Four Conceptions of Social Pathology,” 90.
87
the social organism are already set, why should any change, however gradual it may be, be admitted?
Here, the long tradition of conservative organicist defences of “eternal society” from Edmund
Burke to Louis de Bonald and Joseph de Maistre is quite revealing and not without significance.
Finally, the organicist view misrepresents the biological organism at the heart of the
organism-society analogy. It assumes that in a self-maintaining society, each part must fulfill its
function in order for society to reproduce itself successfully, but we have good reasons to doubt this
Aristotelian teleological picture in which each organ has a proper function or task it must carry out
in order to sustain the living organism. First, organisms are products of a natural history of
successive functional transformations which include birth, maturation, senescence, and death.
Second, organs with analogous functions appear in diverse structures and the tasks that they fulfill
can be accomplished in various ways. Third, organisms are often able to maintain themselves despite
the loss of some organs. Fourth, there is a question as to whether stabilizing self-maintenance is a
principle of organic life at all—as opposed to expenditure, growth, instability, and rupture. In short,
if the analogy is taken seriously, the complexity, dynamism, and plasticity of the biological organism
calls into question the notion of social pathologies as diseases of the social organism.214
II.5 Social Pathologies as Socially Produced Obstacles to Self-Realization
The most cogent conception of social pathologies, and the one that follows from the
alienation critique, is the notion of socially produced obstacles to self-realization. The idea of social
pathologies as socially produced obstacles to self-realization evinces a clear proximity to the practice
of social philosophy as ethical critique. First, the definition is open-ended and hence avoids any
worries about essentialism that might run afoul of our commitment to the ethical-formal conception
of a successful life. Moreover, the fact that definition is open-ended means that it can accommodate
214
Laitinen and Särkelä, “Four Conceptions of Social Pathology,” 89-92.
88
(i) the disappearance of specific social pathologies and (ii) the appearance of new ones in response to
new social formations and practices.
As Neal Harris notes, “the heurism of social pathology, understood in the broadest sense,
enables social theorists to conduct analysis of the appropriateness of ways of living, and of structural
restrictions ‘forms of life’ place on subjects achieving self-realization.” More specifically, because
the concept of self-realization we have put forward is not only broad but also formal—that is,
concerned with the successful appropriation of self and world, and not the content of what is
appropriated—it is capable of diagnosing a wide array of diverse social pathologies that undermine
late-modern subjects’ relationship to the world, and hence their self-realization, regardless of their
constitutive makeup. As we shall this in the next chapter, these include autonomized spheres of
individual freedom, heteronomous demands for self-realization, and various subjective alienations.
Moreover, the concept of social pathologies as socially produced obstacles to self-realization
is responsive, or directly applicable, to individuals and their own conceptions of the good, life pursuit,
desire and needs, etc. Of course, in order for a phenomenon to count as a social pathology it must
be socially produced and pervasive in society, but it is the fact that this frustrates or impedes the
subject’s capacity for self-realization and the possibility of establishing a successful relationship to
the world is what makes it a social pathology, which takes us to the next point.
According to our definition what makes something “pathological” is that it obstructs the
individual’s capacity for self-realization. Defined in this way, the social pathology diagnosis enables
an ethical interrogation of the social developments, formations, and practices that limit or restrict
the subject’s capacity to live a successful life, and thus “remains essential to the capacity of social
theorists to engage in normatively weighty questions of the appropriateness of forms of life for
human flourishing.” Put differently, it enables social theorists to examine the social conditions
necessary for an autonomous and successful relationship to the world.
89
III. The Torments of Self-Foundation: A Symptomatology of Late Modernity
In this section, I attempt to sketch a picture of the symptoms or “malaises” of late modernity.
Whether we regard the current historical period as an “interregnum” in which, as Antonio Gramsci
famously observed, a great variety of “morbid symptoms” appear or as an ailing modernity in the
late stages of terminal decline, what can hardly be contested is that “the morbidity of many of the
symptoms is all too apparent, and the crises are all too real.”215 Therefore, as we saw above, the first
task of a successful social pathology diagnosis is to provide an accurate symptomatology of late
modernity.
III.1 Premodernity, Classical Modernity, Late Modernity
A society can be characterized as modern when (a) “it functions according to the mode of dynamic
stabilization, i.e., when it systematically requires growth, innovation and acceleration for its structural reproduction,”216
while (b) “its cultural program is aimed at systematically increasing the share of the world—[academic capital,
cultural capital, physical capital, relational capital, social capital, etc.]—of both individuals and cultures.”217
As Rosa points out, the two dimensions are mutually reinforcing, but it will be important for our
purposes to keep them conceptually distinct when charting the dialectical trajectory of modernity.
Although the precise dates remain contested “classical modernity” can be said to fall between 1848
(beginning with the Revolutions of 1848, also known as the “Springtime of the Peoples”) and 1945
(coming to an end with the conclusion of the Second World War). From 1945 onwards,218 however,
most social theorists agree that a shift to a new historical epoch occurs, which has been given a wide
215
Noam Chomsky, preface to Practical Utopia: Strategies for a Desirable Society by Michael Albert
(Oakland: PM Press, 2017), vii.
216
Hartmut Rosa, “Escalation: The Crisis of Dynamic Stabilisation and the Prospect of Resonance,”
Sociology, Capitalism, Critique, 283.
217
Rosa, Resonance, 308, 354.
218
Some social theorists believe that “classical modernity” ends (and “postmodernity” begins)
around 1968-1972/1980s, not 1945. See, for example, David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity:
An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (Malden: Blackwell Publishers Inc., 2000).
90
range of names: postmodernity,219 high or late modernity,220 hypermodernity,221 liquid modernity,222
and reflexive modernity,223 amongst others.224 This late-modern epoch admits of its own social
pathologies that are historically situated, socially produced, and distinctive from those of its classical
counterpart. In light of this historical specificity, I will return to the tertiary division between
premodernity, classical modernity, and late modernity in order to isolate the pathological symptoms
of the latter.
Two caveats before proceeding. Although I will be focusing on the alienation critique’s
critical diagnosis of various ailments, social pathologies, and comorbid symptoms of late modernity,
(i) I do not wish to deny that modernization serves a dialectical, emancipatory function, namely, liberating
subjects from indigence, ignorance, political tyranny, scarcity, superstition, and a wide array of
traditional beliefs, roles, and values that have in many cases undermined the subject’s self-realization.
At the same time, modernization ushers in a “fundamental anxiety” in which subjects’ various
relationships to the world—to their bodies, to their own biographies, to history, to nature, to others,
to things—are impeded, ruptured or strained, resulting in increasing feelings of alienation,
disorientation, and distress.225 In short, modernity can be understood both as a history of progress
and a history of cultural decline. Accordingly, (ii) the emphasis on the social pathologies of late
219
Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington
and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).
220
Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); and
Anthony Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity: Self and Society in the Late Modern Age (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1991).
221
Gilles Lipovetsky, Hypermodern Times, trans. Andrew Brown (Malden: Polity Press, 2005).
222
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Malden: Polity Press, 2019).
223
Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization: Politics, Tradition and
Aesthetics in the Modern Social Order (Malden: Polity Press, 2007).
224
For an anthology of writings that tries to chart a “post-postmodernist” path and includes other
classifications of the current epoch, such as “altermodernism,” “automodernism,” “digimodernism,”
“performatism,” “remodernism,” “renewalism,” and “metamodernism,” see David Rudrum and
Nicholas Stavris, eds., Supplanting the Postmodern: An Anthology of Writings on the Arts and Culture of the
Early 21st Century (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015).
225
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modernity does not entail a regressive prescription to premodern forms of life, nor an endorsement
of the postmodern view that the ideals of the enlightenment, having led to “disaster triumphant,”
should be discarded wholesale alongside the concept of instrumental reason they have ushered in.
Instead the alienation critique takes its cue from the “promise of modernity”—the autonomous,
self-determining subject whose self-realization is predicated on successful acts of appropriation of
self and world—and how it can be fully achieved in practice. The alienation critique is concerned
with the pathologies of late modernity insofar as they disrupt, foreclose, or impede this promise.
Thus, it represents an effort to realize the unfinished project of modernity by highlighting socially
produced obstacles to autonomy and self-determination on one hand and establishing the
preconditions for the full exercise of social freedom on the other.
III.2 Achievement Societies vs. Disciplinary Societies
To understand the proliferation of new forms of social pathologies we must first distinguish
between disciplinary or immunological societies, which characterized the last century, and today’s
achievement societies. Disciplinary societies are those governed by negativity, following a scheme of
center/periphery, friend/foe, included/excluded, internal/external, self/other, etc. They are defined
by the negativity of prohibition, i.e., by the disciplinary injunction “may not” and the compulsion
“should.”226 As such, the immunological age is one marked by guilt, neurosis, and repression.
Depression is the result of exaggerated feelings of guilt and self-blame, anger turned inwards, or an
intra-psychic tension in the form of an inability to regulate surplus desire leaving the subject at the
mercy of a punishing superego. Obedience-subjects are haunted by charges of nonconformity and
transgression that attach to the violation of prohibitions, commandments, and laws. Disciplinary
societies consist of institutions of confinement: asylums, barracks, factories, hospitals, and prisons.
226
Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
2015), 1-12.
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Subjects move within “closed systems,” ordered by space and time, locked in panoptic
configurations of surveillance and control. Marked by denial and suppression, disciplinary societies
produce criminals, madmen, and neurotics.227 In Sigmund Freud’s decidedly stark formulation,
“[w]hosoever is incapable, due to an inflexible constitution, of participating in [the] suppression of
drives stands in relation to society as a ‘criminal’ and an ‘outlaw’.”228
Achievement societies, on the other hand, are defined by an excess of positivity, dissolving
all the constraints of disciplinary societies. In the face of the disintegration of the grand foundational
theo-logico-political narratives that marks the transition from modernity to postmodernity, including
those of individual and collective emancipation (e.g., enlightenment critical rationality and Marxism),
the achievement-subject, unmoored and rudderless in a sea of non-meaning, is thrown back upon itself,
tasked with the hysteron proteron229 of self-creation. Prohibition is supplanted by neoliberal incitement:
an auto-compulsion to produce oneself, to be the author and creator of oneself, to fashion oneself
as homo liber; the “I” as entrepreneur, as lord and master of itself, a ghostly, parthenogenic sovereign;
the self-as-a-work-of-art, “the Potter thumping his wet Clay,”230 continually molded and remolded in
ceaseless self-optimization. The achievement-subject positivizes itself, disposes over itself as a project.
Mired in its own reflexivity, the entrepreneurial self is “always in a mode of becoming, never being”:
227
Han, The Burnout Society, 9.
228
Sigmund Freud, “‘Civilized’ Sexual Morality and Modern Nervous Disease,” Civilization and Its
Discontents, ed. Todd Dufresne, trans. Gregory C. Richter (Peterborough: Broadview Press, 2016),
120.
229
Also known as “hysterology.” Used in rhetoric to denote an inversion of anteriority and
posteriority such as when a phrase that should come last is put first—e.g., “She is well and lives.”
Reflexive achievement-subjects are faced with a similar dilemma: they must posit themselves as
subjects in order to trigger the action through which they produce themselves as subjects. See Dany-
Robert Dufour, The Art of Shrinking Heads: On the New Servitude of the Liberated in the Age of Total
Capitalism, trans. David Macey (Malden: Polity Press, 2008), 70-71.
230
The rest of the epigrammatic poem by the 11th century philosopher, Omar Khayyám, is equally, if
not more, applicable to the condition of the reflexive achievement-subject today: “For in the
Market-place, one Dusk of Day, / I watch’d the Potter thumping his wet Clay: / And with its all
obliterated Tongue / It murmur’d—‘Gently, Brother, gently, pray!’” Omar Khayyám, The Rubáiyát of
Omar Khayyám, trans. Edward Fitzgerald (New York, Penguin Books, 1995), 30.
93
a subject in the marketplace as a marketplace.231 Achievement societies are governed by “can,”
replacing all prohibitions, commandments, and laws with initiatives in the service of performance.
They have no fixed base, geography, or territory since these would only serve to hinder
productivity. Deterritorialized and disembedded, the achievement-subject is a nomad that traverses
arid oases—casual/short-term/zero-hour contracts, gigs, internships, McJobs, (perma)temp
positions, perennial certifications and conferences, precarious work, professional development
workshops, project units, training seminars—and glittering “cathedrals of consumption,”232
perpetually mobile and rootless. Achievement societies are not concerned with the “successful life.”
Those who are incapable of being “seduced by the infinite possibility and constant renewal
promoted by the consumer market, of rejoicing in the chance of putting on and taking off identities,
of spending [their lives] in the never ending chase after ever more intense sensations and even more
exhilarating experience…are the ‘dirt’ of postmodern[ity].”233
III.3 Janus Bifrons: A Vade Mecum of the Comorbid Symptoms of Late Modernity
In today’s achievement society [Leistungsgesellschaft] individuals increasingly suffer from the
“torments of self-foundation”234: aboulia (lack of will); acedia (lack of care); addiction; “affluenza”235
231
Ulrich Bröckling, “The Subject in the Marketplace, the Subject as a Marketplace” in Lost in
Perfection, 24-35.
232
See George Ritzer, Enchanting a Disenchanted World: Continuity and Change in the Cathedrals of
Consumption, 3rd ed. (Thousand Oaks: Pine Forge Press, 2010). Included in his typology of
“cathedrals of consumptions” are casino-hotels, chain stores, cruise ships, discounters,
eatertainment, electronic shopping centers, entertainment aimed at adults, franchises and fast-food
restaurants, shopping malls, and superstores.
233
Bauman, Postmodernity and its Discontents (Malden: Polity Press, 1997), 14.
234
Dufour, The Art of Shrinking Heads, 64. See also Dany-Robert Dufour, “Modern Subjectivity/Post-
Modern Subjectivity,” Late Modern Subjectivity and its Discontents: Anxiety, Depression, and Alzheimer’s
Disease, ed. Kieran Keohane, Anders Peterson, and Bert van den Bergh (New York: Routledge,
2017), 15.
235
Clive Hamilton and Richard Denniss, Affluenza: When Too Much Is Never Enough (Crows Nest:
Allen & Unwin, 2005); Oliver James, Affluenza: How To Be Successful and Stay Sane (London:
Vermilion, 2007); John de Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas H. Naylor, Affluenza: How
Overconsumption Is Killing Us—and How We Can Fight Back, 3rd ed. (Oakland: Berrett-Koehler
Publishers, Inc., 2014).
94
(a condition of obsessive consumerism, envy, and “luxury fever” resulting from placing a high value
on money and possessions, looking good in the eyes of others, and becoming famous); anhedonia
(lack of pleasure); arrhythmicity/dysrhythmicity (disturbances in the rhythm of life);236 anxiety;
attention deficit hyperactivity disorder; avoidant personality disorder; avolition (lack of motivation);
body dysmorphic disorder; borderline personality disorder; burnout;237 cynicism,238 death-by-
overwork [karoshi/guolaosi/gwarosa];239 decision fatigue; decompensation (the failure of psychological
defence mechanisms to “compensate” for enervation, tension, etc., resulting in a worsening of
symptoms); dysthymia; eating disorders; exhibitionism; identity crises;240 “impairments of
performance” [Leistungsversagen]; insomnia; kiasu (a grasping, selfish attitude arising from the fear of
missing out);241 living and performing tasks alone [ohitorisama]; loneliness;242 “lonely death”
236
Not to be confused with “[cardiac] arrythmia” or other arrhythmic medical conditions—see Bert
van den Bergh, “Depression: Resisting Ultra-Liberalism?” The Social Pathologies of Contemporary
Civilization, 100.
237
I use the term “burnout” in the broadest sense possible to include “asthenia” (lack of strength),
“exhaustion,” “myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome” and “weariness.” See Anson
Rabinbach, The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue, and the Origins of Modernity (Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1992); Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2015); Byung-Chul Han, The Transparency Society, trans. Erik Butler (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2015); Byung-Chul Han, Psycho-Politics: Neoliberalism and the New Technologies
of Power, trans. Erik Butler (New York: Verso, 2017); and Anna Katharina Schaffner, Exhaustion: A
History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).
238
Timothy Bewes, Cynicism and Postmodernity (New York: Verso, 1997).
239
Karoshi is the Japanese term—literally, “overwork death”; guolaosi is its Chinese counterpart;
gwarosa, the South Korean term for the same phenomenon.
240
Christopher Lasch, The Minimal Self: Psychic Survival in Troubled Times (New York: W. W. Norton &
Company, 1984); Kenneth J. Gergen, The Saturated Self: Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life (New
York: Basic Books, 2000); and Paul Verhaeghe, What About Me? The Struggle for Identity in Market-Based
Societies, trans. Jane Hedley-Prôle (Minneapolis: Scribe Publications, 2018).
241
The puerile acronyms FOMO (“fear of missing out”) and YOLO (“you only live once”), which
ironically represent a living mortification rather than an injunction to seize the day, may be considered
symptoms of the contraction of the present and the acceleration of the pace of social life under late
capitalism. For responses to these phenomena, see Sherry Turkle, Alone Together: Why We Expect More
from Technology and Less from Each Other (New York: Basic Books, 2011); Adam Phillips, Missing Out: In
Praise of the Unlived Life (New York: Picador, 2012). Svend Brinkmann, The Joy of Missing Out
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019).
242
Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness: American Culture at the Breaking Point (Boston: Beacon Press,
1990); Richard Stivers, Shades of Loneliness: Pathologies of a Technological Society (New York: Rowman &
95
[kodokushi]; “multiphrenia” (the splintering of the late-modern subject into a multiplicity of self-
investments);243 narcissism;244 neurasthenia (a vague disorder marked by extreme lassitude,
generalized aches and pains, loss of appetite, and weakness of nerves; “Americanitis”); obsessive-
compulsive disorder; “overchoice”;245 panic attacks;246 pleonexia (avarice, covetousness, and ruthless
self-seeking);247 “presenteeism” (working while sick or staying at the workplace after completing
one’s tasks); psychomotor slowing (inability to initiate action); schizoid personality disorder; self-
harm; social phobia; social withdrawal [hikikomori];248 “solastalgia”249 (existential distress caused by
Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2004); John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Loneliness: Human Nature
and the Need for Social Connection (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2008); Thomas Dumm,
Loneliness as a Way of Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Ben Lazare Mijuskovic,
Loneliness in Philosophy, Psychology, and Literature (Bloomington: iUniverse, Inc., 2012); Lars Svendsen,
A Philosophy of Loneliness (London: Reaktion Books, 2017).
243
The term was coined by the social psychologist Kenneth J. Gergen in The Saturated Self, 73-80.
244
Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New
York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1979); Jean M. Twenge, Generation Me: Why Today’s Young
Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before (New York: Atria
Paperback, 2006); Jean M. Twenge and W. Keith Campbell, The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age
of Entitlement (New York: Atria Paperback, 2009).
245
Also known as “choice overload” or “the paradox of choice”—a form of “analysis paralysis” in
which the subject, faced with a surfeit of equivalent choices or options, can arrive at none. See, for
example, Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (New York: Bantam Books, 1971); Gregg Easterbrook, The
Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse (New York: Random House, 2004); Barry
Schwartz, The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less (New York: Harper Perennial, 2005); Edward C.
Rosenthal, The Era of Choice: The Ability to Choose and Its Transformation of Contemporary Life (Cambridge:
MIT Press, 2005); and Renata Salecl, The Tyranny of Choice (London: Profile Books, 2011).
246
Gianni Francesetti, ed. Panic Attacks and Postmodernity: Gestalt Therapy Between Clinical and Social
Perspectives (Gouldsboro: Gestalt Journal Press, 2007).
247
For a discussion of how the pursuit of “pleonexic goods” jeopardizes the common interest, and
hence our capacity to realize our conceptions of the good life, see Michael J. Thomson, “The
Common Good as a Principle of Social Justice,” The Good Life Beyond Growth, 119-130.
248
Michael Zielenziger, Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation. (New York:
Vintage Books, 2006); Saitō Tamaki, Hikikomori: Adolescence without End, trans. Jeffrey Angles
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013); Flavio Rizzo, “Hikikomori: The Postmodern
Hermits of Japan,” Warscapes, published June 14, 2016
http://www.warscapes.com/opinion/hikikomori-postmodern-hermits-japan
249
The term was coined by the environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht in “Solastalgia: A New
Concept in Human Health and Identity,” Philosophy, Activism, Nature 3 (2005), 41-55. For examples of
solastalgia, specifically those that relate to the alienation from nature, see Peter Dickens, Reconstructing
Nature: Alienation, Emancipation and the Division of Labour (New York: Routledge, 1996; Andrew Biro,
Denaturalizing Ecological Politics: Alienation from Nature from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School and Beyond
96
environmental change); stress disorders; suicide, workaholism, world-weariness [taedium
vitae/Weltschmerz—literally, “world pain”];250 and the list goes on. If disciplinary societies are
characterized by neurosis, the dominant pathology of achievement societies is depression.251 The
depressive subject fails in the project of being an “I”: exhausted by his own sovereignty, “[he] is
unable to measure up; he is tired of having to become himself.”252 Depression is the contemporary
mal du siècle, the “guardrail of the person with no map”253:
[Depression] is the pathology of a society whose norm is no longer based on guilt and
discipline but on responsibility and initiative. Yesterday, social rules demanded
conformists…today, initiative and mental capacities are required. The individual is
confronted with a pathology of inadequacy more than with a pathology of the mistake, with
the universe of dysfunction more than with the universe of law: the depressed individual is a
person out of gas…If neurosis is the tragedy of guilt, depression is the tragedy of
inadequacy. It is the familiar shadow of a person without a guide, tired of going forward to
achieve the self and tempted to sustain himself through products and behaviours.254
What are we to make of this new psychic economy or “torments of self-foundation”? The
first thing to note is that the symptoms oscillate between extremes and hence can be sorted into two
clusters: on one end are illnesses of hyperactivity/self-optimization (affluenza, pleonexia, workaholism, etc.)
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005); and Simon Hailwood, Alienation and Nature in
Environmental Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
250
Although the concept of Weltschmerz is primarily associated with the fin de siècle climate of
fashionable despair, sophistication, and world-weariness at the close of the 19th century, it is still
operative today in the form of an au courant cynicism, ironic detachment, and listlessness shorn of
the concept’s artistic, literary, and symbolic dimensions.
251
Alain Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self: Diagnosing the History of Depression in the Contemporary Age
(Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2010); Dan G. Blazer, The Age of Melancholy: “Major
Depression” and Its Social Origins (New York: Routledge, 2014); and Barbara Dowds, Depression and the
Erosion of the Self in Late Modernity: The Lesson of Icarus (New York: Routledge, 2018).
252
Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self, 4.
253
254
Ehrenberg, The Weariness of the Self, 9, 11.
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in which individuals are subject to an auto-compulsion to “become themselves,” driven by the
dictates of continuous self-reinvention; on the other end are illnesses of inadequacy/self-responsibility
(burnout, depression, identity crises, etc.) as an inexorable counterpoint to the expenditure of energy
in which individuals, faced with the slogan “nothing is impossible,” are no longer able to be able
[nicht mehr können kann]. Achievement-subjects flounder in the gyre of their hyperkinesis, locked in a
“frenetic standstill”255 or “polar inertia.”256 The illnesses of hyperactivity/self-optimization and
inadequacy/self-responsibility are two sides of the same coin, two faces of the late-modern Janus.
IV. Late Modernity and its Discontents: Aetiologies
IV.1 Late Modernity and its Discontents I: Reflexivization as Pathogenesis
Why should hyperactivity and the demands for self-optimisation in late modernity lead to
burnout, depression, and other illnesses of inadequacy? Part of the answer lies in the fact that the
self in modernity increasingly assumes the form of a reflexive project or, as Margaret Archer puts it,
“for the first time in human history the imperative to be reflexive is becoming categorical for all.”257
Reflexivity, as a category of mediation between subject (agency/self) and object (structure/world),
refers to the modern self’s constitutive susceptibility to chronic revision in light of new knowledge
or information in relation to its social contexts and vice versa. In the absence of social structures,
morphostatic configurations, or semiotic signposts to offer guidance (especially in novel situations),
the burdens of choice, meaning, responsibility, and self-foundation fall squarely on the individual.
Achievement-subjects become entirely dependent on their own frenetic (re)constructive endeavours.
While the late-modern self is never fully shorn of content, the latter is always subject to revision and
255
German: “rasender Stillstand.” An “inspired translation” of Paul Virilio’s polar interia. See, for
example, Hartmut Rosa, Social Acceleration: A Theory of Modernity, trans. Jonathan Trejo-Mathys (New
York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 15, 93, 111, 247, 248, 272, 283, 290, 299-322, 365n22.
256
French: “inertie polaire.” Paul Virilio, Polar Inertia (London: Sage, 2000). For a similar concept, see
also Ivor Southwood, Non-Stop Inertia (Washington: Zero Books, 2011).
257
Margaret S. Archer, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2012), 1.
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hence ephemeral, indeterminate, and precarious. A few enterprising, fluid subjects that embrace the
situational logic of opportunity and the market vagaries of ceaseless consumption and obsolescence,
will succeed in building rewarding self-identities. The majority—the detritus of postmodernity—will
succumb to burnout, depression, and other pathologies of inadequacy.
Of course, no society can exist without some exercise of human reflexivity. To begin with,
reflexive first-person awareness is necessary for individual actors to abide by, apply, and interpret
social expectations and rules. Furthermore, traditional social practices require “reflexive monitoring”
in order for individuals to adapt when things go wrong and to respond to unforeseen contingencies.
Lastly, traditional norms and regulations may come into aporetic conflict with one another, making
it necessary for individual actors to choose between two options of equal normative force. In short,
there is no social formation so comprehensive or structure so commanding that it can sustain itself
without the reflexivity of its members.258 Nevertheless, there are dominant “modes of reflexivity”
that correspond to different historical periods. Although Archer denies (implausibly, in my opinion)
that the reflexive imperative is tied to the project of modernity or to late modernity,259 she argues for
“a historical succession in the dominance of [four] reflexives modes.”260 The four ways of being reflexive,
according to my amended reading, help demonstrate how reflexivization in late modernity leads to
illnesses of inadequacy/self-responsibility.
The argument I am proposing is as follows: all four modes of reflexivity can be found in
practice today, but each mode plays a dominant role associated with a specific historical juncture,
with far-reaching and profound implications for the agent’s self-world relation (see Table 3.3 below).
258
Archer, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, 2.
259
260
Archer, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, 12. For a detailed discussion of Archer’s four
“modes of reflexivity,” see Margaret Archer, Structure, Agency, and the Internal Conversation (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), Chapters 6-9 and Margaret Archer, Making Our Way Through the
World: Human Reflexivity and Social Mobility (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), Chapters
4-6.
99
Since the modes of reflexivity are meant to supply subjects with an orientation towards the question
“What is to be done?” they are closely bound to the conditions necessary for the successful
appropriation of self and world (and hence of direct relevance to the social pathology diagnosis).
The argument, which charts a historical trajectory of reflexive intensification, is largely theoretical rather
than empirical but is supported by the work of Beck et al. on the transformation of the late-modern
self as an expression of reflexivity.261
Communicative reflexivity, which prevails in premodern or traditional societies, involves
internal conversations that need to be confirmed by others before they lead to appropriative action.
Communicative reflexives strongly identify with their social lifeworld, retain close relationships with
kith of kin, and tend to take up intrafamilial vocations, rejecting the situational logic of opportunity.
In modernity, autonomous reflexivity becomes the dominant mode of relating to the world,
and refers to internal conversations that are self-contained, leading directly to appropriative action.
Autonomous reflexives are independent, choose their acquaintances and friends on the basis of
mutual interests, and pursue financial and public sector careers largely based on material incentives,
adapting to situational opportunities in order to maintain or secure a competitive market advantage.
However, the reflexive imperative, in its pathological form, only reaches its zenith in late modernity.
Late modernity is characterized by two modes of reflexivity, one which we can qualify,
reluctantly, as “functional” (at least by its own internal standards), and the other as “dysfunctional.”
In the first, meta-reflexivity, internal conversations compulsively revisit and reassess previous inner
dialogues and tend to promote a sceptical attitude towards the possibility of effective appropriative
action. A useful illustration of meta-reflexivity can be found in Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse:
“As a jealous man, I suffer four times over: because I am jealous, because I blame myself for being
261
See Beck et al., Reflexive Modernization; Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity; Giddens, Modernity
and Self-Identity; and Alberto Melucci, The Playing Self: Person and Meaning in the Planetary Society (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
100
so, because I fear that my jealousy will wound the other, [and] because I allow myself to be subject
to a banality.”262 Meta-reflexives are cynically or ironically disengaged from the social lifeworld,
which is neither internalized (as in the communicative case) nor normalized (as in the autonomous
case), leaving them responsible for their own self-socialization. Old contacts are rejected as quaint,
redundant, or no longer compatible with new belief orientations (“you’ve just got to let things go
and move on”)263 and social networks are sieved on the basis of common values. Nonetheless, meta-
reflexives profess a desire for change inspired by movementist niche trends (aid campaigns, climate
change, etc.)264 and aspire to “meaningful” occupations in non-profit and non-governmental
organizations (NGOs). Since they remain perennially at a remove from the social lifeworld, meta-
reflexives are proficient at exploiting situational opportunities should they arise, e.g., through
meticulously managed online profiles on social networking platforms such as About.me, Jobcase,
LinkedIn, and Opportunity.
Despite being sceptical of the efficacy of appropriative action and being impelled to work
out their own orientations towards the social order, meta-reflexives’ openness to the logic of
opportunity means that they are ultimately able to match life outcomes to their concerns and ends.
But not all late-modern subjects are so fortunate. Those—and there are many—who are unable to
successfully navigate the categorical demands of reflexivity and self-socialization lead lives of
subjective destitution (to borrow a term from Lacan): incapable of generating meaning and lacking
262
Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010),
146. The example also appears in Gergen, The Saturated Self, 135.
263
Quoted in Archer, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, 226.
264
However, this desire for change is not one rooted in firmly held convictions or commitments, but
in performance. Gergen gives the following example in The Saturated Self, 186: “The Live Aid convert
of 1985 elicited support from millions of young people all over the United States and Europe and
generated millions of dollars for starving Ethiopians. A month before the concert, it is safe to say,
only a small percentage of this population was even aware of the famine in Ethiopia; one may doubt
whether many had even heard of the country. An indeed, within weeks after the concert, Ethiopia
disappeared into insignificance once again…In the postmodern view, social outcry is not a matter of internal
belief, basic morality, or deep-seated feeling; it is simply another form of performance (emphasis mine).”
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symbolic stanchions, they are the “casualties of the reflexive imperative.”265 In fractured reflexivity,
internal conversations cannot lead to purposeful appropriative action, resulting in an intensification
of personal disorientation and distress. Whether the fractured reflexives in question once exercised a
certain measure of appropriative efficacy, but under adverse circumstances lost this capacity
(“displaced reflexives”); or approximate a functional mode of reflexivity, albeit inadequately
(“impeded reflexives”); or supplant the demands of reflexivity with gut feeling as a guide to action
(“expressive reflexives”), “the self-talk of the ‘fractured reflexive’ is primarily expressive. Its effect is to intensify
affect.”266 Lacking all symbolic support, and the functional reflexivity required for self-determination,
the fractured reflexive is like the protagonist in Kafka’s short story who finds himself in an
unfamiliar town late for an early-morning appointment:
It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my way to the
station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realized it was much later than I had
thought and that I had to hurry; the shock of this discovery made me feel uncertain of the
way, I wasn’t very well acquainted with the town as yet; fortunately, there was a policeman at
hand, I ran to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: “You [are] asking
me the way?” “Yes,” I said, “since I can’t find it myself.” “Give it up! Give it up!” said he,
and turned around with a sudden jerk, like someone who wants to be alone with his
laughter.267
The protagonist’s initial distress is brought on by his discovery that his own time and the system’s
time are not in sync, that is, “that the individual and society are not calibrated to one another and
265
Archer, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, 249-291.
266
267
Franz Kafka, “Give It Up!” in The Complete Stories, ed. Nahum N. Glazer (New York: Schocken
Books Inc., 1971), 456.
102
that the I is unfamiliar to itself.”268 A second source of distress is the subject’s incapacity to find the
way to the station himself—his own knowledge and resources fail him: he is “uncertain of the way”;
he “can’t find it [himself].” Finally, turning to a symbolic authority figure for help, a third source of
distress is the derisory abandonment of the late-modern subject in need of guidance and/or support.
The mocking refrain of the policeman—“Give it up! Give it up!”—confronts the fractured reflexive
with the futility of action: he cannot orient himself successfully (like the meta-reflexive can), nor will
the symbolic authority orient him or come to his aid. Adding insult to injury, if a semblance of
guidance is offered, it merely redirects the late-modern subject back upon itself. In the latter case,
the fractured reflexive resembles the ailing patient in the joke who complains to the doctor that he is
suffering from indecision, melancholy, and self-doubt only for the doctor to prescribe the following:
“The treatment is simple. The great clown Pagliacci is in town tonight. Go to the show and see him.
That should pick you up”—which elicits a mournful outcry from the patient: “But I am Pagliacci.”
Incapable of engaging in purposeful courses of appropriative action (except those of the
most rudimentary day-to-day planning), fractured reflexives are consequently estranged from the
social lifeworld, which they reject as a source of relational evils, trauma, unfinished projects, and
unresolved disputes, resulting in their disaffection. They have no relationships which they can count
as meaningful or secure, and thus cling to others, on whom they become immediately dependent.
Jobs are sought according to ephemeral appeals and passing whims often taking the form of
precarious “gigs” or contingent work while the inability to engage in purposeful action means that
the logic of situational opportunity is met with passivity. Archer contends that fractured reflexives
“are not pathological people or people with pathologies”—but it is not clear how this odd verdict
can be squared with her characterization of them as “casualties of the reflexive imperative,”
268
Ulrich Bröckling, The Entrepreneurial Self: Fabricating a New Type of Subject, trans. Steven Black (Los
Angeles: SAGE, 2016), 7.
103
“fractured,” and “the walking wounded,” “drifting [through the trackless, late-modern wasteland]
without aspiring to the agency that seemingly evades them”269—a far more convincing conclusion,
and one that the alienation critique draws our attention to, is found at the end of her discussion:
[Fractured reflexives] accrue objective penalties as the dark side of their inability to comply
with the reflexive imperative. Subjectively, they undergo profound mental distress and
experience a disorientation that is qualitatively distinct from the anger and unfairness
experienced by many in modernity. The picture is darker still in that many struggle with their
“fracturing” in the absence of the collective support forthcoming in modernity: those
similarly placed, geo-locally rooted and frequently collectively organized, who could at least
understand modernity’s “victims.”270
A quick glance at the pathological effects of the late-modern reflexive imperative on the self-world
relation of fractured reflexives compared to their counterparts in Table 2.1 should make clear what
“objective penalties” they accrue. Since fractured reflexivity fails to supply subjects with an
orientation towards the question “What is to be done?” and is shorn of the symbolic efficiency that
the metanarratives of modernity formerly secured, their self-world relation is ruptured on all fronts:
inveterately abortive, the whirlwind expenditure of energy, in response the demands of reflexivity,
yields only disorientation and distress, social estrangement, dependency, and passivity. Depression
“follows from overexcited, overdriven, excessive self-reference that has assumed destructive traits.”
The fractured reflexive is at war with itself: “Entirely incapable of stepping outward, of standing
outside itself…it locks its jaws on itself…It wears [itself] out in a rat race it runs against itself.”271
269
Archer, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, 251, 290.
270
Archer, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, 290-291.
271
Han, The Burnout Society, 42.
104
Table 2.1 Modes of Reflexivity and the Self-World Relation272
Modes of Relationship Response to
Relationship with Career Sought
Reflexivity with Social Situational
Others (Old/New) For/Sought In
(Dominant In) Lifeworld Opportunity
Communicative
Reflexives Identification Retention/Commonalities Replication/Family Rejection
(PREMODERNITY)
Autonomous
Material
Reflexives Competitive
Independence Selection/Interests Benefits/Financial and
(CLASSICAL Adaptation
Public Sector
MODERNITY)
Meta-Reflexives Promoting
(LATE Change/Third
Disengagement Rejection/Values Embrace
MODERNITY) (Nonprofit/Voluntary)
[“Functional”] Sector
Fractured Reflexives
Ephemeral
(LATE
Rejection Absence/Dependency Appeal/Uncertain Passivity
MODERNITY)
(‘Gig Economy’)
[“Dysfunctional”]
To sum up, modern-day “phoenixes” who are capable of complying with the demands of
the reflexive imperative in late modernity by birthing themselves from their own ashes may succeed
in forming rewarding self-identities, but the majority of achievement-subjects, whose frantic efforts
yield no such recompense, succumb to the “hectic fever” described by John Donne more than half a
millennium ago:
The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit
Can well direct him where to look…
’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone;
All just supply and all relation,
Prince, subject, father, son, are things forgot,
272
The table is a modified version of Archer’s summary of her own empirical findings, altered to
reflect my own interpretation of her conclusions and thus should in no way be taken as indicative of
her own views. See Archer, The Reflexive Imperative in Late Modernity, 293.
105
For every man alone thinks he hath got
To be a phoenix, and that there can be
None of that kind, of which he is, but he.
[…]
Thou see’st a hectic fever hath got hold
Of the whole substance, not to be controlled…273
Fractured reflexives, despite all their feverish activity, fail at the reflexive project of the self:
incapable of leading “successful lives” they are the abortive phoenixes of late modernity, suspended in
the centripetal inertia of their eddying embers.
IV.2 Late Modernity and its Discontents II: Dynamic Stabilization and the Pathologies of De-Synchronization
The reflexive imperative with its late-modern “casualties” goes some way to explaining the
comorbid symptoms of late modernity, but it provides us with only half of the story. A second no
less important factor helps explain why the demands of self-optimization lead to burnout,
depression, and feelings of inadequacy. The concept of “dynamic stabilization,” which as we saw
earlier is the defining feature of modern societies, states that in order for a society to reproduce itself
structurally—i.e., in order for it to maintain its socio-economic and institutional status quo—it requires constant
acceleration, growth, and innovation.
At first blush, this strikes us as ostensibly false or contradictory. How can the status quo be
maintained through change?274 In a well-known passage from the Manifesto of the Communist Party,
Marx and Engels highlight the permanent, self-revolutionizing force of capitalism and its effects,
comparing it to a sorcerer who has lost control over of the cataclysmic powers he has unleashed:
273
John Donne, “The First Anniversary. An Anatomy of the World,” Selected Poems (New York:
Penguin Books, 2006), 162-163.
274
Rosa, “Escalation,” Sociology, Capitalism, Critique, 283.
106
The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of
production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole
relations of society. Conservation of the old modes of production in unaltered form,
was, on the contrary, the first condition of existence for all earlier industrial classes.
Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social
conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from
all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and
venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become
antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned…
[…]
Modern bourgeois society, with its relations of production, of exchange and of
property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of
exchange, is like the sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the
nether world whom he has called up by his spells.275
This dynamic self-revolutionizing force is not incidental to capitalism; it is the constitutive means of its
structural reproduction. Fueled by the economic motor of ceaseless competition, the logic of profit,
financial markets, and the drive to limitless productivity, firms that do not constantly compete,
innovate, and reinvent themselves quickly become obsolete or fall prey to competitors. In order to
“stay in the game”—to retain a specific market share or rate of quarterly returns—even the most
profitable economic entities must continuously expand, rebrand, refashion, and remold themselves:
they must put out new innovative products, launch successful advertising campaigns, keep up with
the most recent technological developments, and so on. The same logic applies to modern workers.
275
Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, The Marx-Engels Reader, 476, 478.
107
It is no longer enough for workers to have a job: in order to retain it, they must consistently
demonstrate personal initiative, acquire and develop new skills and talents, pass routine performance
reviews, complete training workshops, obtain (and perennially renew) industry-specific certifications,
etc. Academics must “publish or perish.” Even gig and service industry workers trapped in dead-end
McJobs and part-time shift work are expected to have an online profile, a polished résumé, and a
“five-year plan.” The logic of dynamic stabilization unleashed by capitalism also holds sway over
every aspect of cultural and social life including art, education, love, politics, science, and the legal
system.276
The successive waves of epochal dynamization (i) are historically conditioned and situated
(and hence assume a different historical form in late modernity than in classical modernity), and (ii)
must be grasped dialectically: the inexorable flattening of all traditional, hierarchical dichotomies—
believer/heretic, national/foreigner, noble/commoner, etc.—ushered in by capitalism simultaneously
paves the way for new avenues of self-realization by liberating subjects from the fetters of tradition,
and ushers in a crisis of symbolization since the asymbolic reign of capital leaves only money as the
universal referent,277 undermining the conditions and social lifeworld necessary for self-realization
(e.g., by leaving no nexus between late-modern individuals other than the “callous cash payment”
and drowning all ethical considerations “in the icy waters of egotistical calculation”).278
276
For some compelling examples, see Rosa, “Escalation,” Sociology, Capitalism, Critique, 284-286. For
instance, we no longer consider knowledge to be rooted in ancient wisdom, tradition, or great
canonical texts; nor do we regard it as something that is handed down incrementally from one
generation to the next, as the classical moderns did, but rather as something that is dynamically
created, subject to incommensurable paradigm shifts, which must persistently demonstrate a novel
contribution that goes beyond what is already known. In the realm of art, imitation and mimesis give
way to the fetishization of originality and the cult of the avant-garde. In the legal system, legislation
becomes an open-ended task, supplanting the static notions of an immutable corpus of “eternal” or
“holy” law, and so on.
277
Alain Badiou, The True Life (Malden: Polity Press, 2017), 35-42.
278
Marx and Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party, The Marx-Engels Reader, 476.
108
Of course, one need not accept the claim I have put forward that the capitalist mode of
production is responsible for the entire range of dynamic stabilizations that afflict late-modern
societies (e.g., one can adopt a Weberian analysis which locates these in cultural as well as material
developments).279 Whatever the principal causes, what can hardly be disputed is that the logic of
dynamic stabilization pervades all spheres of contemporary social life. Some of the consequences of
the hyperacceleration of late modernity are listed below:
• Changes in information and communications technology that make possible a
simultaneous worldwide exchange of and access to information and ideas;
• Organizational-technological changes that make the distinctions between day and night,
workdays and weekends, free time and work disappear;
• The growing interchangeability of goods, places, and images in a “throw-away society”;
• The increasing fluidity and ephemerality of fashions, goods, work processes, ideas, and
images;
• A sharpened “temporariness” of goods, jobs, careers, nature, values, and relationships;
• The often boundary-crossing prevalence of new commodities, flexible forms of
technology, and enormous trash heaps;
• The growth of short-term labour contracts and a “just-in-time” workforce as well as the
tendency to draw up long task lists;
• The growing “modularization” of free time, training and continuing education, and
work;
• The extreme increase of in the availability of goods and customs from highly different
societies in all parts of the world;
279
Rosa, “Escalation,” Sociology, Capitalism, Critique, 285-286.
109
• The (worldwide) feeling of overly fast pace of life that is in contradiction with basic
human experiences.280
More importantly for our analysis, “if the mode of dynamic stabilization entails the incessant
acceleration of material, social and cultural reproduction of society, then this cannot leave the
structures of the individual psyche (and body) and the character of the human subject untouched.”281
Exposed to the demands of ceaseless dynamization, subjects are caught in a self-propelling “spiral”
across three dimensions of acceleration: (i) technical (communication, production, transportation);
(ii) social (professional specialization, the division of labour); and (iii) acceleration of the pace of life
(condensation of action episodes, contraction of the present, heightened tempo of life).282 With the
escalatory logic of social acceleration come pathologies of de-synchronization, since not all aspects
of social life can be increased or extended, only compressed; nor can all individuals keep up with the
dynamization of the social lifeworld—they “fall out of sync.” This can happen in one of three ways.
First, escalation grows more difficult with each successive step, since the more dynamic a subject is,
the more effort, energy and power is required to dynamize further, resulting in a failure to dynamize.
Second, even in cases where successful dynamization is possible, it comes at the expense of stability,
leading to psychological burnout, collapse, and depression. Third, the promise of the escalatory logic
of modernity that once paved the way for individuals to lead autonomous lives of self-determination
motivated by narratives of individual and collective emancipation has, in late modernity, been
transformed into its opposite. The “exhaustion of utopian energies” means that the dialectical
emancipatory function of modernity is subverted. Today dynamization is no longer a catalyst for progress;
like the sorcerer who is unable to control the fearsome powers he has conjured up, it confronts
280
Rosa, Social Acceleration, 219-220.
281
Rosa, “Escalation,” Sociology, Capitalism, Critique, 293.
282
Rosa, Social Acceleration. See also Hartmut Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory
of Late-Modern Temporality (København: NSU Press, 2014).
110
individuals as a perpetually expanding abyss, gaping at their heels, heralding crisis and catastrophe.283
The nightmarish imperative to dynamize or risk social abandonment, obsolescence, and rejection—
“the fears of being caught napping, of failing to catch up with fast-moving events, of being left
behind, of overlooking ‘use by’ dates, of being saddled with possessions that are no longer desirable,
of missing the moment that calls for a change of tack before crossing the point of no return”284—is
captured nicely by Gilles Châtelet’s mocking, scornful exhortation:
Young nomads, we love you! Be yet more modern, more mobile, more fluid, if you do not
want to end up like your ancestors in the muddy fields of Verdun. The Great Market is your
draft board! Be light, anonymous, precarious like drops of water or soap bubbles: this is true
equality, that of the Great Casino of life! If you are not fluid, you will quickly become losers.
You will not be admitted into the Great Global SuperBoom…Be absolutely modern…be a
nomad, be fluid—or check out, like a viscous loser!285
The illnesses of hyperactivity and self-optimisation are a result of this compulsion to dynamize—
to “keep up” with the runaway escalatory logic of late modernity; and the feelings of inadequacy,
