ALIENATION, ETHNICITY, AND

POSTMODERNISM
Edited by FELIX GEYER

Contributions in Sociology, Number 116 Dan A. Chekki, Series Adviser

GREENWOOD PRESS Westport, Connecticut London

Questia Media America, Inc. www.questia.com

Publication Information: Book Title: Alienation, Ethnicity and Postmodernism. Contributors: Felix Geyer
- author. Publisher: Greenwood Press. Place of Publication: Westport, CT. Publication Year: 1996. Page
Number: iii.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Alienation, ethnicity, and postmodernism / edited by Felix Geyer. p. cm.--

(Contributions in sociology, ISSN 0084-9278; no. 116)

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-313-29889-2 (alk.

paper) 1. Alienation (Social psychology) 2. Ethnic relations. 3.
Postmodernism--Social aspects. I. Geyer, R. Felix. II. Series. HM291.A465
1996 302.544--dc20 95-50515

British library Cataloguing in Publication Data is available.

Copyright 1996 by Felix Geyer

All rights reserved. No portion of this book my be reproduced, by any process

or technique, without the express written consent of the publisher.

library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 95-50515 ISBN: 0-313-29888-2

ISSN: 0084-9278

First published in 1996

Greenwood Press, 88 Post Road West, Westport, CT 06881 An imprint of

Greenwood Publishing Group, Inc.

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this book complies with the Permanent Paper Standard
issued by the National Information Standards Organization (Z39.48-1984).

1098765432

Contents

Preface vii
 Preface

This volume derives from the activities of the Research Committee on Alienation
Theory and Research of the International Sociological Association. It was founded in
1972, and by the mid-1970s had developed into the main international forum where
an increasingly interdisciplinary group of alienation researchers, embracing different
theoretical and methodological perspectives, regularly met to exchange and evaluate
research results and discuss priorities for further research.

Since its foundation, the Research Committee has been actively organizing meetings
to facilitate this goal, especially at the quadrennial World Congresses of Sociology.
Between World Congresses, several smaller international meetings were organized,
while communication between the members is furthermore facilitated by the
publication of a regular, now largely electronic Newsletter. The most important
results of these meetings, presenting the most recent developments in alienation
theory and research, were published in five volumes, appearing between 1976 and
1992.

The present volume is the sixth in this ongoing series. It illustrates the recent and
fertile convergence of alienation research with studies on ethnicity and
postmodernism, more fully elaborated in the introductory chapter. As usual, the
contributors form an international and interdisciplinary group, as will be evident
from the following overview.

First of all, thanks are due here to the contributors. They have been extremely
patient, and first produced revised versions of their original contributions on the basis
of my editorial suggestions. These were not only directed at the contents of the
contributions themselves, but were also aimed at increasing the coherence of the
volume as a whole, by suggesting several crossreferences between the different
chapters. Only at a later stage, it became obvious

-vii-
that many chapters had to be condensed, some even considerably, in view of the
word limit imposed by the publisher. I therefore want to thank here especially those
contributors who must have had a hard time to keep their line of argument fully
intact as a result of the sometimes severe space limits imposed.

Also, I am grateful to all those contributors who have sent me their often quite
detailed comments and criticisms on a draft version of the introduction; many of their
suggestions were incorporated in that chapter.

Also, professor Irving Louis Horowitz deserves a special word of thanks. He not only
figures here as a contributor, but I also benefited from his advice as a professional
publisher when preparing this volume for publication.

Furthermore, I want to thank here editors Elizabeth Murphy and Nick Street, Kim
Hastings of the production department, and copy editor Nicole Balant, as well as all
others involved on the Greenwood side in the production of this book, for their
excellent and much appreciated support.

Last, but most certainly not least, I want to express my gratitude to dr Johan Sterk,
director of my institute, the Netherlands Universities' Institute for Coordination of
Research in Social Sciences, more easily known under its Dutch acronym SISWO.
He recognized, at an early stage, the importance of alienation as a central concept in
the social sciences, and managed to convince SISWO's successive boards of directors
over the last quarter century to support my activities as secretary, and later as
president, of the Research Committee since its very beginning.

So far, these activities included writing a doctoral thesis on the subject thanks to a
half-year sabbatical in 1975-76, intensive coordination of, and participation in,
Research Committee sessions at five World Congresses and a number of smaller
international conferences, regular and often costly contacts with an international
membership of well over 250 persons, editing and co-editing six volumes on
alienation, and producing and mailing regular Newsletters. A conservative estimate
of the total cost involved up till now might well surpass one million dollars.

It is money undoubtedly well-spent, in view of the international network that has

successfully been built and its continuing productivity, but it is most certainly also a
debt I cannot repay! More generally, this support demonstrates how the concentrated
and dedicated long-term effort of a relatively small but progressive institute can
make a difference, and can decisively influence the international development of a
new branch of the social sciences.

Amsterdam, September 20, 1995

Felix Geyer

-viii-
Introduction: Alienation, Ethnicity,
and Postmodernism
Felix Geyer

Alienation: An Umbrella Concept

It will be argued here, first, that alienation is an umbrella concept, with
sometimes widely diverging, but nevertheless more or less loosely linked,
connotations and dimensions; and second, that it is an extremely useful
sensitizing concept for the social sciences, which can serve as an advance
warning system, especially during periods of rapid social change, and give a
timely indication of unintended negative consequences of certain aspects of
societal development. For those not specializing in this area, its often implicit
connotations and its usually distinguished dimensions will first be discussed,
followed by a short overview of the history of the concept, the new directions
in alienation research linking alienation to problems of ethnicity and
postmodernism, and the emergence of new forms of alienation under
conditions of postmodernity.

The Dimensions of Alienation

Alienation is indeed an umbrella concept, uniting different, but loosely
related, dimensions. Melvin Seeman ( 1959), working within a tradition of
socialpsychological empirical research, distinguished five dimensions in a
pioneering article: powerlessness, meaninglessness, normlessness, social
isolation, and selfestrangement; later, he added a sixth dimension: cultural
estrangement. He defined these dimensions as subjective probabilities held by
the individual; powerlessness, for example, is "the expectancy or probability
held by the individual that his own behavior cannot determine the occurrence
of the outcomes or reinforcements he seeks"; meaninglessness is "a low
expectancy that satisfactory predictions about the future outcomes of behavior
can be made."

-ix-
Not surprisingly, the Marxists among his critics obviously took him to task for
concentrating too much on subjective states of individuals--e.g., their expectancies of
being powerless--without judging their reality content, thus taking attention away
from the meso- and macrosocietal structures that cause these feelings, like actual
conditions of powerlessness in the workplace. The Marxists thus tend to consider a
person alienated when that person is embedded in objectively alienating
environmental conditions, whether s/he admits to being alienated or not; in the latter
case, "false consciousness" is supposed to be at work or, in psychoanalytic terms,
"repression." Social psychologists object that the subject should have some say in
defining his or her own internal state, which can, in principle, be a happy and
unalienated one under conditions of false consciousness.

Both positions seem to be defensible, and they may not even be that far apart but
rather may reflect different priorities; both recognize that alienation is an ultimately
subjective and more or less conscious phenomenon, though brought about by an
often extended process of interaction with an alienating environment. This can be the
macro- or meso-environment of late capitalism, as the Marxists claim, but the
alienating process can also start almost at the beginning of life, by dysfunctional
interaction patterns with the micro-environment (e.g., neuroticizing parents), as
psychoanalysts tend to stress.

The Connotations of Alienation

Alienation as a Process: It should be clear from the above that alienation is a
process, although marked by a degree of stagnation or fixation, rather than a state.
Obviously, administering an alienation scale, or relating its alienation score to
situations in the factory, political life, and so forth, gives only a momentary snapshot
of that process, which both Marxists and psychoanalysts try to uncover
longitudinally.

Alienation as an Individual-environment Relationship: Alienation nearly always

points to a relationship, defined by a subjectively undesirable separation, between a
subject or group of subjects and some aspect of their environment, self-estrangement
being the only exception. This environmental aspect may be real or imaginary,
concrete or abstract: such as nature, God, work, the products of work or the means of
production, fellow humans, or different social structures and institutions, etc.

Alienation as a Subjective versus Objective State: In the author's view, alienation

always refers to a subjective individual state, although that state may be caused by a
long process of interaction with more or less "objectively" alienating conditions, as
described in Marxist and psychoanalytic theory.

Alienation as a Conscious versus Unconscious State: There are different

methodological consequences, depending on whether one assumes that alienation is a
conscious state or an unconscious one, characterized by false consciousness or
repression. The social psychologists imply that the individual is aware of his or her
alienated state, which has consequences for their preferred way of
 -x-

measuring alienation: asking subjects how they feel, and taking their word for it, on
the assumption that they are fully conscious of their own feelings and, moreover,
competent to verbalize them. In most Marxist sociology, the individual is often
considered to be unaware of alienation, which either may be masked by false
consciousness or simply never became conscious in the first place, for lack of
reflection. Consequently, measurement in this case follows a Skinnerian-type of
"black box" approach: one cannot look "inside" the subject but can only make
inferences about what goes on there by comparing and interpreting the differences
between the subject's input--like class position or working conditions--and the
output, or manifest behavior.

Alienation as a Normative and Evaluative Concept: Generally, alienation is

utilized as a normative and evaluative concept, with critical and often polemical
overtones, and with a stress on the desirability of change. Although Marxist
sociology certainly employs the concept in this vein, and although anomie is often
considered to be a similar concept from a more conservative position, with a stress
on equilibrium maintenance, the criticism may certainly also come from the right.

A Short History of the Concept

Alienation is a venerable concept, with its roots going back some two millennia. In
Roman law, alienatio was a legal term used to denote the act of transferring property;
St. Augustine described insanity as abalienatio mentis; Ludz ( 1973) illuminated its
use among the early Gnostics, and Fu Ting Liao ( 1993) described its positive usage
among the Taoists.

In modern times, the concept surfaced again in the nineteenth century and owes its
resurgence largely to Marx and Freud, although the latter did not deal with it
explicitly. After World War II, when societal complexity started its increasingly
accelerated rate of change, and the first signals of postmodernity were perceived by
the intellectual elite, alienation slowly became part of the intellectual scene; Srole
was one of the first in the 1950s to develop an alienation scale to measure degrees
and varieties of alienation. Following the 1968 student revolutions in the United
States and Europe, alienation studies proliferated, at least in the Western world.

In Eastern Europe, however, even the possibility of alienation was denied;

theoretically, it could not exist, since officially, the laborers owned the means of
production. However, the existence of alienation in the "decadent, bourgeois"
societies of the West was gleefully confirmed, as it heralded the impending demise of
late capitalism.

In the Western world, and especially the United States, empirical social
psychological research on alienation rapidly developed: several alienation scales
were developed and administered to college students (even national samples) and
especially to different disadvantaged minory groups which, not surprisingly, tended
to score high on all these scales. On the other hand, much of the theoretical work was
of a Marxist persuasion and largely consisted of an exegesis

-xi-

of the young Marx's writings and their potential applicability to all kinds of
negatively evaluated situations in Western society: the alienation of labor under
capitalism, political alienation and apathy, suppression of ethnic or other minority
groups, and so forth.

Thus, the 1970s were characterized by a great divide with, on the one hand, the
empirical researchers--often, though not exclusively, non-Marxist-administering their
scales and charting the degree of alienation among several subgroups, and, on the
other hand, the (generally neo-Marxist) theoreticians, rarely engaging in empirical
research at all.

During the 1980s, as the postwar baby boomers grew older, and perhaps more
disillusioned, and willy-nilly entered the rat race, interest in alienation subsided. The
concept definitely--and luckily!--became less fashionable, although a small but
active international core group continued to study the subject in all its ramifications,
since the problems denoted by alienation were certainly far from solved--to the
contrary, even.

New Directions in Alienation Research

Maturing in relative seclusion, this core group, the Research Committee on
Alienation of the International Sociological Association (ISA), managed to narrow
the hitherto existing gap between empirical and theoretical approaches and between
Marxist and non-Marxist ones. The empiricists basically knew by now who were the
alienated and why, and they realized the near-tautology inherent in discovering that
the (objectively or subjectively) disadvantaged are alienated. Moreover, many
Marxist theoreticians had exhaustively discussed what Marx had to say on alienation,
commodity fetishism, and false consciousness and were ready to engage in empirical
research along Marxist lines.

Consequently, attention shifted increasingly to theory-driven and hypothesistesting

empirical research and to attempts at discovering often very pragmatic strategies for
dealienation ( Schweitzer and Geyer, 1989), as manifested by research on Yugoslav
self-management and Israeli kibbutzim ( Schweitzer, Chapter 3 of this volume).

The Recent Confluence of Alienation, Ethnicity,

and Postmodernism
Since the start of the 1990s, there has again been an upsurge of interest in alienation
research, which was caused by different developments:
First of all, the fall of the Soviet empire gave a tremendous boost to alienation
research in Eastern Europe, for two reasons: (1) the population as a whole was finally
free to express its long-repressed ethnic and political alienation, which had
accumulated under Soviet rule, while (2) the existence of alienation was no longer
denied and instead became a respectable object of study. In the 1970s only a few
researchers in relatively strong social positions, could permit themselves to point to
the existence of alienation under communism. 1

Second, though processes of globalization and internationalization tended to

monopolize people's attention during the last few decades, the hundred-odd local
wars fought since the end of World War II, which were increasingly covered live on
worldwide TV, claimed attention for the opposing trend of regionalization and
brought ethnic conflicts to the fore. 2 This certainly is also evident in the case of the
former Soviet Union, where the end of the Pax Sovietica unleashed dormant ethnic
tensions. It almost seems that if one cannot "keep up with the Joneses" and
"globalize," one has nothing left but to "regionalize." A Dutch satirical television
program, describing the blessings of the Internet computer network, drove this home
recently: "The Internet furthers international contacts among people of different
persuasions and cultures, thus leading to international understanding and mutual
feelings of solidarity and brotherhood. This is clearly proven by the fact that in
nations with relatively few Internet connections--such as, for example, Bosnia and
Rwanda--people have nothing better to do than bash each other's skulls."

Third, postmodernism emerged as an important paradigm to explain the individual's

reactions to the increasingly rapid complexification and growing interdependence of
international society. Many of the phenomena labeled characteristic for
postmodernity squarely fall under the rubric of alienation; in particular, the world of
simulacra and virtual reality tends to be an alienated world, for reasons that Marx and
Freud could not possibly have foreseen.

Changes In the Nature of Alienation during This

Century
To oversimplify, one might say that a new determinant of alienation has emerged, in
the course of this century, which is not the result of an insufferable lack of freedom
but of an overdose of "freedom," or rather, unmanageable environmental complexity.
Of course, the freedom-inhibiting classical forms of alienation certainly have not yet
been eradicated, and they are still highly relevant for the majority of the world's
population. Freud and Marx will continue to be important as long as individuals are
drawn into freedom-inhibiting interaction patterns with their interpersonal micro- or
societal macro-environment. However, at least for the postmodern intellectual elite,
starting perhaps already with Sartre's wartime development of existentialist
philosophy, it is the manifold consequences of the knowledge- and technology-driven
explosion of societal complexity and worldwide interdependence that need to be
explained.
Perhaps this started out as a luxury problem of a few well-paid intellectuals and is
totally irrelevant even now for the majority of the world's inhabitants, as it is,
certainly, under the near-slavery conditions still existing in many parts of the Third
World. Nevertheless, in much of the Western world, the average person is
increasingly confronted, on a daily basis, with an often bewildering and overly
complex environment, which promotes attitudes of apathy and withdrawal from
wider social involvements.

Postmodern philosophy has largely been an effort at explaining the effects of this
increased complexity on the individual so far, but while it is largely a philosophy
about the fragmentation of postmodern life, it often seems a bit

-xiii-

fragmented itself. What else can one expect perhaps, given Marx's insight that the
economic and organizational substructure tends to influence the ideological
superstructure? However, while postmodern philosophy certainly draws attention to a
few important aspects of postmodern living, it will be argued later that modern
second-order cybernetics can offer a much more holistic picture of societal
development over the past few decades (see also Geyer, 1980, 1990, 1991, 1992,
1994, 1995), and provides a metalevel linkage between the concepts of alienation,
ethnicity, and postmodernism discussed here.

As the present volume demonstrates, it is in the work going on in alienation research

during the past few years that two developments converge: while "classical"
alienation research is still continuing, the stress is now, on the one hand, on
describing new forms of alienation under the "decisional overload" conditions of
postmodernity (Chapters 10-16), and on the other hand on the reduction of
increasingly pervasive ethnic alienation and conflict (Chapters 5-9). For reasons of
space, only a very short overview of the contributions can be presented and only a
few illustrative remarks can be taken out of context to characterize the different
chapters and link them together; anyhow, since they will amply speak for themselves,
the reader will realize why they were selected and to what extent they illustrate the
trends described here.

Overview of the Contributions

A strictly logical ordering of the 16 chapters in this volume is, of course, impossible,
in view of their different degree of overlap along several dimensions. The first four
chapters discuss theoretical or empirical alienation research, without as yet very
explicit reference to problems of ethnicity and postmodernism (although in Schacht's
leading chapter they are certainly connected with alienation). Chapters 5 through 9
all deal with alienation and ethnicity; moreover, all report empirical research.
Chapters 10 through 16 present theoretical investigations of the links between
alienation and postmodernism.
Schacht opens this volume with an extremely interesting reconceptualization of
alienation under postmodern conditions, basing his stance on what he still considers
applicable from the writings of Hegel and Nietzsche. This is a philosophically
oriented chapter that offers an overall frame of reference to interrelate what is said
about postmodern alienation in the different chapters that follow. Schacht considers
the "politics of identity"--religious, ethnic, sexual, or otherwise--to be one of the
plagues of our century, a "latter-day tribal identity mania." Moreover, he feels such
identities are only tolerable if not taken very seriously, and if mediated by a
counterbalancing positive sense of alienation. Different kinds of alienation are only
meaningful human possibilities to the extent that corresponding types of
identification are likewise meaningful, that is, imply some sort of social reality that
satisfies the imperative of self-affirmation--which may be difficult under postmodern
conditions, which offer only a decentered multiplicity of alternative reference points
and possibilities of involvement.

Horowitz (Chapter 2) argues that the concept of alienation has been

-xiv-

disconnected from its roots in Hegel and Marx, that it has now become part of the
tool kit of social psychology, and that this should be seen as a positive development.
Alienation has become part of the social science tradition rather than the tradition of
social protest; the concept has been objectified and is no longer a footnote to the
ideology of revolution. It has also been neutralized and specified: "alienated from
what?" "integrated into what?" Most important, perhaps, is the fact that both
alienation and integration have now become relational concepts that refer to
processes of interaction rather than steady states. This has opened the way for a
positive evaluation of alienation: it is no longer an estrangement from cruel
industrial-capitalist demands but an "inalienable" right: a source of creative energy--
or an expression of personal eccentricity. Instead of the duty to participate, the stress
is now increasingly on the right not to participate, and to remain happily alienated.

Schweitzer (Chapter 3) agrees with Horowitz's diagnosis but evaluates the changes in
the conception of alienation negatively: he convincingly demonstrates how alienation
has been denuded of its original content by its incorporation in mainstream empirical
social science, especially in industrial sociology. In a selfreferential effort, which is
all too rare in social science, he applies the concept to the alienated "industry of
sociology" itself. Reified knowledge lends itself to the legitimation of
promanagement policies in the workplace, which give the worker only a feeling of
control: these policies include new human relations and job redesign programs,
codetermination policies, quality control cycles, and quality of working life projects.
The ideology of scientific objectivity, with its often implicit value-neutrality,
psychological reductionism, methodological individualism, and survey research
empiricism, has led to a reification and mystification of underlying social
contradictions and is filtering the world in a reductionist fashion to make it accessible
to the methods of science. Schweitzer then discusses the possibility of developing
effective dealienation strategies and discusses what can be learned in this respect
from the early Yugoslav experiments with industrial democracy and the organization
and present problems of the Israeli kibbutzim.

Archibald (Chapter 4) certainly does not study alienation in the alienated way that
Schweitzer describes. He was one of the first to engage in Marxistoriented empirical
research, and he reports here the results of an extensive study among industrial
workers in Hamilton. He managed to first find and then interview many of the
workers who had experienced the Depression of the 1930s, and compares them with
workers interviewed during the economic recession of the late 1980s, for which
processes of globalization and automation, rather than a market crash, were
responsible. Two opposite scenarios exist for economic crises: in the optimistic
scenario, the crisis weakens the bourgeoisie, which causes labor to rebel, while in the
pessimistic one, historic agency may diminish during crises, since interworker
competition destroys classwide organization and struggle. Archibald finds more
evidence for the pessimistic scenario: during crises, there tends to be a lot of fear and
apathy and a regression to lower-order subsistence needs, which makes conceptions
of social inequality and justice less relevant. His

-xv-

interview material presents an excellent and detailed illustration of how work

alienation operates in situations where labor is powerless with regard to both capital
and state government. While presenting some possibilities for action during crises,
Archibald concludes that there is still much to learn about the conditions under which
laborers will rebel rather than become alienated during crises. Orkin (Chapter 5)
reports a large-scale research project dealing with youth marginalization, from which
he draws imporant implications for the democratic process. A nationwide stratified
sample of 2,224 persons between 16 and 30 years of age was interviewed in late
1992 and early 1993; 77% of the respondents were black, 10% colored, 2% Indian,
and 11% white. Orkin developed four indices: citizenship (based on two-item indices
of political commitment and political efficacy), democratic commitment (based on
indices for nonracism, nonsexism, and fair governance), political party affiliation
(describing the left-right dichotomy) and organizational involvement (none, versus
church and/or union, versus political only, or together with church/union). The results
of Orkin's sophisticated methodological analysis of the four-way interaction between
these indices and the way it is affected by the further variables yield a fascinating
picture of the attitudes of present-day South African youth. Coupled with a short
overview of political developments in South Africa over the last few decades and a
theoretical analysis based in part on Gramsci's writings, this chapter ends with a
discussion of the prospects and conditions for the further development of democracy
in South Africa, based on both the research findings and the theoritical framework.
Horton (Chapter 6) describes six years of ethnographic and electoral research in
Monterey Park, California. During this period, a rapid and dramatic globalization of
everyday life took place, mainly as the result of large-scale Chinese immigration.
Originally, three kinds of alienation were manifest:
1. both the old Anglo residents and the recent Chinese immigrants experienced
alienation from home and from the local environment;
2. there was also ethnic alienation, a sense of being disenfranchised from local
 citizenship on the basis of ethnicity;
3. finally, there was class alienation of home owners and land users as a result of
manipulation by developers and their City Hall friends.

What Orkin envisages for South Africa actually happened in Monterey Park in the
course of the research: there arose a greater political and community participation of
women, ethnic groups, and immigrants, via voting as well as political action. Three
responses are possible under postmodern conditions of extreme ethnic and racial
diversity: (1) the nativist response, leading to protectionist measures and a "we-they"
dichotomy; (2) ethnic politics, with equally divisive consequences, and (3) the
recognition of differences in ethnicity and nativity as political resources, leading to
political alliances that were practical, situational, and unstable. Horton ends on the
optimistic note that crossing rather than drawing boundaries (see Chapter 15) is to be
applauded and studied, apart from being a condition for the occurence of postmodern

-xvi-

dealienation.

Bien (Chapter 7) gives an interesting example of practical and strategic efforts at

dealienation. He describes a project consisting of a series of meetings between
Jewish and Arab Israeli teachers, where both sides could clarify their often strong
emotions of anxiety and agressiveness. The aim was modest: not to resolve the
conflict, but to at least gain a mutual understanding of conflicting positions and learn
to live with the conflict while still cooperating on many issues. The Arab teachers
turned out to be well informed about the entire spectrum of Jewish approaches and
attitudes, probably because a knowledge of the majority is vital; however, their
reactions initially showed few personal differences. For the Jewish teachers, it was
often their first meeting with Arabs; they demonstrated a great variety of responses.
In the course of the meetings, both sides started to reveal more personal emotions,
and this revelation of "the other" stimulated a turn to the "self" in an effort to reassess
the components of personal identity. Arabs tried to rank-order being Arab,
Palestinian, and Israeli; Jews often hesitated between their Israeli and Jewish
components. Both groups related to two variables: an often irrational tendency to
cling to their past (their cultural, religious, or historic heritage) and a more rational
concentration on the present (the territory, the state, present-day Israeli society). The
latter was obviously more functional for reducing ethnic tension.

Kalekin-Fishman (Chapter 8), though also concerned with education in Israel, does
not deal with ethnic tension, but rather takes cooperation for granted. Her focus is on
the alienating effects of the school system in a democratic state. Does schooling
contribute to socioeconomic and political participation (i.e., overall dealienation) or
to isolationism and apathy (overall alienation)? This is not only a practical question
for a democratic society, but also a fundamental issue in social theory. Kalekin-
Fishman describes the results of a large-scale research project, which was executed
in two stages: an analysis of 2,213 school regulations in 34 Hebrew and 18 Arab
schools, followed by interviews with 1,459 students and 749 teachers from 105
schools--28% primary, 72% post-primary; 45% Arab and 55% Hebrew. Basing her
analysis on Erikson's stages of psychosocial development as well as an analysis of
her detailed data, she concludes that not all these stages are conducive to good
citizenship: trust, industry, and the role identity of a "good student" encourage
passivity; while autonomy, initiative intimacy, and generativity are often expressly
excluded in the rules, which try to make the student into a dependent of a
bureaucracy, thus encouraging powerlessness and conformity rather than furthering
an adult potential for selfrealization.

Macey (Chapter 9) paints a pessimistic picture of European discrimination against

visible minorities which, she suggests, has been intensified by economic
globalization. Concentrating on alienation among majority group members, she
suggests that alienating processes at the global, international, local, and individual
levels result in high levels of uncertainty and insecurity, which are displaced onto
minorities via scapegoating, marginalization, and exclusion. The transfer of industrial
production to the Third World has intensified competition which,

-xvii-

together with a technological and communications revolution, has resulted in large-

scale unemployment and poverty. This has been accompanied by a shift to the right
in the politics of many European countries, the reduction of health and welfare
benefits, strict limitations on immigration, and heavy policing of the outer borders of
"Fortress Europe." Macey suggests that the growth of a form of violent pan-
European xenophobia can be analyzed via the concept of alienation, which has its
roots in global capital.

Gergen (Chapter 10) argues that alienation theory up till now has departed from three
assumptions that are no longer valid under conditions of postmodernity: (1) the
existence of an autonomous self, to be repaired by therapy if damaged; (2) the
possibility of authentic action, implying a coordination between that autonomous self
and personal action; (3) a unified structuring of society: while one should not be
alienated from organized society, one also should not be too much at one with it, as
this carries the risk of self-alienation. Nowadays, postmodern forms of alienation are
emerging that question these premises: (1) the fully autonomous agent would be an
empty self; all that was natural and autonomous is now viewed as cultural and
relational, as Foucault and the social constructionists stress; (2) authentic action, too,
cannot be conceived without an identifiable state of "natural mind," beyond social
interpretation; (3) there is no unified structure of society anymore, if there ever was
one; it has been replaced by images of fragmentation, disorganization, and diffuse
forms of relatedness. Postmodernism deconstructs everything, including not only
alienation, but also itself Gergen is against such total deconstruction and proposes a
revisioning of alienation theory by shifting the locus of theoretical concern from the
individual to relatedness, thus taking not only into account the more classical forms
of alienation, but also those that are brought about by the newly emerging forms of
social life. He considers a nomadic sense of rootlessness inevitable and views
alienation as a signal of immersion in at least two conflicting relational realms.

Langman and Scatamburlo (Chapter 11) distinguish two different "post-al"

trajectories in postmodernism--"ludic," or reactionary, postmodernism, and
postmodernisms of resistance (i.e., postcolonialism and various feminisms). They
both contest and deconstruct the epistemological and ontological presuppositions of
Western Enlightenment--rejecting all totalizing, universalizing "mastering"
narratives, repudiating modern theory's search for foundations of knowledge, and
renouncing the rational, autonomous, essentialist Cartesian subject of liberal
bourgeois humanism. The authors reject ludic postmodernism, with its "death of the
subject," who becomes a mere fiction of discourse. However, they are sympathetic
toward the postmodernisms of resistance, which challenges traditional power
arrangements and the construction of subalterity and supports new identity claims.
They argue that a precondition for rethinking the "subject" has to articulate the
differences between self(hood), identity, and the subject and that a Marxist dialectical
approach that includes the possibility of resistance is preferable, in spite of the
postmodern resistance to "master narratives."

-xviii-

humanist interest in socialism and the possibilities for dealienation. However, they
both bridge secular and sacred solutions to the problem of alienation, and they
converge in their later works from an exemplary, respectively emissary, prophetic
mode towards an inner-worldly mysticism, in spite of their quite different
beginnings. Wexler argues that a resacralization of culture is emerging, which is
represented by several New Age movements, was analyzed by Buber and Fromm,
and centers on a social psychology of presence, attention, and being.

Ahponen (Chapter 15) is interested in the frequent "border crossings" one inevitably
has to make in a postmodern and networked risk society, as described by Beck and
Luhmann: How are the features of familiarity versus strangeness classified when
foreign, alien, and anonymous people are encountered, and what happens to the
personality of the individual who crosses the borders of familiar, secure and
trustworthy circles? Questions of social justice will be increasingly difficult to
answer since civil rights are based on the majority principle, while social minorities
increasingly stress their political demands. Luhmann ( 1993), who concentrated his
interest on the reflexive organization of the network of human communication, has
little to say about the position of the increasing number of economically and
otherwise marginal people. Postmodern society increases chances to meet strange
people and circumstances, which also furthers chances for the emergence of a
reflexive self and offers the possibility to realize that differences are not necessarily
barriers, but rather signals of complexity. For an increasing number of people, being
"on the road" toward new experiences also means that possibilities to become deeply
rooted somewhere are being lost--or at least that new and more flexible personal
identities have to be developed, since fixed personal identities are only possible to
maintain within a secure and limited social space.
Augusto (Chapter 16) also deals with changes in culture and the selfrepresentation of
societies and how these relate to personality changes, although she prefers to speak
of modern rather than postmodern society. Since the Enlightenment, two, often
contradictory, ideas have been the basis of societal self-representation: on the one
hand, the belief in progress, knowledge and technology, increased mastery over
nature, and so forth; on the other hand, the belief that increasing individual and
collective freedom will become possible as the result of an emancipatory or
revolutionary movement toward democracy. These two ideas have contaminated one
another, as did the correlated rational versus romantic conceptions of the individual,
and both have recently been weakened. The unilinear rather than cyclical
conceptualization of time bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment has caused a
profound alteration in the meaning of death, which has become an inexorable end,
thus forcing us to fill the available time up to that point with a maximum of events
and deeds. This need to use time with maximum efficiency has been internalized and
leads to an emphasis on the instantaneous, a hyperindividualism, and the tendency to
live in the here and now without much regard for either the past or the future. In a
way, since life has lost its deeper meaning and has been reduced to a frenzied

-xix-

Gottdiener (Chapter 12) discusses various critiques of postmodern theory as

developed by Baudrillard and Jameson, including the pop culture variant of critical
theory developed before the advent of "pomo" by the Frankfurt School and by the
often more conservative mass society critics. They already painted a depressive
picture of passive, manipulable, superficial, and depoliticized individuals, to which
postmodern theory can add little. Moreover, the modern critical theory approach also
reinforces the postmodern vision of culture, without blocking its nihilistic
conclusions. As a basis for critical theory, Gottdiener prefers the postwar Marxist
work of Lefebvre, who was principally concerned with alienation in capitalist society
rather than with the domination of an imagedriven culture and who focused on
everyday practices, which include a dialectic of alienation and possibilities for
resistance and self-liberation. Along these lines, Gottdiener presents an interesting
analysis of Robert Altman's film "Short Cuts," viewed as an example of the
pervasiveness of alienation in a consumeroriented capitalist society rather than as an
illustration of postmodern tendencies of hyperfragmentation.

Vandenberghe (Chapter 13) compares theories of reification with theories about

postmodernity and is bitingly critical of both. His main thesis is that postmodernism
is the cynical play-form of positivism. It looks on modernism in the same way that
modernism looked on traditionalism and backwardness: it pretends to be sure about
nothing but is convinced that reason is dead and that the historical Enlightenment
project of modernity has come to an end. The different existing reification theories
( Hegel, Simmel, Weber, the Frankfurt School, Habermas) deal with the same issues,
but in a different way; nevertheless, they all tend to transform reification from a
methodological assumption into a metaphysical one, thus excluding the possibility to
conceptualize the transformation of the social system. A theory is onedimensional
and not critical if it can only visualize the alienation of the subject and not its
emancipation. Postmodernism prolongs the flaws of a critical theory of reification,
with its antihumanistic methodology and its fetishistic hypersimulation. In
postmodernism, deconstruction ultimately deconstructs itself and has little to offer
for the reconstruction of a critical theory of reification, which can counter the
McDonaldized thinking which is no longer critical of commodity fetishism and
reification.

Wexler (Chapter 14) concentrates on what he terms "New Age social theory," which
is a theory of dealienation and a collective reassertion of the life force against the
postmodern culture of death. Postmodernism has not succeeded in obliterating the
drive to overcome alienation. To the contrary, alienation, and especially self-
alienation, has deepened under postmodern conditions: apart from a loss of agency,
there has been a loss of feeling and organic sensation and an increase of boredom and
anxiety. Wexler analyzes what a few classical social scientists--notably Durkheim,
Weber, Norman O. Brown, and Reich--have to contribute to New Age social theory
and then concentrates his discussion on Buber and Fromm. Buber is more the
romantic, being interested in "ecstacism," experience, and, specifically, in Hasidism,
while Fromm has a more Marxist-

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race in order to forget that one is going to die, death has lost its meaning as well--an
extreme example being, perhaps, the public indifference toward the extermination of
street children in Brazil.

A Sociocybernetic View of Societal Development

It should be stressed here, first of all, that second-order cybernetics is only one of the
possible metatheories that can link alienation with ethnicity and postmodernism.
Second, as will be argued in the following discussion, it may help to explain in
particular the modern forms of alienation, which-like postmodernism--are felt by a
small, though growing, minority. For most people, especially in the Third World, the
"classical" forms of economic alienation are still predominant; for them, class and
capital are more immediately relevant than agency and complexity; under the
prevalent conditions of joblessness, poverty, and economic exploitation, they tend to
have a lack of alternatives for action rather than the bewildering overchoice
described by postmodernism. Third, in spite of the fact that postmodernism rejects
"grand narratives," and that "attempting to locate postmodernism within a cybernetic
framework is like trying to herd cats," 3 it is felt here that second-order cybernetics--
while undoubtedly being a grand narrative itself--can help to explain the phenomena
that postmodernism only describes, while also explaining ethnic conflict as a
resistance against increasing complexity and growing interdependence.

Especially in progressive social science circles, cybernetics has often obtained an

unwarranted negative image because it is mistakenly identified with first-order
cybernetics, as utilized by Parsons, with its linear, mechanistic, and technocratic
associations and its predilection for steering "objective" external systems.
Second-order cybernetics, to the contrary, deals with what Prigogine ( 1984) has
termed the "emerging sciences of complexity." These include, among others, biology,
the neural sciences, the social sciences, artificial life, and artificial intelligence.
Second-order cybernetics, which is the cybernetics of observing rather than observed
systems, should be distinguished from first-order cybernetics, which was developed
in the 1940s--generally by control engineers and others within the natural sciences--
with the intention to improve and automate the steering of external, and generally
mechanical, systems. Secondorder cybernetics originated in the 1970s to describe the
behavior of selfreferential, autopoietic, and self-organizing systems like human
individuals and groups, and it is often equated with sociocybernetics.

For those readers not acquainted with second-order cybernetics, a short overview
follows. A few of its main conclusions, especially those derived from simulation
experiments with neuronal networks, seem to be applicable to the high rate of
present-day societal change and the resulting problems of alienation, ethnicity, and
postmodernism ( Waldrop, 1992):

1. Complexity is in the software, not in the hardware; in the structure rather than in
the elements making up the structure; in the way simple building blocks are
organized as a result of simple and local laws, and not in the building blocks
themselves. Indeed, the complexity of *human software*--the web of
interrelations between individuals and groups--has certainly exponentially
increased under postmodern conditions, with new groups constantly emerging
and interacting, leading to increased interdependence; it is not people (the
building blocks) who have become more complex, but the environment they
have created for themselves (the structure).
2. The emergence of complexity is a bottom-up process--without any central
controller leading it--rather than a top-down one; it is a matter of local units,
acting according to local laws, which produce new levels of complexity by
interacting. With authoritarian systems generally on the decline in much of the
Western world, newly emerging groups there are indeed usually the result of
bottom-up processes; it is their inceased rate of interaction that is, at least
partially, responsible for the increased complexity of present-day society. This is
not to deny that, once new and higher levels of complexity have emerged, they
tend to exercise hierarchical control over the lower levels--as one can observe all
the way from physiology to sociology.
3. Experiments with the simulation of neural networks make it clear that the more
densely they are interconnected, the less likely they are to cycle through a
limited number of states or to ever repeat the same state; this probably holds for
human networks as well. With more dense and varied interconnections between
individuals and, especially, groups, they indeed no longer tend to cycle anymore
through a limited number of states; under present conditions, history--at least in
its concrete details--repeats itself less and less often. Again, this is not to deny
that for the majority of the world's population, life continues as it always has
been: a virtually unbreakable cycle of economic exploitation, powerlessness,
poverty, joblessness, ethnic prejudice, lack of access to means that could
improve living conditions, and other assorted miseries.
4. Complex systems do not exist in isolation; it is always complex adaptive systems
 that are at issue, undergoing co-evolution rather than evolution. Indeed, while
increasingly complex groups, institutions and alliances thus emerge, it should be
clear that they do not do so in isolation but that their increased complexity is
largely the result of an adaptive co-evolution.
5. Neuronal networks have many agents acting in parallel and their control is
highly dispersed, with any coherent behavior resulting from competition and
cooperation among the agents themselves. This trend can especially be
recognized in the so-called new social movements.
6. They have many levels of organization, with agents at one level serving as
building blocks for the agents at the next higher level; this can clearly be seen in
the accelerated process of nation building since World War II, and actually
already since medieval times: from local fiefdoms all the way to the United
Nations, and from village economies to the present world economy.
7. These building blocks are rearranged constantly as a result of what one might
call either learning, experience, evolution, or adaptation. This also seems to be
applicable to human societies, though admittedly these processes are often
agonizingly slow, as is evident in the many cases of mutual alienation under
conditions of ethnic conflict (Chapters 5-7 and 9).
8. They all have many niches they can exploit, whereby filling one niche often
opens up new ones that can be filled; complex adaptive systems always create
new

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opportunities. In human societies, this creative trend is, unfortunately, more

easily visible in economic systems than in political ones.
9. As a consequence, it is meaningless to talk about complex adaptive systems ever
being in equilibrium; they can never reach it and instead are always in transition.
Taking this proposition seriously has important consequences for researchers in
the social sciences: they should forget their ideals of forecasting future
developments, and accept that they can, at best, develop alternative scenarios and
warn of impending dangers in societal developments, while explaining these
only in retrospect.
10. The agents in complex adaptive systems cannot optimize their fitness, utility, and
so forth; the space of possibilities is simply too vast and the environment is also
too complex and rapidly changing; they can, at best, improve on some
dimensions, but they can never optimize. This rule should especially be taken to
heart when talking about possibilities for dealienation, even in the best of all
possible complex worlds, as Schacht has done explicitly in Chapter I of this
volume.

Applying all this to Seeman ( 1959) five alienation dimensions, one might say that
they have been "speeding up" in the postmodern situation, which has been
characterized by Luhmann ( 1968, 1970) as implying the growth of an increasing
"complexity differential" between the individual and its environment. In order to
manage environmental overcomplexity and to close, at least somewhat, the
individual-environment "complexity gap," the postmodern individual is forced to
increase his or her own internal complexity--with obvious consequences for his or
her personality structure. With the accelerating throughput of information, for
example, meaninglessness is not a matter anymore of whether one can assign
meaning to incoming information, but of whether one can develop adequate new
scanning mechanisms to gather the goal-relevant information one needs, as well as
more efficient selection procedures to prevent being overburdened by the information
one does not need, but is bombarded with on a regular basis. Likewise, a new type of
powerlessness has emerged, where the core problem is no longer being unfree but
rather being unable to select from among an overchoice of alternatives for action,
whose consequences one often cannot even fathom.

Postmodern society is certainly an extremely "mediated" society, although mediation

was already an important characteristic of modern society as well ( Lachs, 1976) and
is even apparent in tribal societies. Mediation implies that the individual forms only a
small part in a causal chain of actions. The psychologically normal learning situation,
which progressively disappears as mediation increases, is for the individual to plan
an action execute it and be confronted with its positive or negative consequences.
One might argue, by broadening the human concept of planning to a certain readiness
for action, that this is the case for every living system, from bacteria to mammals. In
this respect, however, especially postmodern society treats people worse than dogs,
who at least do not suffer from postponed punishment. The normally continuous
cycle of information exchange with the environment is partially broken there:
nowadays, one is unable to react to a large percentage of the informational inputs one
obtains, and spends also quite some time on actions to which hardly

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any reaction is forthcoming. The more complex one's environment, the later one is
confronted with the latent, and often unintended, consequences of one's actions.
Consequently, in view of this causality-obscuring time lag, both the "rewards" and
"punishments" for one's actions increasingly tend to be viewed as random, often with
apathy and alienation as a result.Another psychologically normal situation, derived
from small-group interpersonal interaction, is spontaneous immediacy; however, to
engage succesfully in action in the intricate web of an increasingly complex and
interdependent environment, its opposite--a calculated "internal simulation" or
planning--is mandatory if one wants to further one's goals--which themselves
become increasingly long-range. Like a chess player, one has to calculate several
moves ahead if one's actions are to have success, and often, counterintuitive rather
than spontaneous behavior is required to obtain the desired results.An effort has been
made here to argue that the sciences of complexity, with cybernetics at their core, can
provide a more or less holistic picture of the reasons for what is viewed as the
fragmentation of modern life, which is so much deplored by postmodern philosophy.
The phenomena described by postmodern philosophy (Chapters 11-16)--the
fragmentation, the "death" of the autonomous subject, the impossibility for
"authentic action," the loss of "essence," the reduction of realities to simulacra and
virtual reality--are viewed here as, hopefully, temporary adaptation problems of
individuals, confronted by the objective effects of an accelerating societal complexity
and interdependence that they have subjectively not yet been able to
master.Confronted with this "complexity differential" between environmental
complexity and the individual's internal complexity, basically two reactions are
possible:
1. one can indeed try oneself to "become more complex" and to adapt in an
increasingly self-referential way to a fast-changing world, to go ahead rather
than retreat, to at least analyze what happens and take the consequences, as
postmodernism tries to do, or:
2. one can try to maintain, or withdraw to, a supposedly simpler past, and deny the
inevitable developments by which one is surrounded, as especially
fundamentalist movements do.

Such withdrawal implies having an oversimplified and, therefore, dysfunctional

model of one's environment; instead of going with the tendency toward globalization,
it implies some kind of regionalization, unfortunately often along shortsighted ethnic,
nationalistic lines. Thus, increasing complexity can either be dealienating by
increasing interdependence or be alienating by having a centrifugal impact.

However, the increasing complexification of present-day society is something from

which one can ultimately not withdraw without adverse consequences for oneself,
and often for others. It requires perhaps a different, more flexible and fuzzy
personality structure than the relatively unidimensional

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one still generated by most ideologies, educational systems (Chapter 8), and
especially religions, which often remain replete with agricultural imagery from a
simpler past. Even Marx retained had the ideal of an unalienated laborer, rearing
some cattle on the side in the evening.Of course, the world itself is not fragmented,
as postmodernism claims, although its fragmentation was already deplored millennia
ago, 4 and will continue to be deplored by those who cannot integrate their image of a
complexifying environment--which they are consequently almost forced to view as
fragmented. With worldwide interdependence reaching unprecedented peaks,
however, the world is less fragmented and more interconnected than it ever was. It is
one's image of the world that has become fragmented, owing to the overload of
information with which one is confronted as a result of a horizonwidening process
set in motion by increased communication and the overload of possibilities from
which one can barely choose using the antediluvian selection mechanisms still
promoted by much of present-day education.To the extent that alienation is viewed
by some as a disturbance somewhere along the way of a "normal" socialization
process toward everwidening horizons--from primary groups all the way to
macrosocietal contexts like the nation and even world society--some degree of
alienation has indeed become inevitable, as Schacht (Chapter 1) stresses. One cannot
identify with one's total environment anymore but instead has to select certain
aspects of it that offer concrete and rewarding possibilities for identification.To be
well adapted to postmodern, nonmonolithic multigroup society, some degree of what
second-order cybernetics considers self-referential metalearning is imperative, for
example:
 -- one needs to learn to unlearn under conditions of fast environmental change;
-- a high degree of tolerance of ambiguity is not only required, but one should
even thrive on it, rather than feel frustrated by it--in view of the increasing
number of "fuzzy" situations one encounters in postmodern life;
-- to fully utilize the possibilities the world offers, there must be a willingness to
take more or less calculated risks--that is, to perform internal mental
simulations--and concentrate on their inherent opportunities rather than their
chances for failure;
-- likewise, a relatively high degree of self-knowledge is required nowadays, in
view of the frequent need to "reprogram" oneself under fast-changing
environmental conditions;
-- in order not to be lamed by such self-knowledge, one needs to develop the
ability to differentiate intellectually between what can and what cannot be
steered, as well as the requisite emotional attitudes of involvement and
resignation, in order to prevent unnecessary alienation;
-- one should be willing to pay the price of anticipatory socialization toward new
groups: inevitable alienation from old ones.

This list is far from exhaustive, and it certainly poses heavy demands with which few
can comply. Nevertheless, it should give a fair idea of the personality traits that
should be furthered by present-day formal and informal education and are required in
order to thrive in postmodern society. Obviously, such

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personality traits do not add up to a fixed identity, though they certainly help to
develop a many-faceted personality. A fixed identity, if there ever was something like
that, is just as absurd as the total lack of identity and personal continuity often
claimed to exist by postmodernism. A relatively fixed identity could only be
developed when much simpler environmental conditions obtained (Chapter 15). The
age-old and, for many, frustrating question "Who am I?" cannot be answered
anymore, although many still try; or rather, it should be answered differently from
one day to the next, and especially from one context to another.

The quest for identity--something one supposedly simply just had in earlier times,
but now apparently needs to look for feverishly--is an understandable one for
disadvantaged, but reasonably integrated subgroups within Western society, and it
can give highly needed self-esteem where previously there was none (Chapter 11). In
the periphery of the Western world, however--and increasingly within it, as in
Bosnia--this quest for identity often takes on fanatical overtones, along nationalistic
or ethnic lines. It is often mistakenly viewed as a protest against the encroachment of
Western civilization but should perhaps rather be seen as an effort to withdraw from
personalitythreatening processes of globalization. As Bien argues (Chapter 7): when
one is unable to function optimally in the present, one tends to withdraw to the past
and a culture that was, but already is no more.

