/. WHAT IS ALIENATION?
Why a man works and what his work means to him have been central questions in one tradition of socialist thought. It has been said that under capitalism man works out of fear of starvation alone, and cannot see his work as expressing any purpose which he could assume as his own. To this the reply has always been: when have men ever been allowed to work from any other motive and in any other way ? This rejoinder has some value as an antidote to the form of social nostalgia which tries to rehabilitate some murky slab of our past to serve as the golden age, but as an answer to socialist criticism it misses the point rather sadly. Of course, the vast majority of men have always had to work to avoid starvation, and it is very much to be doubted that the slaves who built the pyramids felt much identification with the purpose of the Pharaohs, but the point of the criticism is not to compare the present with an imaginary past, but to show it up in the light of a possible future. A critic may then ask why we speak of capitalist society specifically instead of simply all past society. The answer is that in industrial society the problem arises in an unique way. In pre-industrial society it was possible for a man's work, although hard and oppressive, to be an integral part of a life which, however difficult, had a meaning he could accept. This is certainly clear when we look at those societies where work is integrated by seasonal ceremonies, etc., into the ritual life of the community, which is also the centre of its cultural life. In a situation of this kind, one cannot reduce the motive for working to a simple fear of starvation: social solidarity, commitment to the common meanings of a culture can also enter in. One cannot equate this to the temporary position where men feel often indifference sometimes loathing for the way they earn their living, which they are therefore quite willing to separate rigidly off from the rest of their lives, as so many ' lost' hours. But this does not mean that the only way forward is to recreate the conditions of an earlier society. The growth of education and of self-conscious choice which have occurred since then are not only precious achievements, they are also irreversible developments. The way to recapture the good of the past is most emphatically not to copy the past. The same values cannot be given the same meaning at all times in history. It is therefore anachronistic to interpret ' meaning ' as purpose in the context of primitive society. When we talk about the ' meaning of life,' we naturally tend to think of purposes or goals towards which life can be directed ; but that is because we have been taught to think analytically of a thing and its purpose as separable. But this is a comparatively modern development. We can also think of ' meaning ' more on the model of artistic meaning: to say that a life has meaning is to say that its duties and rights, freedoms and
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servitudes, its basic orientations, form a pattern; a whole which is meaningful in this quasi-artistic sense to the one who lives it. Thus it is no answer to those who talk of alienation under capitalist society to point out that most men have not given their lives a consciously defined purpose : this has not always been essential to a meaningful life in the past. But, by the same token, we cannot expect it to be sufficient in the future ; we cannot recreate even the general pattern of the past. Liberal thought is often guilty of this kind of anachronism: it dismisses the problem of alienation on the grounds, first, that human nature has never changed and therefore our age has no special problems (therefore why worry); second, that human nature will never change and the perennial problems are ineradicable (therefore no use worrying). Thus one of the features of work in industrial society that one minority stream of socialist critique (e.g. Marx, Morris, Fridham) has clearly delineated, is the radical separation between work hours and the rest of life, which now becomes the rule. It is clear that work cannot be meaningful under these conditions, but it it usually assumed that the rest of a man's life doesn't necessarily suffer overmuch. Thus, although it is a commonplace that the proletariat of early industrialism were deprived of their cultural heritage and forced to lead aesthetically impoverished lives, it is widely believed not only among Liberals, but also in the Labour Party, that this was entirely due to the long exhausting hours, the overcrowding and the rapidity of the change of environment. Once these factors could be removed, the march of progress would recommence. But the " the-problems-of-work-are-over-the-problems-of-leisure begin" school on the Left seem to take for granted a very questionable Utilitarian theory of leisure and culture. The crude hedonism of Utilitarianism saw pleasure as an ' experience' in the classical empiricist sense,' i.e. as an effect of the senses or mind (we are never quite sure which), which they receive passively from the environment. In the quasi-economic book-keeping model of behaviour which the Utilitarians adopted, this was incorporated into the simple two-fold classification of human behaviour into Production and Consumption as the mechanism behind the latter. But this model entirely excludes Play, or the exercise of the faculties for other than bread-and-butter purposes or rather it splits it up into two separate processes: the action, which is work, and the experience, which is quite passive, i.e. into production and consumption. Now this model cannot account for the kind of activity which is crucial to all cultural life, the participation by people, who are not themselves creators of culture in the normal sense, in a heritage of meanings, which they take on, shape, whose offered continuations they accept or reject and which they ultimately hand on. This kind of activity, visible in anything from the square dance to the alive theatre audience, is not even thinkable in the original Utilitarian scheme, or unthinkable without fragmentation into two. For the ' passive experience' model of pleasure is meant to apply to art-tasting as well as to other forms of ' consumption.' The active participation of the amateur must then be considered as some form of ' work,' as in some sense ' productive,' as a means to the end of consumption. It is relegated to the other side of the dichotomy. That this fragmentation obscures from view the basic nature of the individual's participation in the cultural life of his community becomes obvious, for neither of the two kinds of activity into which it is ' analysed' resembles it in the slightest degree: it is neither ' experience' nor is it work ; the sum of these two cannot therefore come any closer to equalling it.