burnout, and depression are a direct corollary of the failure to do so or of “successful” dynamization
at the expense of the mental and physical well-being (i.e., the stability) of the late-modern subject.
We are now able to distinguish the demands of self-optimisation from the Enlightenment ideal of
perfectibility, which plays a prominent role in the history of art, ethics, and literature. Perfectibility is
a “regulative ideal with a holistic focus on integration and balance”: it aims at establishing a
harmonious appropriative relation between self and world. It functions as a lodestar that furnishes
individuals with a normative orientation, even if what it aspires to remains ultimately unachievable.
283
Rosa, “Escalation,” Sociology, Capitalism, Critique, 286-288.
284
Bauman, Liquid Life, 2.
285
Gilles Châtelet, To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Democracies,
trans. Robin Mackay (New York: Sequence Press, 2014), 75.
111
Self-optimisation, on the other hand, is geared towards “permanent, open-ended overachievement”
which must be repeatedly surpassed ad infinitum. This means that the demands of self-optimisation
can never be met or satisfied. Fueled by the escalatory logic of dynamic stabilization, they are purely
instrumental in orientation, subjecting all dimensions of social life to the diktats of market efficiency,
of ever-increasing renewal and reinvention.286 The individual psyche becomes a war room, enlisted in
an arms race against itself as late-modern subjects adopt the role of “life entrepreneurs,” disposing
over their lives as one would over a business. A new economy of self-management is born. The body
and soul of the achievement-subject are transformed into a performance-machine [Leistungsmaschine].
Those who are incapable of founding this “Me Inc.,” or keeping up with the escalatory demands of
self-optimisation are left behind. “Life in liquid modern societies,” to quote Bauman’s bleak verdict,
“is a sinister version of musical chairs, played for real.”287
Let me conclude with the following. In the face of a neoliberal dispotif of late capitalism
declaring the end of the emancipatory, political metanarratives of modernity—capitalists/workers,
colonizers/colonized, exploiters/exploited, etc.—only the category of winners and losers remains:
“Either you are strong and smart [and dynamic and labile and mercurial and polyvalent and serous],
or you deserve your misery. The establishment of capitalist absolutism is based on the mass
adhesion (mostly unconscious) to the philosophy of natural selection [i.e., social Darwinism].”288
Those who are unable to keep up with the escalatory logic of dynamic stabilization or to adopt a
fluid, situational identity that “disembogues” and “flows” and “gushes” and “purls” and “surges” are
the viscous losers of liquid modernity.
IV.3 Case Study: The Man with No Talents
286
Vera King, Benigna Gerisch, and Hartmut Rosa, “Introduction: ‘Lost in Perfection’—Ideals and
Performances,” Lost in Perfection, 2-3.
287
Bauman, Liquid Life, 3.
288
Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (New York: Verso, 2015), 51-52.
112
Consider the following testimony of a Tokyo day labourer who after graduating university
and working as a “salaryman” in a large Japanese firm decided to drop out of the corporate rat race
at the age 40 and lead a precarious existence as a casual labourer in the notorious San’ya district:
The demise of my career as a salaryman followed a distinct pattern. The trouble invariably
began with my habit of driving myself to extremes in order to conform to professional life
(that is, life as a company employee)…But there was no way to continue the impossible; and
indeed, my excessive compulsion to conform would lose momentum over time. A sudden
and unmitigated desire to absent myself from work would be accompanied by some
psychosomatic disorder…After going through this process countless times, I concluded to
myself upon arriving, finally, in San’ya, “I might as well face it: I’m just not suited for human
life.” Later I read a book or two on psychiatry and determined that my symptoms were akin
to a mild form of depression…I couldn’t hold down a steady job or get married…I so
lacked any energy for life that I was unable to confront my own sense of failure head on.289
Both clusters of antipodal symptoms outlined above are explicitly identified by the author himself:
the demands for constant performance and self-optimisation, and the inability to keep up, leading to
“psychosomatic disorders” and depression. Ōyama Shirō (the pseudonym used by the author)
wonders if his depression is not “simply a kind of defense mechanism, rooted in human weakness,
that allows people in my position to escape the frustration and anxiety and despondency that
naturally assail them?”290 Unlike many of the other casual day labourers at San’ya, Ōyama did not
drink or gamble,291 required little by way of accommodations, and spent his money parsimoniously.
289
Ōyama Shirō, A Man with No Talents: Memoirs of a Tokyo Day Laborer, trans. Edward Fowler
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2005), 4. Ōyama Shirō is a pseudonym. I follow the Japanese
custom of writing the author’s name in the order of family name first, given name second.
290
Ōyama, A Man with No Talents, 4-5.
291
While Ōyama candidly acknowledges the three main vices in San’ya—“drinking, gambling, and
whoring”—he admits to being predisposed only to the third. Ōyama, A Man with No Talents, 67-68.
113
By his own admission, he was driven to the district by his “utter lack of willpower” and recognized
in San’ya the “perfect hiding place”—“a place where someone lacking any vitality whatsoever could
go about the business of accommodating his own fecklessness and ill luck.”292
Ōyama, who submitted his manuscript as a lark to the top literary competition in Japan,
went on to win the prestige Kaikō Takeshi prize, which included a considerable sum of money.
Perhaps what is most revealing of his motivations is that he not only refused to avail himself of the
amenities and comforts of middle-class life after the money was transferred to his account, but that
he transitioned from the San’ya doyagai [lodging house district] to outright homelessness in order to
“avoid having to work altogether” and stretch out his prize winnings as long as possible. “The sum,”
he writes in the book’s postscript, “was by no means large enough to eliminate all anxiety about
surviving into old age, but it did liberate me for the time being from the necessity of plunging into
that predawn rush for a job.”293
Conclusion
We are now in a position to revisit the eight questions outlined above. First, the entity affected by
the social pathology diagnosis is the individual, not society. Organicist conceptions, while not
without merit, tend to overlook the subject’s agency, appropriative efficacy, and self-determination
(e.g., the functional meta-reflexives and the “players” of late-modernity may suffer no impediments
to self-realization) as well as the way that the conditions of late modernity directly undermine some
individuals’ relationship to the world, their pursuits and projects, and the real desire for an
accommodating, resonant world. If the fundamental concern of the alienation critique is the
292
Ōyama, A Man with No Talents, 5.
293
Ōyama, A Man with No Talents, 122. In the same postscript, Ōyama contends that the prize
money liberated him from “the demons of fear and uncertainty and profound anxiety” that had
threated to overwhelm his previous existence (130).
114
possibility of subjects’ successful relationship to the world, then our definition must be responsive to
the subject’s own ends.
Second, the “central cases” that a successful social pathology diagnosis which is attuned to
the late-modern epoch needs to capture are those pervasive and socially produced obstacles to self-realization:
as we shall see in the next chapter, these are the pathologies of individual freedom, pathologies of
de-synchronization, and pathologies of organizational self-realization. These are not meant to
capture the whole gamut of possible social pathologies nor those that might arise in the course of
time, but only the central contemporary cases which prevent late-modern subjects from establishing
a successful relationship to the world.
Third, according to alienation critique, a state of affairs is pathological because it impedes
successful appropriation of self and world and hence our capacity for self-realization, not vice versa.
This also means that the medical and naturalist vocabulary—“pathology,” “illness,”
“disease,” etc.—is to be understood metaphorically. What is really of concern is the possibility of a
successful relationship to the world.
Social pathologies, under our definition, need not share a common structure. While they are
defined as socially produced obstacles to self-realization, they may consist of an autonomization of
one sphere at the expense of others; a heteronomous, neoliberal injunction to realize oneself or
dispose over oneself as an entrepreneurial project; or various subjective alienations that impede or
ability to lead successful lives. The fact that they do no share a common structure also means that
the social pathology diagnosis remains open to the possibility of other criticizable social formations
and practices that may emerge in the future.
My hope is that this ethical-formal conception of the social pathology diagnosis not only
helps define a distinctive task of social philosophy, but it simultaneously enables a “thicker” species of
critique than is furnished by the moral critique with its focus on political legitimacy and justice while
115
at the same time providing what Honneth refers to as a “weak formal philosophical anthropology”
which is less “thick” than perfectionist conceptions of the good life and other content-based
universal standards of critique. As such, it stakes a middle ground that, ideally, can be deployed by
both analytical and continental social theorists without compromising its critical diagnostic and
prescriptive potential.
Seventh, as we shall in the next chapter, one of the main social pathologies discussed has to
do with a distorted form of self-realization in which the injunction to realize oneself becomes an
organizational imperative that prevents subjects from autonomous or non-alienated self-realization.
Finally, insofar as the conception of social pathologies are socially produced obstacles to
self-realization helps diagnose the “pathologies of individual freedom” stemming from the
autonomization of the spheres of legal and moral freedom, the “pathologies of de-synchronization”
stemming from the escalatory logic of dynamic stabilization and succeeds in realizing the promise of
modernity in the form of a successful appropriation of self and world that is currently under ailing
skies will determine whether this diagnostic conception is plausible, informative, and helpful. Let us
turn to these now.
Chapter 3
The Three Diagnostic Fronts
In the previous chapter, I situated ethical critique vis-à-vis moral critique, and argued that the novel
contributions of the appropriative model of alienated labour qua ethical critique can be organized
into four essential tasks: (i) symptomatology, (ii) aetiology, (iii) diagnosis, and (iv) prognosis/therapy.
116
In the chapter, I was primarily concerned with the first two tasks (symptomatology and aetiology),
but also put forward three novel claims regarding my account of ethical critique, which are worth
recapitulating in summary form.
First, contemporary political philosophy requires ethical critique in order to properly
diagnose alienating social formations, practices, and structures that are not adequately captured by
moral critique but nonetheless prevent late-modern subjects from leading successful lives. Second,
ethical critique is meant to supplement, not supplant, moral critique—which is to say, self-realization
requires both moral critique (the distributive, justice-based focus on equality) and ethical critique
(the removal of impediments to self-realization). However, if moral critique is regarded as the only
legitimate form of social critique, it remains severely limited in scope as well as diagnostic and
prescriptive potential, and, as we shall soon see, may even impede self-realization. Third, ethical critique,
under the appropriative model, does not run afoul of the ethical pluralism of contemporary societies
(and hence is able to bypass the arguments from ethical abstinence levelled at it by its critics),
because it abstracts from the particular content of the “good life” and focuses instead on the
conditions that facilitate the realization of a successful life.
These ethical-formal criteria, in turn, led us to adopt a definition of social pathologies as
socially produced obstacles to self-realization. I argued that this is a welcome development since it
simultaneously enables a “thicker” species of critique than is furnished by the moral critique without
the breach of ethical pluralism, controversial metaphysical loading, or dubious organicist views, that
attend rival definitions of social pathologies.
Turning to the first task, I began by outlining the symptoms or collective “malaises” of late
modernity. Deploying the alienation critique, I sorted these comorbid symptoms into two clusters:
illnesses of hyperactivity/self-optimisation and illnesses of inadequacy/self-responsibility. These
antipodal clusters, I maintained, constituted two sides of the late-modern Janus: in the first,
117
individuals try, frenetically, to keep up with the ceaseless, open-ended demands of self-foundation
and self-optimization; in the second, as a counterpoint to this unremitting expenditure of energy,
they lapse into burnout, depression, and feelings of inadequacy.
In addressing the aetiology of the symptoms of late modernity, I argued against monocausal
explanations and offered three developments or cultural forms, each with its own logic and
trajectory, that coalesce into a specific social formation and share an elective affinity with capitalism.
The first was the transition from disciplinary to achievement societies. The second was the process
of increasing individualization/reflexivization in late modernity. The third was the escalatory logic of
dynamic stabilization. In each case, I tried to demonstrate that the possibility of a successful
relationship to the world comes under severe strain in late modernity but deferred the diagnostic
analysis to this chapter.
What social pathologies do these symptoms and their aetiologies point to? Philosophers,
psychoanalysts, and social theorists have put forward various accounts of the social pathologies
suspected of giving rise to the comorbid symptoms of late modernity.
For example, Jürgen Habermas lists nine pathologies that stem from the tendency of the
“system” (sedimented structures and patterns of instrumental action, specifically the “steering
media” of money and power) to encroach upon or colonize the “lifeworld” (the everyday world with
share with others: culture, personality, society): (i) loss of meaning, (ii) withdrawal of legitimation;
and (iii) crisis in orientation and education as disturbances of cultural reproduction; (iv) unsettling of
collective identity, (v) anomie, and (vi) alienation as disturbances of social integration; and (vii) rupture of
tradition, (viii) withdrawal of motivation, and (ix) psychopathologies as disturbances of socialization.294
294
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, Volume Two: Lifeworld and System: A Critique of
Functionalist Reason, trans. Thomas McCarthy (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987), 143.
118
Charles Taylor identifies “three malaises” of modernity: loss of meaning in the form of a
disenchanted world, ushered in by untrammelled individualism; the primacy of instrumental reason
with its economic calculus, subjecting all aspects of life to the logic of the market; and the
powerlessness of individuals under the “soft despotism” of nominally democratic institutions over
which they have very little say or control.295
Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity296 marks the shift from a world of “solid”
order-building structures to one of protean “liquescence”—deregulation, flexibilization,
liberalization—in which “change is the only permanence and uncertainty the only certainty.”297 As a
result, the free-floating liquid subject is increasingly beset by social dislocation, indecision, insecurity,
and a privatized ambivalence:
To put it bluntly, under conditions of “liquidity” everything could happen yet nothing can be
done with confidence and certainty. Uncertainty results, combining feelings of ignorance
(meaning the impossibility of knowing what is going to happen), impotence (meaning the
impossibility of stopping it from happening) and an elusive and diffuse, poorly specified and
difficult to locate fear; fear without an anchor and desperately seeking one. Living under
liquid modern conditions can be compared to walking in a minefield: everyone knows an
explosion might happen at any moment and in any place, but no one knows when the
moment will come and where the place will be.298
The psychoanalyst, Josh Cohen, offers a fourfold typology of the “inertial character” of the
late-modern achievement-subject—the burnout, the slob, the daydreamer, and the slacker—whose
295
Charles Taylor, The Malaise of Modernity, CBC Massey Lecture Series (Toronto: Anansi Press,
2003), 1-12.
296
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Malden: Polity Press, 2019). See also: Zygmunt Bauman,
Liquid Life (Malden: Polity Press, 2005); and Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of
Uncertainty (Malden: Polity Press, 2017).
297
Bauman, Liquid Modernity, viii.
298
Bauman, Liquid Modernity, xiv.
119
lives involve a loss of interest in the external world, social withdrawal, forsaking worldly ambitions,
and so on, in response to the imperatives of work and ceaseless calls self-optimisation.299
In his book Lost Connections, Johann Hari lists nine causes of depression and anxiety in late
modernity: disconnection from meaningful work, disconnection from other people, disconnection
from meaningful values, disconnection from childhood trauma, disconnection from status and
respect, disconnection from the natural world, disconnection from a hopeful or secure future, genes,
and brain changes.300
One of the novel contributions of the alienation critique is the ability to capture what these
multifarious accounts have in common, and to offer an overarching reason for addressing them,
without presupposing any of the respective authors’ own controversial philosophical worldviews
(e.g., Habermas’s lifeworld/system distinction): social pathologies, under my ethical-formal account,
hinder self-realization. They disrupt, foreclose, or impede the ability of subjects to lead successful lives.
This fact alone is enough to warrant the attention of all political philosophers and social theorists
who take the ideals of freedom, self-determination, and flourishing seriously, regardless of their respective
political orientations or philosophical commitments. The goal of this chapter is to flesh out this claim in
detail. If I am successful, the novel contribution of the alienation critique cannot be underestimated.
In this chapter, I deploy the diagnostic potential of the alienation critique on three fronts,
corresponding loosely to one of the three aetiologies identified in Chapter 2. In the first section, I
examine the “pathologies of individual freedom” and argue that while legal and moral freedom are
integral parts of self-realization, there are limited in scope and, when taken as the whole of freedom,
generate their own social pathologies that hinder self-realization.
299
Cohen, Not Working.
300
Johann Hari, Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope (New York: Bloomsbury
Publishing, 2018), 69-190.
120
In the second section, I turn to the “pathologies of de-synchronization” (corresponding to
the mode of dynamic stabilization) and identify four alienations which disrupt or rupture the
subject’s self-world relation: alienation from place/actions, from things, from time, and from others.
Additionally, I argue that there are significant costs to social acceleration and dynamic stabilization
that are privatized in late modernity, compounding the estrangement of late-modern subjects who,
due to an inability to dynamize or to keep up, are regarded as “personal failures.”
In the third section (corresponding to achievement societies and the demands for ceaseless
self-optimization), I argue that the notion of self-realization itself has become pathological and been
co-opted as a form of critique into the service of the very system it sought to radically transform.
Nevertheless, the alienation critique enables us to distinguish non-alienated self-realization from its
pathological variant, organized self-realization and, in doing so, to retain the emancipatory potential
of the concept of self-realization (rather than jettisoning it altogether).
I. Self-Realization with Others: Pathologies of Individual Freedom
The process of individualization set in motion by the onset of late modernity consists of
transforming identity from an embedded “given” (premodernity), or a “co-operative undertaking” of
re-embedding modern subjects in an new collective enterprise or just society (classical modernity)
into an “individual task” and charging late-modern subjects with the plenipotentiary responsibility
for performing that task, on the one hand, and for the consequences, costs, and side-effects of their
performance, on the other (late modernity). In this section, I argue that there is a pathological gap
between the condition of late-modern subjects as individuals de jure (by law or rightful entitlement)
and late-modern subjects as individuals de facto (able to gain control over their life circumstances,
make the choices they desire, and pursue their own conceptions of the good and “ground projects”
via acts of successful appropriation of self and world). To put it another way, my thesis is not only
that being an individual de jure does not guarantee individuality de facto because late-modern subjects
121
lack the necessary resources to deploy the rights implied by the former (and required for the latter),
as Bauman suggests, but also that the autonomization of legal and moral freedom impede self-realization.
More specifically, I defend the following three claims: (i) legal and moral freedom are
necessary components of self-realization; (ii) nevertheless, regarded as the whole of freedom, they
are both limited in scope and insufficient for self-realization; (iii) moreover, the autonomization of
the spheres of legal and moral freedom amounts to socially produced obstacles to self-realization,
and hence represents “pathologies of individual freedom” that undermine the ability of individuals
to establish successful relations to others, to themselves, and to the world in a self-directed manner.
I.1 Negative Freedom
Honneth distinguishes three models of freedom that emerged from the discourse of
modernity: (i) negative freedom, (ii) reflexive freedom, and (iii) social freedom.301 The model of
negative freedom which arises, via Thomas Hobbes, out of the religious civil wars of the
seventeenth century defines freedom as the absence of external impediments to action. Human
beings are said to be free if they are unhindered by others in realizing their private aims, however
contingent or idiosyncratic. Political liberty is understood as the arena within which individuals can
act unobstructed by others. Although the contours of negative freedom would be elaborated in
different ways by subsequent thinkers such as John Locke, John Stuart Mill, and Robert Nozick,
“the idea remains that the purpose of freedom is to secure a protected free-space for egocentric
action, unimpeded by the pressures of responsibility toward others.”302 Accordingly, the sphere of
justice corresponding to the model of negative freedom is that of legal (i.e., abstract or formal) right.
Justice is the enforcement of subjective rights to non-interference in the form of a social contract
the secures the egoistic interests of individuals.
301
Honneth, Freedom’s Right, 15-67.
302
Honneth, Freedom’s Right, 23.
122
Legal freedom, which institutionalizes negative freedom, is both necessary and limited. It is
necessary for unalienated acts of appropriation, and hence for individual self-realization, insofar as
“the system of law or right [Recht] guarantees individuals a space of private autonomy in which they
can retreat from all existing role obligations and attachments in order to explore the meaning and
aims of their individual lives.”303 This is important for two reasons. First, it affords individuals the
ability to pursue their own aspirations and goals independently of their social roles and obligations,
especially when these become burdensome or threaten to overwhelm individuals’ resources and
eclipse their own ground projects. Second, in carving out a space free from the demands of social
conformity and cultural norms, it allows for Millian “experiments in living”304 in which individuals
are able to discover and explore a wide range of possible forms of the good life. In short, legal
freedom “offer[s] each individual an indispensable element of radical emancipation from all social
obligations.”305 Externally, it guarantees individuals the right to be safe from interference on the part
of the state or any other actor. Internally, it grants them a protected sphere in which they can
privately weigh, examine, and experiment with their life aims.
However, in defining freedom strictly in terms of the absence of external impediments,
individuals are left to the vagaries of desires whose content they do not autonomously determine.
Since internal impediments to action cannot be regarded as restrictions on freedom under the
negative model, they cannot play a role in determining whether an act is free or not. Zurn cites the
examples of the addict, the manipulated person, and the wanton as illustrations of this limitation.306
In each case, the individual’s actions may be “free” in the negative sense, but an inner compulsion
(in the case of the addict), distorted reasoning, preference-formation, or desires implanted by others
303
304
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty in The Basic Writings of John Stuart Mill: On Liberty, The Subjection of
Women, and Utilitarianism (New York: The Modern Library, 2002), 58.
305
306
Zurn, Axel Honneth, 158.
123
(in the case of manipulation) and capricious, unruly, or inveterate desires (in the case of the wanton)
clearly belie this conclusion. In a Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphism, drawn from Hans Fallada’s own
history of addiction, the protagonist, who shares the author’s name, spends an “ill-starred day” in
search of morphine:
When I woke up on the designated morning, staring into the void, I knew I had to have
morphine at any price. My whole body was painfully jittery, my hands shook, I was full of
crazy thirst, not just in my mouth and throat, but in every cell of my body…getting dressed
is incredibly hard, my joints are quivery and weak, the feeling of assurance gone, my body
doesn’t believe I’m going to be able to resupply it…Inevitably, my stomach refuses to keep
even that watery coffee down. I can feel my whole body shake with cramps, and then sour
bursts of bile. ‘I’m going to die,’ I whisper to myself, and stare into space.307
Fallada’s protagonist does not die and even succeeds in getting multiple injections of morphine, but
his inner compulsion for the opiate suggests a fundamental lack of freedom. Finally, consider Plato’s
description of the “tyrannical soul” in Book 9 of the Republic: The tyrannical soul, according to Plato,
will be “full of slavery and illiberality” with the best parts enslaved, and the most wicked acting as
master. It will “least do what it wishes…as a whole” (even as it freely pursues its immediate desires)
and be “full of disorder and regret”—“insatiable,” “maddened by…appetites and passions,” beset by
“wailing, groaning, lamenting and painful suffering.”308 Although such a soul may encounter no
external obstacles in the pursuit of its desires—it is useful to recall that Plato’s discussion is couched
in terms of an ongoing city-soul analogy—one could hardly call it free.
I.2 Pathologies of Legal Freedom: Juridification of Everyday Life and Chronic Aboulia309
307
Hans Fallada, Short Treatise on the Joys of Morphinism, trans. Michael Hofmann (Toronto: Penguin
Books, 2011), 2-4.
308
Plato, Republic, 577d-578a.
309
Literally, “without will”; diminished motivation; indecisiveness; aimlessness; “drifting along”
[Getriebensein].
124
In addition to its limitations, legal freedom also suffers from two social pathologies that take
the form of obstacles to self-realization, and hence merit discussion. Both pathologies involve the
autonomization of legal freedom. Rather than grasping the negative meaning of legal freedom,
“subjects take the latter to be the whole point of freedom and make it an exclusive point of
reference for their own relation-to-self.”310 In other words, they regard legal freedom as the ideal of
freedom itself. The first pathology is the juridification of everyday life in which the system of law
supplants the sphere of intersubjectivity, leaving formal rights as the only nexus between individuals,
and calcifying individual subjectivity into legal personality. In the legal codification of the lifeworld
individuals relate to others only as legal subjects, i.e., as bearers of rights, and govern their
interactions with each other in terms of their legal import. Therefore, in Hegel’s Elements of the
Philosophy of Right, we find the following passage:
If someone is interested only in his formal right, this may be pure stubbornness, such as
often encountered in emotionally limited people; for uncultured people insist most strongly
on their rights, whereas those of nobler mind seek to discover what other aspects there are
to the matter in question. Thus abstract right is initially a mere possibility, and in that respect
is formal in character as compared with the whole extent of the relationship. Consequently, a
determination of right gives me a warrant, but it is not absolutely necessary that I should
pursue my rights, because this is only one aspect of the whole relationship.311
The problem is not merely characterological as Hegel’s comments initially seem to suggest,
but rather that those who articulate all their aims, desires, and needs in terms of formal rights
become estranged from social life312: having expanded the sphere of legal freedom to encompass all
310
311
312
Axel Honneth, The Pathologies of Individual Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001),
35.
125
social relations, society becomes a large courtroom in which individuals are alienated from others,
from themselves, and from the communicative lifeworld, which is reduced to competing legal
claims. Perhaps one of the richest illustrations of this tendency is found in Honneth’s discussion of
the film Kramer vs. Kramer about a couple undergoing an acrimonious divorce. As the film progresses,
the characters increasingly regard themselves and others, as well as their own conduct, from the
perspective of their legal suit, tailoring their actions and relationships to those they think would be
viewed favourably by the court. This results in a deterioration of their relationship to their only son,
an instrumentalization of their dealings and friendships with others, and an autonomization of
juridical forms of action as the only means for resolving conflicts.
Chad Kautzer highlights a more concrete example of this “rights-centric” pathology in the
individuation of the U.S. Second Amendment right to bear arms into an unbounded private right via
the radicalization of the Castle Doctrine, which holds that acts of self-defence in private spaces and
on private property carry certain protections and immunities, to the Stand Your Ground Doctrine,
which drops the private spaces and private property restriction altogether. Kautzer concludes that
“[t]he dramatic expansion of the Second Amendment right in public spaces and institutions is
matched only by the intensity of the subjects’ passionate, exclusive and immediate identification with
it…the right is increasingly rendered synonymous with freedom as such.”313
The second pathology of legal freedom is chronic aboulia understood as “a deficit of will or
motivation, often leading to an inability to make decisions and plans.”314 Here the autonomization of
legal freedom does not involve a legal codification of the social lifeworld but the permanent retreat
into the sphere of formal rights, wielding its interruption of social obligations and postponement of
313
Chad Kautzer, “Self-Defensive Subjectivity: The Diagnosis of Social Pathology,” Philosophy and
Social Criticism 40 (2014), 748.
314
Andrew M. Colman, “Abulia,” Oxford Dictionary of Psychology, 4th ed. (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2015), 4.
126
communicative demands as a means of freeing oneself from having to make any commitments.
Therefore, chronic aboulia can be understood as the indefinite suspension of obligations without
filling the de-socialized lifeworld with formal rights and without the calcification of individual
subjectivity into legal personality. As such, it is not merely a lack of values or convictions; nor an
inability to form attachments or the consequence of an existential crisis or generalized ennui; nor an
instance of weak will; but a form of “drifting along” born of the ceaseless deferral of commitments,
“a light-hearted and often self-ironic tendency to put off any major decisions”315—a scepticism
about long-term value attachments married to an endless adolescence or puerilization of adulthood316
under the cover of legal freedom.
Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, the quintessential “superfluous man” in Russian literature and a
member of the moribund aristocracy, spends the entire novel, which shares his name,317 in bed
dreaming of his halcyon childhood and deferring matters of his estate and his marriage to Olga,
whom he loves, indefinitely, until he loses both (retaining a portion of his estate only through the
interventions of his best friend, Stoltz, who eventually marries Olga). While
“Oblomovism”/“Oblomovitis” [Обломовщина] has become a part of the Russian avos’,
synonymous with fatalistic inertia or sloth, it is Oblomov’s indecisiveness and fear of wading into
the lifeworld of commitments, obligations, and responsibilities that results in a “second childhood”
which mirrors the dreamworld of the first. At the end of the novel, Oblomov marries his widowed
landlady, Agafia, who acts as his solicitous caretaker, insulating him from the world of attachments
until he dies peacefully in his sleep.
315
316
Badiou, The True Life, 22-24.
317
Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov (New York: Penguin Books, 2005).
127
In Eva Illouz’s sociological study of modern relationships, Why Love Hurts, she diagnoses an
“aboulic commitment phobia” which demonstrates the pathological nature of contemporary aboulia.
Eugene, a divorced man, has been involved with Suzanna for two years:
Eugene: It has been difficult, although I love her very much.
Interviewer: Can you say why it has been difficult?
Eugene: Well, she wants children, a family…I hesitated for a long time, I thought
about this endlessly, I scrutinized myself as long as I could, and the amazing
thing is that I just could not see one way or another what I wanted to do. I
love her very much, but…in the end I could not decide. I just couldn’t decide
what I wanted, we broke up. I broke up. Maybe she could have continued
this way for a little while, but I felt I did not have the right to hold her back,
she needs to have a family with someone else. But until today, I don’t know
if I did well, until today, I don’t know what I really wanted.318
What is striking is not that Suzanna wanted a family and Eugene did not, which can hardly be
characterized as “pathological,” but the aboulic inability to arrive at a decision one way or the other.
Eugene is not sure what he wants. He does not say that, in the final analysis, he could not see
himself wanting a family; instead he tells the interviewer that after scrutinizing himself endlessly, he
“could not decide what [he] wanted” (nor, tellingly, has the passage of time afforded him any clarity).
Aboulic commitment phobia mimics the deferring, interruptive character of legal freedom indefinitely
with pathological results. One is reminded of a short exchange, punctuated by a listless indifference,
in Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1960 film L’Avventura:
Sandro: Good night, my love.
Claudia: Good night. Tell me that you love me.
318
Eva Illouz, Why Love Hurts: A Sociological Explanation (Malden: Polity press, 2012), 92.
128
Sandro: I love you.
Claudia: Tell me once more.
Sandro: I don’t love you.
By now it should be clear how the two pathologies of legal freedom impede self-realization.
Subject to the juridification of everyday life, individuals are incapable of participating in the social
lifeworld which, as legitimate bearers of rights, they increasingly come to view in terms of competing
legal claims. Not only are they estranged from others, from themselves, and from the sphere of
communicative action, but their self-realization is, at best, limited to assertions of legal personality.
In the case of chronic aboulia, all the social commitments, entanglements, and projects that enable
self-realization are thrown into abeyance and perpetually suspended, setting individual actors adrift.
In absolutizing the negativity of legal freedom, that is, in rendering the temporary suspension of
obligations permanent, the space of private autonomy it opens up is robbed of determinate content,
and the aboulic subject hollowed out. The social grounds for and content of self-realization,
endlessly postponed, can no longer be accessed. Rendered synonymous with freedom tout court,
“rights emblematize the ghostly sovereignty of the unemancipated individual in modernity.”319
I.3 Reflexive Freedom
In the eighteenth century thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant advanced
a new model of freedom based on the distinction between autonomous and heteronymous acts.
According to this “reflexive” model, in order for an act to be free it is not enough for it to be carried
out in the absence of external impediments; the act must also be traceable to the individual’s will.320
In other words, individuals are free if their actions are autonomously guided by their own intentions,
which is to say, if they reflectively endorse their motives and reasons for acting. There are two
319
Wendy Brown, “Rights and Losses,” States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (New
Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1995), 110.
320
129
strands of reflexive freedom: the first strand, made prominent by Kant, focuses on moral autonomy;
the second strand, made prominent by Rousseau, focuses on authenticity, personal integrity, and
individual self-realization. Corresponding to the autonomy strand, are procedural theories of justice
(e.g., Habermas and Rawls). Corresponding to the authenticity strand, there is liberal perfectionism
(e.g., Mill) and republicanism (e.g., Arendt). Despite their differences, all three theories of justice—
procedural, liberal perfectionist, and republican—share a common methodological procedure:
whether reflexive freedom is understood in terms of self-determination or in terms of individual
self-realization, “we deduce ideas about which institutional circumstances are needed to guarantee
that all individuals can realize either notion of freedom.”321
Like its predecessor, moral freedom, which institutionalizes reflexive freedom in the form of
moral rules and sanctions rather than state coercion, is a necessary but limited aspect of freedom.
Moral freedom is necessary for self-realization because it allows individuals to step back from the
social demands of everyday life in order to reflexively assess those demands from a moral standpoint
(or an impartial point of view of all those affected by them), and to reject those that cannot
withstand moral scrutiny. This enables individual actors to (i) critically evaluate their own beliefs,
desires, and motivations so that they may be better aligned with their own ends and moral ideals, (ii)
resolve communicative conflicts by engaging in practices of reciprocal justification, and (iii)
transform the existing lifeworld by ridding it of its morally unacceptable elements and forms of life.
The notion of moral freedom marks an improvement over its legal counterpart and
overcomes the latter’s limitations by insisting on the reflexive endorsement of desires and ends.
With legal freedom, it made no difference what the content of the actor’s desires or intentions was;
it is only with moral freedom that the idea of self-determination/self-realization comes to the fore.322
321
322
Hegel, Philosophy of Right, § 106 Addition.
130
Nevertheless, moral freedom suffers from its own limitations. Neither strand of moral freedom
“interpret[s] the social conditions that enable the exercise of freedom as elements of freedom itself.”
Moral freedom conceives of the social conditions as prerequisites for individual self-realization that
arise only when the question of a just order is raised. Thus, it stops short of these very conditions.323
Why does this matter? Part of self-realization is the availability of social goods and practices
necessary for realizing one’s aims, but these social goods and practices, including the aims they
support, are only candidates for moral freedom (i.e., candidates available for individuals to endorse)
if they are instantiated in the social environment. In other words, the social conditions predetermine
the content of self-realization as well as the parameters of moral deliberation. Hence, they are not
external to moral freedom, but constitutive of freedom itself. Zurn offers the following example:
[C]onsider the way in which the idea of a professionally rewarding career was not even a live
possibility for a woman in an eighteenth-century western nation—“professional woman”
was not an intelligible role in that society’s social practices—nor would a woman have been
able to freely realize a professionally rewarding career there, no matter how reflexively she
had determined herself to do so in accordance with her autonomy or authenticity.324
The fact that moral freedom stops short of considering the social conditions necessary for
self-realization (e.g., a woman pursuing a professionally rewarding career in the eighteenth century)
as elements of that freedom means that, like legal freedom, it plays only a limited role in social life.
Non-interference (in the form of subjective rights) and individual self-determination/self-realization
(in the form of reflexive endorsement) are necessary but insufficient conditions for successful acts of
appropriation. As we shall see in §3.IV.5., this means that individual (i.e., reflexive) self-realization
alone is not enough for the unalienated exercise of freedom.
323
324
131
IV.4 Pathologies of Moral Freedom: Uninhibited Moralism and Morally Justified Terrorism
Moral freedom is also susceptible to two social pathologies as a result of the autonomization
of the sphere of moral self-legislation without regard for the social context in which it is embedded.
Both pathologies alienate subjects from the social lifeworld and hence undermine rather than
facilitate their self-realization. Like the pathologies of legal freedom (§3.IV.2.), they can be described
as transforming a means into an end in itself. In the case of uninhibited moralism, individuals regard
themselves as “legislators over the entire world,” ignoring the facticity of social norms and practices,
including the foibles and follies of human nature, and detach themselves from the domain of fallible
interpersonal relationships in order to satisfy a criterion of universality validity.325 As Susan Wolf
argues in a well-known essay, moral sainthood is pathological not because it is unduly moralistic, but
because the “specific desires for objects, activities, and events that conflict with the attainment of
moral perfection are not simply sacrificed but removed, suppressed, or subsumed.”326 In taking up
the position of a universal legislator detached from the social lifeworld, the autonomy of oneself and
others is deformed and self-realization impeded because the moral ends that the legislating agent sets
are (i) no longer subject to limiting conditions (specifically, those stemming from the nature of their
attachments and relationships with others), and (ii) involve abstracting from all social commitments
and preconditions of intersubjectivity, which furnish the grounds for and content of self-realization.
This is not to suggest that uninhibited moralism is alienating because the legislating agent seeks to be
impartial or to adopt a moral stance; rather it is alienating when the agent attempts to do so in a
wholly detached, rigid, or unsituated way. The uninhibited moralism associated with de-differentiation and
self-legalisation is not rooted in the impartiality of moral freedom, but in the abandonment of all
325
Honneth, Freedom’s Right, 114-115.
326
Susan Wolf, “Moral Saints,” Virtue Ethics, ed. Roger Crisp and Michael Slote (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 84.
132
considerations of human fallibility and folly, interpersonal obligations and roles, and social identity
already operative in a given context.
Perhaps the most unsettling illustration of the pathology of uninhibited moralism is the
phenomenon of virulent online shaming. In most cases, those being shamed are guilty of some
moral indiscretion or wrongdoing (often of a racist or sexist nature), or a faux pas running afoul of
societal standards of propriety or good taste. None of this is in dispute—I cannot stress this enough:
it is not my intention to argue that no such moral transgression, impropriety, or gaffe has taken place.
Instead the pathological nature of uninhibited moralism lies in the fact that the condemnation of
those shamed, operating under the banner of moral probity and rectitude, becomes detached from
the facticity of the social lifeworld and is consequently no longer subject to any limiting conditions.
Stripped of all considerations of ethical life, uninhibited moralism lapses into rigid dogmatism, with
ruinous implications for the self-realization of the moral legislator as well as those being denounced.
Amongst the countless examples327 of online shaming that have become commonplace
today, consider the cases of Alicia Lynch, Justine Sacco, and Lindsey Stone. In 2013, 22-year-old
Alicia Lynch went to an office Halloween party dressed as a Boston Marathon bombing victim
(athletic wear, fake blood, runner’s number, etc.) and posted a picture of herself in costume, smiling,
one hand resting gently on her hip. The Twitterstorm was immediate:
“You should be ashamed, my mother lost both her legs and I almost died in the marathon.
You need a filter.”
327
For other examples of uninhibited moralism in the form of online shaming see “Dog Poop Girl”
(Seoul Subway Car), “Donglegate” (PyCon Technology Conference), Jennifer Kim (Amtrak Train
Crash Violin Request Tweet), Jonah Lehrer (Self-Plagiarism/Bob Dylan Quote Fabrication), Judith
Gricos (Cook Source Infringement Controversy), Juli Briskman (Trump Motorcade), Matt Taylor
(“Shirtstorm”), Melissa King (Miss Teen Delaware), Paul Christoforo (N-Control), Steve Bartman
(Cubs-Marlins Major League Baseball Game), Timothy Hunt (World Conference of Science
Journalists), and Zhang Ya (Sichuan Earthquake). For specifically Canadian examples, see Marcella
Zola (“Chair Girl”), Marisa Lazo (“Crane Girl”), and Ken Pagan (“Blue Jays Beer-Can Tosser”).
133
“[Y]ou are an absolutely disgusting human being.”
“[W]hat’d did you go as last year, a cancer victim?”
“Nice costume. Hope your mom gets cancer.”
“Alicia Ann Lynch @someskankinmi @shankaskank is the b**** from MI who wore the
marathon bombing costume. Make sure she fries, ignorant clam.”328
Alicia deleted all her social media accounts only reopening Twitter to issue an apology—to no avail.
She continued to be the subject of torrents of online abuse, received death threats, and lost her job.
Twitter users discovered that she had posted a picture of her driver’s license and used the
information to publish her home address and phone number and to attack members of her family.
They also circulated nude photos and videos of her found on Tumblr. She implored them to stop:
“Plz stop with the death threats towards my parents. They did nothing wrong. I was the one in the wrong and
I am paying for being insensitive.”
“I have been fired from my job. I am paying for what I thought was a simple joke. I know it was wrong now.
I wasn’t thinking.”
“I’m sorry.”329
The apologies and supplications fell on deaf ears. The case of Justine Sacco follows a similar
pattern. Justine was working as a publicist for IAC (InterActiveCorp) with 170 followers on Twitter,
when she sent out three poorly worded tweets, intended as jokes, on her way to South Africa:
328
Quoted in Rachel Zarrell, “What Happens When You Dress As A Boston Marathon Victim And
Post It On Twitter” Buzzfeed News, published November 2, 2013
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/rachelzarrell/what-happens-when-you-dress-as-a-boston-
marathon-victim
329
Quoted in Zarrell, “What Happens When You Dress As A Boston Marathon Victim And Post It
On Twitter.”
134
[On the plane from New York] “Weird German Dude: You’re in first class. It’s
2014. Get some deodorant.—Inner monolog as I
inhale BO. Thank god for pharmaceuticals.”
[On the layover at Heathrow] “Chili—cucumber sandwiches—bad teeth. Back in
London!”
[Before boarding the plane to Cape Town] “Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just
kidding. I’m white!”330
After Justine sent the last tweet, she wandered around the airport for a while, boarded the plane,
shut off her phone, and went to sleep. As she slept, her AIDS tweet started trending worldwide,
with comments pouring in from outraged Twitter users:
“In light of @JustineSacco disgusting racist tweet, I’m donating to @CARE today.”
“How did @JustineSacco get a PR job?! Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News.
#AIDS can affect anyone!”
“No words for that horribly disgusting, racist as f*** tweet from Justine Sacco. I am beyond
horrified.”
“I am an IAC employee and I don’t want @JustineSacco doing any communications on our
behalf ever again. Ever.”
[From her employer, IAC] “This is an outrageous, offensive comment. Employee in
question currently unreachable on an intl flight.”331
The uninhibited moralism quickly transformed into a malicious glee as countless bloggers,
celebrities, and Twitter users waited with bated breath for Justine’s plane to land. The hashtag
#hasjustinelandedyet began trending worldwide and someone working on the flight she was on
330
Quoted in Jon Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed (New York: Riverhead Books, 2015), 68.
331
Quoted in Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, 69.
135
linked to a flight tracker website, ensuring that its 11-hour progress could be monitored in real time.
When her plane landed at Cape Town International, a Twitter user was waiting to snap her picture.
“It’s kinda of wild to see someone self-destruct without them even being aware of it.”
“#hasjustinelandedyet may be the best thing to happen to my Friday night.”
“We are about to watch this @JustineSacco b**** get fired. In REAL time. Before she even
KNOWS she’s getting fired.”332
When she stepped off the plane, Justine was already a pariah. She was fired from her job.
Her extended family in South Africa, avid ANC supporters, accused her of indelibly tarnishing the
family name. Media websites started trawling through her Twitter feed for more humiliating tweets
(and found them). She was forced into seclusion, left New York to take up a volunteer job with an
NGO in Ethiopia, and cried her body weight in tears. The Gawker journalist, Sam Biddle,
responsible for the online blitzkrieg against her was unapologetic, revelling in “morose delectation”
[delectatio morose]333 at her swift destruction: “The fact that she was a PR chief made it delicious…It’s
satisfying to be able to say ‘OK, let’s make a racist tweet by a senior IAC employee count this time.’
And it did. I’d do it again.”334
Lindsey Stone had been working as a caregiver at LIFE (Living Independently Forever) with
her friend Jamie for a year and a half. As a running joke, they liked to take silly photos of themselves
(e.g., smoking in front a no smoking sign). On a trip to Washington D.C., they accompanied a group
of 40 adults with learning disabilities to the military cemetery in Arlington County across the
Potomac River. There they came upon a small sign: “ARLINGTON NATIONAL CEMETERY:
SILENCE AND RESPECT.” Jamie took a picture of Lindsey making a vulgar gesture next to the
332
333
“The habit of dwelling with enjoyment on evil thoughts” (Catholic Theology)—akin to the
German Schadenfreude and the Greek epicaricacy/epichairekakia [ἐπιχαιρεκακία].
334
136
sign and posted it on Facebook. Four weeks later, someone saw the photo and circulated it online.
The denunciations started pouring in as the friends were celebrating their birthdays at a restaurant:
“Lindsey Stone hates the military and hates soldiers who have died in foreign wars.”
“Just pure Evil.”
“The face of a Typical Feminist. Fifty pounds overweight? Check. Sausage arms and little
piglet fingers? Check. No respect for the men who sacrificed [their lives]? Check.”
“Spoke with an employee from LIFE who told me there are Veterans on the board and that
she will be fired. Awaiting info on her accomplice.”
“HER FUTURE ISN’T RUINED! Stop trying to make her into a martyr. In 6 months no
one except those that actually know her will remember this.”335
[The incident occurred in 2012.]
A “Fire Lindsey Stone” Facebook page was created garnering over 12,000 likes. Her employer would
not allow her back on the LIFE premises (she was asked to hand over her keys in the parking lot).
Camera crews hounded her family. Lindsey issued an apology, but the vitriol continued unabated.
She fell into a deep depression, refused to leave the house, and in the year that followed the incident
her numerous applications for care work, a profession she enjoyed and loved, yielded no call backs.
Agoraphobic and crestfallen, she withdrew into herself:
“I became obsessed with reading everything about myself.”
“Literally, overnight everything I knew and loved was gone.”
“I felt so terrible for Justine Sacco and that girl at Halloween who dressed like the Boston Marathon
victim.”336
335
Quoted in Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, 208-209.
336
Quoted in Ronson, So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, 209-211.
137
As Mark Fisher notes, “Twitter can often be a miserable, dispiriting zone…What [those who
had been shamed] had said was sometimes objectionable; but…the way they were personally vilified
and hounded left a horrible residue: the stench of bad conscience and witch-hunting moralism.”
This online dynamic, Fisher argues, is driven by “a priest’s desire to excommunicate and condemn.”337
The strength of the diagnosis of uninhibited moralism as a pathology of moral freedom is that it can
grant that a moral lapse or breach of propriety/social etiquette has been committed in such cases
and, bracketing the litany of misogynistic comments and calls for violence in the Twittersphere
(both problematic in their own right), it can provide an answer to an otherwise perplexing question:
What has gone astray in those self-legislators who denounce others from bona fide moral motives?
First, is the tendency to individualize and privatize moral transgressions to the exclusion of
the impersonal structures that may have contributed or given rise to them. Second, is the proclivity
to abstract from a given social context as if the behaviour being roundly condemned was born in a
metaphysical vacuum, or stems from an act of sheer voluntarism. Third, is the conspicuous refusal
to countenance any social circumstances or factors that might explain or mitigate the act in question.
If we combine all three explanations, we can put the argument as follows.
It is as if those being publicly shamed exist somewhere beyond the scope of human error,