The above has, hopefully, clarified the assertion that second-order cybernetics can
indeed be a fertile metatheoretical framework to illuminate the linkages between the
problems of alienation, ethnicity, and postrnodernism. To summarize, an important
underlying cause of these problems is the increasing complexity of the human-made
environment, which feeds on itself to produce more complexity. Perhaps it is a
dealienating thought that it is indeed humanmade, in a bottom-up process resulting
from cumulative and intricate interactions over many generations of self-referential
and self-organizing actors, who pursued their own goals. Nevertheless, the single
individual's confrontation with the complexity of this human-made environment can
indeed be a highly alienating experience; it takes concerted action, which is difficult
to organize--as can be seen in the case of the slow rise in ecological awareness--to
make it change course.

Conclusions: What Has Been Accomplished, and

What Remain to Be Done?
The recent confluence of alienation theory and research with work done on problems
of ethnicity and postmodernism can only be applauded, as it stresses new problems,
which have only emerged relatively recently and for which new solutions still have
to be found. Schacht (Chapter 1) presents a detailed analysis of these problems and
points to some possible solutions, arguing for a new conceptualization of alienation
under the emerging conditions of postmodernity.

Work on the "classical" dimensions of alienation--whether from a Marxist,

-xxvi-

psychoanalytic, or other vantage point--still continues, and rightly so, since

objectively alienating conditions remain fairly pervasive, especially under the, often,
both politically and economically oppressive situations in the Third World and
among the disadvantaged minorities in the West. In the latter respect, Archibald's
research (Chapter 4) among the workers of Hamilton, Ontario, during economic
recessions gives fascinating glimpses of alienation at work in concrete situations.

However, there is no longer an urgent need to discover who the alienated are, as was
the case in the 1970s when empirical alienation studies were charting the terrain: this
is well known by now. It is quite something else to lay bare the often macrosocial
structural roots of alienation in early life--as opposed to its microsocial
psychoanalytic causes in the personal history of the individual. In this respect,
Kalekin-Fishman's research (Chapter 8) on the alienating effects of the educational
system in a democratic state should be quite an eye-opener. The same goes for
Schweitzer's account (Chapter 3) of how the alienation concept has been reified, how
alienation has even pervaded the alienation researchers themselves, and how their
research helps to continue objectively alienating working conditions for the subjects
of their research. Horowitz (Chapter 2), however, presents a more positive evaluation
of the transition from alienation as a Marxist, normative, and critical concept to one
that has become more neutralized as an operational tool in the hands of empirical
researchers.
Empirical research on alienation as connected to problems of ethnicity has only just
started, but already it presents interesting leads from which dealienating strategies to
reduce ethnic tensions might be derived, as especially the chapters by Bien (Chapter
7) and Horton (Chapter 6) demonstrate. However, much more research is needed,
especially in situations where the situation is extremely complex and still rather
volatile, as in Orkin's area of study, presentday South Africa (Chapter 5), and all the
more so in situations where interethnic violence has already erupted and tends to
continue indefinitely, although conducting empirical research surely will not be easy
under those circumstances. The need for more research on the reasons for increasing
racist violence against ethnic minorities--and not just within politically backward
Third World dictatorships, but right in the center of the Western world--is amply
demonstrated by Macey (Chapter 9).

Work on the connections between alienation and postmodernism is very recent and
generally still of a theoretical nature. Here, the terrain may not yet be ready for
sophisticated empirical research, but the chapters represented in this volume certainly
give useful pointers for future empirical studies. They all describe and analyze the
effects of recent and accelerated societal change on the individual and discuss
possible coping strategies. It does not even matter terribly whether one talks about
postmodernism, prefers to call it modernism, like Augusto (Chapter 16) in her
analysis of the effects of the introjection of unilinear time, or is squarely against it,
like Vandenberghe (Chapter 13) in his incisive comparative analysis of "post-al"
theories and theories of reification.

-xxvii-

Many of the authors indicate what should be done, in their opinion, to further the
individual's adaptation to the postmodern condition. Gergen (Chapter 10)
demonstrates how new and more relational conceptualizations of alienation are
necessary, and-like Ahponen (Chapter 15)--views a certain degree of nomadic
rootlessness as inevitable and even desirable. Langman and Scatamburlo (Chapter
11) argue against "ludic" postmodernism. They have more sympathy for what they
call the postmodernisms of resistance (feminism, postcolonialism) but finally opt for
a dialectical approach, in spite of postmodern objections against "master narratives."
Gottdiener (Chapter 12), in line with Lefebvre, views many ostensibly postmodern
phenomena as signs of alienation rather than as proof of postmodern fragmentation.
Wexler (Chapter 14) draws especially on the work of Buber and Fromm to present a
solution to the disadvantages of postmodernism that goes in the direction of a New
Age sociology, which is centered on innerwordly mysticism and "being there."
Ahponen stresses the possibility of an adaptive personality change as a result of
frequent and open contact with totally different others.

This summing up clearly demonstrates that many authors reject the often extreme
positions of postmodern theory, though recognizing the symptoms it describes, and
they often advance their own recipes for living in the present world, whatever it is
called. Alienation--whether "classical," ethnic, or postmodern--will certainly be with
us well into the next century; however, the struggle against it will continue as well,
hopefully supported with at least a small contribution from the theoretical and
empirical research results of the social science community.

Notes
1. For example Adam Schaff in Poland, Agnes Heller in Hungary, and Zagorka
Golubovi and Mihailo Markovi in Yugoslavia.

2. The International Sociological Association (ISA) devoted a special book to this

issue on the occasion of the 12th World Congress of Sociology: Globalization
Knowledge, and Society, ed. M. Albrow. London: Sage

3. As stated by Lauren Langman in a comment on this chapter.

4. Shoham ( 1979) mentions the ancient Jewish myth of the "breaking of the
vessels" in this respect.

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ALIENATION, ETHNICITY, AND

POSTMODERNISM
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1
Alienation Redux: From Here to
Postmodernity
Richard Schacht

Nietzche's Warning
A point made much of by Hegel, which would seem to ring importantly true, is that
once a certain rather modest level of self-consciousness has been attained, human
beings come to have a profound need for some sort of identity that they can affirm. 1
The varieties of identity that may suffice to satisfy this need are highly diverse, and
they are by no means invariably individualistic; but the absence or loss of any such
positive self-conception would appear to be as dire a state of affairs as there can be in
human life, as it brings a host of individual and social pathologies in its train.

The attainment of such an identity involves a complex dialectic of both identification

and differentiation. The materials and means of attaining an identity can only be found
outside oneself, in the social and cultural dimensions of one's environing world above
all, and they must be internalized through relations of involvement in this common
domain. One's ability to affirm as well as attain any such identity, moreover, is bound
up with relations with others by whom it is acknowledged. Yet it is no identity at all if it
is not different from other discernible identities one might have and others do have; and
one's ability to affirm it requires that one find some way of valorizing this difference.
This complex dialectic fascinated Hegel and many others after him, who likewise
linked their explorations of it with their discussions of alienation and selfalienation. Its
great interest and significance may help to explain the emergence and continuing
importance of alienation theory.

I believe that certain developments at work in the world today are rendering traditional
ways of thinking about these matters outmoded and making something like the basic
anti-essentialist and historicist premises of

-1-
postmodernism come true. Thus we find ourselves confronted with the apparent
paradox of simultaneous tendencies toward both homogenization and pluralization in
social and cultural life, accompanied by what might be called the deconstruction of
definition and normativity in the scripting of socialization and acculturation. This
dynamic renders old models of the "individual-society" relation increasingly
questionable. It also has profound implications for the notions of human identity,
autonomy and community. The ideas of alienation and self-alienation have long been
employed to mark out certain sorts of relations in which some sort of avoidable
separation obtains. However, one consequence of this new dynamic is to transform the
conditions of the possibility of making sense of many such separations and of the forms
of unity with which they are to be contrasted.

In what follows I shall explore some of these issues in an attempt to begin to come to
terms with this phenomenon, the importance of which can hardly be overstated. I shall
take as my point of departure an observation of Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw it
coming--even as he also saw dangers along the way that could result in other and far
sorrier fates for humanity than postmodernity.

What is dying out is the fundamental faith . . . that man has value and
meaning only insofar as he is a stone in a great edifice; and to that end
he must be solid first of all, a "stone"--and above all not an actor!

To say it briefly (for a long time people will still keep silent about it):
What will not be built any more henceforth, and cannot be built any
more, is--a society [Gesellschaft] in the old sense of that word; to build
that, everything is lacking, above all the material. All of us are no
longer material for a society: this is a truth for which the time has
come. ( Nietzsche, 1974, sec. 2).

Nietzsche is best known for his proclamation that "God is dead"; but God is not the
only fatality on his list of casualties of earth-shaking proportions. In the abovequoted
passage, which is from a section of The Gay Science entitled "How Things Will Become
Ever More 'Artistic' in Europe," he points to another: the kind of society "in the old
sense of the word" that has a discernible, distinctive, coherent structure and content, or
what Hegel had called "substance." It was societies of this sort that Hegel had regarded
as the Weitgeist's finest flower and as the true "individuals" and loci of spiritual identity
on the human scene.

Such societies are on their way out, Nietzsche contends, as the human conditions of
their possibility cease to obtain. To be sure, their demise may be as slow and agonizing
as the deaths that he heralds of religions and moralities that have long been embraced
and relied on; and their last gasps may even give the appearance of new leases on life.
But Nietzsche urges us not to deceive ourselves in wishful thinking about all this. The
real question, he insists, is, or ought to be: what are our options, if we are unwilling to
console and delude ourselves with impossible dreams? Nietzsche may have
overestimated the extent to which people are "no longer material for a society." He also
may have underestimated the tenacity, and even ferocity, with which many will cling to
some version of the "fundamental faith" to which he refers, fearful of losing the

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"value and meaning" it bestows upon their lives. But the problem he poses here is a
profoundly serious one; and I believe that we must find a large-scale solution to it if
humanity is to have a chance of making it through the next century without sinking into
a new, barbarous Dark Age. I say this because I believe that Nietzsche and Hegel were
both right to stress that human beings have a profound need for something like the kind
of value and meaning that the sense of being "a stone in a great edifice" can give.
Moreover, as Nietzsche darkly warns, "Man would rather will nothingness than not
will" ( 1967, 3rd essay, sec. 28).

Hegel likewise may have given an overly mystified account of human life, as Marx
complained; but he understood something of great importance about human nature that
Marx seems, rather disastrously, to have missed (even though Marx has had a lot of
company in this respect). Employing the admittedly opaque language of his
philosophical interpretation of human life in terms of Geist, Hegel gave abstract but
emphatic expression to what may well be a fundamental anthropological truth: human
beings are so constituted that they require social identities involving both identification
and differentiation, beyond the levels of purely particular (physical or psychological)
existence and merely affective bonds, and yet narrower than the identities associated
with their common biological, rational, or human natures.

Hegel's way of putting this point was to conceive of the Volk, or "people," as a kind of
middle term between the twin abstractions of human particularity and universality and
to emphasize the importance of unity with the Volksgeist or life of one's people. There is
nothing mysterious or mystical about such unity; it is simply a matter of living in
inward and outward accord with that which gives one's people its identity: its language,
rules, customs, practices, and institutions. Relations of identification with, and
participation in, some such "social substance"--either immediate and unreflective or
self-conscious and comprehending--were for Hegel crucial to our human/spiritual self-
realization. Withdrawing from them, on the other hand, meant self-alienation as well as
social alienation; and the generalized collapse of such relations was for him a recipe for
chaos and a prelude to disaster.

True as this may be, times have changed; and Hegel's solution has been rendered just
about impossible. Ours is a world in which monolithic societies are sustainable only by
totalitarian means. The globe has shrunk, economic life has become internationalized
and popular culture is following suit, tourism is everywhere, travel is routine, and great
numbers of people are on the move, for reasons both good and dismaying. Successive
waves of developments in communications technology are further rapidly eroding the
conditions of isolation upon which the local acculturation process has long depended,
updating the old song, "How're ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm after they've seen
TV?" The sun is setting on the day of Hegel's "peoples" and their distinctive
sociocultural identities, even if its mythology persists.

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The Identity Question
Events in many parts of the world in recent years, particularly in the aftermath of the
collapse of the self-styled Marxist world and its universalistic ideology, have given new
impetus to a consideration of what might be called "the identity question," The demise
of this ideology, and the emptiness of its comparably universalistic consumer-
capitalistic rival, have led to renewed interest, not only in religiously, racially, and
sexually based forms of identity, but also in those based on nationality and ethnicity.
This interest is manifested both in the terrible conflicts that threaten to plunge various
parts of the world into chaos and darkness, and also in disputes of the (happily) more
bloodless variety carried on in the media and academia. So, for example, concerns
about the growing ethnic, racial, and religious divisions in the U.S. have prompted our
National Endowment for the Humanities to schedule a series of televised discussions
exploring "the meaning of American identity," setting off an exchange in the New York
Times Op Ed pages on this topic to which Richard Rorty contributed.

Rorty, it rather surprisingly turns out, remains something of an Hegelian after all, his
vaunted ultra-postmodernism notwithstanding. He actually argues for the great
importance of "a sense of shared national identity." 2 In doing so, he goes beyond what I
would call the "liberal line" on this matter, to the effect that without such a shared
national identity, the ability of members of a large and diverse population to live
harmoniously together will be jeopardized or lost. He seems instead, or in addition, to
subscribe to something like the Hegelian view that those who lack such an identity are
thereby deficient in an important respect as human beings.

It would be interesting to see how someone (like Rorty) who purports to eschew
essentialism of any kind could go about justifying such a position. It also seems to me
that (contra Rorty, and paraphrasing the title of one of his best-known pre-postmodern
essays) national identity is "an identity well lost"--along with ethnic, racial, sexual,
religious, and all other such forms of identity. Rather, they are better played down than
played up to the point of pitting people against each other and overriding other
considerations in human affairs. Indeed, we have ample evidence that a heightened
sense of such identity is itself one of the gravest threats to the ability of members of
populations that are divided along such lines to live harmoniously together. The
"politics of identity" (to give it a name) is one of the plagues of our century. It already
has taken a horrible toll and may instigate further disasters that could prove fatal to
civilization and, along with it, the modicum of humanity we have managed to achieve.

In a sense, this latterday tribal-identity mania is terribly ironic, if (as Nietzsche

suggests) all such identities are becoming increasingly anachronistic. However, perhaps
this very anachronization belongs in the pathology report. For it is "all too human," in
Nietzsche's phrase (and as he elsewhere observes), that if something is meeting a basic
need and we begin to have doubts about it, we tend to cling all the more desperately to
it as our doubts increase. This

4-
desperation is fertile soil for a fanaticism that is capable of anything. It well exemplifies
what Paul Tillich--with Nazism in mind-called the "demonic," and analyzed as the
special sort of corruption and evil that results from elevating something finite and
contingent to the status of one's "ultimate concern." 3 Fanatics not only ought to know
better, but frequently do-only this does not stop them from making their leaps of faith.

With this problem and danger in mind, I would advance a proposition that may seem
paradoxical but, upon reflection, may be seen to make sense. It, in effect, simply
restates an important Hegelian insight. My proposition is that national, ethnic, and all
other such forms of identity are tolerable only if they are not taken very seriously.
Indeed I would go even further, and suggest that they are benign only if accompanied
and mediated by a counterbalancing sense of alienation. This alienation does not have
to be complete; but it ironically needs to be strong enough to preclude the completeness
and intensity of identification that would be required for them to be the primary means
of satisfying the postulated basic need for a sense of value and meaning.

Hegel agreed--and thought he had a solution. His dialectic of development proceeds

from immediate unity through a stage of alienation and separation, to a final
reconciliation in which unity is regained but mediated by reflection and recognition of
otherness. But that is not all: in Hegel's happy ending, all such finite unities are also
superseded by the attainment of a higher-level perspective from which the limitations
upon the claims of lower-order relationships can be discerned, thereby guarding against
Paul Tillich's demonic dangers. Hegel's entire political philosophy is situated within a
larger context of interpretation and spiritual life that is his philosophical replacement of
religious experience, with the Absolute Knowledge of "spirit knowing itself as spirit" as
the demythologized successor to union with the Godhead. In this way Hegel thought he
had shown a way out of the sequence of temptations to the fanaticizing apotheosis of
the finite. All lower-order identities prior to the final stage of Absolute Spirituality are
recognized to be merely stages upon the human spirit's way, as humanity pursues its
quest for full human/spiritual self-realization. They may be necessary, but they are not
sufficient; and they must be aufgehoben (superseded) in order to take their proper
places in our lives.

But if we are not Hegelians through and through, and if we can take seriously only as
much of Hegel as we can de-Idealize, we must modify this picture, removing Absolute
Spirituality. The abandonment of this last vestige of transcendence may be
philosophically commendable; but it costs us Hegel's solution to the problem of how to
give our need for what he called "objectivespiritual" identity its due without being
consumed by it. How can such identities be aufgehoben if we no longer suppose that
there is any higher-order identity capable of subsuming them to which we might
ascend? Moreover, if neither they nor anything beyond them are suitable objects of our
ultimate concern, capable of endowing our lives with value and meaning through our
identification with them and participation in them, what is the alternative?

Nietzsche feared that the outcome of the dethronement of all pretenders

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laying claim to our allegiance and ultimate concern would be nihilism. He also
recognized that, in what he called this Gtzen-Dmmerung, or "twilight of the idols," in
which all such pretenders are moving toward their demise, there will be many people
who will cling to them and defend them by every possible means. However, diagnosing
these twin pathologies of nihilism and fanaticism was of less interest and importance to
him than trying to think through the problem of how this nihilism might be overcome
and what different way of arriving at an affirmation of life might be possible. He came
to be convinced that this will require a fundamental "revaluation of values," as well as a
thoroughgoing reinterpretation of ourselves and our world in the aftermath of their de-
deification; for we will have to wean ourselves away from craving the kind of value and
meaning associated with the idea of something absolute and unconditioned, with which
we might absolutely and unconditionally identify ourselves.

Can we do this? The passage from The Gay Science cited previously suggests that
Nietzsche thought that we--or at least some of us--are already halfway there. But what
might lie beyond the withering away of all those candidates for our commitment that
promise value and meaning in exchange for our unqualified identification? The
alienation from them that may be necessary to enable us to resist their demonizing
embrace may have the consequence of rendering them not only harmless but bootless as
well, leaving us empty-handed. That surely is also what will happen, however, if we
retain our longing for something to which we could give ourselves unconditionally, and
turn that longing into a criterion nothing can meet. This is a fascinating as well as
worrisome problem, which poses a challenge that surely ranks with the best in the
history of alienation theory.

The long-term future of alienation thus need not expire along with the religious, moral,
social, and cultural gods in relation to which human identity and worth have long been
conceived. It likewise is not limited to the need to learn to hold at arm's length those
communities, practices, and institutions with which we may once have identified
without reservation and in which we may continue to participate. Rather, I would
suggest that a more interesting part of its future will have to do with alternative ways of
conceiving of conditions of the possibility of achieving a human identity worth having.

Downsizing Identity
I shall take it as axiomatic that a type of alienation is a meaningful human possibility
only in cases where a corresponding type of identification is a meaningful human
possibility. I shall further suppose that all human identity or selfhood that is not merely
physiological is grounded in (if not simply a function of) relations of involvement in
one's environing world, ranging from activities involving objects to interactions with
others, participation in sociocultural forms of life, and operations in symbol systems.
And I also shall assume that human beings are so constituted as to need and seek the
sort of

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identity that is only possible by way of participation in social configurations that join
them with others in a differentiating manner.

So far, so Hegelian, but I further consider it necessary at this juncture to turn the
Hegelian approach to social alienation and self-alienation inside out. Hegel thought that
it should be (or, in the best of all possible worlds, would be) possible to specify for
everyone the "social substance" with which they ought to identify (as the objectification
of the Volk of which they are a part) (see Schacht, 1970, ch. 20). I propose to start
instead from the idea that human beings need to participate in, and identify with, some
sort of social reality that is in some way sufficient to satisfy what I shall call the
imperative of selfaffirmation. The force of this notion is that one must be able to affirm
oneself and that, to be able to do so, one must have some sort of self to affirm--which,
perforce, must be relationally constituted. The question then becomes: how can this
imperative be satisfied in a postmodernized world in which "peoples" and their discrete
social substances have been scrambled, and no one is any longer "fit material for
society"? Moreover, what becomes of the notion of alienation under such conditions, in
which there no longer is anything in particular with which any particular person ought
to identify, but rather only a decentered and deprivileged multiplicity of available
alternative reference points and possibilities of involvement?

What are the human alternatives that might be pursued under these conditions, not only
philosophically but pedagogically, politically, through literature and the arts, and in the
other arenas of modern discourse? One might of course simply give up, in the nihilistic
manner that Nietzsche feared would be all too common on the part of those for whom
nothing less will do, in the aftermath of the death of the only gods one knows. . . .
Alternatively, one might take one's cue from Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Grand Inquisitor
and attempt to reimpose a version of a simpler world by totalitarian means or by an
update of the "noble lie." However, these are evasions of the problem I am posing,
rather than serious attempts to confront it.

One way of trying to confront it would be to seek, in each person's past or in the
"givens" of each person's existence, the basis of some sort of community with others of
a similar origin or kind. One might then foster the extraction or elaboration of a shared
form of life, based on this commonality, in which they might participate with these
others. This would come as close as may be possible to giving a postmodern lease on
life to Hegel's model of the integration of individuals into the lives of their "peoples." In
this case, however, it would be the selected common denominators drawn from the
circumstances of life history, physiology or psychology that would serve to individuate,
unite, and differentiate the groups and supply the identities being affirmed. Here the
idea would be to narrow and shift the focus of identity for each person until a
satisfactory fit of some sort is found between something about the person and others of
the same description. Anticipations of this sort are already familiar enough, with
associations and identifications based upon such circumstances college attendance,
military service, religious affiliation, sexual orientation,

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athletic interest, political ideology, and even various sorts of affliction.

It is characteristic of this alternative to suppose that individuals some-how are, or come

to be, importantly defined by certain characteristics, preferences, or experiences that
they happen to have, and that the imperative of self-affirmation is best met by
recognizing them and acting accordingly. Indeed there is no reason to suppose that this
way of achieving self-affirmation and selfhood is not viable. Identities can be, and are,
shaped through such forms of identification and participation, sufficiently to satisfy the
appetites of many; and one salutary benefit of this way of settling the matter is that it
may well diminish susceptibility to the siren appeal of more sinister forms of the
politics of identity. Moreover, the very fact that such groupings are modest in scope and
evidently lacking in world-historical significance is a happy circumstance, for it renders
unlikely their transformation into movements posing threats to others.

On the other hand, their relative paltriness in the larger scheme of things and their
evident contingency do tend to limit the extent to which those who participate in them
can derive a sense of value and meaning from identification with them; and this raises
doubts about the adequacy of this option, particularly in times of personal and societal
crisis. Moreover, one cannot ignore the more fundamental problem with any such
recourse, upon which the existentialists used to harp: why should any mere
circumstance of either nature or nurture be deemed, or allowed to be, definitive of one's
identity and decisive with respect to the leading of one's life? Identities may be chosen
in this way; but no such choice is mandated by any such contingency.

An alternative to this miniaturized Hegelian model is suggested by Nietzsche's notion

of "self-becoming," which was perhaps most succinctly expressed in another passage in
The Gay Science: "We want to become those we are--human beings who are new,
unique, incomparable, who give themselves laws, who create themselves" ( 1974, see
335). As Nietzsche well knew, this is something that one cannot do entirely on one's
own; for it, too, requires entrance into the only forms of life through which one's
abilities and interests can be developed and meaningfully expressed. However, such
participation is associated with an emerging autonomy that attenuates it; and it is
neither restricted to nor guided by the common-denominator sensitivity discussed here,
which is concerned chiefly to enable one to locate and connect with others like oneself.
There is room for the notion of a community of kindred spirits here; but it is a
community defined primarily by allegiance to and participation in forms of what might
loosely be called cultural endeavor.

Nietzsche attempted to mark the distinction between this kind of thing and the
nationalism he despised by giving the name of "good European" to those whose
identities were no longer merely nationalistic, ethnic, religious, racial, or otherwise
superficial. It may be argued that this designation too is problematic in the same respect
and needs to be replaced by something more generic (like "Kulturmensch," cultural
devotee) to be faithful to Nietzsche's intentions; but the basic point should be clear
enough. The fundamental identification he would have us make is with that in and
about ourselves and others that can lend itself

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to the enhancement of human life through the flourishing and enrichment of human
culture. "Be yourself!" may be a sound maxim; but Nietzsche does not leave it at that.
"Your true nature," he writes in Schopenhauer as Educator, "lies not concealed within
you, but immeasurably high above you, or at least above that which you usually take
yourself to be" ( 1983, sec. 1, p. 129). He goes on to elaborate on what this requires in
terms of a "consecration to culture," and "a struggle on behalf of culture."

By coming to this resolve one places himself within the circle of

culture; for culture is the child of each individual's self-knowledge and
 dissatisfaction with himself. Anyone who believes in culture is thereby
saying: "I see above me something higher and more human than I am;
let everyone help me to attain it, as I will help everyone who knows
and suffers as I do" ( 1983, sec. 6, pp. 162-63).

This general way of thinking, when conceived more specifically, becomes a model of
participation in some selection of opportunities for involvement in available aspects
(and occasionally new variants) of human cultural life in the broadest sense of this
expression, as one's abilities and circumstances may permit and as one's choices may
dictate. Its scope is by no means restricted to "high" (or even "popular") culture, but
rather extends to matters as diverse as scientific endeavor, athletic activity, and
professional and public life, all of which provide contexts for the cultivation and
creative application of human abilities and the attainment of forms of proficiency and
excellence. Indeed, the diversifiability of human cultural life in this broad sense is
virtually limitless; and it is not only those who achieve absolute supremacy (for the
moment) or even general superiority in various areas of endeavor who contribute to its
flourishing and enhancement, but all who participate in them and attend to them--rather
like speakers of a language, all of whom contribute to keeping it a living and
developing affair. Their contributions may typically be incremental rather than
substantial; but that is no barrier to identification and need be no impediment to the
satisfaction associated with a sense of value and meaning deriving from it ( Schacht,
1991).

This somewhat Nietzschean model of social participation and selfaffirmation thus

combines a high degree of pluralism at the level of particular involvements with the
possibility a metalevel identity that might be widely shared. This identity would be that
of participant in the enterprise of human culture and its enhancement, through which
human life is endowed with a value and meaning that it intrinsically lacks. Through this
metalevel identification, one might derive a sense of sharing in that value and meaning
and so be less susceptible to the temptations of the debilitating narcotics of illusion or
the dangerous stimulants of the politics of identity. Moreover, at least for some though
perhaps not for all, this diluted Nietzscheanism could be a more attractive option than
that of what I have called miniaturized Hegelianism. For fairly obvious reasons, a social
framework of democratic liberalism would be maximally conducive to such satisfaction
and to the vitality of the diversity of forms of cultural life it would involve. It is one
nice question, however, what

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limits might have to be placed on the operation of institutions and the conduct of
individuals within such a society in the interest of that very vitality; and it is another
whether human motivations would need to be inculcated and educated (and if so how
and by whom) to ensure active involvement.

A large and worrisome question hanging over both options, however, is whether human
beings generally are capable of deriving a sufficient sense of value and meaning from
any such sets of involvements to satisfy their imperative of self-affirmation if they are
clearly aware of the merely human (and often very human), contingent, historically
conditioned, and finite status of any and all of the social formations in which they
participate and through which they attain their identities. If and when that day arrives,
humanity will have matured, leaving behind its immature longing for absolute realities
and guarantees in relation to which to achieve self-esteem. But that day may be long in
coming, for our immaturity has been compounded by long addiction to an all-or-
nothing, "infinity or bust" way of thinking that is intended precisely to render us
unwilling and unable to settle for anything this side of transcendence. Nietzsche was
right to see a crisis and great danger here and to dwell on the magnitude of the
revaluation of values required to surmount it. 4

Postmodern Alienation
However, let us look down the road in the direction Nietzsche points, past the twin
perils of fanaticism and nihilism, to the state of affairs that presumably would obtain if
and when the transition to a postmodern world has occurred. In place of the likes of
dominant cultures, peoples, social substances, and their latter-day remnants, there will
be only a profusion of social and cultural formations, participation in any of which is
optional and normatively neutral. Classical social alienation, as conceived in terms of
the loss or absence of identification with, and participation in, the form of life
characteristic of one's society, will have become meaningless ( Schacht, 1986). But the
closing of that chapter in the concept's career need not be the end of its story. On the
contrary: the new chapter to follow may prove to be an even more interesting one-albeit
perhaps a good deal more complicated, and (I suspect) far from congenial to social
scientists of a quantitative persuasion.

For starters, the human need recognized by Hegel for an identity of social dimensions
surely will not fade away with the dawning of postmodernity. This need, however, will
now have to be met through forms of participation and identification representing a
recognized selection from an array of historically engendered social possibilities,
mandated neither by divine authority nor by anything of a more mundane nature
(including one's own innate constitution). In place of a socially defined conception of
deviance, however, one might substitute the idea of a serious pathology, for if it is the
case that the need in question cannot go unmet without serious consequences for the
kind of self one comes to have, then the generalized absence of relations of social
participation and identification would indeed be something about which to worry; and it

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obviously would make good and important sense to characterize it as a basic form of
social alienation. As for Hegel, moreover, such alienation would have the significance
of self-alienation as well, for it would mean that an important part of what goes into the
development and preservation of human selfhood would be lacking.

It may be observed, in this connection, that one does not have to be a metaphysical
essentialist to talk in this way. There is a good deal of conceptual space between
essentialism, on the one hand, and the idea that things have no natures whatsoever apart
from the contingencies of the moment and the vagaries of interpretation. Human
selfhood, like human nature more generally, may be no eternal verity or immutable
blueprint. However, even if it has come to be the sort of thing it is in the course of a
long, complex, and contingency-driven history, and admits of vastly differing
realizations, it quite conceivably may now have general features that can be identified
and that develop in different ways depending in part upon what transpires in the lives of
those involved. The plasticity of human nature has its limits, in the short run even if not
sub specie aeternitatis (under the aspect of eternity), and we encounter one of them, I
surmise, in the inseparability of important elements of the kind of selfrealization that is
a central feature of our humanity asit emerges from some significant measure of social
participation and identification.

In any event, it is undeniable that whatever sorts of selves human beings come to have
are relationally constituted affairs and so inevitably will turn out differently depending
on the kinds of relations present in the particular context of which they are constituted.
Because they are dynamic affairs rather than fixed permanently like sculptured forms,
moreover, they depend for their shape on the kinds and patterns of relations within
which they are engendered and so are affected if those relations are significantly
reconfigured. As in the case of interpersonal relations, forms of social and cultural life
in which one comes to be involved do make a considerable difference in the way in
which one turns out. The difference it makes if significant involvements of this sort are
or are not a part of one's life, however, is of a whole different kind and is vast.

It is important to notice the difference between this futuristic conception of radical

social alienation and what I am calling its classical predecessor. The latter presupposes
that there is in the society under consideration some prevailing social substance with
which its members are as such expected to identify and in the life of which they are
expected to participate. This successor notion presupposes nothing of the kind, but
rather only requires a social context affording a variety of possibilities for such
involvement. Moreover, while in the former case there may be an onus attached to
social alienation deriving from the presumed legitimacy of a societal imperative that
creates the expectation indicated, in the latter there are no longer supposed to be any
such societal claims. It would now be a buyers' market. The only onus attaching to
radical social alienation would have to arise from something like the aesthetic
preferability of the sort of self-realization made possible by social participation. That
may seem not to amount to much to those whose expectations with respect

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to normative and evaluative judgments have been formed under the influence of myths
of divine commandments and categorical imperatives. We may need to learn to think in
that way and make more of such distinctions, however, if we are to have anything at all
to go on after all such myths have died and the habits of thought they have engendered
have faded.

However, there is a second kind of role that may be envisioned for the notion of social
alienation under the conditions of postmodernity. It is at once more modest and less
problematical, and so may have a greater appeal to our colleagues of the future in the
postmodern world's successors to today's social sciences. In a manner of speaking, it
would involve customizing the notion, along with the idea of the self, so that what
would count as social alienation would be tailored to fit the form of the social-
relationally configured self of each individual. This would parallel the current and
familiar double meaning of the notion of interpersonal estrangement, a term that can be
used either to convey that a person is entirely bereft of interpersonal relationships or to
characterize breakdowns of specific relationships the person has had. In the latter
context, the notion comes into play only if a significant relationship of some sort has
previously developed; and there is no presumption that a particular person will or
should develop such relationships with everyone else. The others in one's world
represent possibilities for the establishment of such relationships, but only a few such
possibilities actually are, or can be, realized. When, and as, they are, however, a part of
the person's identity takes shape, for one's self is partially constituted in this dimension
as well as in the dimensions of other kinds of involvements. Moreover, it is such
involvements that establish the context in which it becomes meaningful in particular
cases to speak of estrangement.

Mutatis mutandis, the same thing can readily be done with the notion of social
alienation on the level of particular possibilities of participation in forms of social and
cultural life. One might think of these forms of life as a vast array of games of different
sorts that are being played alongside each other but relatively independently of each
other, and differing in many respects. There is not just one game in town that everyone
is expected to play, in which everyone may meaningfully be characterized either as a
participant or as a refusenik, and with which it makes sense to characterize everyone
either as identifying or as at odds. Everyone may be deemed to be better off playing
some such games rather than none, but there is no prior presumption with respect to
anyone or any game in particular. The games one starts out playing may be influenced
by those others around whom one happens to favor; but there is no presumption that
one will or should follow suit, and there is ample exposure to alternatives to render their
selection real possibilities.

In this model, no assumptions need be made about autonomy or equality of access and
no choice need be made between what were earlier called the miniaturized Hegelian
and diluted Nietzschean pictures of identity determination. All that is required is the
idea that one may meaningfully be described in terms of social alienation only in
relation to those games, or sociocultural

-12-

formations, with which one comes to identify strongly enough to have a relatively
enduring impact on the configuration of one's self--and only as long as the impact lasts.
This last qualification is important; for as in the case of interpersonal estrangement, it
would make little sense to regard someone as alienated in relation to something that
once mattered enough to the person to leave its mark if the subsequent passage of time
and events has obliterated all but an occasional memory trace of it. Specific contexts in
which it becomes meaningful to speak of such alienation must be established piecemeal
in individual lives, like castles in the sand; and like castles in the sand they may wash
away, even though the lives of those whose applications bring them into existence may
go on with redirected attentions.

The central idea this conception of social alienation seeks to capture (or preserve) is
that one can only be said appropriately and significantly to be alienated from something
to which one has been and remains meaningfully related, but from which one at the
same time has come to be separated. Without a persisting link of some sort, the absence
of participation and identification does not suffice. On the scenario of postmodernity,
that link cannot be supposed to be provided by anything other than what happens to
come to matter to human beings in the course of their lives. The fact that such mattering
is not utterly ephemeral, however, opens up the possibility of phenomena of the
complexity of interpersonal and social alienation, at least in their customized versions.
It is not easy to imagine any way of subjecting them to quantification, statistical
analysis, and nomological explanation. It is easy to imagine, however, that long after
classical social alienation has done its work of ridding the world of the virus of
chauvinist fanaticism and has joined classical religious alienation in historical
retirement, human beings will continue to have their trials and tribulations in their
diverse sociocultural lives as well as in their other involvements, and social
participation and alienation will remain among the salient features of the human scene.

Toward a Postmodern Humanism?

Contributors to alienation theory from Hegel onward have recognized that the
significance of any forms of involvement and alienation one may distinguish is bound
up with larger questions relating to possible ways of living worth going for, and to
attainable sorts of self worth realizing. This surely will continue to be so even after
humanity emerges into postmodernity and bids farewell to all gods and other absolutes.
And as long as the sense persists that at least some differences in these respects do
matter, it will matter not only whether human beings involve themselves in identity-
shaping social games, but also which ones they enter into and how they do so. There
can be no general formula that would be appropriately applicable to all in these matters,
any more than there can be with respect to interpersonal relationships or artistic activity,
once the artificial harbors of essentialist thinking have been left behind in favor of the
open seas of postmodernity.

-13-

It thus would be easy and reasonable enough simply to conclude by echoing the
pronouncement of Nietzsche's Zarathustra: "'This is my way; where is yours?'--thus I
answered those who asked me 'the way.' For the way--that does not exist" ( 1954, pt. 3,
sec. 11:2). But I believe that something more can, and should, be said by way of
providing a context within which this construal of social participation and alienation
can be situated and positioned for subsequent consideration and elaboration.

Where do we go from here? How can human life be meaningfully led beyond the death
of God, the advent of nihilism, the end of History, the collapse of ideology, and
disillusionment with respect to the basic articles of religious and Enlightenment faiths
alike? What can be and should be salvaged from previous ways of thinking that might
be of help in this connection, as humanity struggles to come of age? Can significant
sense be made of anything along the lines of Geist naturalized, rationality humanized,
the Obermensch democratized, revolution domesticated, the irrational civilized,
nihilism and fanaticism both overcome, optimism and pessimism alike transcended, and
the good life come true--as something attainable and worth working and fighting for in
the face of the dark forces that will always threaten? Can there be a recovery or
discovery of a vision of humanity, civilization, and culture; of what it means for them to
flourish, and of why or how it matters that they do, despite the absence of any
transcendent justification?
This bootstrapping operation need not start from scratch. Thus, for example, it seems to
me that Hegel was not wrong to celebrate a form of society in which a complex of
institutions and educational strategies would serve to foster, facilitate, and promote
general human welfare, personality, citizenship, and knowledge. Marx was not wrong to
stress the development of economic resources, the elimination of exploitative practices,
the cultivation of human community and aesthetic sensibility, and the full development
and selfexpressive employment of the human powers of each and all. Nor was
Nietzsche wrong to stress the attainment of excellence and the value-engendering
power of creativity, the differences as well as the similarities between human beings,
and the idea of a possible enhancement of human life. For that matter, Immanuel Kant
was not wrong to stress the attainability of a measure of rationality and autonomy in
human thought and conduct, and the dignity associated therewith. These visions do not
stand and fall with the attempts made by their advocates to provide them with firm
theoretical foundations or compelling justifications. They each illuminate human
possibility in ways that deserve and reward serious consideration. Even if they cannot
be said unequivocally to be true, moreover, it is arguable that we have it in us to make
them come true.

One realizable model of human excellence is that of a person who has some particular
endowment and does whatever it takes to develop and employ that ability to the fullest,
perhaps attaining superiority to others devoting themselves to the same pursuit, or at
least contributing to the flourishing and development of that form of endeavor. This
model admits of indefinitely many and diverse realizations, which issue forth in a
profusion of forms of activity

-14-

and specific excellence.

Another such model is that of one who opts for some combination of forms of activity,
for each of which one has some aptitude, attempting to achieve a rich mix rather than
one particular excellence. This would represent a different, but equally significant, sort
of achievement, which is capable of yielding a different, but comparable, sort of
satisfaction; and it, too, could be realized in indefinitely many ways.

Alternatively, a model of human worth could be developed around the idea of finding
the role or roles in one's community or society that one can best and most congenially
play, and of doing this to the best of one's ability, deriving satisfaction and a sense of
worth by virtue of the contributions one makes. A particular person might either focus
on one role or combine a variety of roles in quite different and unrelated contexts; and
here, too, the possibilities may be many (although they would be limited to the
available options).

This list of (somewhat Nietzschean, Marxian, and Hegelian) models could easily be
extended to include others, reflecting other visions of kinds of human life worth living
and striving for. None of them is the right one; but all of them are available--and all of
them represent ways in which human life can come to be endowed with value and
meaning beyond that of the mere existence and perpetuation of the species. All are
value-engendering and meaning-bestowing; and all are not only compatible with but
conducive to the flourishing and enhancement of human life.
 Far from ruling them all out, postmodernity rules them all in--or rather, opens the door
to them all, rendering them all accessible, with no apologies necessary. All are ways of
making something of human life, transfiguring its commonplace features in ways that
may in the long run be more promising in their capacity to sustain us than leaps of
faith borrowing their sustaining power from dreams of transcendence. Nothing eternal
is at stake, either to be won or lost. In the larger scheme of things, no doubt, none of
this makes the slightest difference, but on the scale of humanity it makes all the
difference. And it is in this context, with different attainable models of the human
good appealing to us, that different practical solutions to questions of social
participation and alienation will have to be conceptualized and pursued as humanity
learns to accustom itself to postmodernity. 5

Notes
Author's note: This essay derives from the new Introduction to the reissue of Richard
Schacht, Alienation, a publication of the University of Illinois Press ( 1996), and
appears here with the permission of the University of Illinois Press.

1. This is one of the leitmotivs of Hegel Phenomenology of Spirit ( 1977), and

indicates an important aspect of the dynamic he takes to drive the entire human-
spiritual development with which he is concerned in that work.

2. New York Times, Op-Ed, February 13, 1994.

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Table 2
3. I recall this vividly from his lectures at Harvard in the early 1960s.

4. See Schacht ( 1983), esp. Chapter 6, "Value and Values."

5. For further discussion of many of the issues raised here, see Schacht ( 1994).

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2
The Strange Career of Alienation:
How a Concept Is Transformed
without Permission of Its Founders
Irving Louis Horowitz
The purpose of this brief exercise is not so much to review the history of alienation--a
turgid undertaking done many times, for better or worse--but to indicate how a concept
as broad ranging as this can survive and live another day, perhaps even another century,
even when the social and intellectual soil which nourished it in origin collapses.

I am suggesting that alienation, which began its rise to fame within the Hegel-Marx
tradition of the contrite separation of fact from conscience, labor from commodity, the
individual from the system, and a host of polarities adding up to a strongly negative
view of industrial-capitalist society, is dramatically transformed into an operational
guidebook for psychology and economy within these self-same capitalist societies.
Moreover, this change in usage takes place without the formal approbation of its
founders.

It is commonly known and appreciated that the concept of alienation owes its currency,
if not its very existence, to the Hegelian tradition in philosophy and the Marxian
tradition in economy. But with the virtual collapse of the communist systems--in
Europe at least--that gave succor and weight to its tradition, it becomes interesting to
explore how key ideas may have outcomes that profoundly differ from their earlier
embodiment in theoretical systems and ideologies.

The essential mechanism for this concept transformation is operationalism, or more

simply, pragmatism: the use of the alienation paradigm to explore levels of isolation or
integration of individuals within the workplace, the polling place, and more intimate
contexts such as family structures and personal interactions. Slowly, over time, the
concept of alienation lost its global, totalist impact as part of a Marxist arsenal and
became part of the tool kit of social psychology and social stratification in the
examination of behaviorally rooted conditions.

-17-

The alienation-integration axis became the sociological response to the neuroses-

normality syndrome established early in the twentieth century by the psychiatric
tradition. Its great virtue was to objectify a wide range of human behaviors without
falling victim to an extreme personalism or subjectivism. The alienation-integration
approach has the additional virtue of being easily linked to the parallel evolution of
theories of social stratification. The private life and the workplace--first perceived by
Marx as being at at odds--in this way was advanced, first by industrial sociologists like
Mayo and Roethlisberger, and then by popularizers of high quality, like Peter Drucker
and William Whyte, as the source of a higher fusion of society and economy.

In that sense, alienation is now part of the tradition in social science rather than social
protest. This change came about with a broadening realization that terms like being
alienated are no more and no less value-laden than being integrated Sociologists
rightfully began asking the question: alienated from what, and integrated into what? In
this way, alienation became enveloped with notions of the human condition--a
permanent part of the social makeup of each individual personality. Since one could just
as readily speak of social or personal integration in the same way, the concept itself
becomes objectified. That is to say, it lost its special flavor as a footnote to an ideology
of revolution or an element in working class immizeration, and became, curiously, more
useful as a way in which social scientists could talk about the relation of individuals to
groups: the voter in relation to the party; the technician in relation to the product; or the
child in relation to the parent. That did not imply an absence of concern with the status
of workers and the workplace, but just an appreciation that such concerns are part of a
larger dynamic that impacts the overall processes of development and industrialization.

In short, alienation and integration both have become relational concepts. They do not
so much designate states of being as they do processes of interaction. Again, we can see
how a concept that starts out as part of a revolutionary vernacular is not simply made
null and void, but rather finds a new intellectual home in social contexts far removed
from those who think of alienation in particular as a mobilizing device or a deepened
sense of victimization. This is a perfectly reasonable way to think of the natural history
of a concept.

Beyond operational shifts over time are valuational changes, namely, the use of
alienation as a positive rather than negative force. Rather than view alienation as
framed by "estrangement" from a human being's essential nature as a result of a cruel
set of industrial-capitalist demands, alienation becomes an inalienable right, a source of
creative energy for some and an expression of personal eccentricity for others. As in the
work of Czeslaw Milosz, Norbert Elias, George Orwell, or other anti-utopians,
alienation becomes an ethical framework for allowing individuals to move counter to
the crowd, or counter to integration in the social environment as such. Alienation
becomes a critical theme in the civil libertarian belief that privacy is no less an
inalienable right than sociability. Within the social sciences, no one deserves more
credit for this new consciousness of alienation than Lewis S. Feuer ( 1995). By his
rigorous

-18-

opposition to dogmatism in social theory, he pointed the way to save the kernel of
alienation theory from its rotten exterior.

So much of the nineteenth-century radical tradition presumed the superiority of public

displays of organization over the private life as such that alienation was frequently
viewed in the same terms as privacy. Overcoming alienation became little else than a
call, nay a demand, for participation in the affairs of communities of states. Sometimes
this entailed a multistage operation: first, participate in the manufacture of a community
or state to one's liking; second, participate in the brave new world one has created;
third, be punished for the failure to engage in such communal obligations. This natural
history of totalitarian usages of alienation served only to weaken any claims it had on
the consciousness of modern social science research.

It could be argued that late twentieth-century thought simply, or not so simply, reverses
such meanings: the right not to partake of a social movement--neither to support nor
oppose, but simply not to participate--becomes the touchstone of alienation. In that
sense, the concept becomes a positive legal force, a barrier to incursion by totalitarian
parties or states in the self-defined well-being of the person. This theme, struck by
Dostoevsky and Kafka in literature, only now, finally, becomes part of the common
inheritance of alienation as a social theory within free societies.
In this fashion, and over the course of the twentieth century--with a huge boost
provided by the collapse of Marxism as a worldview and communism as a world
system--social science has incorporated the notion of alienation into its intellectual
stock-in-trade. This has larger ramifications and indicates that the relationship between
systems and ideas is far from unilinear or mechanical. It also indicates the value in not
discarding the baby with the bathwater; that is to say, a concept may have an
unanticipated use, no less than an unanticipated consequence, for its users.