The recovery of participation in cultural life cannot therefore be a simple question of shortening hours so that enough time and energy is left after work ; or one simply of proliferating the means to such participation. It involves also re-acquiring the ability to participate. And there is no doubt that this has been lost to some considerable degree.
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nothing is changed if the search is successful, there are no intrinsic criteria of achievement; the search is potentially endless. (Cf E. Durkheim: Suicide, Bk. II, Cp. 5). Some socially established external criterion of success for different classes and groups is therefore a necessity. The goal of Pleasure and the avoidance of Pain becomes that of possession of the visible signs of ' full' life. The status hierarchy, laying down the standards of present required achievement, and of achievable future ambition becomes a psychological necessity. Status tensions, inevitable in a mobile society, begin to carry a lethal psychic charge. Anxiety over futility merges with anxiety over the gap between required and achieved status. This anxiety is, of course, fixed on and intensified by mass-media advertising. Advertising, as today practised in Britain and America, both exploits and helps to give shape to the status hierarchy. It trades on the anxiety over status by convincing people that the products it recommends are the pivotal criteria for having arrived. But this is not the only arrow in its quiver. It also gives recognition to the anxiety over futility. This is if anything intensified by the diversion of the search for Pleasures as a Consumer good into what even those firmly in its grip refer to as " the rat-race " for status. The increase in anxiety and effort required is liable to make the game seem even less worth the candle, even for those who are psychologically incapable of ' opting out.' Much advertising copy attempts to offer us surcease from our doubts by appealing to the original desire for Pleasure as a passive experience, by supplementing our faulty imaginations and conjuring up for us a dream world where Pleasure is consumed in such conditions of beauty for what manages by present canons to pass for it), grace and ease, not to speak of primal innocence, as quite to restore our flagging faith in the ideal. To the extent that we identify with the figures in these advertisements and every attempt is made to have us do so we are reconfirmed in our belief that it is worth while trying to find happiness and a meaning in life through every more satisfying, discriminating and expensive consumption, and we are discouraged from seeing our own creative potentialities as possible sources of happiness and meaningful living. These ads. are to the new religion what sermons on the Kingdom of Heaven are to Christianity. It is, of course, true that, in a capitalist society, particularly when the 'economics of abundance ' prevail, advertising will always be used to make as many people as possible good consumers, but it would be foolish to consider advertising, or the ' Dreamland' propaganda of the mass media in general, as solely responsible. This search for Pleasure as a consumer good is obviously deeply rooted in the way of life of industrial capitalist society.