imperfection, or folly; somewhere beyond the social lifeworld shared by their fellow Twitter users,
no longer subject to its allurements, pressures, and vicissitudes; somewhere external to its facticity,
where no structural constraint, no extenuating circumstance, no mitigating condition, no exigency,
no interpersonal relation, no youthful “lack of good sense,” no difficult childhood or wayward
upbringing, no private foible or quirk, no clumsy misstep can temper what they are being accused of
(that is why the apologies of those who have been publicly shamed are for the most part ineffectual).
337
Mark Fisher, “Exiting the Vampire Castle” K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark
Fisher (2004-2016) (London: Repeater Books, 2018), 737, 740.
138
In its zeal to condemn and denounce, to self-legislate from the vantage point of abstract universality,
uninhibited moralism makes a tyranny of virtue, drastically restricting the potential for self-realization
both in the moral legislators (who set themselves over and above the social lifeworld) and in others
(whose opportunities for genuine self-realization are severely jeopardized, if not entirely foreclosed).
Freed from the dense facticity of the social lifeworld, uninhibited moralism plunges back to
earth in the form of a captious, hypercritical, and pettifogging fixation on the minutiae of social life.
Here, we would do well to heed Kant’s warning against “fantastic virtue” and the “micrological
conscience” (i.e., a conscience “burdened with many small scruples on matters of indifference”)338
that attends it:
[T]hat human being can be called fantastically virtuous who allows nothing to be morally
indifferent (adiaphora) and strews all his steps with duties, as with mantraps…Fantastic virtue is
a concern with petty details which, were it admitted into the doctrine of virtue, would turn
the government of virtue into tyranny.339
The sphere of moral freedom can also become pathological when morality is used as a
justification for the use of any means to achieve moral ends. This often begins with justified doubts
about the legitimacy of a prevailing social order. As we saw earlier (§3.IV.3), moral freedom is
indispensable for creating a critical distance through which individuals can expose and critique the
injustices of the existing lifeworld. However, if this questioning devolves into a pervasive mistrust of
all social rules and institutional arrangements, a moral standpoint of its potential victims is adopted,
and the social order is rejected wholesale. Once moral freedom is severed from its social context,
i.e., from the attachments, commitments, organisations, practices, relationships, and values that are
338
Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind, trans. Peter Heath (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), [VE 27:356] 134.
339
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, ed. and trans. Mary Gregor (New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2009), [MS 6:409] 167.
139
already embedded in it, all means, including terrorism, are considered justified in attacking what is
seen as a morally bankrupt social order. Of course, there are forms of terror that do not invoke
universalist values, but in the case of those that do, the abstract, detached exercise of self-legislation
can inspire a morally justified terrorism.
IV.5 Self-Realization with the Others and the Promise of Modernity
What conclusion should we draw from the “pathologies of individual freedom”? The first
thing to note is that both legal and moral freedom are necessary, but insufficient, for self-realization.
Not only are they limited in scope, but taken as the whole of freedom, they give rise to social
pathologies that impede rather than promote self-realization. It is, however, the third point that I
would like to focus on here.
The idea that the conditions of individual freedom—of being an individual de facto—cannot
be adequately realized without reference to a form of intersubjective ethical life or without recourse
to a communal, cooperative endeavour is not new. One conclusion we can draw from the
pathologies of individual freedom is that individual self-realization can only be attained with others,
or as Honneth puts it in describing Marx’s position, “freedom of self-realization relies on that
freedom being supplemented by others.”340 So far so good.
But I would like to advance an additional, more challenging thesis: that the “promise of
modernity”—the promise of autonomy, reflexive endorsement, and self-determination; the idea that
“[h]ow we, as subjects, should lead our lives should not be pre-determined by political or religious
powers beyond our grip, not be king or church, not by a social order which pre-defines our place in
the world…[r]ather it should be left to the individuals themselves”341—which once went hand in
hand with modernization, is broken or no longer credible under conditions of late modernity. The
340
341
Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration, 77-83.
140
“pathologies of individual freedom” point to one obstacle hindering its realization. Put differently,
the diagnoses of the alienation critique should not be of interest only for communitarians, Marxists,
and so on, but for all those who share this commitment to autonomy and ethical self-determination.
The alienation critique, so understood, is concerned with the blockage of the social freedom
required to realize the broken promise of modernity. Thus, I am in agreement with Jaeggi that the
alienation critique helps us “gain insight into how demanding the preconditions for being the subject
of one’s own life really are, and…helps one to see the shortcomings of the liberal idea of freedom.
An alienation perspective allows us to see what kind of social preconditions we need in order to be
free.”342 As socially produced obstacles to self-realization all the pathologies I discuss in the rest of
the chapter can be regarded as impediments to the realization of this broken promise of modernity.
II. Pathologies of De-Synchronization
In the previous section (§3.I) we saw how the autonomization of the spheres of legal and moral
freedom in the form of hyper-individualization and uninhibited self-legislation associated with the
reflexive imperative of late modernity gives rise to numerous “pathologies of individual freedom.”
The escalatory logic of dynamic stabilization and social acceleration, ushered in by the capitalist
mode of production, results in a second set of social pathologies the afflict late-modern subjects.
These pathologies arise from the inability of late-modern subjects to keep up with the demands of
social acceleration, specifically, the ability to dynamize, on the one hand, or to successfully dynamize
but at the expense of individuals’ “stability” (i.e., their mental and physical well-being), on the other.
As such, this set of pathologies focuses on the escalatory temporal dimension of late modernity.
Subjects fall “out of sync” with place/actions, with things, with time, and with others.
The pathologies of de-synchronization highlight the effects of ceaseless dynamization on the
late-modern subject’s identity and self-world relation. In what follows, I examine four of these
342
Fraser and Jaeggi, Capitalism, 134.
141
pathological effects from the vantage point of the alienation critique: the first having to do with the
“illegible world” understood as the late-modern subject’s alienation from place/actions; the second,
with the “disposal world” understood as the late-modern subject’s alienation from things; the third,
with the “timeless world” understood as the late-modern subject’s alienation from time; the fourth,
with the “fragmented world” understood as the late-modern subject’s alienation from others
(§§3.II.1-4). In each case, I argue that the escalatory logic of dynamic stabilization radically disrupts
or ruptures subjects’ self-world relation, significantly undermining their avenues for self-realization.
My claim is not only that there are significant costs to social acceleration but that these costs are
privatized in late modernity, i.e., laid at the feet of subjects, compounding their estrangement.
II.1 The ‘Illegible World’: Alienation from Place / Alienation from Actions
One of the central aspirations of the project of modernity was to make the world more
“legible,” that is, to make the world speak or respond to the modern subject’s desire for meaning.
The escalatory logic of dynamization, which dissolved all traditional symbolizations in its wake,
nonetheless promised to re-enchant the world it had laid bare, to bring a new world within reach—
through the collective accumulation of knowledge; through enlarging humanity’s share of the world;
through mastery over nature; through the inexorable march of science and technological progress—
in short, it promised to make the modern world appropriable or legible to subjects, like an open book.
The promise of modernity, according to the poet (and students of May ’68) lay under the paving
stones:343 “Slumb’ring deep in every thing / Dreams a song as yet unheard, / And the world begins to
sing / If you find the magic word.”344 The German concept of Heimat [“home”/“homeland”], which
has no equivalent translation in the English, is meant to capture this notion of an accommodating,
343
Famous French slogan from May ’68 (Sorbonne): “Sous les paves la plage”—“Beneath the
pavement, the beach” or “Under the paving stones, the beach.” See Julien Besançon (ed.), The Walls
Have the Floor: Mural Journal May ’68 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2018), 24.
344
Joseph Freiherr von Eichendorff, “Divining Rod,” trans. Alison Turner in German Poetry from 1750
to 1900, ed. Robert M. Browning (New York: Continuum, 1984), 145. See also Rosa, Resonance, 229.
142
responsive world made resonant and understandable, a “right place” or “right segment of world”
that has been adaptively transformed so that the conditions for appropriative efficacy, on one hand,
and symbolic efficiency on the other, in direct opposition to alienation, are met.
Paradoxically, the escalatory logic of modernity has had the opposite effect: the more
differentiated the structures of late modernity, the more they are prone to disintegration (Durkheim);
the more culture is subject to rationalization, the more corrosive is the erosion of meaning (Weber);
the more individualized the late-modern personality, the more massified the culture (Simmel); the
more domesticated our relation to nature, the greater the risk of eco-catastrophe (Marx).345 Consider
the mediums of science and technology: “with every expansion of the scope of science and technology, the
horizon of the unreachable also expands.”346 The more science develops, the more the promise of science
elude us. Rather than re-enchanting the world by making it more legible, science formalizes
disenchantment. As Max Weber solemnly notes in “Science as a Vocation,” “Every scientific
‘fulfillment’ means new ‘questions’ and cries out to be surpassed and rendered obsolete…to be
superseded scientifically is not simply our fate but our goal…this progress is infinite.”347 The more
modern physics advances, the opaquer the world that it describes (think of the notorious complexity
of quantum theory/physics). No body of scientific knowledge or corpus survives this inexorable
process of hyper-dynamization. The more “interactive” the dazzling array of technologies at our
fingertips, the more passive we become. The more prospective partners are brought into our virtual
orbit on internet dating sites and phone apps, the colder our intimacies. The more “liquid” our
relationships, the lonelier we are. Even research studies, with their cautious conclusions, tailored to
the general public and the media, result in bewildering antimonies (How much exercise is required
345
Rosa, Social Acceleration, 58-62; Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration, 40.
346
347
Max Weber, The Vocational Lectures: “Science as a Vocation” “Politics as a Vocation,” ed. David Owen
and Tracy B. Strong, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2004),
11.
143
for subjects to be fit and healthy? What food should one eat? Is chocolate/coffee/wine in
moderation bad for one’s health or good?) and the minutiae of everyday natural processes become
the subject of daedal, multilayered debates. Diet and self-help books proliferate, each with
conflicting advice and intricate disciplinary regimes. Aporias abound. Basic life decisions—what field
to study, if any, and where; what career to pursue; what banks, credit cards, energy providers, and
insurance companies to use—all become “illegible.” We must define for ourselves what we want
and how to get it, but the logic of dynamic stabilization means that even the information we require
to make decisions is always in flux: partial, stillborn (instantly outdated), and increasingly subject to
unceremonious contestation, revision, or revocation. Additionally, the acceleration of the pace of
life, condensation of action episodes, and contraction of the present mean that we lack the time to
familiarize ourselves with the ever-changing surfeit of data and information that is available to us.
Pages upon pages of business statements, contracts, guides, manuals, and service agreements are
avoided or consented to without careful inspection or review, burdening subjects with a guilty
conscience and setting them adrift in a sea of “known unknowns”: “Do you have the best insurance
company, bank account, energy supplier and old-age pension scheme (or nursing-service for your
parents) you can get?…[A]re you confident, at least, that the conditions [on] offer are OK? If not:
How can you feel ‘at home’ when dealing with these issues?”348
Oversaturated, incomprehensible, and without resonance, late modernity is bereft of
consolation or guidance. Rather than enlarging our share of the world or rendering it meaningful,
the compulsion to escalate “erode[s] all of the niches in which we could feel at home and adaptively
transform the world for ourselves.”349 It renders the world inappropriable and mute, and transforms
the most basic actions and life decisions into precarious gambles.
348
Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration, 89.
349
144
Escalatory modernity results in a “dichotomous split” in the subject’s relationship to the
world. On one hand, the central institutions of modernity—the economy, science, technology—
promise to increase individuals’ shares of the world by making it legible or responsive to their
desires and ends. On the other hand, they enforce a mute “relation of relationlessness” to the world,
in which the efforts to make the world more accessible, attainable, and available render it alien to us:
mastery over nature is transformed into environmental destruction and a global climate crisis;
technological innovation into a runaway world that is bewildering, opaque, and replete with
unknown risks responsive only to market forces; the internet, social media, and virtual exchanges
into cold intimacies and interpassivity. The fear and trepidation that these paradoxes engender does
not reside in the fact that we might lose the world as a resource, “but that nature might fall mute as a
sphere of resonance, [as] an independent counterpart capable of responding to us and thus giving us
some orientation”350—as a place or segment of the world that speaks to us, that has something to
say. It is this muting of the legible world—“the eternal silence of these infinite spaces” (Pascal) that no
longer resonate with the music of the spheres—that fills us with dread. In commenting on Pascal’s
pensée, Peter Kreeft sums up this alienation from place as follows:
The usual way of describing this change [i.e., the process of modernization] is to say that
scientific knowledge of nature and technological control of it have progressed immensely;
that man now has a radically greater knowledge of nature. This is exactly the opposite of the
truth. Our knowledge of nature has shrunk. For nature now appears empty, purposeless,
meaningless. This is a minus, not a plus…modernity is not demythologized but orphaned,
delivered not from superstition but from home.351
350
351
Peter Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans: Pascal’s Pensées Edited, Outlined and Explained (San
Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 135-136.
145
Of course, one need not accept Kreeft’s conclusion that “we are alienated from our cosmic mother”
or that modern alienation echoes the Fall352 to realize that the fundamental promise of modernity—
“[t]hat we can go out into the world to find the place that ‘speaks to us’ or ‘appeals to us,’ where we can feel at home,
that we can make our own”353—is lost in late modernity, sacrificed on the altar of ceaseless
dynamization. In its place is the fundamental anxiety of the rootless late-modern subject who has,
like the speaker of T. S. Eliot’s disconsolate poem, “heard the mermaids singing, each to each”—
only to conclude: “I do not think that they will sing to me.”354
II.2 The ‘Disposal World’: Alienation from Things
The thing-world consists of objects that we produce and objects that we consume or use.
The longer we spend with objects of consumption/use, the more they get appropriated by us—that is,
the more they become part of our everyday routine, part of our history, part of our lived experience;
the more they bear our stamp, are incorporated into our identity, admit of our sensuous particularity.
Social acceleration upends, or ruptures, this temporal relation to the thing-world. According to Rosa,
as consumption, exchange-rates, and production speed up and commodities become infinitely more
complex, we no longer repair objects and we lose our practical knowledge of how to maintain them.
Ephemeral, interchangeable, and easily discarded or replaced, they become “alien” to us355—but
even this complaint, having succumbed to the dynamics of social acceleration long ago, now strikes
us as anachronistic, recalling the 19th century artisanal-Romantic critique of industrial capitalism by
John Ruskin and William Morris. Today, a different diagnosis is needed. In industrial capitalism, the
fetishism of commodities involved a “misplaced concreteness”: the reification of commodities
concealed the intersubjective relations undergirding their production. A process of hypostatization
352
Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans, 136, 138.
353
354
T. S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in The Complete Poems and Plays (London: Faber
and Faber, 1969), 16.
355
146
imbued them with fantastical powers thought to inhere in them as objects. In late modernity, what
Walter Benjamin calls the “aura” of objects—that is, the embedded, irreproducible, and singular
“tissue of space and time” constituting their authenticity and uniqueness356—is not merely “reified”:
it is altogether lost. In the accelerated cycle of capitalist production-obsolescence-replacement,
objects are successively stripped of their auras. The changing historical conception of commodities
charts this dynamic process of acceleration-induced liquefaction: use-value gives way to the
operational and performance capabilities of the object; performance to the object’s status-conferring
property; status to the pleasure associated with the object’s acquisition and ownership; pleasure to
the object’s semiosis, which we purchase directly to instill our lives with meaning and value.
Alienation reaches its zenith when a recurring cycle of acquisition-boredom-disinterest-fungibility-substitution
becomes the dominant mode of relating to the thing-world. As the rate of social change accelerates,
the new emphasis on the disposal of things, on abandoning them, getting rid of them,
instead of their appropriation well suits the logic of our consumer-oriented economy. People
sticking to yesterday’s clothes, computers, mobiles, or cosmetics would spell disaster for an
economy whose main concern, and the condition sine qua non of its survival, is a rapid and
accelerating assignment of sold and purchased products to waste.357
Consumer goods are acquired only to be discarded or set aside, like lifeless marionettes, as the
ecstasy of buying gives way to instantaneous boredom, dissatisfaction, and ennui. Books lie unread,
devices idle, raiment unworn, tools unused. Merchandise is rendered obsolete at the point of
purchase. In the tumult of social acceleration—mass production, hyper-consumption, desuetude—
356
Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility: Second
Version,” The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on Media, ed.
Michael W. Jennings, Brigid Doherty, and Thomas Y. Levin, trans. Edmund Jephcott, Rodney
Livingstone, Howard Eiland, and Others (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University
Press, 2008), 19-55.
357
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty (Malden: Polity Press, 2017), 104.
147
previous cycles of replacement are superseded by instant turnover. We buy options and potentialities
instead of goods until only the act of buying remains “to compensate for the forgone ‘real’
consumption through increased ‘shopping’.”358 Consider the following passage from Don DeLillo’s
eighth novel, White Noise. The protagonist, Jack Gladney, is told by a colleague that he looks like a
“big, harmless, aging, indistinct sort of guy,” which puts Jack in a “mood to shop”:
Babette and the kids followed me into the elevator, into the shops set along the tiers,
through the emporiums and department stores, puzzled but excited by my desire to buy.
When I could not decide between two shirts, they encouraged me to buy both. When I was
hungry, they fed me pretzels, beer, souvlaki. The two girls scouted ahead, spotting things
they thought I might want or need, running back to get me, to clutch my arms, plead with
me to follow. They were my guides to endless well-being…I shopped with reckless abandon.
I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake,
looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it. I
sent clerks into their fabric books and pattern books to search for elusive designs. I began to
grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a
person I’d forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me…I traded money for goods. The
more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums…[They]
came back to me in the form of existential credit. I felt expansive, inclined to be sweepingly
generous…Voices rose…from the gardens and promenades, a roar that echoed and swirled
through the vast gallery, mixing with the noises from the tiers, with shuffling feet and
chiming bells, the hum of escalators, the sound of people eating, the human buzz of some
vivid and happy transaction.359
358
359
Don DeLillo, White Noise (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 83-84.
148
Not only do consumer goods play no role in the whirlwind of corybantic buying—they are not
ancillary but immaterial to it—they vanish altogether. Only that “vivid and happy transaction” exists.
According to Jonathan Crary, previous cycles of replacement were at least long enough to maintain
the illusion of semi-permanence, whereas the new accelerated cycles require two contradictory
attitudes to exist: “on the one hand, the initial need and/or desire for the product, but, one the other
hand, an affirmative identification with the process of inexorable cancellation and replacement.”360
More tellingly, despite the short-lived euphoria of unbridled virtual consumption, the Gladney
family’s disenchantment is immediate: “We drove home in silence. We went to our respective
rooms, wishing to be alone. A little later I watched Steffie in front of the TV set. She moved her lips,
attempting to match the words as they were spoken.”361
The loss of aura and disposability of objects means that they no longer disclose a “world,”
severing our relation to others and to the social lifeworld. In the popular A&E reality TV series
Storage Wars, auction-goers bid on storage lockers on which rent has not been paid for three months
(they are given five minutes to inspect them from the doorway) and then rummage through the
lockers searching for high-priced items in the hope of making a sizeable return on their investment.
A running, on-screen display tallies their net profit or loss. At no point in the show do the bidders,
each with their own zealous fanbase, or the riveted viewers consider why the original locker owners
failed to pay rent and abandoned their personal items: Did they die? Become ill? Fall on hard times?
Get incarcerated? Leave the state? Nor do any of the objects, however intimate or treasured,
however steeped in personal history or coated with the fine dust of memory, register any meaning
outside the monetary gains they can secure when resold. Pictures and family albums are destroyed.
Old toys are discarded (unless they can be sold to avid collectors). Family heirlooms and antiques are
360
Jonathan Crary, 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep (New York: Verso, 2014), 44-45.
361
DeLillo, White Noise, 84.
149
appraised by experts to determine their pecuniary “worth.” The acceleration of cycles of
replacement effectively bestows a similar fate on all consumer goods at the point of purchase.
Consequently, the disposal world is one in which the ceaseless dynamization of the cycles of
replacements entails the erasure of the past.
In 1928, Benjamin wrote, “Warmth is ebbing from things. Objects of daily use gently but
insistently repel us.”362 Today, objects do not repel; they beckon us with their hypnotic
disappearance like lambent wraiths, shimmering in immaculate marble malls, inviting us to bask in
the spectral glow of their self-annulment. As for those who cannot keep up with this rate of instant
turnover or with the relentless search for ever-newer sensations that are consummated at the moment of
purchase, we can sum up their fate as follows: “Woe to those who, because of a dearth of assets, are
doomed to go on using goods that no longer hold the promise of new and untried sensations; woe
to those who…are stuck with one good instead of browsing through the full, and apparently
inexhaustible, assortment.” Such people, Bauman argues, are “the outcasts in the society of
consumers, the flawed consumers, the inadequates and incompetents, the flops; the emaciated
starvelings amidst the opulence of the consumer feast.”363
II.3 The ‘Timeless World’: Alienation from Time
In premodernity, time was largely “cyclical” (the repetition of the collective rhythms of social
life, daily routines, shared milestones, and seasonal patterns led to a congruence between the space
of experience and the horizon of expectation); after the initial surge of dynamization in classical
modernity, a divergence of time horizons resulted in a “linear” conception of time (past and future),
in which the subject’s daily routine conformed to a predefined time schedule; in late modernity, the
362
Walter Benjamin, One-Way Street, trans. Edmund Jephcott, ed. Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge:
The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2016), 38.
363
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love (Malden: Polity Press, 2010), 50.
150
“temporalization of time” means that “the duration, sequence, rhythm, and tempo of actions,
events, and relationships are first decided in the course of their execution, that is, within time itself.”
This has profound implications for the identity and self-world relation of modern subjects.
The “temporalization of time” detemporalizes, or dissolves, the authoritative life course regimes of
classical modernity—leaving late-modern achievement-subjects without any signposts or orientation
(when to acquire an education, to fall in love, to settle down, to marry, to have kids, to start working,
to retire, etc. no longer admit of any sequential order or correspond to a particular age or station).
As a result of this detemporalization, all chronological stages of existence, biographical narratives,
life course regimes, diachronic plans, predetermined schedules, sequential or systemic time windows,
(i.e., all “strategic conducts of life”) are rendered untenable: only a fully reflexive context-dependent
“situational conduct of life”—flexible, multifarious, protean, synchronic, time-juggling—can ensure
a functional appropriation of self and world. Those who are able to embrace the situational logic of
temporal dynamization are the “players” of late modernity. For them, the temporalization of time is
a generator of possibilities, which they don and doff as they please, like mad hatters, always evading
their sentence of death for “murdering the time.”
It should come as no surprise now that this manumission of time gives rise to its obverse:
the lack of predefined time schedules does not mean that late-modern subjects are able to reap the
benefits of flexibilization by conducting their life activities at any time around the clock. Instead,
because every activity requires its own arrangements, coordination, deadlines, duration, and motive,
it comes with a profusion of options and contingencies that make its execution tortuously complex.
In each case, a great deal of pre-planning is required in order to guarantee the late-modern subject’s
autonomy and appropriative efficacy but this is precisely what the temporalization of time rules out:
with the social dynamization of time, the duration, sequence, rhythm, and tempo of activities is
decided in the course of their performance—outside of which they are undecidable, unforeseeable, and
151
unplannable. The only recourse for late-modern achievement-subjects who are unable to dynamize
or take up this situational imperative is to give up the aspiration to autonomy and become “drifters,”
espousing a reactive fatalism.364
Nor, I should add, are subjects liberated from the time constraints of classical modernity,
since their activities, which can be undertaken at any time now, overflow their former time frames.
For example, the fact that employees and workers can answer e-mails outside work hours does not
mean that they are free to do so; it means that they must do so or risk falling behind their co-workers.
The fact that we are never “at” work, means that we are always at work, and so on. Thus, the
displacement of regulatory time associated with late modernity entails the ubiquitous colonization of time.
As Crary persuasively demonstrates, “[a] 24/7 environment has a semblance of a social world, but it
is actually a non-social model of machinic performance and a suspension of living that does not
disclose the human cost required to sustain its effectiveness.”365 We will revisit this idea in Chapter 4.
Like the disposability of objects, the temporalization of time results in an erasure of the past.
Prior to the onset of late modernity, the “subjective paradox of time” meant that the time of experience
and the time of remembrance were inversely related. If subjects are engaged in activities that they enjoy
(spending time with friends on languorous summer afternoons, working on a “labour of love,” etc.),
in the course of the day, time goes by very quickly. But when looking back at the end of the full day,
they feel that this day was long. This form of time-experience can be characterized as “short/long.”
If, on the other hand, subjects are engaged in dull or instrumental activities that they do not enjoy
(waiting in long queues or congested traffic, doing a job they hate, etc.), the course of the day feels
interminably long with time moving extremely slowly. But when looking back at the end of the day,
it is remembered as a very short one in memory (“nothing happened—I spent all day at the office!”).
364
365
Crary, 24/7, 9.
152
This form of time-experience can be characterized as “long/short.” With the dynamization of time,
a new form of impoverished time-experience emerges. Imagine turning on the TV early in the day
and binge-watching a TV series that you like. Provided the series is engaging, time passes by quickly.
But at the end of the day, you barely remember the period of TV-watching: it vanishes from memory.
This form of time-experience is “short/short”: time goes by quickly and diminishes from memory.366
Benjamin’s distinction between Erlebnissen (episodes of experience) and Erfahrungen
(experiences which leave their stamp on subjects and are thus relevant to their identity and history)
helps illustrate the alienating effect of short/short time patterns.367As Rosa notes, Benjamin’s
prediction that there may come a time in which subjects are rich in Erlebnissen but poor in
Erfahrungen has come to pass.368 The proliferation of short/short time patterns means that we are
glaringly poorer in lived-experiences (Erfahrungen), i.e., that time slips through our fingers in the form of
disjointed and disparate episodes (Erlebnissen) which we fail to appropriate—or to make our own. Rosa
sums up this dilemma as follows: “[W]hat happens here is a lack of ‘appropriation of time’, we fail to
make the time of our experience ‘our’ time: The episodes of experience, and the time devoted to
them, remain alien to us.”369 Since Erlebnissen do not leave memory-traces, we forget them right away,
and the past invariably eludes us.
Finally, the temporal dimension of social acceleration sheds light on depression as a
“pathology of time.” First, burnout, depression, and feelings of inadequacy are consequences of the
acceleration of the pace of life—contraction of the present; proliferation of assignments and tasks;
increased stress levels; interminable to-do lists, undesired time pressure; hectic rates of change;
366
367
Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah
Arendt (New York: Mariner Books, 2019), 103-148. See also Rosa, Alienation and Acceleration, 94-95.
368
369
153
etc.—leading to temporal disorientation, “disjunctions, fractures, and continual disequilibrium.”370
Second, the acceleration of the social rate of change beyond a critical threshold means that the
depressive achievement-subject who is unable to dynamize experiences time as stationary or viscous
and suffers from a fragmented identity that has lost the capacity for appropriative integration. Third,
depression is the quintessential embodiment of the temporal experience of a “frenetic standstill.”371
The depressive achievement-subject “reaches for the future, whose labours he must face, made
heavy with internal responsibility”372 only to remain frozen in position, fixed in his kinetic activity,
like a top spinning furiously in place. Thus, the diagnosis by “The Invisible Committee” which ties
the social pathologies of late modernity, foremost among them depression, to social acceleration is
not mistaken:
Individualization of all conditions—life, work, misery. Diffuse schizophrenia. Rampant
depression. Atomization of the fine paranoiac particles. Hysterization of contact. The more I
want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express myself, the more I am
drained…We’ve becomes our own representatives in a strange commerce, guarantors of a
personalization that feels, in the end, a lot more like an amputation. We insure our selves to
the point of bankruptcy. […] The weak, depressed, self-critical, virtual self is essentially that
endlessly adaptable subject required by the ceaseless innovation of production, the
accelerated obsolescence of technologies, the constant overturning of social norms, and
generalized flexibility.373
II.4 The ‘Fragmented World’: Alienation from Others
370
Crary, 24/7, 31.
371
372
Crary, 24/7, 31
373
The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009), 29, 31.
154
In late modernity, the social saturation that accompanies the dynamization of society results
in a fragmentation of our relationship to others. In premodernity (and much of early modernity),
social relationships were confined to small, face-to-face communities, often no more than a short
walking distance away: family, kith and kin, neighbours, oppidans, townsfolk. From birth to death,
subjects were part of a cohesive social group with whom they could share biographical milestones,
as well as the stations and vicissitudes of life. Travel from one town to another was arduous and
time-consuming, and international travel even more so. Communication was largely monocultural
and the group suffered changes only through its births and deaths. The “cast of others” remained
relatively stable across generations (premodernity) or within a single generation (classical modernity).
With the acceleration of technological change in late modernity, especially in the fields of
communication, production, and transportation, “contemporary life is [transformed into] a swirling
sea of social relations,”374 reaching a point of social saturation. The typical late-modern individual
“may confront as many persons…in the first two hours of the [work]day as the community-based
predecessor did in a month…It is not only the immediate community that occupies our thoughts
and feelings, but a constantly changing cast…spread across the globe.”375 In late modernity, even the
life cycle of the family, once the closest and most reliable cast of individuals in our social ambit,
tends to change intra-generationally (e.g., through steadily rising rates of divorces and remarriages),
lasting less than an individual lifespan.
This hyper-saturation brought on by the ever-increasing social and technological acceleration
in a world of fast-changing and unstructured encounters means that we are less likely to relate to
others in a deep or meaningful way. Our connections and relationships to others become (i) fractional
(built around limited aspects of ourselves); (ii) pure (internally referential, i.e., entered into solely for
374
Gergen, The Saturated Self, 61.
375
155
the rewards they deliver and continued only insofar as they are thought by both parties to offer
mutual benefits and satisfaction); and (iii) too attenuated, eroded, or “liquid” to sustain a cohesive community:
“Let’s go for a drink, yes, but let’s not try to give personal accounts and establish deep relations in the
sense of true ‘axes of resonance’…The latter are time-consuming to build and painful to dissolve.”376
(a) Fractional Relationships
Guided by the imperatives of efficiency and speed, fractional relationships do not require the
full expression of the self, nor the meandering hours and time-consuming prerequisites essential for
deep commitment, enduring friendship, and life-long intimacy (hence their market utility and allure).
Instead, we tailor them to suit our contextual, situational needs:
• “I enjoy visiting on holidays, but I could not stand their company day in and day out.”
• “I love watching films with them, but otherwise they are insufferable bores.”
• “They are great to have at parties, but incapable of thoughtful conversation.”
• “We relish exchanging texts, but I find the idea of meeting them in person off-putting.”
• “We have amazing ‘physical chemistry’, but I would hate to live with them.”
Whatever their alleged utility, such fractional relationships alienate us from the social lifeworld by
hindering our ability to establish enduring and meaningful relations with others when we desire to do so.
At this point a critic might object that I am tendentiously valorizing specific kinds of social relations
(ones that are durable and intimate) above others (ones that fleeting and impersonal). My claim,
however, is not that late-modern individuals cannot experience fractional relationships as fulfilling
(or even liberating), but that they come at a price, one which forecloses the possibility of successfully
“being oneself in the other,” that is, which leaves no room for the increase of freedom that stems from
our ability “to experience our will as something whose articulation is desired by a concrete other”;
from the capacity to share our experiences, feelings, and life without reservation with another; and
376
156
from the mutual trust and certainty that our faults and idiosyncrasies will find safe harbour in the
other and not be brandished against us (see §3.I.4 for an account of the betrayal of this assurance).377
Thus, I tend to agree with Boltanski and Chiapello that “the value of commitment, and the
enthusiasm it elicits [including its distinctive charm], [are] associated, whether explicitly or implicitly,
with its durability”378—but the critic need not embrace this conclusion in order to acknowledge that
fractional relationships do not typically allow for such an expansion or increase of freedom. For one,
the number of prospective relationships available to individuals coupled with the scarcity of time
(§3.II.3) means that the temporal costs of being with others and the slow pace required for the
development and maturation of solid relationships makes them unattractive to late-modern subjects.
Consider the following testimony from a 55-year-old, highly educated man:
Interviewer: In I understand you correctly, you’re saying you had girlfriends but it was
always “until further notice”?
Steven: Yes, correct, beautiful…I could have a partner but it had to be temporary,
limited, twice a week and a little on the telephone and that’s it. That’s enough
for me, I don’t need any more of it so I don’t need partnership. Partnership
is a burden. I have tons of people I could go out with but I don’t have the
time. This is interesting and this and this, and I can’t do it all. Why do I need
a relationship to burden me now?379
The sheer amount of potential relationships combined with the accelerated tempo of life means that
substantive attachments and bonds are viewed as “burdens.” When the interviewer asks Steven what
he means by “it” when he says that the people he dates “always want more of it,” Steven replies:
“more dates with me; more to be in touch; more talk; […] they wanted to live me, share bank
377
Honneth, Freedom’s Right, 44, 139-41.
378
379
Illouz, Why Love Hurts, 83.
157
accounts, their bed, their books with me, but I couldn’t do that.” Social saturation creates abundance
which generates the problem of assigning value to the object of desire.380 As we shall see, they are
also a great source of anxiety and uncertainty, since we are never sure where we stand in the eyes of
others. For example, when reading the five statements above, most of us imagine ourselves in the
position of the speaker, but we could easily be the ones being spoken of—the poor company, the
insufferable bores, the ones incapable of thoughtful conversation, and those that the Other does not
want to meet in person or to have over for the weekend. This will become more salient once we
turn to the crisis of commitment and intimacy in late-modern relationships. For now, it is enough to
note that the liquification, fractionalization, and saturation of social relations becomes the late-
modern individual’s dominant way of being-in-the-world and of relating to others. A chilling
illustration of the pathological effects of social and technological acceleration on our relationship to
others can be found in Bret Easton Ellis’s The Rules of Attraction. Written in Ellis’s cool, detached
prose, Victor Johnson, a former student at Camden College, is backpacking across Europe and (very
tepidly) searching for someone called Jaime along the way:
Took a charter flight on a DC-10 to London, landed at Gatwick, took a bus to the
center…Saw the changing of the guards at Buckingham Palace. Ate a grapefruit next to the
Thames River…Bought some speed from an Italian guy I bumped into at a record store in
Liverpool…It rained a lot, it was expensive, so I split for Amsterdam…I biked to Danoever,
to a youth hostel where there were some cool German guys who spoke a little English, and
then I went back to Amsterdam and spent the night with this really stupid German girl. Next
day I took the train to Kroeller in Arnhem where there were tons of cool Van Goghs…Got
a ride to Cologne and stayed at a youth hostel in Bonn…Had a beer then headed South
through Munich, Austria, and Italy. Got a ride to Switzerland…Wandered around
380
Illouz, Why Love Hurts, 83-85.
158
Switzerland but the weather was bad…I took a bus from Switzerland to Italy, then
hitchhiked to get to this town where there was this girl from school who had graduated and
who I was sort of in love with but I had lost her phone number and wasn’t even that sure if
she was in Italy. So I wandered around and met this totally cool guy named Nicola who had
greased-back hair and wore Wayfarer sunglasses and who loved Springsteen and kept asking
me if I’d ever seen him in concert…Then I was in some town called Brandis or Blandy or
Brotto…Still was looking for that girl, Jaime. Bumped into someone from Camden on the
Italy Program and this person told me that Jaime was in New York not Italy. Florence was
beautiful but too full of tourists…Went to this tiny town, Siena. Smoked hash on the steps
of this church, the Doumo. Met a cool German guy in this old castle. Then I went to
Milano…Rome was big and hot and dirty…Then I went to Greece and it took me a day to
get to where the ferry leaves. Ferry took me to Corfu. Rented a moped on Corfu. Lost the
moped. Got on another ferry and headed for Patras and then Athens. Called a friend in New
York who told me Jaime wasn’t in New York but in Berlin and gave me the phone number
and address. Then I went to the islands, went to Naxos, got into town really early…I headed
for the water and bumped into some guy who dropped out of Camden. Asked him where
Jaime might be. He told me either Skidmore or Athens but not Berlin. Then I went to Crete,
fucked some girl there. Then I went to San Torini…Took a bus to the South coast, went to
Malta and it made me sick. Started hitchhiking. Then I went back to Crete and spent a day at
this beach full of Germans and went swimming…I didn’t know where I was…I met some
guy from Canada, who had stolen a car and done some time in prison, and we hung out and
talked…found a Donald Duck comic in Greek lying in someone’s backyard. In Greece,
while hitching, some truck carrying watermelons picked me up…Ended up in Berlin but that
159
person gave me the wrong address. Stayed at another youth hostel…Couldn’t get a flight out
of Berlin so I went back to Amsterdam and…381
Victor is able to travel with relative ease around Europe, largely with the help of others, but his
connections and interactions to those he meets along the way are fugacious, impersonal, and
perfunctory. Even his search for Jamie, who he claims (unconvincingly) to be “sort of in love with,”
and who is always elsewhere and nowhere, is half-hearted and unenthusiastic, conducted almost as a vapid
afterthought. In the film adaptation of Ellis’s novel, Victor’s flat, uninterrupted monologue
(significantly abridged here) and his aimless tour of Europe end with the following candid
admission: “I get my stuff and barely make my plane back to the United States. I no longer know
who I am and I feel like the ghost of a total stranger.” Here the acceleration and fractionalization of
our relationships to others amounts to a form of self-alienation, since we no longer feel anchored to
the social lifeworld: our “blasé attitude” (Simmel) and de-socialized, one-off relationships only serve
to compound our estrangement, setting us adrift in a society of individuals. Nowhere is this clearer
than in the domain of late-modern romantic relationships.
Late-modern life is rife with fractional relationships, especially in the spheres of love and
sex—back-up partners/spare-tyre or standby lovers; casual relationships/hookups/one-night stands;
conscious couplings; fluid-bonding (not used here in the adjectival or metaphorical sense of “fluid”);
friendly lovers; friends with benefits/fuck-buddies; hybrid couples; long-distance relationships; low-
level romances and trysts; mail-order brides; marriage markets; metamours; microwave relationships;
nesting partners; non-dyadic or non-monogamous relationships; on-again, off-again relationships;
open or non-exclusive relationships; girlfriend experiences; primary, secondary, and tertiary partners;
romantic friendships; semi-detached couples; sex tourism; speed-dating; temporary marriage licenses
subject, like leases, to renewal or termination (the default marriage contract would be for two years);
381
Bret Easton Ellis, The Rules of Attraction (New York: Vintage Books, 1998), 24-27.
160
top-pocket relationships; transactional relationships; triads and quads; until-further-notice
arrangements; virtual relationships; and so on. In his discussion of social saturation, Gergen gives
the following illustration of the “friendly lover relationship” cited above:
A single professional woman from Maryland disclosed that she was “seeing” a local lawyer
(unhappily married) because it was fun and convenient. At the same time, he took a back
seat when a favorite “old friend” in her profession came in from Oklahoma. However,
especially during the summer, she was keen to spend her weekends with a Boston
consultant…whose boat was moored at Martha’s Vineyard. Each of these individuals, in
turn, had other friendly lovers.382
In her recent work on the social pathology of “depressive love,” Emma Engdahl cites a (romantic?)
SMS between two colleagues at a Swedish University that evinces a similar compartmentalization of
social relationships:
It feels meaningless to think of you and me [having] a life together…I don’t think of a future
with you in it, where we would be together…But I [would] like to see you, and have sex and
talk about important things…I don’t think of a future for us. But we can of course have sex
and such!…I [would] very much like to be your lover; but would rather meet someone [else]
to live my life with.383
The first thing to note is that, subject to the diktats of social acceleration, we witness an
increase in the rate of relational turnover along with new interpersonal forms corresponding to the
imperatives of speed (e.g., hookups, one-night stands, speed-dating). There is also an element of
accumulation, in which late-modern subjects amass sexual experiences/partners as a form of capital.
The splintering, frailty, and precariousness of these social bonds, whether couched in terms of
382
383
Emma Engdahl, Depressive Love: A Social Pathology (New York: Routledge, 2019), 92.
161
confluent love or plastic sexuality (Giddens),384 orphaned and bereaved homo sexualis or liquid love385
(Bauman), erotic or sexual capital (Illouz),386 is not merely a product of social saturation, but equally
of the emergence of the “pure relationship,” shorn of all exogenous social anchors, signposts, and
stanchions by the attritional imperatives of speed.
(b) Pure Relationships
Anthony Giddens defines “pure relationships” as social relationships that are entered into
solely for their own sake, that is, for the rewards—affection, alleviation of boredom/entertainment,
companionship, passion, pleasure, etc.—that they deliver to the parties involved, and nothing else.387
Pure relationships, which tend to be dyadic, pertain not only to romantic partnerships, but to the
domains of friendship, marriage, and sexuality in general, even if they vary according to context.
Born of the attritional, escalatory logic of social dynamization, which leaves nothing “solid” intact,
pure relationships are freed from the fetters of tradition: immortality-through-continuation-of-kin,
companionate love (as a life-long bond), marriage, permanence, security. Thus pure relationships are
(i) not anchored or governed by the external conditions of social life—they are liquid or free-floating;
(ii) sought only for what the social connection, or relationship, can bring to the partners involved;
(iii) dependent only on themselves and thus subject to compulsive reflexive questioning and self-examination;
(iv) reliant, in the place of external anchors, on the commitment of the partners who, for whatever
reason, may decide to commit to each other (establishing the degree, nature, and scope of that
384
Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in Modern Societies
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), 2, 27, 61-64, 112, 117-118, 121, 144, 156, 167, 178-180.
385
Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds (Malden: Polity Press, 2010). For the
specific discussion of “orphaned and bereaved homo sexualis” see 38-57 in the former.
386
Illouz, Why Love Hurts, 56-57; Illouz, “Is Love Still Part of the Good Life?” 183-184. See also
Robert T. Michael, “Sexual Capital: An Extension of Grossman’s Concept of Health Capital,”
Journal of Health Economics 23 (2004), 643-652.
387
Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy, 27.
162
commitment), or to annul or discontinue their commitment when it no longer serves their purposes;
(v) increasingly focused on the demand for, and expectation of, intimacy to the point of compulsion;
(vi) founded on mutual trust which cannot be taken as a “given”; it must be won and worked at; and
(vii) not predicated on a recognition of the other, or an affirmation of one’s self-identity in the other,
but on the ongoing, open-ended exploration and negotiation of self-identity.388
Like many of the consequences of modernization and social acceleration discussed above,
fractional relationships and pure relationships are a double-edged sword. One the one hand, the
freeing of social relationships from the yoke of communal dependency, enforcement of tradition,
codified power imbalances between the sexes, and sexual prohibitions holds the possibility of the
democratization of personal bonds: late-modern subjects are, so the story goes, free to decide what
social relationships to enter into and with whom; to determine the degree, nature, and scope of their
social relationships; to enjoy them autotelicly (i.e., for their own sake); and to dissolve or terminate
them as they see fit. This is largely the narrative Giddens develops in The Transformation of Intimacy,
and I do not wish to deny its emancipatory thrust—provided it is grasped dialectically. As Bauman
points out,
More often than not [this transformation of intimacy] is…hailed as the indispensable stage in
the process of individual emancipation. And yet this does not seem to be the only aspect of
the ongoing redeployment of sex; neither does it seem to be its most seminal aspect.
Emphasizing this aspect and this alone, at the expense of other aspects, seems to be rather a
manifestation of a “false consciousness” of sorts; the emphasis helps to turn eyes away from
the “unanticipated,” or rather latent (since absent from the actors’ calculations)
consequences and side-effects of the new sexuality.389
388
Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity, 88-89.
389
Bauman, Postmodernity and its Discontents, 147. See also Illouz, Cold Intimacies, 30: “Gidden’s analysis
only resonates with the psychological credo that celebrates equality in intimate relationships and [as a
163
Whether Giddens is ultimately guilty of this charge is not my concern here. Instead, I wish to
highlight three of these “unanticipated” consequences or side-effects of fractional/pure relationships
that undermine rather than promote the late-modern subject’s capacity for self-realization.
First, subjects are not “free” in any meaningful sense of the word to choose their partners or
to enter to into any relationship they wish. Impersonal mechanisms—the capitalist market, internet
technologies, and a vast process of rationalization (intellectualization, rational management of the
flow of encounters, visualization, commensuration, competitiveness, maximization of utilities)390—
create daunting relational expectations and hyper-cognized, rational methods of partner selection
that intervene between late-modern subjects and the social connections they desire, belying the
emancipatory narrative of autotelic, self-directed, and spontaneous relationships. More importantly,
the process of rationalization and the concomitant autonomization of the sexual sphere successively
purge sexual relations of their social dimensions—communicative pledges and vows, idealizations of love,
protected bonds and obligations, the alien bodies, ambiguities, and pollutions (i.e., the negativity) of
the Other—and, at the opposite end of the spectrum, purge social relations of the palest sexual undertones
which may solidify those relations into something more durable and secure. Sexual undertones are
hysterically (and, we should add, puritanically) sought out and bowdlerized from every domain,
emotion, and encounter of contemporary social life with the paradoxical effect of introducing sex
“in a panic-stricken fashion” into every alcove and exedra of the social lifeworld:
result] fail[s] to interrogate the very transformation of intimacy it purports to describe…Rather, we