Just as systems may outlive their originating ideas--for example, the neoDarwinian idea
that capitalism can only exist in a world where the struggle for survival between people
is accepted--so, too, ideas may outlive originating systems, as with the Marxian idea
that alienation is some horrific state of mind rooted in the bowels of capitalism and to
be overcome in the establishment of communism. This operational approach to
alienation, which comes perilously close to supporting the very system it was intended
to subvert, is hardly the expected consequence of the idea of alienation by its founding
fathers and mothers. The strange history of alienation as a concept goes to show that
serendipity can, at times, triumph even over the entrenched dogmas of an age. It might
also be the case that this is but a rare example in which chiliastic fervor is transformed
into pragmatic utility. In either event, the career of alienation offers an optimistic hope
for the future of social research as such.

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3
The Fetishization of Alienation:
Unpacking a Problem of Science,
Knowledge, and Reified Practices in
the Workplace
David Schweitzer

This chapter provides a critical investigation into the discourse and practice of science
associated with the empiricoanalytic reconstruction of Marx's concept of alienation in
contemporary sociology. The concept has undergone a fundamental transformation with
the scientific turn in its contemporary career. It has been severed from its intellectual
roots in normative theory, wrenched from its evaluative context of discourse, and
transformed into a variety of seemingly objective analytic categories and empirical
measures. The normative qualities and radical critical powers originally imbued in the
concept have been diluted, bracketed, or completely eliminated from the analysis. This
is associated with a strategic operationalization effort at rendering the concept amenable
to the methods of science. 1 The epistemic implications and practical consequences are
far-reaching. Despite claims to scientific objectivity and value-neutrality, this purging
operation is seen in light of the present investigation as a normative procedure in its
own right, with its own surrogate ethic and immanent practical thrust. The humanistic
grounds and visionary ethical directives for dealienation and social practice are
consequently obscured or subverted in the process.

The epistemic stance of science is examined with reference to reifying tendencies that
are seen to occur in the very process of doing empiricoanalytic work of this kind--from
the production of reified sociological knowledge (including the creation of reified
categories and accounts pertaining to work and alienation) to the ways in which it is
ultimately applied and received in the lay social world. My aim is to uncover some of
the ways in which reified sociological knowledge about work and alienation is
produced within the scientific world of empiricoanalytic sociology and then applied
toward the creation of reified managerial practices in the workplace.

-21-
The investigation points to some of the practical ways in which reified knowledge
about work and alienation lends itself to the legitimization of promanagement policies
in the workplace. The creation of reified practices in the workplace is associated with
the application of new human relations strategies and job redesign programs. While
these measures imply a humane commitment to reducing alienation and improving the
human quality of working life, it is argued that they are, in effect, applied toward the
rationalized control of labor. The focus here is on workplace strategies that contribute to
a manipulative shaping of adaptive behavioral responses among workers to their
existing conditions of work--strategies that are necessarily compatible, in the first
instance, not with the needs and interests of labor but with those of management and
capital. One of the suggestions that emerges from this investigation is that
contemporary practitioners who lay claim to Marx's concept of alienation as well
should not lose sight of its original humanistic meaning and evaluative frame of moral-
practical discourse.

Several alternatives to the new human relations strategies are considered, based on
leads provided by the early Yugoslav experiments with workers' control in self-
managing collectives and the recent Israeli experience with kibbutz communities and
industries. They involve theory-guided strategies to practically attack the problem of
alienation and enhance the human quality of working life according to the integrated
standpoint of all participants in the working community. These efforts are guided by a
dialectical merger of theory and practice and by humanistic principles reflected in
Marx's normative theory of alienation and dealienation. The chapter concludes with an
assessment of minimum requirements for a praxis-centred sociology that attempts to
overcome many of the reifying tendencies associated with the empiricoanalytic
approach to theory, research, and practice.

The Normative Transformation and Scientific

Reconstruction of Alienation
Marx's formulation of the alienation problematic is organized around his theory and
concept of alienated labor, as developed in the first fragment of the Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts ([ 1844] 1964) and expanded in his later works on capital (e.
g., [ 1857-58] 1973, pp. 450-456; [ 1867] 1959, p. 645; [ 1894] 1967, p. 85). It is
grounded in normative assumptions concerning the human condition. People are seen as
the creators of their material and mental world through their labor activity. They are
endowed with natural human qualities, creative capacities, and historically existing
potentialities for human growth. But the products of their labor (e.g., commodities,
ideas, and social institutions) assume an autonomous life of their own. They come to
rule over people as dehumanizing objects and powers, as alien and hostile forces
operating independently, above and against the common will of their own creators.
People no longer experience themselves as active beings of praxis in conscious control
of their life circumstances. Their own productive activities, human creations, and social
relationships remain alien and beyond their grasp.

The concept of alienation emerges in Marx's writings as an ethically

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grounded instrument for the diagnosis and critique of society. It is a radical weapon of
attack, which is aimed at the dominant values and repressive institutional arrangements
of society. The concept is infused with normative judgmental qualities, radical critical
powers, and moral prescriptions for a practical, humanistic solution. Alienation is
consequently construed by Marx as a normative concept with explicit ethical directives
for dealienation and practical action. But in the course of its secular evolution in
contemporary sociology the concept has undergone a fundamental change. It has been
transformed in intrinsically subversive ways that depart radically from its original
meaning and humanistic intent.

The normative transformation of alienation stems from an empiricoanalytic

operationalization procedure for fragmenting and reducing this encompassing concept
to a variety of neutralized psychological categories and empirical measures. It is guided
by the specifications and requirements for scientific objectivity, value-neutrality,
psychological reductionism, methodological individualism, and survey research
empiricism. This involves a careful and systematic filtering of the classic concept
through an epistemic screen of scientific assumptions. The concept of alienation is
consequently (1) severed from its intellectual roots in normative theory and philosophy,
(2) wrenched from its evaluative frame of reference and original context of discourse,
(3) purged of its normative anthropology and humanistic grounds for remedial action,
(4) stripped of its radical critical powers, (5) fragmented and reduced to a variety of
purely descriptive psychological categories, and (6) converted into attitudinal survey
measures.

The counterideological demand for scientific objectivity and value-neutrality associated

with this operationalization procedure surfaces as an ideology and normative procedure
in its own right. It contains its own implicit value commitments and deradicalized
remedial prescriptions. The ideology of scientific objectivity emerges as another value-
specific way of perceiving and responding to the world. Extrascientific values and
commitments are introduced that are overtly uncritical and seemingly apolitical
( Horton, 1964). The ideology of science, as such, contributes to the legitimization and
fundamental preservation of existing power relations in society. It surfaces as a status
quo ideology, which is imbued with conservative value-commitments and legitimizing
political powers. I refer to ideology in the narrow, more precise sense of the term as it
was used by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in The German Ideology, namely, as an
expression of particular needs and interests of dominant groups in society ([ 1845-46]
1970: pp. 64-68). From this standpoint, ideology reifies, mystifies, or disguises
underlying social contradictions (e.g., forms of domination and oppression), which
stand out as barriers to dealienation and the realization of a genuinely human social
existence. Ideology rationalizes, obscures, and conceals existing power relations at the
expense of weak and powerless groups in society. It is defused in ways that undermine
the perceptions of subordinate groups regarding the real possibilities for ameliorative
change and political practice.

Another problem arises with this scientific endeavor. The empiricoanalytic

-23-

operationalization of alienation necessarily narrows the classic sociological focus down

to an analysis of individual responses to standardized, close-ended, attitudinal survey
items. The scope of analysis is restricted to an enumeration of individual characteristics
and a type of aggregate social psychology. Questions and answers about alienation tend
to lie, not in the domain of sociology, but in the realm of individual feelings, attitudes,
and perceptions. The analysts are severely restricted, not only in their theoretical
understanding of the main macrosociological variables at play, but also in their capacity
to make grounded judgments about the social requisites for dealienation. Societal
conditions and structural processes that presumably correspond with the psychological
states of individuals are largely excluded from both the analysis and the strategies for
ameliorative change. Only the feelings, attitudes, and perceptions of individuals appear
to be at issue. What is lacking is a larger, more imaginative picture that situates the
alienation problematic within the broader sociological domain, where societal
conditions and structural processes are interconnected with the subjective forms of
alienation.

The Epistemic Stance of Science

Interconnecting issues of ontology, epistemology, and social practice are at stake
regarding the scientific operationalization and ultimate fetishization of alienation in
contemporary sociology. Marx's critique of alienation and the search for a practical,
humanistic solution are guided by fundamental assumptions regarding the human
condition. He begins with a conception of (1) the character of a genuinely human life
and, therefore, an image of the way things ideally ought to be, (2) the undesirability of
the way certain conditions are, and (3) how the gap between the first two conceptions
could, and should, be reduced or eliminated. However, Marx's normative anthropology
is purged by the scientific operationalization process. The implications of this purging
operation are farreaching: the normative thrust of his theory is diluted. Moreover, its
polemic qualities and radical powers are neutralized, and the visionary ethical directives
for remedial change and strategic action are obscured or subverted. The entire moral-
practical context of humanistic discourse is, in effect, suspended, bracketed, or
eliminated from the analysis. This is one of the intended consequences of a science that
proceeds strictly according to the canons of value-neutrality and scientific objectivity.

Friedrichs points to the "epistemological screen" of scientific assumptions through

which the experienced world is filtered in an effort at rendering it accessible to the
methods of science. The scientific frame of reference is seen as a "metaphysic" in its
own right. As he put it, a certain philosophical anthropology (i.e., a conception of
human nature) emerges in the process, along with an associated ethic that relies on a
scientific frame of reference. The scientist necessarily draws on normative guidelines
for research from within the established scientific community. This is a community that
gives exclusive priority to the guiding ethic of value-neutrality and predictive efficiency
in the

-24-

name of science. The epistemic stance of science appears as a reified one, or what
Friedrichs referred to as an "anti-metaphysical metaphysic." The calculus of efficiency
materializes as a "surrogate ethic for a science that would draw normative guidelines
from within its own frame of reference" ( 1970, p. 225).
Reifying tendencies in the process of doing scientific work of this sort are manifested in
the objectification, depersonalization, and ultimate reduction of the metaphysically
humane and subjective image of the individual to a thing, an object, or an
operationalized intervening variable. As a transformed scientific object, the human
individual is "denuded of any but external significance," to be used by the scientific
community to satisfy its own interests, namely, "to predict the world of experience with
increasing efficiency" ( Friedrichs, 1970, pp. 235-236). Friedrichs concludes:

The sociologist priest, then, is not only able to claim "value-neutrality"

in his research activity, but must eventually face the fact that if he
would seek his normative guidelines for social research from within his
scientific commitment--either by deriving them from its epistemology
or by emulating its communal ethic--he must settle for a posture that
cuts dramatically against the grain of the humane image of man that
has been the West's heritage from its Hebraic and Greek forebears
( 1970, p. 258).

Fuchs ( 1986, p. 127) and others (e.g., Harding, 1991) who have focused in greater
detail on the discursive constitution of science have shown how objectivity is
constructed narratively and how "professional knowledge producers" seal their
ownership of that knowledge through the narrative voice of the scientific community.
The narrative voice becomes an integral part of the analyst's epistemic rationale and
commitment to the methods of science. It has methodological implications when it is
used to establish intellectual autonomy and influence credibility with readers ( Cohen
and Rogers, 1994). The epistemic stance of science that is highlighted here is directly
linked to the kind of reified sociological work and consciousness that tends to occur
within some circles of the scientific sociological community. My aim in the section that
follows is to explicate the reifying tendencies associated specifically with the
empiricoanalytic reconstruction of Marx's anthropology and concept of alienation.

Reified Sociological Work and the

Commodification of Alienation
Marx's anthropology of the "total man" is fundamentally undermined by the scientific
operationalization process. The positivistic theory of scientific knowledge requires an
objectifying approach, which reifies and fragments the full cognitive status of the
individual, such that people are no longer seen as total, conscious, self-creative beings
of praxis. A malleable scientific image of the individual surfaces to fill the ontic void.
Alienation--originally construed as a total phenomenon characterizing the entire human
condition--now becomes fragmented, reduced to neutralized psychological categories,
and fetishized as separate elements for scientific scrutiny. The normative and humane
image of the individual is no longer the starting point for the critique of alienation in
society

-25-
or for a dialectically conceived vision of the direction for ameliorative change and
human growth. The radical, praxis-oriented character of a possible humanistic solution
is thus severed at its very roots.

Horton associates this with reified or fetishized sociological work and consciousness. It
is characterized largely by what it excludes, namely, "any theory and practice which
deals critically with the totality of man and society" ( 1971, p. 184). Empiricoanalytic
sociology of this sort is seen as a burial ground for radical ideas. "In its cemeteries the
critical and human elements of the language of protest have been laid to rest, while their
reactionary ghosts live in the fetishes of survey research" ( 1970, p. 185). For Horton, it
is only from the holistic structural view of the individual that sociology and society can
be sufficiently subjected to radical criticism and change.

An early step in the fetishization of alienation involves the valueneutralization, or

death, of alienation through fragmentation. As Horton put it:

Alienation is broken into bits, into distinctive and separate cognitive

and affective dimensions. The sociologist independently of his own
values can now determine whether alienation exists and whether
individuals think it is a discontent. Thus protest against fragmentation
in the name of a unified theory of man is itself fragmented ( 1970, p.
185).

The next step in the fetishization process "requires turning alienation, a protest against
the thing-like character of labor, into a thing-like possession of the individual mind"
( Horton, 1970, p. 185). The normative-evaluative dimension of alienation is separated
from its cognitive dimension. Is is then deleted from the scientific research process or
neutralized and reduced to the reported emotions and attitudes of individual
respondents. Alienation, as a total condition of dehumanization, is fragmented,
neutralized, and reduced to psychological characteristics pertaining to the individual's
private world. For Horton, this "leads at best to an abstract theory of individual
psychological discontent and its control" ( 1970, p. 186). This suggests, among other
things, that we would be better off if the term alienation were eliminated from the
scientific vocabulary and replaced with more accurate ones.

Efforts of this sort at empiricoanalytic operationalization are guided largely by the quest
for scientific objectivity and a certain pretence to the ideology and practice of value-
free sociology. These are among the conditions of reified scientific work and
consciousness that have facilitated the ironic transformation of alienation from a radical
weapon of attack on alienated labor and commodity fetishism to a fetishistic,
commodity-like concept in its own right. The point that Horton stressed is that
"alienation as a commodity-like concept is merely a way of reifying the world, not a
way of changing or understanding it through practice in the world" ( 1970, p. 186). As a
commodity-like concept, alienation has become a highly marketable item with a
flourishing career. Theorists and empiricists alike have competed to appropriate it, as a
fashionable label and an intellectual commodity in the academic marketplace. The
preoccupation with these concerns within empiricoanalytic sociology has contributed
not only to the fetishization of

-26-
alienation; it has also helped to divert attention away from the classic concern for a
radical, humanistic solution. The future career of the transmogrified concept is
nevertheless guaranteed because it produces work and money for the intellectuals while
excluding any possibility for a critical sociology that takes into account the totality of
the human individual, society, and their historical development.

It should be noted that empiricoanalytic sociology does not have a monopoly on the
creation and utilization of reified categories and accounts. A certain reifying process is
generally at play in any effort at abstracting the concrete world through words,
categories, concepts, models, or theoretical statements. However, there is an inherent
tendency in the process of abstraction to treat categories and concepts as objects in their
own right rather than referent tools for the description and analysis of concrete social
relations. Reification of this type involves the attribution of thing-like properties to
categories and concepts that they do not, in fact, have. As reified products of
intellectual labor, they not only take on the character of things; they also acquire a
relatively autonomous, hypostatizing, phantom-like objectivity in ways which often
distort or conceal, rather than illuminate, the human and hermeneutic character of social
relations.

Marx also used reified categories (e.g., class) and concepts (e.g., the state) in order to
raise relevant questions. But as Heller ( 1990) pointed out, categories and concepts like
"rational action" or "praxis" are, by definition, nonreified in that the human subject is
treated as the author of his or her action. The main point here is that a theoretical and
empirical sociology that seeks critical knowledge devoted to an emancipatory interest
in uncovering the conditions of constraint and domination in society must operate with
both reified and nonreified (or dereified) categories and concepts. A critical science of
this sort must proceed under the guidance of a philosophical paradigm (or metatheory)
thatwhich allows for the dereification of its categories and concepts. An ongoing
process of critical selfreflection and practical discourse is required on the part of the
analyst engaged in theoretical and empirical work. This is an essential requirement for a
science that proceeds on behalf of emancipatory (as distinct from merely technical)
interests in society in the pursuit of applied critical knowledge.

Another type of reification associated more distinctly with Marx's critique of

commodity fetishism is also relevant to the present discussion. The categories,
concepts, and accounts (theoretical and empirical) that intellectuals create and use on
behalf of their own extrinsic professional interests are also products of human labor that
become objectified and transformed into commodities for exchange and profit. This
occurs not only in the academic marketplace, but also in the applied realm of
professional consultancies. These commodities create jobs and sustain careers for
intellectuals and social practitioners alike.

A double-layered process of reification is at play that intersects both the professional

and lay worlds. In the process of exchange within and between the two worlds, the
social character of productive intellectual and practical activity appears as something
alien and objective to the individuals involved. Thus, "the relations connecting the labor
of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relations between
individuals at work, but as they really are,

-27-
material relations between persons and social relations between things" ( Marx [ 1867]
1959, pp. 72-72; see also [ 1857-8] 1973, p. 157; [ 1894] 1967:380-382). 2

Reified thinking by social scientists about themselves, their work, and their society is
often projected in subtle ways that contribute to reifying practices in the lay world. It
lends itself, both deliberately and unintentionally, to apologetic rationalizations and
legitimistic remedial prescriptions that serve dominant interests in society. Reified
thinking emerges as a form of alienated thinking that blurs or masks the extent to which
people operating in both the scientific and social worlds are dependent on hypostatized
social forces of their own making. It consequently disguises and undermines the
dialectical relationship between theory and practice.

Reified Practices in the Workplace

Reified sociological thinking about alienation contributes in several ways to a theory
and science of manipulative practices in social life. Because the problem of alienation is
dehumanized, psychologized, and relocated in the individual, solutions also tend to start
with the individual. Individual adaptation to the dominant values and institutions of
society is emphasized. The necessity for a fundamental transformation of existing social
relations is de-emphasized or entirely dismissed in the analysis. Only the feelings and
attitudes of individuals appear to be of central concern. In the specific realm of work,
the strategic object of study is not work itself but the reaction of workers to it. Primacy
is given to adaptive changes in workers' attitudes through manipulative environmental
changes within the existing structure and process of the work situation. Emancipatory
interests in genuinely improving the human quality of working life are consequently
superseded by the controlling technical interests of management. Reified workplace
practices of this sort range from scientific management and labor rationalization
policies to human relations strategies and contemporary job redesign programs.

Taylor ( 1911) influential scientific management policies, which were initiated in the
last decades of the nineteenth century, and Mayo ( 1933) human relations school
provide two prime examples in the early history of industrial relations research which
has proceeded along these lines. The object of these studies was to abolish, not the
objective realities of alienated work and degraded working conditions, but the worker's
awareness of those realities. Taylor's emphasis was on achieving higher productivity,
profitability, and control over the workplace. Mayo and his followers were concerned
more with integrating the worker into the industrial enterprise without altering the basic
penetration of capitalist relations into the workplace. Both shared an explicit interest in
controlling or manipulating the worker on behalf of management. The adherents of
Taylorism emphasized labor rationalization strategies and changes in the top
management of industrial enterprises in order to facilitate the organization and control
of work and production. 3 Mayo's followers emphasized engineered changes in the
production process involving teamwork and cooperation within the

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workplace. Administrative elites in business organizations were trained in the science of

human relations and the skills of organizing cohesive work groups that encouraged
worker compliance with management policies. A concerted effort was made to give a
seemingly more "human face" to what was essentially a top-down manipulative strategy
in the labor process.

The literature abounds with other studies that recognize and describe degraded working
conditions in considerable detail, but the focus in many ultimately shifts to an analysis
of adaptive coping practices and informal ways in which workers actually adjust
themselves to their alienated or degraded working conditions. We seldom gain any real
insight into the larger structural character of exploitative relations between workers and
management. As Braverman sees it, "This leaves to sociology the function which it
shares with personnel administration, of assaying not the nature of work but the degree
of adjustment of the worker" ( 1974, p. 29). These studies consequently lend
themselves, often deliberately and by commission, to policies and recommendations
that facilitate adaptive solutions on behalf of management interests and corporate
objectives. 4

The more sophisticated reincarnations of the human relations movement today involve
a variety of advanced job redesign strategies, including the reportedly more humane
quality of working life and sociotechnics programs, job enlargement measures, and
codetermination policies ( Kaufman, 1993, Giordano, 1992). Job redesign strategies of
this sort are created and implemented, not from the standpoint of the worker, but from
that of management. As Rinehart ( 1987, p. 192; see also 1986) put it, job-redesign
strategies and quality of working-life programs are undertaken by management for its
own purposes. These strategies are generally introduced by corporations in ways that
imply a humane commitment to improving the quality of working life. But they are
pursued only to the extent to which they are compatible with management interests and
corporate goals (e.g., cutting costs, maximizing profits, improving efficiency, and
raising productivity). Job-redesign strategies are also used to appropriate workers'
knowledge, dilute shop-floor militancy, insulate management from the prospect of
workplace unionization, weaken the existing power of the labor unions in the
workplace, and co-opt resistant workers into willing collaborators with management
and its policies (cf. Berberoglu, 1993; Giordano, 1992; Story, 1991; Panitch and Swartz,
1988; Wells 1987).

The new managerial style encourages greater employee participation and more personal
and intimate labor-management relations through a variety of formal company
programs, such as quality control circles, participatory management schemes, and
quality of working-life projects. One of the aims is to nurture attitudes and feelings
among workers that contribute to the smooth functioning of the workplace without
actually providing them with any real control over managerial decisions. As Howard
( 1985) study of the "brave new workplace" shows, the purpose of the new corporate
ideology is to imbue work with meaning and to instill in workers a "feeling" of control
while actually obfuscating manipulative managerial practices.

Strategies for promoting workers' feelings of satisfaction with the job,

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enlarging the variety of work tasks, or advancing integrative sociotechnical systems and
quality circles in industrial enterprises are not dealienation strategies, as they are not
implemented by management for the genuine humanization of working life. As
Rinehart correctly points out, they are used primarily to intensify labor, reduce labor
costs, and meet production exigencies that a highly specialized division of labor cannot
handle economically. The human relations approach--from its auspicious initiation by
Mayo and his associates to its more sophisticated contemporary practices--has operated
as an arm of management in solving its problems. There is in this evolving science of
human relations "an irreducible element of anti-labor bias and no remedy for alienated
labor" ( Rinehart, 1987, p. 193). The science reflected here is indeed a science for
managers.

Despite protests to the contrary among the proponents of this applied research
enterprise, their top-down remedial prescriptions are formulated in ways that essentially
favor the technical interests of management and capital over the emancipatory interests
of human labor. Applied scientific knowledge is generated and passed on in ways that
lead to the reduction, not of alienated labor, but of workers' dissatisfaction with their
work. The psychologized emphasis on workers' feelings, attitudes, and reactions to
work facilitate adaptive solutions that are necessarily consistent with management
policies and corporate objectives. It should not be surprising that science and
management appear as compatible bedfellows. The science of an intellectual elite lends
itself to the needs and interests of the corporate-managerial elite. An ideological pro-
management disposition is inherent in the very nature of a science that draws its
guidelines for social research from within its own frame of reference. The scientific
commitment to value-neutrality and predictive efficiency takes priority over humanistic
commitments and guidelines for genuinely improving the quality of working life.
Labor's emancipatory interests in the humanization of work are largely supplanted by
management's technical interests in the rationalized control over it.

Dealienation and Workers' Control: The Early

Yugoslav and Israeli Kibbutz Experiments with
Workplace Democracy
Several viable alternatives to these scientific experiments with engineered job designs
and promanagement practices are worth considering, as significant advances have been
made toward modifying some of the conditions and reducing some of the specified
forms of alienation in the domains of work, organizations, and intentional communities.
The early Yugoslav experiments with direct worker participation in self-managing
collectives and the Israeli experience with kibbutz communities and industries represent
two paramount efforts at attacking the problem of alienation from the integrated
standpoint of all participants in the working community. The search for practical
dealienation strategies in the workplace is guided by humanistic principles specified by
Marx and others regarding the character of a genuinely human social life. It is
organized largely

-30-

around theory-guided social experiments with participatory democracy, collective

decision making, power equalization, and self-government in the vital spheres of work
and the community. Part of the challenge lies in implementing strategies for the radical
and progressive humanization of working life while at the same time meeting basic
exigencies of production.

Practical dealienation strategies that were developed in the early Yugoslav collectives
revolved around the issue of workers' control over the process of production and the
formation of policy. One of the aims was to ensure that all participants were given more
responsibility in decisions concerning a wide range of work-related matters, such as
hirings, firings, promotions, salaries, safety measures, and working conditions. These
efforts at democratizing the decisionmaking process were channeled through elected
workers' councils, the highest body of authority and the central vehicle for
implementing direct workers' democracy. Managers were directly subordinate and
accountable to the council. They were normally bound by the council's decisions and
tended to earn the same income as workers. Organized efforts were also aimed at
enhancing communal participation, social solidarity, and consensus-building programs
regarding the collective's basic needs, goals, and policies ( Horvat, Markovi, and
Supek, 1975; Markovi, 1981, 1989).

The Israeli kibbutz also revolves around self-management principles, power

equalization measures, and direct democratic procedures. Weekly general assemblies
and the election of officers on a rotating basis are the main structural vehicles of the
community. A system of collective ownership and measures for equalizing communal
wealth are also central features of the classic kibbutz. One of the principal aims is to
counter some of the alienating consequences commonly associated with private
ownership, hierarchical authority, and ensuing problems of powerlessness. Practical
dealienation strategies are particularly aimed at reducing the structural complexity of
social organization and radically equalizing the distribution of power in kibbutz
communities and their industrial plants. Revised and updated strategies for
decentralizing and further democratizing the decision-making process in kibbutz
factories are based largely on experiments with participatory democracy and workers'
self-management. In several instances, job enrichment programs and sociotechnical
intervention strategies have been introduced within the existing frame of these
experiments. Human relations strategies of this sort are implemented according to the
common needs and interests of all kibbutz members ( Rosner and Mittelberg, 1989; see
also Rosner et al., 1990).

A note of caution is in order regarding some of the problems and limitations associated
with these experiments in light of the current crisis in the former Yugoslavia and the
changing conditions in Israeli society. Self-managing collectives must regularly take
into account the ultimate impact of external societal conditions on their internal
operation. Perhaps the most serious obstacle in the Yugoslav case came from outside
political interference and state penetration into the internal affairs of the collectives.
Despite egalitarian participation in the management of the collectives, they were
ultimately faced

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with a pervasive penetration of outside interests associated with the

Sovietization of Yugoslav society following World War II and the formation of a federal
partystate following the death of President Tito in 1980. According to Sekelj ( 1993),
Yugoslav disintegration and the ensuing civil war were rooted primarily in these
changing political conditions and in the general failure of modernization and the
resurgence of ethnic nationalism. Regional inequality, economic stagnation, high
unemployment, rising inflation, and increasing indebtedness also contributed to
thwarted expectations and a growing sense of pessimism and cynicism which prevailed
in Yugoslavia by the 1980s. Whitehorn ( 1989) found that psychological powerlessness
and work dissatisfaction levels among factory employees in the collectives that he
studied were significantly on the rise, and a clear majority of employees no longer felt
that the workers' councils represented their class interests. These conditions pose a
striking contrast to an earlier era of economic growth, decentralization,
democratization, pluralism, high expectations, and a general optimism in the larger
Yugoslav population.

The specific problems confronted by the collectives included the subversive infiltration
of technocratic and politicobureaucratic interests associated with the authoritarian
apparatus of state power. Hegemonic state control extended to most spheres of human
activity under the state-sponsored ideology of economic rationality. The very notion of
workers' self-management--the Yugoslav trademark for four decades--emerged as the
official top-down ideology of the party-state. As Golubovi put it, "This so-called self-
governing socialism, proclaimed in the 1950s by the Yugoslav leadership, became little
more than a facade." It served "to mask the persistent and determined authoritarian one-
partyrule" and "the continued subversion by the state of both the functions and the
rights of self-management bodies" ( 1992, p. 30). The ideology of workers'
selfmanagement and self-governing socialism functioned as a tool for the legitimization
of monopoly political power in the post-Tito era.

In the Israeli case, the problem of outside interference lies more in the cultural sphere,
where kibbutz autonomy and identity are threatened by the penetration of a hegemonic
capitalist culture and subversive system of external values ( Rosner and Mittelberg,
1989). Internal kibbutz problems are linked to basic external changes in the larger
economic, occupational, and social structures of Israeli society. According to Rosner
and Mittelberg, this has had a subversive impact on the transition from small,
homogeneous communities of young people to larger, multigenerational communities
with more marked age differences and a greater variation in cultural backgrounds.
These ensuing internal changes have had a weakening impact on the original value
consensus and social cohesion of the communities. The rising standard of living and
changing consumption patterns are among other factors contributing to an increasing
internal complexity in kibbutz communities. More recently, excessively high inflation
rates and costly national security policies generated by the Israeli state have had a
profound impact on the financial survival of most kibbutzim.

Recent studies of worker participation in other countries point to other strategies for
democratizing the workplace. 5 For example, Sandberg et al. ( 1992)

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highlighted the political and organizational impact that unions can have on worker
participation and the decentralization of workplace authority structures in Sweden. This
is associated with the enactment of national laws that have been instrumental in
legitimizing increased union and worker participation in managerial decisionmaking.
Others point to opportunities provided by the new technologies and computerized
production strategies. However, Giordano concludes in her study of a California aircraft
manufacturer that the new industrial relations measures (e.g. quality circles and
computerized machining) are ultimately "part of the historical continuation to control
production, enlist labor cooperation, and reduce uncertainty in the marketplace" ( 1992,
p. 210).

A distinguishing feature of the early Yugoslav and Israeli experiments with workplace
democracy should be highlighted in conclusion. These experiments are grounded in a
praxis-centeredmerger of normative theory, humanistic philosophy, and applied
empirical research. The feasibility of empiricoanalytic survey procedures and job-
redesign strategies is considered within the normativeevaluative frame of these
collective experiments. A certain political-practical engagement in the applied research
process is required on the part of the analyst in the continuing search for humanistic
solutions to new and changing forms of alienation in the workplace. An important
aspect of the Israeli kibbutz experience, which distinguishes it from its Yugoslav
counterpart, lies in its broadly integrative and comprehensive character. While the
Yugoslav experience is restricted to a specific domain of human activity and social life
(i.e., that of work and organizations), the kibbutz experience involves a broader, far-
reaching, holistic integration of almost all aspects of social activity. This includes an
organized effort at overcoming alienating divisions between mental and manual labor,
between the workplace and the home, between urban and rural life, and between work
and leisure. 6

Despite the numerous and often insurmountable problems that confront the Yugoslav
and Israeli experiments (see also, Flaherty, 1992; Stanojevi, 1990), significant
practical advances have been made. They provide important leads for a dialectical
synthesis of theory and practice. A fundamental point of contrast to reifying
promanagement practices associated with many of the new industrial relations
strategies lies in the radical reorganization of work and a sustained effort at humanizing
working life on behalf of all participants in the labor process.

Concluding Remarks
This inquiry into the reifying process of applied empiricoanalytic work in contemporary
sociology underscores the call for a revitalization of sociology's classic moral-practical
tradition. Marx's concept of alienated labor was singled out for special attention with an
eye to "unpacking" the empiricoanalytic process associated with the production and
application of reified sociological knowledge about work and alienation. The reifying
process begins with a strategic effort at transforming the classic concept into a
fragmented set of objectified analytic categories and empirical measures that are
amenable to the methods of attitudinal

-33-

survey research. The normative thrust and practical humanistic intent of the original
concept are seriously undermined by this scientific turn in its contemporary career. The
guidelines for reified sociological work of this kind stem from within the scientific
sociological community--a community of professional knowledge producers with a
narrative voice and a self-sustaining discourse that stresses the ethic of value-neutrality,
scientific objectivity, and predictive efficiency.

The consequences are far-reaching when reified scientific categories and accounts are
projected from the scientific world onto the practical world of work. Reified scientific
knowledge about work and alienation in the workplace lends itself to a manipulative
shaping of adaptive responses among workers to their existing, and often degrading,
conditions of work. Objectified, "dedialecticized" knowledge of this kind is applied, in
the first instance, not toward the reduction of alienation or the genuine humanization of
working life, but toward regulatory practices in the workplace. The dominant technical
interests of capital (e.g., improving efficiency, raising productivity, cutting costs, and
maximizing profits) are systematically favored over the emancipatory interests of
human labor.

A double-layered process of reified scientific work and consciousness is at play. Reified

scientific accounts of working conditions are produced and then applied toward the
rationalization and control of labor on behalf of management through the
implementation of various job-redesign programs, employee participation schemes, and
quality of working-life projects. Reified knowledge is extended from the scientific
world of the industrial analysts and human relations experts to the social world of work
and the creation of reified thinking among workers regarding their working conditions.
One of the aims of the new management style and, reportedly, more humane corporate
ideology is to infuse meaning into work and instill in workers a "feeling" of control
without actually providing them with any real control over managerial choices and
decisions. The exploitive realities of work are blurred or disguised, and manipulative
managerial practices are obfuscated by these reifying, promanagement strategies.
Feelings of satisfaction with the job are artificially improved, productivity is increased,
and managerial control is sustained.

An alternative approach to theory, research, and practice emerges from this

investigation. It begins with an explicit and overtly normative theory of the individual,
the society, and their historical development. It is grounded in humanistic principles and
guided by an emancipatory interest in the conditions under which people progressively
become free to realize their creative capacities for human growth. An ongoing process
of practical discourse is required on the part of the analyst, which must be directed
toward strategic action in relation to moral-practical judgments and prognoses for
ameliorative change. It entails a sustained, self-reflective process of critical awareness
and engagement in the practice of sociology, including theoretical, empirical, and
remedial practices. This involves the kind of emancipatory self-reflection that releases
the subject (e.g., the scientist or sociologist) from dependence on hypostatized powers
of his

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or her own making (e.g., reified scientific categories, accounts, and practices).
The analyst is cast in dialectical opposition to powerful reifying tendencies associated
with the creation and application of scientific knowledge. Critical science, as such,
serves as a "dialecticizing" check against reifying tendencies and practices within and
between the scientific and lay worlds.

Giddens's notion of the "double hermeneutic" lends further insight into the self-
reflective process in sociological work that cross-cuts the two worlds. A double process
of translation or interpretation on the part of the analyst is required in the interplay
between social science (e.g., the metalanguages and categories invented by social
scientists) and those whose activities compose its subject matter (e.g. the meaningful
social world as constituted by lay actors). The interpretative categories and sociological
descriptions created by the analyst are aimed, not only at "mediating the frames of
meaning within which actors orient their conduct"; they also require "an effort of
translation in and out of the frames of meaning" in the practice of sociology ( 1984, p.
284).

Despite inherent epistemic differences, this conception of a critical social science is not
always necessarily or entirely incompatible with empiricoanalytic strategies and
techniques. For example, survey research methods can be applied toward an empirical
investigation into Marx's theory and concept of alienated labor while at the same time
meeting some of the fundamental requirements for a critical social science (cf.
Bonacich, 1991; Whitehorn, 1989; Greenberg, 1986; Archibald, 1976). Marx ([ 1880]
1956) attempted this to some extent when he focused on the objective conditions of
work, rather than the feelings or behavior of the workers he polled in his own empirical
study. Under certain specified conditions (e.g., kibbutz industries and workers' self-
management collectives), empiricoanalytic procedures and job-redesign programs are
also appropriate to the extent that they adhere to the kind of humanistic premises and
emancipatory value commitments specified by a critical, praxis-centered social science.
This entails a qualified, epistemic subordination of strict positivist logic to the overall
logic of dialectical inquiry and moral-practical discourse. It also involves the
subordination of survey research procedures and job-redesign strategies to a normative
paradigm and an evaluative frame of reference. A balancing emphasis is placed on the
creation and application of knowledge that serves technical, practical, and emancipatory
interests alike. A sustained process of critical selfreflection and moral-practical
engagement throughout the entire research process is required on the part of the analyst,
from the selection and formulation of the research problem to the way in which
scientific knowledge is produced, applied, and ultimately received in the lay social
world.

Notes
Author's note: I wish to thank John Horton ( University of California at Los Angeles),
Menachem Rosner (Institute for Research of the Kibbutz and the Cooperative Idea,
University of Haifa) and Zagorka Golubovi (Centre for Philosophy and Social Theory,
University of Belgrade) for their comments on earlier drafts of this paper,

-35-

although I bear full responsibility for the views expressed herein.

1. Empirico-analytic work of this kind is distinguished largely by an emphasis on the

 ethic of value-neutrality, a quest for scientific objectivity, functionalist middle-
range theorizing, and the use of attitudinal survey methods in social research. See
Seeman for a defense ( 1959, 1976) and rethinking ( 1991) of this approach to
contemporary alienation theory and research.

2. For further discussion of the reification problematic pertaining to the present

inquiry, see Lukcs ([ 1923] 1971), Israel ( 1976), and Schweitzer ( 1992).

3. Lenin ([ 1918] 1965:295) also argued for the study and qualified use of Taylor's
scientific management practices, along with other contemporary capitalist
achievements in science and technology, as part of the programme for building
socialism after the revolution in Russia. Gramsci ([ 1929-35] 1971:279-318), on the
other hand, was considerably more apprehensive. He saw Taylorism as a
hegemonic ideological force and precursor of the most sophisticated mode of
domination under capitalism. With the implementation of scientific management
practices and the increasing diffusion of technobureaucratic norms in the
workplace, he foresaw that workers would be subordinated to machine
specialization and reduced to obedient automatons in the name of efficiency. This
involved strategies for increasing productivity by regulating the entire moral-
psychological being of the worker, with the ultimate aim of creating a routinized
psychic structure for work (see Boggs 1976:47). For Gramsci, the rationalization of
work and production occurs in ways which undermine not only the capacity of
workers for creative and critical thinking but also the de-reifying impulse for
counter-hegemonic resistance to their conditions of domination and exploitation.

4. See Kaufman ( 1993) and Brown ( 1992) for a more comprehensive historical
discussion of industrial relations theory and research pertaining to the present
inquiry.

5. Studies of workers' control and workplace democracy in other countries relevant to

the present discussion are highlighted in Lichtenstein and Harris ( 1993), Sandberg
et al. ( 1992), Rosner and Putterman ( 1992), Albert and Hahnel ( 1991), Szell
( 1988), Greenberg ( 1986), and Whyte and Blasi ( 1984).

6. A more extensive comparative analysis of the Yugoslav and Israeli experiments and
the numerous problems associated with these experiments appears in Schweitzer
( 1993).

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4
"But What Can 'One' Do?": Agency
and Alienation in Economic Crises
Peter Archibald
In Karl Marx's relatively early writings, economic crises are perhaps the major
sources of working-class action for reform and revolution. On one hand, crises
deprive workers--to such an extent that they eradicate any interest they might
have had in the political economic system--and provoke them to rebel; on the
other, crises expose, weaken, and delegitimate the bourgeoisie and its state to the
point where workers turn toward socialism and become favorably situated to
bring it about. 1 However, in Marx's late writings, crises by themselves become
considerably less important as direct sources of working class action. Indeed, at
least successful historic agency by the working class may actually lessen during
economic crises, especially because competition among workers for
employment destroys and prevents much classwide organization and struggle. 2

In two earlier article 3 I indicated how these two diametrically opposed views
characterize many claims regarding the Great Depression of the 1930s, and then
attempted to "test" them on Hamilton, Ontario, workers during that period;
Hamilton's local economy, which centered heavily around iron and steel
production and the manufacture of capital and consumer goods and construction
with these as raw materials, having been especially hard hit by the Depression.

Drawing from archival materials and in-depth interviews with 200 retired
workers who lived and worked for pay in Hamilton for at least two years during
the 1930s, I in fact found evidence supporting both the optimistic and
pessimistic scenarios, which suggests that we should pay more attention to
additional circumstances that lead economic deprivation to produce either
rebellion/agency or conformity/alienation. Nevertheless, there was much more
support for pessimism than optimism. Thus, overt conformity and covert,
pragmatic "deviance" predominated over collective rebellion, even among
workers whose

-37-

subsistence needs were deprived. Furthermore, within the decade of the 1930s,
strikes and political protests decreased rather than increased as the economy
worsened and competition among workers increased. Strikes and protests
undertaken in poorer economic times were more likely to be met with repression
and fail, and failure was more likely to lead to fear, withdrawal, and apathy than
further rebellion. The interviews indicated that deprivation was far more likely
to lead to individual or familial self-preservation than collective frustration and
aggression against employers and governors; and to preoccupation with,
"regression" to, and "fixation" on lower-order subsistence needs than with those
having to do with social inequality and injustice.

These conclusions are consistent with the proposition that economic crises
usually shift the balance of power toward ruling classes and make workers feel
more powerless, such that they retreat rather than go on the offensive. The same
is true for my finding that deprived workers who did rebel tended to have
employers who were especially dependent on their individual skill or experience
and/or more social support for rebellion from family members, workmates, or
political comrades. On the other hand, consciously expressed feelings of
powerlessness were not taken up in a concerted way in the earlier articles.

I begin the present analysis by filling the latter lacuna. Having done so, I then
ask whether the responses of Hamilton workers to the "Great Recessions" of the
early 1980s and 1990s have been similar to, or different from, those of earlier
generations to the Great Depression. Finally, I briefly take up some of the
theoretical, practical, and ethical implications of these analyses.

"What Strike in the 30s? You've Got to Be

Kidding!"
"I was angry! But there was nothing I could do about it. They considered I was a
permanent fixture and they knew I couldn't do very much about it." 4 This
worker, "Ralph," had been laid off for nearly two years between 1931 and 1933
and was unable to find alternative employment. Another worker, Don, was let go
from his truck-driving job soon after the stock market crash of 1929, and his
subsequent employment was sporadic. Although not unionized, he and the other
drivers on one job did strike. However, their employer "forced us back to work,
and we had to go. . . . The company said no, and the drivers just figured they had
no choice. We had it in mind that there were hundreds more out there, looking
for work." 5

"There was an open shop, no contract. We were getting 95 [cents an hour], and
the [electrical] contractors offered us 85, and everybody was insulted. So we
went on strike, and we ended up getting 75, and no contract." 6 "They wouldn't
say nothing [to managers about poor pay and working conditions at International
Harvester, Westinghouse Electric, or Firestone (tires)]. They wouldn't have been
there five minutes. They weren't complaining. The gate was full of people trying
to get in." 7 "From '31 to '39, it was nip-and-go, all the time. . . . If you had a job,
you didn't complain[.] I had a job [at the Steel Company of Canada, "Stelco"] I
didn't like at all, but I held on to it. . . . In those days, you were more

-38-

acceptable; [you took] whatever you could get. . . . No, there wasn't [any Wk of
unions in the 30s.] But later on [in the 40s], when things got busy, and the
workers got together, it was fixed. The union had no trouble organizing." 8

"Tammie" felt that her employers at Mercury [a maker of hosiery] Mills were
dependent enough upon her experience and skill that she could not only
complain when new employees were taken off the street and given the same pay
as her, but participate in several strikes, and lead one. However, "There was no
union. We were trying to get one in, but they [management] never give us a
chance to form. [I] was a member, [but] I guess I would've been out on my ear if
I had [admitted it to managers.]" As for the strikes, her workmates often did not
trust each other--there was animosity especially among different ethnic groups--
and they "got scared, see; scared of their job. . . . They were scared to death."
The strikes were all lost. For that matter, as the sole provider for her parents and
siblings for a number of years, even fearless Tammie had her limits. She
attended the biggest demonstration of the period and called the police bullies,
but she would not identify herself and instead melted into the crowd. 9

After having had to give up homesteading in the Canadian northwest, "Doris"

and her husband could only find work as a maid and chauffeur in the homes of
Hamilton's wealthy. Doris was hot-tempered and would only tolerate a certain
amount of deprivation and frustration, and at one point she was promptly fired
for "talking back" to an employer. However, the market for domestics was fairly
good at that point (about 1937), and they immediately found new employment
down the street. On the other hand, Doris was well aware that domestics were
not in a good position to organize and rebel collectively: "[People] would of
[complained more] but they were too scared. What would we do if we protested
in one of them homes . .? You wouldn't have a job when you go back."
"Somebody else would take it!" 10

The Recent, "Great" Recessions: Has Very Much

Changed?
Given the "Great Compromise" among capital, the state and labor during and
immediately following World War II and the relatively prosperous and stable
years until the mid-1970s, one might expect huge differences between the 1930s
and the 1980s-90s. After all, in the postwar period, capital and states could pass
on increased costs to customers and taxpayers and therefore had less need to
take them out of workers; cyclical economic crises became fewer, farther apart,
and less severe; and workers were so cushioned against them by partially state-
funded unemployment and health insurance that their labor and they themselves
had become "decommodified." 11 In the successor to the optimistic scenario,
workers had rebelled against economic deprivation during the 1930s, but not in
the postwar period, because there was "affluence" instead of deprivation.
Alternatively, workers had not rebelled successfully in the 1930s and instead
made significant gains only in later and better times. On the other hand, with
their own social democratic governments, workers then became so successful
that they subsequently rebelled less and settled instead for small-scale,
incremental

-39-
 reforms. 12

However well these paradigms may have applied to the postwar period, they are
now "history." Even large private corporations became highly subject to markets
and competition, attempts by them and their unionized employees to return to
the protectionism of the 1930s were not very successful, and capital's
subsequent strategies--closing or technologically transforming and "downsizing"
plants in the developed West, transfering production to low-wage areas and
subcontractors, and/or extracting various concessions from smaller numbers of
remaining employers--have shifted the balance of power greatly toward capital
and against labor. Furthermore, rather than being in a position to even contain,
let alone rectify, these problems, states have been "held for ransom" by
multinational corporations prepared to move unless they get concessions from
workers and states. Indeed, even social democratic governments have now
disemployed thousands of workers and drastically cut back the very services that
are supposed to have led to decommodification. 13

Workers in Hamilton have been very much subject to these recent recessions and
restructurings. In 1983, those temporarily or permanently laid off in the
Hamilton region represented 21.3% of those in the province of Ontario as a
whole. Most had worked for Stelco and Dofasco, the two largest steel producers.
Between 1983 and 1985 two more of Hamilton's "Big Five" employers,
International Harvester and Firestone (tires), downsized and then shutdown
operations altogether. Employees of the fifth, Westinghouse (electric), were not
subject to such massive layoffs, but there were enough to make them insecure
well. 14

Hamilton has been a strong union city, and the United Steelworkers' Union
(USW) actually struck against Stelco for 125 days in 1981. However, during and
immediately after the strike, a sizable chunk of Stelco's share of the market was
taken over by Dofasco, which was traditionally much more paternalistic in its
labor relations and was non-unionized. Stelco and its workers suffered greatly a
result, but in the process Stelco managed to create its very own, large "reserve
army." Large numbers of workers were placed on "indefinite layoff" but then
recalled on occasion, most importantly, it appears, to threaten remaining, fully
employed workers. Stelco also served layoff notices to workers who had never
been let go before and who were never let go after receiving the notices, either.