class and elite culture intertwine, and are sharply set off against 'pop' culture, so that the inevitable struggle between the two is inextricably bound up with class tensions and resentments. But the trivialization of common meanings which immediately affects ' pop ' culture attains the 'highbrow ' indirectly in that it is classed as such, not only by those who do not participate in it but inevitably to some extent by those who do. It is thus always in danger of becoming the possession of a coterie, of becoming inbred, a set of private meanings by which the members of the elect recognise each other. But a 'highbrow' culture which doesn't seek to communicate, which doesn't try to break the existing barriers to communication inevitably stifles in a hotbed atmosphere of marginal titillation: it becomes as trivialized as the ' pop ' culture against which it has raised its walls. This is perhaps most evident of all in the theatre which, from its beginnings in ritual, has been the form which par excellence is ' of' a society, is meant to address a society and not a number of fragmented individuals, which requires the kind of audience participation which only a society with common meanings makes possible. The trivialization of content on both sides of the barrier means that neither side can remake a common culture simply by engulfing the other. But attempts are made at all levels to break through the limits, to reach new people, to rediscover the nerve-points of meaning. Because of the all-pervading power that trivialized culture has at its disposal in the mass media, the attempts that are made are often savage, and centre around a pre-occupation with violence, especially among young people. The violence often reflects the pent-up frustrated desire to break out to a new and more authentic image of inarticulate experience. And then, of course,the mass media try to cater for this need as well in sex-and-violence dramas, and once more to reduce it to a formula, shepherd it back to a safe anonymity. Small wonder that the most authentic voices! are often heard from genuine social rebels. But this very fact means that the participants in ' highbrow' culture, many of whom staff the mass media and the advertising agencies, cannot reach or very often even understand what is genuine in ' pop ' culture. If the cultural cleavage bothers them at all, they think of the answer in terms of a liquidation of popular culture, an extension of national culture from the top down, which is doomed to failure from the start.
"Pop" v. "Highbrow"
If it is true that what I have been calling Utilitarianism, which can perhaps more accurately be described as an abstraction of certain of the most popular doctrines of Bentham (certainly not of I. S. Mill), is the self-consciousness of alienated man in our society, then we would expect this to be reflected in the quality of its cultural life. We would expect its cultural life to be fragmented, no longer a bond between different groups ; and we would expect to see an enervating ' popular ' culture, which only needed to be 'consumed' to be enjoyed, vying with a more traditional culture, which, would either be the appanage of a class which had not been totally disrupted by industrial society, or would be an 'elite' culture, one entered by people individually on the basis of education. In Britain, 14
societies grew up in the new industrial towns, usually on the basis of a local tradition, the fact that work-hours became so many lost hours did not at once destroy the traditional conceptions of meaning in life ; rather something like a common culture grew up in the different working-class communities, based on the values of solidarity and mutual trust. The fact that the sense of solidarity was largely based on a mistrust and hostility to ' THEM ' has often been cited to show the narrowness and parochialism which infected the working-class community, but whatever the faults and virtues of this culture it provided a sense of meaning in life alternative to the standard utilitarian one of the alienated man in mass society. The gradual, weakening of these groups has made individuals uncertain of their status and has opened the door to the status tensions, which are exacerbated by the fact that they provide the only criterion of success. (This represents, in fact, the growth of " Consumer Capitalism," which Stuart Hall analyses at length in his article in this issue.)
to us via Marx, does more than just describe the phenomena, it represents also a beginning of an explanation, by offering us a model, that of human capacities and powers becoming foreign to man. An explanation is also, of course, the groundwork tor a programme of reform. It is therefore far more than a question of words whether ' alienation ' is the right term. A rival term is that of ' anomie,' introduced by Durkheim. This concept fits naturally into a quite different explanatory model, that of a breakdown of the rules which used to be accepted. Anomic men are men who accept no rules, no boundaries. Durkheim links this directly to a weakening of the social bond. It is for him therefore the fact that men become more independent, more self-reliant, that society becomes more varied, in short more ' open,' which is at the root of what, following Marx, I have called alienation. According to Durkheim (in Suicide), all forms of human activity which are not strictly necessary for survival are given meaning by society: " they are society itself jncarnated and individualized in each one of us " (Suicide, p. 212). Thus the weakening of social bonds through a development of individual self-consciousness cannot but raise a question which must remain unanswered: to what purpose? It cannot but introduce a sense of meaninglessness into " the superior forms of human activity." This thesis of Durkheim is important, for it introduces the idea of meaning unconnected with that of conscious purpose. For whatever rationale these ' superior forms ' of activity have had in the past religious, ideological or moral the reason why they have held men's allegiance is, according to Durkheim, the sense men have had of being p a r t of a larger whole. It is a sense based largely on an unreflecting adherence to a way of life, rather than on an acceptance of a purpose after reflection. These activities therefore had meaning and can only have meaning in the quasi-artistic sense mentioned above ; they are part of a set of common meanings which express adequately a people's deepest awareness of the turning-points of life. They are meaningful in the sense, for example, that primitive puberty rites are.
