This, of course, does not mean that live TV is doomed to remain a closed form. Not at all, for it already has numerous possibilities for opening its discourse and launching into an exploration of the profound indeterminacy of daily events. All it has to do is enrich the main event, filmed according to all the laws of verisimilitude, with a variety of marginal annotations, with rapid inquiries into the surrounding reality, with all sorts of images unrelated to the primary action but relevant precisely because of their unrelatedness, given the new perspectives, the new directions, and the new possibilities they propose for the same set of events.
Live TV might then have a rather interesting pedagogical effect: it could give the viewer the feeling, however vague, that life—that even he himself—is not confined to the story he so eagerly follows. These digressive annotations would then jolt the viewer out of the hypnotic spell woven by the plot, and, by distancing him from it, would force him to judge, or at least to question, the persuasiveness of what he sees on the screen.
VI. Form as Social Commitment
A famous columnist who’s always keenly aware of what is «in» and what is «out» recently warned her readers to beware of the word «alienation,» by now quite outdated and vulgarized, good only for readers of bestsellers or for some contemporary Bouvards and Pecuchets. Of course, philosophers ought not to care whether the technical terms they use are «in» or «out»; on the other hand, why a given word should suddenly become terribly trendy and then, quite as suddenly, lapse into disuse is certainly part of their concerns. Why did the term «alienation» become so popular at the beginning of the 196os, so long after its first appearance? Might one say that the way in which it has been used and abused is in itself one of the most egregious yet unrecognized instances of alienation in the history of our civilization?
First of all, let’s look at the term’s origins and correct usage. Its meaning changes depending on whether it is followed by the preposition «from» (as is generally the case in English) or the preposition «in» or «to.» Philosophical tradition prefers the latter usage as the more correct translation of the German word Entfremdung, which implies renouncing oneself for the sake of something else, abandoning oneself to some extraneous power, becoming «other» in something outside oneself, therefore ceasing to be an agent in order to be acted upon. «Alienation from,» in the sense of «estrangement from» something, corresponds instead to the German Verfremdung and means something quite different.
In its daily use, however, the term has acquired yet another meaning which implies that the something that is acting upon us, and on which we depend, is something totally extraneous to us, a hostile power that has nothing to do with us, an evil will that has subjugated us despite all our efforts and that someday we may be able to destroy, or at least reject, since we are ourselves and it is an «other,» substantially different from what we are.
Of course, everyone is free to build a personal myth in which the word «alienation» has this particular meaning.
But this is certainly not the meaning it had either for Hegel or for Marx. According to Hegel, man alienates himself by objectivizing himself in the aim of his work or his actions. In other words, he alienates himself in the world of things and of social relationships because he has constructed it according to the laws of subsistence and development that he himself must adjust to and respect.
Marx, on the other hand, reproached Hegel for not making a clear distinction between objectification (Entausserung) and alienation (Entfremdung). In the first case, man turns himself into a thing; he expresses himself in the world through his creations, thus constructing the world to which he then commits himself.
But when the mechanism of this world begins to get the upper hand—when man suddenly becomes unable to recognize it as his own creation, unable to use for his own purposes the things he has produced, and instead ends up serving their purposes (which he might identify with the purposes of other men)—then he finds himself alienated; it is his creations that henceforth tell him what to do, what to feel, and what to become. The stronger the alienation, the deeper man’s belief that he is still in control (whereas, in fact, he is being controlled) and that the situation in which he lives is the best of all possible worlds.
For Marx, objectification is a substantially positive and indispensable process, whereas alienation is a historically engendered situation, a situation which, therefore, can find a historical solution—in communism.
In other words, according to Marx, Hegel’s problem lies in his having reduced the question of alienation to a process of the mind: consciousness alienates itself in its object and only upon recognizing itself in the object discovers its own effectuality. But this knowledge automatically entails the negation of the object, for the moment consciousness recognizes the object, it gets rid of its alienation by negating the object itself.
«Objectivity as such,» Marx says of Hegel, «is considered to be an alien condition not fitting man’s nature and selfconsciousness. Thus, the reappropriation of the objective essence of man, which was produced as something alien and determined by alienation, not only implies the transcendence of alienation, but also of objectivity. This means that man is regarded as a nonobjective, spiritual being . . . The appropriation of the alienated objective essence or the supersession of objectivity regarded as alienation … means for Hegel at the same time, or even principally, the supersession of objectivity, since what offends selfconsciousness in alienation is not the determinate character of the object but its objective character.»‘
So the consciousness that constitutes itself as selfconsciousness not only would eliminate its state of alienation to the object, but, in its furious desire for the absolute, would also kill the object by taking it back within itself. It is not surprising that Marx, interpreting Hegel in this fashion, had to react by asserting that the object created by human activity exists just as much as the reality of nature, technology, and society. Hegel’s achievement was to define the range and function of human labor; the object of this labor could not be denied. however selfaware one might become and however conscious of the freedom one must acquire in relation to this object.
Work must be seen not as an activity of the spirit (so that the opposition between consciousness and the object of its knowledge may be resolved in an ideal play of assertions and negations) but rather as the externalization of the powers of man, who must now deal concretely with what he has created. If man wants to «resume his own alienated essence into himself,» he cannot suppress the object (through a spiritual dialectic); rather, he will have to act practically in order to suppress alienation—that is, in order to change the conditions that have brought about this painful and scandalous separation between himself and the object he has created.
The nature of this separation is both social and economic: the capitalistic mode of production allows for the fact that man’s work may concretize itself in an object that is fundamentally independent from its producer, so that the more objects the producer produces, the more depleted he becomes. The situation can be summed up as follows: the worker depends on the things he produces; then he inevitably falls under the dominion of the money that represents them; after this, the more he goes on producing the more he becomes like the merchandise he produces. In other words, «he is no longer the product of his own work; so the larger this product, the lesser he will be.»
Solution: a system of collective production in which the worker is no longer working for others but working for himself and his own kin, and thus feels that what he makes is his own product and that he is one with it.
But then, how could Hegel have so easily confused objectification and alienation, as Marx says he did?
From the vantage point of a later historical and industrial reality, we can now reconsider the whole question of alienation in a different light. Hegel did not make any distinction between the two forms of alienation because, in fact, the moment man objectifies himself in the works he has created, and in the nature he has modified, he produces an inevitable tension. The two poles of such a tension are, on the one hand, his domination of the object, and, on the other, his total dissolution in the object, his total surrender to it.
This is a dialectic balance that is based on a constant struggle between the negation of what is asserted and the assertion of what is denied. Thus, alienation would seem to be an integral part of every relationship one establishes with others and with things, whether this be in love, in society. or within an industrial structure.’
The question of alienation would then become (to put it in Hegelian terms, at least metaphorically) «the question of a human selfconsciousness, which, unable to conceive of itself as a separate ‘cogito,’ can find itself only in the world that it itself constructs, and in the other Ts it recognizes, and, at times, misconstrues. But, this way