With persistent rumors that the plant would be shut down altogether, Stelco then
restructured. Entire steelmaking processes were fully automated, and some were
completely eliminated. Electricians and mechanics were amalgamated into a
single "supertrade" or "multicraft," and machine operators were often ordered to
train these tradespeople to replace themselves. Workers were then pressured to
work overtime so that laid-off workers would not have to be recalled, and their
benefits paid, even during serious labor shortages.

Initially, USW leaders boycotted multicraft training and tried to discourage

members from accepting overtime. However, the workers were frightened of
losing their jobs if they did not agree to overtime, and some welcomed the
opportunity to regain the income lost in the 1981 strike, or simply to increase

-40-

their income in general. Some argued that they were going to lose their jobs
after all, or that fellow workers would work the overtime anyway.

Selective recalls from the internal labor pool, "bumping" of operators by

tradesmen and those with more seniority in general, and the excessive, even
illegal, amounts of overtime created serious conflicts of interest and overt
antagonism within the union local; especially between laid-off workers and
those who were still employed, but also among the latter themselves. Desperate
to mend these rifts and regain some of its former power, the union took legal
action to stop the company from using overtime instead of recalling laid-off
workers. However, the company won the case, overtimers managed to unseat
many antiovertime stewards, and union leaders "pleaded for mercy." 15 Workers
struck again in 1990, for 106 days, but this was mainly a desperate attempt to
prevent Stelco from breaking the union altogether. As in 1981, the strike was not
a total loss, yet many strikers were never called back, and in 1992, of the
remaining 5,400 unionized workers 500 were laid off. At that point, the local
union agreed to accept multicrafting in exchange for an additional year of
benefits for the newly-laid-off workers. 16

Some of those in the 1992 layoff sabotaged their machinery before the end of
their last shift. Many of those in the "pool" have leafleted their still-employed
union brothers, begging them not to do overtime. Some of the employed have, in
fact, refused to do overtime, but others would not even take the leaflets, and
instead laughed in the faces of the unemployed and even threatened their lives if
they persisted in criticizing those who accepted overtime. 17

Divisions and resentment are rife among workers, and there is considerably less
interaction with workmates and participation in the union local. "[Tradespeople]
are now taking them [production jobs] over. This has created a lot of anger."
"These guys [overtimers] are incredibly greedy." "Stelco is doing a very good
job at keeping people divided. . . . There's a lot more tension now on the shop
floor. If the guys in our shop just stuck together, we'd get something done, but
they don't. . . . There's been a real big increase in this since the recession."
"[W]orkers don't socialize with other workers anymore." "The guys don't
support the union. One guy said, 'What's the union ever done for me?'" 18

As for feelings of insecurity and powerlessness, "The guys are very, very
scared . . . about losing their jobs." "[I]n a couple of years these jobs might not
be there. . . . You're always on edge[.]" "It is a company market right now."
"There's not as many grievances now because they don't want to draw attention
to themselves. The union doesn't have the bargaining power they used to have.
The company can do whatever it wants. . . . There's not many jobs out there. You
gotta be careful." "With the recession and places closing down, you have to
work more hand-in-hand with the company. It's not worth it to go on strike
anymore." "None of us are too happy about [multicrafting.] Stelco has all the
power. The union is only able to curb how it abuses its power." "Everybody
knows the company is in financial trouble; otherwise, they'd never get away
with what they're doing." "It's really a world recession." "The biggest thing is
holding on to what you have, not asking for more." "[T]he power of the union
changes with

-41-

the economy. We're not in a position to negotiate for wage increases now." 19

Looking after themselves as individuals and "making do" appear to constitute

the agenda of most workers. "You just take one day at a time." "You gotta look
after yourself; try and learn more jobs and cover your ass. . . . I'm not active [in
the union]. I just pay my dues. The recession is always on the back of my mind
but I try not to worry about it." "Ever since the strike [ 1990], I haven't had
much to do with the union." "Through the 1980s, it wasn't all that bad. I
accepted the 6-month callback as my lot." "The only way I can handle [being
called back only occasionally] is to get out and walk my dog. If I think about it,
it gets to me. So I try not to think about it." 20

These responses have been still more prevalent among nonunionized workers.
Dofasco overextended itself and by 1993 had permanently laid off 5,000
employees. Most of those who kept their jobs appeared relieved and grateful: "I
feel lucky. I was kinda worried when I heard rumors they were going to lay off
as high as 11 year's [seniority]." "It's scary as hell." Some publicly apologized
for the company's decision: "The company has to do it if we [sic] want to stay
profitable. It used to be that Dofasco could sell everything it made. But that's all
changed." "People are questioning things that have happened. But you can't
ignore it's necessary to keep the company in the black." 21 Not all those who kept
their jobs were as selfish, however. Some lamented the obvious passing of "that
family aspect" and expressed a great deal of anger toward the company, but
these people did not want reporters to publicly identify them, and resignation
was by far more common. 22

Like Dofasco, Procter & Gamble has been one of Hamilton's leading dispensers
of corporate welfare as well as soap and various other products.

However, in July 1993 its headquarters in Cincinnati, Ohio announced that it

would close 30 plants and eliminate 13,000 jobs, despite profits being up 6%
from the year before. Rumors were circulated, perhaps deliberately, that
Hamilton's plant would be one of the plants to close. In December of that year,
P&G then conveniently proclaimed that while its plant's profits were fine, its
yearly survey indicated that its wages were higher than those of other
comparable Hamilton firms and that it should therefore lower them by 3.6%.

Newspaper reports imply that P&G's pre-wage-cut strategy worked extremely

well. On the eve of the company's announcement of whether or not the Hamilton
plant would be shutdown it notified the public that it would close a plant in
Quincy, Massachusetts. "The news of the Quincy closure came as a relief."
However, as one worker said, "'People are still anxious [about the fate of the
Hamilton plant]. No matter who you talk to everybody feels it is just a matter of
time before Hamilton closes. Ninety percent of the people I talk to figure
Hamilton will close in three years.'" Then, when a reprieve for Hamilton was
announced on the following day, there was further resignation as well as relief,
despite the cost of 25% of P&G's Hamilton employees as well as the earlier
wage cut. As one worker put it, "I'm happy I've still got a job. It's probably the
best we could have hoped for." Said another, "'It's good for us [sic]. We've still
got jobs, we're still making soap', while yet another said simply, "We could have

-42-

been Quincy." 23

As in the 1930s, in the 1980s Ontario's governments began to freeze or roll back
wages, restrict the right to bargain freely and strike, lay off many workers, and
increase the workloads for those who remained. Then, in 1992 a seriously
unemployed, overworked and overtaxed public threw out a smug Liberal
government and replaced it with Ontario's first social democratic government.

Nevertheless, the latter New Democratic Party (NDP) government came under
capitalist fire right from the beginning and almost immediately scrapped its first,
"pump-priming" budget. It then announced that at least $2 million would have to
be trimmed from the provincial budget and that civil servants, from university
professors to municipal garbage collectors, would all have to "give back" jobs or
income, either directly or through such things as unpaid "holidays" over and
above their yearly vacations. As social democrats, the government was at least
giving local governments and employees the "opportunity" to decide where the
cuts should occur. However, if they would not do so "freely" on their own, the
"Social Contract" empowered the government to reopen contracts and impose
layoffs and rollbacks. Furthermore, unions that struck would suffer severe
penalties. 24

Cries of betrayal and rage were rampant. After all, here was a party funded
mainly through contributions from union dues, which were sometimes
compulsory, and elected in good part through the unpaid labour of union
activists. Union locals and, indeed, Canada's largest union, the Candian Union of
Public Employees (CUPE), refused to reopen their contracts and bargain with
either local employers or the province. Many locals threatened to strike or
perform various other acts of civil disobedience. Various local, provincial, and
national unions withdrew their funding for the NDP. A coalition to fight the
cutbacks was formed, not just among different public sector unions, but between
them and the traditionally antiunion faculty associations and community groups.
25

Meanwhile, the NDP government became more defensive, threatening its own
members who opposed the legislation and expelling from caucus those who
went public with their concerns. Many municipal bodies were not, in fact, eager
to reopen contracts and make cuts. Having already had their provincial funding
lowered in previous years, they did not want to further sour labor relations and a
public already grumbling from cuts in service despite tax increases. However,
when upper levels of government "played hardball," the lower levels had to
follow suit. Furthermore, rifts began to appear among the workers. Most public
sector unions gave in, while a few others held out and became marginalized.
Steelworkers continued to support the NDP, while their occasional rivals, the
Canadian Autoworkers, withdrew both funding and moral support. CUPE itself
became so internally divided that it could neither support nor condemn the
govermnent! 26

Eventually, the volcanic imagery in newspaper accounts gave way to one of, at
best, "simmering," and at worst, "burn out." The president of Hamilton's union
of bus drivers and mechanics initially said: "Something is going to blow up here
sooner or later. People aren't going to take it much longer." However, a week

-43-

later the union was still undecided whether to follow Toronto's lead in talking
strike, and eventually it negotiated cutbacks. Similarly, janatorial staff in the
public schools, having come off a long and bitter strike less than a year before,
were also adamant: "We won't touch a comma in our collective agreement or
negotiate a social contract which breaks those agreements through the back
door." That they had been prepared to strike to the bitter end earlier stood them
in better stead than, for example, library workers, who suffered more in the
finale to the Social Contract. However, more highly paid "professional" workers
such as medical doctors and university professors, although seldom unionized,
usually got off with salary freezes rather than cutbacks, and complaints about
such blatant inequities were infrequent and muted. 27

"But What Can 'One' Do?"

At least on the surface, the record of attempts, and especially successes, at
working-class agency during economic crises is discouraging. This reality places
labor activists in a serious ethical dilemma; to wit, if during economic crises,
rank-and-file workers are neither inclined to rebel on their own nor likely to
have much success when others organize them to do so, then attempts to lead
them into battle may be irresponsible. Nevertheless, I believe that history will
continue to be more open to agency than this scenario suggests.

In the first place, our interviews with Depression-generation workers indicated a

surprising amount and variety of solidarity and cooperation. Workers sometimes
informally shared out highly scarce work, so that those with families would get
more than others, but also so that no one would be completely without. Although
even the recognition of unions, let alone closed shops and successful strikes,
was often precluded, craftworkers sometimes successfully insisted that new
workers join the unions and pay dues anyway. Housewives associated and
lobbied for both price controls and consumer cooperatives, and church
congregations and ethnic groups organized relief for their members. In fact,
Depression Hamilton also saw "new" and relatively progressive social
movements among both women and youth. 28 Many workers were not only
anticommunist but anti-social democratic and antiunion, yet most saw the
unions as at least a necessary evil, and many were prepared to tolerate even
communist leaders if they were good leaders. Union and party leaders with their
own sectarian interests may have been more of a hindrance to broader
organization than their rank-andfiles. Both craft and industrial unionists, on the
one hand, and social democrats and communists, on the other, accused each
other of sectarianism and of having sabotaged classwide organization, but both
sides appear to have been equally guilty. 29

Presently, despite poor odds, workers have cooperated, both on and off the job,
in the "informal" and "underground" as well as the formal economy, and in the
new social movements as well as the traditional labor movement. Currently,
however, Canada's labor and social democratic movements are again seriously
split, mostly by a rift between the unions of the United Steelworkers (USW) and

-44-

the Canadian Autoworkers (CAW). There are some differences of principle and
strategy between them, yet the two unions have been rivals in attempting to
organize the same workers beyond their traditional jurisdictions; the
Autoworkers' holier-than-thou stance probably rests less on ideological purity
than on the partially protected nature of the Canadian automobile market; and
the highestprofile new movement in which the Autoworkers have participated is
the protectionist movement against free trade. 30

Second, there is surely much truth to the statement of a Stelco worker that "our
power is in our option to strike even if it isn't feasible." 31 In Depression-era
Hamilton, the Woodlands Park incident brought fairly widespread sympathy for
the protesters, and factory occupations in the then-new form of the sit-down
strike also greatly impressed other workers. On the surface, those in power
completely won these battles, yet by such actions, the workers both opened the
field for other such actions, by shifting the ruling-class's strategy from
repression to repressive tolerance, and provoked many substantial reforms, even
in the short run. For example, Hamilton's city council instituted a high
minumum wage for workers employed by private contractors on publicly funded
construction; a large day-care center for the children of "working" mothers, and
its own coal and clothing depots for unemployed workers and their families who
were on relief. 32

Similarly, plant closings during the recessions of the 1980s and 1990s have
sometimes led Canadian workers to temporarily take over their factories.
Admittedly, this has usually been done simply to receive higher severance pay,
but occasionally, such actions have brought such attention to, and examination
of, the owners' motives that they have led to public demands for legal action,
nationalization, or state-aided buyouts and ownership by the workers
themselves. 33 How much worse would matters have been without such a threat?
Presumably because of its strong strike record, the USW's Local 1005 was at
least able to keep layoffs more or less in line with seniority; and, moreover, how
much more extensive and deep would the cuts to public sector workers have
been had they not been heavily organized in relatively progressive unions with
strong ties to the ruling NDP?

Third, there are many other things short of such militant actions that workers
have done and can still do. In Depression-era Hamilton there was "restriction of
output" and other job actions short of unionization and strikes, and in the
political arena there were protests, both parliamentary and otherwise. Some
"ripped off" the relief system or engaged in other forms of crime. Others
attempted to curb the excesses of capitalism through within-system legislation. I
have already referred to informal work-sharing and the provision of relief,
which occurred among neighbours as well as within families, and to movements
to replace capitalist distribution with consumer cooperatives. There were also
lively debates about various socialist alternatives to capitalism in local churches
and newspapers as well as labour halls and political party meetings. 34

Admittedly, with the apparent taming of capitalism and discrediting of Eastern

communism, we may now actually be in a worse position to discuss positive
alternatives. However, after their initial, naive experiments with the
 -45-

unregulated, grotesque capitalism of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, the

workers and new middle classes of many Eastern European countries are now
awkwardly turning back toward hybrid forms of social democracy. Similarly, in
the West, strikes and extraparliamentary protests are down but participation in
the "underground economy" and attempts to deposethrowing out do-nothing and
draconian governments are up. 35 In other words, as old forms of agency may
have become more difficult to attempt and infrequently accomplished, new ones
have appeared.

On the economic front, Canadian steel- and autoworkers provide us with

contrasting but, I believe, equally valid alternatives. In 1992, rather than stand
by as financially troubled Algoma Steel stopped operating altogether and
permanently threw thousands of its members out of work, the USW helped
organize a state-assisted buyout by workers whereby the company is now owned
and, to a much greater extent than previously, operated by its own workers.
Some workers were still let go, while those who remained had their wages and
benefits cut back anyway, and the company has continued to be vulnerable to
cutthroat competition and calls for even further cutbacks. On the other hand, not
only is the company now doing well financially, there at least exists more
"workers' control" than before the buyout. Alienation from work also appears to
have lessened. 36

Meanwhile, with better market conditions for products and passage of the state-
organized "Autopact" (the Canada-United States Automotive Products
Agreement, 1965) between Canada and the United States protecting a minimum
number of jobs for Canadian autoworkers, the CAW has been able to force
employers to lessen overtime, extend paid vacations, and sweeten early
retirement, thereby recalling many laid-off union members without having to
take on employers' risks for them. It has also been able to extract wage and
benefit increases from employers, which in turn has led the rank and file to
agree not to take as much overtime and work vacations and instead to give the
work to their laid-off brothers and sisters. 37

Public sector workers have been faced with not only cash-strapped and
concession-hungry employers, but tax-weary publics. However, they too have
adapted in creative ways. Thus, tax, unemployment insurance, and welfare
workers have indicated their expertise and importance for keeping governmental
costs down, by publishing pamphlets indicating ways in which clients could
"beat the system" if they had the knowledge of civil servants. Similarly, a
coalition of public sector unions exposed managerial practices whose
eradication could save the public hundreds of thousands of dollars in the cost of
government. Meanwhile, Hamilton's public library workers have appealed to the
public to phone city councillors to complain about cutbacks in service. 38
On the political front, workers appear readier to throw out neoconservative
governments. Unfortunately, the liberal ones that have replaced them have often
had such large majorities that they then "thumbed their noses" at the electors.
For example, Canada's federal Liberal government is calling unemployment
insurance (UT) a "tax" on employment that is so expensive for employers that it
makes

-46-

them unwilling to hire more workers. Consequently, it has actually lowered

employers' UI contributions and, furthermore, lowered the income of UI
recipients, both directly and by making UI harder to obtain. Furthermore,
increasing amounts of UI funds are being given to employers instead of workers,
ostensibly to help the former train or retrain workers in order to make them
more employable when, in fact, there are few jobs for them to be employed in. 39

On the other hand, new, progressive policies are also being explored, and with
them has sometimes come increased recognition that capitalists should not
continue to feed from the public trough. For instance, Bell Canada, the
telephone monopoly, attempted to follow other employers in abusing a UI
scheme that permitted employers to pay their workers from UI funds for a
limited period of time in order to lengthen the period before laying them off for
good. Its permament workers would work five days a week for a year but only
be paid for four days, while the UI fund would pay them for the fifth day. This
was done despite high profits. Public outrage prevented Bell Canada from
cheating the general public in this way, but unfortunately they then cut back
their employees anyway. 40

Another example is the opposite of the above "tax on employment." Here,

employers' UI contributions are lowered only after they have retained, and
perhaps hired, more workers. Conversely, whenever employers lay off workers,
they must pay substantially higher UI premiums for their remaining employees.
Apparently, among other things this forces employers to consider alternatives to
layoffs, such as work sharing. Of course, the latter can be dangerous, especially
when it is involuntary and involves cuts in wages and benefits. However, other
things being equal, it is probably preferable to wholesale layoffs. Such a policy
has already been instituted in parts of the United States and may have had
something to do with the greater speed of its recovery as compared with that of
Canada.

This discussion merely scratches the surface. Many other potentially successful
strategies could be gleaned from looking at other countries such as Sweden and
Germany, although the greater success of their workers may have been a
function of their healthier economies as well as their better-organized and more
class-conscious working classes. 41 To be sure, there is still a lot to be learned
about when and why, as well as how, workers rebel rather than alienate in the
face of crises. Indeed, whereas severe economic deprivation seems to be more
likely to lead to alienation than rebellion, it is probably true that some
deprivation is more likely to provoke rebellion than is complete gratification.
Obviously, there is still need, and room, for agency by analysts as well as
workers.

Notes
1. Marx 1976, pp. 489-496; 1978a, pp. 52, 67-69, 120-22.
2. Marx 1977a, pp. 531-37; n.d., pp. 408-10, 425-35, 595-99, 612-27.
3. Archibald ( 1992, and 1993).

-47-

4. "Ralph Virgint," M036:16. Interviewees are identified by their actual names

if they gave us permission to do so, and by pseudonyms, indicated by quotation
marks, if they did not. Males were numbered M001 through M100, and females
F101 through F200. The page references are to the printed transcripts of the
interviews, which will eventually be available in the Labour Archives of Mills
Memorial Library at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario.
5. Don Eperson, M010:5.
6. Bert McClure, M011:4.
7. John Bellingham, M014:8.
8. Louis Morelli, M079:15, 20-21.
9. "Tammie Aylward," F198:12-18, 24.
10. "Doris Ellis," Fl 16:67-69. Parenthetically, all but one of
these examples was taken, not from the sample of 178 workers as a whole, but
the 16.7% minority whom I classified as definitely both deprived and inclined to
rebel. Given this selection, imagine how much more powerless most of the
remaining four-fifths must have felt!
11. Influential early accounts include Marcuse ( 1964) and
Baran and Sweezy ( 1966). 'Me "Great Compromise" refers to implicit
agreements among capital, states and labour which emerged out of their
experiences of the Great Depression of the 1930s. All three parties wanted to
avoid economic crises in the future, and to have states intervene in the economy
both to do this and lessen the impact of those crises which occurred anyway. In
exchange for this and recognition of its legitimacy and "right to manage,"
capital agreed to increase workers' wages and job security, and sometimes even
to allow unionization, and to permit much more state regulation. In turn, for
increased wages, job security, the right to unionize, relief from unemployment
and other social welfare benefits, labour conceded capital's right to manage. A
useful, comparative approach to the Great Compromise in several different
countries is Gourevitch ( 1986). The decommodification thesis is presented well
in Epsing-Andersen ( 1989).
12. The first position was Marcuse ( 1964); the second is
implied by many social democrats, both European (e.g., Epsing-Anderson,
1989) and North American (e.g., Morton, 1980).
13. For accounts of these dramatic changes see O'Connor
( 1973); Bluestone and Harrison ( 1982); Bluestone and Harrison ( 1988); Piore
and Sabel ( 1984); Gourevitch ( 1986); Harvey ( 1989); and Marchak ( 1991).
14. Explanations for the new crises have varied greatly, from unfair
competition from Japan and newly industrializing countries and overly
speculative financial dealings to the inappropriateness of mass production and
distribution, the failure of North American capital to adopt revolutionary new
technologies quickly enough, inflation arising from the Vietnam War and the oil
and wheat crises of the early 1970s, and high labor and welfare costs arising
from the rebellion of black people, women, and youth denied most of the
benefits of the Great Compromise. For example, see Peter Moon, "Once Strong,
the Steel City is Rapidly Rusting," Globe and Mail, December 22, 1992.
15. On these matters, see esecially Corman et al. ( 1993), pp. 19, 32-41, 45-46,
58-69. The "mercy" quotation is on p. 43. See also Iacovino, "Divide and
conquer: A study of Hilton Works employees during the economic recession of
the 1990s." Unpublished paper, McMaster University, ( 1993), pp. 7-28. In an
appendix, Iacovino provides complete transcripts of the interviews she did with
Stelco workers. In subsequent notes, "IR#" refers to her respondent number, and
the pages to those of the interview transcripts.
16. Iacovino ( 1993), op. cit, p. 7.

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17. Ibid. On sabotage: IR#1:7, IR#2:5, IR#4:7, IR#7:2, 5 ; on

leafletting: IR#9:3, ER#11:2.
18. Ibid. IR#4:2-5, IR#5:3-5 .
19. Corman et al. ( 1993), pp. 49, 53, 92. Iacovino ( 1993),
IR#1:5-7, IR#2:4-5, IR#5:2-5, IR#6:3-4, IR#7:2-7, IR#8:3-5.
20. Corman et al. ( 1993), p. 88. Iacovino ( 1993), IR31:2-7,
IR#2:2-4, IR#9:2, IR#11:2.
21. Hamilton Spectator, October 27, 1993/A1; October 28,
1993/A1; Toronto Star, October 28, 1993, p. D1.
22. Ibid, plus Hamilton Spectator, October 30, 1993, p. D1.
23. Hamilton Spectator, July 16, 1993, p. D6; December 10,
1993, p. A1; December 17, 1993, p. A13; January 13, 1994, p. A1; January 14,
1994, p. A1.
24. Hamilton Spectator, April 22, 1993:A1, A2; April 23,
1993:A1; May 4, 1993:A1. The NDP government's "Social Contract Act" was
announced in the Ontario Legislature on April 23rd, 1993, and passed into law
in June. It was designed to trim $2 billion from the province's annual $43 billion
wage bill for public-sector employees. The government proposed to do this
mainly by freezing wages and benefits for three years and requiring workersd to
take twelve days of unpaid leave each year. (Since the Premier's name was Bob
Rae, the latter became known as "Rae Days.") The government emphasized that
only such measures could prevent massive layoffs, but that some layoffs would
occur anyway. It referred to its legislation as a "social contract" because (a)
workers' agreement with the wage freeze and cut from unpaid leaves would
indicate their "choice" of this route over massive job losses, and (b) in return for
abiding by the legislation, unions would have more say in the province's
spending plans, both under the Social Contract Act and more generally.
25. Hamilton Spectator, March 18, 1993, p. A1. Globe and
Mail, March 18, 1993, p. A6. Hamilton Spectator, April 16, p. A3; April 20, p.
C3; April 22, p. A1, A2; April 24, p. A1; April 26, p. A1; May 3, p. A9; May 4,
p. B1; June 16, p. B3; July 6, p. B3; August 12; September 2, p. A10; September
7, p. A3; November 17, p. A5. Toronto Star, November 17, p. A5. Hamilton
Spectator, November 25, p. A3. Toronto Star, November 25, p. A3, A5 (all dates
1993).
26. On the reactions of the provincial NDP and local
governments: Hamilton Spectator, March 18, 1993, p. A1; April 17, p. A4; April
24, p. B1; April 27, p. A4; April 29, p. A5, C3; May 1, p. B1; May 6, p. A1, A3;
September 28, p. B4; November 24, p. B8. On divisions among and within
private and public sector workers: Hamilton Spectator, April 16, 1993, p. A9.
Globe and Mail, April 23; April 27 (all dates 1993).
27. On drivers, see: Hamilton Spectator, July 14, 1993, p. A1;
July 20, 1993. p. B3; August 13, 1993, p. A1. On janitors, see: Hamilton
Spectator, July 6, 1993, p. B3; July 9, 1993, p. B3; October 28, 1993, p. C1. On
librarians, see: Hamilton Spectator, February 8, 1994, p. B1.
28. Archibald ( 1992).

29. Ibid.
30. Globe and Mail, November 25, 1993, p. A4.
31. Iacovino ( 1993), IR#7:2-7.
32. Archibald ( 1992).
33. Grayson ( 1985); Stables ( 1991); Corrnan et al. ( 1993), "Conclusion."
34. Archibald ( 1992).
35. For example, on doubts in the East, see Hamilton Spectator,
November 5, 1994, p. A13. On the underground economy, see Hamilton
Spectator, May 21, 1993, p. A1;

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Globe and Mail, May 21, 1993, p. B1.

36. Unfortunately, I have misplaced a long newspaper article where the
reporter interviewed many workers as well as managers at Algoma.
37. Hamilton Spectator, September 18, 1993, p. A7, Globe and Mail, October
2, 1993, Toronto Star, October 20, 1993, p. A23.
38. On public workers' proposals, see Hamilton Spectator, March 23, 1993;
April 19, 1993, p. C1; May 5, 1993, p. A1; Globe and Mail, May 8, 1993, p. A3.
On library workers, see Hamilton Spectator, February 8, 1994, p. B1.
39. Hamilton Spectator, November 3, 1994, pp. A10, A13; Toronto Star,
November 5, 1994, p. B1.
40. Hamilton Spectator, November 13, 1993, p. B3; December 8, 1993, p. B3.
41. For one compendium of cross-national comparisons, see Golden and
Pontusson ( 1992). For discussions of Sweden's and Germany's recent economic
woes, see, for example, Toronto Star, May 16, 1993, pp. A1, A12; May 30,
1993, p. Fl.

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5
Building Democracy in the New
South Africa: Civil Society,
Citizenship, and Political Ideology
Mark Orkin

Introduction: Towards a Renewed Politics of Civil

Society in South Africa
Over the last two decades in South Africa, progressive institutions and
movements drawn from civil society--notably youth organisations, trade unions,
churches, and civic associations--played an essential role in developing a
counterideology to apartheid and applying it to popular political mobilization.
These organizations were abetted by the underground structures of the African
National Congress (ANC) and by the sanctions campaign from abroad.

With the lifting of bans on the ANC and other liberation parties in 1990, these
elements combined to achieve the installation of a transitional authority and
provisions for a first democratic election. The ANC decisively won this election,
but its vote was largely limited to the African population. Moreover, during the
negotiations it conceded that a government of national unity would preside for
the first five years, including ministers in the cabinet from parties to the right of
the ANC.

Constrained in these respects, the ANC now faces the challenges of undoing the
inequalities of apartheid, reversing the repressive style of government, and
integrating the previously segregated population groupings into a nonracial,
nonsexist democracy. The three challenges are linked: as the ANC's program
notes, national development requires the active involvement of the citizenry in
transforming the state and civil society ( African National Congress, 1994, pp. 5-
7).

At center-stage in South Africa's sociopolitical future is thus an interplay among

four variables--individuals' sense of citizenship, participation in civil society
organizations, commitment to democratic values, and party allegiances. Among
them, the definition of civil society is itself contested ( Atkinson, 1992,

-51-

pp. 10-113). The sense used here is based on Gramsci's, namely the domain of
nonstate activities encountered, for example, in schools, unions, churches,
women's, youth and cultural groupings or movements, nongovernmental
organizations, and residents' associations Gramsci, 1979; see also Keane, 1988,
p. 14). On this definition, civil society is distinct, on the one hand, from the state
or "political society," namely, the legislative, security, and bureaucratic aspects
of government, as well as the traditional realm of formal political parties
( Gramsci, 1971b, p. 267); and, on the other hand, from the intimate society of
the family.
This chapter combines history, survey results, and political theory in considering
the interplay among the four variables. I recall the contribution of civil society
to achieving social transformation in South Africa; then unpack some statistics,
drawing on a national, all-race survey of South African youth; and last, build on
Gramsci's analysis of the struggle for democracy in considering the subsequent
relationship between state and civil society. The material points to social
movements as a means of sustaining the popular engagement that characterizes
the struggle phase, while synthesizing the diverse agendas of civil society into
democratic national politics.

Historical Overview: Politicized Civil Society in

the Struggle to Transition
In 1960, with the massacre at Sharpeville, the apartheid state crushed the civil
rights movement of the ANC and its offshoot, the Pan Africanist Congress. Ten
years later, the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) was founded to provide
an ideological antithesis to apartheid doctrine. It spread rapidly in the racially
segregated black universities and schools.

In mid- 1976, the Soweto revolt erupted. Pupils and students in the BCM
demanded an end to segregated and inferior education, as well as the overthrow
of the apartheid system. Hundreds of youngsters were killed by security forces,
and thousands detained without trial. Others slipped into exile, where they
revitalized the ANC and its armed wing. Inside the country, the black trade
union movement was energized by militant recruits. Student and worker
organizations collaborated in stay-aways. The BCM organizations were banned
in October 1977 ( Kane-Berman, 1978). However, the renascence of progressive
black civil society was irreversibly underway.

Returning ANC guerrillas waged "armed propaganda." Residents' associations

formed in the black "townships" (the segregated ghettoes for blacks, which were
located adjacent to cities and towns). Students regrouped in the militant
Congress of South African Students (COSAS). By 1980, African support for the
still-banned ANC had soared ( Orkin, 1986, p. 32), culminating in campaigns to
free Mandela and popularize its Freedom Charter.

Equivocal reforms by the government encouraged a plethora of voluntary

associations to recruit around popular grievances. Many townships developed a
"civic" (residents') association, sometimes a local COSAS branch, a tradeunion
chapter, and a youth club. There was a resurgence of attacks by the ANC

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underground, and anniversaries of ANC occasions were publicly celebrated. Six

hundred voluntary organizations formed the nonracial, politically oriented
United Democratic Front (UDF), whose first success was a near-total boycott of
the. elections for the "reformed" parliament.

The UDF in due course allied itself with the Freedom Charter, signaling its
affinity with the exiled ANC. It sought alliances across classes as well as races
under the broad goal of a nonracial, united, democratic South Africa. Its
leadership was drawn from political organizations, civic groups, trade unions,
and student or youth congresses ( Swilling, 1988, pp. 90-113).

COSAS-led student protests against poor education coincided with an economic

downturn in 1984. Escalating rent strikes were organized by UDF civics
( Seekings, 1993, pp. 82-84). The state responded in 1985 with the first of
several declared states of emergency. Nevertheless, media campaigns continued
to strengthen UDF recruitment. By 1985, the UDF and its prominent patron,
Archbishop Tutu, were as popular as the ANC among black metropolitan
respondents ( Orkin, 1986, p. 32). School, rent, and consumer boycotts were its
chief political weapons; these were intended to ensure that "the masses linked up
local issues with the question of political power" ( Zwelakhe Sisulu, quoted in
A. W. Marx, 1992, p. 165). But widespread harassment of its supporters and
leaders and the cutting off of its foreign funding pushed it into decline. It was
effectively banned in 1988 but continued clandestine work in some regions.

Other agencies of civil society continued its project. Archbishop Tutu began
calling for disinvestment and sanctions against apartheid. Having been
prominent in the UDF, he was able to function as a spokesperson, but he
occasioned controversy among his white congregants when he supported ANC
policy, and among his black ones when he differed from it.

Simultaneously, the Congress of Trade Unions, COSATU, increasingly came to

represent the interest of all blacks rather than only the workers. Worker-led stay-
aways became the main form of popular mobilization. However, the alignment
of its constituent unions with specific political programs such as the Freedom
Charter proved to be divisive ( A. W. Marx, 1992, p. 215).

In effect, although the leaderships of both the church and union federations were
prepared to assume the mantle of the banned UDF and the underground ANC in
publicly representing blacks' national political concerns, they were constrained
by the more particularistic bent of the affiliated members. Meanwhile, the
regime was suffering the cost of sustaining repression, coupled with the
escalating impact of financial sanctions and the arms embargo. By the end of the
decade it had, in economic terms, been brought to its knees ( Orkin, 1989), and
forced to open negotiations.

The lifting of bans on the liberation movements and the release of their leaders
allowed the ANC to assume the role of the dominant progressive political
movement. The UDF disbanded, and the civic groups within it regrouped.
Meanwhile, an alliance was set up between the ANC, COSATU, and the small
South African Communist Party. COSATU's Reconstruction and Development
Program (RDP) became the main election platform of the future governing
party.

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In addition, as the ANC's civil society counterparts, COSATU and the civic
groups participated alongside it in a host of negotiating forums with the
outgoing regime and organized business. The forums were in sectors like
metropolitan government, housing, and electrification. They signaled a new and
relatively structured interpenetration of state and civil society. We will return to
this relationship after introducing the survey evidence.

Survey Data: Citizenship and Participation in the

Pursuit of Democracy
The survey discussed here was commissioned by the Joint Enrichment Project
(JEP) of the South African Council of Churches and the SA Catholic Bishops
Conference. 1 Having themselves been prominent in the civil society
mobilization of the preceding decade, they wanted to find out how far, and in
what ways, the youth had been "marginalized" in using educational boycotts as a
lever for liberation ( Everatt and Orkin, 1993).

There were 2,224 respondents from all four main population groups, in a
nationwide stratified sample. The face-to-face interviews were conducted in
December 1992 and January 1993. An upper age limit of 30 years captured
those who as teenagers would have been affected by the 1976 revolt described in
the previous section. The lower limit of age 16 meant that younger respondents
would have been in their teens during the insurrection of the mid-1980s. Some
10.7 million young people fell into this age range: 77% were African, 10%
colored, i.e., of mixed race, 2% Indian, and 11% white.

On the basis of my previous research on political alienation among black youth (

Orkin, 1992), two-item indices of political efficacy and political engagement
were included to tap political alienation. The two were strongly associated, and
were thus summed to form a composite index, C. 2 This furnished the first of the
four variables, "citizenship"--in the sense of people expecting to express their
political being in active participation.

The operationalization of the second variable, democratic commitment, had to

be compiled from items to hand. It is consonant with popular debate at the time.
The vision of democracy advanced in the election, and not only by the ANC,
had three components: nonracialism, nonsexism, and fair governance. Two-item
indices covering each of these concepts had been included in the questionnaire.
The indices turned out to be strongly associated and were, accordingly, summed
to provide democratic commitment, D. 3 The indices for C and D were then
dichotomized into "low" and "high," to make the log-linear interpretation
manageable.

The third relevant attitudinal variable was political party affiliation. Africans
overwhelmingly supported the ANC, and whites divided between the National
Party and the racist, white, far right. Indian and colored youth scorned the far
right but were likelier to support the NP than the ANC. Other parties received
single-digit scores.

The pattern suggested an effective left-right dichotomy for party orientation, P:

the ANC (plus votes for the other, tiny liberation party) versus the parties to

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their right, notably the former ruling Nationalist Party and Inkatha (plus the
"none" response, which was evidently conservative on balance).

The last of the four variables was organizational involvement. Half of

respondents reported being a member of at least one organization. Three of the
civil society categories that featured large in the historical sketch--Wlitical, trade
union, and church organizations--were also populated enough to analyze.
(Respondents involved in civic groups were too few to include--members of
civic groups tend to be older householders rather than youth.) In various
combinations, these three organizations yielded seven options.

The breakdown of citizenship, C, and democratic commitment, D, by this

organizational mix is summarized in Figure 5.1 . The lighter columns show the
proportions of respondents who were "high-C," namely, fell into the "high"
category on dichotomy C. The surprise is that the high-C proportion among
people who participate only in unions was scarcely higher than among
respondents who belonged to no organizations at all. 4 The same applied to
church-only membership (in the sense of some active involvement, e.g., in the
choir). These findings recall the historical point that when the leaders of unions
and churches contemplated affiliation to the UDF, there were painful divisions
among the followers between those looking to the union or church only to
represent their interests and those seeing them as vehicles of political
citizenship.

Among people belonging to union and church, the high-C proportion improved
somewhat. However, the improvement only became substantial when
respondents reported membership of a political organization, on its own or
alongside other memberships. Figure 5.1 shows that political unionists were
slightly higher, and political congregants slightly lower.
From one viewpoint, these findings are almost tautologous: political activity will
obviously be better than nonpolitical activity at enhancing political efficacy and
engagement--which are the two ingredients of the citizenship index, C.
However, when looked at another way, the findings warn us that nonpolitical
activity--of the sort traditionally held to define civil society--will not, of itself,
enhance people's sense of citizenship.

When one looks also at the darker bars in Figure 5.1 , referring to high
democratic commitment, D, the pattern is less marked. This makes sense, since
D includes broad social as well as specifically political values. But the basic
similarity is there: only when respondents reported a political involvement,
either on its own or with other involvements, were high-D proportions of more
than 60 percent encountered.

These prima facie contrasts within both C and D suggested that the seven-part
organizational variable could be simplified into "no organization,"
"church/union only," and "political" (only or with church/union). 5 In this more
convenient form, organizational involvement is labeled O.

These associations between O and C and between O and D (denoted OC and

OD) need to be qualified by party allegiance. Recalling Gramsci on the
conservative influence of the Catholic Church, one may surmise that the
apparent dedemocratizing impact of mixing church membership with political
involvement

-55-
 Figure 5.1 Citizenship C, and Democratic Commitment D, by Organizational
Mix OOrganizational mix

may apply more among parties of the right than the left. Log-linear analysis
guides one through the plethora of possible effects among the four variables.
The usual selection procedure among possible models showed unequivocally
that the four-variable interaction OPCD could not be dispensed with.

The next move was to ascertain the bearing of demographic variables. Based on
my previous experience with the index C in the South African context, the likely
differentiae would be population group or "race," class as approximated by
respondent's education, and gender. These were suitably categorized, yielding R,
E and S respectively. The simplest model that would fit all seven variables
simultaneously proved to be RO RP EO SO SC OPCD RE SE. 6 In other words,
the full interaction was retained between O, P, C, and D, together with several
two-way associations to the three demographic variables (and a couple of
associations among the latter).
We can bypass the cross-tabulation corresponding to the OPCD term in favor of
the pattern displayed in Figure 5.2 . Concentrate first on the pair of solid lines,
which ignore P to depict the OCD interaction. They display the proportions of
respondents who are high on democratic commitment D, i.e. high-D,
corresponding to the three kinds of civil society involvement O.

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Figure 5.2 The OPCD Interaction Organizational involvement O

The solid line on the left covers low-C respondents--those who scored low on
citizenship C. Among them, the proportion of high-D respondents increases
slightly as one moves through the categories of O from those who had no
organizational involvement (38%) to those involved in church/union only
(47%), and then increases markedly as one moves to those with some political
involvement (65%). Look now at the solid line on the right, reflecting high-C
respondents. In their case, by contrast, organizational involvement did not make
much difference: the high-D respondents are roughly constant around the mean
value (57%), across no organization, church/union only, and some political-
organization membership.

Put another way: in comparison to no organizational involvement at all, pure

church and/or union involvement mildly enhanced democratic commitment
among youth who were low-C (low on citizenship), and mildly depressed it
among those who were high-C. But political involvement, which had little
additional effect on those who were high-C, greatly enhanced democratic
commitment among those who were low-C. In practice, then, civil and political
society are interwoven in a subtle pattern. This was foreshadowed by the
historical evidence, which mentioned the conflict at membership level when
church and union leaders sought to carry forward the political ideals of the
banned UDF. It poses a challenge to the theory below.

-57-

We now examine how P modulates the OCD interaction to yield OPCD. First
notice that, in Figure 5.2 , the dashed lines displaying respondents of liberation
orientation are above the mean profile (the solid lines), namely, they show larger
high-D proportions, whereas the dotted lines displaying those of conservative
orientation are below the mean profile. In words, respondents of liberation
orientation were generally more likely (58%) to endorse democratic values than
conservative respondents (41%). This is hardly surprising in a context in which
right-wing parties resisted the idea of nonracial democracy before 1990.

Concentrating next on church/union-only respondents, one sees that a liberation

orientation magnified the improvement in the high-D proportion among the low-
C respondents (53% high-D at point V on Figure 5.2 ); and conversely, that a
conservative orientation appreciably depressed the high-D proportion among the
high-C (44% high-D at point Y).

The former--who turn out to be almost all ANC supporters--are a potential

resource for democracy in the new South Africa, if they can be accessed via
their church or union connections and educated into the attractions of
citizenship. The latter are a threat: politically able but expressing their
nondemocratic outlooks in union or church involvements. The data show that
they mainly do not declare their party preference at all. Those who do declare
turn out to belong to the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), the NP, and the right, in
proportions roughly comparable to the size of the parties. Both sides of the
contrast underline the difficulty of differentiating civil from political life.

Second, the left-hand side of the diagram-dealing with low-C respondents--

shows how actually belonging to a political party magnifies the tendency of
either a greater commitment to democracy--among liberation supporters--or a
lesser commitment--among conservatives. Point W on Figure 5.2 shows that,
within low-C youth, party membership boosted the high-D proportion among
liberation-minded individuals to 75%. Conversely, point X shows that only 18%
of the conservatively inclined individuals, within the low-C group, were high-D.

A low sense of citizenship thus appears to be a destabilizing force, which pushes

supporters of opposing tendencies toward widely discrepant commitments to
democracy. By contrast, it is remarkable that among those with a high sense of
citizenship (on the right-hand side of Fig. 5.2 ), there is convergence between
the proportions of high-D respondents among the conservative and liberation
tendencies (at point Z). This recalls the negotiated settlement, in which there
was a shared acceptance of the democratic process among the elites despite their
parties' very different policies. This bodes well for building democracy by
galvanizing sentiments of citizenship.

There is little space to mention the terms that relate the demographic variables
E, S and R to the OPCD interaction. For instance, RO shows that Africans are
likelier than the minority groups to belong to a union and/or church as well as to
a political party. EO shows that less-educated individuals are less likely to
belong to a political party. Likewise, SO indicates that women are likelier than
men to belong to a church, but less likely to belong to a union, and

-58-

even less likely to belong to a political party. Clearly, there is a strong

continuing stereotyping of women in terms of traditional patriarchalism (See
Ramphele and Boonzaaier, 1988, pp, 153-66).

Alongside the OPCD effects, these demographically based inequities pose

additional challenges for the nurturing of democracy in the new South Africa. In
the next section, I argue the importance of restoring, from the struggle phase, the
importance of political citizenship in energizing and synthesizing civil society
engagements.

Theoretical Conspectus: How Should Civil Society

Relate to Political Life?
Both the historical sequence and the statistical interaction bring to mind Gramsci
( 1971, 1973) analysis of social transformation. In his view, state and civil
society are intrinsically in tension, if not always evidently so. In wellestablished
liberal-democratic dispensations, the state rarely needs to resort to overt
coercion. Rather, it secures compliance by the way in which particular
ideologies are absorbed by the citizenry as they participate in civil society
institutions. This is what constitutes bourgeois hegemony. The result, as Boggs
describes it, is "a generalized alienation that results in passivity, a sense of
powerlessness, subcultural fragmentation, a separation of the personal and
political" ( Boggs, 1976, p. 123).
However, in less stable societies, the state and civil society are in
disequilibrium. The state has frequent recourse to force, and the internalization
of the dominant ideology is much less even. Obviously this was the case in
South Africa. Most of the African population never accepted apartheid, even
though they initially had no alternative to enduring it following the forcible
suppression of the liberation movements. However, some opted for
accommodative strategies, like Buthelezi's Inkatha movement, which accepted
"homeland" status while resisting aspects of grand apartheid. Such partial
strategies resulted in greater political alienation than among those whose
Charterist nonracialism sought to transcend it ( Orkin, 1983). In our sample of
young people, points Y and Z in Fig. 5.2 (corresponding to the oppositional
versus the accomodative party positions) suggest that, among those who are
lower on the index of citizenship, wide differences in commitment to democracy
are found.

In such uneven circumstances, a revolutionary movement can make ready

headway in constructing a counterhegemony. First, it needs to begin with the
concrete particulars of people's everyday lives; therefore, various nonparty
groupings will be important to its project. Second, it follows that the movement
should be prepared to seek durable alliances that transcend a class base. It may
embrace ideological forms like nationalism or religion for whatever
counterhegemonic content they may offer, even if this comes at the expense of
its socialist content. However, the impact of the movement can only become
decisive when, third, it manages to transform the particular, often economic,
demands of interest groups into a universalistic political challenge of the
dominant system in terms of "the public, common and collective" ( Boggs,
1976,

-59-

p. 102).

The education-based revolt of the seventies in South Africa, described in the

historical section, was heroic but fell short in all three strategic respects: its
demands appealed mainly to students; it advanced a racially divisive, rather than
inclusive, ideology; and it was prevented by repression from developing a
national infrastructure. By contrast, all three of Gramsci's requirements were
central aims, and appreciable achievements, of UDF strategy. It began with the
everyday concerns of the lives of all its affiliates, like rent as well as education;
it gathered these under the broad Charterist rubric of nonracial democracy; and
its popular campaigns systematically sought to unite participants in the
expression of national political demands. Clearly, the several prominent UDF
leaders who were graduates of the earlier phase had learned their strategic
lessons well.
However, in its declining phase, and under massive repression, the UDF did fall
short of the Gramscian model in two related respects. First, the primacy of
politics for Gramsci is inherently mass politics ( Boggs, 1976, pp. 83, 105, 125).
In effect, he envisaged a broad-scale, but effectively articulated, social
movement. Second, he allowed that the achievementof
counterhegemonicmobilization would be "organic," (i.e., gradual), until the
moment (abetted by an exogenous "conjunctural" crisis such as military or
economic disaster) when power can be seized.

By contrast, it has been argued of the UDF that, under the duress of repression,
it partly mutated from movement to party. In some regions, elite cabals took ad
hoc decisions, and at the grassroots, some impatient Charterist activists were
somewhat premature in concluding, because popular revolt had rendered certain
townships "ungovernable" by the authorities, that the entire state was on the
verge of capitulation ( A. W. Marx, 1992, pp. 171-72). (In fact, we have seen
that they were only a couple of years early in reading the conjunctural crisis, to
which their efforts had made a major contribution.)