should precisely inquire about the ways in which the new norms of equality or freedom have
transformed the ‘emotional texture’ of intimate relationships.”
390
For a thorough treatment of this process of rationalization in the sphere of late-modern
relationships, see Eva Illouz, Consuming the Romantic Utopia: Love and the Cultural Contradictions of
Capitalism (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997); Illouz, Cold Intimacies; and Illouz, Why
Love Hurts. For a concise summary of some of these rational mechanisms, see 180-182 in Why Love
Hurts.
164
The spectre of sex now haunts company offices and college seminar rooms; there is a threat
involved in every smile, gaze, or form of address. The overall outcome is the rapid
emaciation of human relations, stripping them of intimacy and emotionality, and the wilting
of the desire to enter them and keep them alive.391
Second, since fractional/pure relationships are internally referential (that is, responsive only
to the internal dynamics of the relationship), they are increasingly frail, precarious, and transitory—and,
as such, a constant source of (i) insecurity (“[D]o I call him, don’t I call him? Do I tell him I like him
very much or do I play indifferent? To be hard to get or to be sweet and loving? […] I become
insecure…I need to know if they love me or how much they love…I want to be reassured…”392); (ii)
uncertainty (“I have a constant feeling of never being satisfied…Either he’s not calling, or when he’s
calling, it’s not romantic and so on…‘Is everything all right in terms of him [does he still love me]?
or ‘Is everything all right in terms of me? How am I?’ […] Should I want to help him open up more,
or should I worry about myself and break up with him?…I’ve always been so afraid, wondering,
‘Will somebody stay?’”393); and (iii) risk (“[After being together for five years] he stopped loving me.
What can you say to that? Love me, because I’m wonderful?…I had left my job for him, given up
my rent-controlled apartment, took out my savings, given up my life basically…”394). Consider the
notions of commitment and intimacy. In fractional/pure relationships, commitment and intimacy
are no longer guaranteed or insured against loss by external factors; they owe their existence to the
mutual alignment of the desires, inclinations, and whims of the partners involved. However, such
mutual alignments are notoriously difficult to sustain, leaving individuals in a state of constant precarity.
Not only do these heightened levels of insecurity, uncertainty, and risk stem from the inability to
391
Bauman, Postmodernity and its Discontents, 148.
392
Illouz, Why Love Hurts, 140-141.
393
Shere Hite, Women and Love (London: Viking, 1988), quoted in Giddens, Modernity and Self-Identity,
88.
394
Illouz, Why Love Hurts, 133.
165
successfully establish the relationships with others that we desire, but they also compound this inability.
In mirroring the socioeconomic “precarization” of the labour markets in the social realm, they fuel
the cynicism of late-modern subjects who increasingly come to regard others as disposable objects
for one-off use, leading to a further erosion and fragmentation of human bonds.395 In Liquid Love,
Bauman sums up the dual nature of fractional/pure relationships as follows: “It is all right, even
exhilarating and altogether wonderful for sex to be so liberated. The snag is how to hold it in place
once the ballast has been thrown overboard…Flying lightly is mirth, rudderless flying is distress.
Change is blissful, volatility annoying.”396 In focusing solely on the putative liberatory dimension of
such relationships, we overlook the privatized costs and immense feelings of insecurity, uncertainty,
and risk they engender and the way that these obstruct the self-realization of late-modern subjects.
Third, given that individuals must establish their own social bonds by their own efforts without
aid or the external support of authority, domesticity, idealized sentiments, morality, or tradition,
there are those who are successful at doing so and others who are unable to do so. Like all the other
“pathologies of de-synchronization” we have been discussing, there are winners and there are losers,
those who “fall out of sync,” who cannot keep up with the imperatives of speed and the liquification
of social bonds. A particularly striking example of this can be found in the work of the French writer
Michel Houellebecq. In his first novel, Whatever (the title in French, as we shall see, is much more
revealing—Extension du domain de la lutte, that is, An Extension of the Domain of the Struggle), the
protagonist describes a work colleague by the name of Raphaël Tisserand: bald, short, and stocky
with greasy acned skin and bifocal glasses, he has “the exact appearance of a buffalo toad—thick,
gross, heavy, deformed features, the opposite of handsome.” Lacking all finesse in conversation and
having absolutely no charm or humour, Tisserand is “so ugly that his appearance repels women, and
395
Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 160-165.
396
Bauman, Liquid Love, 46.
166
he never gets to sleep with them. He tries though, he tries with all his might, but it doesn’t work.
They simply want nothing to do with him.”397 Ruminating on these facts and his own impoverished
sex life, the disaffected protagonist concludes:
It’s a fact...that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation,
completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as
mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like
unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces
phenomena of absolute pauperization. Some men make love every day; others five or six times
in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It’s what’s
known as ‘the law of the market’…In a totally liberal economic system certain people
accumulate considerable fortunes; others stagnate in unemployment and misery. In a totally
liberal sexual system certain people have a varied and exciting erotic life; others are reduced
to masturbation and solitude.398
Left to fend for themselves in both spheres, on the economic plane, Tisserand and the protagonist
belong “in the victors’ camp” (as computer programmers, they both have secure, well-paying jobs);
on the sexual plane, “in that of the vanquished.”399 They are the “sexual paupers” of late modernity,
casualties of the fragmentation and “purification” of human bonds. Of course, one can dismiss this
side-effect as merely a byproduct of the democratization of social relationships, but the alarming
growth of subcultures such as “incels” (involuntary celibates) and “herbivore” or “grass-eating men”
[soushoku danshi] (a term used in Japan to describe men who have no interest in getting married,
finding a partner, or having sex, and prefer “less competitive lives” [the phrase alone is quite telling])
attest to a more widespread discontent with the ruthless social Darwinism of the sexual marketplace.
397
Michel Houellebecq, Whatever, trans. Paul Hammond (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2011), 53-54.
398
Houellebecq, Whatever, 99.
399
Houellebecq, Whatever, 99.
167
For instance, according to various surveys, between 60 to 75 percent of unmarried Japanese men in
their twenties and thirties describe themselves as “grass-eating men,” causing panic among the local
authorities who worry about Japan’s declining birth rate and anemic consumption.400 As Kate Julian
notes, the “taxonomy of Japanese sexlessness” extends to “shut-ins” [hikikomori], “parasite singles”
[parasaito shinguru] (people who live with their parents beyond their twenties), including other
large swaths of the population—all of whom are said to suffer from “celibacy syndrome”
[sekkusu shinai shokogun].401 In the face of the rise of such “syndromes,” or collective malaises,
the argument that these subcultures merely reflect lifestyle choices becomes increasingly thin.
(c) The Erosion of Community
Finally, social acceleration and hyper-saturation result in a disintegration of community or a
“polymorphous perversity of social pattern” which, in turn, gives rise to three ersatz communities
(i.e., communities in their liquid incarnation). Mirroring the fragmentation of social relations,
collage/patchwork communities consist of “a multiplicity of disjunctive modes of living,” in which
each group exists within its own enclosed, private nucleus of customs, practices, and traditions.402
The fluidity of the community lies precisely in the avoidance of disparate social encounters,
friendships, and romances across groups and in the frictionless proclivity for each group to
congregate in its own established venues, houses of worship, places of leisure, etc. Such groups
attempt to reproduce, on a more modest scale, the Gemeinschaft of past organic communities in an
ever-changing, fractured, and impersonal Gesellschaft.
400
Alexandra Harney, “The Herbivore’s Dilemma: Japan Panics About the Rise of ‘Grass-Eating
Men’ Who Shun Sex, Don’t Spend Money, and Like Taking Walks,” Slate, published June 15, 2009.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2009/06/japan-panics-about-the-rise-of-herbivores-young-
men-who-shun-sex-don-t-spend-money-and-like-taking-walks.html
401
Kate Julian, “The Sex Recession,” The Atlantic, December 2018.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/
402
168
Unlike the former, carnival/cloakroom communities stage scintillating events and spectacles
(e.g., music concerts, grand openings, sporting events) which (i) “appeal to similar interests dormant
in otherwise disparate individuals”; (ii) allow late-modern subjects to briefly suspend their
monotonous daily routines and monadic existence and come together for a common purpose; and
(iii) provide workers with cathedrals of consumption (Ritzer), diffuse spectacles (Debord), and
leisure industries (Adorno) to blow off pent-up steam in order to return to work re-invigorated.403
Rather than solidifying social bonds, carnival/cloakroom communities tend to contribute to their
commercialization and, as a result, to the social estrangement of late-modern subjects by commodifying
their connections to others, making them increasingly diffuse, haphazard, and transient, and by
predicating community on a “carnivalization of society”404—an escapism which, however ludic,
becomes a mere recuperative appendage of consumption and work. Such “pseudo-activities” and
“institutionalized vicarious satisfactions,” as Adorno notes in his discussion of Freizeit, amount to a
“continuation of the forms of profit-oriented social life.”405 The important point for our purposes is
that instead of furnishing the grounds for social freedom and the possibility of establishing
successful relations with others, carnival/cloakroom communities reproduce the prevailing
conditions of alienation and unfreedom, more efficiently, in spectacular fashion.
Cardboard/virtual communities represent the third and final form of communal
disintegration. In cardboard/virtual communities, interdependence and interaction are maintained,
“but the participating bodies are absent.”406 In their cardboard form, they include cafés, fire stations,
malls, parks, and recreation centers but the apartments and houses remain, for the most part, empty
403
Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 199-201.
404
See, for example, Jerome Braun and Lauren Langman (eds.), Alienation and the Carnivalization of
Society (New York: Routledge, 2013).
405
Theodor W. Adorno, “Free Time” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. J. M.
Bernstein (New York: Routledge, 2006), 189, 194.
406
169
(e.g., as a result of the ease and low cost of commuting or rapid gentrification). In their virtual form,
images, information, and words are exchanged seamlessly through electronic channels and fora,
social media platforms, and vast global networks, with little face-to-face contact among individuals.
In both manifestations, the geographic closeness, physical immediacy, and sensuous particularity
typically associated with community is lost. In its place, a spectral alienation and hyper-sterility
parading itself as ease of life dominates. Bertolt Brecht, in his poem about Los Angeles,
“Contemplating Hell,” provides a withering indictment of the anodyne, de-socialized character of
carboard/virtual communities:
Also in Hell,
I do not doubt it, there exist these opulent gardens
With flowers as large as trees, wilting, of course,
Very quickly, if they are not watered with very expensive water. And fruit markets
With great leaps of fruit, which nonetheless
Possess neither scent nor taste. And endless trains of autos,
Lighter than their own shadows, swifter than
Foolish thoughts, shimmering vehicles, in which
Rosy people, coming from nowhere, go nowhere.
And houses, designed for happiness, standing empty,
Even when inhabited.407
Although Brecht was writing in the 1940s, a similar sentiment is expressed by the French sociologist
Jean Baudrillard describing the “extreme disconnection,” “hyperreality,” and “superficial neutrality”
of Los Angeles (and the general liquification of American communities) roughly half a century later:
407
Bertolt Brecht, “Contemplating Hell,” All Poetry.com https://allpoetry.com/Contemplating-Hell
170
“[C]ities which are not cities…[a] thousand cars moving at the same speed…coming from nowhere,
going nowhere…no intimacy or collectivity, no streets or facades, no centre or monuments…an
extravaganza of indifference…the immanent fascination of dryness and sterility.”408
Carboard/virtual communities are liquid communities whose burnished façade masks their absence.
I would like to end this section on a cautionary note. In the same way that the restoration of
certainty is not in the cards, the restoration of traditional, premodern communities is neither
possible nor desirable from the perspective of the alienation critique. To advocate a return to
premodern forms of life would be to ignore the dialectical emancipatory thrust of modernization.
Nevertheless, we must also be wary of deploying this “one-sided argument” in the other direction:
the fact that the emergence of fractional and pure relationships and the fragmentation of community
have certain liberatory dimensions (a fact I do not wish to deny) should not blind us to the costs of
this process of dynamization. We turn to this next.
II.5 On Winners and Losers: A Further Implication of the Privatization of the Pathologies of De-Synchronization
The pathologies of de-synchronization we have been examining so far disrupt the subject’s
self-world relation in various ways. What they all share, however, is that, in each case, late-modern
individuals incur certain costs—insecurity, uncertainty, risk—that exacerbate their alienation from
place/actions, from things, from time, and from others. Furthermore, these costs are privatized in
late-modernity, such that “how one lives becomes the biographical solution of systemic contradictions”409—
which is to say, the costs incurred by subjects come to be increasingly regarded as “personal
failures.” Finally, subjects not only have to bear the costs on their own, but they have to make their
own way in the world, take decisions, navigate the accelerated tempo of life and the scarcity of time,
and stitch together their social relations purely by their own efforts and wit. Fueled by the escalatory
408
Jean Baudrillard, America (New York: Verso, 2010), 131-138. Baudrillard’s aperçu was originally
published in 1986.
409
Beck, Risk Society, 137.
171
logic of dynamic stabilization, such a process necessarily yields winners and losers. The table below
sums up the winners and losers in the four pathologies of de-synchronization discussed above.
Table 3.1 Winners and Losers in the Pathologies of De-Synchronization