former would have to create and nurture the ' primary group' with a conscious purpose: to make people happy ; while the latter would have to be conditioned unreflectingly to feel themselves a part of the larger whole. These are already the terms of reference with which much work in ' human relations ' in American industry is done. But this work is bound to fail, and the problems it is meant to solve to recur as long as America remains a democracy. Even more futile is the attempt to become both manipulator and manipulated characteristic of the way of life of the Organization Man. In the part of his book entitled " The New Suburbia." Whyte describes the community life of the new, highly mobile middle class of America the ' pioneers ' of Riesman referred to above. The belief underlying their emphasis on participation, Whyte points out, is that the individual cannot live the ' good life ' without close bonds to his society. The important need to fill is that for a 'sense of belongingness.' But to the extent that this is seen as another good to be 'consumed,' to the extent. therefore that people try to administer it to themselves, to manipulate themselves and others, they must be much too sophisticated, much too highly conscious of their technique to develop a real ' sense of belongingness.' Since this requires an unreflecting sense of adherence to a group, they must always be in the position of people trying with great ingenuity to hoodwink themselves, which is never ultimately completely successful. If the aim were to found a sense of community on the basis of some agreed purpose, the task would be difficult, perhaps immensely so, but not self-defeating. But this is not the aim: the attempt is precisely to sink those differences of purpose religious, political, ideologicalin silence, and to build a community on ' togetherness ' alone. But mere ' togetherness' is impossible since it is just another means to the end of individual happiness, another good which the individual atom of society will consume-
criterion of this kind. By it one can measure one's successes and failures: one has a standard of achievement. ' Anomie ' can therefore be re-defined more broadly to include "not only those who are 'ruleless' but also those who are prisoners of a rule, a set of criteria for success and failure' which they cannot really accept. They are the 'maladjusted'
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Positively, the road is not so clear. The premium put on individual mobility in a capitalist society, the style of life, i.e. consumption pattern, which represents its highest goal of achievement, have not only contributed to the break-up of the primary group but have tended to create actuation where those which survive are the most stagnant and resistant tochange. The struggle for survival has often resulted in a stifling parochialism. The attempt to build new primary societies cannot be based on the existing ones alone. But it cannot start without them. If we need the sense of a common lot, intertwined with that of a common purpose, we can only find it here, even if the purpose seems now largely lost and the lot for the most part negatively defined. The most urgent job is therefore to rescue the old communities, to prevent their sinking into the amorphous mass of the surrounding conurbations, to open them out by rescuing the local theatres, art galleries and museums from financial asphyxiation, to plan the rebuilding so that the old relationships are not torn down with the condemned housing, to give their development
some of the impetus that has been given to the New Towns, to associate the communities in their own development projects. This salvage work is as important, if not more so, than the development of the New Towns. We need pilot schemes in community development as the New Towns were pilot schemes in decongestion. But community development cannot be tried in New Towns since here the community can only be the product of the development and not the other way round. We must therefore start with the old communities. If democratization can be made real in this context, it can help to providethe model for the newer urban centres. Of course, this work cannot go on in a vacuum. It requires a context of socialist policy in education, and industry. Alienation is of a piece in work and leisure. But though it is true that socialism, to gather it up in a phrase, is about Industry and Society, this does not mean that the second is a simple projection of the first. Rather the aim of socialist policy is that they enrich each other.