A last point to note is that the attractions of civil society activity--its diversity,
immediacy, and affective nature--also pose a danger: precisely because civil
society is constituted of interest groups (unions, churches, and civic groups were
noteworthy in our context), mobilization toward democratic transformation may
be impeded by divisive interests. As the means of transcending this
particularism Gramsci urged two closely related requirements.

Firstly, our diverse civil society commitments have to be infused with the
unifying ideal of political citizenship (i.e., of individual self-realization achieved
through active participation in communal political activity). Second, sectional,
and especially economic, consciousnesses must be integrated into an essentially
political challenge of the state. The struggle must be both popular and national
for democracy to emerge ( Boggs, 1976, p. 83).

These two central recommendations coincide with the key aspects of the OPCD
interaction uncovered in the data. There too, the importance emerged of
citizenship, and of the primacy of the political in the building of democracy.
First, in conditions of low citizenship, commitments to democracy diverged
among supporters of opposing political orientations; in conditions of high

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citizenship, they converged. Second, among those low on the citizenship index,
the data showed that church and/or union membership only mildly improved
democratic commitment; among those who were high on the citizenship index,
and especially conservatives, church/union membership appreciably diminished
democratic commitment. The data affirm Gramsci's expectation that particular
or local interests may be counterproductive as bases for democratic mobilization
unless they are melded into comprehensive national aims by left-oriented
mobilization in civil society.

This description of the desirable relationship between the four variables--

citizenship, civil society, political ideology and democracy--was formulated, and
appears to be corroborated, for the phase of struggle. What lies over the
democratic threshold when the unifying social movement becomes the ruling
political party, as in South Africa? Gramsci's least implausible view is still a
utopian fancy, a "regulated society" in which the state increasingly recedes in
favor of "a complex and well-articulated civil society, in which the individual
can govern himself . . . without his self-government coming into conflict with
political society--but rather becoming its normal continuation, its organic
complement" ( Gramsci, [ 1929- 1935] 1971, pp. 263, 268).

Gramsci's critics correctly object that this underestimates the extent of legitimate
dissent among the agencies of civil society, or between them and the state:
strikes and lockouts, gun lobbies and peace marches, anti- and prolifers. This
hubbub, they contend, can best be accommodated by liberal democracy, with its
provisions for majority rule, electoral competition, and civil liberties ( Gramsci,
1971, p. 167). Both the regulated society view and its weaknesses have been
canvassed in South Africa. On behalf of the former, civil society activists argue
that the organizations developed in the struggle phase, and notably those
associated with the UDF, were "typically anti-statist, decentralized, community
and/or worker controlled, democratic, non-profit, well-organized, and
exceptionally creative." They have now comprised a progressive alliance that
will drive development more effectively and transparently than the new state or
the business sector ( Swilling, 1990, p. 157).

Against this view, it is contended that in reality, these organizations are often
unaccountable or unrepresentative;, that the majority of citizens living outside
the metropolitan areas tend to lack access to them anyway; and that there are
many other legitimate elements of civil society that are neutral, or even resistant,
to their newly hegemonic Charterist ideology. The argument concludes that only
a representative democratic state, "in which outcomes are subject to control by
elected representatives," can "guarantee the rights and entitlements of all against
special interests" ( Friedman, 1991, p. 17; see also Friedman, 1992, and van
Wyk, 1993).

The civil society activists reply that representative democracy 'is, as Boggs
warned early, fundamentally alienated, referring to "the elite, particularistic,
nonpublic and depoliticized form of democracy in modern societies" ( Arato and
Cohen, 1993, p. 167). However, there is another form of democracy--
participative government--in which political citizenship need not be confined to

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marking a national ballot every few years. On the one hand, there is local
government, "building a 'voice' at the grassroots level" ( Swilling, 1992, p. 81).
On the other hand, there are the exercises of democratic procedure in the
nonpolitical contexts of civil society: the school, the cultural association, and
especially the workplace. "Civility" is what Walzer calls this nonpolitical
counterpart of citizenship ( Walzer, 1992).

The problem with the local government substitute is seen from our South
African evidence: the crucial achievement of the UDF was to move through
local grievances into national political claims. The problem with the nonpolitical
substitute is that it runs counter to the data: the nonpolitical contexts of civil
society seem to be areas where democracy threatens to wither, not flourish.
Moreover, both proposals abandon the vigor of the Gramscian national
challenge. Civil society participation is permitted to be political provided it is
not national, or national provided it is not political.

However, I contend that between the two extremes there is a notion, developed
in the South American literature on democratization, of politicized civil society (
Arato and Cohen, 1992). On the one hand, it conceives political parties in an
extended form, functioning not as sporadic electoral instruments, but as lively,
ongoing means for gathering and disseminating opinion on issues of government
and development, from bottom to top and back again.

On the other hand, politicized civil society includes social movements, which
may be more or less long lived, issue driven or sectoral, drawing together
various civil society elements, in which parties may, or may not, participate
from time to time. Movements might, through organized lobbies or non-
governmental organizations, seek politically to influence governance on issues
that formal parties are neglecting or avoiding, such as the environment, or gay
rights. In this way, the mobilization of civil society can narrow the gap between
the affectively motivated concerns of the individual citizen and the more formal,
intermittent political processes of the state and the elite-driven political parties
( Geyer, 1990).

There are exciting contemporary examples in South Africa, building upon the
ferment between civil and political society in the last two decades. Social
movement unionism "engages in alliances in order to establish relationships
with political organizations on a systematic basis" ( Lambert and Webster, 1988,
p. 21). The Women's National Coalition, a cross-party, nonracial movement, has
lately resolved "to build organizations, structures and lobbying power to ensure
that women's equality becomes a reality," including "how women are going to
be represented in the RDP structures." 7 Indeed, the Reconstruction and
Development Program itself envisages development to be

"a process of empowerment which gives the poor control over

their lives and increases their ability to mobilize sufficient
 development resources, including from the democratic
government where necessary" ( African National Congress, 1994,
p. 15).

The implications are profound. Both the leaders of the social movements and the
bureaucrats in the government of national unity may initially be uncomfortable
with this unruly relationship between the state and civil society. As Keane
insists, "the development of new democratic mechanisms is likely to increase
the frequency of surprises for all groups, movements, parties and governments"
( Keane, 1988, p. 26; see also p. 15).

However, this mediated process is the alternative to the pervasive alienations of

representative democracy as summarized here: passivity, powerlessness, and the
separation of the personal from the political. Our history of struggle confirms
that the alternative is possible. The statistics urge that it remain essential, lest
mere civility substitute for citizenship and development thrive at the expense of
democracy.

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Notes
Author's note: This chapter was first published in Review of African Political
Economy, No. 66 ( 1995), pp. 525-37, and is reproduced with permission of its
authors.

1. My thanks for the extensive financial sponsorship to the JEP; and for
helpful insights and detailed comments to CASE (Community Agency for
Social Enquiry) Deputy Director Dr. David Everatt, who managed this project,
and to our collaborator, Dr. Ros Hirschowitz.
2. The item pairs for citizenship, C, were as follows: each was asked as a
five-point Likert scale, running from "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree."
They were reversed as necessary in being summed into the indices:

-- Political efficacy: "Politics is too complicated for young people to

understand," and "Young people can't really influence politics."

-- Political engagement: "Mass action remains necessary to secure a democratic

future," and "Occupying public buildings is justified to help bring an end to
apartheid."
3. The three pairs of items were reversed as necessary and then summed to
provide democratic commitment D:

-- Non-racialism: "There will be no racial hatred in South Africa," and "Young

people of different racial groups will never really trust each other."

-- Non-sexism: "There are too few women in political leadership," and "Women
are less capable than men."

-- Fair governance: "The future government will fairly represent the interests of
all races," and "Nothing will change except the country's leaders will be black."

4. Most respondents were black, and most black union members are in
COSATU.
5. Categorical automatic interaction detection (CHAID), confirmed that the
organizational-mix variable behaved like a trichotomy when considered as a
predictor of C or D.
6. Terms were regarded as unnecessary if the deterioration in chi-squared
caused by their removal was significant for p < .01. This stringent crierion
yielded this model as the most parsimonious (chi-squared = 297, d.f. = 337, p
= .95).
7. "Coalition Lives on to Fight," The Star, Johannesburg, June 21, 1994.

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6
Immigration, Alienation, and
Political Change: A Positive Case
from Los Angeles
John Horton
Introduction
Drawing on six years of ethnographic and electoral research, this chapter
describes a case study of political relations between Chinese immigrants and
established "Anglo" (white), Latino, and Asian Americans. The site is Monterey
Park in Los Angeles County, transformed by a new wave of immigration into the
first majority Asian city on the U.S. mainland. The chapter outlines:
1. establishment-resident alienation from a local community dramatically
transformed by Chinese immigration and resistance to the newcomers, as
expressed politically in Anglo-led, "Official English" and slow-growth
movements;
2. the decline of nativist alienation and anti-immigrant resistance and a process
of dealienation spurred by the increased incorporation of ethnic minorities
and immigrants into a local political and social life once dominated by
Anglos;
3. the context of the change from a politics of exclusion to a postmodern
politics of inclusion on the foundation of diversity and difference.
Change was facilitated by:
1. material conditions: the large size of the immigration and the middle and
upper middle class economic and educational resources of the newcomers
that tipped the city toward an Asian majority and undermined both the
economic and demographic base of Anglo hegemony;
2. political conditions: the entrance of new political players--women, grass-
roots activists, and, increasingly, elected officials who opposed the old boy
network and generally played a mediating role; minorities fighting against
the white establishment for empowerment; and progressives and
multiculturalists pressing for interethnic

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connections and alliances in a situation where no single ethnic group could gain
without support from others.
Postmodern Alienation
Focusing on exploitation and loss of control over the labor process, Marx
observed that the alienated worker "is at home when he is not working and when
he is working he is not at home" ( 1977a, p. 80). However, the separation
between work and home, or public and private life, is an illusion. There are no
safe havens from the global movements of labor and capital. Workers and the
middle classes who cannot afford the gated ghettos of the rich are no longer at
home in the suburbs, their fantasy escape from the unruly and colored crowds of
the inner city. During the booming 1980s, the sprawling suburbs of Southern
California became sites of established resident alienation and resistance to
unwanted and seemingly uncontrolled economic development and immigration,
postmodern conditions of instability and uncertainty.My research concerns
established resident and immigrant responses to the rapid and dramatic
globalization of everyday life. The place is Los Angeles County, which was
made more non-white than white and more non-European than European by the
post-1965 wave of immigrants from Mexico, Central America, and Asia. Within
the county of Los Angeles, my site is Monterey Park, a multi-ethnic bedroom
city of about 60,000, which was made more Asian than non-Asian by Chinese
immigrants from Taiwan, Hong Kong, the People's Republic of China, and
Southeast Asia. The story of Monterey Park is important as one chapter in the
restructuring of the demography, economy, and local politics of Los Angeles,
and the United States, within an increasingly integrated Pacific Rim and world
economy.In this chapter, I focus on the uneven movement from established
resident resistance to immigrants to their increased political and social
incorporation during a period of rapid demographic and economic change from
the late 1970s to 1994. This movement is analyzed in relation to the intersection
of three types of alienation experienced by established residents and newcomers:
1. alienation from home--the local and lived environment. Some long-
established residents experienced alienation as a sense of estrangement from
a once-familiar and homogeneous "American" environment, now made
foreign by the "colonization" of often prosperous Chinese and Asian
newcomers. For their part, newcomers often experienced alienation from the
local community as a sense of being outsiders, who were excluded by
established resident hostility and nativism;
2. ethnic alienation--the sense of being disenfranchised from local citizenship
on the basis of ethnicity which was a problem shared by established Asian
Americans, Mexican Americans, and "Anglos," as well as Asian
immigrants;
3. economic or class alienation--for home owners and land users, whether
immigrants or established residents, a sense of powerlessness in face of land
use decisions made by developers and their friends in City Hall.

The research for this study, which was conducted from 1988 to 1994, was

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based on hundreds of pages of ethnographic field notes, 90 taped interviews

with local activists, reviews of Chinese and English newspapers, and
quantitative data from two exit polls and the U.S. census. The core of the
research was the work of a multiethnic, multilingual team of sociologists. 1

Demographic Transitions
Located about 10 minutes by an uncongested freeway east of downtown Los
Angeles, Monterey Park was sold by developers in the postwar decades as a
tranquil suburban refuge. Predominantly an Anglo town in 1960 (85% Anglo,
12% Latino, and 3% Asian), the city was slowly integrated with the in-migration
of native-born Mexican Americans and Japanese Americans. The population
changed dramatically after the mid-1970s with the rapid immigration of Chinese
people and capital from Taiwan, mainland China, Hong Kong, and Southeast
Asia. By 1980, the ethnic map of the city was almost evenly divided between
Anglos (25%), Latinos (39%), and Asians (35%). There was only a small
population of African Americans--about 1% in 1980. 2

Between 1980 to 1990, the number of Asian residents in the city increased by
91% to become 56% of the total population, while Anglos declined from 47% to
12% of the total, and Latinos declined by 10%, to 31%. Today, Monterey Park
has become America's first "suburban Chinatown" and a major financial and
service center for an expanding regional Chinese and Asian population. The
immigration represents an altogether new pattern of Chinese diaspora away
from the traditional urban Chinatown into the middle-class and ethnically mixed
Mexican-American, Asian-American, and Anglo suburbs of eastern Los Angeles
County.

The physical transition of Monterey Park was initially unplanned and uneven.
The city looks unfinished, as if caught in a time warp between a postcard-perfect
Middle America of parks, a civic center, and neat single-family dwellings, and
the encroaching restaurants, banks, supermarkets, condominiums, and traffic of
a Chinese boomtown. The sights and the sounds of the 1960s and 1990s clash on
the major commercial streets. On North Atlantic, one encounters, in succession:
Ai Hoa supermarket (the words, untranslated into English, meaning "Loving the
Chinese Homeland," might shock old-timers); more Chinese signs with enough
English to identify Little Taipei Restaurant, Red Rose Hair Design, Flying Horse
Video, Cathay Bank, Remax Realty, and Bright Optical Watch, all patronized by
a large, regional, mostly Mandarin-speaking population; and empty lots--
formerly Fred Frey Pontiac and Pic N' Save--awaiting Chinese capital. Hughes
Market and Marie Callender's Restaurant remain as clues to a "Western" past.

Political Transitions
The political transition occasioned by the new immigration has been painful.
Residents, newcomers and established residents never intended to be neighbors,

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but finding this to be the case, they faced the task of either fighting each other or
rebuilding a sense of community at the points where their lives collided and
intersected under conditions of great ethnic diversity. The first responses were of
resistance and defense as political structures were challenged and changed.

Collapse of the Old-Boy White Network and the

Rise of New Forces
Tipping the population in favor of Asians, the new immigration had unleashed
complex and competing political forces. On one side were established residents,
who resisted what they saw as uncontrolled economic growth and immigration.
On the other side were women, minorities, multiculturalists, and newcomers
challenging the traditional, white male political dominance and pressing for
power and change. The story of the struggle between these forces of resistance
and change deserves to be told, because it highlights political processes
occurring in other communities globalized by immigration, and because it had a
relatively positive outcome, which stands in contrast to the simplistic media
image of Los Angeles as the American capital of anti-immigrant sentiments and
ethnic strife.

Throughout the 1980s, newcomers were met with resentment and resistance by
the old-timers, particularly whites. They blamed Chinese newcomers for the
enormous changes that had taken place in Monterey Park since the 1970s--the
massive immigration, unplanned economic development, crowding, congestion,
and, above all, their sense of alienation from home and neighborhood
transformed by Chinese people, signs, and businesses.

Establishment Resident Alienation

We found few old-timers who did not comment on the foreignness of Monterey
Park. An elderly Anglo woman wearing a conspicuous pin in the shape of the
American flag had this to say about the lack of shopping areas:

We can't walk downtown to get anything. Not to a grocery store.

On Garvey and Garfield, it's all oriental grocery stores . . . stacks
of rice in the window. The store I worked in during the [Second
World] war, Oriental; they're all Oriental, every one of them.
We're not against them, but they want to buy our city, take our
city. Everything that's loose, they buy. They buy a taco stand,
they can't make tacos. But they come in with money, and they
have cash money.

The sense of alienation was shared by many established Latino and Asian
American residents. For example, a Latino resident who was in his 30s and
marginally employed, echoed the theme of displacement when asked by a
campaign worker whether he would support a Latino candidate in the next city
council race:

It's too late. There aren't many of us left. This was a nice Latino
neighborhood once. Now the Chinese-run parts store on the next
corner doesn't want my business. Look at the two

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new houses across the street, single-family dwellings, but six

Chinese families live in one and four in the other. My kids can't
get into the pre-school because the immigrants have taken all the
 places. Besides how can you learn anything with all those
languages? This is not Monterey Park; it's Mandarin Park.

While we were interviewing a Nisei, or second-generation Japanese American,

about his experiences in Monterey Park, his son, who had been out of town for a
number of years, joined our conversation with the remark:

Damn it, Dad, where the hell did all these Chinese come from?
Shit, this isn't our town anymore.

Newcomer Alienation
While established residents tended to legitimate their claim to citizenship in
Monterey Park in terms of years of residence and participation in local
organizations, immigrants tended to base their claim to inclusion on the
American experience of change, free enterprise, and immigration. For example,
a Burmese-born Chinese doctor legitimated his own claim to being American as
a hard-working immigrant, a participant in the revitalizing cycles of
immigration, diversity, and change--precisely the qualities nativists associate
with the disintegration of America. Reflecting on the discrimination against
Chinese in Southeast Asia, he argued that the greatest danger for America would
be to become nationalistic, hinder ethnic diversity, and stop the process of
change:

I think that the founding fathers must have had a dynamic

definition of America in their minds, that America should never
cease to grow. When you stop growing and become nationalistic,
when you say we have grown and this is how we are going to be,
and now we are going to safeguard our borders, push everybody
out, treat everybody else differently . . . that's the beginning of
the downfall of every nation.

I think the old-timers have to be educated to be made aware of

what America is. It should be written in bold letters: "We will
continue to have immigrants. This is America, and if you don't
like it, don't live here."

The Politics of Established Resident Alienation

The alienation of established residents found political expression in two
movements: Slow Growth and Official English.

Slow Growth
Slow or controlled growth was a populist protest against the developers who had
turned the once-peaceful suburb into a mass of mini-malls, condominiums, and
traffic-congested streets. Monterey Park became, in fact, one of the most
militant and successful centers of the controlled-growth movement, which began
to sweep Southern California in the 1980s. Supported largely by home owners,
the movement represented a rejection of the once-unquestioned Californian faith

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in market-driven growth and development. In the 1980s, the voters of Monterey

Park approved six initiatives placing limits on commercial and residential
development. In 1986, the slow-growth forces achieved control of the city
council. The grass-roots force behind these actions was RAMP (the Residents
Association of Monterey Park). The leadership was white, including
conservative Republicans and liberal Democrats united in the bipartisan fight
against big developers and a developer-friendly City Hall. A RAMP leader
encapsulated his philosophy at a town meeting:

I came here to buy a home, not a ticket to development. The

underlying philosophical question is, who owns the city? The
town belongs to the people who live here.

Monterey Park's slow-growth movement was not exclusively a class protest of

homeowners against capitalist developers for control over land use. It also had a
nativist and racist face. In a city where development was undertaken largely by,
and for, Chinese newcomers, the controlled-growth movement had strong anti-
immigrant and anti-Chinese overtones. Limitations on growth were primarily
limitations on immigrants who were rebuilding the commercial and residential
infrastructure of the city. This was clearly understood by the Chinese
developers:

We Chinese emigrated here and became more and more dominant

through the free market system. We did not "take over" this area
by force, and we didn't intend to overwhelm the rest of the
residents. Those who sold out their houses at a dear price were
doing so willingly. They could have refused to sell their property
and remain the majority in this area. I was really disgusted to
read in the newspaper that some old residents claimed that they
sold out because they were upset about the community quality
being brought down by Chinese. . . . I think that Monterey Park is
fortunate to have established a unique environment not only in
Los Angeles or Southern California, but literally in this nation.
The city has become identified as a land of new opportunity, a
legend of a revitalized town. It has been a success story. We have
made Monterey Park an important cultural and economic center.
Official English

The second expression of alienation from the home environment was more
overtly and consistently ethnic rather than economic. In the mid-1980s, nativism
began to appear on the bumper stickers of cars: "Will the last American to leave
Monterey Park please bring the flag?"

Nativism found its strongest expression in opposition to the use of Chinese on

signs and on public occasions and, more generally, to bilingualism and diversity.
One of the leaders of the movement stated this viewpoint clearly:

What we have to do is unify ourselves as a nation. We have to

declare that we want one official language, not a bilingual culture
or bilingual society, and this is what will keep us together as
Americans.

The local Official English movement was expressed in attempts to limit Chinese

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language signs in public places and Chinese books in the local library. In 1986,
the slow-growth-dominated city council passed a resolution declaring Monterey
Park an "Official English" city and not a sanctuary for refugees. This nativist
tendency could also be seen in the revival of patriotic festivals like the Fourth of
July and the largely white Monterey Park Historical Society. The leaders of
these movements were mainly white and politically conservative, although they
enjoyed widespread support from established Latinos, Japanese Americans, and
Anglos of various political persuasions.

Thus, the alienation of established residents had both a class base, which was
anti-big capital and anti-big government and a nativist base, which was anti-
immigrant. The linking of racial/ethnic and class factors was built into the
contradictory character of the two movements and the close relations between
their leaders. Leaders of Official English tended to be on the side of no
economic growth; and many leaders of controlled growth were sympathetic to
the cause of Official English. As a result of these connections, the movements
overlapped in practice and were often classed together as anti-immigrant and
racist by an uncomfortable mix of developers, Chinese immigrants, and citizens
who were advocates of minority and immigrant rights.

From Nativism to Ethnic and Inter-Ethnic Politics

While the controlled-growth movement was generally successful in passing
initiatives and achieving representation on the city council, the nativist
movement, which had achieved prominence in the mid-1980s, lost at least
temporary momentum in Monterey Park by the end of the decade, a fact
symbolized by the defeat of its most visible leader, Barry Hatch, in the city
council race of 1990. Since 1990, Monterey Park has had a majority/minority
city council, although the composition has varied over time. In 1993, the five-
member council consisted of two Chinese Americans (one an immigrant), two
Latinos, and one Anglo. In 1995, the council had three Latinos, one Anglo, and
one Chinese American. In addition, since 1990, three out of the five council
members have been women, which is another dramatic change in a political
arena traditionally dominated by men. In 1994, bucking a statewide trend, the
multiethnic city council voted to oppose California's anti-immigrant Proposition
187.

Thus, the direction of recent political movement was away from nativism and
toward greater political and community participation of women, ethnic groups,
and immigrants in local politics at the levels of both voting and direct political
action. Demonstrations at city council meetings have become especially
important political tools for the many immigrants who are not citizens.

What were the factors behind this turnaround and, in particular, the movement
away from confrontations between newcomers and established residents toward
what could be described as a connective politics of diversity? They were both
material and political.

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Diversity as the Result of Political Struggle

The neutralization of nativism was the result of political leadership and struggle
that challenged the political polarization between newcomers and established
residents. Increasingly, politics was realigned in two directions, which tended to
break down the divisions between newcomers and established residents. One
division was ethnic, between Asian Americans, Latinos, and Anglos. The other
was interethnic and more class-based, consisting of the formation of often short-
lived alliances between ethnic groups and native-born and immigrant Americans
on issues of economic development and quality of life.

Ethnic Politics
Increasingly in Monterey Park, as a direct result of the changes brought by
immigration and the nature of entitlement in the United States, ethnicity has
become a primary principle of political organization, which tends, under certain
circumstances, to override divisions based on nativity. Before the new
immigration, the pattern of political control was white-sponsored diversity--that
is, minorities were not locally organized for political action and had to depend
on white support to attain office and political influence. By the mid-1980s,
however, Latinos, Asian-American, and Chinese immigrants had begun
establishing their own political groups and organizing for action. We also found
in our analysis of exit polls for the 1988 and 1990 Monterey Park City Council
elections that ethnicity overrode education, income, immigrant status, and other
characteristics in determining voter choice. That is, Asians tended to vote for
Asians, Latinos for Latinos, and Anglos for Anglos (see Table 6.1 ).

Replicating a major finding of the 1988 poll, in the 1990 election we found that
ethnicity was the single most important determinant of candidate choice in
Monterey Park. Knowing a voter's ethnicity was a significant predictor (at the .
001 level) of candidate choice. The result was obtained by simultaneously
controlling for seven independent variables: ethnicity, education, income,
gender, length of residence in the United States, opinion on bilingual education,
and position on a ballot "Measure S" favoring control over residential develop-
ment. Table 6.1 presents a profile of the social and political characteristics of the
major ethnic voters.

The important point for understanding the shift away from nativism was that for
certain political purposes ethnicity could override divisions between immigrants.
For example, in a situation where Asian Americans generally lacked political
representation and few Asian candidates were running for office, diverse Asian
groups united as Asian Americans around a Chinese-American candidate. Thus,
in 1988 and 1990, established Japanese-American residents, although native-
born and very much like Anglos in their levels of nativism, voted for Chinese-
American candidates.

We found that the pattern of pan-Asian ethnicity, let alone pan-Chinese

ethnicity, did not hold in 1994, when many Chinese American candidates were
running against each other and there was a chance for a Chinese majority on city

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council. Ethnicity was a major factor in city politics, but the meaning of
ethnicity was highly situational and changed over time.

Table 6.1 Candidate Choice and Voter Profile by Ethnicity (in

Percentages), Monterey Park, Municipal Elections, April 10, 1990
Anglo Chinese Latino Japanese
American American
All Voters 36 25 26 13
Candidate choice
Kiang 40 90 30 69
Purvis 53 26 48 34
Reichenberger 44 15 21 36
Hatch 37 10 19 25
 Anglo Chinese Latino Japanese
American American
Balderrama 45 36 67 44
Barron 42 19 47 37
Voter Characterististics
Foreign Born 6 74 20 1
College+ 36 66 23 43
Age 45+ 69 33 48 57
Income $50,000+ 35 54 31 50
Party Affiliation
Republican 35 47 15 37
Democrat 59 22 80 59
None 3 22 3 1
30+ years of residence in 56 18 42 37
Monterey Park
Support for Proposition S
Yes 67 51 65 70
No 19 22 19 15
Didn't vote 7 13 9 8
No response 7 147 7
Support for Bilingual Education
Yes 41 68 57 40
No 46 20 29 45
Undecided 12 7 11 11
Number of Candidate Choices
1 13 44 23 18
2 10 10 14 14
3 70 41 53 62
Respondents (N) 349 239 255 131
Source: John Horton, exit poll of Monterey
Park Municipal Elections, April 10, 1990.
Percentages
do not add up, since voters had three
candidate choices.

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Class-Based Interethnic Alliances

A second force attenuating nativism and divisions between newcomers and
established residents was the movement toward the formation of multiethnic
alliances around issues of development. This was, in part, a class force uniting
residents, regardless of nativity and ethnic status, as small property owners and
property users against developers and property speculators.

Table 6.2 Political Profile of Chinese Voters by Nativity and Length

of Residence, Monterey Park Municipal Elections, April 10, 1990
Newcomers Old- American-
(%) timers Born
(%) (%)
Candidate Choices
Kiang 95 89 85
Balderrama 25 42 41
Hatch 7 13 46
Number of votes
1 59 42 23
2 3 10 21
3 28 44 56
Support for
Measure S
Yes 38 53 69
No 22 22 23
Didn't vote/No
40 25 8
response
Support for
Bilingual Education
Yes 80 62 59
No 9 24 33
Undecided/No
11 14 8
response
Family Income
$40,000 or more 53 72 NA
$20,000 or less 17 5 NA
Respondents 41.4% 33.1 25.5
(N) (99) (79) (61)
Note: "Newcomers" were defined as
immigrants with less than 10 years of
residence in Monterey Park
Source: See Source and "Old-timers" as immigrants
to Table 6. 1. residing in the city more than 10
years. Years of residence in the city
were not taken into account in the caw
of "American-Born."

Our analysis of exit poll data collected during the 1988 and 1990 elections
 -74-

and of previous voting trends indicated that the majority of voters favored some
kind of growth controls. Established residents, whatever their ethnic
background, were more favorable than newcomers. However, this distinction
bluffed when we examined the effect of length of residence on immigrants. The
longer they had been in the United States and in Monterey Park, the more likely
they were to support the goals of controlled growth, that is, to adopt an
established resident profile. In this instance, the alienation of residents as
property users from property developers and speculators overrode divisions
based on nativity and ethnicity, at least for that small but influential group of
voters. Table 6.2 shows that established and native-born Chinese were more
likely than newcomers to support a slow-growth measure, Proposition S, and to
select candidates across the ethnic spectrum.

The Crucial Role of Multiculturalists and

Progressives
This strengthening of economic over ethnic interests was achieved by the
delinking of controlled growth and nativist (Official English) movements and,
consequently, class and racial issues. This was a direct result of political
leadership. In 1988, Judy Chu, a Chinese-American woman, was elected to city
council with a platform linking the goals of controlled growth with ethnic
harmony and diversity. Her message did not escape the leaders of the Residents
Association of Monterey Park (RAMP) and the growth-control movement.
Interested in promoting their economic agenda and avoiding guilt by association
with Official English and the charge of racism, in the 1990 municipal elections,
RAMP failed to endorse their one-time ally and nativist leader, Barry Hatch, and
he lost the election. In the 1992 elections, RAMP endorsed the winning minority
candidates for city council, Judy Chu and Rita Valenzuela. Although the
controlled-growth movement continued to contain anti-immigrant tendencies,
this pattern of endorsement signaled the importance of interethnic alliances
within the movement, which would have been unthinkable less than a decade
before.

The contradictory character of established resident alienation made this

development possible. On the one hand, it was classbased, targeting developers;
on the other hand, it was nativist, targeting the newcomers. The balance of these
tendencies was determined by the course of political struggle. Of course, the
formation of interethnic alliances on the basis of local development issues did
not always achieve class unity across the ethnic and immigrant spectrum. For
example, in 1993, some prominent white leaders of the slow-growth movement
supported the proposal of a Taiwanese developer to build a card club in
Monterey Park. They saw this as an opportunity to gain needed city revenue and
avoid paying higher taxes.
Besides, the gamblers would most likely be Chinese American, and the facility
would be located near the poor, Latino part of town. Chinese American leaders
strongly opposed the casino which could tarnish the image of a model
immigrant community. Siding with the Chinese, Latinos did not want another
negative development dumped in their backyards. Thus, in this case, Chinese

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Americans and Latinos, rather than Anglos, became the leaders of an inter-
ethnic alliance opposed to development.

Material Conditions for Political Diversity

Although the ethnic composition of alliances varied according to shifting class
and ethnic interests, the concept of alliance was favored by leaders who were
realistic about the demographics of the region. Interethnic alliances were made
on the basis of material conditions that were generally favorable to
accommodation rather than direct conflict between newcomers and established
residents and between ethnic groups.

Interethnic cooperation was increasingly a political necessity. While Monterey

Park was primarily Asian and secondly Latino, the state and federal districts
were predominantly Latino and the Asian population was extremely diverse,
with internal divisions based on nativity and national origin. To get elected,
individual voters, whether white or nonwhite, had to court interethnic support.
This was clearly the strategy of Judy Chu, a Chinese-American who was elected
to city council in 1988 and 1992 and who ran, although unsuccessfully, for state
assembly in a primarily Latino district. Chinese immigrant candidates who have
pursued a more nationalist and pro-immigrant line have been less successful in
local elections.

Other factors favoring accommodation between newcomers and established

residents were the large size of the immigration and the middle-class status of
many newcomers and established residents. The Chinese had the economic and
educational resources to press for a favorable accommodation. Besides, many of
the effects of immigration were positive for changing and revitalizing the
region. Although old-timers complained about being invaded by aliens, many
sold their homes and businesses at a great profit. The newcomers did not
threaten their livelihoods and instead helped the homeowners to prosper. In fact,
Monterey Park remained a pocket of economic revitalization and relative
prosperity as Southern California generally slumped into recession.

The economics and demographics of the new immigrant community also

supported political change. The size and the resources of the immigrants
undermined the economic basis of local white power and opened up the local
political structure to greater ethnic participation for women, minorities, and
immigrants who had not previously been represented. Their competition for
power was not based on a life-or-death economic struggle for existence. Indeed,
a politics of alliance and diversity is more feasible under conditions of relative
economic equality.

Dealienation in Postmodern Los Angeles

Monterey Park provides a case study of alienation and dealienation strategies
under the postmodern conditions of extreme ethnic and racial diversity. Many
established residents--Anglo, Asian American, and Latino--responded to the

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large immigration of Chinese and rapid, uncontrolled economic development

with a sense of powerlessness and alienation from the foreignness of a once
familiar order. Likewise, newcomers confronted foreignness and nativism in
their new home. Thrown together by global forces, both newcomers and
established residents were challenged to create a sense of community at the local
level.

The nativist response to alienation was to deny the reality of diversity except as
a divisive ideology. Nativists wanted to reassert their order by calling for
restrictions on growth and immigration and by reaffirming the dominance of the
English language and Euro-American traditions. The effect of these strategies in
Monterey Park was divisive, drawing an ever narrower and sharper division
between "them" and "us." Another response to diversity has been the
development of an ethnic politics and the ethnization of everyone, including
Anglos who preferred to see themselves as Americans without qualification.
This result could also be divisive, essentializing differences and turning politics
into a zero sum game of ethnic competition.

However, there was one response that fostered dealienation and cooperation--
recognizing differences of ethnicity and nativity as political resources and
mobilizing them into alliances for representation and controlled development.
To gain a sense of power and identity in an ethnically fragmented environment
and achieve greater control over the quality of local life, newcomers and
established residents were learning to form alliances across the divisions of
nativity and ethnicity.

The construction of a positive, connective politics of diversity and difference in

Monterey Park and the neutralization of nativism and ethnic politics confirmed
neither the conservative's prediction of immigration causing ethnic war nor the
liberal's faith in the redeeming value of diversity. These alliances were practical,
situational, and unstable; they were not sustained by an abstract commitment to
diversity. They were made possible by the middle-class character of the
community and the relative equality of the residents, factors that were not
present in the poorer Los Angeles communities, whose diversity and inequality
erupted into the riot of 1992. The case of Monterey Park suggests that there is
not one but many different immigrant communities, which have different and
complex effects on the course of political development in the United States. 3

Our research offers no easy models for achieving greater harmony under the
postmodern conditions of immigration and diversity. What we can show,
however, is the complexity and fluidity of a local political process that lessened
established resident alienation and nativism, moving away from xenophobia and
toward a more international conception of home and citizenship. In a world of
immigrant bashing and ethnic cleansing, crossing rather than drawing
boundaries is an accomplishment to be applauded and studied.

Notes
1. Parts of the text originally appeared in John Horton with the assistance of
Jose Calderon , Mary Pardo, Leland Saito, Linda Shaw, and Yen-Fen Tseng,
The Politics ofDiversity: Immigration, Resistance, and Change in Monterey
Park, California

-77

Diversity: Immigration, Resistance, and Change in Monterey Park,

California ( Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995).

The above assistants constituted the major researchers in our multiethnic

team. I am indebted to their work and insight. In many ways, my thinking
was the negotiated result of our interaction.

Generous financial assistance was provided for our research by the National
Board of the Ford Foundation funded Changing Relations Project and the
Asian American Studies Center, the Institute of American Cultures, and the
Academic Senate of the University of California, Los Angeles.
2. In this paper I employ the terminology generally used by local residents for
the major ethnic groups: Anglos or whites (terms reluctantly used by the
one-time ethnic majority who prefer to think of themselves as Americans
without qualification); Latinos--Americans of Mexican and Latin American
descent, whatever their racial phenotype; Asian Americans; and African
Americans. Wherever possible, I refer to more specific groups like Mexican
Americans, Taiwanese, etc. By using ethnic labels, I did not intend to
essentialize socially constructed categories. On the contrary, a major finding
of our study was the situational and fluid character of ethnic identities in an
internationalized and diverse community.
3. The middle class and suburban situation in Monterey Park can be contrasted
to that of poorer sections of Los Angeles that have also been dramatically
 changed by immigration. For example, in South Central Los Angeles poor
African Americans may feel in competition for housing and jobs with Latino
immigrants, and both have been in conflict with middle class Korean
immigrant shop- keepers. Their alienated relations under conditions of
poverty and urban neglect created the material conditions for riot in the
spring of 1992. Accommodation requires a political struggle for diversity
within a framework of equality and social justice.

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7
Ethnic Revival and Conflicts: The
Challenge of the 1990s
Yehuda Bien

Our whole world is in a crisis of transition. Contradictory trends characterize

current developments in Europe. In one part of Europe, a supranationality has
fallen apart, while in another part great efforts are invested in the construction of
a new supranationality. Moreover, there are revivals of ethnic and national
entities. Nobody really knows what will prevail during the rest of the 1990s. Is it
the decade of ethnic communities striving for a new expression of their national
identity?

It seems that the result of these processes must be the replacement of the present
system by something else. We are finding ourselves in the middle of a
worldwide rebellion against the irrationality of rulers, who have oppressed
groups and continue to do so in the name of holy traditions or universal logics
and ideologies. Contradictions built into the political and economic structures of
the dominant system are evoking counterculture, religious fundamentalism,
racist, and antiracist movements. Social scientists are therefore obliged to
rethink their conceptual apparatus, question fundamental premises, reinterpret
the meaning of basic ideas, and propose alternative conceptions.

Theoretical work on the concepts of nation and state is often confusing and
problematic. Traditional views have restricted social sciences to a rational and
empirical assessment of means, distanced from the quality of outcomes. In
contrast, a theoretical approach is proposed here that emerged from the
collective adventures of Israeli citizens--Jews and Arabs--and focuses on the
collective management of human affairs.
The verification of goals in human life is a social process characterized by
fluidity, which requires communicative action. The actors in the process
interpret the common goal from different and changing perspectives and thus
reshape it.

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They reflect on their action and search for a multiperspective view; They strive
to "overcome their at first merely subjective views and, thanks to the mutuality
of rationally motivated convictions, to create simultaneously the objective world
and the intersubjectivity of their life-world" ( Habermas, 1975, p. 98). They are
constructing alternatives to existing social arrangements. That reconstruction is
not always the outcome of a conscious and critical behavior, but it has a deep
impact in the sphere of consciousness. People in unique historical processes and
social circumstances therefore create alternative theories about nation and state (
Znaniecki, 1952; Fals Borda, 1981).

Is the primary task of a social scientist in such steady processes of social and
human change to analyze past and current events in order to provide facts and
clarifying data, or to ". . . look behind the front . . . for some consistent but not
so visible currents explaining the diagnosis . . . [and] drawing up alternative
pictures of the society . . ." ( Lochen, 1990). Are recent developments in the
former USSR and Eastern Europe, as well as the revival of ethnicity in the West,
a destructive force or an enriching resource?

In Eastern Europe, in the face of crushing socioeconomic systems and

ideologies, the search for new definitions of personal and ethnic identity became
vital. The revival of ethnicity combines a departure from profane contents and a
legitimation of a great variety of irrational beliefs. People search for new
spiritual anchors, while the "new" political leaders and most of the political
institutions are now mistrusted. People trust only those institutions that might
provide protection and security--the spiritual security provided by the church
and physical protection provided by the police and the army.

When communist rule ended in Poland, people requested the Roman Catholic
Church to participate in replacing the old system. Many expected that the church
would fill the ideological gap. Another segment adored the "New God" of the
free market economy. A combination between the "old" God and the "new"
became the most attractive alternative for the majority of people in Poland and
other East European countries. However, this "double-facing God" has not saved
ethnic minorities from harmful impacts. Nationalistically oriented leaderships in
Yugoslavia tried to create a mixture between the new "spiritual" phenomenon
and authoritarian approaches, which caused a bloody confrontation and the
nation's destruction. The Russian leadership responded with similar approaches
in order to protect the unity of the Russian Federation.
It seems that Western European societies are also suffering from growing signs
of disintegration which are very harmful for the communities of guest workers,
who are largely excluded from political participation and from the provision of
equal rights in the welfare institutions, while many are victims of violent
attacks.

With the Polish scientist Kwasniewski ( 1990) we must ask: what are the
perspectives of a real European integration, if national identities are not
respected and preserved as a valuable and pluralistic enriching factor? If
contradictory tendencies among some 55 ethnic entities will prevail, then a
federal and functional connection between them is questionable. Responding to
such doubts

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requires answers to additional questions: What internal contradictions are

represented in the alternative concepts of national and ethnic identities? What
imposes a variety of attitudes on individuals and groups from different ethnic
communities when they are dealing with political controversies? What creates
divisions and what promotes understanding--and how can parties in conflict be
engaged in a dialogue that might lead to collective action?

Similar questions can be posed regarding the conflict between Jews and Arabs in
Israel, which represents a relationship between a national majority and an ethnic
minority. This chapter describes the efforts made to use the educational system
as an instrument to promote "Democracy and Coexistence" in Israeli society, as
well as the theoretical and practical approaches used and the insights gained
from that experiment.

The Israeli Case

The Israeli case represents a social situation resulting from the conflict of
antagonistic social movements. Israel inherited from its founders two basic
components of legitimation, which clashed in political practice. The components
are: (1) the collective "particularism" of the Jewish national state, (2) the
"universalism" of a modern Western society.

However, national societies that include ethnic minorities differ in terms of the
degree of promotion or avoidance of change. There are societies in which
historical change takes place through a controlled modification of relationships
between ethnic communities, while in others, such change is abandoned, the
autonomy of social actors weakened, and confrontation with conflicts is
avoided. Marshal Tito's Yugoslavia represents this second option; it has not
considered "conflict" a valuable subject for research by social scientists.
In Israel, a well-designed decision-making system and dozens of voluntary
organizations have been engaged in attempts to modify ethnic relationships by,
for example, arranging meetings for the parties in conflict. Such confrontation
included a process of dialogue and a mutual clarification of strong emotions of
anxiety and aggressiveness. It facilitated an analysis of controversial issues and
produced a mutual understanding of conflicting vantage points. The aim was not
to resolve the conflict, but to learn how to live with it and to cooperate
nevertheless ( Bien, 1993).

From the observation of such processes we gained new insight into ethnic
obstacles, the limited possibilities for bridging gaps, and the surprising variety
of personal ethnic or national definitions. Initially, Jews and Arabs reacted
differently. Arabs tended to explain their attitudes and political conceptions
without referring to any personal differences. They seemed well informed about
the whole spectrum of Jewish approaches and attitudes, which indicated that
knowledge of the majority is a vital necessity. However, the position of a great
number of Jewish participants was quite different. For many it was the first
opportunity to become acquainted with their neighbors. They presented a variety
of attitudes and responses.

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A follow-up of the processes indicated that the revelation of the "other"

stimulated a turn to the "self" in order to reassess the components of one's
personal identity. Such a process produces a slow change in attitudes.
Furthermore, both parties became aware that explanations and responses differ
among individuals belonging to the same ethnic community. The process of
deepening mutual acquaintance thus facilitates a lifting of personal masks and
alters the interpretation of personal identities. It also had a confusing impact.
The "ethnic" group, which so far exhibited a similarity in approaches, lost its
collective mask. Elements of heritage, of the historical and cultural "past" were
still manifest, but a diversity of attitudes emerged from the confrontation with
the controversies of the "present." Apparently, the "past" and the "present"
together are shaping ethnic identity. That new phenomenon required a scientific
clarification and produced the analytic approach to ethnic and national identities
described in the following discussion.

The analysis of personal definitions of ethnic identities reflected a variety of

descriptions. One group gave preference to the territory, the dwelling place, the
piece of land, or civic obligations. The cultural, religious, or historical
component was a secondary attribute. Others preferred to highlight the "past"
and added aspects of territory and state issues. A third group tried to balance
between the "present" and the "past." Arabs tried to rank-order the personal
meaning of being an Arab, a Palestinian, and an Israeli. Jews hesitated between
their Jewish heritage and their Israeli components. However, both Jews and
Arabs searched for what they have in common with their ethnic relatives in
dispersed places outside their homeland.

The analysis indicated something else: people relate to two variables. One
represents the "past" and its cultural, religious, and historical heritage. The other
describes the relationship to the territory, the state, and the contemporary
"present." People from different ethnic backgrounds relate to these two continua
and place themselves somewhere inbetween. Everybody creating their unique
personal point, which depicts their personal alternative of an abstract idealized
model. In this model, the strength of one variable depends on the other, and the
personal places are the functions of both (see Figure 7.1 ).

In our scheme the vertical axis points to the past and represents the accumulated
values of the heritage of ethnic and national identity. The horizontal axis
represents the weight of values emerging from the "present," as incorporated in
personal identities, as well as the orientation toward the "future." Ethnic
personalities outside their homeland relate only to the heritage. Their location is
therefore outside the interrelated area.

This model facilitated an understanding of personal variations among members

of the same ethnic community and between people from different communities.
It enabled a breaking out from the constraints imposed by conventional
categories of national identity. People could feel comfortable with their personal
alternatives without being regarded as outsiders. The model also depicts the
"outside" location of ethnic relatives in the Diaspora, who do not participate in
the creation of the present Israeli reality.

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 Figure 7.1 Personal Relations to Past and Present
If indeed both the "past" and "present" shape ethnic identities, it is necessary to
discover their relative contribution. An observer of tendencies in those countries
characterized by ethnic revival can easily conclude that its main feature is a
departure from a "present" that was dominant for decades. If the present is
crushed, then the "past" is called to replace it. People then adopt the spiritual
base of former generations without any effort at renewal. Ethnic revival seems
to be a revival of the past and a turning point from rationality to irrationality,
from something "profane" to a devotion to the "sacral," and from a doubtful
existence to a struggle for survival. Most important--the "past" becomes the
formulating force of the new "present."Relying on Habermas's theory of
communicative action ( 1981), the usual behavior of actors in modern society
and the behaviors of actors involved in a process of ethnic revival can be
distinguished and analyzed. Anyone observing the daily actions of individuals
and groups can easily detect contradictory relationships to the surrounding
world. Daily life is a steady confrontation with new experiences, facts, and
norms; people use competencies already tested in analogous circumstances,
trying to apply them again.Two resources nourish these competencies: the
tradition assimilated during the process of socialization, and the personal
insights and conclusions drawn from successful experiences. Both are utilized in
our rational and irrational responses. The steady confrontation with new events
necessitates a balance between "old" and "renewed" responses, although often,
people fail to develop an effective control of their new environment.The feeling
of unsuccessful performance manifests itself in a great variety of symptoms:
A. Loss of confidence in accumulated personal knowledge-practical wisdom
becomes meaningless or looses its legitimation;
B. Loss of confidence in collective approaches and ideas--which undermines

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solidarity and creates social alienation;

C. Loss of
confidence
in the
self--the
inherited
messages
are not
applicable,
motivation
fades, and
frustration
prevails.
Such unsuccessful performance often leads to an avoidance of confrontation
with "new" circumstances. Individuals and groups thus unwittingly renounce
their claims to manage new situations. Frustration and mistrust replace critical
social consciousness, which normally functions as a navigator in the social
reproduction process. It is very hard to deal with basic questions without such
competency: What is still relevant from the tradition, and what new elements
must be added? What represents a further elaboration of the "past," and what is a
partial departure from it, and thus a renewal?People are accustomed to relying
instinctively on competencies that have already been tested. A sequence of
satisfactory tests and outcomes produces a fixation of responses and patterns of
behavior. These are incorporated in personal identity and deeply absorbed in the
personal, "invisible" culture. Instinctive responses emerge from this "invisible"
part of human culture and are therefore hard to describe or articulate. They
represent the personally socialized past and tradition, having been implanted,as
it were, in the human "marrow." A mixture of conscious thoughts and
nonconscious feelings represents a continuation of some traditional elements
and a divergence from others. It produces instinctive responses and drives one's
reaction to the surrounding world. Crises in the personal ability to reproduce
these responses are therefore a breeding ground of "sacral" attitudes, with myths
and metaphysical imaginations influencing the orientation toward daily
praxis.To regain control and mastery of one's own destiny requires:
A. Renewed legitimation of personal knowledge and wisdom through exposure
to new resources that provide evidence that the accumulated personal
knowledge is effective;
B. Legitimation of alternative social patterns and their corresponding system of
values, together with exposure to new patterns and selection of the preferred
one;
C. Formation of a renewed personal identity, which requires new functional
abilities and high identification with the selected patterns of social action
and its incorporated values.