Pathologies of De- Winners Losers
Synchronization (Successful Dynamizers) (Unsuccessful Dynamizers)
Alienation from Place/Actions Tourists Vagabonds
Alienation from Things Shoppers Flawed Consumers
Alienation from Time Players Drifters
Alienation from Others Networkers/Seducers Social Isolates/Sexual Paupers
III. Non-Alienated Self-Realization: Pathologies of ‘Organized Self-Realization’
III.1 Paradoxes of Self-Realization, or, Self-Realization Betrayed
In The New Spirit of Capitalism, Boltanski and Chiapello argue that in order to reproduce itself
structurally, capitalism requires a “spirit of capitalism,” that is, an ideology or normative framework
that motivates people (wage-earners and capitalists alike) to take part in the activities conducive to
the accumulation of capital.410 Boltanski and Chiapello identify three distinct “spirits of capitalism”
corresponding to three historical periods: (i) from the early modern period to the Great Depression
(characterized by adventurism, thrift, and utilitarianism); (ii) from the 1930s until the 1970s
(characterized by dirigisme, hierarchical Fordist structures, and long-term planning); and the “new”
spirit from the 1970s to the present (characterized by non-hierarchical networks, personal initiative,
and calls for organized self-realization).411
According to Boltanski and Chiapello, a major factor in these historical transitions is critique.
When confronted by a form of critique it can no longer delegitimize or elude, capitalism, they argue,
410
411
Alastair Hemmens, The Critique of Work in French Thought: From Charles Fourier to Guy Debord (Cham:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 170-171.
172
“is obliged to respond positively to the points raised by critique, to try to placate it and maintain the
support of its troops, who are in danger of listening to the denunciations, by…incorporate[ing] some of
the values in whose name it was criticized.”412 Given that the principal critique levelled at the second spirit
of capitalism was the artistic/ethical critique advanced by the participants of May ’68, which stressed
the four components of self-realization—authenticity, autonomy, creativity, and liberation—the
notion of self-realization was absorbed and exploited by the “new” spirit of capitalism in the service
of its own ends (structural legitimacy, production, consumption).
My thesis is as follows: co-opted and stripped of its emancipatory potential, the calls for
“organized self-realization” rather than enabling authentic self-realization which is, first and foremost,
responsive to the late-modern subject’s aspirations, desires, ground projects, life goals, and needs
not only bypasses the latter, but radically undermines them, becoming an obstacle to their fulfillment.
The self-realization narrative which, according to Honneth, “once promised an increase of
qualitative freedom [is] henceforth altered into an ideology of de-institutionalization, [resulting] in
the emergence in individuals of a number of symptoms of inner emptiness, of feeling oneself to be
superfluous, and of absence of purpose.”413 In short, the calls for self-realization become pathological.
Let us examine this claim in more detail.
III.2 Why is ‘Organized Self-Realization’ Pathological?
The calls for organized self-realization may be considered pathological on my account for
three reasons. First, rather than arising autochthonously from subjects and reflecting their own
conceptions of the good, they are imposed heterochthonously, from without, by a neoliberal dispositif
geared towards production, consumption, efficiency, performance, and self-optimization. In effect,
412
Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism, 28.
413
Axel Honneth, “Organized Self-Realization: Some Paradoxes of Individualization,” European
Journal of Social Theory 7 (2004), 467. See also Martin Hartmann and Axel Honneth, “Paradoxes of
Capitalism,” Constellations 13 (2006), 41-58.
173
the first-order contents of self-realization no longer stem from individuals and their appropriation of
self and world; instead, they confront them as “alien” injunctions, which, in calling for authenticity,
are decidedly inauthentic (i.e., not their own). Arriving at a similar conclusion in her article,
“Burnout as a Social Pathology of Self-Realization,” Elin Thunman cogently distinguishes between
“free self-realization” (subjects’ strivings to develop their potential in an experimental process) and
“standardized self-realization” (the demands of being authentic as defined by the employer).414
Second, organized self-realization not only involves heterochthonous injunctions, but as
Zurn points out, “the expectations of self-realization increasingly strike individuals as insistent,
inescapable demands”:415 human activity is transformed into a means for generating a multiplicity
and succession of concurrent projects without end,416 and the mantras of the new spirit of capitalism
as well as the qualities of what Boltanski and Chiapello call the “great man” enjoin us to be
adaptable, authentic, autonomous, creative, daring, empowered, enterprising, enthusiastic, flexible,
innovative, mobile, open, outgoing, tolerant, and versatile417—or risk failure and obsolescence.
Consequently, subjects are under enormous pressure to meet the demands of self-realization, to
always be engaged in a series of activities and projects, and to acquire the traits of the “great man.”
Briefly put, the calls for self-realization end up taking the form of commandments or imperatives
which are then turned against individuals:
The subject model in the concept of empowerment…is subtended by the belief in the ability
of individuals to gain more autonomy, self-realization and self-determination by their own
414
Elin Thunman, “Burnout as a Social Pathology of Self-Realization,” Distinktion: Scandinavian
Journal of Social Theory 13 (2012), 53.
415
416
417
174
efforts, and this should also be possible for the addressees of welfare aid whose life
management is buried under a layer of dependency, resignation and impotent opposition.418
An inability to heed this call for organized self-realization and to dispose over oneself and one’s life
as an entrepreneurial project “is a direct route to the status of ‘a little man’.”419
Third, the four components of self-realization are not only recuperated but also redeployed
by the “new” spirit of capitalism in ways that are inimical to the worker’s authentic self-realization:420
(i) the demand for authenticity which originally issued in a critique of the administered world and
everyday life, a critique of the culture industry and the massification of society, and so on, has been
“placated by the proliferation and diversification of commodity goods” and the commodification of
authenticity in the form of luxury and semiotic brands that confer “authenticity” on their consumer;
(ii) the demand for autonomy has made it possible to re-engage workers with reduced supervisory
costs, to substitute self-control for managerial oversight, and to enlist the notion in the promotion
of self-responsibility, shoring up the work ethic, and the meeting of unrealistic deadlines and goals;
(iii) the demand for creativity has been exploited as source of boundless profit and untapped potential
marshalling the imagination, innovation, and inventiveness of workers to enrich the firm at expense
of its cadres whose creativeness, cultural products, and new technologies fail to enrich their own lives; and
(iv) the demand for liberation which was originally constructed in opposition to bourgeois morality,
oppressive social customs and sexual prohibitions, has been “emptied of oppositional charge” and
utilized to open up new, ever-expanding capitalist markets (e.g., for sex-related goods and services).
The co-optation or recuperation of the artistic/ethical critique by capitalism outlined above
is not meant to be exhaustive (one can, for example, add the rise of Romantic expressivism421 and
418
Norbert Herriger, Empowerment in der Sozialen Arbeit: Eine Einführung (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer,
1997), 74-75 quoted in Bröckling, The Entrepreneurial Self, 129-130.
419
Anders Petersen, “Authentic Self-Realization and Depression,” International Sociology 26 (2011), 17.
420
421
See, for example, Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society.
175
the dismantling of the welfare state to the list of explanatory causes), but rather intended to show
how the idea of self-realization was transformed from a means of emancipation and radical critique
to a socially produced obstacle to (authentic) self-realization.
III.3 The Need for the Alienation Critique: Non-Alienated Self-Realization vs. ‘Organized Self-Realization’
How should we respond to these pathologies of organized self-realization? We have two
options before us. The first entails jettisoning the notion altogether. This is the solution implied by
Anders Petersen’s article “Authentic Self-Realization and Depression,” in which Petersen argues that
“authentic realization results in the psyche of the individual being exposed to considerable stress”
giving way to a “roulette game of self-realization” and eventually to depression as a social pathology
of action and inadequacy. Because the contents of the norm of self-realization are always unspecified
or vague, disentangling the notion from the possibilities of bona fide self-realization is unlikely.422
Although these misgivings are understandable, I think they point to the opposite conclusion:
precisely because pathological and non-pathological self-realization are difficult to disentangle, we
require some means of differentiating between the two. This is where the alienation critique comes
into play: the alienation critique allows us to distinguish non-alienated self-realization from organized self-realization.
Without recourse to this diagnostic function, one risks throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Non-alienated self-realization is (i) autochthonous (responsive to the subject’s own
conceptions of the good, desires, ground projects, life goals, and needs); (ii) a source of flourishing,
security, and well-being for the subject rather than a categorical injunction, inescapable demand, or
chronic source of depression and stress; and (iii) first and foremost, a means for the realization of
the authenticity, autonomy, creativity, and liberation of the subject—not of capital, capitalist firms,
commodities, employers, or the market.
Conclusion
422
Petersen, “Authentic Self-Realization and Depression,” 11-12.
176
In this chapter I deployed the diagnostic potential of the alienation critique on three fronts. First, I
examined the “pathologies of individual freedom” and argued that while legal and moral freedom
are integral parts of self-realization, their autonomization generates social pathologies that obstruct
subjects’ ability to lead successful lives. Self-realization requires self-realization with others. But
under conditions of social acceleration, the “pathologies of de-synchronization” (corresponding to
the mode of dynamic stabilization) make this collective endeavour even more difficult by alienating
late-modern subjects from place/actions, from things, from time, and from others. Moreover, I
argue that there are significant costs to social acceleration and dynamic stabilization that are
privatized in late modernity, compounding the estrangement of subjects who, due to an inability to
dynamize, are regarded as “personal failures.”
In the third and final section, I argued that the notion of self-realization itself has become
pathological and been co-opted as a form of critique into the service of the very system it sought to
radically transform. Nevertheless, the formalism of the alienation critique enables us to distinguish
non-alienated self-realization from its pathological variant, organized self-realization and, in doing
so, to retain the emancipatory potential of self-realization. Although these social pathologies are not
exhaustive, they are specific to late-modernity, and in the depth of their alienation hold the promise
of their overcoming. This is the theme of Part III.
177
Chapter 4
The Politics of Work
Dreamers of a successful life perceive in the process of labor the means to escape their dreamland; in the tangible—yet
blocked and incomplete—separation between production and the assigning of value, they perceive the principal route for
a dialectic of liberation.
—Paolo Virno, “Dreamers of a Successful Life”423
The supersession [of the commodity] naturally implies the abolition of work and its replacement by a new type of free
activity…it is work itself which must be called into question. Far from being a “utopian,” the abolition of work is the
first condition for the supersession of commodity society, for the elimination within each person’s life of the separation
between “free time” and “work time”—those complementary sectors of alienated life…only when this opposition is
overcome will people be able to make their vital activity subject to their will and consciousness and see themselves in the
world that they themselves have created..
—Situationist International, “On the Poverty of Student Life”424
NEVER WORK [NE TRAVAILLEZ JAMAIS]
—Guy Debord, Graffito, Rue de Seine, Paris, 1953
423
Paolo Virno, “Dreamers of a Successful Life” in Autonomia: Post-Political Politics, ed. Sylvère
Lotringer and Christian Marazzi (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007), 113.
424
Situationist International, “On the Poverty of Student Life” in Situationist International Anthology,
revised and expanded edition, ed. and trans. Ken Knabb (Berkeley: Bureau of Public Secrets, 2006),
428.
178
A halcyon passage depicting Adam and Eve before the Fall in John Milton’s Paradise Lost has often
puzzled commentators:
Under a tuft of shade that on a green
Stood whispering soft by a fresh fountain side
They sat them down and after no more toil
Of their sweet gard’ning labor than sufficed
To recommend cool Zephyr and made ease
More easy, wholesome thirst and appetite
More grateful, to their supper fruits they fell:
Nectarine fruits which the compliant boughs
Yielded them sidelong as they sat recline
On the soft downy bank, damasked with flowers.425
Speaking to Eve a few lines later, Adam says: “…let us ever praise Him and extol / His
bounty, following our delightful task / To prune these growing plants and tend these flowers /
Which, were it toilsome, yet with thee were sweet.”426
The question that interests us is why should Adam and Eve in that “happy rural seat” where
“To all delight of human sense exposed… / Nature’s whole wealth, yea more, / A Heav’n on
Earth”427—work at all?
A similar thought troubles the alienation critique. In the previous two chapters we saw that
Marx’s theory of alienated labor furnishes us with the tools to diagnose a number of social
pathologies. This is the critical-diagnostic dimension of the alienation critique, but I also argued that the
critique issues in a positive prescription, a way to overcome the impasse plaguing contemporary
425
John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Gordon Teskey (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 87.
426
Milton, Paradise Lost, 90.
427
Milton, Paradise Lost, pp. 83-4.
179
political philosophy. At the broadest level, what kind of prescription does the alienation critique
issue in? There are three possible candidates: (i) more work, (ii) better work, and (iii) less work.
Before I turn to these, however, in the first half of the chapter, I draw attention to the dual
nature of work—work-as-a-curse/work-as-self-realization, alienated work/non-alienated work—that
runs throughout the history of work and its various conceptions. By highlighting the dual nature of
work and its role as the means by which subjects mediate their relationship to the world, I hope to
demonstrate that in the second half of the chapter that alienation critique results in radical critique
of work without abandoning the emancipatory dimension of work.
In the second half of the chapter, I defend the “exoteric” critique of work from its
“esoteric” counterpart and argue that while Week’s call for less work is the right one, it requires the
alienation critique both for its criticism of the rival theoretical paradigms and in order to enable a
critique of consumption.
I. The Meaning of Work
I.1 Defining Work
The concept of work is notoriously difficult to define. As Herbert Applebaum notes in his
monograph on work, “No definition is satisfactory because work relates to all human activities, and
one would have to exhaust all such activities to exhaust the provinces of work.”428 In a textbook
dedicated to the sociology of work, Keith Grant and Darren Nixon arrive at a similar conclusion:
“no unambiguous or objective definition of work is possible.”429 The Oxford English Dictionary, for
example, lists twenty-one definitions of work as a noun and forty as a verb430 and, as we shall see,
the etymological roots of the terms for work in various languages betray its alienating, negative
428
Herbert Applebaum, “Introduction,” The Concept of Work: Ancient, Medieval, Modern (Albany: State
of University of New York Press, 1992), x.
429
Keith Grant and Darren Nixon, The Sociology of Work, 4th ed. (Malden: Polity Press, 2015), 6.
430
John W. Budd, The Thought of Work (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011), 1.
180
features: the Greek ponos means sorrow; the Latin labor, drudgery; the Hebrew avodah shares the same
etymological root as eved—slave; the German Arbeit, adversary and hardship; and the French travail
stems from the Latin tripalium, an instrument of torture431 (this is, of course, only one dimension of
the dual nature of work—more on this below).
Thus, it should come as no surprise that the conceptions and definitions of work in the
literature range from the simple (“something that exercises our brain and brawn as we do things”432)
to the droll (“Work is of two kinds: first, altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface
relatively to other such matter; second, telling other people to do so”433)—to the more
comprehensive (“The supply of physical, mental, and emotional effort to produce goods and
services for our own consumption, or for the consumption of others”434) to a process of valorization
(“a value-creating practice”435). There are three important points to note here.
First, the myriad definitions of work, the problems of exclusivity and inclusivity, the ongoing
discursive debates, and so on, work in our favour. If our aim is to show how late-modern subjects
can move from alienating conditions to conditions of self-realization, and work plays a central role
in this story, then we should expect a wide spectrum of conceptions of work—clusters of which that
track the notion of alienated work and others which track the non-alienated liberatory aspects of
work. This is exactly what we find in John Budd’s ten conceptions of work in The Thought of Work
(although Budd does not arrange them according to their dual nature as we will).
The ten conceptions of work outlined by Budd are useful for distinguishing between two
general aspects or categories of work that I would like to draw attention to: alienated work—work as a
431
Lars Svendsen, Work, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2016), 5.
432
Stephen Fineman, Work: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1.
433
Russell, “In Praise of Idleness” in In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays, 3.
434
“Work” in The Oxford Dictionary of Sociology, 807.
435
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-Form (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 7.
181
curse (“An unquestioned burden necessary for human survival or maintenance of the social order”),
work as commodity (“An abstract quantity of productive effort that has tradeable economic value”),
work as disutility (“A lousy activity tolerated to obtain goods and services that provide pleasure”);
and non-alienated work—work as freedom (“A way to achieve independence from nature or other
humans and to express human creativity”), work as personal fulfillment (“Physical and psychological
functioning that [ideally] satisfies individual needs”), work as a social relation (“Human interaction
embedded in social norms, institutions, and power structures”), and so on. 436 It is this dual nature of
work that is relevant to the possibility of late-modern subjects establishing successful relationships
with others, with themselves, and with the world, which is to say, of charting a course from
alienation to self-realization in the form of a successful appropriation of self and world.
Second, whether an activity is characterized or experienced as work depends on the extant
cultural, economic, and historical conditions under which it is undertaken. Consider the definition of
work an activity carried out for a wage. This is the dominant cultural understanding of work in
capitalist societies but left out of this familiar definition are countless forms of unwaged work: care
work, shadow work, creative labour, domestic labour, reproductive labour, and so on. In Chapter 1,
we defined labour as the process by which subjects through their actions mediate and regulate the
metabolism between themselves and the world. Assuming a fixed definition of work that specifies
the content of this mediation in advance risks overlooking the dialectical engagement with the world
and the way this appropriative relation alters both the subject and the object. To put it another way,
a rigid definition risks reifying the concept of work as a process or, as Marx puts it in the Grundrisse,
the concept of labour as “living, form-giving fire; [as] their transitoriness of things, their temporality,
as their formation by living time.”437
436
John W. Budd, The Thought of Work, 14.
437
Marx, Grundrisse, 361.
182
Finally, the different conceptions of work outlined above highlight the centrality of work in
our lives (more on this below).
I.2 From the ‘Primal Curse’ to the ‘Iron Cage’: A Short History of Work438
It is easy to forget that the valorization of work and the “work-based society” are fairly
recent historical phenomena. For most of history, manual and paid labour were regarded as a
curse.439 In the book of Genesis, labour is the primal curse—Adam and Eve’s punishment for eating
from the tree of knowledge:
And unto Adam he said, Because thou…hast eaten of the tree, of which I commanded thee,
saying, Thou shalt not eat of it: cursed is the ground for thy sake; in sorrow shalt thou eat of
it all the days of thy life; Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee; and thou shalt
eat the herb of the field; In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto
the ground; for out of it wast thou taken: for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou
return.440
There are two points worth noting before we move on. First, that the notion of work as a curse
predates the Judeo-Christian account in the book of Genesis. Writing around 700 BC, Hesiod in
Work and Days gives voice to the following lament: “Would that I were…born earlier or born later!
For now it is a race of iron; and they will never cease from toil or misery by day or night, in constant
distress, and the Gods will give them harsh troubles.”441 Second, as Edward Granter has observed,
Jesus seems to have held work in open contempt:442 “Behold the fowls of the air: for they sow not,
438
For a more comprehensive history of work, see Applebaum, The Concept of Work.
439
See, for example, Keith Thomas (ed.), The Oxford Book of Work (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1999), 3-77; Budd, The Thought of Work, 19-26.
440
Genesis 3:17-19, The Old Testament, The Bible: Authorized King James Version with Apocrypha (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 4.
441
Hesiod, Works and Days quoted in The Oxford Book of Work, 4.
442
Edward Granter, Critical Social Theory and the End of Work (New York: Routledge, 2018), 16. See
also José Porfirio Miranda, Communism in the Bible (Eugene: Wipf & Stock, 1982) and Terry Eagleton
“Introduction” in Terry Eagleton presents Jesus Christ: The Gospels (New York: Verso, 2007), xxii: “Some
183
neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feedeth them”443 and “Consider
the lilies how they grow: they toil not, they spin not; and yet I say unto you, that Solomon in all his
glory was not arrayed like these.”444 Garner goes on to note, wryly, that Jesus is regarded as
exemplary in all other matters, but this fact is conveniently overlooked (the same, we should add,
can be said of his scriptural denunciations of Mammon, the “preferential option for the poor,” the
early Christians holding property and possessions in common in Acts,445 liberation theology, and
many other radical pronouncements that contravene the “gospels of success,” “gospels of work,”
and “prosperity theology” which serve as vulgar theo-ideological handmaidens of late capitalism).446
(a) Ancient Greece
In the Greek polis, free citizens neither worked nor engaged in business, opting instead to
dedicate themselves to cultural pursuits, education, and political life. The arduous toil [pónos]
necessary for the reproduction of biological and domestic life and the labourers, peasants, and slaves
responsible for carrying it out were regarded with open disdain while the craftsmanship or skill
[érgon] involved in the manufacturing of products enjoyed a slightly better reputation.447
Nevertheless, throughout the Politics, Aristotle uses the word banausos/banausoi (a pejorative term for
the class of manual labourers and artisans) and “banausic” occupations in a derogatory manner,448
aspects of the way Jesus is portrayed in these texts have an obvious radical resonance. He is
presented as homeless, propertyless, peripatetic, socially marginal, disdainful of kinfolk, without a
trade or occupation, a friend of outcasts and pariahs, averse to material possessions, without fear for
his own safety, a thorn in the side of the establishment and a scourge of the rich and powerful.”
443
Matthew 6:26, The New Testament, The Bible (KJV), 9.
444
Luke 12:26, The New Testament, The Bible (KJV), 93.
445
Acts 2:44-2:45, The New Testament, The Bible (KJV), 149: “And all that believed were together,
and had all things in common; And sold their possessions and goods and parted them to all men, as
every man had need.”
446
See, for example, Hollis Phelps, Jesus and the Politics of Mammon (Eugene: Wipf & Stock Publishers,
2019) for a radical reading of Jesus’s teachings as anti-family, anti-money, and anti-work, advocating
an excess of life against asceticism.
447
Andrea Komlosy, Work: The Last 1,000 Years, trans. Jacob K. Watson with Loren Balhorn (New
York: Verso, 2018), 9-10.
448
Svendsen, Work, 17-21.
184
insisting that “any occupation, art, or science, which makes the body or soul or mind…less fit
for…virtue, is vulgar…[and] tend[s] to deform the body, and likewise all paid employments, for they
absorb and degrade the mind.”449 This leads him to conclude that “[free] citizens must not lead the
life of mechanics or tradesmen, for such a life is ignoble, and inimical to virtue. Neither must they be
husbandmen, since leisure is necessary both for the development of virtue and the performance of
political duties.”450 Of course, the fact that the toil of labourers, merchants, peasants, slaves, and
women was what allowed the Greek citizen to actively engage in such leisure activities was never
questioned by the Greeks and receives little mention by them.
(b) Ancient Rome
The Romans, who were greatly indebted to the Greeks, contrasted labour out of necessity
[labor] with the noble arts based on honour and the creativity embodied in an individual work [opus].
As the Roman empire began to expand, with the shift from community service and public life of the
Greek poleis to the Roman private sphere, the disdain for work began to fade: agricultural labour by
free persons and skilled crafts rose in esteem, and the Judeo-Christian notions of work that were
beginning to emerge called the ancient view of work into question. Despite these new developments,
the Latin concept of labor was conceived, like its Greek counterpart, as a hardship or necessity that
people had to bear or, in the framework of the emerging Christianity, as an expiation for the sin of
defying God and the expulsion from paradise.451
(c) The Middle Ages
In the Middle Ages, labour was transformed into a virtue inaugurating laypeople, monks, and
peasants alike into the divine order. The injunction “pray and labour” [ora et labora] marked the
449
Aristotle, Politics, 1337b9-1337b14 in The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York:
The Modern Library, 2001), 1306.
450
Aristotle, Politics, 1328b39-1329a2 in The Basic Works of Aristotle, 1288-1289.
451
Komlosy, Work, 10-11.
185
beginning of the Christian work ethic. According to Komlosy, labour—of every form and social
rank, paid or unpaid—was now “anointed with God’s blessing” and assigned a positive place in the
divine order of things: clerics, knights, and labourers, all attained dignity through work equally.
Medieval monasteries began to cultivate a Christian work ethic that transformed Christendom into
“a highly effective economic unit,” and idleness [otiositas] became a cardinal vice, unless the
individual’s free time or leisure [otium] was dedicated to the contemplation or service of the divine
(e.g., through an Aquinian vita contemplativa, mendicancy, or monasticism).452 Thus, early Christians
regarded work both as a curse and a duty, “a Janus-faced juxtaposition of burden and fulfillment.”453
In short, the Greco-Roman distinction between toilsome work and creative work was preserved in
the medieval distinction between work-as-suffering and work-as-salvation.
(d) The Protestant Reformation
In The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, Max Weber famously contends that with the
onset of the Reformation, the traditional Christian work ethic assumes the form of a “calling”
[Beruf].454 For Martin Luther, salvation is no longer to be attained through the mediation of the
Church and its elaborate system of rites, rituals, and sacraments, but in devoting one’s entire life to
disciplined work, and in maintaining one’s place in the social order. In effect, Luther individualizes
and universalizes the monastic ideal of a life devoted to God in the form of a universal work ethic.
Therefore, “Luther is one of the first social theorists…to attach unambivalent moral and spiritual
positivity to work; the traditional notion of work as a curse, as a painful and burdensome activity,
began to erode, the notion of work as life’s essence began to solidify.” According to Luther,
individuals who avoid work (with the exception of those actively seeking it who cannot find it),
452
Komlosy, Work, 11.
453
Komlosy, Work, 12.
454
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Routledge Classics, 2001).
186
whether from the ranks of the priesthood or the dispossessed and homeless, are feckless and lazy,
and open to banishment, punishment, and compulsory labour.455
Weber argues that the Protestant ethic—asceticism, disciplined labour, work-as-calling—
which develops in conjunction with capitalism, is irrational at its core by contrasting it with what he
calls “traditionalism” (the instrumental orientation to work which existed prior to the Protestant
ethic and which treated work as nothing more than a means to finite ends). First, the Protestant
ethic is not tied to an earthy accumulation of goods or possessions (material instrumentality), since
these were of little consequence to the devout Puritan subject; nor is it tied to the promise of
heavenly salvation (religious instrumentality) since the Calvinist doctrine of predestination held that
no amount of good deeds, hard work, or productive effort could affect one’s salvational destiny
which was predetermined by God. In light of these facts, what motivated the Protestant work ethic?
Hard work serves not as a means to change the individual’s destiny (which is impossible),
but as an assurance of the fact that one is among God’s elect, since God would have chosen only
those who are assiduous, productive workers to be saved. Industriousness and success in the realm
of work are regarded as matters of grace and a possible sign that one is a likely candidate for salvation,
temporarily allaying anxieties about one’s place among the elect. Weeks sums up Weber’s argument
as follows:
The orientation to work was thus less the result of one’s faith in the afterlife than
constitutive of it; hard work and success are not a means to salvation, but at most signs of
it…As a means to neither concrete material nor spiritual rewards but rather as an end in
itself, the instrumentality of the work discipline is even further weakened. The rationality of
the behavior appears increasingly tenuous.456
455
Granter, Critical Social Theory and the End of Work, 18.
456
Weeks, The Problem with Work, 45.
187
This has wide-ranging implications for the historical conception of work. Work is no longer
determined, governed, or guided by its outcomes (the accumulation of goods, heavenly salvation),
but becomes an end in itself. Moreover, since no amount of disciplined work or productive effort
guarantees subjects a place among the chosen, toil and productive activity become interminable as
individuals are increasingly plagued by anxiety and self-doubt. But the Protestant ethic is irrational in
a more fundamental way—in its new secularized form, fully absorbed by the “victorious capitalism,”
it losses even its constitutive religious justification, parading itself as an axiomatic economic truth,
leaving “the idea of duty in one’s calling prowl[ing] about in our lives like the ghost of dead religious
beliefs”:
The Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so. For when asceticism was
carried out of monastic cells into everyday life, and began to dominate worldly morality, it
did its part in building the tremendous cosmos of the modern economic order. This order is
now bound to the technical and economic conditions of machine production which to-day
determine the lives of all the individuals who are born into this mechanism…with irresistible
force. Perhaps it will so determine them until the last ton of fossilized coal is burnt. In
Baxter’s view, the care of external goods should only lie on the shoulders of the “saint like a
light cloak, which can be thrown aside at any moment.” But fate decreed that the cloak
should become an iron cage.457
Although Weber maintains his characteristic ambivalence towards this development, his description
of the “iron cage” paints a bleak picture of bitter, totalizing self-deception and categorical alienation:
“For the last stages of this cultural development, it might well be truly said: ‘Specialist without spirit,
sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before
457
Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 123-124.
188
achieved.’”458 Here we have arrived at the dominant economic conception of work which prevails
today.
The economization (Ökonomisierung) of the work ethic—i.e., its secularization—signals the
decisive break in which all work becomes assessed as productive activity. Work now becomes a
factor of production. Rather than merely sustain one’s existence or take the form of a calling, the
concept of work is now understood as that which creates and accumulates capital. However, as
Komlosy demonstrates, the dual nature of work is retained in many of the Greek and Latin roots of
select European languages.459
My aim is what follows is to develop and defend this dual conception of work—couched in
terms of “labour” vs. “work,” or “productive labour” (working for money and subsistence) vs.
creative labour (working for self-realization and social creation). This distinction serves three crucial
functions: (i) it explains the centrality of work to self-realization, that is, to the capacity of late-
modern subjects to lead successful lives; (ii) it helps us distinguish productive labour as a historically-
specific form of alienated activity under capitalism from creative labour as an ontological category of
labour; and (iii) in doing so it offers a response to the “critique of value” approach who want to
deny the existence of an ontological conception of labour. Only then will we be able to investigate
what prescription the alienation critique issues in: a call for more work, for better work, or for a
refusal of work.
I.3. Work and Self-Realization
Why should we care about work? That is, in the search for the conditions that facilitate the
realization of a successful life, why should work play such a vital role? Work, as Steven Peter Vallas
notes, is “consequential for human life both individually and collectively” for a number of reasons.
458
Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, 124.
459
Komlosy, Work, 39.
189
First, according to the appropriative model, work is a form of social mediation: it is through
successful acts of appropriation of self and world that we experience our capacities and powers
objectively in the world (in the same way that a work of art is the material embodiment of the artist
in the world) and make ourselves at home in our environment. Impeded appropriation of self and
world leaves us estranged from others, from ourselves, and from the world. I will return to this idea
shortly. For now, let us examine some of the other roles, for better or worse, that work plays in
people’s lives and their relevance to self-realization.
Under capitalism, work is the primary mechanism for income distribution, and therefore
“the central avenue through which people access material necessities such as food, clothing, and
shelter, as well as commercial entertainment, and escapes offered by modern consumerism.”460
Simply put, the majority of people in late modernity must work in order to access primary goods,
meet their basic needs, and get by in market societies.
Third, work is not merely an economic transaction but is embedded in the social lifeworld,
with its culture, institutions, and intersubjective relations. Education, independence, social
engagement, social integration, and socialization of the young are all deeply implicated in the work
that subjects do or aspire to do. Moreover, the embeddedness of work means that “what actually
happens at work often departs, in subtle yet vital ways, from the formal rules and official policies
inscribed within the employee handbooks.”461 This social “hidden underside of workplace life” is
both a sight of alienation and contestation—a refutation of the anodyne pronouncements of the
economists and free market acolytes, on the one hand, and the means by which workers can disrupt
and resist co-optation into the rhythm of capitalist production, on the other.
460
David Frayne, The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work (London: Zed Books,
2015), 14.
461
Vallas, Work, 6.
190
Fourth, in achievement societies, work is the yardstick of social status and prestige. Frayne
points to the “clumsy euphemisms” that we deploy to protect ourselves from the tyranny of status:
“The bin man works in ‘waste and sanitation management’, the fry cook is ‘part of the culinary team’
and the unemployed person is ‘between jobs’.”462 Coupled with the demands of self-optimization,
the escalatory logic of dynamic stabilization, and the privatization of the costs of failure, work
becomes the master-signifier (a signifier that points to itself instead of other signifiers) and a
constant source of anguish, distress, and inadequacy in late modernity.
Finally, one third of our adult life is spent working, not to mention commuting to work,
preparing for work, searching for work, studying for work, training for work—the list is unending.
Given the sheer amount of time that work and work-related activities take up in subjects’ lives, the
centrality of work and its significance for their relationships to others, to themselves, and to the
world can hardly be denied.
Let me return to the idea of work as social mediation. The concept of labour sits at the heart
of the appropriative model. What is its relationship to the alienation critique and why does it assume
such a central role in the model’s diagnostic and prescriptive dimensions? Throughout his works,
Marx qualifies the concept of labour with adjectives such as “abstract,” “alienated,” “concrete,”
“creative,” “dead,” “living,” “objectified” and speaks of “labour power” and “wage labour.” As Amy
Wendling notes, “this enormously complex proliferation is a sign of Marx’s dawning awareness that
the category of labor itself is troubled and cannot be applied without further explanation and
analysis of its contents.”463 In whatn follows, I attempt to (i) offer a brief elucidation of the concept
of labour and (ii) demonstrate the role and significance of labour not only for the appropriative
model but also for our relationship to the world, to ourselves, and to others.
462
Frayne, The Refusal of Work, 15.
463
Amy E. Wendling, The Ruling Ideas: Bourgeois Political Concepts (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2012), 1.
191
Following Wendling, we can distinguish between two senses of labour that are operative in
the contemporary social and political landscape:
Labour1: Labour as an ontology of the human self, invariant over time, present in all
forms of human action.
Labour2: Labour as a historical mode of human activity, variant over time, changing in
character and sense according to this variation.464
Problems arise when these definitions are grasped in a one-sided way or understood to be in
direct opposition to each other—e.g., when Labour2 rather than grasping Labour1 as the basis of all
historical forms of labour, insists that no such basis exists outside the instantiations of Labour1.
Perhaps the most flagrant and idiosyncratic misreading of Marx’s theory of labour stems from such
a confusion. In The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt argues that “a fundamental
contradiction…runs like a red thread through the whole of Marx’s thought”:
Marx’s attitude towards labor…has never ceased to be equivocal. While it [i.e., labor] is an
“eternal necessity imposed by nature” and the most human and productive of man’s
activities, the revolution, according to Marx, has not the task of emancipating the laboring
classes but of emancipating man from labor; only when labor is abolished can “the realm of
freedom” supplant the “realm of necessity”…Such fundamental and flagrant contradictions
rarely occur in second-rate writers; in the work of the great authors they lead to the very
center of their work.
According to Arendt, the Marxian account leaves us “with the rather distressing alternative between
productive slavery and unproductive freedom.”465 A similar misreading of Marx appears in the
Norwegian philosopher Lars Svendsen’s book on work:
464
Wending, The Ruling Ideas, 4.
465
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1958),
pp. 104-105.
192
It is interesting that the later Marx places the realm of freedom completely within leisure,
whereas the younger Marx, placed it within authentic and non-alienated work. Hence, the
later Marx ends up with the very position that they younger Marx criticized Smith for, in
which human life is made up of unproductive freedom (leisure) and productive slavery
(work)…[The later Marx] seems to have given up the idea of non-alienated work
altogether.466
To avoid such confusions which are predicated on an inability to grasp Labour2 (in this case
“alienated labour”) as a distorted form of Labour1 (understood as creative activity), Wendling suggests
the following definition:
Labour3: Labour as a pronounced and important category of capitalist modernity, a
category whose historical operation (Labour2) requires an ontological sense
(Labour1).467
There are two benefits to defining labour in this way. First, Labour3 allows us to grasp the
manifold historical forms of labour (Labour2) without losing sight of their ontological dimension
(Labour1). Second, while Labour1 is transhistorical and Labour2 conceives of labour only historically,
Labour3 furnishes us with the conceptual tools to explain how labour (Labour1) under capitalism is
distorted, impeded, or disrupted (Labour2).
We are now in a better position to see why Marx can say of the labour process that it is
“nothing but work [more on this distinction below] itself, viewed at the moment of its creative
activity. Hence the universal features of the labour process are independent of every form of social
development”468 (Labour1), and that in wage labour under capitalism (Labour2), the worker
466
Svendsen, Work, 42-43.
467
Wending, The Ruling Ideas, p. 5.
468
Marx, Capital Volume I, p. 998.
193
“surrenders [labour’s] creative powers…because the creative power of his labour establishes itself as the
power of capital, as an alien power confronting him.”469
So far so good, but what is meant by the idea of labour “as an ontology of the human self”?
That is, how does labour form the basis of human subjectivity? In order to answer this question, we
need to take a step back and examine Marx’s account of needs, powers, and objects.
“Life,” according to Marx, “involves above all eating and drinking, shelter and clothing, and
many other things. The first historical act is thus the production of the means to satisfy these
needs.”470 This is a fundamental condition of all history which must be fulfilled in order to sustain
human life. We can summarize Marx’s account of basic human needs as follows: for sustenance
(“eating, drinking”); for warmth and shelter (“heat, clothing, housing”); for sexual activity
(“procreation,” “the relationship of man to woman as a natural species-relationship”);471 for basic
hygiene (“the simplest animal cleanliness”); for movement (to “roam,” “physical exercise”); and for an
environment conducive to health (“fresh air,” “a dwelling in the light”).472
It is important to distinguish Marx’s idea of needs from the utilitarian conception which
understand needs strictly in terms of suffering or lack. The Marxian ideal is one in which individuals
are paradoxically “rich in need”: “It is apparent how the rich man and wide human need appear in
place of economic wealth and poverty. The rich man is simultaneously one who needs a totality of
human manifestations of life and in whom his own realization exists as inner necessity, as need.”473
Sayers captures the point well when he writes, “Fulfillment is not a condition in which all needs are
stilled; rather it is a matter of developing a wealth of needs and desires.”474
469
Marx, Grundrisse, p. 307.
470
Marx, The German Ideology, Selected Writings, p. 115.
471
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Selected Writings, pp. 62-3, 70.
472
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and the Communist Manifesto, trans. Martin
Milligan (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988), pp. 117-8.
473
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Selected Writings, p. 77.
474
Sean Sayers, “Marxism and Human Nature,” Marxism and Human Nature, p. 164.
194
Therefore, the satisfaction of basic needs, for Marx, must not be regarded as the final end of
human activity. Marx uses the term “power” to capture the idea of an “ability,” “capacity,” “faculty,”
or “function,” on the one hand, and the suggestion of “potentiality” or “possibility” on the other.475
Under the development of these present- and future-oriented powers, the young Marx includes
aesthetic pleasure (“a musical ear, an eye for the beauty of form”); artistic expression (to “sing,
paint”); culture (to “go to the theatre,” to “travel”); emotional and moral fulfillment (to “will, love”);
intellectual activity (to “read books,” to “theorize,” “learning”); and recreation (to “drink,” to
“fence,” to “go to the dance hall”), but given their open-ended development, their fecundity, and the
boundless possibilities for their realization, this can only be a preliminary list.476
The production of new needs and proliferation of powers sets human beings on the path of
universal development.477 What does this universal development entail? According to Marx,
As a living natural being [the human being] is, in one aspect, endowed with the natural
capacities and vital powers of an active natural being. These capacities exist in him as tendencies
and capabilities, as drives. In another aspect as a natural, living, sentient, and objective being
man is a suffering, conditioned, and limited creature like and animal or plant. The objects of his
drives, that is to say, exist outside him as independent, yet they are the objects of his need,
essential and indispensable to the exercise and confirmation of his essential capacities.478
Marx once again speaks of “essential capacities,” “powers,” or “drives” which individuals as
objective beings can express or realize in a humanized environment. The important point for our
purposes is that since the nature of all beings must lie outside those beings, needs and powers
475
Ollman, Alienation, pp. 74-75.
476
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, pp. 108-9, 118-9.
477
Marx, The German Ideology, Selected Writings, p. 77.
478
195
presuppose a sensuous domain of objects appropriate for their actualization.479 Marx uses the
example of hunger as the natural need of a body for an object outside itself. This is absolutely key:
“The fact that man is a corporeal, actual, sentient, objective being with natural capacities means that he
has…objects for his nature as objects of his life-expression, or that he can express himself
in…objects.”480 There are three points to keep in mind before we proceed. First, as Ollman makes
clear, “Marx uses ‘object’ in the sense of the ‘object of a subject’ (real or potential)” and not as a
material object, even though the latter is included in the former.481 Second, the human being, as a
part of nature, is also an object for others and for itself, since its nature is always located outside
itself. Third, “neither objective nor subjective nature is immediately presented in a form adequate to
the human being.”482 In light of these facts, the question then becomes: how are human needs and
powers realized in objects? Put differently, if (i) the nature of human beings always lies outside them
and (ii) they require objects for the expression of their needs and powers, objects that are (iii) not
immediately found in the world in a form adequate for that expression, how do human beings
realize themselves in the world?
The realization of human needs and powers in the world is established through three
interconnected processes: perception, orientation, and appropriation. Perception refers to the
immediate contact with nature that human beings as corporeal, sensuous beings achieve through
their senses. Power, as we shall see, is sense in its interaction with nature. Orientation refers to the
way human beings perceive objects and establish a framework for action within the world.
Appropriation, the most significant of the three processes for the purposes of our discussion here,
“is the intersection between man’s senses and nature, in which the [needs and] powers involved use
479
Stephen Mulhall, “Species-Being, Teleology and Individuality, Part I: Marx on Species-Being,”
Angelaki: Journal of Theoretical Humanities 3 (1998), p. 10.
480
481
Ollman, Alienation, p. 78.
482
196
the nature they come into contact with for their own ends” and, as such, always refers to the
realization of human needs and powers.483
Appropriation is a process of “building by incorporating,” or “sublating/working up”
[Aufheben]. In appropriating the nature that subjects perceive and become oriented to, they make it a
part of themselves, simultaneously altering themselves (including their senses and future orientation)
as well as the natural objects they appropriate.484 Consequently, each of the subject’s essential powers
has not only boundless possibilities for realization, but also many possible objects of appropriation,
limited only by its stage of historical development. We will return to this idea in the next section.
Ollman offers the following example of appropriation:
To ‘capture’ a sunset, it is not necessary to paint, write or sing about it. It becomes ours in
the experiencing of it. The forms and colours we see, the sense of awakening to beauty that
we feel and the growth in sensitivity which accompanies such an event are all indications of
our new appropriation. To paint the sunset or to write about it, if joined by genuine
emotions, would achieve an even higher degree of appropriation, would make the event even
more a part of us.485
Ollman’s example revolves around the aesthetic power of seeing, but, given that neither objective
nor subjective nature is immediately available in a form adequate to the human being, most acts of
appropriation require a more active role in the form of a “mediation” between subject and object to
realize the subject’s needs and powers in the world. What is this role?
Creative activity, or work, is the means by which the subject appropriates objects. That is,
“activity, for Marx, is this role: it is man interacting with nature with his body as well as his mind. As
such, activity is the actual movement of man’s powers in in the real world, the living process of
483
Ollman, Alienation, pp. 85-86.
484
485
197
objectifying these powers in nature.”486 Since human existence is inconceivable without the
transformation of nature, productive activity is the “first-order mediation” in the subject-object
relationship between human beings and nature: it is only by externalizing and objectifying
themselves in their environment through their productive activity that persons realize their powers
in the world and make themselves at home in it. As Ollman notes, in Marx’s later writings the term
“activity” is replaced with “work.” Frederick Engels distinguishes “work” from “labour” as follows:
“Labour which creates use-values and is qualitatively determined is called ‘work’; labour which
creates value and is only measured quantitively is called ‘labour’, as opposed to ‘work’.”487 However,
the general English usage has failed to make use of Engel’s distinction, so I will retain the distinction
between alienated labour/productive activity and non-alienated labour/creative activity, but
continue to use labour and work interchangeably.
How does creative activity realize the subject’s essential powers? First, it requires the
deployment of numerous powers in concert and hence engages virtually all of the subject’s powers:
concentration, dedication, planning, skillful effort, etc. Second, it establishes new possibilities in
extending the boundaries of nature for the proliferation of powers and their creative actualization.
As we saw earlier, the world of objects at any specific historical stage limits the possibilities of
realizing a subject’s powers. Therefore, in continuously remolding nature, each progressive alteration
enables the subject’s powers to achieve newer kinds of fulfillment and higher degrees of refinement.
The satisfaction of needs and powers in turn generates newer, richer needs and powers, and so on.
Finally, productive activity is the development of a subject’s powers qua powers. It is not only a
“first-order mediation” in the subject-object relationship, but a self-mediation, or onto-genesis, in
which, “the entire so-called history of the world is nothing but the begetting of man through human
486
487
Marx, Capital Volume One, p. 138, n. 16.
198
work, nothing but the coming to be of nature for man.”488 Thus, Ollman is not mistaken in his
remark that “there is no clear distinction in Marx’s writings between ‘activity’, ‘work’ and ‘creativity’.
In interacting with nature, each man deposits part of his personality, the distinctive contribution of
his powers in all he does.”489
Now that we have outlined the relationship between creative activity and the realization of
human needs and powers, it is not difficult to see how labour under capitalism disrupts or interposes
itself between the subject-object relationship in the form of a second-order mediation. With the
development of the division of labour, its increased specialization, and repetitive nature, productive
activity no longer engages all of the subject’s powers, and for those that it does engage, these powers
are considerably fewer and narrower in scope. And although industry continues to produce new
horizons and possibilities, they are not directed at the fulfillment of the needs and powers of the
worker, for
the better shaped his product, the more misshapen he is; the more civilized his product, the
more barbaric is the worker; the more powerful the work, the more powerless becomes the
worker; the more intelligence the work has, the more witless is the worker…To be sure,
labor produces marvels for the wealthy, but it produces hovels for the worker. It produces
beauty, but mutilation for the worker. It displaces labor through machines, but it throws
some workers back into barbarous labor and turns others into machines. It produces
intelligence, but for the worker it produces imbecility.490
488
Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, p. 68.
489
490
199
This establishes an accumulation of drudgery and want, corresponding with the development of
industry: “Accumulation of wealth at one pole is, therefore, at the same time accumulation of
misery, agony of toil, slavery, ignorance, brutality, [and] mental degradation, at the opposite pole.”491
Finally, instead of developing people’s creative powers, the conditions of capitalist production
destroy every remnant of charm in their work, turning it into hated toil, and estrange them from
their own potentialities.
II. The Critique of Work
So far, I have been defending the dual nature of labour, but our discussions of alienated labour have
been limited to the labour process. In this section, I would like to turn to the labour form. My aim is
to continue defending the alienated/non-alienated dichotomy, while showing how the latter can
issue in a radical critique of work.
II.1 Two Critiques of Work
In his excellent study, The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought, Alastair Hemmens identifies two
critiques of work:
The first effectively dives straight into an empirical, historical, ethical, and moral critical
analysis assuming that work as such is not problematic but might become so under certain
conditions. The second grounds its analysis of the phenomenological expressions of work in
capitalism in a critique of the category itself.492
Hemmens admits that both approaches might arrive at very similar conclusions, and have their roots
in Marxian thought, but it is only the second approach, he argues, that mounts a radical critique of
work in and of itself, that is, of work per se, in its historical specificity as a socially imposed reality or
product of the capitalist form of life. Whereas the first “exoteric” approach (likely to be understood;
491
Marx, Capital Volume One, pp. 639-40.
492
Alastair Hemmens, The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought: From Charles Fourier to Guy Debord
(Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 6.
200
intended for the general public) regards work as a transhistorical natural necessity and is
characterized by Hemmens as having a “progressivist and positivistic conception of labour” that is
distorted under capitalism, the “esoteric” approach (difficult to understand; requiring initiation)
“presents labour, first and foremost, already as an inherently destructive, fetishistic, and anti-social
category of social synthesis that forms the basis for an ‘abstract domination’ by…the value form (or
‘dead labour’).”493 The main proponents of the “esoteric” approach, aside from Hemmens, are
Robert Kurz and other members of the Wertkritik or “critique of value” school of Marxism, and
Moishe Postone. In Time, Labor, and Social Domination, Postone sums up the two critiques of work we
have been discussing as follows: “I shall begin…by distinguishing between two fundamentally
different modes of critical analysis: a critique of capitalism from the standpoint of labour, on the one
hand, and a critique of labor in capitalism, on the other.” The first “exoteric” approach is based on a
“transhistorical understanding of labor,” while the second “esoteric” approach regards labor in
capitalism as a historically specific form constituting the essential structures of capitalist society.494
