Thus, we have identified two extreme attitudes toward the recurring and ineluctable possibility of alienation present in all our relationships with things and others: the pessimistic attitude, which destroys the object (or rejects it as evil) for fear of being implicated in it, and the optimistic attitude, according to which integration with the object is the only positive aspect of a relationship.
The availability to the world characteristic of the second attitude is fundamental, because it allows us to commit ourselves to the world and to act in it. But the fear that accompanies our every dealing with the world, and the awareness that our adjustment could turn out to be a failure, are also essential to the welfare of the relationship.
In my interaction with my car, in order to keep the right dialectic balance I need only ensure that my operational projects always remain more important to me than the biological harmony I may attain with the engine. For so long as I know what I am doing with the car, what I want from it, and what it allows me to do, I will not risk falling under its spell.
The amount of time during which I will let it take over and, as it were, drive me, will be reasonably balanced by the rest of my day and by the fact that, even as I allow myself to be led by it through intersections and traffic lights, I will never be totally absorbed by it, but rather will use it as a sort of sonic or rhythmic background to my thoughts. (This, of course, will also involve a dialectic between the rhythm of my thoughts and the movement of the car: just as my adjustment to the car will affect my thoughts, so my thoughts will influence my relationship with my car.
A sudden intuition may translate into a muscular spasm, an increased pressure on the accelerator, and therefore a variation in speed and in the hypnotic rhythm that could easily have turned me into an instrument of the car. On the other hand, why linger on the reciprocal relationship between the psychological and the physiological when Joyce has already told us everything there is to say about it in his description of Bloom reading on the toilet?)
Once I have become aware of this polarity I will be able to invent a number of «ascetic» stratagems to safeguard my freedom while implicating myself in the object, the last and most banal of which would be to mistreat the car, keep it dirty, deliberately disregard its maintenance, abuse the engine—in other words, do everything in my power to avoid being totally integrated with it. I would thus avoid Entfremdung by means of Verfremdung, escape alienation through estrangement—a technique similar to Brecht’s, who, to prevent his audience from being hypnotized by the events in his plays, demands that the lights be on at all times and that the public be allowed to smoke.
All this should cast some light on a number of procedures. Take, for instance, some lines by Cendrars which Zolla considers a «tragic example of macabre taste»:
Toutes les femmes que j’ai rencontrees se dressent aux
horizons
Avec les gestes piteux et les regards tristes des semaphores
sous la pluie.
All the women I have met stand up against the horizon
With the pathetic gestures and sad faces of semaphores under
the rain.
We could justly see these lines as a poetic attempt to humanize an aspect of the technological landscape which otherwise would have remained totally alien to us; as a way of rescuing a technical tool from its daily function by lending it a symbolic value; as a new way of dealing with feelings, without resorting to worn out «poetic images» but, rather, by trying to introduce the imagination to new responses.
In other words, we could read them as an attempt to recognize the object, to understand it, to see what space it occupies in our lives, and, having done all this, to see how we can use it for our own ends, however metaphoric, without having to submit to it. What Zolla sees as macabre has nothing to do with the semaphore, or with any other luminous signal, but it may have something to do with the despair and the squalor of lost loves evoked by Cendrars. In any case, the poem has done its job: it has given new form to an old formula and has offered us the possibility of a new landscape.
The question now becomes: Why do we see the situation of the car driver as more alienating than that of the caveman? Why do we resent the humanization of a semaphore and not that of Achilles’ shield? (And we should not forget that the latter is described in the Iliad in great detail, including the «industrial» process that produced it, an aspect that must have shocked intellectuals in Homer’s day.) Why do we see alienation in the symbiotic relationship that joins a driver to his car and not in the one that joins a rider to his horse when, in both cases, the corporeality of the person is extended into that of the vehicle?
Obviously because nowadays, in our technological civilization, objects have become so pervasive, so sophisticated, so autonomous that we feel threatened by them. The fact that their forms have tended to become less and less anthropomorphic certainly contributes to their otherness. But there is another reason: between the caveman and his tool there was direct contact, an immediate relationship in which the only risk involved was that of total integration between the manipulator and the manipulated object.
The car, however, does not simply alienate its driver to itself; it also alienates him to the system of laws that governs the highways, to the race for prestige (the ambition of possessing a new model, a particular accessory, more horsepower), to a market, to a world of competition in which the individual must lose himself in order to acquire the car. In other words, alienation is a chronic condition of human existence at all levels, but it has become particularly prominent in our modern industrial society, as Marx clearly foresaw in his economic analyses.
To modern man, alienation is as much a given as weightlessness is to an astronaut: it is a situation in which we have to learn how to move, how to acquire new autonomy, and how to devise new ways of being free.
We have to realize that we cannot live without an accelerator, and that maybe we would be unable to love without thinking of semaphores. There are still people who think we can speak of love without referring to traffic lights. One of these is the man who writes the lyrics for Liberate. He has been able to elude the inhuman reality of machines: his universe still revolves around the very human concepts of «heart,» «love,» and «mother.» But the moralist in the know is aware of what lies behind such a flatus vocis: a world of petrified values that is used to fool the public. By accepting certain linguistic expressions, the lyricist has alienated himself and his public to something that manifests itself as an obsolete linguistic form.
With this last observation, the discussion has moved from the examination of a direct, real relationship with a situation, to that of the forms through which one organizes one’s analysis of the situation. How does alienation manifest itself at the level of art or of pseudoart forms?
Since I have decided here to use «alienation» in its broadest sense, my argument on this subject will develop along two different, if converging, lines.
First of all, one could speak of the sort of alienation that occurs within a formal system, and which could be more aptly defined as a dialectic between invention and manner, between freedom and formal restrictions. Let’s, for instance, consider the system of rhyme.
Rhyme, as such, was elaborated according to a number of stylistic patterns and conventions, not out of masochism but because it was generally assumed that only discipline could stimulate invention and force one to choose the association of sounds that would be most agreeable to the ear. Thanks to these conventions, the poet is no longer the victim or the prisoner of his enthusiasms and emotions: the rules of rhyme restrain him but at the same time liberate him, the way an Ace bandage restrains the movement of an ankle or a knee while allowing the runner to run without fearing a torn ligament.
And yet, as soon as we accept a convention we find ourselves alienated in it: the second line is in part determined by the rhyme of the first one. The more a certain practice asserts itself, and the more it pushes us to contemplate creative alternatives, the more it imprisons us. The use of rhyme will result in a dictionary of rhymes, which will start as a compendium of possible rhymes and end up as a catalogue of common rhymes. So, after a while, a poet will inevitably be more and more alienated in the rhymes he or she uses.
A typical example of formal alienation is that of the writer of popular song lyrics who is so conditioned by a certain convention that the moment he