Of course, people differ in their observances of traditional components and their

departures therefrom. Some adhere consciously to traditional symbols and
mythic phenomena, while others doubt the relevance of their own traditional
concepts, criticize their heritage, and reshape symbols and messages of the past.
Still others take positions between those opposing alternatives. A more critical
approach does not deny the contribution of the past but rather searches for the
mythic and the concrete as interwoven in the traditional messages. In order to
fully utilize the past in its confrontation with the present, it is necessary to pick
out the concrete nucleus, which was crystallized through the practical
experiences of past generations. The challenge is to reproduce the past in a way
that it can be applied in the present situation, with a full awareness of the
continuity of historical conditioning and its effect on the "present." Individuals
differ in their

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personal ability to make such a selection, interpret traditional elements, and test
and elaborate them.Individuals differ also in their relationship to the surrounding
world of action, where they carve their "micro" world from the "macro"
environment, according to their personal interests, orientation, and level of
education. Everybody adheres to their personal definitions of problems and
solutions and overlooks those of the others. However, when normative
consensus is lacking, a tendency toward conflicting designs and plans of action
prevails, which has a harmful impact on organizational and social fabrics. It
often causes divisions, which form a breeding ground for organizational, social,
and political alienation. In designing our coexistence program, we tried to
challenge such social and ethnic malaise.
Attitudes: Religious versus Secular, and
Particularistic versus Universalistic
Israel is also a society in steady transition, and one may wonder whether the
Israeli case is similar to cases of ethnic conflict elsewhere. In searching for
answers, we invited many groups of Arabs and Jews to a "maze" exercise,
during which they were exposed to the fundamental social, cultural, and political
controversies in Israeli society. The "maze" presents simulated life dilemmas
and invites the participants to face basic problems of a society in change.
Similar to real-life situations, individuals are limited in choosing between
alternative options that might resolve the presented dilemma. According to their
personal concept of democracy, ethnicity, faith, and education, they select their
favorite. Oriented by their own preferences, they are each making their unique
way in the network of the "labyrinth." During the final stage of the exercise, the
participants compare their different solutions and explain the reasons for
selecting them.The participants' selection of alternative options indicated that
two pairs of interrelated forces shape personal attitudes and personal behavior
when individuals are confronted with social and political controversies. One pair
represents the psychodynamic aspects of human behavior:
A. The "social consciousness" of human beings, which can be placed on an axis
denoting magic vs. critical consciousness, with the naive and the fanatic
inbetween ( Freire, 1972).
B. The need to either escape from or confront political and social controversies.
Our observations indicated that persons who tend to escape from a real
confrontation are mainly locked into magic or naive consciousness. The
confrontation-oriented personality is motivated by a critical or fanatic
consciousness.The second pair represents conflicting forces:
A. The religious or secular relationship to spiritual and cultural heritage.
B. The particularistic or universalistic concept of social life.

A variety of combinations of those forces creates divisions between individuals

and groups. The impact of both molds alternative concepts of national identities
within the framework of one nation ( Bien, 1982). We can easily detect four
combinations of these forces:

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 Figure 7.2 Alternative Options for Personal Behavior and Attitudes
1. Religious nationalism emerges from extreme particularistic attitudes,
combined with religious beliefs; it leads to fundamentalism, racism,
xenophobia, and theocracy.
2. Secular nationalism combines particularistic and secular attitudes; such an
approach tends to deny ethnic pluralism and to support uniformity or
legitimation of one dominant culture.
3. Secular liberalism combines universalistic and secular attitudes; it confirms
ethnic pluralism and recognizes the rights of minorities, and it represents the
belief that the principal historical movements emerge on behalf of the
people and their freedom.
4. Religious liberalism combines universalistic and religious attitudes. It
emphasizes tolerance and coexistence. It fosters also a master identity of
citizenship with opportunities for a secondary nationality of minorities.

The behavior of Israelis--Arabs and Jews--who challenged the controversies of

the maze indicated that people from dissimilar ethnic groups do not differ by
ethnic origin in the process of selection of an alternative. Their personal location
between the two axes corresponded partly to their accumulated inherited values
and to contemporary experiences. This creates a new linkage between the past
and the present. The past is not neglected, but it is no longer a hindrance
anymore in reaching out for a fruitful dialogue. The elements of the "past"
nourish the conflicts. However, people can live with them if they detect what
they have common in their present. This insight causes, finally, a reassessment
of their

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personal heritage. They can learn to live together despite the conflict ( Bien,
1993).

Changes in Educational Policy

Deep social, cultural, religious, and national divisions characterize Israel and
many other pluralistic societies. Israeli Arabs found themselves under military
rule after the establishment of the state. Only after 18 years was that rule
abolished, allowing the Arabs to attain the status of formal civic equality. They
started to enjoy civil liberties, conditioned by the fulfilment of civic duties,
without identifying themselves with the symbols of the Jewish state. Their
behavior was expected to be neutral with respect to the state's particularistic
( Cohen, 1983).

In the 1980s increasing numbers of Arabs began to question the official

perception of their identity as an ethnic, religious, and cultural minority. They
threw doubts upon the existing policy of domination and asked for a change to a
policy of consensus building. They emphasized more and more their need to be
respected as Israeli citizens of Palestinian identity. At the same time,
nationalistic tendencies spread among Jews, nourished by fears that recognition
of a Palestinian identity might make the Arabs in Israel and in the occupied
territories a unified national entity. Such fears became a fertile breeding ground
for extreme nationalistic and racist attitudes. It caused the election of a racist to
the Israeli parliament (the Knesset) in 1984, while the strong support for his
attitudes among youngsters required an educational response.

The Ministry of Education and Culture announced a "Democratic Year" and

advised the schools to use new educational programs designed to promote ideas
of "Coexistence." A monthly letter called for initiatives by school staffs and
invited universities and voluntary organizations to contribute. However, nobody
prepared the teachers for such a challenge. Political education was forbidden,
and schooling omitted political controversies. Consequently, teachers without
the opportunity to acquire experience and hone their skills and methods were
now suddenly asked to mobilize energy to meet a temporary goal and to
implement untested programs without a sufficient professional background. In
their eyes, this was similar to one of the annual instances of "crisis
management" being treated by "impression management." In the meantime, the
real challenge was set aside ( Elboim-Dror, 1989).

In other words, "teachers and principals appear to be uncertain as to what their

schools are for" ( Goodlad, 1976, p. 17). Furthermore, it was feared that schools
"soon will be obsolescent" if they "are not likely to go beyond teaching facts and
fundamental skills, if we will not ask them to provide systematic encounters
with all the major domains of knowledge, encounters designed to inform,
enlighten and stimulate thoughts" ( Goodlad, 1984, pp. 23-24).

However, such "prospects for the future" are obstructed by "domains of power
and control" which consider the schools as their battleground ( Kousez and
Mico, 1979; Bien, 1986). Policy makers, supervisors, officials from munici-

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palities and unions, and others seek to influence the quality of schools and fight
actively to maintain stability between their domains.That bureaucratic game
obstructs goal clarification and the emergence of a systematic order of priorities.
Inconsistencies of goals and goal ambiguity impose on teachers a "survival
game" ( Miles, 1980). In order to survive, teachers are preoccupied with issues,
materials and programs created and imposed by superior authorities. To
summarize: the "institution of schooling, as parentally conceived and operated,
is not capable of providing large numbers of our young people with the
education and this democracy require now and in the future" ( Doodlad,
1994).In the face of such statement one may wonder whether there is any hope.
However, if we want to avoid pessimism, we must recognize "that there are
intraas well inter-group variations in educational outcomes and some autonomy
among schools and teachers. . . . Many teachers and others may wish to see
activities of classroom and school as apolitical, ideologically neutral and
isolated from life beyond their doors, [but] the reality is inescapably different"
( Reid, 1986). Moreover, there are historical conclusions to the effect that
teachers and other culture bearers in society can take the risks of change. They
are likely to reshape major aspects of the structure of their organization and their
society, if they are supported by processes of social interaction ( Eisenstadt,
1985).My personal involvement in many experiments and programs in Israel
taught me that managing major targets for educational change requires
collaborative approaches ( Bien, 1976, 1982, 1986, 1987). It demands also a
scope-analysis range--from the study of interaction between two people to the
examination of a system--and a linkage between micro- and macrotheories
( Archer, 1985).Teachers can effectuate changes if they perceive a combination
of perspectives, each one corresponding to basic organizational elements and
domains and aligned, one to another, in a mutually supporting way. It is
necessary to link what seems contradictory and to create a new approach that
combines a "human resources" perspective with political, structural and
symbolic perspectives, making them a meaningful vehicle for analysis and
change ( Lawrence and Lorsch, 1976; Cohen and March, 1974; Argyris and
Schon, 1978; Alderfer and Smith, 1980). Despite the constraining forces in the
context of the Israeli education system, there seems to be reason for optimism.
Reactions to Educational Policy Changes
The first issue of feedbacks from the activities of the "Democratic Year" caused
a change in Ministerial policy formulation. The main conclusion was that the
responsibility for "Education for Democracy and Coexistence" must be handed
over to a ministerial unit. We proposed that the activity of this unit should
combine policy making with action-research-oriented activities, especially to:
1. provide cooperative frameworks of in-service training for Jewish and Arab
principals and staffs;
2. design diverse processes of experiential learning, with a permanent

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ingredient of meetings between Jewish and Arab teachers and students;

3. provide resources for a steady follow-up by a team of researchers.

That proposal was based on a survey of the experiments accomplished during

the "Democratic Year." It indicated deficiencies in the abilities of teachers and
principals, who were not successful in handling controversies. We assumed
consequently that their in-service training is a precondition for successfully
accomplishing the new educational policy. Another consequence was that
"Education for Democracy and Coexistence" must become a permanent
ingredient in all processes of learning and education and should not only be
handled as an appendix of informal activities. We interviewed the teachers in
order to reveal the contribution of the annual project and found them still
suspicious and doubtful. They expressed feelings of uncertainty about the results
of such efforts and their impact on students' attitudes and behavior. Teachers
argued that there was no opportunity to engage in introspection and no
reciprocity between the people in conflict. They emphasized:

There was no time to prepare ourselves or to draw conclusions.

Most of us have not been personally involved . . . the job has
been done by tutors of different organizations . . . we fulfilled the
functions of observers. . . . We had a feeling of being bombarded
by a variety of programs and tried to hide in "trenches." . . . Now
it is over and we are expecting that it will not start again.

Arab teachers added doubts about the relevance of a "democratic" message for
their population, while the Jewish teachers expressed disbelief in the
possibilities of a meaningful coexistence. A minority among both communities
drew positive conclusions and was already convinced that the new goals are a
vital necessity.
Previous experiences led to the conclusion that dominant figures within the
Ministry should be involved, in order to overcome the traditional resistance of
the different "domains of power" within that body. It was necessary to convince
them that it is about time to start a confrontation with painful social, cultural,
ethnic, and national conflicts. It is therefore necessary to learn: (1) how to deal--
and how to live--with such conflicts; (2) how to introduce political controversies
in schooling and education; and (3) how to prepare staffs for the new challenge
and arrange cooperative in-service training for staffs from the different sectors
of the Jewish and Arab communities.

This was reflected in the new policy declaration of the minister, which was
announced to a convention of top officials and supervisors. After this meeting,
study days were arranged with ministerial teams and teams of voluntary
organizations. However, this process of persuasion and optional involvement in
the new adventure evoked steady resistance among some parts of the traditional
"domains."

Being aware of those countervailing forces, we assumed that the double aim of
the new policy--education for democracy and coexistence--might facilitate the
participation of increased numbers of staff members. They could choose
between the goals and respond autonomously to actual events.

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The "Eshkolot" System

The Israeli schools serve different communities in terms of their social, cultural,
ethnic, religious, and national background. Schools are separated from each
other. There are religious and nonreligious schools, urban and suburban schools,
and Arabic and Jewish schools, none of which are used to cooperating. We
concluded from many workshops that simply putting together people of
different background does not necessarily eliminate prejudices and stereotypes.
To the contrary, in many cases it fortifies mistrust and false conceptions.We
assumed, therefore, that basic conditions for a successful implementation of the
new policy are:
a. breaking down the boundaries between schools;
b. providing opportunities for staff members to serve as sources of mutual
information, inspiration and enrichment.

We were familiar with the doubts about the possibility of installing a resource
exchange rationale into existing human service organizations, on grounds that
"formal organizations in the human services are self-serving, deliberately
uncoordinated, destructively competitive entities, impermeable to change and fit
objects for change only by those people with fathomless reservoirs of unfulfilled
masochism" ( Sarason, 1979).
However, it was concluded from the experience with the League of Cooperating
Schools that collaboration based on resource exchange can vitalize schools
( Bien, 1982). The league tried to advance Arab education only, but during its
final stage, most of the participants proposed a network with Jewish neighbor
schools, an idea that, at the time, policy makers and supervisors were reluctant
to implement.

Now, this idea corresponded with the announced policy. We envisioned a new
collaborative framework, called Eshkol (in Hebrew: a "cluster of grapes" or,
synonymously: "a person of eshkolot"--a wise person). It was intended to
represent the pluralism of Israeli society and Israeli schools, and was designed
as a formal and informal meeting place of neighbors who had never before
cooperated. The rationale of this pattern looks substantially different from the
description of usual school innovations, most of which are subject-matter
oriented, and provide the means for carrying out well-designed objectives. In the
usual innovations, the teachers' job is to apply what has been designed by
scientific teams. In our "intensive" pattern, however, action precedes particular
goals. It invites the staffs to create and invent new approaches and to draw
conclusions from their own experiential learning and mutual relationship. Most
importantly: the focus was on the process and not the product; the first subject
of change was the teacher and not the student.

Three annual stages of action were designed. The first stage tried to serve a
"core team"--the principal and leading functions within the staff--while the
entire staff became involved during the second stage. The third and final stage
served the students and their parents in an innovative and experiential learning
process.

It was assumed that the unique mixture of personal styles of individuals and

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teams would create a variety of processes and actions. Accordingly, it was

concluded that only qualitative research, based on anthropological concepts,
would be able to provide updated insights that might be helpful in the redesign
of processes and testing new ideas. The first difficult test was the confrontation
with an unexpected aggravation of the Jewish-Arab conflict due to the outbreak
of the "Intifada" in the occupied territories. It overshadowed all other items of
conflict in Israeli society. The uprising generated deep anxieties among Jews and
Arabs in Israel. Those fears nourished ideas of transfer of the revolting
population among Jews. At that time, Israeli Arabs felt solidarity with their
Palestinian relativesMeetings between Jews and Arabs required new concepts
and methods. It became necessary to confront controversial issues without delay
and learn about the impact of such harmful events on one's colleagues. It
became clear that both parties had the need to express strong emotions of fear
and aggression; often, the confrontation tended to escalate, aggravated by the
"we-they" dichotomy. People tried to protect themselves and avoided asking the
most crucial questions. However, they also tried to protect the fledgling
framework they had voluntarily created. Apparently, they acted from a deep
personal conviction that the new experiment was vital for Israeli education and
society. The expectation of a positive outcome in the form of incipient feelings
of human and professional solidarity became a most important stimulus.The
Eshkolot provided a terrain of intensive action, testing ground for new ideas,
approaches, and methods brought in by personalities and groups with differing
social, cultural, and ethnic backgrounds. It tested repeatedlyagain and again
modes of collaboration never before experienced, which could be also applied in
a great variety of extensive programs. Observations indicated that the double
aim of the program--education for democracy and coexistence--facilitated the
navigation of the Eshkolot. "When it became apparent that the discussion around
one of the issues reached a blind alley, you could turn to the other issue . . ."
( Doleve-Gandelman, 1988- 1989, p. 7).It was found that three gains nourished
the formation of new relationships and the construction of a support group with
unique codes of interaction:
a. A continuous analysis of ethnic identities contributes to personal growth and
change;
b. Confrontation with political controversies affirmed that political education
is vital;
c. The exchange of personal resources enriches and improves professional
abilities.

In other words, the mutually positive feelings prevalent in the new solidarity
group created a collective rational decision-making model without eliminating
the deeply rooted ethnic decision-making model. Both complemented each other
and were significant in individual attitudes and actions. The collision between
the different models became an efficient learning process. Its final outcome was
a step forward in "learning how to live with ethnic conflicts" ( Bien, 1993, pp.
243-253).

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Three years of observation and research indicated that the new setting is not
only providing new knowledge, it is also proving responsive to events in the
schools and the surrounding society. However, its most important contribution to
the individual participant is to increase awareness of the components of his or
her identity. The Eshkolot process required from the participants a reassessment
of their professional and organizational functions, and also of their relationship
with their political and ethnic environment. We composed a new instrument,
based on Seeman's instrument of five dimensions of alienation ( 1959) and
Geyer's concept of political alienation ( 1990), which presented four ladders of
personal growth relative to the profession, the organization, and the ethnic and
political environments (see Table 7.1 ; see also Bien, 1990).
Table 7.1
Ladders of Exit from Situations of Alienation
Professional Organizational Ethnic Political
Experimental
Creation of Cooperation Learns to live
political
material and with students with conflicts
learning in
methods and parents and lifts masks
classroom
Exchange of Common
Focus on personal growth and Political edu-
ideas within identity
team cation tested
the Eshkol components
Open doors-- Methods
New definition of Reassessment
and mutual applied to
professional role of identities
exchange controversies
Experiences
Takes additional Tests mutual Emotional
political
responsibility contributions confrontation
dispute
Focus on Avoidance of Alienated to Anxious to
professional task school problems ethnic problems face politics

The participants marked their personal baseline when joining the program as
well as the position to which they ascended. In their responses they displayed a
great variety of personal positions and combinations between the different
ladders. The duration of their involvement in the program, the development of a
new atmosphere in the staff room, and the moral power exerted on the whole

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staff influenced the progress of the individual participants. They shaped their
unique paths, with some moving easily and others in a steady rush. However, the
newly created mutual relationship contributed to a synchronistic advancement;
in that process the assistance of the principal and the core team was decisive.

Our final conclusion is that only a sequence of meetings, based on common

needs and interests and steeled in the burning heat of controversies, can produce
the need for collective action between conflicting ethnic groups.

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8
Tracing the Growth of Alienation:
Enculturation, Socialization, and
Schooling in a Democracy
Devorah Kalekin-Fishman

Systems of education are political creations, consisting of the deliberate exercise

of power in order to intervene in human development. The modern state
legislates and organizes groups, assigns learning tasks, and defines methods of
evaluation. Resources are invested and usages sanctioned to ensure the
transmission of selected elements of culture. Yet, the outcomes of educational
intervention rarely satisfy the original design. After political decisions set the
scene, morphogenetic systems as are those for education, preliminary decisions
undergo apparently uncontrollable change ( Archer, 1979).

Tracing tensions between decisions about education in a democratic society and

the ways in which the system actually works is the goal of this chapter. The
focus is on mechanisms that promote or, alternatively, repress, the achievement
of participation. After laying a theoretical basis, I will summarize research
findings about one channel of educational intervention, its formal framework,
and reflections of teachers and students on its implementation.

Whether schooling indeed contributes to social, economic, and political

participation (overall dealienation) or to isolationism and apathy (overall
alienation), is both a practical question for a democratic society and a
fundamental issue in social theory. Democratic ideology projects education for
active participation in all spheres of social life. Every citizen is supposedly
trained to be in control of herself and to have a hand in controlling the collective
( Ichilov, 1993; Turner, 1990a). Citizens all have the right to be competent, to
exercise responsibility for probing and criticizing their society, to make
autonomous decisions on social issues, and to initiate actions they consider
worthwhile, as well as to join forces for effective action.

There is, however, little convincing evidence that democratic objectives are

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realized through schooling. Classroom observations (e.g., Danziger, 1978;

Erickson, 1982; Mehan, 1979), like examinations of school-leaving statistics
( Shavit and Blossfeld, 1993) confirm that, contrary to their declared purpose,
school practices perpetuate a variety of social, cultural, and class inequalities.
These observations link up with research on the pervasiveness of alienation
among young adults ( Keniston, 1967; Willis, 1977). Competencies of
participation are apparently neither encouraged nor achieved. In order to account
for this, it is necessary to unpack the nexus of education, development, and
alienation. Drawing out theoretical connections between enculturation,
education, and socialization, I will show how socialization relates to alienation.

Enculturation, Socialization, Education

Basically, schools are not indispensable for ensuring learning. Enculturation is
the inexorable social process of configuring constraints of meaning and usage.
The entire collection of tools--material and spiritual, cognitive, affective,
conative, and evaluative--that shapes group living, is exposed to members of
society for application to situational contexts ( Durkheim, [ 1915] 1965;
Swidler, 1986). According to Berger and Luckmann ( 1972), the repertoire is
imparted in forms of language (nominalizations), normative behavior patterns,
generalizations, and abstract principles, all of which converge to form
transcendental messages.

Socialization, the development of the person in contact with others, is also

inevitable. Since human maturation depends on such contact, socialization is
identical to what psychologists call development. The heart of the process of
socialization lies in a dialectic of interaction--exposure to accessible roles in
contextualized situations. Group members mirror and filter gestures according to
innate intuition and evolving interpretations ( Mead, 1934). The range of
cultural elements made available in practice and the kinds of situations in which
people take part depend on their social positions. Educational systems regulate
enculturation through selecting elements judged appropriate for socialization.

There are reasons why this attempt is not always crowned with success. Some
have to do with the mechanics of production. Plans have to be "filtered down" to
the level of performance and are likely to be carried out in diverse ways. Other
reasons relate to the intricacies of socialization. Proffered meanings-in-use are
not automatically internalized by students. Instead, learning depends on the
mesh of the selected elements of culture with each person's particular trajectory
of growth. It is possible to grasp some of the difficulties by referring to Erikson
( 1950) extension of Freudian theory.

Erikson ( 1950) showed that in every culture, socialization is managed

according to consensual assessments of developmental capacities. This is the
frame for conveying a repertoire of nominalizations, patterns of behavior, and
principles in situated interaction. In his view, moreover, development unfolds
lifelong in eight stages, each of which is marked by a discovery of sensitivity to,
and aptitude for coping with, sociocultural challenges. Each stage is, therefore,

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a kind of trial encounter with a medley of cultural options.

According to Erikson, infancy is the stage in which individuals are challenged to

learn "basic trust" in the world. Failure is signaled as "basic mistrust." In the
anal stage of development, the child is challenged to achieve "autonomy," taking
control of body functions. "Shame" and self-doubt attend failure. In the phallic
stage, the sociocultural challenge is to demonstrate "initiative." Misplaced
enterprise is the source of "guilt." Persons in the stage of "latency" are
challenged to be industrious and to learn how to work with tools; failure is
defined as "inferiority." When reaching "sexual maturity," the individual is
challenged to define her role identity, an act made possible only by overcoming
the allure of role-diffusion and procrastination (the pose of Hamlet). By contrast
with Freud, Erikson viewed adulthood as a period of further development.
Maturity demands the capacity to enter into relations of "intimacy" (avoiding
"isolation"), to cultivate one's "generativity" rather than to resign oneself to
"stagnancy." Finally, a developmental career marked by success enables a
person to enjoy "integrity" in old age, a consciousness of a life well lived,
whereas a cumulation of failures leads to "despair."

Erikson's model stipulates that throughout development, a mischance at one

stage can be repaired further on. This assurance is the cornerstone of his faith in
therapy, and ours in education. Modes of coping with cultural trials at the stage
of latency, the age when children usually enter school, for example, can modify
unsatisfactory resolutions of earlier stages. Moreover, resolutions of early
challenges hint at routes an individual may travel in later stages of development
(achieving "role-identity," "intimacy," "generativity," and "integrity").

What Erikson does not allow for is the likelihood that what seems appropriate to
therapy may not be socially or politically desirable. Not all the resolutions that
he defines as eugenic facilitate the attainment of the goals valued in a
democratic society. In the next section I will describe some of the snares.

Alienation and Socialization

The term alienation refers to objective conditions, to subjective feelings, and to
orientations that discourage participation. Objective alienation is fostered by
comprehensive systemic processes that separate mental from manual labor, fix
people in fragmented roles, and restrict access to resources. If alienating
conditions are not apperceived, the individual can be said to be deluded ( Marx,
1967; Kalekin-Fishman, 1992). The subjective affect of alienation may have
different sources ( Seeman, 1967).

A person suffers from alienation in the form of "powerlessness" when she is

conscious of the gap between what she would like to do and what she feels
capable of doing. The state of "meaninglessness" is defined as the feeling that
one is unable to foretell the social outcomes of one's actions. Anomie, or
normlessness, the bewilderment that may accompany a rapid change in position
or status, is a type of alienation with which people in modern society often have
to cope ( Durkheim, 1951). Paradoxically, however, the opposite of
normlessness

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is a slavish commitment to conventional means to achieve conventional goals,

which is also a sign of alienated affect ( Kalekin-Fishman, 1992).

Self-estrangement is the psychological state of denying one's own interests--of

seeking out extrinsically satisfying, rather than intrinsically satisfying, activities
( Heinz, 1992). The feeling of being segregated from one's community is what is
meant by social isolation. 1 Each of these affective states has an impact on the
ways in which people construe situations and construct, or avoid constructing,
situated action. Thus, the states may determine the very possibility of active
participation.

When we confront the process of socialization at the different stages elaborated

by Erikson with dimensions of alienated affect and orientations to action, we
find interesting relationships. If indeed each stage of development makes it
possible to meet a novel sociocultural challenge, the potential for experiencing
alienation and adopting alienated modes of action must be embedded in the
nature of the challenges and the expectations that attend them. Educational
interventions that can be categorized as dealienating should mediate the
transmission of elements in a shared culture so as to foster socialization for
participation. Such an education will promote feelings of powerfulness and
conscious activism; confidence in predicting outcomes of actions--
meaningfulness; and a sense of being proficient in cooperating with others
(social integration rather than social isolation) while aware of one's own self-
interest (rather than encouraging self-estrangement). When we scrutinize the
resolutions of the sociocultural challenges that Erikson proposed, we note that
not all contribute to dealienation and the potential for participation.

From among the challenges that attend different stages of development, those
that promote "autonomy" and "initiative," like experiences that adumbrate
challenges of "intimacy" and "generativity," bolster dealienation and
participation. On the other hand, what Erikson denoted as success in achieving
"basic trust," demonstrating "industry," and embracing a well-defined "role-
identity" actually favors tendencies to alienation. The thrust of the latter is
toward "normfulness," "social isolation" and "self-estrangement." The impact,
however, can only be decided through empirical investigation.

"Integrity," the desirable resolution of the last stage of adult development, is not
an indicator of either participation or non-participation. Success in evading
"despair" depends on the degree to which resolutions that the individual has
achieved match socially sanctioned expectations. "Integrity" may not necessarily
be related to democratic behavior.

Schools: Loci of the Production of Citizens

Intervention to produce citizens is the task of a state school system. Principles
include the norms for deliberation and decision making that govern processes of
production. These norms dominate the cultivation of learned behavior and
modes of thinking. By fixing boundaries between levels of erudition, schools are
engaged by the state to construct sound lives. Production

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is implemented through the totality of activities that constitute the educational

mission, the "pedagogical habitus" ( Bourdieu, 1994). This includes all aspects
of the curriculum, including teacher-student relationships, subjects of study, and
classroom discourse, as well as administrative arrangements.

Production is a topic to be learned as well. Schools serve as a proxy for the

world of work for long periods of time. In the process, time, space, and
knowledge of content in premolded chunks are packaged for use. Achievements,
measured in grades, serve as wages for pupils in the immediate context and
index profits on their investment for the adults involved.

Since schools serve developing individuals, the issue at hand is one of how the
implementation of the educational habitus meshes with maturation to lead to
participation/dealienation or to alienation/nonparticipation in the widest sense of
the word. To the extent that school-based challenges are dealienating, they will
encourage role incumbents to be independent, take risks, perceive their true
needs, and be creative according to their own potentials. A dealienating
education will encourage people to participate, that is, to test personal
constructions of their life conditions by spontaneous confrontation with the real
world ( Kelly, 1955). Sets of encounters that are alienating will, on the other
hand, foster dependency and conformism, and impose accepted contructions of
reality and identification with the collective. By isolating a specific aspect of the
habitus, the researcher can gain insight into the life experience at school and into
the guidelines it supplies for adulthood.

I will summarize findings from two studies related to aspects of the pedagogical
habitus as embodied in school regulations in Jewish and Arab schools in Israel.
The studies are part of a project designed to look at the cultural elements
selected for transmission in schools and how these elements are organized to
affect socialization/development. 2

School regulations are a salient component of the curriculum. They constitute an

educational intervention in the lives of students and their role partners in the
school. Like codes of law, they represent a formalization of objective conditions
with which teachers, parents, and children must deal. In terms of our
understanding of socialization, modes of implementation exemplify the
culturally acceptable presentation of developmental challenges, and they impact
affect.

On the basis of the theoretical argument developed above, it is possible to assess

whether or not the elements selected for inclusion in the regulations cultivate de-
alienation and participation. By looking at how regulations are perceived and
interpreted by pupils and teachers, we can assess the extent to which objective
conditions are reflected in feelings. Findings in a study of this kind make it
possible to predict tendencies toward participatory action.

The Research
Background

In Israel, schools are designed and administered from the center by a state
Ministry of Education. "Guidelines for regulations about school routines" were

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circulated by the director-general of the Ministry in 1978 and again in 1986.

After recommending an introductory statement about the overall significance of
education in Israel, the guidelines suggest a graded list of punishments when
rules are breached. Schools are instructed to formulate regulations in writing.
Details on behaviors and sanctions are left to the discretion of the school
authorities. Indeed, the documents analyzed for this chapter are quite
dissimilar.The general research questions were the following:
1. Overall, do school regulations create conditions of participation and
dealienation? In other words, which of the cultural challenges laid out by
Erikson ( 1950) do school regulations reinforce?
2. What consequences in terms of feelings of alienation can be attributed to the
regulations?
Stage 1

In the first part of the study data were collected from the regulations of 52
schools in the north of Israel, 34 in which Hebrew is the medium of instruction
and 18 in which Arabic is used. I also conducted exploratory interviews with 20
teachers or principals responsible for enforcing the regulations.

Altogether, there were 2,213 provisions in the documents, with a mean of about
50 per school in the Jewish schools and 32 in the Arab schools. With the help of
a research assistant, I analyzed the content to see which resolutions of cultural
challenges were encouraged. By referring to the style of presentation, the topics
covered, the "recipes" for action and interaction, and the exposition of norms,
we could work out how the content of the documents intersects with cultural
challenges. The following is an overview of the resolutions implied for each
developmental stage.

Above all, school regulations emphasized the resolution of "basic trust."

Mistrust, whether expressed in deviant behaviors or in a nonconformist
approach to authority, is threatened with negative sanctions. Relating to the
second developmental stage, the analysis shows that "shame" is openly
advocated, although not always expressly labeled. More stringent punishments
are possible only when shaming has not had the sought-for effect. There is, on
the other hand, no doubt about how autonomy is limited. A concrete example is
found in the extensive control of pupils' uses of time (568 items) and, implicitly,
of space.

As to the challenge of the phallic stage, "initiative" (versus "guilt"), analysis

shows that "guilt" is highlighted. Among others, this is disclosed in the relative
weights allotted to norms of prescription, prohibition, preference, or permission
( Merton, 1967), as well as to norms presented simply as statements of fact.
More than 86% of the rules are phrased as extreme constraints. Sanctions for
prescription and prohibitions range from "having a talk with the pupil" to
expulsion for several days and transfer to another school. Of these constraints,
35% are presented as "the way things are," as routines that must be internalized.
In this connection, specific sanctions are not spelled out.

The wide variety of topics to which regulations refer indicates that all

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aspects of school life fall under some rule. These include detailed instructions on
how to behave and to dress. There are 543 items that relate to orientations to
study, of which about 80% deal with technicalities of achievement such as
exams, quizzes, and grades. There are also rules about school property and
interpersonal relationships including safety precautions and rules for the
prevention of violence. All the provisions are presented as approved perceptions
of universalistic principles.

Imparting conceptions of "industriousness" and "inferiority" is a central task of

the regulations, as of all schooling. Diligence is specified in about 64% (1,413)
of the items analyzed and is often appended to categories noted here (e.g., time
use, studies, interpersonal behaviors). The sign of "inferiority" is "laziness."
Pupils are to be dedicated, ambitious, ready to follow a well-beaten path, and
warned to persist even when they do not enjoy immediate success. Industry is
even the key to avoiding "role-diffusion."

The documented regulations convey a principled description of significant "role-

identities." Teachers and parents are allotted prefabricated roles by school
authorities. As framed in the regulations, the role of the teacher in the Hebrew-
speaking schools is to dispense sanctions. A fully rounded role is also detailed in
regulations of the Arabic-speaking schools. Parents are co-opted without
question. Most of the emphasis is laid on the role of the pupil and the traits that
are considered crucial to the pupil's image.

The content analysis shows that the successes of stages in adult life are not
furthered in the schools. "Intimacy" is perceived to conflict with academic
achievement specifically and with the atmosphere of school as a whole. Instead,
pupils must learn to be isolated individuals. In the role behaviors that are
described and lauded, there is no hint that the impulse to "generativity" is
advantageous. Moreover, neither creativity nor novelty are mentioned in any of
the documents.

Constraints that enable a person to achieve the accolade of "good pupil" cue us
to the type of "integrity" adumbrated in the regulations. The attainment of
"integrity" seems to be contingent on accepting conformity with the objective
demands of the system, which are funneled through the school.

The analysis showed that school regulations do not encourage qualities of

democratic citizenship. Indeed, staff members in 20 of the schools that supplied
us with documents agreed that these strictures were not in line with what they
would call a democratic way of life. They insisted, however, that the rules fit the
"needs" of their school's population and environment and that it would be
impossible to run an educational institution without them.

Stage 2

In the second stage of the research, teachers and pupils from 105 schools were
interviewed individually about their perceptions of the regulations. Of the 1,800
student and 850 teacher protocols, 2,074 (1,459 students and 749 teachers) were
analyzed. Of these, 28% were from primary schools and 72% from

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postprimary schools; with 45.3% of the interviewees from schools in which

Arabic is the language of instruction and the remainder from schools where
Hebrew is the language of instruction.

In addition to sociological variables related to gender, class, ethnicity, and role,

background information included indices of social ties, outside interests, and
self-reports of academic achievement. The questions on school regulations
assessed the authority by which the respondents had knowledge of the rules
pertinent to their school, the degree to which the respondents felt they could
influence the formulation of regulations, their perception of the consistency with
which sanctions were applied, and the degree to which the rules were considered
acceptable by pupils, teachers, and parents.

The analysis included calculations of scores on each measure for the entire
population and separately for the Arabic-speaking and Hebrew-speaking sectors.
Subgroups were defined in terms of role (teacher or pupil), school level, and
gender. Spearman correlations were calculated to assess the independence of the
indices. We used the chi-square statistic to compare scores of the subgroups. For
reasons of space I will summarize only some salient findings.

Although respondents knew about the school's regulations, few could remember
whether the knowledge had come from reading a document or from some other
source. A full 95% thought that the principal made them up, while less than 15%
(including teachers) felt that they could influence their formulation. In the Arab
sector, the perception that information about school regulations is unreliable and
that nobody but the principal who formulates them really knows all the details
was more pronounced.

There was a good deal of uncertainty about the consistency with which stated
sanctions were implemented. More than 90% of the pupils could, however, cite
specific actions for which punishments were always meted out. All the
respondents knew the proscriptive and prescriptive rules that applied to
deviations in dress, unjustified absences, lateness, breaches of discipline, and
damage to school property. In Arabic-speaking schools, there was a wider
agreement that sanctions were applied consistently.

The punishments were accepted as indispensable by pupils and teachers alike,

although not all are feared equally. For the most part, pupils' fears were based on
appraisals of consequences. They dreaded physical pain and falling back in their
studies, and they exhibited uneasiness about comments in their personal files
that might pose a threat in the future. There was, however, common agreement
that the worst of all was to be suspended from school.

A query on the acceptability of the regulations disclosed some important

contradictions. Of interest is the finding that students who rated themselves as
high on academic achievement were most emphatic in stating that the
regulations were acceptable and necessary. They also perceived themselves as
having influence on the formulation of the regulations and assumed that
punishments were administered consistently. About 87% of the pupils were
dissatisfied with the rules and wanted more flexibility and "liberality" (65% to a
certain extent, and 14.9% to a great extent). However, about the same number
(66.4%) asserted

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that regulations helped them to be better students!

Overall, the judgment was that "everybody" was in favor of the regulations.
When asked what would happen if there were no document to spell out the rules,
almost 90% of the respondents--teachers and pupils alike in both the Arab and
the Jewish sectors and in primary and in secondary schools--responded that this
was an impossibility. Among the responses were comments such as: "Life in
school would be hellish! . . . It would be impossible to run the school. . . .
Anarchy would rule." There was no question but that the rules and regulations
were perceived to provide protection against a kind of "natural" tendency of
pupils to behave badly.

Discussion
This study of regulations and their implementation in Israeli schools was
undertaken to assess how they are likely to influence pupils' orientation to
participation in a democratic community. I analyzed documents and their
implementation on the assumption that schools produce acceptable citizens by
intervening in students' development. The mechanism is that of devising
challenges that accord with a hegemonic sociocultural consensus. The
theoretical basis was Erikson ( 1950) construal of human development and the
explication of its possible connections with objective and subjective dimensions
of alienation.

From the analysis of documents (stage 1 of the research), we learned that the
challenges presented to pupils frame conditions of alienation. From responses to
the individual interviews (stage 2), it was possible to draw conclusions about the
differentiated impact of the regulations on respondents' perceptions. These
findings index consequences of an objectively alienating framework on the
subjective affect and the orientations to action of those involved in schools. The
discussion relates to both phases of the research.

In general, the bureaucratic structure of the educational system is an alienating

setting. There is a clear division between mental and manual labor, as well as
between the responsible ministry and the schools. Pupils do not plan. Rather,
they are assigned tasks which are a kind of manual labor in the educational
context. The role of pupil is fragmented, separated decisively from the affective
and generative impulses of the whole person in the family or with peers. Role
fragmentation is furthered by the division of labor that governs the definition of
school knowledge. Topics are fragmented into separate subjects that are
differentially accessible. Varied demands are made by different teachers.

The content analysis of the regulations disclosed that schools intentionally set up
objective conditions that are alienating and designed to induce nonarticipation.
Relating them to socialization, I found that schools do not allocate equal
significance to all the developmental successes that Erikson's theory defines.
The accomplishments emphasized in the regulations in the form of "trust,"
"industry," and the "role-identity" of an obedient student encourage passivity.
Resolutions such as "autonomy," "initiative," "intimacy," and "generativity" are
neglected or expressly precluded. Thus, the rules and

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regulations that govern Israeli schools are slanted toward what Erikson
characterized as the "positive" resolutions of the challenges that turn a person
into a dependent of a bureaucracy--the school organization. At the same time,
regulations are biased toward the "negative" resolution of those challenges that
promise full self-realization in the praxis of adults.

The resolutions of the developmental challenges that are encouraged appear to

promote alienated affect. By fostering trust, the regulations encourage
powerlessness as well as conformity (what I have termed "normfulness"). Even
diligent pupils may not be able to predict the consequences of their efforts, and
thus will experience meaninglessness. Furthermore, the regulations ignore the
need of individuals for promoting their self-interest by cultivating a taste for
intrinsic satisfactions ( Heinz, 1992). The bias is toward extrinsic satisfactions
that promotes integration into the society of the school (rather than social
isolation), and identification with cultural values (rather than cultural
estrangement).

These findings raise theoretical paradoxes. Success in adopting the identity that
the school regulations define signals identification with a stereotype.
Theoretically, this should lead to discomfort at the resulting excessive
normfulness and feelings of self-estrangement. In school practice, however, such
conformity is likely to impart a sense of being able to do things (the negation of
powerlessness), as well as a feeling that one can understand what is going on in
the school surroundings (the negation of meaninglessness). In the framework of
the school, "industry" is the legitimate means to the goal of scholastic success.
Diligence entitles pupils to extrinsic rewards. However, in contrast to Heinz
( 1992) theoretical understanding, the pupil is led to accept these as congruent
with self-interest rather than self-estrangement. The fundamental lesson
imparted by the documents is the Orwellian "Newspeak" principle that
submission is autonomy and self-actualization. This principle is the core of the
systematic inculcation of false consciousness of self ( Marx, 1967; Orwell,
1951).

When all is said and done, then, the aspects of alienation that are, in fact,
perceived by the people involved cannot be determined theoretically. Stage 2 of
the study was designed to check on the immediate affective consequences of the
objective alienating conditions and their significance to teachers and pupils.

In the responses, evidence of competence in participation is limited at best.

Pupils are aware of being powerless. They have little say about determining
school laws, and they know it. They understand the rather sobering principle
that rules are made and fully understood only by people in authority. When they
abide by the salient rules, however, they can foretell the socially logical
outcomes of their acts and may evade feelings of "meaninglessness."

Pupils are content to ignore the regulations insofar as possible. They construct a
world of their own--a world of mutual involvement, even of intimacy, in which,
as their responses to the interviews show, the regulations are recognized as a
knotty setting that one takes care not to brush up against. Real life--the cosmos
of childhood and adolescence--is taking place where children meet and construct
situations in which they play and play out roles, finding ways to circumvent
unpleasantness. However, children also sense the contradictions.

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As the regulations make clear, and as the pupils demonstrate in their responses,
private interests and personal quirks are a nuisance in the school context. Pupils
are plucked out of their natural context and consigned to identical pigeonholes
by rule of the personal file and grade. It is accepted, moreover, that part of being
a good student is sticking to the rules, whether or not you have participated in
formulating them and whether or not you feel that a given rule is in the interest
of your unique individuality. The total endorsement of the regulations as
inevitable demonstrates that schools manage to impart the moral that self-
estrangement in the theoretical sense actually serves self-interest in the
organization. Role incumbents who recognize this central metanorm are
rewarded handsomely.

Social isolation, or segregation from the (adult cultural) community, is part of

the fate of pupils. As the regulations make clear, and as educators avowed, the
do's and don't's enumerated therein are peculiar to the schools and valid only for
the duration of a student's career. The very sterility of the school milieu is
presumed ultimately to provide a useful backdrop for remodeling private and
public lives. Tensions are created by the fact that the roles cultivated in school
are essentially disconnected from the world that creates the school system.

The disjunctions explain the disorder that seems to be held in abeyance only
temporarily despite the bias of the regulations toward orderliness, predictability,
and normative role behaviors. Strangely enough, the staff agree that they have to
cope with meaninglessness; teachers reported that the rules are revised every
year because "circumstances change." Perpetual monitoring is needed because in
principle, the "cracks" are inherent to the conception of how schools should be
run.

My findings are in a sense a rejoinder to conclusions that Seeman ( 1967)

reached in his studies of Swedish factory workers. Their responses to
questionnaires on subjective alienation did not confirm many of the then
prevailing hypotheses about the relationship between the alienating conditions
of factory work and the formation of an alienated consciousness. Seeman found
that workers "simply come to terms, more easily than our theories imply, with
the only work life they know and can reasonably expect for themselves. . . .
[They] manage . . . an acceptable life of the moment by creating occasions,
however, small, for humor, sociality, decision-making, competition, argument,
etc., that are at once trivial and remarkable" ( 1967, p. 284). In Seeman's view,
these findings demand a re-examination of the meaning of work in a person's
life and a radical revision of theories of alienation. He suggests that measuring
alienation is a thankless, and perhaps a useless, enterprise.

There are good grounds for questioning these conclusions. For one thing,
alienation stubbornly refuses to disappear as a problem, even in the fin de sicle
postmodern climate. It is, however, questionable whether pen-and-pencil tests
are

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the best way to characterize the phenomenon. Meaningful research on alienation

should trace specific links between objective causal factors and discernible
effects in subjective states and observable behaviors.

Furthermore, a key failure of the Seeman studies, furthermore, is, in our terms,
their gross inattention to the educational background of the workers apart from
logging years of schooling. Although the sheer quantity of schooling is no doubt
of some importance, the quality of those years is a more important indicator of
the tendency of workers in a study to use "making do" as a viable and satisfying
strategy for conducting their lives.

On the basis of the studies I have carried out, I would claim that any serious
examination of alienation has to consider the preparation for work embedded in
the structures of school life, as well as its effects over time. The impact of the
pedagogical habitus on pupils as discerned in my researches can be interpreted
as evidence that the process of forcing people to enjoy life as a series of
"remarkable, if trivial, small occasions" is integral to institutionalized
educational interventions. Manipulations of terminology, of rewards and
punishments, and of their diverse combinations, as driven by hegemonic
relations, at once induce nonparticipation and inculcate ways of managing an
alienated existence.

The analysis of documents generated hypotheses about the effects of rules and
regulations on pupils. Further analyses have distinguished some of the
differentiated effects on pupils of different backgrounds. The findings from this
project indicate that there is leverage in mapping other structural components of
the school system in order to see to what extent they support the bias of
intervention toward alienation. The crowning aim is to elicit the potential for
participation or nonparticipation that enculturation--socialization--andeducation
impart to the individual personality over time.

For a comprehensive understanding of alienation, furthermore, there is purchase

in assessing evidence of the practical impact on children's ways of construing
the world beyond school. This type of analysis is likely to afford further and
deeper insight into continuities and discontinuities in cultural traditions.