It should be clear from the previous section that the appropriative model is a form of
“exoteric” critique: it recognizes that work is alienated in the sphere of capitalist production and in
achievement societies, impeding the self-realization of late-modern subjects, while simultaneously
aspiring to a form of non-alienated creative activity in which subjects are able to lead successful lives and
to establish the self-world relations they desire. It is, in fact, this possibility of non-alienated work or
creative labour which furnishes the grounds for the critique of alienating forms of life that obstruct
self-realization. Before we explore some of these criticisms of work, however, I would like to adduce
some reasons why we should be wary of esoteric critique, despite its putatively radical import.
493
Hemmens, The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought, 6-33.
494
Moishe Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination: A Reinterpretation of Marx’s Critical Theory (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 5-6.
201
First, it is not obvious why Hemmens believes that only “esoteric” critique can mount a
“ontological break” with the labour form, issuing in a call for the abolition of work. All the thinkers
he surveys from Charles Fourier to André Breton and Guy Debord call, in one form or another, for
the abolition of work from within the bounds of “exoteric” critique. Hemmens admits this much:
“Western Marxism…which included such movements as the Frankfurt School and the Situationists,
would take on certain aspects of ‘esoteric’ critique, in particular commodity fetishism, but often in a
manner that reproduced Marx’s aporetic understanding of labour [i.e., Marx’s ‘exoteric’ critique].”495
How was this possible? Because these thinkers understood “the break with the labour form” to
mean a break with the alienated labour form; and understood “the abolition of work,” as Marx did, to
mean the abolition of alienated work—in order to make room for free creative activity.
Second, both Hemmens and Postone accuse “exoteric” critique of having a “transhistorical”
conception of labour. But, as Gullì persuasively argues, this specific charge rests on an equivocation.
“Trans” can mean “beyond” in which case transhistorical refers to “a metaphysical level that
transcends all history”; needless to say, this is not a view that the appropriative model (or any other
model of “exoteric” critique, for that matter) endorses. “Trans” can also mean “across or through”
in which case, transhistorical is an accurate description: labour is present in all modes of production
as a form of social mediation between subjects and the metabolism of nature496—which takes it to
the third and last point.
Perhaps the most puzzling and fatal objection to the “esoteric” critique is that, if the
category of labour is historically specific to capitalism,
What if not labor, would characterize the social relations of (past and future) noncapitalist
societies? Certainly not labor subsumed under capital…Yet it is still a form of labor that
495
Hemmens, The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought, 15.
496
Gullì, Labor of Fire, 88-89.
202
constitutes (in interaction with material resources) the necessary and nonnecessary wealth of
all social formations…Certainly, labor can be playful rather than draining, free and creative
rather than compulsory and dull (and it is really in the synthesis of these opposites, namely,
what in labor is necessary and what is free and creative, that one finds the sense of an
alternative); yet, it would still be a form of labor.497
The problem is not only that the “esoteric” critique of work is based on a reductive account of
labour (which regards all labour as alienated labour—“work is capitalism and capitalism is work”498),
but that the very function of critique as a “theory of social mediation [that] seeks to overcome the
classical theoretical dichotomy of subject and object, while explaining that dichotomy historically”499
is lost—with perplexing implications. Consider, for example, Hemmens’ description of the activities
of precapitalistic societies:
Human beings have not always “worked.” They have always sown fields, built homes,
created luxuries and taught children—often throughout much of its history, they have even
been paid in coin or kind for these tasks—but these concrete activities have not always had
the essentially abstract form that defines them in capitalism. The ancients were aware of
“labour” as pain but labour as such—labour as the undifferentiated expenditure of human
energy, measured in socially necessary time, for no other purpose than turning £100 into
£110—was unknown to them.
At best, this seems like a matter of semantic hairsplitting—that is, the “esoteric” critic
acknowledges that subjects in precapitalistic societies “worked,” but denies that it was work as such.
A much more straightforward diagnosis of what Hemmens is describing is that under capitalism
497
Gullì, Labor of Fire, 89-90.
498
Hemmens, The Critique of Work in Modern French Thought, 194.
499
Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, 5.
203
work becomes alienated, or at least alienated in specific way, that is unprecedented in human history:
it is no longer a means (even partially) for self-realization, but an obstacle to the latter.
If work plays such a fundamental role in our lives, why is there an inattention to work and
general paucity of critiques of work in contemporary political philosophy?
II.2 The Depoliticization of Work
While the role of work permeates every aspect of our lives from the moralizing discourse of
the Protestant ethic in ghostly secularized form, which enjoins us to approach work as if it were a
calling, to the celebration of work in achievement societies as a path to individual self-expression
and creativity (organized self-realization)—the valorization of work has gone hand in hand with its
depoliticization. As Kathi Weeks points out in The Problem with Work,
[T]he amount of time alone that the average citizen is expected to devote to work—
particularly when we include the time spent training, searching and preparing for work, not
to mention recovering from it—would suggest that the experience warrants moral
consideration…Perhaps more significantly, places of employment and spaces of work seem
to be supremely relevant to the very bread and butter of political science…Indeed, the work
cite is where we often experience the most immediate, unambiguous, and tangible relations
of power that most of us will encounter on a daily basis. As a fully political rather than a
simply economic phenomenon, work would thus seem to be an especially rich object of
inquiry.500
And yet, Weeks goes on to argue, “political theorists tend to be more interested in our lives
as citizens and noncitizens, legal subjects and bearers of rights, consumers and spectators, religious
devotees and family members, than in our daily lives as workers.”501
500
Weeks, The Problem with Work, 2-3.
501
204
Weeks identifies two reasons for this inattention to work in political theory. The first is the
privatization of work, the view that work is a not a social institution to be conceived of in structural
terms, but a private relationship. Drawing similarities between the privatization of work and the
marriage relation, Weeks argues that the workplace, like the household, is “figured as the product of
a series of individual contracts rather than a social structure, the province of human need and sphere
of individual choice rather than a site for the exercise of political power.”502 Not only is the
privatization of work a product of the institution of private property that secures its
individualization (exacerbated by the division of labor and myriad specializations in the workplace);
it is also an artefact of the naturalization of work, i.e., the reification of a social convention as a
necessary part of the natural order. After all, what could be more “natural” than earning one’s keep?
A second reason for the inattention to work within contemporary political philosophy is the
absence of worker’s parties, the sharp decline in union membership and union-based activism, and
the rise of consumer politics, effectively circumscribing political imaginaries to the corporate
expressions of ethical buying/corporate responsibility, consumer boycotts, hashtag activism (or
“slacktivism”), and purchasing power. While Weeks acknowledges that these are important avenues,
she rightly concludes that “to the extent that unionization and consumer organization [are]…often
the only avenues for imagining a politics of work, we are left with few possibilities for marshalling
antiwork activism and inventing postwork imaginaries.”503 The depoliticization of work obscures both
the alienating dimension of work, that is, the myriad ways in which work obstructs self-realization,
and the emancipatory potential of non-alienated work as means to self-realization. Consequently,
whatever prescriptions we put forward must bring the question of work to the foreground so that
late-modern subjects can counter its alienating effects and utilize its liberatory potential.
502
503
205
II.3 Precarious Work
In Chapter I, we saw that self-realization, under the appropriative model, consists of five
dimensions: (i) appropriative efficacy; (ii) symbolic efficiency; (iii) satisfaction of needs; (iv)
engagement in autotelic activities; and (v) the capacity to freely formulate and pursue ground
projects which afford subjects meaning. With these five criteria in mind, in this section I would like
to offer a critique work. My claim is that waged work in late modernity is alienating not only within
the labour process (although it certainly remains so), but also in the precarious nature of late-modern
work, which prevents subjects from leading successful lives and severely undermines the possibility
of self-realization.
One of the fundamental problems confronting late-modern workers, which undermines
virtually all the constituents of self-realization, is increased precarity: lack of job predictability, security, and
stability has resulted in a growing class of “precarious subjects”—known as the precariat.
The precariat is made up of the creative classes (artists, coders, squatters, engineers, designers,
etc.), the new working classes (subcontracted employment as unskilled workers or technicians in
warehousing, logistics, industrial manufacturing, food processing, construction, etc.), the service classes
(waiters, baristas, cashiers, cleaners, fast-food workers, etc.), and the unemployed classes (NEETs [Not
in Education, Employment, or Training], the short- and long-term unemployed, labour force
dropouts, welfare recipients on workfare, illegal immigrants and refugees, etc.).504
According to Guy Standing, the precariat “consists of people living through insecure jobs
interspersed with periods of unemployment or labour-force withdrawal (misnamed ‘economic
activity’) and living insecurely, with uncertain access to housing and public resources. They
experience a constant sense of transiency.”505 Of course, lack of labour security is not a new
504
Alex Foti, General Theory of the Precariat: Great Recession, Revolution, Reaction (Amsterdam: Institute of
Network Cultures, 2017), 24.
505
Guy Standing, A Precariat Charter: From Denizens to Citizens (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 16.
206
phenomenon but today this has become the norm rather than the exception for a large number of
working subjects. The precariat lacks access to the majority of labour-related securities that previous
workers struggled hard to obtain: “non-wage perks” (company pensions, medical leave, and paid
vacations); rights-based state benefits provided to citizens in the middle class and the salariat; and
community benefits (local support networks, public services and amenities, and a strong commons).
The casualization of work, dwindling job protections, increased insecurity, low and stagnant wages,
and the privatization of the commons means that precarious late-modern subjects lack the
rudimentary preconditions for appropriative efficacy, autonomy, and the satisfaction of basic needs.
Additionally, the precarious conditions of life, and the uncertainty that accompanies such an
existence, means that the precariat is confronted with an inappropriable, opaque world bereft of
symbolic efficiency. As Standing notes, this lack of occupational identity and biographical narrative
“is a source of frustration, alienation, anxiety, and anomic despair.”506
In Chapter 3, we saw how the “temporalization of time” ushered in by the imperatives of
speed and social acceleration results in pathologies of de-synchronization. The precariat can no
longer rely on the “industrial time” that characterized work in classical modernity and demarcated
the working day into blocks of time. Instead, it is subject to what Standing calls “tertiary time”—
expected to always be on call, ready for casual labour, interviews, temp positions, shift work, etc. at
all hours of the day, every day. In the time not spent working, the precariat is preparing to work:
updating resumes an online profiles, applying to jobs, juggling debts. Subject to the escalatory logic
of dynamic stabilization, “[t]o take ‘time out’ is to risk missing opportunities and falling behind.”507
Exacerbating the insecurity of the precariat and further undermining its ability to establish
successful self-world relations is the uncertainty associated with globalization and the neoliberal
506
Standing, A Precariat Charter, 22.
507
Standing, A Precariat Charter, 23.
207
expansion of the market into all spheres of human life. Not only are the hazards and risks much
greater for precarious subjects, since they are exposed to more dimensions of uncertainty and have
fewer resources to deal with them, making them less resilient in the face of adversity, but the costs
of failure are privatized, leaving them vulnerable to self-recriminations, heightened anxiety, and
depression.
Lastly, the precariat is subject to “precarity traps”—“a combination of poverty traps,
exploitation and coercion outside the workplace…that amounts to a tsunami of adversity”—largely
due to means-tested social assistance and workfare, in which precarious subjects are obliged to take
low-paying jobs, engage in unpaid “work experience,” or undertake extensive, bureaucratic steps
(answering “trick” questions, filling out forms, providing documentation, queuing, reporting for
interviews, etc.) in order to gain means-tested benefits. Precarious late-modern subjects also have
difficulty moving in search of employment, since youths often cannot rent an apartment without a
permanent job, deepening the precarity trap.508
Looking forward, the prognosis is bleak. In Inventing the Future, Nick Srnicek and Alex
Williams predict the following trends based on analysis of the current tendencies of capitalism,
further exacerbating the precarity of late-modern workers:
(1) The precarity of the developed economies’ working class will intensify due to the surplus
global labour supply (resulting from both globalisation and automation).
(2) Jobless recoveries will continue to deepen and lengthen, predominantly affecting those
whose jobs can be automated at the time.
(3) Slum populations will continue to grow due to the automation of low-skilled service
work and will be exacerbated by premature industrialisation.
508
Standing, A Precariat Charter, 27-28.
208
(4) Urban marginality in the developed economies will grow in size as low-skilled, low-wage
jobs are automated.
(5) The transformation of higher education into job training will be hastened in a desperate
attempt to increase the supply of high-skilled workers.
(6) Growth will remain slow and make the expansion of replacement jobs unlikely.
(7) The changes to workfare, immigration controls and mass incarceration will deepen as
those without jobs are increasingly subjected to coercive controls and survival
economies.509
Needless to say, under such conditions, the possibilities of precarious subjects leading
successful lives is remote. To put it slightly differently, without a measure of security and stability,
the prospect of self-realization, let alone its constituents, remains a distant dream. We will return to
this point in Chapter 5.
III. Three Theoretical Paradigms: More Work, Better Work, Less Work
How should we challenge the dominant work ethic that dictates virtually every aspect of our lives?
Weeks considers three theoretical paradigms: (i) the call for more work (socialist modernization), (ii)
the call for better work (socialist humanism), and (iii) the call for less work (or, following the
autonomist Marxist tradition, the “refusal of work”510). Eschewing the alienation critique, she argues
against the first two and embraces the third. In the sections that follow, I try to show that Weeks is
correct to take up the refusal of work, but that the alienation critique can only be jettisoned at the
expense of the former, leaving the critique of the labour process and production unmotivated and
acceding to much ground to passive consumption.
509
Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (New
York: Verso, 2016), 104.
510
See, for example, Mario Tronti, “The Strategy of Refusal” and “The Struggle Against Work!” in
Workers and Capital, trans. David Broder (New York: Verso, 2019), 241-262, 272-276.
209
III.1 The Call for More Work
The first theoretical paradigm is concerned with the critique of exploitation and follows
from an “analytic” reading of Capital that focuses on the contradiction between the forces and
relations of production. Exploitation is the result of the private ownership of the forces of
production and appropriation of surplus value, but bourgeois property relations eventually become
impediments to the full development of productive forces. Communism would democratize these
property relations, leaving the productive forces unhindered. As Weeks notes, “the relations of
production—class relations—would be thus radically transformed, while the means of production
and the labor process itself would be merely unfettered.”511
Weeks associates socialist modernization with state socialism, citing Lenin’s characterization
of the socialist phase, which marks the transition between capitalism and communism, as one of
self-sacrifice and commitment to disciplined labor—but a better example would be the notion of
Stakhanovism or the Stakhanovite Movement (named after Alexey Stakhanov) which referred to
workers producing more than what was required of them through disciplined, industrious labour.512
From the perspective of the alienation critique, the problem with calls for more work under
the traditional Marxist paradigm is clear: while property relations are democratized, the capitalist
work ethic, including its uncritical endorsement of continuous production, is reproduced in full
without attending to the nature of the labour process. Thus, Weeks rightly complains the call for more work
is “founded upon an insufficient critique of capital…its vision of an alternative preserves too many
of capitalism’s structures and values.”513 Because the traditional Marxist paradigm is concerned with
the mode of distribution, socialism, according to Moishe Postone,
511
Weeks, The Problem with Work, p. 83.
512
See Lewis H. Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1990).
513
210
is seen as a new mode of politically administering and economically regulating the same
industrial mode of production to which capitalism gave rise to; it is thought to be a social
form of distribution that is not only more just, but also more adequate to industrial
production.514
Weeks openly betrays the need for the alienation critique when she argues that in this form,
“the critique of capitalist production does not extend…to the labor process itself, and that does not
account adequately for Marx’s many pointed critiques of the mind-numbing and repetitive qualities
of factory work, or his insistence that freedom requires a shortening of the working day.”515 In short,
the call for more work, even under a socialist paradigm in which property relations have been fully
democratized, fails to provide an adequate critique of production (which it takes as its starting point).
The call for “better work” is an improvement in this regard but suffers from its own inadequacies.
We turn to this next.
III.2 The Call for Better Work
Unlike socialist mobilization, socialist humanism incorporates a more extensive critique of
work, drawing its inspiration from Marx’s theory of alienation in the Economic and Philosophic
Manuscripts of 1844. Accordingly, it is concerned with the alienating quality or phenomenal experience
of the labour process. The looks promising at first blush but suffers from its own limitations.
As we saw in Chapter 1, the appropriative model is formal in nature and hence not
committed to any metaphysically dubious claims that attach to traditional humanist accounts of
alienation. Insofar as the call for better work is predicated on an essentialist or perfectionist
understanding of alienated labour, it runs afoul of the ethical pluralism of modern societies and the
appropriative model. But this need not be case, so let us set aside this reservation for now.
514
Postone, Time, Labor, and Social Domination, p. 9.
515
211
A more pressing difficulty is that the call for better work is unable to detach itself from the
spectre of production. While it is an improvement from the previous paradigm insofar as it subjects
the labour process to critical assessment, it nevertheless accepts the value of production, seeking
only to ameliorate its conditions. Production remains at the center of all human activity: where the
socialist paradigm was concerned with liberating production from capitalist exploitation, the
humanist paradigm seeks to liberate work from the alienating nature of the labour process—but
leaves the value of production unexamined.
Here the concept of organized self-realization we examined in Chapter 3 provides a perfect
illustration of this problem. Ever since the 1970s, talk of alienation and calls for “meaningful work”
have been steadily absorbed into the managerial discourse of HR departments, sociology textbooks
and wellness seminars. Long co-opted, and still adorned in their humanist garb, they now serve to
make capitalist production more efficient (the more ergonomic the desk chairs, the healthier the
worker, the higher the productivity, etc.), extending the boundaries of work into all aspects of
human life. Thus Weeks is not wrong to conclude that “the [humanist] affirmation of unalienated
labour is not an adequate strategy by which to contest contemporary modes of capitalist control; it is
too readily co-opted in a context in which the metaphysics of labor and the moralization of work
carry so much cultural authority.”516 But if the appropriative model is not satisfied with the
democratization of capitalist property relations (the socialist paradigm), nor by the work society
qualitatively perfected (the humanist paradigm)—what prescription does it issue in?
III.3 The Call for Less Work
The first thing to note about the “refusal of work” is that, like the alienation critique, it consists of
two dimensions: a negative, critical dimension (i.e., an antiwork politics) and, belying its name, a
positive construction of alternative futures (i.e., postwork imaginaries)—simultaneously comprising
516
212
“a movement of exit and a process of invention.”517 Therefore, the call for less work is not a
rejection of non-alienated labour as free creative activity, but its very condition. Nevertheless, Weeks
argues that the alienation critique has nothing significant to contribute to the refusal work. This is a
mistake for three reasons.
First, by not availing ourselves of the critical authority of the alienation critique, why should
the unaddressed nature of capitalist production and its labour processes give us pause in the socialist
paradigm once the capitalist relations of production have been democratized? If the answer is that
they continue to uphold the primacy of production, why should this matter (since the social relations
governing them are no longer ones of exploitation)? The appropriative model, on the other hand,
with its concern for successful acts of appropriation and the material conditions underlying them,
has ample reason to reject the socialist paradigm as insufficient precisely on these grounds: it leaves
two central obstacles to self-realization unaddressed—the labour process and the primacy of
production, both of which hinder self-realization.
Second, the appropriative model succeeds in avoiding the pitfalls of the humanist paradigm
and neutralizing a host of metaphysical and essentialist objections, while retaining the critical
authority of the alienation critique. Furthermore, because of it is capable of diagnosing organized
self-realization as a pathological variant of self-realization (that is, a pathological variant of itself), the
appropriative model is capable of distinguishing the managerial language of “meaningful work” from
non-alienated work, and hence is significantly less prone to co-option than its humanist counterpart.
So why does Weeks reject the alienation critique?
According to Weeks,
[T]he refusal of work is not in fact a rejection of activity and creativity in general or of
production in particular. It is not a renunciation of labor tout court, but rather a refusal of the
517
213
ideology of work as highest calling and moral duty, a refusal of work as the necessary center
of social life and means of access to rights and claims of citizenship, and a refusal of the
necessity of capitalist control of production. It is a refusal, finally, of the asceticism of
those—even those on the Left—who privilege work over all other pursuits, including
“carefree consumption.”518
The passage is striking for a number of reasons, the most glaring of which is its embrace of
“carefree consumption.” Without a critique of the latter, there is nothing preventing the refusal of
work from lapsing into anodyne consumption. It is not difficult to imagine a basic universal income,
for example, coupled with the administered world of late capitalism in which we withdraw into the
soft parade of television pictures.
I am very partial to Weeks’s critique of worldly asceticism and for making room for idleness
(and even hebetude), but the uncritical attitude towards consumption “ignores consumption’s
interconnection with more structural social relations (class or income, for example)” and the fact
“that consumption is premised, and dependent on production.”519 It is also ignores the fact that
most of consumption takes place in the sphere of necessary production, and that as the obverse of
production, it plays a critical ideological role in its reproduction. As such, one cannot dismiss the
critique of consumption without overlooking the role it plays in the perpetuation of the work ethic.
As Garner puts it, “If we accept that consumption…is the very fuel on which the system depends, it
is hard to see how this consumption…can take place without running counter to the interests of
liberation for all people of the globe.”520
So far I have been arguing that Weeks’s argument for less work is a wrong step in the right
direction: wrong because she believes that the alienation critique plays no role in her arguments
518
519
520
214
against work and is bound to the theoretical paradigm of socialist humanism with its attendant
difficulties, and consequently should be jettisoned altogether; right because the sociopolitical
conclusions Weeks draws, both in their anti-work orientation and emphasis on post-work
imaginaries, are correct from the perspective of the alienation critique. However, without availing herself of
the latter, the criticisms she levels against the two rival paradigms are unmotivated, on one hand, and
leave unaddressed the critique of consumption.
Consider the following exchange drawn from Bini Adamczak’s Communism for Kids in which
the characters, through successive trials, are trying to “name the society that [best] gets rid of all the
evils people suffer under capitalism.”521
The Problem with Traditional Marxism (Critique of Exploitation)—“Just a minute!”
someone interrupts. “Working in the factory isn’t fun at all! It’s exactly the same dumb work
as before. […] The important thing isn’t that irons are made but rather how they are made.
It’s not enough just to have some work to do. What matters is the kind of work we are
doing.” “Yes! That’s right,” calls out someone else. “Who cares if I have work when I don’t
enjoy it?”522
The Problem with Socialist Humanism (Critique of the Labour Process)—“Making so
many things and fulfilling so many wishes was pretty nice,” the people say, “but work was
killing us.” “Well then,” somebody suggests, “let’s get rid of work.” “Excellent idea!” other
people exclaim. “Why didn’t we think of this before? Let the machines do the work for
us!”523
521
Bini Adamczak, Communism for Kids, trans. Jacob Blumenfeld and Sophie Lewis (Cambridge: The
MIT Press, 2017), pp. 1, 35-6, 57, 65.
522
Adamczak, Communism for Kids, pp. 41-3.
523
Adamczak, Communism for Kids, p. 57.
215
↓
The Problem with the Critique of Production (without recourse to the Alienation
Critique)—Now the machines are working instead of people. Since people are no longer
afraid of being unemployed…they have more free time to enjoy. The people shout, “Out
whole lives, we’ve been workers. From now on we’re pleasure seekers! […] Lying there, a
thought crosses their minds. Once again, everything revolves around things. People only care
about having things…“now we don’t do anything together anymore. And people only speak
to their things, not to each other. That’s not how we imagined it…”524
The Refusal of Work (Critique of Production and Consumption)
To recap, we require the alienation critique to mount a critique of the labour process, of
production, and of consumption. Because Weeks remains sceptical of the concept of alienation, she
puts jettisons it too quickly leaving her otherwise trenchant critique of the call for more work and
the call for better work unmotivated and leaving the relationship of consumptions in the
perpetuation of the work ethics unaddressed. Table 4.1 below sums up the conclusions of my
argument.
524
Adamczak, Communism for Kids, pp. 58-9.
216
Table 4.1 The Call for Less Work and the Need for the Alienation Critique
Less Work
Less Work
(without
(with recourse
More Work Better Work recourse to the
to the alienation
alienation
critique)
critique)
• Critique of • Critique of • Critique of • Critique of
Exploitation Exploitation Exploitation Exploitation
• Critique of the • Critique of the • Critique of the
Labour Process Labour Process Labour Process
Addressed
(unmotivated) • Critique of
• Critique of Production
Production • Critique of
(unmotivated) Consumption
• Critique of the • Critique of • Critique of
Labour Process Production Consumption
• Critique of • Critique of
Production Consumption
Unaddressed
• Critique of
Consumption
Conclusion
In this chapter, my aim was: (i) to highlight the dual nature of work—work/non-alienated work—by
offering a short history of work and its myriad conceptions (ii) to offer an account of labour as a
form of social mediation through which subjects come to realize their capacities and powers in the
world; (iii) to defend the “exoteric” critique of work drawing on the dual nature of labour offered in
the first half of the chapter; (iv) to offer a general critique of the depoliticization of work and the
alienating effects of precarious work, and finally, (v) to argue that Weeks’s call for less work follows
from the alienation critique but runs into fatal difficulties without it. The call for less work serves a
prescriptive theoretical lodestar—guiding but in search of content. We turn to these next.
217
Chapter 5
Four Proposals
[A] step in the direction of liberation today involves the possibility of slowing down the pace of connections, without
thereby fearing that one no longer exists for others or sinking into oblivion and, ultimately, “exclusion”; of deferring
engagement in a project or publishing a work, and instead sharing it…without thereby seeing the recognition to which
one believes one is entitled appropriated by another; of lingering over an ongoing project, whose full potential one had
not realized at the outset; of putting off the moment of the test…
—Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism525
A new utopia is needed if we are to safeguard what the ethical content of the socialist utopia provided; the utopia of a
society of free time. The emancipation of individuals, their full development, the restructuring of society, are all to be
achieved through the liberation from work. A reduction in working hours will allow individuals to discover a new
sense of security, a new distancing from the “necessities of life” and a form of existential autonomy…[and] political
control of its objectives and a social space in which they can engage in voluntary and self-organized activities.
—André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason526
I have wavered in terminology between the abolition of labour and abolition of alienated labour because in usage labour
and alienated labour have become identical…I believe that labour as such cannot be abolished…but in this utopian
hypothesis labour would be so different from labour as we know it or normally conceive of it that the idea of the
convergence of labour and play does not diverge too far from the possibilities.
—Herbert Marcuse, “Marcuse Defines his New Left Line”527
525
526
André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason (New York: Verso, 1989), 101.
527
Herbert Marcuse, “Marcuse Defines his New Left Line” in Douglas Kellner (ed.), Herbert Marcuse,
the New Left, and the 1960s (London: Routledge, 2005), qtd. in Granter, Critical Social Theory and the End
of Work, 89.
218
~
The following exchange was recorded on January 8, 1850. George Ruby, “who appeared
about fourteen years of age,” gave evidence at the Guildhall, London, in a case of assault:
ALDERMAN HUMPHERY: Well, do you know what you are about? Do you know what
an oath is?
BOY: No.
ALDERMAN: Can you read?
BOY: No.
ALDERMAN: Do you ever say your prayers?
BOY: No, never.
ALDERMAN: Do you know what prayers are?
BOY: No.
ALDERMAN: Do you know what God is?
BOY: No.
ALDERMAN: Do you know what the devil is?
BOY: I’ve heard of the devil, but I don’t know him.
ALDERMAN: What do you know?
BOY: I knows how to sweep the crossings.
ALDERMAN: And that’s all?
BOY: That’s all. I sweeps a crossing.528
The exchange captures, with tragic clarity, that difference between alienated/productive labour
geared towards productivity and non-alienated/creative labour which allows for self-realization
outlined in the previous chapter. Of course, one would be mistaken to think that this degree of
528
Thomas (ed.), The Oxford Book of Work, 514.
219
alienation is representative of the situation today (although we can be sure that in some places it is),
but one must also be sceptical of assuming that the possibilities for self-realization and leading a
successful life are readily available for the majority of late-modern subjects under capitalism. The call
for “less work” in the last chapter was meant to function as a lodestar which orients subjects away
from the work ethic and the productivist values governing achievement societies to a “post-work”
lifeworld in which a successful life is possible. As a lodestar, this prescription serves its functions
well, but it remains pitched at an abstract, theoretical level. In this chapter, I put forward four
demands or proposals that I believe, if implemented together, will furnish the necessary conditions
for the self-realization of late-modern subjects:
(1) Desanctification of Work
(2) Basic Income
(3) Shorter Working Hours
(4) Creation and Exploration of Post-Work Imaginaries
Before turning to these demands, I establish three criteria that the three demands must meet
in order to successfully pave the way to a post-work society: (i) the proposals must enhance the
security and stable of late-modern subjects, that is, they must first and foremost mitigate their
precarity (ii) the proposals must contribute to the decommodification of labour (understood as the
ability to procure basic needs without having to engage in waged work or to satisfy a means-test529),
and (iii) the proposals must pave the way, prefigure, or help establish the realm of freedom from
necessity. I argue that due to their formal nature, these criteria are necessary for self-realization not
only for socialists or those concerned with creative labour, but also for liberals and libertarians alike
(albeit on different grounds).
529
See, for example, Gøsta Esping-Anderson, The Three Worlds of Welfare Capitalism (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 1990).
220
I. The Road to Self-Realization
I.1 Security, Decommodification of Labour, and the Realm of Freedom
As we saw in Chapter 4, late-modern individuals are, first and foremost, precarious subjects:
economically vulnerable, assailed by the demands for self-optimization, the imperatives of speed,
and the acceleration of the pace of life. As such, the first task of any proposal is that it enhances the
security and stability of late-modern subjects. Here, I am in agreement with Boltanski and Chiapello:
Everything that enhances the security and stability of people at work today creates a margin
of freedom and furnishes opportunities to resist the abusive expansion of self-control and,
precisely relying on the ideal of autonomy acknowledged by the new spirit of capitalism, to
contest the proliferation of the new control mechanisms.530
Without this baseline of security (economic or otherwise), the possibilities of self-realization remain
dim, ephemeral, and fugacious. Thus, the first aim of any policy should be to provide precarious
subjects with as much security and stability as possible. Only when a measure of security is in place,
can we turn to realm of freedom, understood as the site of self-realization.
The second criteria that any proposal should promote (either directly or indirectly) is the
decommodification of labour. Drawing on its Marxist pedigree, in his book The Three Worlds of
Welfare Capitalism, Gøsta Esping-Anderson considered the decommodification of labour as one of
the major axes differentiating welfare regimes. In the attempt to make room for true self-realization
and the possibility of leading a successful life responsive to subjects’ own conceptions of the good,
desires, goals, ground projects, and needs, individuals must be freed from the necessity of selling
their labour power as a commodity in order to survive. Only then can alienated labour be supplanted
by creative labour and the subject truly be considered autonomous. I will return to this idea shortly
in my discussion of liberal freedom.
530
221
In the third volume of Capital, Marx draws a distinction between the “realm of freedom” and
“realm of necessity”:
[T]he realm of freedom actually begins only where labour which is determined by necessity
and mundane considerations ceases; thus in the very nature of things it lies beyond the
sphere of actual material production…Beyond it begins the development of human energy
which is an end in itself, the true realm of freedom…The shortening of the working day is
its basic prerequisite.531
The call for less work in Chapter 4 is meant to pave the way for the “true realm of freedom” in the
form of self-realization understood as the successful appropriation of self and world necessary to
lead a successful life. As we saw in Chapter 2, the formal nature of the appropriative model means
that the content of a successful life is not specified in advance. This enables it to bypass charges of
essentialism, paternalism, and perfectionism that have beleaguered traditional accounts of alienation
and which may contravene the ethical pluralism of modern societies. To put it slightly differently,
the appropriative model focuses on the conditions that facilitate the realization of a successful life
rather than the contents of that life, which it leaves for late-modern subjects to decide in accordance
with their own conceptions of the good, desires and needs, ground projects, etc.
There is, however, yet another advantage to the formalism of the appropriative model which
follows it from its account of alienation to its vision of self-realization—that is, from its definition of
alienation as impeded acts of appropriation, to its conception of social pathologies as socially
produced obstacles to self-realization, to the idea of self-realization itself. Although I have chosen to
conceive of self-realization in terms of creative labour, since each successive step of the argument is
content-neutral, the idea of self-realization can be cashed out or understood using different political
frameworks. I take this to be one of its main advantages. If this is correct, both the diagnostic and
531
Marx, Capital, Volume Three in The Marx-Engel Reader, 441.
222
prescriptive dimensions of the alienation critique, as well as the idea of self-realization, should appeal
equally to liberals, libertarians (and not only socialists). That is, they should be able to avail
themselves of the argument without abandoning their respective politico-theoretical commitments.
My claim is not that there are no fundamental or intractable disagreements between the positions,
but that the form of the argument, both diagnostically and prescriptively, has much to offer.
I.1 Liberal Freedom: Autonomy and Self-Realization
As we saw in Chapter 1, the liberal focus on individual autonomy and value pluralism in
modern societies means that liberals tend to restrict the scope of justice and equality to (i) the access
to job opportunities and (ii) the conditions of work without questioning the character of work
itself.532 Non-alienated work is regarded as one value among many, and it is up to late-modern
individuals to choose among these competing values. There are two distinct worries at play in the
liberal argument.
First, there is a worry about perfectionism, namely, that a prohibition on alienated labour would
privilege a particular vision of the good life over others. Since we defined alienation as impeded
appropriation of self and world, the appropriative model is able to neutralize concerns about
essentialism, paternalism, and perfectionism: what matters is not the content of appropriation, but
the ability to establish a successful relationship to the world, irrespective of “what” is appropriated.
In other words, self-realization is not a matter of actualizing a particular good life but a successful life,
responsive to the subject’s own conception of the good, desires, goals, ground projects, and needs.
Second, there is a worry about autonomy. Here, it is up to late-modern individuals to choose
which values to pursue, and which values to trade-off against others. Some values—like
consumption, leisure, relationships with family and friends, “bodily and mental health, the
532
Beate Roessler, “Meaning Work: Arguments from Autonomy,” Symposium: Political Philosophy at
Work, The Journal of Political Philosophy 20 (2012), 74.
223
development of cognitive facilities…play, sex, friendship, love, art, religion”533—may conflict with
non-alienated labour or require alienated labour in order to acquire. Abolishing alienated labour, the
liberal argues, makes it difficult for late-modern individuals to pursue the things that they truly value.
It takes the choice of out of their hands, and hence amounts to a violation of their autonomy.
I think we should take this argument from autonomy seriously on the liberal’s own terms. Thus,
it is not enough to say that non-alienated labour, under our account, is above all a formative activity—
the process by which subjects, through their actions, mediate and regulate the metabolism between
themselves and the world—and hence not one good among many but a special source of value
(since this is precisely what the liberal denies). The foundational argument might appeal to Marxists
and other fellow travelers, but the liberal will balk at the first premise, considering it an unwarranted
(not to mention tendentious) valorization of the notion of labour. Instead, for the sake of argument,
let us grant the liberal that non-alienated labour is simply one good among many. The problem is,
even with this assumption in place, there is something peculiar about the argument from autonomy.
The argument presupposes that alienated/non-alienated work are choices available to
subjects like any other, on the same footing as art, friendship, play, etc. but this overlooks the fact
that work for the majority of individuals is not a voluntary choice—that is, it is not something they can
opt to do or not to do, or something they can opt to do for a few hours less or more in order to
acquire another good. It is something they must do in order to secure their means of subsistence.
Marx puts the point as follows:
Labour power is…a commodity which its possessor, the wage-worker, sells to capital. Why
does he sell it? In order to survive. But the exercise of labour power, labour, is the worker’s
own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life. And this life-activity he sells to another
person in order to secure the necessary means of subsistence. Thus his life-activity is for him
533
Kymlicka, Contemporary Political Philosophy, 193.
224
only a means to enable him to exist. He works in order to live. He does not even reckon
labour as part of his life, it is rather a sacrifice of his life…life begins for him where this
activity ceases, at [the] table, in the public house, in bed…If the silk worm were to spin in
order to continue its existence as a caterpillar, it would be a complete wage-worker.534
Since we agreed to temporarily set aside the idea of labour as a formative “life-activity,” let us focus
instead on the “decision” to work. My claim is as follows: the need which confronts (the majority of)
late-modern subjects to work or to engage in specific kinds of labour is heteronomous—not autonomous,
that is, it is not something that subjects choose voluntarily. What is peculiar about the argument
from autonomy is that it seems to be unfazed by the heteronomous nature of alienated work—
“work that is subject to the social division of labour, specialized and professionalized and performed
with a view to commodity exchange.” In heteronomous work, “[n]either the exchange value of such
work, nor its length, nature, goal, or meaning can be determined by the individual.”535 To put it more
precisely, subjects are not free (i) to opt out of waged work, (ii) to decide the nature of their work,
(iii) to influence the trajectory of their work, (iv) to intervene or make critical decisions at work, or
(v) to realize themselves at work. The heteronomous nature of work undermines their autonomy—
especially in light of the fact that most of their waking lives are spent working. Bauman sums up this
argument, trenchantly, as follows:
[T]he work ethic called men to embrace willingly, gladly, enthusiastically, what was in fact
unavoidable necessity…But to embrace the necessity willingly meant to give up all resistance
to rules experienced as an alien and painful imposition. In the workplace, autonomy of
workers was not tolerated. The work ethic called people to choose a life devoted to labour; but
534
Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital in The Marx-Engel Reader, 204-205.
535
André Gorz, Critique of Economic Reason, 164-169.
225
a life devoted to labour meant no choice, inaccessibility of choice, and prohibition of
choice.536
According to Gorz, the operative distinction in late modernity is no longer between
necessity and freedom (as Aristotle and Marx had once posited), since the productive forces and
technological progress have reached a stage at which necessity should no longer be an obstacle to
self-realization. Freedom consists less in subjects freeing themselves from necessity than freeing
themselves from heteronomous work. The primary struggle is that of “autonomy’s rights over itself”:
It relates, in a word, to the autonomy of autonomy, considered and valued not, in this case, as a
necessary means, subjugated to the imperatives of competition and profit, but as the cardinal
value on which all others rest and against which they are measured. The issue, in a nutshell,
is the development of people’s autonomy irrespective of companies’ need for it. What is at stake is the
possibility of withdrawing from the power of capital, of the market, of the economic sphere,
the fields of activities which are opening up in the time freed from work.537
Notice this argument does not appeal to labour-as-a-formative-activity. Gorz speaks of “multi-activity,”
but all that is needed for the argument to go through is that self-realization be understood as
requiring autonomous activity. Given the role that work plays in our lives, the liberal critic cannot be
indifferent to heteronomous work, or they can be only at the expense of the subject’s autonomy.
Insofar as alienated work is heteronomous work (non-autotelic, not determined by the subject, etc.),
liberal self-realization—“the autonomy of autonomy”—requires non-alienated labour.
I.2. Libertarian Freedom: Liberty and Self-Realization
536
Zygmunt Bauman, Work, Consumerism and the New Poor, 2nd Ed. (New York: Open University
Press, 2005), 19. For similar reservations about the liberal argument from autonomy, see Adina
Schwartz, “Meaningful Work,” Ethics 92 (1982), 634-646; and Roessler, “Meaning Work: Arguments
from Autonomy,” 71-93.
537
André Gorz, Reclaiming Work: Beyond the Wage-Based Society, trans. Chris Turner (Malden: Polity
Press, 1999), 74.
226
Now consider Philippe Van Parijs’s theory of “real freedom” in his book Real Freedom for All.
A free society, according to Van Parijs, is one that satisfies the following three conditions: (i) there is
a well-enforced structure of rights (security); (ii) persons own themselves (autonomy/self-ownership); and
(iii) each individual has the greatest possible opportunity for doing what they might want to do
(leximin opportunity).538 A society that satisfies the first two conditions can be considered formally free,
but real-freedom-for-all requires that all three conditions be met in order to be realized. For Van Parijs,
“security and self-ownership, though necessary to freedom, are not sufficient for it, because doing
anything requires the use of external objects which security and self-ownership cannot guarantee.”539
Of course, the “real libertarian” will define the content of these external criteria differently
than we will—e.g., in terms of individual rather than collective self-realization; strictly in terms of
resources or negative freedom, and so on—but the structure of the argument is remarkably similar:
legal and moral rights (security and self-ownership) are necessary but insufficient for self-realization;
in order to be truly free, more is needed (subject to everyone’s formal freedom being respected).
Therefore, “what matters to the real libertarian is…not the only the protection of individual rights,
but assurances of the real value of those ‘rights’…the worth or real value of person’s liberty depends
on the resources the person has at her command to make use of her liberty.”540 It is no wonder that
Van Parijs, as we shall see in §5.III, has been one of the staunchest supporters of a basic income,
one of our four proposals to bolster the security of subjects and their capacity for self-realization in
late modernity. Although our reasons for the implementation of a basic income scheme will differ,
securing the conditions of real freedom can be understood as securing the means for self-realization.
538
Philippe Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All: What (If Anything) can Justify Capitalism? (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2003), 25.
539
Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All, 21.
540
Philippe Van Parijs, “A Basic Income for All” in What’s Wrong with a Free Lunch? Philippe Van
Parijs, eds. Joshua Cohen and Joel Rogers (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 14.
227
Thus, I believe that both liberals and left libertarians have good reasons to endorse the following
four proposals.
II. Desanctification of Work
II.1 Politicizing Work
As we saw in the previous chapter, part of the power of the work ethic derives from its
depoliticization which amounts to its naturalization. Therefore, the first step in desanctifying work is,
according to Weeks, to develop a political theory of work in order not to affirm the value of work, but to
uncover and lay bare its mechanisms—precisely those mechanisms which make it the cornerstone of
capitalist economic systems today: (i) the activity people spend most of their lives engaged in; (ii) the
process by which individuals gain access to food, clothing and shelter; (iii) the means of distributing
income and status; (iv) the channel which affords (some) people access to healthcare and retirement;
and (v) the site of both our relations of power and our sociality.541
Weeks’s emphasis on the internal conflicts of waged labor and, as we shall see, on the
antimonies of the Protestant work ethic, give us the means to locate a kernel of emancipatory
potential within the existing organization of work. For example, while Lockean natural property
rights attempt to establish the private character of work, the state’s role in defending property rights,
under that same Lockean account, threatens the private/public divide. With industrialization, as
work becomes increasingly identified with waged labor outside the household, the private/public
divide is thrown further in doubt.542 Employing a similar tactic, Weeks attempts to undermine the
idea of the Protestant work ethic as a single, monolithic doctrine, by highlighting five antimonies
which point to the ethic’s shifting, paradoxical nature and instability.
541
Weeks, The Problem with Work, pp. 2, 6.
542
228
The importance of the work ethic is brought to the fore when we ask why we work as long
and hard as we do. Weeks rejects the two standard answers to the question—we work because we
must (necessity) and we work because we want to (desire satisfaction)—as insufficient. The two
replies alone, although important, “cannot explain the relative dearth of conflict over the hours we
are required to work or the identities we are often expected to invest there; [nor can] individual
consent…account for why work would be so much more appealing than other parts of life.”543
Instead, Weeks refers to the official morality, with its “shifting claims, ideals and values,” that
manufactures this consent as the work ethic.544
The dual nature of work also manifests in the antagonisms or tensions of the work ethic.
First, the work ethic is both rational and irrational. The most rational economic injunction to work,
so familiar today, has at its religious core and origin, an irrational element, one which conceives of
work noninstrumentally as a “calling” or end in itself. In its secular form, this irrational element
haunts the work ethic:
[O]ur commitments [to work] remain difficult to defend; attempts to explain them often
exhibit more the qualities of post hoc rationalizations than sufficient accounts of our
motives. Yet the puzzle of our motivation would seem to be of little practical concern; when
we have no memory or little imagination of an alternative to a life centered on work…our
focus is generally confined to how…“we shall set to work and meet the ‘demands of the
day.’”545
Second, the work ethic simultaneously promotes productivist and consumerist values. That
the work ethic involves an ascetic Puritanism comes as no surprise, since the demands of work must
constantly be shielded from the seductive pleasures and spontaneous enjoyment of life, but the ethic
543
544
545
229
also forges a link between ascetic denial and worldly desire by establishing consumption as the reward
for production. This connection between disciplined work and the consumption of goods issues in a
“worldly asceticism” that sits at the heart of the capitalist work ethic and is easily discernible today.
Not only is consumption encouraged as the obverse of production; the enjoyment of wealth is only
objectionable if it threatens to diminish or render superfluous this double need to work and consume.
Third, the work ethic entails both individual independence and social dependence.
Paradoxically, work is valorized as a path to agency, self-reliance and sovereignty over’s one person
at the same time that the individual is dependent on waged labor and the vagaries of the employer.
In short, the autonomy of work authorizes a relation of subordination so that “what we might call
the sovereign individual subject of exploitation…is increasingly the source of surplus value.”546 Here,
as Weeks notes, the individualizing discourse of the work ethic “serves the time-honored ideological
function of rationalizing exploitation and legitimating inequality”547—a fact that is reproduced in
responsibility-based egalitarian theories, with their emphasis on “ambition-sensitive” principles and
voluntary choice. However, the work ethic is not limited to this classic ideological function; it also
constructs productive individuals as docile, exploitable subjects. As a biopolitical force, the ideals of
independence and self-sufficiency involve “the cultivation of habits, the internalization of routines,
the incitement of desires, and the adjustment of hopes, all to guarantee a subject’s adequacy to a
lifetime of work.”548
Fourth, while the work ethic is conceived of by Weber primarily as a method of
subordination, Weeks argues that it also a source of insubordination. For one, the ethic’s focus on
worldly goals and tangible desires at the later stages fueled workers struggle for reforms. Moreover,
drawing on the labor theory of value, different versions of the work ethic were adopted by the
546
547
548
230
working class “from below” to celebrate the worth and dignity of waged labor while taking aim at
the idle rich. Despite its origins and its historical function to define the bourgeoisie as a class, the
work ethic has also helped constitute the proletariat as a class, circumscribing it in the position of
dialectical opposition. Finally, taking seriously the ideological descriptions of what work can be,
whether as a means to social mobility, individual fulfilment or self-realization, workers have used
these descriptions to challenge the existing conditions of waged labor. These class struggles not only
alter the work ethic (e.g., by forcing small concessions to workers, developing human-resource
systems to address worker’s rights in the name of profitability, and so on); they also have the
potential to expose the class specificity of the ethic which, depending on the nature of the struggle,
may be ideologically obscured.549
Fifth, the work ethic is simultaneously a mechanism of exclusion and inclusion. Weeks
focuses on the exclusion of women’s unwaged domestic labor from the traditional work ethic. She
outlines two feminist strategies in response to this exclusion. The first accepts the lesser value
accorded to domestic labor by the work ethic and seeks to secure women’s access to waged labor
outside the household. The second insists on the need to re-evaluate forms of unwaged labor,
extending the work ethic to domestic labor and care work. Weeks recognizes that there a benefits to
both strategies—in the first, securing equal employment opportunities for women; in the second,
raising the standard of domestic labor by making it “visible, valued and equitably distributed.”550
Nevertheless, she remains critical of the way they echo the traditional discourse of the work ethic,
leaving its fundamental commitments, suppositions and values unaddressed. This leads her to
conclude that
549
Weeks, The Problem with Work, pp. 57-61.
550
231
Each of the approaches risks contesting the gendered organization of a capitalist society by
reproducing its fundamental values. Claiming one’s place as a productive citizen and one’s
value in relation to the legitimating ethic of work, whether or not the original ethic is thereby
altered, remains in this specific sense a mode of rebellion susceptible to co-optation.
Struggling only within, rather than also against, the terms of the traditional discourse of work