Notes
1. Seeman ( 1967) adds the category of "cultural estrangement." I interpret this
as an extension of "social estrangement" rather than as a separate
phenomenon.
2. Details of the choice of schools, procedures, instruments, and steps in the
analysis are available from the author.

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9
Alienation and Racial Discrimination in the European Union

Marie Macey

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 . . . are swept away, all new formed ones
become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts
in the air, all that is holy is profaned . . . ( Marx and Engels F.
[ 1848] McLellan, 1977, p. 224)

This chapter examines the links between economic globalization, alienation, and
racial discrimination in relation to the European Union (EU). It argues that there
is a relationship between the increasing levels of racism in the EU and alienating
processes at the global, international, national, local, and individual levels. 1

Globalization has intensified competition, which has resulted in economic and

social restructuring, large-scale unemployment and poverty, and widespread
insecurity and uncertainty. These have combined to produce an alienating
environment in which visible minorities are viewed as competitors for scarce
resources and scapegoated for the ills of society.
The alienation experienced by minorities exposed to structural discrimination,
marginalization, and exclusion will be implied rather than analyzed. In general,
this chapter focuses on alienation among majority groups and its possible
consequences for their treatment of minorities. I suggest that a clearer analysis
of dominant group behavior is a potentially more productive way forward in
terms of both sociological analysis and policy formation than an attempt to
analyze the outcomes of such behavior on groups that are in subordinate
structural positions. This does not constitute an expression of sympathy for, or
understanding of, the perpetrators of racism, whether at the structural,
institutional, or individual levels. Nor does it imply that the

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relationship between economics and racism is a causal one. It does, however,

suggest that "the analytical usefulness of the alienation concept . . . resides in its
ability to rescue and bring to light the human costs--physical, social, and
spiritual--of the 'free market'" ( Gimenez, 1992, p. 191). It also suggests that
without a "humane economy" ( Addy, 1994) there can be little hope of racial
amity.

Economic and Social Restructuring in the EU

Although ostensibly economic, current economic policies
presuppose an important political agenda; they seek to establish
the grounds for qualitative changes in the state, the main
economic agents, and their mutual relationships which will, in
turn, lead to changes in the content of acceptable political
ideology and collective behavior ( Gimenez, 1992, p. 186).

In contemporary Western Europe, the impact of globalization, accompanied by

rapid technological change and a communications revolution, has led to the
intensification of competitive pressures. This has resulted in increased demands
for flexibility of sites of production, organizational structures, and the utilization
of labor ( Crompton and Brown, 1994). Because mass-produced goods and
services can be provided more cheaply in the newly industrialized countries,
there has been a shift in the EU away from manufacturing industry and toward
the development of consumer industries geared to meeting cultural and symbolic
needs. The former rested heavily on unskilled labor, while the latter demands a
highly skilled and much reduced workforce, an obvious outcome of which is
increased unemployment.

Along with globalization go high levels of insecurity and uncertainty:

"Globalization is accompanied by extraordinary turbulence and insecurity as
economic life is fundamentally restructured and reorganized" ( Addy, 1994, p.
39). The intensification of competition leads to demands for ever-faster rates of
technological change, restructuring, and "rationalization." This results in both
unemployment and dramatic changes in employment structures: labor is
casualized; part-time, hourly paid, short-term and temporary contract work and
homeworking increase. This is accompanied by moves toward deregulation at
all levels --inter-national, national, and local. At the European level, for
instance, the recent white paper on the economy and employment emphasized
job creation via flexible labor markets ( Commission of the European
Communities, 1993). At the national level, government initiatives in, for
example, the United Kingdom, Germany, and the Netherlands are aimed at
removing protection measures in working and living conditions ( Addy, 1994).
At the organizational level, new technologies and the introduction of "lean"
production systems exacerbate unemployment and the uncertainty of job
security ( Crompton and Brown, 1994). Unions are unable to protect workers
because the logic of the global market demands the cheapening of labor and the
breaking of organized labor power ( Gimenez, 1992).

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Other features associated with global competition include a general shift to the
right in the economic policies of EU member states ( Tsoukalis, 1991); the
relocation of labor-intensive industries in areas where labor is cheap and
plentiful and social costs low ( Abrahamson, 1991); and the reduction or loss of
welfare benefits ( Burkitt and Baimbridge, 1993; Kennett, 1994). These
exacerbate the tendency toward dual societies and labor markets. Gimenez's
criticisms of the privatization of state enterprises, the dismantling of
protectionist regulations, and the general delegitimation of union and working-
class demands were made about Argentina but apply equally to many countries
in the EU, as do her comments that such policies unavoidably deepen alienation
( 1992, p. 185).

Poverty, Citizenship and Alienation

Poverty is not only about shortage of money. It is about rights
and relationships; about how people are treated and how they
regard themselves; about powerlessness, exclusion and loss of
dignity ( General Synod of the Church of England, 1985, p. 195).

Poverty, citizenship, and alienation are highly contested concepts ( Giddens,

1988; Turner, 1990; Scott, 1992), but they are clearly linked. Poverty as relative
deprivation is based implicitly on citizenship, with those living in poverty being
"deprived of the conditions of life which ordinarily define membership of a
society ( Townsend, 1979, p. 915); ". . . to live in poverty is to be excluded from
the kind of life expected of a full citizen" ( Scott, 1992, p. 1). If people cannot
participate in the life of their society, they can be said to be alienated; moreover,
the causes and outcomes of this are apparent at the system, group, and individual
levels ( Kalekin-Fishman, 1994). There are an estimated 20 million people
unemployed and 50 million people living in poverty in the EU ( European
Commission, 1995). The Cambridge Econometrics Group ( 1993) warned of
permanent polarization between rich and poor, and Lash ( 1994) has suggested
that a pan-European underclass of noncitizens is emerging.

In addition to widespread alienation, the EU is characterized by fierce

competition in the labor market and all areas of social welfare. In such a
situation, Weber notes:

Usually one group of competitors takes some externally

identifiable characteristic of another group of (actual or potential)
competitors--race, language, religion, local or social origin,
descent, residence, etc.--as a pretext for attempting their
exclusion. It does not matter which characteristic is chosen in the
individual case: whatever suggests itself most easily is seized
upon. Such group action may provoke a corresponding reaction
on the part of those against whom it is directed. ( 1968, p. 242).

Gimenez suggests, "It is in the sphere of the struggle for survival that the
political effects of alienation can surface in the popular consciousness with
potentially disastrous consequences" ( 1992, p. 190). One such consequence is
the growing tendency for white majorities to perceive visible minorities, not
only as

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competitors for scarce resources, but as responsible for that scarcity. This
scapegoating, in various formats, is currently taking place at the international,
national, local, and individual levels and has been exacerbated by the spread of
an ideology emphasizing the supremacy of market forces and the primacy of
individualism. It can be seen in policies that marginalize and exclude minorities;
in political discourses that define them as "the problem"; in the discriminatory
practices operating to limit access to social wealth; and in the organized,
streetlevel violence that is increasingly practiced against minorities.

Racial and Ethnic Discrimination in the EU

The EU Level

The history of racism in Europe is not pretty. Its most evil and
grotesque manifestation--the Third Reich--falls easily within
living memory. This last attempt, by force of conquest, to remove
European boundaries was of a very different nature from the
Treaty-making processes currently underway. But a disturbing
thread of brutal disregard for the human rights of ethnic minority
people settled in the continent runs through the two endeavors.
( Boateng, 1989, p. ii)
Discrimination against minorities, particularly visible ones, takes place on a
number of dimensions at the EU level, including agreements, conventions, and
policy decisions. 2 For example, one convention introduced at the Dublin
meeting of interior and home affairs ministers in 1990 ruled that if a third-
country national is refused entry by one member state, this is tantamount to
refusal by all the others. 3 A second convention ruled that the country of first
entry must assume responsibility for the foreign national concerned ( Ford,
1992). These rulings will encourage both the development of restrictive
immigration policies and more rigorous checks at borders as member states
move to avoid being seen as lax on immigration and/or having to accept
responsibility for entrants ( Baimbridge, Burkitt, and Macey, 1994).

Another example is the completion of the single internal market (SIM) of the
EU in January 1993. The SIM is designed to remove boundaries between
member states to form an area without frontiers in which the free movement of
goods, persons, services, and capital is ensured. Two aspects of this could
impact negatively on visible minorities. First, as internal frontiers between
member states are dismantled, external boundaries between the EU and other
countries are being progressively strengthened (a process that has led to the use
of the term Fortress Europe). This could lead to more stringent checks on
immigration statuses at borders and to random checks when, for instance, people
request housing, health care, or other forms of social welfare ( Flynn, 1989).
Second, Western Europe seems to be redefining its identity in a way that
excludes black citizens. Both these processes could have adverse consequences
for individuals and groups labeled outsiders in the new Europe, whether non-
Europeans or EU residents of ethnic, or other, minority origin. This is
particularly problematic in a context

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where the discourse has become racialized to the point where immigrant and
black are virtually synonymous.

The National (Member State) Level

. . . The massive immigration of the last quarter-century to

Western Europe and North America, leaving in its wake a large
population whose formal citizenship is in question, has
engendered a new politics of citizenship, centred precisely on the
question of membership of the nation-state ( Brubaker, 1992, p.
36).

Brubaker's comment highlights one of the most significant forms of

discrimination in Europe: that surrounding the question of who is to be accorded
citizenship of the union's member states. Decisions about immigration, refugee
and asylum legislation, and entitlements to residency and citizenship status are
made at the level of the individual member state. However, they are influenced
by such profoundly undemocratic groups as Trevi, Schengen, and the Ad Hoc
Group on Immigration. 4 These operate outside the official Community
framework, devising restrictive policies toward immigrants, refugees, and
asylum seekers which are frequently adopted by individual member states. One
proposal from the Expulsion Subgroup of the Ad Hoc Group on Immigration,
adopted at the Copenhagen summit in 1993, is for a common EU policy for the
identification and expulsion of foreigners against whom some irregularities can
be found. This could increase the already high levels of harassment of visible
minorities in the EU, since distinctions are not made between immigrants,
migrant workers, and citizens of European states. Following the decision, the
French police initiated mass hunts for people in "irregular situations," an action
probably connected to France's declaration of its intention to become a country
of "zero immigration."

Citizenship rights in EU member states range along a continuum from full

citizenship, as in the United Kingdom, to guest workers in Germany who, until
very recently, had few rights. Large numbers of people in the EU have no
security of residence, no right to vote or stand for election, no right to be joined
by families or visited by relatives, and no right for their children to gain
automatic citizenship ( Allen and Macey, 1990). Ireland ( 1991) noted that
ethnic minorities are generally granted specified entitlements in terms of civil
and social rights, which stop far short of full citizenship. Layton-Henry ( 1990)
referred to this as the division between citizens and denizens, though he
acknowledged the gradual extension of citizenship rights for migrants (other
than in the United Kingdom, where they are being progressively eroded).

Mitchell and Russell ( 1994) noted the association between citizenship,

nationality, and immigration control, in that the latter are designed to restrict
access to citizenship rights. For over two decades, individual member states
have been moving toward ever more restrictive legislation regarding
immigrants, asylum seekers, and refugees. There has also been a clear
convergence between

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the immigration and deportation policies of a number of member states (see

Hammar, 1985, on France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, West
Germany, and the United Kingdom and Cohen, 1987, on Britain, France,
Germany and Switzerland).

In almost every case, such controls appear to be directed toward restricting the
entry of black, rather than white, people. The European Commission warned
that these policies could contribute toward structural discrimination ( European
Commission, 1988); the Netherlands Institute of Human Rights linked them to
the growth of fascism and racism (Netherlands Institute of Human Rights,
1988), and the Human Rights Division of the Council of Europe expressed grave
concern over the tightening of policies on asylum seekers and refugees
(European Parliament, 1985). Notwithstanding these cautions, EU member
states are developing ever more stringent entry criteria for potential immigrants,
refugees, and asylum seekers. Boateng commented:

Europe finds it hard enough to agree on what it means to be

European. But there seems, in some quarters at least, to be a
rapidly developing consensus about who is to be excluded from
any access to any definition which might emerge. ( Boateng,
1989, p. i)

This situation is unlikely to be improved by the shift toward the right that has
taken place in Western European local and national politics in recent years. In
France and Germany, political parties of the far right (campaigning on an overtly
anti-black, anti-Islamic, anti-immigrant ticket) have gained in electoral
popularity in recent years. In Italy in 1994, over 150 right-wing National
Alliance representatives were elected, 5 of whom are now government
ministers. In Britain in 1993, a British National Party (BNP) candidate was
elected in a local election and, though this candidate was subsequently
deselected in 1994, the fact remains that in some localities, BNP candidates
received up to 30% of the vote. Baimbridge, Burkitt, and Macey ( 1994) carried
out an econometric analysis of the results of elections to the European
Parliament between 1979 and 1989, which demonstrates rising electoral support
for parties of the far right in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Greece, Italy
and Spain. They point to a clear association between economic recession,
unemployment, and votes for the far right, a finding confirmed by Mayer
( 1995) with respect to France.

The Local (Structural) Level

To be born into an ethnic minority in Britain--particularly a

minority whose origins are in Bangladesh, the Caribbean or
Pakistan--is to face a much higher risk of leading a life marked
by a low income, repeated unemployment, poor health and
housing, working for low wages with few employment rights and
being forced to rely on social security benefits than someone who
is white. ( Amin and Oppenheim, 1992, p. 63)

Discrimination within individual EU member states is well documented, though

it takes different forms and is practiced against different groups in different

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contexts (European Parliament, 1985, and 1990). Amin and Oppenheim's
description of the structural location of minorities in Britain applies to many
other states in the EU. This is partly the legacy of postwar migration in Europe
when an expanding economy led to the recruitment of foreign workers to fulfil
the needs of the labor market. Migrant workers were generally located in the
lowest socioeconomic groups in particular sectors of the economy; they had few
employment rights, earned low wages and were often disenfranchised and
nonunionized ( Brown, 1984; Cohen, 1987; Ogden, 1991). In consequence, they
had only limited access to such social rights as adequate education, health care,
housing, social security, disability and sickness allowances. Subsequent
economic contraction and a decline in the manufacturing, transport and
communications industries (in which large numbers of minorities were
employed) resulted in high levels of unemployment or low-paid, casualized
work ("disguised unemployment") since they were unable to gain the skills
necessary for redeployment in the expanding service sector.

However, the structural position of ethnic minorities in contemporary Western

Europe cannot be explained solely in terms of changes in the labor market.
Research demonstrates that racial discrimination plays a central role in the
process (see British Broadcasting Corporation, 1992, on the Netherlands;
Brown, 1992, on the United Kingdom; Hjarn, 1991, on Denmark; and Ogden,
1991, on France). After more than three decades in Europe, large numbers of
former migrant workers and their children remain stuck at the bottom of the
social scale. This location carries with it the marginalization and exclusion from
full societal participation that form the alienating experience of all people living
in poverty. However, in addition to the general effects of poverty, black people
suffer racial harassment and violence.

Violence in the EU
Young people who commit racist crimes do not fall out of the
sky. They are children of our society. This society is marked by
competitiveness and by a tendency which promotes "I virtues"
rather than "We virtues." It is a society which idealizes the
performance of the individual, rather than social or ethical values.
( Voigt, 1993)

The origins of the EU lay in the anxiety of post-World War II politicians to

avoid future European wars and safeguard democratic institutions against
fascism and Nazism. It is, then, ironic that across the continent that vowed
"never again" after the Holocaust, there has been an outbreak of racially
motivated violence against a variety of minorities. In a number of EU states,
black people are subjected to physical assaults resulting in mutilation, paralysis
and death. There were at least 75 racially motivated killings in 1993--an increase
of 13% over 1992 (Campaign Against Racism and Fascism, 1994). Anti-
Semitism is expressed in the distribution of anti-Semitic literature, the
destruction of graveyards, and the exhumation of bodies, attacks on synagogues,
and assaults on school children.

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Gypsies (Roma) are the object of verbal and physical abuse. Muslims suffer
assaults on their persons and property, including their mosques. Asylum seekers
and refugees are the target of violent attacks, including firebombings of hostels,
reception centers and private homes. Turks are subjected to physical violence
and murder. Of grave concern is the authorities' failure to act: in Germany, for
example, the police at best ignored, and at worst encouraged, ferocious neo-Nazi
attacks on foreigners in May 1994.

In sum, contemporary Western Europe is home to a form of highly virulent pan-

European xenophobia which embraces racism, anti-Semitism, religious bigotry,
and right-wing political extremism, sometimes subsumed within a nationalistic
project. Furthermore, there is evidence that international links have been forged
between far right groups, particularly young "skinheads" whose networks extend
across Britain, Germany, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Scandinavia,
Hungary, Poland and the United States, where they are linked with the Ku Klux
Klan ( Macey, 1992). This stands alongside the electoral support for racist
parties, whose influence on more mainstream parties ensures a lack of political
action.

Globalization, Alienation, and Racial

Discrimination
Never before have we faced a global financial system with such
power to deconstruct whole communities and to impose political
solutions which bring starvation and death. ( Addy, 1994, p. 51)

Thus far, I have argued that the process of globalization has led to intensified
competition in the EU, resulting in wide-scale economic and social
restructuring. This has been accompanied by the development of an ideology
prioritizing free market mechanisms, individualism, and competition, and it has
influenced the development of right-wing economic and political policies of
privatization, reduction of welfare benefits, and deregulation. The outcome has
been polarization within, and between, member states, groups, and individuals
as people are forced into a degree of poverty that marginalizes and alienates
them. This, in turn, has led to the targeting of minorities as scapegoats at the
international, national, local, and individual levels.

The concept of alienation can be seen to underpin all the spheres identified here.
At the international level, one of the major issues confronting the EU is that of
human movement, whether migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers. In 1992, the
number of refugees worldwide was estimated at 17.6 million, 1 million more
than in 1991 and over twice the figure of 10 years previously (not including
internally displaced people). 5 Moreover, as Gimenez ( 1992) observed, the
alienation of labor power underlies internal and international migration as
people with only their labor power to sell are forced out of their communities.

Much north-south migration has its roots in the gulf between the wealth of the
north and the poverty of the south, which shows no signs of decreasing. The
other main direction of migration of concern to the EU is that between East and

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West Europe, which also has its roots in material inequality. One of the
consequences of the massive disparities in wealth at the global level is that
migration and refugee movements are likely to continue to grow beyond their
already extremely high levels. In the present economic climate, it is probable
that the EU will close its borders ever more firmly to those defined as
"outsiders," many--though by no means all--of whom are black. This has
consequences, not only for the people excluded, but for minorities within the EU
as distinctions fail to be made between, for example, Third World refugees and
black EU citizens.

At the national level, governments are confronted by the question of how to deal
with increasing applications for entry from refugees, asylum seekers, and
migrants. In a socioeconomic climate of near recession and high unemployment
it seems likely that for the foreseeable future, governments will continue to
restrict entry and ration citizenship entitlements ( Mitchell and Russell, 1994). In
the process, there has been a tendency for politicians (notably in France, the
United Kingdom and Belgium) to whip up anxiety among already alienated
people by eliding asylum applications with grossly exaggerated statistics on
(black) illegal immigration.

At the local level, it can be suggested that as long as people are forced to
compete for scarce social resources, they will define others as a threat and act
accordingly. When competition is for that most crucial resource--a job--the
struggle for survival is likely to lead to a focus on minorities as "the enemies"
who are taking jobs away from local people. Nor is this entirely without
foundation, for though racism in employment practices is clearly documented,
the rampant competitiveness of the global market has encouraged employers to
engage in practices that disadvantage workers of both majority and minority
status. In Germany, for example, as many as half a million (mainly Eastern
European) workers are estimated to be employed illegally on building sites,
where they are paid less than half the official rate. At a time when labor is
becoming increasingly disorganized, this situation is likely to exacerbate
hostility between groups. This is an example of intergroup alienation whereby
competitors are defined as enemies instead of victims of the structures that
induce the competition. Levy terms this "structure blindness" and identifies it as
". . . a basic mechanism in xenophobic reactions and other forms of
discrimination" ( 1992, p. 69).

At the individual level, Kalekin-Fishman ( 1992) model suggests that varying

expressions of hostility can be analyzed by reference to alienation at the system
level, the outcome of which is structural deprivation, inequitable access to
resources, and alienation between groups. This may be expressed at the
individual level in various forms of hostility, an extreme example of which is the
growing number of racially motivated assaults, including murders, in the EU.
Linking this to unemployment, Macey, Baimbridge, and Burkitt reported that in
Britain, ". . . over the period between 1988 and 1992 for every one percent rise
in unemployment there was an increase in reported racial incidents of 2.7 times
that magnitude" ( 1994, p. 6).

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Conclusion
Discrimination, social injustice, fear of social decline and
concern over jobs and housing have always resulted in a search
for a scapegoat--the root of much of our present-day aggression
and violence. ( Voigt, 1993)

In this chapter I have concentrated on what might be termed the material base of
discrimination against visible minorities in the EU and have suggested that a
considerable amount of racism has its roots in economic globalization and its
exacerbation of poverty and inequality. Globalization creates an apparently
unbreakable chain which links the international, national, local and individual
levels in ways that are not always apparent. In terms of the EU, this chain
connects the community, local states, organizations, and individuals so that
policies adopted at the EU level (such as the Maastricht Treaty) have
consequences for each level of linkage. For example, individual member states
are pushed toward the exclusion of "outsiders" and the implementation of right
wing economic and social welfare policies; employers are pushed toward
practices that, in different ways, disadvantage both migrant workers and the
indigenous population; and workers (and/or the unemployed) are confronted by
a struggle for survival that pushes them toward defining visible minorities as
competitors for scarce resources and scapegoats for the ills of society.

The entire process both is rooted in, and leads to, alienation, which is
increasingly expressed in various forms of racial discrimination. The alienation
is economic in origin, and it is in this sphere that action needs to be taken to
achieve what Addy ( 1994) termed a "humane economy," without which there
can be little hope of racial amity.
Notes
1. The term racism is highly problematic. It is used in this chapter to refer to
discrimination by one group against another on the basis of ascribed
biological inferiority.
2. An ethnic group is a segment of larger society which is seen by others to
differ in some combination of language, religion, race and/or culture and
whose members perceive themselves in that way ( Yinger, 1986). Minorities
are subordinate segments of complex state societies ( Wagley and Harris,
1958). Visible minorities are groups that are recognizably different from the
majority of the population, frequently in terms of phenotypic characteristics
such as skin color.
3. A third-country national is a citizen of a state that is not a member of the
EU.
4. The mandate of the Trevi group is to examine terrorism, radicalism,
extremism, and international violence. The Schengen group (of countries)
has agreed to common policies on visas and "firm" border control; members
keep and exchange computerized information on asylum seekers and
"undesirables."
5. European Consultation on Refugees and Exiles, 1993.

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10
Postmodern Culture and the Revisioning of Alienation

Kenneth J. Gergen

Inquiries into alienation have long been significant entries into deliberations on
cultural life. In this respect, 20th century discussions of alienation have drawn
importantly on well established traditions of humanism (for example, Rousseau
Kierkegaard ), romanticism (e.g. Fichte Schiller), German idealism (e.g., Hegel),
and classical economic theory (e.g., A. J. S. Mill Smith). Although the particular
configurations of twentieth-century writings offer much that is new and
different, much of their challenge has continued to rely on assumptions of
historical long standing. In particular, I propose that most of the major theorists
of alienation in contemporary times share with many of their predeccessors one
or more of the assumptions discussed in this chapter:

1. The Autonomous and Naturalized Self

Drawing especially from humanist and romanticist traditions, twentiethcentury
alienation theories frequently presume a naturally given condition of selfhood,
in which an autonomous consciousness stands at the center. In her work on
alienation, Karen Horney ( 1950, p. 23 ) describes how the normal individual
experiences the self as "an active, determining force in his own life . . . an
organic whole." For Erich Fromm ( 1947, p. 66 ), the fully functioning
individual "experiences himself as the center of his world, as the creator of his
own acts." For Marx [ 1844] ( 1964, p. 43 ), "free, conscious activity is the
generic chracter of human beings."

The central drama for much alienation theory thus results from positing the loss
of the natural condition of selfhood, that is, an alienation from one's own core
being. Because this loss cannot be originated within the self--i.e. there is no

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reason for the human agent in his/her natural state to become self-alienated--the
source of the deterioration is typically traced to the environment (e.g., defective
economic or work conditions, urban life, consumerism, social influence).
Although not the exclusive palliative, a very common means of alleviating
selfalienation is some form of psychotherapy. Therapy has served as a common
solution, from Paul Schilder's work on self-spectatorship in 1914 to Frederick
Weiss's discussion of the dynamics of self-alienation in 1964, Bugental
existential account in 1965, and the contemporary existentialist theorizing of
Muller ( 1987).

2. Authentic Action
Closely associated with these arguments, it is common among twentiethcentury
theorists to presume a naturally preferred state of coordination between the
autonomous self and personal action. Again drawing primarily from humanistic
and romanticist resources, individual agency is presumed to be realized through
action. When one's actions are consistent with one's intentions and one's
intentions are grounded in the experience of one's true nature, one is operating
as a fully functioning or authentic human being.

Here the drama of alienation analysis is generated by sounding the alarm for the
loss of this preferred state of being--the alienation of the self from action. In
Marx's account of alienated labor, we find that

the more the worker exerts himself, the more powerful becomes the world of
things which he creates and which confront him as alien objects; hence the
poorer he becomes in his inner life, and the less belongs to him as his own. . . .
The greater the worker's activity, therefore, the more pointless his life becomes.
Whatever the product of his labor, it is no longer his own ( 1964, p. 71 ).
As Lewis Mumford ( 1934, p. 6 ) wrote in regard to the impending influence of
machine technology in our lives, "With the successive demands of the outside
world so frequent and so imperative, without any respect to their real
importance, the inner world becomes progressively meager and formless;
instead of active selection there is passive absorption, ending in a state of addled
subjectivity."

Such views have also been reflected and extended variously in the works of
Erich Fromm, Ivan Illich (in the case of schooling as alienated activity), and
more recently, Oldenquist and Rosner ( 1991). While therapy has been the
preferred solution to problems of self-alienation, forms of revolution (e.g.,
economic, cultural, educational) have more frequently been championed as
means of returning to the natural condition of authenticity.

3. Unified Structuring of Society

Although the lineage and lines of argument are more complex in this case, much
twentieth-century alienation theory also posits a preferred (and sometimes
"natural") condition of a unified social organization. The presumption is of a

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natural state of unity with others, and alienation is seen as a condition of

marginality or expulsion from that natural condition. The particular structure of
society from which the individual is alienated varies considerably among
theorists. Critics point to the way in which individuals are variously cut away
from solid and secure niches in the family, religious institutions, and community
life. For Marx, the argument for social alienation was largely derived from his
theory of alienated labor. That is, as our labor is degraded, so is our "free,
spontaneous activity" degraded. "An immediate consequence of man's
estrangement from the product of his labor is man's estrangement from man." In
Fromm's variation on this theme, "Modern man's relationship to his fellow man"
is cast as "one between two abstractions, two living machines, who use each
other" ( 1947, p. 31 ). Although critics have been less certain about how to
reestablish the natural condition of social enlodgement--some waxing nostalgic,
others championing a self-conscious reshaping of relationships--many have been
seen economic and cultural revolution as the necessary remedy.

It is also worth noting here the underlying irony inherent in much alienation
writing, to wit, that while it is essential for the individual to belong to (to feel
part of or be at one with) organized social units, it is the social world that
simultaneously splits the self from its original base, destroying the natural,
agentive inclinations as they are appropriated, obligated, or otherwise ensnared
by the demands of the social. In effect, as alienation theories are wont to argue,
immersion in the social is both essential and self-destructive (see, for example,
Fromm ( 1941) on the "escape from freedom," Whyte ( 1991) on the
"imprisonment in brotherhood," Riesman ( 1973) on "other-directedness," and
Pappenheim ( 1968) on the "inauthenticity of the anonymous crowd"). One
should not be alienated from organized society, but simultaneously, to be at one
with the social group is to risk alienation from the self.

For those of us in the scholarly community, there is little doubting the

significance of these various theoretical endeavors over the past century. Not
only has such work sustained and reinvigorated important elements of the
Western tradition, it has brought such thinking to bear on major aspects of
contemporary life-- industrialization, bureaucratization, mechanization,
commercialization, stratification, urbanization, and the broad-scale translocation
of peoples. It has stimulated a critical consciousness and narrowed the gap
between the work of the scholar and the surrounding community.

Nonetheless, these waning years of the twentieth century are also an auspicious
time for reflection, for the latter half of the twentieth century in particular has
brought with it an important range of new and challenging conditions. As it is
surmised, with increasing frequency we are shifting from a period of cultural
and intellectual modernism to the challenges of a postmodern condition. To the
extent that such surmises are sensitive, it is no longer clear that the presumptions
of traditional alienation theory remain serviceable. The conceptual resources that
are redolent with rhetorical potential and fit for effective cultural work may be
historically situated. In the same way that concepts of melancholy, mal de
sicle, anomie, and identity crisis reached their nadir and slowly vanished from
cultural

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consciousness, so, too, may the presumptions of alienation be specific to an

epoch now in decline.

In the remainder of this chapter I would like, first, to focus on several significant
intellectual developments of recent years and their implications for theories of
alienation. As I shall propose, to the extent that these lines of argument achieve
credibility, traditional alienation theory loses its capacity to compel. Then, I
wish to consider briefly several emerging conditons of culture that seem
congenial to these various forms of argument. In effect, this will be done to
propose that traditional theories of alienation may be losing their relevance to
our emerging conditions. Finally, rather than abandoning the concept of
alienation, I propose a revisioning. Specifically, I propose that by shifting the
locus of theoretical concern from the individual to relatedness, we may refigure
the concept of alienation. In its altered semiotic matrix, the concept may
continue to speak importantly and critically to our postmodern condition.

A Tradition in Question
Let us again consider the several presumptions undergirding major forms of
alienation theory, but now in the light of the robust intellectual currents of recent
decades. Here, as elsewhere, my analysis must necessarily be circumscribed.
However, for any intellectualy engaged scholar, the present account should be
sufficient to call forth a host of more elaborated exegeses. First, we confront a
host of writings, from many quarters of the academy, set against the traditional
assumption of an autonomous and naturalized self.

Prominent, for example, is Sandel ( 1982) critique of the liberal humanist

conception of moral action. As Sandel cogently argues, if we posit a fully
autonomous agent as the source of moral action--an agent who makes decisions
beyond the dictates or prescribed categories of the society--we rapidly find that
the presumed agent is without the potential of moral discernment. On what
grounds, it is argued, can one undetake moral deliberation except within the
categories of one's culture? The fully autonomous agent is an empty self.
Sandel's critique is congenial with an enormous range of developmental theory--
from Vygotsky to the more recent writings of Harre and Bruner--that
demonstrates how processes of thought are lodged within cultural systems of
meaning. Logical thinking, in these cases, is not a culturally transcendent
process but rather the deployment of culturally and historically situated
conventions of making sense.

More radical in implication is much of Foucault's writing (especially 1978,

1979) on knowledge and power, along with many social constructionist accounts
of mental process. For Foucault, discursive relations are effectively relations of
power. Thus, as various "discursive regimes" expand in scope, as they become
institutionalized, and as their argots proliferate within the society, so are people
caught up in relations of power. To illustrate, as Rose ( 1990) shows us, as
disciplines such as psychology and psychiatry generate languages for the
classification of individual minds, and as various practices of testing, education,

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and therapy invite persons into these realities, so is the professional language of
the individual mind objectified. Thus, as people today commonly speak of
depression, mental illness, occupational stress, burnout, and anxiety, they are
operating as extensions of the hegemonic discourse of the mental health
professions. As they submit themselves to therapeutic treatment, purchase
antidepressants, and develop policies for mental health insurance, they are
submitting to relations of power.

The radical extreme of this line of thinking is reached in various social

constructionist writings. For Foucault and many of his sympathizers, there is a
residual nostalgia for a period beyond power--a time before we were caught in
the insidious processes of discursive colonization. By contrast, in much
constructionist writing there simply is no sense of self outside the cultural
matrix ( Gergen, 1985, 1994). That we identify single selves at all--that we
attribute to them emotions, intention, logical thought and the like--is entirely a
byproduct of cultural relations. There is no pure object or process of mind, no
possibility of identifying a logos beyond language, because the very language of
the culture is constitutive of the self. All that was natural and autonomous from
the alienationist's standpoint, is now cultural and relational.

With autonomous subjectivity thus impugned (or the "death of the author" as
postmodernists would have it), we are positioned to consider the second canon
of alienation theory, namely authentic action. As these various incursions make
clear, without an identifiable state of natural mind (i.e., beyond social
interpolation), it is difficult to theorize the authentic. On the one hand, this is to
say that if all that is internal is an installation of the social, then there is no
action that can reflect a state of pure agency. There would be no means by which
we could distinguish the authentic from the inauthentic act, for all actions would
be inauthentic by virtue of their origins in the artificial tissues of the social.
Some actions might be indexed as more expressive of self than others, but this
sense of "true expression" would ultimately be deceiving. What is "true" is
simply more rooted in convention and thus, from the traditional standpoint, all
the more alienated.

From the more radical writings of Foucault and the social constructionists the
critique of authenticity is more brutal: there simply is no inner world that is--or
is not--expressed in external action. The inner world is an attributed world, a
construction of the self employed in the marketplace of daily affairs. In this case
the entire dualistic premise that guides traditional alienation theory is thrown
into question. This position is pursued most vigorously, perhaps, in Derrida
( 1976) critique of what he sees as the logocentric tradition in human letters. For
Derrida, all texts are self-referring; they gain their meaning by virtue of their
relationship to other texts. To extend the logic to human action, one's words and
deeds are not rendered meaningful by virtue of their relationship with a
psychological interior. Rather, their meaning is derived from their relationship
with other words and deeds.

The assault of postmodernist writings on traditional assumptions of alienation

theory are not complete with their undermining of both self and

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authenticity. They have also begun to eviscerate traditional assumptions

of unified social structures. Here the theoretical work is less pointed and more
mottled. However, important themes have begun to emerge with unsettling
synchrony. In each case structure, organization, and recognizable social units are
replaced by pictures of fragmentation, disorganization, and diffuse forms of
relatedness.

Here I can only scan the intellectual landscape. There are, for one, the writings
of fragmentation, which see the thrust of cultural modernism toward unified and
rational society giving way, first to wholesale fragmentation ( Frisby) and then
to the loss of centralized order ( Deleuze and Guattari). It is in the latter vein that
theorists have variously recognized the replacement of strong institutionalized
power with the capillary proliferation of discourses ( Foucault), the demise of
strong hegemonic orders and the rise of multiple nodules or centers of organized
meaning ( Lauclau and Mouffe), and the endless circulation and transformation
of signs within contemporary technoculture ( Lyotard).

However, these various accounts of disunified society do not take us quite far
enough for present purposes. Specifically we must consider the relationship of
the individual to the social entities--even in their fragmented form. Traditional
alienation literature often posits the individual as separate from the social--as
either cut away from a necesary lodgment or buried within a social sphere that
prevents self realization. However, as much of the literature on the autonomous
self suggests, this view is deeply flawed. As outlined here, this view is
effectively replaced by one in which the individual is inherently a social agent.
To the extent that the world is meaningful at all, the individual is a culturally
interpolated being.

Toward a Relational Vision of Alienation

As we find, much scholarly writing of the past two decades radically
problematizes pivotal presumptions within the broad corpus of alienation theory.
Such writing questions the possibility of the agentic self that can be alienated
from its natural condition or from another private subjectivity, of action that
bears an inherent relation with an inner world, and of a condition of unified
society from which one can be separated. We might well consider at this
juncture the possibility of suspending serious concern with alienation, and
getting on with other, increasingly central matters of social organization. We
might, in effect, agree with Laslett ( 1960, p. 145 ) remark that "The word
alienation is part of the cant of the mid-twentieth century . . ." and turn our
attention to the critical problems confronting our cataclysmic slide into the
onrushing century.

However, there are reasons for resisting this option. The postmodern literature
from which I have drawn succeeds so powerfully in deconstructing the analytic
vehicles of the social sciences (the concept of alienation only the immediate
instantiation) that it runs the risk of full irrelevance. The rush to deconstruction
is everywhere apparent, but to succumb fully to this delicious impulse is to
paralyze the social analyst and indeed, all subsequent dialogue. Rather than
endlessly picking the bones of past articulations, it seems preferable
 -122-

to explore the implications of such theorizing for further sources of analytic

intervention into culture. Further, there are many occasions in which we might
wish to speak of alienation, in considering, for example, the continuing plight of
the jobless, the homeless, the rootless, those engaged in routine labor, the
disenfranchised, and the oppressed. Rather than casting aside the concept of
alienation we might rather think in terms of a conceptual resuscitation.

Additionally, an altered conception of alienation might furnish a valuable

resource in confronting the newly emerging forms of social life. As many social
commentators believe, Western culture is rapidly moving away from the
condition of modernity--characterized by universal rationalities (grand
narratives), mechanization, monopoly capitalism, hierarchy, bureaucracy, mass
production, and circumscribed industrial products. Rather, largely under the
influence of a wide range of increasingly sophisticated and widely available
technologies (with information technology as pivotal), cultural life is becoming
increasingly oriented toward heterogeneity or the localization of rationality,
postindustrial capitalism, distributed or collective decision making, niche
production, and symbolic goods.

We find increasing numbers of professional nomads who identify with no

special community or country but live a multinational life; a dramatically
expanding domain of technorelationships--relations largely limited to the
exchange of electronic impulses--and the rapidly expanding production of media
culture, in which the major sources of daily motivation are drawn from the
mythic world of popular entertainment and sports. As the culture undergoes such
transformations, so too must we enrich the range of conceptual tools for relevant
social analysis.

To open dialogue on this conceptual reconstruction, I suggest that we return to

certain postmodern critiques of traditional alienation theory. Although these
critiques are powerful in their deconstructive potential, they, too, carry with
them numerous suppositions. If we unpack their conceptual implications in
certain ways, we find that the critical moment in postmodern theorizing gives
way to a reconstructive moment. In this vein, I wish to call particular attention
to the privilege granted by much postmodern critique to the social or relational
sphere.

In the present sketch, we found this emphasis on relationship (as opposed to

atomized selves) most focal in the works of the cultural developmentalists (who
see individual meaning as culturally derived), Foucault (in his account of the
self as embodied discourse), and the social constructionists (who view all
meaning as the outcome of relationship).
If there were sufficient time, I could expand on this shift to the social in
postmodernist writings by discussing the works of historians of science and
sociologists of knowledge (who replace the individualist view of knowledge
with a communal conception), communication theorists (who center their
theoretical concerns on the joint construction of meaning), and literary analysts
(who focus on the significance of interpretive communities). In each case there
is a significant attempt to replace the long dominant focus on the individual
agent with relational process.

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With the individual mind as explanatory fulcrum now replaced by relationship,

we are positioned so as to revision the narratives of alienation that graced the
earlier decades and to explore alternative courses of ameliorative action.
Consider first the narrative of the autonomous self cut away from its natural
needs and impulses. From the postmodern perspective the self is never cut away
from nature by virtue of culture. The natural is the cultural, and the suppression,
repression, or falsification of one over the other is a conceptual impossibility.
Nonetheless, the sense of self as estranged from its core surely continues. How
are we now to account for such an attitude, and with what implications?

Here we might usefully consider the increasing problem in postmodern culture

of immersion in multiple domains of meaning (and, by implication, multiple
relational networks). To feel "at home" with the self, on this account, is akin to
existing in a single community, carrying out a coherent and repetitive set of
activities, and framing one's identity in a single, community-based vocabulary.
However, as the contemporary world dramatically extends the range of our
relationships--both interactively and vicariously--we increasingly restrict the
range of contexts in which there is a comforting sense of "being at one."

From the present standpoint, we may abandon the therapeutic option of

traditional preference. In the modernist context, self-alienation presented a
problem to be solved through therapy only because the social world was
conceptualized in traditional terms. From the relational standpoint, we might
rather view a sense of nomadic rootlessness as a normal outcome of
contemporary life, and its negative valence as primarily derived from the
context of modernism. If we see this condition in terms of an extended set of
relationships, the negative valence is largely diminished.

Rather, it is the strong sense of a secure base that becomes suspect. Certainty of
self operates as a rigidifying influence, the sense of an autonomous center denies
the forms of interdependence that render "being" possible. Indeed, the
traditional demands for coherence and consistency in self might reasonably be
traced to the influence of hegemonic forces--such as church and state--that
demanded a coherent subject in order to better guard their interests against
competetive ideologies. It is when one moves in a state of ambiguous
multiplicity that realization of relational being is most fully realized.

These arguments also form the basis for reconceptualizing the problem of
alienated action. Rather than viewing certain actions as more synchronous or
expressive of a naturalized or autonomous self, let us consider all forms of
action as culturally interpreted. Thus, for example, whether any particular action
constitutes "work," and whether what we call work is valued or devalued, are
both subject to cultural signification.

Typically within the sphere of organizational, industrial, or commercial life, jobs

are defined in positive terms--providing opportunities, income, security, a future.
To remain within the specific organizational culture, then, is not to experience
one's work as alienating. It follows that to declare one's efforts "alienated" is to
share membership in at least one other interpretive community.

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In effect, we may view the state of alienation as indicative of immersion in at

least two conflicting relational realms.

The outcome of such an analysis is not, then, to revolutionize the world of work;
this would be to destroy at least one internally valued realm of relatedness, and
indeed, that realm from which the occupation has germinated. Rather, the
invitation is for significant boundary work that might enable an interpenetration
of the signifiers and the relevant community of users. (See also M. Pecheux,
1982, on "disidentification" in organizations.)

What, finally, can be said about unified social structures and the individual's loss
of (or failure to gain) participation therein? From the present standpoint, the
traditional view of self versus society is deeply problematic and should be
replaced by a conception of the self as always already immersed in relatedness.
On this account, the individual's lament of "not belonging" is partially a
byproduct of the traditional discourses themselves. To experience a sense of
existential isolation is, in this sense, grossly misleading. The experience itself
owes its palpability to a preexisting immersion in a tradition of meaning, which
bestowes on this condition the degree of value and significance that writers
(particularly the existentialists) place on it.

Further, to experience a sense of alienation from a given group suggests that, to

a significant degree, one has already incorporated the meanings or values of the
group in question. The longing is already a sign of communal appropriation. The
desire for wealth or luxury, for example, is only operative so long as one has
appropriated the forms of meaning shared within cultures that are absorbed by
the search for these things.
Of course, we still confront myriad conditions in which certain groups are
denied the privileges enjoyed in other sectors of society. There are many reasons
in such cases to pursue policy and laws that ensure free movement within
society. However, as the African-American, Native-American, gay, and feminist
movements in the United States have so significantly demonstrated, there is
ample reason for coupling such policy changes with a deeper and more
appreciative look into the meanings shared by those within the "outsider" status.
Rather than racing headlong into an embrace of the ontology, values, and
practices of those classes into which membership has been denied, there are
enormous gains to be made by refurbishing and revivifying the implicit
meanings inherent within the outsider tradition. Not only is there a diminished
desire for "forced entry" into alterity, but when new social positions are taken
up, those who occupy them may bring resources that may significantly change
their character. Those entering business or the professions, for example, may
import values and practices that may enrich these settings in significant ways.

These are, of course, but faltering and thinly articulated moves into a largely
uncharted conceptual space. At the present time we lack a rich tradition of
relational theorizing. However, it is possible that the postmodern turn in the
intellectual world may provide a much-needed opening to new ranges of theory.
However, these resources may be essential tools for grappling with the emerging
conditions of global transformation.

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11
The Self Strikes Back: Identity
Politics in the Postmodern Age
Lauren Langman and Valerie Scatamburlo

In recent decades, a proliferation of new theoretical discourses have sought to

contest, deconstruct, decenter, and otherwise disrupt the epistemological and
ontological presuppositions bequeathed to us by the project of Western
Enlightenment. Various post-al trajectories have, despite their differences,
converged to some extent, to (i) reject totalizing, universalizing, "master"
narratives, (ii) repudiate modern theory's search for foundations of knowledge
and its apodictic truth claims and, (iii) renounce the rational, autonomous,
essentialist Cartesian subject of bourgeois liberal humanism.

Indeed, "re"-theorizing the subject has been a central concern in postmodern

formulations. Concomitantly, recent social mobilizations, often referred to as
identity politics, have emerged to challenge a number of traditional power
arrangements, identity claims, and the construction of subalterity. Hence, in
contrast to those forms of postmodernism that have proclaimed the "death" of
the subject or treated it as a mere fiction of "discourse," we contend that the rise
of identity politics can be interpreted as a moment that belies the postmodern
pronouncements of the death of the subject; these movements, in short, can be
conceptualized as a "counterattack" on theories of disempowered selfhood.

We will attempt to examine certain theoretical formulations and notions of the

subject, the self, and identity--terms that have often been conflated and/or used
interchangeably in contemporary theorizations. Failure to clarify these terms has
led to many theoretical problems. We also set out to contest the tout court
dismissal of humanism and modernism (as if they were monolithic constructs) in
postmodernism and poststructuralism, for we perceive these reductionist efforts
as misguided and politically debilitating--especially in light of the question of
agency.

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Hence, through dialectical and contextual modes of interpretation, we

endeavor to forge a "third" space--one that traverses the rigid boundaries
fostered by the binary oppositions of essentialism/anti-essentialism and
humanism/ antihumanism, which are so pervasive in current discourses of the
subject, self, and identity. In privileging a dialectical approach, our intent is to
emphasize the importance of locating selves and various identity formations
within broader political, economic, and cultural contexts and to address some of
the problems inherent in contemporary forms of identity politics. As a
theoretical as well as political project, we view this effort, however partial, as a
beginning--a point from which to launch a rethinking of the self and questions of
agency from an ethical basis committed to emancipatory transformation and
progressive agendas.

Postmodernity and the Contested Subject

The postmodern challenge has contested received knowledges and questioned
some of the most fundamental assertions of traditional Western thought. Given
its popular currency and the variety of interpretations and ideological
appropriations to which it has been subjected, delineating "postmodernism" is
difficult but not surprising, given its celebration of difference, diversity, and
indeterminability. Rather than enter into or recycle the myriad debates about the
"meaning" of postmodernism, for purposes here a distinction must be made
between ludic or reactionary postmodernism and resistance postmodernism.

Hal Foster ( 1983, pp. ix-xvi) argued that reactionary postmodernism takes on
an apolitical, ahistorical, and uncritical character in the course of repudiating
modernism, whereas a postmodernism of resistance seeks to deconstruct
modernism and the status quo from critical perspectives. Elaborating on this
formulation, Teresa Ebert ( 1991, 1992- 1993) has termed those approaches to
social theory concerned almost exclusively with signs, signification, texts, and
the discursive as ludic postmodernism. Ludic postmodernism, which often
perpetuates the status quo by reducing history and agency to the
"supplementarity of signification" (celebrating consumption and technology and
the migration of the subject to hyperreality), is, as we argue, decidedly limited in
its ability to interrogate broader social relations of power and privilege. The
distinction between these two differing constellations within postmodern theory
is also significant for an adequate understanding of the various ways in which
the self, the subject, and identity are taken up in regnant trajectories.