both limits the scope of the demands that are advanced and fails to contest the basic terms
of the work society’s social contract.551
II.2 Full Automation
The demand for full automation has been a common refrain among utopian thinkers from
John Adolphus Etlzler’s The Paradise within the Reach of All Men, without Labour, by Powers of Nature and
Machinery: An Address to all Intelligent Men to Herbert Marcuse’s call for full automation as a means to
abolish alienated labour in Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man. The prospect of automation
has also been a historical source of anxiety for workers who justifiably feared for their livelihoods.
Marx captures this tension well in his “fragment on machines”:
Capital employs machinery, rather, only to the extent that it enables the worker to work a
larger part of his time for capital, to relate to a larger part of his time as time which does not
belong to him, to work longer for another. Through this process, the amount of labour
necessary for the production of a given object is indeed reduced to a minimum, but only in
order to realise a maximum of labour in the maximum number of such objects. The first
aspect is important, because capital here – quite unintentionally – reduces human labour …
to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition
of its emancipation.552
551
Weeks, The Problem with Work, pp. 68-9.
552
Marx, Grundrisse, quoted in Aaron Bastani, Fully Automated Luxury Communism (New York: Verso,
2020), 52.
232
In other words, the same technological process that is pitted against workers, unintentionally
furnishes their means of emancipation from alienated labour. This tension is to be expected, since
technology is, as Marcuse insists, a “historical-social project”:
For Marcuse, technology is not inherently evil or inherently liberatory, neither it is something
that autonomously shapes human existence, although for the worker, or the victim of
mechanised warfare, technology appears oppressive, this oppression is actually the result of,
and originates in, social organisation.553
Thus, in calling for full automation as a means of desanctifying work, it is crucial (i) that the demand
be formulated as a political project of the left (i.e., one that is consistent with the democratization of the
relations of production and the collective regulation of automated industries); (ii) that it
simultaneously aim to liberate subjects from drudgery while producing increasing amounts of wealth;
and (iii) that it accelerate the tendency for automation until it bursts its capitalist integument.554
Like the call for the “end of work,” the demand for automation is not a descriptive forecast
(the literature is filled with doom-laden predictions about the end of work and the horrors of
automation), but a utopian demand which aims to reduce the amount of necessary labour as much
as possible in order to make room for creative labour.
II.3 Some Promising Developments
Although I have avoided discussions of feasibility, there are some promising developments
regarding the trajectory of automation, if they can be captured by the left. Today, it is suggested that
47 to 80 percent of existing jobs are capable of being automated, encompassing every part of the
labour market, including but not limited to:
553
554
Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, 109.
233
data collection (radio-frequency identification, big data); new kinds of production (the
flexible production of robots, additive manufacturing, automated fast-food); services (AI
customer assistance, care for the elderly); decision making (computational models, software
agents); financial allocation (algorithmic trading); and especially distribution (the logistics
revolution, self-driving cars, drone container ships and automated warehouses).555
In his (admirably rosy) assessment of the possibility of a “full automated luxury communism”
(FALC), Aaron Bastani is confident in the potential for post-scarcity in labour (full automation), in
energy (limitless power), in resources (mining the sky), in age and health (editing destiny), and in
sustenance (food without animals). Similar predictions abound in Peter Frase’s chapter entitled
“Communism: Equality and Abundance” in Four Futures: Life After Capitalism.556 While we might not
share these sanguine assessments, and the call for full automation may, in the face of feasibility
constraints, be more modest in scope, this should not prevent us from demanding as much
automation of necessary labour as possible under the existing social conditions. In conjunction with
the other three proposals, the desanctification of work rests on the politicization of work and the
deployment of automated industries in the service of human ends.
III. Basic Income
III.1 Definition and History
We can define basic income as “a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on
an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement.” According to the Basic Income Earth
Network (BIEN), there are five characteristics of basic income:
(i) Periodic. It is paid at regular intervals (for example every month), not as a one-off grant.
555
Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, 110-111.
556
Peter Frase, Four Futures: Life After Capitalism (New York: Verso, 2016), 35-68.
234
(ii) Cash Payment. It is paid in an appropriate medium of exchange, allowing those who
receive it to decide what they spend it on. It is not, therefore, paid either in kind (such as
food or services) or in vouchers dedicated to a specific use.
(iii) Individual. It is paid on an individual basis—and not, for instance, to households.
(iv) Universal. It is paid to all.
(v) Unconditional. It is paid without means test and without a requirement to work or to
demonstrate willingness-to-work.557
Given these features, we can distinguish basic income proposals from age-related transfers, which
are restricted to those above or below a certain age (child benefits, old-age security, pension plans);
conditional cash transfers, which are given to those in need on the condition that they carry out
certain actions (get regular medical check-ups, send their children to school, vaccinate them, etc.);
minimum-income schemes (guaranteed income supplements, unemployment insurance, welfare);
and negative income tax schemes in which those whose income falls below a certain level receive a
“negative tax” or benefit from the government instead of paying taxes to make up for the shortfall.
Basic income proposals have a rich history, both in theory and in practice. Thinkers of
different political persuasions have supported what Daniel Raventós calls a “proto-Basic Income”
including Thomas Paine, Thomas Spence, Charles Fourier, Henry George, and Bertrand Russell.558
Contemporary proponents of basic income, occupying different positions on the political spectrum,
include economists, politicians, and scholars such as Antonio Negri, Carole Pateman, Guy Standing,
Katja Kipping, Louise Haagh, Philippe Van Parijs, and Yanis Varoufakis, to name a few. From 1982
until the present, the state of Alaska has paid out a Permanent Fund Dividend (PFD) annually to its
residents based on oil revenue. Aside from numerous “basic income pilot” projects—in Canada
557
https://basicincome.org/about-basic-income/
558
Daniel Raventós, Basic Income: The Material Conditions of Freedom, trans. Julie Wark (Ann Arbor:
Pluto Press, 2007), 13-16.
235
(e.g., Dauphin, Manitoba) and the United States in the 1960s and 1970s; São Paulo, Brazil (2009);
Nairobi, Kenya (2017); Ontario, Canada in the cities of Hamilton, Lindsay, and Thunder Bay
(2017);559 and Utrecht, Netherlands (2017), amongst others—the Alaska Permanent Fund is one of
the few basic income schemes operative today.560
In recent years, due in large part to the increase in precarity, risk, and uncertainty; the
instability of global markets; and the privatization of the costs of economic failure, basic income
proposals differing in their specifics—amount paid, means of funding, the nature and size of
reductions in other transfers that might accompany it, if any, etc.—have seen an upsurge in
popularity in both academic and political circles.561 Despite its detractors on both the left and the
right, and its “faddish” resurgence, I think that a basic income scheme, provided it meets certain criteria
(more on these below), can provide (i) a measure of economic security for late-modern subjects and
(ii) a means of furnishing the material conditions for, and the invocation of freedom, required for
self-realization.
559
When the Progressive Conservatives came into power in Ontario, the newly elected conservative
premier, Doug Ford, cancelled the pilot project on July 31, 2018.
560
On June 5, 2016 Switzerland held the world’s first referendum on a basic income proposal which
was defeated with a 76.9% majority.
561
For some of the recent work on basic income [from 2017 to the present], see Guy Standing, Basic
Income: And How We Can Make It Happen (UK: Penguin Books, 2017); Joshua Cohen (ed.), Work,
Equality, Basic Income, Boston Review: Forum 2 (Cambridge: Boston Review, 2017); Rutger Bregman, Utopia
for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World (New York: Back Bay Books, 2017); Annie Lowrey, Give
People Money: How a Universal Basic Income Would End Poverty, Revolutionize Work, and Remake the World
(New York: Broadway Books, 2018); Amy Downes and Stewart Lansley (eds.), It’s Basic Income: The
Global Debate (Bristol: Policy Press, 2018); Malcolm Torry, Why We Need a Citizen’s Basic Income
(Bristol: Polity Press, 2018). Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, Basic Income: A Radical
Proposal for a Free Society and a Sane Economy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2019); Louise
Haagh, The Case for Universal Basic Income (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019); Guy Standing, Battling Eight
Giants: Basic Income Now (London: Bloomsbury, 2020); and Brian McDonough and Jessie Bustillos
Morales, Universal Basic Income (New York: Routledge, 2020). For examples of basic income
proposals in the Canadian context, see François Blais, Ending Poverty: A Basic Income for All
Canadians (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company Ltd. Publishers, 2002); and, more recently, Roderick
Benns, Basic Income: How a Canadian Movement Could Change the World (Fireside Publishing House,
2017); and Evelyn L. Forget, Basic Income for Canadians: The Key to a Healthier, Happier, More Secure Life
for All (Toronto: James Lorimer & Company Ltd. Publishers, 2018).
236
III.2 Four Criteria for an Emancipatory Basic Income
In order to protect subjects from poverty, to be an effective counterforce against precarity,
to establish the conditions for non-alienated self-realization, and to prefigure the “realm of freedom,”
the basic income I am proposing needs to be large enough to meet the basic needs of individuals
(security) and to give them the ability to opt out of waged work should they choose to (freedom).
This means that the amount must not fall below what is required for a basic level of subsistence.
Moreover, the basic income must not be used as a pretext for dismantling existing social provisions
(as many conservative and libertarian proposals562 are wont to do). Touching on both these points,
André Gorz outlines the implications of an “insufficient” basic income for precarious subjects:
The guarantee of a basic income at less than subsistence level, which its advocates hope to
see substituted for most forms of income redistribution (family allowances, housing,
unemployment and sickness benefits, basic state pension, etc.) functions to force the
unemployed to accept dirty, low-status jobs on the cheap. This is the position of the
“Friedmannite” neo-liberals of the Chicago School…In their view, unemployment is
explained by the fact that many potential jobs with low skill levels and low productivity are
unprofitable at normal rates of pay. These jobs have, consequently, to be subsidized by
allowing the worker to combine an insufficient basic income with equally insufficient income
from work…The lower the basic income, the greater will be the “encouragement” to take
any work at all, and the more the new “slavers” will be able to specialize in employing a
562
See, for example, Charles Murray, In Our Hands: A Plan to Replace the Welfare State, Revised and
Updated Edition (Washington: AEI Press, 2016). Of course, not all libertarian basic income
proposals come from the political right. For left libertarian cases for the implementation of a basic
income, see Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All and Karl Widerquist, Independence, Propertylessness, and Basic
Income: A Theory of Freedom as the Power to Say No (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013).
237
cheap workforce in fly-by-night operations providing service work on a contract and
subcontract basis.563
In other words, an insufficient basic income gives rise to a “secondary labour market” and increases
the precarity of late-modern subjects by forcing them to accept low-status gigs/jobs “on the cheap”
in order to supplement their incomes. An insufficient or materially inadequate income would “risk
supporting precarious employment and rationalizing the present wage system. At a level adequate to
live on…it would represent a more substantial rupture with the current terms of the work
society.”564 Thus, our first two criteria are that the basic income being proposed be a sufficient amount
to live on and a supplement rather than a replacement of other social welfare provisions.
Third, the basic income must be unconditional, that is, it must be paid to individuals without
means-testing or other stipulated requirements (to work or otherwise) attached to its transfer. For
one, conditional schemes are unable to break free of the disciplinary regime of welfare capitalism565
with its punishing bureaucratic procedures, “shameful revelation,” and stigmatization of the poor,
but more importantly, since they typically involve workfare or elaborate “willingness-to-work”
demonstrations such schemes fail to separate income from work, and hence to pave the way for a
post-work society.
Finally, the basic income must take the form of a regular payment over a lifetime (social wage)
rather than a one-time payment (capital grant), since the former offers more temporal security and
“some degree of freedom from the times, spaces, activities, and relations of paid work.”566
III.3 Basic Income and the Realm of Freedom
563
Gorz, Reclaiming Work, 80-81.
564
565
Srnicek and Williams, Inventing the Future, 119.
566
238
As a means for counteracting poverty, precarity, and risk, the advantages of a basic income
scheme meeting the four criteria outlined above are clear: it reduces poverty; it offers support to the
unemployed, the precariously employed, and workers in a variety of different fields and occupations
(including casual/contract workers, migrant workers, temporary workers, students and the disabled);
it affords employees a better negotiating position at work; it offers some relief from the opaque
economic forces and vagaries of the global market that constrain choice and impede self-realization;
it mitigates the demands for self-optimization and the costs of economic failure; it offers support for
unwaged care work, domestic work, and immaterial (affective and cognitive) labour; it results in
better public health and reduces health costs; it decreases high school dropout rates and petty crime;
it involves less state bureaucracy; it allows for more time to dedicate to one’s family, friends, and
ground projects; it offers a more rational method of distributing income in a fractured, economic
landscape where secure employment and work benefits are becoming increasingly scarce567—in
brief, it enhances the security and stability of late-modern subjects. This stabilizing, redistributive
function is certainly important, but the real emancipatory potential in the basic income scheme lies
in its future orientation.
What interest us is the idea of basic income as an “invocation of the possibility of
freedom,”568 namely, the potential of a basic income to not only anticipate but to reconfigure the
“realm of freedom” through a radical break or rupture with the society of work. So understood,
basic income is not merely an economic project but, as Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams point out, a
political one. Under capitalism, workers are separated from the means of production and from the
means of subsistence. In order to survive, they are forced to sell their labour power as a commodity
to the capitalist in exchange for a salary or wage. Some of us are lucky enough to be able to choose
567
Weeks, The Problem with Work, 149-150; Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future, 119.
568
239
which work to take, but few of us can forgo work altogether. As long as the choice that confronts us
is “work or starve,” the choice is illusory—a non-choice: work under capitalism remains alienated and
coerced. By disentangling the means of subsistence from work, a basic income makes work voluntary:
“A UBI [universal basic income] therefore unbinds the coercive aspects of wage labour, partially
decommodifies labour, and thus transforms the political relationship between labour and capital.”569
Srnicek and Williams highlight a number of “significant consequences” that follow on the
heels of this transition from coerced to voluntary work. By eliminating reliance on wage labour,
workers are better able to control the labour supply (e.g., by reducing slack in the labour market),
thereby increasing their class power. Moreover, with a robust basic income in place, the threat of
being fired loses its disciplinary force. Without having to worry about being docked pay or depleting
strike funds, strikes and union activities are easier to mobilize. And with basic income as a safety net,
the choice of (waged) work as “one good among many” that liberals were keen to emphasize finally
becomes a reality: individuals are now free to choose how much time to dedicate to community,
family, friends, ground projects, leisure pursuits, politics, and relationships—and how much time to
dedicate to work, without fearing a loss of income. Some of the concrete social freedoms that
become possible under a basic income scheme, according to Guy Standing, are:
• The freedom to do care work for a relative or friend, or voluntary work in and for the
community, that might not be feasible if financial necessity required long hours of paid
labour;
• The freedom to do creative work and activities of all kinds;
• The freedom to risk learning new skills or competencies;
• The freedom from bureaucratic interference, prying, and coercion;
569
Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future, 120.
240
• The freedom to form relationships and perhaps set up “home” with someone, often
precluded today by financial insecurity;
• The freedom to leave a relationship that has turned sour or abusive;
• The freedom to have a child;
• The freedom to be lazy.570
Another way that a basic income reconfigures the realm of freedom is that it transforms
precarity and unemployment from a state of insecurity into a voluntary flexibility, that is, a liberation
from the repetition and monotony of the traditional nine-to-five workday. As we saw previously,
organized flexibility confronts workers as an heterochthonous demand which co-opts the calls for
flexibility originally levelled at the Fordist workplace by ethical/artistic critique. Basic income, here,
functions as a negation of the negation by reappropriating flexibility in the service of self-realization.
Basic income also results in a revaluation of work. Without recourse to a basic income, in
order to survive, workers are often be forced to take jobs that pay too little, offer few benefits,
require a long commute or too much work, are demeaning or hazardous, do not interest them, and
so on. Under a basic income scheme, workers would be able to refuse such work without the fear of
jeopardizing their means of subsistence. As a result, unattractive work would have to be better paid,
and attractive work would be less well paid. The autotelic nature of work rather than its profitability
would become the measure of its value.
The most radical consequence of the distance and separation of work from the wage relation
lies in its exploration of different ways of living, in tracing the contours of freedom and life beyond
productivist values and work. The implementation of a basic income provides the space and time for
aesthetic pursuits; for artistic creation; for collective endeavours; for community; for creative labour;
for flights of fancy; for friendship; for experiments in living; for invention; for ludic irony and play;
570
Guy Standing, Basic Income, 60-61.
241
for the deployment of autonomy; for the expansion of desires and needs; for the joy of hebetude
(emblematized in the languorous summers of our youth); and for the pursuit of ground projects in
which the ceaseless demands for self-optimization and the imperatives of speed fall to the wayside.
Since the formal account of self-realization refuses to specify the content of a successful life in
advance, the importance of this experimental provocation cannot be stressed enough. It helps the
beleaguered, precarious subject “imagine the possibilities of a postwork alternative in which the
structures, relations, values, experiences, and meaning of work might be substantially refigured.”571
Even the deceptively simple query or thought, “What would I do if I did not have to worry about the means
of my subsistence?”—teems with possibility, including the possibility of idleness, of languor, of sloth:
…in the morning
they’re out there
making money:
judges, carpenters,
plumbers, doctors,
newsboys, policeman,
barbers, carwashers,
dentists, florists,
waitresses, cooks,
cabdrivers…
and you turn over
to your left side
to get the sun
571
242
on your back
and out
of your eyes.572
IV. Shorter Working Hours
IV.1 The Demand for Shorter Working Hours: Some Historical Precedents
Marx, as we saw at the beginning of the chapter, makes the shortening of the working day a
basic prerequisite for establishing the realm of freedom. The call for shorter working hours, or a
reduction of the working week,573 has been one of the key demands of the labour movement since
the advent of industrial capitalism. For example, in 1886, workers in the United States were already
calling for an eight-hour workday (at the time, the workday ranged from twelve to eighteen hours)
under the slogan “eight hours of work, eight hours of rest, eight hours of what we will.” The Eight-
Hour Day Movement had a song encapsulating their demands:
We mean to make things over;
we’re tired of toil for naught
but bare enough to live on:
never an hour for thought.
We want to feel the sunshine;
we want to smell the flowers;
We’re sure that God has willed it,
and we mean to have eight hours.
572
Charles Bukowski, “Poem for My 43rd Birthday” in The Roominghouse Madrigals: Early Selected Poetry
1946-1966 (New York: Ecco, 2002), 30.
573
See, for example, Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future, 116: “Our preference is for the
establishment of a three-day weekend, rather than a reduction in the working day, in order to cut
down on commuting and to build upon the long holiday weekends already in existence.”
243
We’re summoning our forces
from shipyard, shop, and mill:
Eight hour of work, eight hours for rest,
eight hours for what we will!574
In the “Right to be Lazy,” Paul Lafargue (Marx’s son-in-law) argued that the proletariat
“must accustom itself to working but three hours a day, reserving the rest of the day and night for
leisure and feasting”575—earning him a section in Leszek Kołakowski’s Main Currents of Marxism
under the backhanded title of “Paul Lafargue: a Hedonist Marxism.”576 Bertrand Russel, in his essay,
“In Praise of Idleness” proposed a four-hour workday:
When I suggest that working hours should be reduced to four…I mean that four hours’
work a day should entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life, and that
the rest of his time should be his to use as he might see fit.577
In “The Post-Work Manifesto,” written in the late 1990s, Stanley Aronowitz et al. called for
a six-hour workday.578 What accounts for this more modest proposal? In 1930, John Maynard
Keynes predicted that in a hundred years (2030), the fifteen-hour work week would be the norm as
574
Roy Rosenzweig, Eight Hours for What We Will: Workers and Leisure in the Industrial City, 1870-1920
(UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985) quoted in Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the
Attention Economy (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2019), 12-13.
575
Paul Lafargue, “The Right to Be Lazy” in The Right to Be Lazy: Essays by Paul Lafargue, ed. Bernard
Marszalek (Oakland: AK Press, 2011), 34.
576
Leszek Kołakowski, Main Currents of Marxism (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005), 468-
474.
577
Bertrand Russel, “In Praise of Idleness” in In Praise of Idleness and Other Essays (New York:
Routledge, 2004), 14. See also Rob Ray (ed.), Why Work? Arguments for the Leisure Society (Oakland:
Freedom Press, 2019).
578
Stanley Aronowitz, Dawn Esposito, William DiFazio, and Margaret Yard, “The Post-Work
Manifesto” in Post-Work, ed. Stanley Aronowitz and Jonathan Cutler (New York: Routledge, 1998),
31-80.
244
people would opt for more leisure time once their material needs were satisfied.579 Although workers
succeeded in reducing the working week from sixty hours in the 1900s to thirty-five hours during
the 1930s, after the Great Depression, the push for shorter working hours came to an abrupt halt
(with the work week settling at forty hours in the aftermath of the Second World War).580
III.2 The Colonization of Non-Work Time
In late modernity, a new trend emerges: rather than a reduction in working hours, there is an
expansion of work. On average, late-modern subjects begin spending longer hours at work, despite the
working week remaining unchanged. For instance, in the US, where the standard working week is
forty hours, a full-time employee works, on average, forty-seven hours a week. As Christophe Dejours
notes in his clinical observation in the Psychopathology of Work, the work-life distinction that
characterized classical modernity was never firm enough to protect the subject’s psychic economy
and social relations from the estrangements and pressures of work:
The theoretical cut-off between work space and outside-work space is entirely artificial. By
leaving the worksite, the subject is still himself, he cannot change skin nor change his psychic
economy. This means that suffering at work…will distort the subject’s entire mental
organisation, its tentacles reaching as far as relationships with his children and partners. The
economy of love and the erotic economy…are taken over by work relations…there is a
fundamental psychic solidarity between work life and outside-work life, or a unity of economy between the two
existential modalities.581
579
John Maynard Keynes, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” in Essays in Persuasion
(New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1963), 358-374.
580
For a detailed account of the history of the movement and its abandonment, see Benjamin Kline
Hunnicutt, Work Without End: Abandoning the Shorter Hours for the Right to Work (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1988).
581
Christophe Dejours (ed.), Psychopathology of Work: Clinical Observations, trans. Caroline Williamson
(London: Karnac Books, 2015), 14-15.
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The situation is exacerbated in late modernity, in which the already tenuous distinction collapses
altogether as the economic demands of work began to colonize non-work time, permeating every
aspect of our lives. New technologies—e-mails, instant messaging, video conferences—keep us tied
to work at all hours of the day. Salaried employees feel compelled to be accessible 24/7 and to work
extra hours. The “hidden labour” required to find and retain work (e.g., acquiring certifications,
constant skills training, job searching, managing online profiles, updating resumés and CVs),
“shadow work”582 (e.g., self-checkouts, self-service, tax compliance activities), unrecognized
overtime, and unpaid internships, fueled by the inexorable demands of competition, self-
optimization, and speed means that work has metastasized into every corner of our lives. The social
pathologies of burnout, death-by-overwork [karoshi/guolaosi/gwarosa], presenteeism, workaholism,
and workplace suicide are a direct result of this colonization of non-work time.
IV.3 The Reduction of Working Time
In light of these developments, there are a number of benefits of the shortening of working
hours (provided the proposal does not entail a reduction in income). Traditionally, the call for
shorter working hours aimed at the alleviation of unemployment or the reduction of unemployment
by raising some part-time work to full-time status. Given, however, that the alienation critique aims
at less work, what interests us is that such a policy can neutralize the worry that increased
automation will lead to mass employment. With a significant reduction of working time, work can be
redistributed. Second, shorter working hours have various environmental advantages. They would
lead to reductions in energy consumption and in our carbon footprint, a reduction in the
convenience goods bought to meet our frenetic work schedule, and better environmental impact
(since productivity improvements would be geared towards less work rather than increased output),
to counter climate change.
582
The term was coined by Ivan Illich in his book Shadow Work (Salem: Marion Boyars, 1981).
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With regard to security, shorter working hours would (i) result in a reduction of the
pathologies of hyperactivity/self-optimization—anxiety, burnout, stress, etc.—that plague subjects
in late modernity. The reduction of working time not only results in healthier more secure subjects,
but (ii) it provides a countervailing force against the perpetual demand of dynamic stabilization and
social acceleration that leave individuals “out of sync” or unable to catch up with the pace of
modern life, alienated from place/actions, things, time, and others. Finally, (iii) it is also one of the
main political tools of the call for less work, consolidating the workers’ class power since removing
labour time, like strikes and refusal of work strategies, is one of way exerting pressure on employers.
Not only does the total supply of labour go down, thereby increasing the workers’ positions and
bargaining power, but, especially when coupled with a basic income scheme, such a policy opens up
the free time and social space in which workers can engage in voluntary and self-organized activities.
More importantly, the call and implementation of shorter working hours functions as a
“means of securing time and space to forge alternatives to the present ideals and conditions of
work…time to recreate and reinvent relations of sociality, care, and intimacy…time to reinvent our
lives, to reimagine and redefine the spaces, practices, and relationships of nonwork time.”583
Therefore, we should not limit the demand and benefits of shorter working hours to the realization
of existing desires and needs or to “self-management” as Aronowitz et al. argue, or to the realization
of time for available pleasures and practices (although these are all important in their own right), but
equally to the realization of new capacities, new subjectivities, and new pleasures and practices.
Combined with the implementation of a basic income, the reduction of working time is a resource
for political projects of transvaluation, for re-learning the art of living, for not only leading a
successful life but for collectively reconfiguring the very coordinates of what such a life would entail.
583
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I would like to highlight one of these new avenues that is made possible through a reduction
of working time before moving on to the final demand for post-work imaginaries. In the previous
chapter, in our critique of capitalist consumption, we discussed the phenomenon of what Soper calls
“troubled pleasures,” that is, consumerist forms of pleasure that can only be experienced at the
expense of more fundamental forms of dissatisfaction (shopping is a paradigmatic example). The
idea, to recap briefly, is that in societies governed by an acceleration of the tempo of everyday life,
the escalatory logic of dynamic stabilization, the imperatives of speed, and a paucity of free-time,
harried late-modern subjects consume at a rate that outpaces their ability to savour their enjoyment.
Soper refers to this phenomenon as the “de-spiritualisation of consumption.” The reduction of
working hours affords individuals the free time necessary to experience new “savoury pleasures”
that involve the more ritualized, sublimated pleasures of tarrying with the objects of consumption.
The Slow Movement which promotes a decelerated pace of life from education to food to thought
tries to approximate the notion of savoury pleasures but can only arrive there if more free time is at
subjects’ disposal. The call for shorter working hours is one way to explore these savoury pleasures.
V. Creation and Exploration of Post-Work Imaginaries
The final proposal I want to explore is the call for post-work imaginaries or what Weeks
refers to as the “utopian demand” which informs all of the previous proposals:
[A] political demand that takes the form not of a narrowly pragmatic reform but of a more
substantial transformation of present configuration of social relations…These are demands
that would be difficult—though not impossible—to realize in the present institutional and
ideological context…In this sense a utopian demand prefigures—again in fragmentary
form—a different world, a world in which the program or policy that the demand promotes
would be considered as a matter of course both practical and reasonable.
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The unabashed “utopian demand” for the creation of post-work imaginaries is integral to
self-realization for three reasons. First, it follows directly from the formal nature of self-realization.
Marx, in Capital, famously derided the project of “writing recipes…for the cook-shops of the
future”584 and the demands we put forward have been concerned with furnishing the necessary
conditions in which subjects are able to pursue their own conceptions of the good, desires, ground
projects, as well as new pleasures, practices, social relations, social formations, and subjectivities—
without specifying their content in advance. I take this to be faithful to a salutary tension in Marx’s
and Engel’s thought. On the one hand, there is a clear repudiation of utopian proposals; on the
other, the Marxian critique of, for example, utopian socialism is meant to pave the way for
“envisioning real utopias”585 to borrow a phrase from Erik Olin Wright, for the framing of utopia-as-
process—a process which, following the formal account of self-realization, is concerned less with what
to imagine, want, or will than that subjects imagine, want, or will.586
Second, the demand for post-work imaginaries which takes the form of utopian speculation
serves two functions: one is to disrupt our relationship to the present (the estrangement function);
the other is to orient our relationship to the future (the provocation function). In the first case, this
disruption takes the form of a Brechtian alienation/distancing/estrangement effect
[Verfremdungseffekt] which “renders unfamiliar the all-too-recognizable contours of the present
configuration of social relations and the experiences and meanings to which we have become
habituated”—and, more crucially for our purposes here, which impede authentic self-realization.
The main emancipatory thrust of this estrangement is the ability to “undercut the present social
order’s ascribed status as a natural artifact, necessary development, and inevitable future.”587
584
Marx, Capital Vol. 1, 99.
585
Erik Olin Wright, Envisioning Real Utopias (New York: Verso, 2010).
586
587
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Moreover, in estranging late-modern subjects from the present order, the utopian demand is able to
temporarily denaturalize or suspend otherwise reified epistemologies and petrified habits of thought.
Whereas the estrangement function of the utopian demand is concerned with disorienting subjects,
the provocation function reorients subjects toward the future: it animates and incites political desire;
it encourages individuals to move beyond what is possible (under the existing social configuration);
and it provides a glimmer of a different world. The two function are, of course, intimately related:
“the ‘no’ to the present…opens up the possibility of a ‘yes’ to a different future.”588
Third, the invention of post-work imaginaries is not only prefigurative; it is also performative.
In the 1844 Manuscripts, Marx writes, “When communist workmen associate with one another, theory,
propaganda, etc. is their first end. But at the same time, as a result of this association they acquire a
new need—the need for society—and what appears as a means becomes an end.”589 In other words,
in the process of envisioning a post-work society, in its very enunciation, the realm of freedom is born. A
utopia, as Jameson puts it, “is not the representation of radical alternatives; it is rather simply the
imperative to imagine them.”590 Thus, the demand for post-work imaginaries is not simply a demand
for experimental representation but for a form of thought-in-praxis in which the act of imagining itself
“becomes an end.”
Conclusion
It is for these reasons outlined above, amongst others, that the desanctification of work, the
demands for a basic income, shorter working hours, and the creation and exploration of post-work
imaginaries are ones around which diverse groups—feminists, LGBT activists, Marxists, union
organizations, and welfare rights activists, to name a few—have historically found common cause:
588
589
Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, 123-4.
590
Frederic Jameson, “’If I Find One Good City I Will Spare the Man’: Realism and Utopia in Kim
Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy” in Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics
of Science Fiction and Utopia, ed. Patrick Parrinder (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 231.
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without specifying the content of the good life in advance, these proposals lay the groundwork, first,
for the security and stability of precarious subjects (without which the idea of self-realization could
not emerge), and, second, for the realm of freedom in which individuals are able to realize their own
conceptions of goods, desires, and ground projects, free from the demands of necessity,
heteronomy, and the ceaseless imperatives for self-optimization. The formal nature of the self-
realization also means that both liberals and left libertarians have good reasons to endorse these
proposals, irrespective of what doubts they have about the formative role of labour or the scope of
freedom.
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Conclusion
Recap of the Problem: Alienation, or, The Broken Promise of Modernity
The “promise of modernity”—the capacity of subjects to lead autonomous, successful lives
and to find meaning in their place in the world—is betrayed in late modernity. As early as the 1950s,
Fromm was pointing to the increase in overt mental disorders, and rising figures on alcoholism,
homicide, and suicide that accompanied economic progress in developed countries as a sign of the
failure of modern societies to satisfy the profound needs of individuals. Fromm referred to this
phenomenon as “the pathology of normalcy.”591 The situation is even more dire today.
The symptomatology of late modern achievement-societies, with their ceaseless demands of
self-optimization, the injunction to “become oneself,” to fashion oneself from the dust of one’s clay,
to dispose over one’s life an entrepreneurial project in the marketplace as a marketplace,592 to found
“Me Inc.”593 is replete with “torments of self-foundation”: anxiety; arrhythmicity/dysrhythmicity;
burnout; cynicism; death-by-overwork [karoshi/guolaosi/gwarosa]; decision fatigue; decompensation;
dysphoria; eating disorders; identity crises; “impairments of performance” [Leistungsversagen]; kiasu;
living and performing tasks alone [ohitorisama]; loneliness; “lonely death” [kodokushi]; multiphrenia;
narcissism; panic attacks; pleonexia; presenteeism; social withdrawal [hikikomori]; stress disorders;
suicide from overwork and stressful working conditions [karojisatsu], workaholism—and, above all,
depression: the pathology par excellence of initiative and self-responsibility, the weariness of the
depleted self, bogged down by its own sovereignty, by the market refrain, “nothing is impossible.”594
These symptoms, like those of a febrile patient, alert us to an underlying “illness” or dysfunction in
591
See Fromm, The Pathology of Normalcy and Fromm, The Sane Society.
592
Bröckling, “The Subject in the Marketplace, the Subject as a Marketplace” in Lost in Perfection, 24-
35.
593
Bröckling, The Entrepreneurial Self, 31-36.
594
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the social body, leading Rosa to conclude that, in late modernity, the conditions for self-realization
are severely undermined:
The promise [of autonomy and self-determination] no longer is credible in late-modern
“acceleration-society”…The promise of political autonomy, of shaping society beyond
economic necessity, is but a faint spectre in this setting…This, of course, is equivalent to
total heteronomy, to the utter inversion of modernity’s promise…[S]ocial conditions in
which actors are…committed to the idea of self-determination while…these very conditions
increasingly undermine the possibility to practically follow or realize that idea, necessarily
lead to state of alienation.595
In short, there is a pathological gap between the condition of late-modern subjects as
individuals de jure (by law or rightful entitlement), and late-modern subjects as individuals de facto
(able to gain control over their life circumstances, and pursue their own conceptions of the good,
desires, goals, ground projects, and needs via successful acts of appropriation of self and world).
Why is this?
One answer offered by moral/social critique and the left egalitarian literature in
contemporary political philosophy is that individuals lack the resources to deploy these rights. I think
this extremely important (and proposals such as the democratization of the relations of production
and the implementation of a basic income scheme are meant, in large part, to address this problem)
but increasing subjects’ shares of resources alone is not enough. While necessary for self-realization,
it still leaves in place various obstacles which impede the capacity of subjects to lead successful lives.
Here, we have reached the constitutive limits of moral/social critique. In addressing only individual
rights and allocations (of goods, privileges, rights, etc.), moral/social critique neglects a large number
of social pathologies—epidemics of collective malaise, disordered or ruptured self-world relations,
595
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pathologies of work, etc.—which impede self-realization, even when a full regime of rights and
equitable distributions obtains.
In light of these gaps or lacunae in contemporary political philosophy— collective malaises,
obstacles to realizing the promise of modernity, psychic ailments, socially produced impediments to
well-being, and the tyranny of work—preventing late-modern subjects from leading successful lives,
what is to be done? The argument I have put forward in this dissertation offers a way out of this
impasse. In doing so, it makes five original contributions that are worth highlighting. The first of
these lies in the overarching argument which informs the divisions of the dissertation.
Recap of the Structure of the Argument and Its Novel Contributions
In addition to moral/social critique, we require an ethical/artistic critique which is focused
on the conditions that facilitate the realization of a successful life [das geglückte Leben]. Ethical/artistic critique,
under my reading, evaluates a social formation or practice on the basis of whether it enables or
hinders self-realization (rather than focusing solely on distribution and the allocation of resources).
First, ethical/artistic critique is meant to supplement rather than supplant moral/social critique.
A social analysis which is concerned with the capacity of late-modern subjects to realize the promise
of modernity and lead autonomous, successful lives cannot be indifferent to legal and moral rights
and issues of distribution, exploitation, and inequality. However, it cannot stop here. Moral/social
critique is necessary but insufficient for self-realization.
Second, ethical/artistic critique is primarily concerned with the diagnosis and overcoming of
social pathologies understood as socially produced obstacles to self-realization. The social pathology
diagnosis, broadly construed, involves four tasks: (i) identifying and illuminating the cluster of
symptoms afflicting a social body or form of life which are generally misdiagnosed, naturalized, or
overlooked by the standards of the current social order (symptomatology); (iii) pinpointing the
underlying causes that give rise to these (aetiology); (iii) identifying what social pathologies these
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symptoms point to (diagnosis); and, finally, highlighting the ways these social pathologies may be
overcome in order for late-modern subjects to be able to establish successful relationships to others,
to themselves, and to the world, and to lead flourishing lives responsive to their own conceptions of
the good, desires, goals, ground projects, and needs (prognosis/therapy).
This amounts to a comprehensive, novel application of the alienation critique, since the
critique is no longer merely “negativistic” in scope (more on this below). Deployed in this way, it
moves from diagnosing the symptoms of alienating social formations, practices, and structures,
including their underlying causes and the social pathologies they disclose (Chapters 2 and 3) to the
ways that these social pathologies may be overcome, charting a course of de-alienation in order to
recapture the broken promise of modernity beyond the realm of necessity and productive labour
(Chapters 4 and 5). In what follows, I would like to review the answers my original analysis yields
with an eye to its contribution to the unfinished project of modernity:
Symptomatology: We have already looked at some of the comorbid symptoms or
“torments of self-foundation” of achievement societies. I argued that
what appears at first as a disparate collection of symptoms, can be
sorted into two clusters: symptoms of hyperactivity/self-optimization
(affluenza, pleonexia, workaholism, etc.) in which individuals are
subject to the diktats of self-optimization and self-reinvention; and
symptoms of inadequacy/self-responsibility (burnout, depression, stress, etc.)
as an inexorable counterpoint to this expenditure of energy. In short,
the symptoms of hyperactivity/self-optimization and
inadequacy/self-responsibility are two faces of the late-modern Janus.
These comorbid symptoms warrant our attention because they
obstruct the capacity of late-modern subjects to lead successful lives.
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~
Aetiology: I pinpointed three phenomena or cultural forms that give rise to
social pathologies in late modernity: individualization/reflexivization,
dynamic stabilization, and the transition from disciplinary societies to
achievement societies. Although I recognized that the capitalist mode
of production cannot be held as the sole cause behind these
phenomena, it remains the primary causal factor and explains the
“elective affinity” between the three cultural forms. Together, these
cultural forms give rise to social pathologies that severely undermine
the ability of late-modern individuals to establish successful relations
to others, to themselves, and to the world.
Diagnosis: I identified three kinds of pathologies, corresponding to the three
aetiologies discussed above, that obstruct the self-realization of
late-modern subjects: pathologies of individual freedom, pathologies
of de-synchronization, and pathologies of organized self-realization.
In the first, I argued that while legal and moral freedom are integral
parts of self-realization, there are limited in scope and, when taken as
the whole of freedom, generate their own social pathologies that
hinder self-realization. In the second, I identified four alienations
which disrupt or rupture the subject’s self-world relation: alienation
from place/actions, from things, from time, and from others.
Additionally, I argued that there are significant costs to social
acceleration and dynamic stabilization that are privatized in late
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modernity, compounding the estrangement of late-modern subjects
who, due to an inability to dynamize or to keep up, are regarded as
“personal failures.” In the third, I argue that the notion of self-
realization itself has become pathological and been co-opted into the
service of the very system it sought to radically transform. One of the
novel contributions of my formulation of the alienation critique is its
capacity to distinguish non-alienated self-realization from its
pathological variant, organized self-realization and, in doing so, to
retain the emancipatory potential of the concept of self-realization
(rather than jettisoning it altogether) as a vital tool to actualize the
promise of modernity.
Prognosis/Therapy: Turning to the prescriptive dimensions of the alienation critique, I
maintained the latter issues in a call neither for “more work” nor
“better work”—but for the “refusal of work” which attempts to
chart a course beyond the work-based society and its productivist
values. I suggested four proposals to ensure the self-realization of
late-modern subjects—(i) the desanctification of work, (ii) the
implementation of a basic income, (iii) the reduction of working
hours, and (iv) the creation and exploration of post-work
imaginaries—that aim to provide subjects with a measure of security
and stability, decommodify labour, and pave the way to the realm of
freedom beyond the realm of necessity and the tyranny of work.
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Only then, I concluded, will late-modern subjects be able to recapture
the promise of modernity.
To sum up, the application of the alienation critique moves, along a satisfying trajectory,
from alienation to self-realization rather than merely pointing to some haphazard alienating features
of capitalist societies. But this is only one of the novel contributions of the argument. There are four
others which center on the ethical-formal character of the alienation critique. We turn to these next.
Recap of the Ethical-Formal Character of the Argument and Its Novel Contributions
When Jaeggi put forward her appropriative theory of alienation, drawing on Tugendhat’s
attempt to formalize the good, she assumed that the formal or procedural structure of her account,
although experimental and open-ended, was “quite modest in its positive appeal”:
Since the diagnosis of alienation, thus conceived, starts from the sources of disturbances of
successful relations to self and world, it is open-ended and not dependent on a closed,
harmonistic model of reconciliation. And although it can be said that the talk of disturbances
presupposes conditions of successful functioning, the (in this respect “negativistic”)
approach pursued here is, in crucial respects, quite modest in its positive appeal to the idea
of a successful human existence.596
Of course, Jaeggi stresses the “modesty” of her approach’s positive appeal to highlight its distance
from the purportedly objective ethical theories that characterized previous formulations of the
alienation critique, which she is rightfully eager to eschew. Nevertheless, I hope that I have shown
that even within the bounds of its formal orientation (and without straying beyond them), the appropriative
model can result not only in perspicacious negativistic diagnoses, but also in ambitious prescriptions
based solely on furnishing the necessary conditions for the realization of a successful life.
Accordingly, what I would like to do in this section is, rather than donnishly recapping the structure
596
258
of the argument, to instead chart its novel formal character as it progresses from alienation (the
formal groundwork) to social pathology diagnosis (the critical-diagnostic dimension) to self-
realization (the prescriptive dimension).
(a) The Formal Structure of the Alienation Critique (Beyond Jaeggi)
The first “formalization” takes place in Chapter 1 in which the Hegelian-Marxist
appropriative model of alienated labour is shown to be the most promising candidate for the
alienation critique. Due precisely to its formal character, which understands alienation as an impeded
appropriation of self and world, the appropriative model, drawn from Jaeggi’s work on alienation, is
the one best suited to overcome the difficulties—essentialism, paternalism, and perfectionism—that
plague traditional accounts of alienation.
Nevertheless, Jaeggi’s own account suffers from its own limitations and pitfalls. Contra
Jaeggi, I argued that self-realization cannot be understood exclusively as a volitional process of
“giving oneself reality.”597 In addition to (i) appropriative efficacy, self-realization also requires (ii)
being immersed in an appropriable, legible, or resonant world, (iii) the satisfaction of basic needs,
(iv) the ability to engage in activities for their own sake, and, finally, (v) the opportunity to engage in
activities that are self-determined and responsive to the subject’s own conceptions of the good,
desires, goals, ground projects, and needs. Although a successful appropriation of self and world
requires these elements, they are not reducible to the process of appropriation as Jaeggi contends.
(b) The Formal Structure of the Social Pathology Diagnosis
This formal orientation and structure are also maintained throughout the deployment of the
critical-diagnostic dimensions of the alienation critique (in Chapters 2 and 3). First, ethical/artistic
critique is based not on a particular conception of the good life but, as we saw above, on the
conditions that facilitate the realization of a successful life. In other words, ethical/artistic critique
597
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follows from the appropriative model and hence is formal in nature: it emphasizes the social
preconditions of self-realization, leaving the goals served by these conditions up to the individual
actors. Ethical/artistic critique does not presuppose a human essence/nature, a given anthropology,
or a teleological account of human life that would furnish the content of a “good life” in advance. It
merely says that successful acts of appropriation of self and world, whatever their content may be,
are a necessary condition for subjects to lead successful lives. As such, it represents an ethical-formal
grounding of the social pathology diagnosis.
Second, the definition of social pathologies as socially produced obstacles to self-realization
is chosen above others because, unlike rival definitions, it is responsive to subjects’ own conceptions
of the good, desires, goals, ground projects, and needs. Social pathologies matter because they
disrupt, foreclose, or impede the subject’s capacity for successful appropriation of self and world. It
follows directly from this that social pathologies interpose themselves between the subjects and their
ability to establish successful relationships to others, to themselves, and to the world.
Third, the three diagnostic fronts discussed—the pathologies of individual freedom, the
pathologies of de-synchronization, and the pathologies of organized self-realization—all constitute
disruptions in the subject’s self-world relation, regardless of the content of those relations.
(c) The Formal Structure of Self-Realization
Finally, consider the five components of self-realization put forward in Chapter 1:
(1) Appropriative Efficacy
(2) Symbolic Efficiency
(3) Satisfaction of Needs
(4) Autotelic Activities
(5) Formulation and Pursuit of Ground Projects
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Each component is concerned not with the content but with the form of the self-world relation,
with the possibility of engaging in successful acts of appropriation.
The ethical-formal nature of self-realization is also used to critique calls for better work that
focus on the labour process without attending to its productive form and the alienations that attend it.
The reason self-realization requires the refusal of work is precisely because it wants to make room
for creative labour, that is, for non-alienated labour in which subjects can autonomously engage in
successful acts of appropriation of self and world.
Consequently, when we put forward the four proposals or demands—desanctification of
work, a basic income, shorter working hours, and the exploration of post-work imaginaries—rather
than utopic blueprints, they are concerned primarily with furnishing the conditions in which late-
modern subjects can formulate and pursue their own conceptions of the good, desires, goals, ground
projects, and needs freely and joyously. The three criteria which all four proposals must advance are
to increase the security and stability of late-modern subjects, to decommodify labour (in order to
abolish the tyranny of waged work and to make room for creative labour), and to expand, facilitate
or prefigure the “true realm of freedom.”
If we combine the three formal accounts—alienation critique, social pathology diagnosis,
and self-realization (including the four proposals)—a fifth, and final, novel contribution emerges:
the ethical-formal nature of the alienation critique in all its steps is ecumenical—that is, it should be
both of liberatory and scholarly interest to all political philosophers and social theorists who take the
promise of modernity (freedom, self-determination, flourishing) seriously, regardless of their
political orientations or philosophical commitments—and not just to Marxists, for whom the
concept of alienation has always been a powerful tool with which to diagnose the ills of capitalism.
This applies to liberals (who are concerned with the “autonomy of autonomy”), left libertarians
(who are concerned with “real freedom”) and even communitarians and conservatists, who lament
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the erosion of community, the atomization of late-modern subjects, and the encroachment of the
market into all spheres of human life. If this is correct, then the argument put forward in this
dissertation has immense political implications and scholarly potential.
Its ethical-formal character not only succeeds in bridging the stark continental-analytic divide
(by neutralizing charges of essentialism, paternalism, and perfectionism), but since it is concerned,
first and foremost, with the conditions that facilitate the realization of a successful life, it can be
deployed by various schools of thought who radically disagree vis-à-vis the content of a successful life.
At a time when a world-wide pandemic is throwing into stark relief the problems of
precarious and dangerous work, lack of dignity in one’s work, and the challenge of a work-life
balance, it seems especially opportune to look anew at how alienation in our work and world can be
understood and remedied. I hope this dissertation succeeds in making some progress in this
complex, challenging, but essential task.
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From Alienation to Self-Realization:

Pathologies of Late Modernity, Work, and the Successful Life

A thesis submitted to the Graduate Program in Philosophy

in conformity with the requirements for the

Degree of the Doctor of Philosophy

Kingston, Ontario, Canada

Copyright © Omar Bachour, 2020

difficulties that plague traditional accounts of alienation.

pathologies of individual freedom, pathologies of de-synchronization, and pathologies of organized

self-realization; social pathologies; work.

Blithe, languorous days

when she visits redolent

of jasmines and myrrh.

critical input, interrogations, and patience.

convivial conversations, indefatigable support, and tireless work in the department.

Aggeliki Psimenatos, Alexander Cousins, David Campbell, Frédéric Côté-Bourdieu, Jacqueline

Thumbelina (Lina) and Tiger Lily (Lily).

(SSHRC) in the form of a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship.

PART I: THE THEORETICAL FOUNDATION

Chapter 1: The Alienation Critique 19

PART II: THE CRITICAL-DIAGNOSTIC DIMENSION

Chapter 2: The Social Pathology Diagnosis 58

Chapter 3: The Three Diagnostic Fronts 117

PART III: THE PRESCRIPTIVE DIMENSION

Chapter 4: The Politics of Work 178

Chapter 5: Four Proposals 218

Table 1.1 Candidates for the Alienation Critique 21

Table 2.1 Modes of Reflexivity and the Self-World Relation 105

Table 3.1 Winners and Losers in the Pathologies of De-Synchronization 172

Resonance remains the promise of modernity, but alienation is its reality.

—Hartmut Rosa, Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World1

the capacity to lead successful lives.

capacity of late-modern subjects to lead successful lives.

preconditions we need in order to be free”4—and, conversely, what conditions impede or obstruct

our capacity for self-realization. Let us examine these more closely.

The Problem I: Psychic Ailments and the Unsuccessful Life

governments of people’s choosing.”6

Writing in the early nineties, Daniel Goleman noted that

than for their grandparent’s generation.11

popping antidepressants like never before.”14

In short, as the material conditions have improved in developed countries, collective

The Problem II: Work and the Unsuccessful Life

despise their work than to love it.

Organization (ILO) cites the following cases of death-by-overwork [karoshi]:

work-related by the Labour Standards Office.

compensation 14 years after her husband’s death.

intentional conflation of work and life in late-capitalist societies.”19

concept as an “overly hasty...hypostatization” of their forebears—“a product of modernity through

of the human essence.”20 As Rahel Jaeggi points out, the concept’s

philosophical foundations look outmoded in the age of postmodernity; its political

capitalism’s decisive victory.21

Novelty of the Contribution

In deploying the concept, the dissertation makes a number of novel contributions.

alienation, is nonetheless problematically narrow or one-sided (Chapter 1). Self-realization cannot be

they are not reducible to the process of appropriation as Jaeggi contends.

the need for such an analysis is both pressing and timely.

this dissertation contributes to the project of bridging the continental-analytic divide in

about the aspirations of modernity—authenticity, autonomy, creativity, liberty—we need to consider

overcome in order for late-modern subjects to be able to lead successful lives.