Our purpose here is not to provide an exhaustive survey of the assorted views on
the self or of theories of subjectivity and identity formation. Rather, we want to
consider some of the "political" implications of current theorizations of the
subject. In some of the more overzealous efforts to repudiate the essentialism of
the Cartesian formulation, some forms of ludic postmodernism have boldly
declared the "end" of the subject, while others have suggested that the very
concept of the subject implodes in the society of simulations ( Baudrillard,
1983). Still others still have sought to problematize the subject of bourgeois
liberal humanism by producing accounts of an anti-essentialist, decentered, and
mainly

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discursive subject.

These approaches dismiss any conception of the subject as a stable entity and
argue that the parameters of the subject vary according to dominant discursive
practices. Of course, this notion of the subject is indebted, in part, to the work of
Lacan ( 1977), whose post-Saussurean models of language and rereading of
Freud emphatically repudiated the attribution of consciousness to the subject. In
contrast to humanism's primacy of consciousness and its belief in the subject as
the origin and destination of discourse, Lacan's antihumanist stance suggests
that the subject is produced by its entry into language. This entry into the
symbolic order produces a subject that is, rather than being the origin of
discourse, spoken through discourse--a position with which we subsequently
take issue.
Critiques of the subject have also drawn extensively from the scholarship of
Michel Foucault. Against positions that presume a pre-given, unified subject or a
fixed human essence, Foucault suggested that "one has to dispense with the
constituent subject, and to get rid of the subject itself, that's to say, to arrive at an
analysis which can account for the constitution of the subject within a historical
framework" ( 1980, p. 117).

For Foucault, the notion of a constituent subject is part of the humanistic

discourse that undermines a critical investigation of the institutional sites
wherein subjects are produced within power relations. The Foucauldian subject
is clearly a subjugated one in a twofold sense--"subject to someone else by
control and dependence, and tied to his own identity by a conscience of self-
knowledge" ( Foucault, 1982, p. 212). Ultimately for Foucault, the subject is
taken up and analyzed as part of the complex function of discourse--in other
words, the subject for Foucault is but an effect of disciplinary power/knowledge
regimes. Hence, Foucault rejects the "active" subject and valorizes those forms
of postmodern thought where the "denuding of agency occurs" ( Best and
Kellner, 1991, p. 51).

Ludic formulations of the subject, which either declare its egregious

extermination or posit it as merely a product of discourse, reveal major
limitations. First, they have been challenged on ideological grounds by
resistance postmodernisms--namely, postcolonialism and various feminisms--
which, while drawing on postmodern critiques of the subject, have nonetheless
rejected its more ludic strands. For example, Harstock ( 1987), Torres( 1991),
and Benhabib ( 1992), among others, have reminded us that it is ideologically
convenient and politically suspect for male, Western intellectuals to discuss the
death and decentering of the subject precisely at a time when the previously
silenced voices of marginalized and subaltern populations were beginning to
claim agential subjectivity and insinuate themselves into regnant discourses.

Furthermore, in these ludic formulations too little attention is paid to how the
issue of subjectivity can be linked to a notion of human agency in which self-
reflexive, politically capable (rather than merely discursive) selves become
possible. The restrictive focus on discourse within ludic postmodernism also
leaves other spheres of social life and material existence virtually unexamined,

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due in part to the proclivity of undermining the very concept of consciousness

( Jameson, 1990) and the lack of attention accorded to lived experience. Despite
the fact that a variety of ludic theories have argued that disciplinary codes,
linguistic practices, signification realms, and the like have restored an agentless
self, the emergence of identity-based politics that foreground the importance of
experience, and of new social movements that have brought about the demise of
the Berlin Wall, the end of apartheid, the events of Tienanmen Square in China,
to name just a few, seem to suggest otherwise and, in and of themselves, pose a
serious challenge to the ludic accounts of the subject outlined above. Hence,
whether identities are imposed through discourses or negotiated by agential
actors becomes a question of fundamental political significance.

De-centering Discursive Subjects and Essentialist

Identities
Postmodern insights have astutely criticized essentialism--a presumed existence
of inherent forms of selfhood--and have noted that subjects are historical
products created in and through a variety of ideologically based discursive and
disciplinary practices. Postmodern discourses have also shed new light on the
limitations of those humanistic ethical doctrines that see people as rational
beings with inherent capacities for truth and goodness and the power to
transform society in progressive ways. Furthermore, the privileging of the white
male subject as well as the hierarchical binarisms of Western epistemology
--two areas that have been thrust to the forefront in postmodernism--have, in
turn, produced much-needed reconceptualizations of these problematics.
Notwithstanding these positive advances, progressives need to approach
postmodernism with more than a modicum of caution.

The postmodern conflation of the social and the experiential to the discursive
condemns us to grasping reality solely through language and carries with it the
danger of a "loss of affect" ( Yudice, 1988). Consequently, gender, race, class,
and sexual specificity are denuded of their historical and ontological existence
and instead textualized as formal categories. Furthermore, despite its ardent
disavowal and repudiation of Enlightenment epistemology and its inherent
dualisms, postmodernism falls short on its promise of abandoning them and has
in essence reinscribed them, albeit in inverse fashion. In other words, the "other"
in binary constructs such as mind/body, universal/particular,
sameness/difference, and culture/nature has simply been exalted. Finally, the
fetishization of textuality and discursivity also attenuates the potential for
agency, undermines the realm of experience and consciousness, elides, ideology
and in many ways has supplanted more radical forms of social theory that
attempt to grapple with relations of power and hegemony.

In contradistinction to those forms of ludic theorizing that completely dismiss

humanism and undermine the possibility of referring to lived experience, the
politics of identity has appropriated the concept of difference to renounce
universalist and monolithic conceptions of the self while retaining the centrality
of experience as a referential standpoint from which peripheralized and margin-

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up as a mediating influence between social structure and social consciousness.
Identity politics has enabled subaltern groups to reconstruct their own histories
and give voice to their individual and collective experiences. We would argue
that the attention accorded to experience and agency in identity politics serves as
a partial corrective to ludic narratives; however, the rise of identity politics has
been a mixed blessing.

The emergence of identity politics has spawned fierce debates in both

intellectual and political circles. On the one hand, this development has been
celebrated ( Brunt, 1990; Smith, 1983) for its affirmation of difference and
heterogeneity, its challenges to the "universal" subject of history, and its
attention to particularities other than class affiliation. Others have maintained
that an exaggerated emphasis on difference has entailed a retreat from
emancipatory and collective political projects ( Hall, 1987; Kauffman, 1990) and
that claims to "authenticity"--in which it is asserted that only those that occupy a
particular position can speak for themselves--often stifle critical dialogue among
and between disempowered groups and raise a form of skepticism about the
possibility of taking advocacy positions (cf. Alcoff, 1991- 1992).

Moreover, like ludic postmodernism, the politics of identity has also failed to
move beyond these dualisms and instead has merely valorized and defended the
devalued member of the binary set, thus inverting rather than subverting or
transcending binary oppositions. In addition, the exclusive emphasis on
experience has been charged with reinstating a liberal humanist conception of
the subject. Here, identity politics is about the (re)discovery of an already
existing identity that is founded on a conception of the subject as centered,
coherent, and self-authored, differing only from classical liberal humanism in its
assumption that identity is plural ( Bondi, 1993). Furthermore, there has also
been a tendency within identity politics of essentializing difference and
psychologizing questions of oppression which, in turn, reduces the political to
the personal and ignores the historical and social situatedness of subalterity.
Finally, the mere declaration that the personal is political, often ensconced in an
"I am, therefore I resist" formulation, is insufficient ground to assume a
politicized and oppositional identity ( Hooks, 1992; Mohanty, 1991).

Otherwise said, there is no inherent justification which necessitates that anyone

occupying a specific experiential realm has to adhere to particular agendas and
interests. As Kobena Mercer states, the new social movements that are

structured around race, gender, sexuality are neither inherently

progressive or reactionary . . . just like everyday people, women,
black people, lesbian and gay people . . . can be interpellated into
positions on the right as much as they can be articulated into
positions of the left ( 1992, p. 426).
Quite simply, pregiven, essentialist identities or subject positions cannot define
and predict one's political direction. Nor, for that matter, can we naively assume

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that identity-based movements have emerged solely within subaltern

populations and left-leaning constituencies. One need only look to the
proliferation of xenophobic movements in Europe and the growing number of
militias in the United States--mobilizations that are based on resentment--to see
the folly of such an assertion.

How then, and on what basis, can we begin to map out a basis for political
agency if, as Eagleton maintains, the problem we confront is that "almost all of
our models and metaphors of 'transformative' agency belong to the problematic
of humanism, in one or another voluntarist, essentialist or existentialist guise"
( 1987, p. 48). Eagleton's assertions raise a number of perplexing questions, and
while we do not purport to provide definitive answers, we would like to engage
some of them since they are inextricably related to debates around essentialism
and anti-essentialism which are situated in, and mediated by, the broader
contestations between humanism and antihumanism. However, prior to
addressing these tensions and attempting to provide epistemological and
ontological grounds for emancipatory critique that avoids both the totalizing
forms of essentialism and the pitfalls of bourgeois liberal humanism, we first
need to grapple with issues related to the subject.

Self, Identity, and the Subject

Communicating his concern with contemporary theories of the subject and the
question of agency, Paul Smith argued that one of the main problems with
current conceptions of the "subject" is that they have tended to produce a purely
theoretical subject--one almost "entirely removed from the political and ethical
realities in which human agents actually live" ( 1988, p. xxix). When not
completely obliterating the subject, ludic postmodernism has problematized the
subject's relation to experience so much that it has become "difficult to keep
sight of the political necessity of being able . . . to refer to that experience"
( Smith, 1988, p. 159). On the other hand, the fetishization of experience in
some forms of identity politics has been equally debilitating--politically
speaking.

We would argue that the starting point for rethinking the "subject" must first
articulate the differences between the self(hood), identity, and the subject. In
short, we suggest that selfhood, identity, and the subject represent different
levels of analysis wherein (i) selfhood reflects the realm of actual, embodied
experience; (ii) identity reflects a system of collective narratives that define
culture(s) as well as specific positions and; (iii) the subject reflects an abstract
concept of theoretical analysis most removed from actual experience.
Selfhood can be understood as a mode of reflexive awareness of a concrete
person as she or he participates in social life and enacts the various routines of
the habitus. While notions of an individualistic, differentiated, assertive selfhood
may be uniquely Western, selfhood is everywhere based on embodiment, in
which developmental schedules of cognition and language gradually enable
symbolic self-representations, reflections on past and present experiences, and
anticipated plans for future action. In all societies, preverbal experiences foster
the capacity

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to classify self and not self. With more complex cognitive operations and the
acquisition of language, selfhood includes symbolic capacities to locate itself in
temporal and interpersonal matrices.

Selfhood is not a stable entity or essence "within." Rather, selfhood is expressed

in the articulation of socially based identity formations. Collectively, a group's
identity is a distinctive image that includes boundaries of inclusion and
exclusion and is often based on differences with other groups. However, when a
group exercises domination over another, through relations of power, conquest,
or colonization, it is likely to construct the Other (or others) on which are
imposed denigrated identities. Within the boundaries of a group are more
localized identities, images, and expectations that are tied to particular roles or
positions. These identities can be thought of as points of intersection between
embodiment, selfhood, and socially constructed narratives.

It is through these identities that selfhood and, in turn, desire are realized in the
performances and interactive rituals of everyday life. While desire has
unconscious components, it is the association with particular identities that
enables the attainment of certain experiences. Regnant social groups construct
their own "self" identities and impose identities of "otherness" on marginalized
populations--identities which, when internalized by subalterns (the forms of
internalized colonization discussed by Fanon), colonize oppositional desire and
serve to reproduce social relations of oppression. The question that emerges, of
course, is how oppositional desire and forms of transformative agency can be
conceptualized.

In his eloquent articulation of the responsibility of theory, Smith argued that the
task for progressive thinkers is to restore a "dialectical view of the subject" that
does not preclude the "possibilities of resistance." Claiming that the purely
"discursive" subject of post-structuralism reflects a "depressive view of the
possibility of radical change," Smith maintains that in light of such
circumstances, a dialectical view of the subject and its "relation to the social"
must be reformulated as the basis for an adequate theory of agency ( 1988, pp.
158-159). We concur with Smith in this regard and have further suggested that
crucial distinctions must be made between the self, identity, and the subject. We
would add, however, that what is needed in discussions of agency and identity is
a conceptualization of the self and not the "subject" since the exclusive focus on
a theoretical and/or discursive subject abstracts the self from the social world,
occludes the materiality of power relations (i.e., notions such as totality are
rejected as grand narratives), and subverts the potential for agency and political
praxis. Hence, the fundamental dilemma of critics who refuse to forsake the
concept of agency is to devise a mode of conceptualizing agency that does not
fall prey to essentialist traps or anti-essentialist culs-de-sac.

The radical anti-essentialist position would deny any human qualities or

attributes such as intentionality, reflexivity, or agency that are not social
constructions based on linguistic practices. This position regards all aspects of
self/subject or identity as texts inscribed on passive slates or docile bodies
whose personal experiences are hardly able to mediate textuality or impact
society--

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actual persons are quite irrelevant.

In addition, anti-essentialism dismisses all those aspects of embodiedness upon

which depend language, thought, and feeling, which we argue are universal
qualities of humans that enable, but do not constitute any particular form of,
human nature outside historical contexts. Those who uncritically reject all
essentialisms do so by conflating human nature, which is a historical
problematic with human attributes that include a variety of inborn qualities such
as affective responses and capacities for speech and abstract thought that, while
inherent, are shaped and formed by social interactions.

Any adequate formulation of agency requires some notion of essentialism--not a

totalizing form, but rather what we term partial essentialism--a position that,
while interrogating notions of human nature as such, also acknowledges that
inborn human attributes and the capacities to experience joy, pain, and so forth
must necessarily be factored into discussions of agency. In other words, political
agency begins to emerge when distress that may be either personal or felt
through emphatic recognition, prompts people to come together, share
experiences and perhaps (but not necessarily) mobilize. In a similar vein,
Melucci ( 1989) argued that the impetus for social movements leads to groups
that interrogate the basis of duress, and in so doing, formulate new cognitive
frameworks to understand the problem, allow new collective identies to emerge,
and in this process, realize various expressions of political agency.

Unlike ludic postmodern accounts, phenomenological and some psychoanalytic

theories have stressed the experiential aspects of embodiedness and, in turn,
have been charged with the heinous crime of "essentialism." While some have
argued that inscriptive and experiential approaches are irreconcilable ( Grosz,
1993) we reject this binary assessment and suggest that a dialectical
interpretation, derived in part from the legacy of Marxist humanism, offers a
theoretically viable and politically enabling alternative. Hence, we neither
embrace explanations that discount social structures as systems of rules, norms,
and expectations and confer to selves unmitigated power, nor do we succumb to
rigid inscriptive approaches that would relegate agency to the prison house of
Language.

The Dialectical Alternative and Identities of

Becoming
Within postmodern trajectories, the very notion of dialectical interpretation is
equated with a repressive "master discourse"--namely that of Marx--and yet we
would argue that despite its obvious blind spots, aspects of Marxist theory
remain indispensable for rethinking some of the very issues raised thus far.
While an extensive elaboration on the relevance of Marx to contemporary theory
is beyond the scope of this chapter, we want here to simply illustrate the
significance of dialectical thought and the notions of totality, mediation and
consciousness for current theorizations of the self, identity, and the social.

Dialectical interpretation is not merely a methodology or mode of analysis

governed by "universal" laws but rather is grounded in the specificity and
history

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of human praxis. As Bologh and Mell ( 1994, p. 86) maintain, the dialectical
tradition turns to ontology and the study of being. A dialectic of the "concrete"
acknowledges and encourages the capacity for "reflexivity" and
"selfconsciousness" while seeking to make connections between seemingly
isolated and fragmented aspects of society.

In response to the dilemmas posed by the post-structuralist decentering of the

subject, Spivak argues that political praxis is contingent upon a person's ability
to "identify with its self-perceived intentions" ( 1990, p. 146). In this regard the
subject cannot be anything but centered--centered, that is, in terms of its
conscious intentions. Echoing this sentiment, Patricia Hill Collins ( 1993, pp.
53-54) articulated the need to have some center, no matter how provisional, that
grounds political action. We would argue that here the "center" which grounds
the political rests in an embodied, experiencing self, one with the conscious
capacity to think, feel, act, and reflect upon his or her situatedness. Here, we
advance a notion of the self and agency in which everything that is local,
immediate, and concrete is "specific" rather than "particular." Agency that is
"specific" is spaciotemporally present yet also contingent on history and the
politics of social relations.
In this sense, lived experience (and its contradictions), as a basis for agency, is
the starting point for politics since experience must be provisionally invoked and
then read through a recounting of experience "within a broader sociopolitical
and cultural framework that signals the larger social organization and forms
which contain and shape our lives" ( Bannerji et al., 1991, p. 94). Such a
formulation, which draws on the Marxian category of mediation, not only
subverts the simplistic essentialist/anti-essentialist dichotomy, but also moves us
beyond those forms of identity politics that have replaced critical engagement
with institutionalized and systemic structures of power with an individualist,
introverted form of cathartic therapy (cf. Kauffman, 1990; West, 1993).

Mediation, as a constitutive category of the dialectic, is indispensable for critical

analysis since it helps to illuminate the specific social and political forces which
mediate the relationship between the self and the larger social totality. Although
the erasure of social totality within ludic postmodernism is done ostensibly in
the name of subverting metaphysical narratives, we need to acknowledge that
not all notions of "totality" are theoretically and politically deficient. As a
central theme within dialectic formulations the meaning of totality is based on
the insight that various phenomena--whether selfhood, difference, or identity
formation--can only be meaningfully understood and examined within the
context of the social totality in which they are embedded.

Furthermore, the concept of mediation also substitutes the liberal humanist

fiction of the autonomous individual with a problematic that emphasizes the
struggles into which one enters in order to become a self-determining and
potentially transformative agent. In addition, it acknowledges the embodied
capacity for agency denied in ludic postmodern trajectories. In other words,
within the dialectical ontology being advocated here, "something neither is, nor
is not, but is always becoming or developing into something else" ( Bologh and

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Mell, 1994, p. 106). Hence, static and essentialist "identities of being" are
replaced with a formulation of identity as an act of "becoming." Identities of
becoming are politically motivated and historically situated--they are not
grounded in essentialist, individualist prerogatives. Rather they are engendered
by a thorough and critical understanding of the social totality and nurtured in
collective struggles.

Humanism Reconsidered
Men [sic] make their own history, but they do not make it just as
they please, they do not make it under circumstances chosen by
themselves ( Marx, 1978, p. 595)
 The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the "state of
emergency" in which we live is not the exception but the rule . . .
( Benjamin, 1969, p. 257)

Just as we have sought to illustrate the importance of resuscitating a dialectical

lens through which the relationship between the social and the self can be made
intelligible and politically enabling, we now want to illuminate the necessity of
rethinking humanism as an ethical basis from which to interrogate relations of
oppression and domination. However, prior to doing so, we need to articulate
our objections to the "post-al" hostility to humanism.

First, we would argue that the postmodern disavowal of humanism is both

intellectually disingenuous and politically suspect. It is intellectually misleading
because critiques of humanism, in their myriad postmodern manifestations, treat
it as though it exists, or existed, as a monolithic discourse. While bourgeois
liberal humanism was, indeed, one particular historical instance that was limited
to elites, we contend that a totalizing rejection of humanism as an essentialist
doctrine is misguided. It is also important, at this juncture, to point out that the
assaults on humanism are, in and of themselves, products of a Western, First
World intellectual trajectory.

Given the resurgence of humanist narratives in countries struggling for

emancipation (cf. Kang, 1992), the demonization of humanism is also politically
suspect. In this regard, the attacks on "the subject" as a humanist concept may
be interpreted as another ploy that, to borrow a phrase from Spivak, seeks to
preserve the "subject of the West, or the West as Subject" ( 1988, p. 271).
Furthermore, as Spivak suggested, humanism can be activated in the service of
the subaltern, as an interventionist strategy. We would further add that a
distinction be made between liberal bourgeois humanism that has played a
colonizing role and the forms of revolutionary humanism--espoused by the likes
of Fanon, Freire, and Gramsci, to name just a few--intended to give voice to the
pain, sorrow, and degradation of the oppressed and inform the struggles for
decolonization of mind, body, and spirit.

Hence, there are alternative ways to conceptualize humanism that do not depend
on assumptions of (rational) human "nature." There are discourses that speak to
a possibility of working with new problematics of the subject that embrace
humanistic

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principles other than those of bourgeois liberal humanism. Indeed, the critique
of the liberal humanist "subject" began long before the emergence of "postie"
theories and can be found in the revolutionary humanist narratives of Marx and
Gramsci. For example, Marx opposed the bourgeois liberal humanist view of the
subject, and the point of his critique of a pregiven, static consciousness was to
advance the possibility of an oppositional political identity. The seeming
freedom and autonomy of the bourgeois "subject" to act in any way he or she
chooses are circumscribed by the material and historical conditions or
"circumstances" (as Marx deemed them in "The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis
Bonaparte," 1978b), over which the "subject" (as delineated in liberal
humanism) had little or no control. However, the potential for the abolition
and/or transformation of oppressive circumstances by embodied selves located
in history and seeking to overcome denigration is a recurring theme.

Although it is often overlooked or downplayed, Marx's own formulations do not

rely on an abstract "theoretical subject," but rather are rooted in concrete praxis
and notions of experiential selfhood. The "body"--and not as a ludic site of
playfulness and pleasure--is a central component of Marx's critique of political
economy and is encapsulated in his assertion that capital comes "dripping" from
head to toe, from every bodily pore, with blood and dirt. While Marx's bodily
metaphor is clearly derived from his understanding of class exploitation, his
profound insights can easily be extended to other forms of exploitation--based
on gender, race, and so forth--which are ultimately experienced by the embodied
person and not the theoretical and/or discursive subject of liberal humanism
and/or ludic postmodernism.

In addition, the work of Gramsci 1 and his own brand of "historical humanism"
which rejected Hegelian notions of transhistorical human nature and forms of
essentialism, were grounded in an understanding of selfhood and identity as
historically contingent entities, which could not be divorced from the lived,
material, and hence, concrete manifestations of embodied subjectivity. In sum,
while much of the "post-al" critique of humanism has rediscovered Nietzschean
and Freudian wheels, humanism as an epistemic and ethical position valorizing
human realization, can take a variety of historical forms besides its liberal
bourgeois incarnation. In addition, the history of ideas has shown a number of
expressions of humanist perspectives since Periclean Athens.

In a world replete with "decentered" subjects and an intellectual climate that

champions anti-foundationalism as well as Lyotardian revolts against totality
and ludic speculation, the legacy of dialectical and revolutionary humanism
exists as our sole recourse for reinstating an ethical ground from which to
address the material circumstances of the living, breathing, and suffering
"subjects" of history. Furthermore, the various expressions of reactionary
politics, neo-Nazis, armed militias, and so on, must be understood as the identity
politics of the right, attempts to preserve dignified identities in the face of
capitalist contradictions.

In an era marked by the growing immiseration of millions of people and the

antipolitics of ludic "post-al" theories, on the one hand, and the resurgence of
fascism, on the other, criticalists armed with both Marx's conception of
historically located selves and Benjamin's insight that the conditions of
degradation are, in fact, the rule, rather than the exception, must work to
recapture interpretive frameworks

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that, while constantly subject to critique and negotiation, would take as their
starting point concrete praxis, lived experience, and the embodied capacity for
agency. However, the beginning of this new problematic occurs only when the
ludic theoretical and discursive subject of postmodernism is usurped by a
grounded, historical "self" that strikes back.

Note
1. Gramsci [ 1929- 1935] ( 1971) understanding of hegemony was based on his
concerns with self-understandings of the subaltern classes and how these
understandings, when imposed on these classes, blocked human potential. In
his discussions on the National Question, he described how hegemonic
processes that maintained the "backwardness" of the south, "blamed the
victim" by imposing denigrated identities upon the "stupid, lazy, deficient"
Southerners. In a different, yet related vein, Fanon ( 1961, 1967) work
attempted to grapple with similar issues as they related to the process of
colonization.

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12
Alienation, Everyday Life, and
Postmodernism as Critical Theory
Mark Gottdiener

Mike Featherstone ( 1991) observed that cultural analysis has assumed the status
of metatheory for postmodern commentators. He suggested that significant
arguments regarding the advent of "pomo" in advanced industrial societies are
currently derived from remarks about the quality of contemporary culture and
cultural change. Pomo theory, as developed in the writings of Jameson or
Baudrillard, assumes a larger significance for the role of culture in daily life than
the previous level of importance characterizing mass cultural analysis prior to
1970. At present important observations about the entire structure and
functioning of advanced industrial society come from cultural analysis.

In some of the earliest postmodern writings that socialized (see Crook, Pakulski,
and Waters, 1992) the issue of change by relating cultural to generic social
transformations, the intent of analysis was to periodize pomo and claim for it a
certain historical specificity ( Jameson, 1984; Baudrillard, 1983b). This effort
was meant less as a serious desire to establish stages in the development of
society or a demonstration of academic historical analysis than as an argument
for the coherence of social change under the hegemonic sign of an image-driven
and information-processing society whose meaning systems were defined by the
free play of difference. The Marxian variant of this early effort sought to
socialize the pomo question by correlating cultural change to phases of capitalist
development, specifically by correlating pomo to the political economy of post-
fordism and late capitalism ( Harvey, 1988).

More recently a number of social science writers have expressed the desire to
merge pomo cultural analysis with critical theory, or, in other words, to
resuscitate the critical theory tradition through an articulation of, or encounter
with, the metatheoretical implications of pomo cultural change ( Best and
Kellner,

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1991; Agger, 1992; see also Dickens and Fontana, 1994). This kind of inquiry
stands in contrast to both the work of Baudrillard, for example, who assumes a
fatalist, reductionist stance vis--vis cultural change, and also the
deconstructionism of Derrida which, I believe, is not only a form of idealism
and relativism, but possesses a very limited relevance to social science and
political economy ( Gottdiener, 1994).The critical theory of pomo culture takes
for granted the domination of sign value and the representation problematic as
formulated by Baudrillard and Jameson. It seeks, within the context of the new
dimensions of a transformed, previously modernist, industrial society, to relate
issues of cultural change to the question of domination or hegemony. Within this
framework it is acknowledged that postmodern culture has the following
characteristics: 1
1. The erosion of distinctions between what was formerly viewed as high art
and the popular forms of mass cultural expression: this phenomenon was
already known as the "democratization of U.S. culture" by critics of mass
culture in the 1950s.
2. Antifoundationalism and the erosion of totalizing, canonic referents for the
evaluation of artistic and cultural expressions: these have been replaced by
the referents of cultural pluralism and, in the case of the United States, by
multiculturalism as, for example, in the reversal of perspective during the
celebration of Columbus's discovery of the New World when he was
redefined as a fascist, imperialist, and genocidal (white male) "Eurocentric,"
i.e., merely a vulgar promoter of decadent Western civilization.
3. The reworking of all forms of cultural expression to the benefit of sign value
and the hegemony of the image through the transformation of reality into
simulation: along with this change, as discussed by Baudrillard ( 1983b),
comes the domination of culture by the mode of representation and the
 problematic raised by representation as the defining characteristic of human
and aesthetic relations ( Jameson, 1984).
4. The ascendancy of a depthless culture based on metonymy (i.e., the
synchronic dimension) and difference as the principal textual figures, with
the consequent loss of the sense of history and antecedent continuity (the
diachronic dimension): this is accompanied by the fragmentation of time
and space to the benefit of the image and the domination of processes of
cultural change based on metonymy and depthless content, such as fashion
and fast capitalism, which are extended to all cultural manifestations,
including the sanctity of personal home furnishings and individual desires
( Baudrillard, 1968; Gottdiener, 1994).

The latter leads to what Baudrillard calls the aestheticization of experience due
to the domination of sign value, that is, according to Featherstone ( 1991, p.
270), the centrality of the commercial manipulation of images through
advertising, the media and the displays, performances, and spectacles of the
urbanized fabric of daily life, therefore, entails a constant reworking of desires
through images. Hence, the consumer society must not be regarded as only
releasing a dominant materialism, for it also confronts people with dream
images that speak to desires and that aestheticize and derealize reality.

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For pomo advocates, such as Baudrillard, we now inhabit a "qualitatively new

society" peopled by individuals who have fully internalized simulation and who
lack the critical distance from the dominant materialist consumerism of late
capitalism to offer alternatives.
The Frankfurt School Tradition and the Pop
Culture Variant of Critical Theory
The critical theory approach to postmodernism rejects the reductionism of
cultural studies in the Baudrillard tradition ( Agger, 1992; Best and Kellner,
1991; Dickens and Fontana, 1994). On the whole, however, observers take the
hegemonic ascendency of image driven culture as a negative and troubling
occurrence. The writing on the left that views pomo in this light almost
universally follows from the critical theory of culture associated with the
Frankfurt School, and more recently Marcuse and Habennas. Agger ( 1992), for
example, views the purpose of pomo cultural criticism as a means to empower
consumers to transcend the hegemony of capitalist marketing by developing
Marcuse's theory of false needs ( 1992, p. 114; see also Dickens, 1994). The
Frankfurt tradition of critical theory, however, is not the only place to ground a
critical theory of pomo. After reviewing the former perspective, I shall discuss
an alternative approach, which is based, not on the work of Adomo and his
colleagues, but on that of Henri Lefebvre.
Frankfurt School Tradition
The Frankfurt School socialized the analysis of culture by relating it to the logic
of capital. As the famous phrase of Marx suggests, under the constant reworking
of traditional, symbolic relations by consumerist capitalism, "all that is solid
melts into air." 2 Specifically, as Adomo argued, capitalism as a social system
was dominated by the logic of exchange value and the conversion of all use-
values into exchange value. Forms of culture that were based on either traditions
of folk culture or the bourgeois canon of high art were both subverted by the
quest for profit and the dominance of exchange value. This included, as Marcuse
argued later on (see Agger, 1992), the production of false needs. Cut off from
affective or aesthetic criteria, the culture of capitalism assumed the dimensions
of a fetishized, commodified world, or as Benjamin ( 1969) observed, daily life
became a phantasmagoria, a dream world of fetishized commodities that
promised new modes of human happiness through the consumer's act of
purchase. In turn, capitalism converted all desires, all objects, to the status of
commodity.During the 1950s, the cultural critics of mass society, who were
mainly literary critics writing from the left or sociologists of popular culture
with both left and right variants, echoed this criticism of late capitalist culture
( McQuail, 1972). Way before the advent of pomo, they blamed commodified
culture for a variety of ills including:
1. The narcotization of the masses, which creates compliance and passivity,

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thought by the Frankfurt Schoolers and later conservative thinkers like

Lazarsfeld and Bell to promote totalitarian and fascist regimes.
3. The domination of escapism as the principal purpose of culture.
4. The development of techniques of deception and manipulation encoded in
cultural products such as advertising, films, radio, and television
programming.
5. The domination of capitalist ideology in the context of all cultural forms,
including novels, television, and films.
6. The depoliticization of social relations due to the ascendency of mass
cultural forms of leisure, many of which privilege the home environment at
the expense of the public sphere.

In sum, according to the critics of capitalist culture--namely, both Frankfurt

schoolers and later conservative mass culture critics--popular culture created
individuals who were passive, manipulable, enamored of superficial contents,
depoliticized, and duped. 3 Compared with today, it seems hardly possible for
pomo critics to add anything more to this already depressingly negative picture.
Baudrillard suggested that the matter is less one of how capitalism debases what
critical theorists claim can be rescued as a consequence of the hegemony of
exchange value than of how all culture falls under the sway of sign value and its
conversion of reality into images and simulations ( 1981, 1983b, 1993).
From the postmodern perspective, the duped status of cultural consumers seems
hardly debatable but ultimately of little concern, because the purpose of
consumers in the simulated society is simply to reproduce or done themselves,
as do all other aspects of society, in the ecstasy of communication ( 1983a). The
main thrust of the Frankfort School critique of culture, therefore, is undermined
by the shifting conditions under which postmodernnism addresses the question
of culture. At the same time, attempts to formulate a critical theory of
contemporary culture assume the same presuppositions about culture as do other
postmodernists (see, for example, Jameson, 1984; Agger, 1992). Thus, the
critical theory approach reinforces the postmodern vision of culture without
blocking its ultimate and very nihilistic conclusions.

Lefebvre and Everyday Life

Not all cultural analysts who situate the production of culture and the issue of
cultural change within the analysis of contemporary capitalist development
follow the view of mass culture critics nor do they all subscribe to pomo
arguments. 4 For example, in the work of both John Fiske ( 1987) and Michel De
Certeau ( 1984) we find the opposing argument, that the domination of
commodified and capitalist mass culture, pomo or otherwise, is resisted in daily
life by counterhegemonic strategies or, in the words of Stuart Hall, "resistance
through rituals." 5 Internalized by social groups or subcultures in the act of
consumption, these countercultural expressions of resistance are encoded in
daily life--for example, in the "gangster rap" record industry and its relation to
ghetto life. The counterhegemonic impulse is, in fact, consumption with a
critical perspective. The Cartesian dichotomy of the Frankfurt School, which
distin-

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guished between materialist acts of production, solely capitalist, and conscious

but manipulated acts of consumption (passive), solely in the domain of the
masses, is false. In rituals of resistance, instead, there is a kind of creative, and
often critical, production in consumption which resists the domination of
commodity fetishism.

By now the arguments of both cultural detractors and counterhegemonists are

rather old and well acknowledged. De Certeau ( 1984; see also Cohen and
Taylor, 1992) work is interesting because he grounds his analysis in Lefebvre's
concept of "everyday life." For De Certeau, the issue is not one of domination
through the production of some ideal and passive capitalist consumer--a mass
"object" of capitalist society--but of defining and analyzing the localized and
everyday practices of consumers. That is, following Lefebvre, the issue facing
cultural analysts interested in the phenomenon of contemporary culture, say
pomo, is the need to locate change in the practice of daily life. It is not
sufficient, for example, to provide a "reading" as Jameson (and now countless
others) has done of the postmodern aspects of some cultural form, say the
Bonaventure Hotel (see Jameson, 1984). This merely places the academic reader
or interpreter in an elitist position as critic.

In contrast, a critical approach to culture would locate postmodern aspects in the

use-values of inhabitants by focusing on the daily practices associated with
Bonaventure Hotel life. 6 A focus on the quality and changing nature of praxis,
as Featherstone ( 1991) suggested, can also be used to analyze the producers of
culture and the intermediaries in society that help create and interpret "art
worlds," as Howard Becker ( 1982) calls them, "music worlds," "hotel worlds,"
"tourist worlds," and the like---each with their own emergent daily practices and
negotiated modes of consumption.

It is only by assessing the quality of daily life through individual and group
practices that conclusions can be drawn regarding alleged cultural changes
associated with either totalizing capitalist mass culture or, more recently,
postmodern society. In sum, I take the position that alleged postmodern changes
should be manifested in actions and not in the interpretations of a single
observer. The quality of postmodern society is not discovered through
interpretations or readings by the academic critic, but in the analysis of actions
and behaviors that can be characterized as embodying or encoding postmodern
qualities.

The Hegemony of Sign Value or the Persistence of

Alienation
The focus on everyday practices, following Lefebvre ([ 1947] 1991), introduces
an alternative critical theory of culture--one that is based on action and the
subjectivity produced by changes in normative behaviors of interaction in
society. However, the focus on the everyday vis--vis postmodernism is not the
intent of Lefebvre's monumental study. Instead, Lefebvre was principally
concerned with the phenomenon of alienation in capitalist society following
World War II. The problematic of alienation was, for Lefebvre, both a product of
nineteenth century industrialization and urbanization and the rise of commodity

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etishism under capitalist social relations, including the domination of exchange

value. His analysis predates postmodernism and belongs to the postwar Marxist
tradition. For Lefebvre, unlike Jameson and other left pomo analysts, the issue is
not one of hegemonic domination of the image driven culture ( la Baudrillard),
but of alienation which, by its very definition, presupposes estrangement from
the objectified culture of capitalism. This distinction requires further elaboration
because, as I shall argue, when observations of behavior in everyday life are
examined closely, they exhibit the quality of "alienation" rather than the
"depthless culture" of postmodernism, so that it is possible to conclude that
estrangement persists at the core of human relations despite postmodern
changes.

Lefebvre's concept of the quotidian can be contrasted with both Habennas's

notion of the "Lebenswelt" (the lived world, the everyday space of individuals)
and some recent pomo theorists who have invoked the term "everyday life." For
Lefebvre, the ontological condition of the "everyday" embraces a dialectic that
he hypothesizes as both an alienated and a potentially liberated state. The
quotidian, like Lukcs's notion of Altglichkeit--the ordinariness of everyday
life, the condition of the mundane--is at once the everyday, trivial existence of
the self-reproduction of capitalism's worker and the transcendence of that status
through acts of selfrealization, which are always implicit in any everyday
situation.

This duality of the quotidian is different from the static and unidimensional state
connoted by Habermas Lebenswelt, which stands as some unified vestige of
precapitalist social relations distinguished from the "system" or the reified,
objective forces of social organization. The duality of "everyday life" and the
"quotidian," which encapsulates the ontological dialectic of alienation and
selfliberation, is also different from the concept of the "everyday" deployed by
some recent pomo writers, such as Featherstone ( 1991) or Grossberg ( 1992),
who refer solely to the static, onedimensional state of ideological domination
lacking in liberatory impulses that is most characteristic of Marxist cultural
studies.

In sum, for Lefebvre, the trivial or "everyday" involves the dialectical tension
between alienation and self-liberation, precisely because every quotidian
situation contains the conditions for the self-transcendence of the reproduction
of capitalist (i.e., alienated) commodity relations. Lefebvre's theory was
instrumental in the formation of the ideas of the Situationists ( Plant, 1992;
Debord, 1977; Vaneigem, 1979) and bears a close resemblance to the approach
of the Birmingham School which was based on Gramsci's notion of resistance
( Hall, 1980; Grossberg, Nelson and Treichler, 1992) 7 .

An Illustration
In this discussion I have contended that grasping the nature of alleged
postmodern changes in society requires a praxis- (or action-) oriented
perspective (following Lefebvre) rather than the interpretive, discursive
framework of postmodern theorists. The issue is not one of labeling phenomena
through

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interpretation as "postmodern," but of grasping changes in the organization of
society by studying modes of behavior and interaction. This approach can be
illustrated by considering a recent film which is explicitly about everday life,
namely, Robert Altman Short Cuts. This three hour marathon intercuts the daily
life of over 20 separate subjects against the tableau of Southern California. To be
sure, one can play Baudrillard and argue, quite rightly, that this film is not
everyday life but only a Hollywood representation. This film is a consumer
product produced by Altman, which presents a simulation of quotidian Los
Angeles. Furthermore, the film itself is flawed in several ways, especially by its
androcentrism and the marginalization of Los Angeles's minority groups despite
an explicit depiction of class differences. Short Cuts is nothing more than a
Hollywood simulation of quotidian, and also white and predominently male, Los
Angeles. This milieu undercuts the formation of any class identity.

However, given these terms, what does the film depict about the everyday? Are
there any elements of interaction that illustrate the kinds of observations made
about postrnodern society? Can we point, perhaps, to this or that aspect of the
quotidian that validates the claims of pomos that something new and different
organizes interaction in daily life, namely, that there is, in short, some way of
representing postmodern daily practice?

Short Cuts is not about postmodernism. Everyday life, as represented in this

film, validates the more traditional view of Marxists that social relations in a
consumer-oriented, capitalist society are dominated by the condition of
alienation. Every relation and every action in this film is a demonstration of the
deep-seated estrangement that exists among people in our society. Individuals,
for example, are simultaneously workers and voyeurs and are devoid of any
reflexive capacity for self-transcendence. They are estranged from the
conditions of their own community life and economic status as workers. Several
of them even lack regular jobs, but are estranged from their Lumpen status by
the affluent location within the suburbs of Los Angeles.

Altman's characters are also deeply estranged from each other and from the
institutions of society. They fail to communicate at every turn and in every
situation. This failure exists not only at the level of male-female, but also
parentchild, relations. Caring and indifference are simultaneously depicted,
while isolation and loneliness negate intimacy in every social encounter. Finally,
people are, simultaneously, ordinary citizens who work and engage in "escape
attempts" ( Cohen and Taylor, 1992)--that is, leisure activities--and also
potential or actual killers in their everyday statuses as members of society. 8 In
sum, an examination of this particular representation of everyday life uncovers
an "alienation" problematic rather than the postmodern problematic of
"simulation," depthless culture, and behavior in an image-driven society.

In one vignette, a women is so tightly locked into her role of parent consumer
that she makes special arrangements for her son's birthday and is so estranged
from her universal role as parent that she allows the underage child to be
responsible for his own safety while walking to school in a busy section of town.
Altman's universe is guided by benign indifference and the chance

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encounters of powerful forces. Another woman on her way home from work hits
the child with her car as he jumps out into the middle of the street. Connected to
this child only by the random accident, she acquiesces to a false sense that he is
well because he has walked away from the accident and so drives away. The
child goes home and lapses into a coma. His mother takes him to the hospital,
where further alienated encounters occur in an institutional setting. The brain
surgeon follows normal bureaucratic procedures and is more concerned with
nightime socializing arrangements (escape attempts) than with his hospital
cases. The child is a sign of the everyday, of the quality of Los Angeles life. The
child dies, while in the very next room, another child recovers from a different
brain problem, due to the same randomness of good or bad luck, while under the
care of the same bureaucratic and indifferent physician.

It might be argued that Altman's vision belongs to another time, to the

preBaudrillard age of alienation. However, the fact remains that in this current
depiction of everday Los Angeles, it is the alienation problematic that dominates
social interaction, and not postmodernism. Lefebvre, in particular, would
probably have liked Altman's film, in which people have been reduced to
something less than human in the "bureaucratic society of controlled
consumption"-Lefebvre's name for late capitalism ( 1971, p. 68). The random
quality of disconnected lives is similar to Bunuel's films on the plight of the
bourgeoisie. It is not the same the "hyperfragmentation" ( Crook, Pakulski, and
Waters, 1992), which is imputed to society by postmodernists, and which
privileges physical relations. In contrast, disconnectedness in Altman's film
invokes Lefebvre's everyday life in the modern world, which is both fragmented
by capitalist relations and abstracted as alienation and estrangement in personal
relations. This is the same quality of disconnectedness as Entfremdung--Marx's
term for alienation when social forces seem to control individuals--which
concerned, among others, the young Marx, Lukcs, Fromm, and, later, R. D.
Laing, rather than the --Frankfurt School.

Short Cuts is instructive in illustrating a critical theory of everyday life in

another way. Almost as each frame or sequence of action transpires--hat is, in
every represented situation--possibilities are suggested for the self-
transcendence of alienation and the realization of the kinds of communal,
humanist relations or acts of fundamental resistance that Lefebvre and later the
situationists (see Vaneigem, 1979) called the "revolution of daily life." The
mother in the film can reject consumerism through an act of denial and become
personally involved in her son's daily life, the driver can respond to injury in a
responsible way rather than as a hit-and-run, the doctor can transcend the
cynical quest for profit and become involved in patients' lives, the parents can
resist and assume control of their own son's care, and so on. By fleshing out
these alternative, transcendent acts, the film becomes a critical commentary as
well as a Hollywood representation.

Having established that in this case the representation of everyday life is

characterized by the alienation rather than the postmodern problematic, are there
elements of Altman's film that might be considered pomo? I have no doubt that
such a reading is possible because the concept of postmodern is so pliable and

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generalizable. It is instructive to separate the aesthetic aspects of the film, which

can clearly be commented on in the pomo vein, from the social aspects, which
seem to be lacking. Aesthetically, the film utilizes pomo elements: nonlinearity
of story and continuity, the representation of everyday life reduced to vignette,
the decentering of the subject, ambiguity of sex and age roles, the organization
of the quotidian by images and symbols from consumerist culture--to name a
few.

The conclusion of this chapter, however, has a different focus. The media
dreams of Hollywood, while increasingly postmodern from the aesthetic point of
view, nevertheless derive their social content from the formidably high level of
alienation in our society. A critical theory of culture, then, addresses not only the
issues of domination and transformation of needs, as in the Frankfurt School
tradition, but also the pervasiveness of alienation in everyday life. The issue
belonging to a critical theory of contemporary culture, then, is not the one
pursued by left-leaning pomos at present ( Agger, Best, Kellner, Aronowitz,
Jameson), namely, how to articulate a postmodern critical theory based on
hegemony and resistance. Instead, it is the problematic raised by the Lefebvrian
tradition, namely, how to refine our understanding of both alienation and
selftranscendence under the new conditions of declining modernity and
postmodernism.

Notes
1. This list, of course, is simply a generalization for the purposes of my
exposition and by no means claims any total comprehensiveness vis--vis
the emergent discourse of pomo.
2. See Tucker, 1978, p. 413: Capital, Volume 1, chapter 15, section 9.
3. This critique differed from an alternative approach advocated in the 1960s
and 1970s and called the "production of culture" perspective ( Peterson,
1976). The latter also assumed a mass audience that was passive and
manipulable but focused on the process of cultural production using an
organizational approach (see Gottdiener, 1985). As such, it did not constitute
 a critical theory of culture or even a critique of mass culture.
4. I am not addressing the case of cultural commentators who ignore the issue
of socializing the question of culture, that is, I am only concerned with those
who, in one way or another, relate contemporary culture to processes of
capitalist development.
5. For an extended discussion of modes of resistance to the alienation of
everyday life, see Cohen and Taylor ( 1992).
6. The power of Jameson's article is exhibited in this case by the fact that he
does, in fact, point to the behaviors generated by the Bonaventura's design,
which are decidedly postmodern. For example, he discusses how this new
hotel, unlike those characteristic of the modernist period, has no main
entrance but rather is designed with the main desk on the third floor. The
path of users is purposely disorienting and decentered, which is another
pomo feature. These are precisely the kind of praxis-oriented comments that
are advocated by this chapter paper for critical theory.
7. There is a great difference between Lefebvre and situationist theory, on the
one hand, and the Birmingham Cultural Studies School, on the other.
Lefebvre, unlike Gramsci, was principally concerned with the alienation
problematic rather than with

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political action within the working-class milieu, as was Gramsci.

Resistanceto domination, which was the focus of cultural studies, addresses
only one of the poles of Lefebvre's dialectic and does so within the context
of working-class lives. In contrast, the situationists were concerned with the
general condition of alienation in the consumer society of advanced
capitalism and called for the transformation of all relations--even those
within the working class, which was, and remains, just as suspect as any
other formation of capitalist society.

In sum, Lefebvre's approach to everyday life, by focusing on the global

issue of alienation, is more general than alternatives that are specific to
particular classes. This is one way of understanding the value of studies,
such as that by Cohen and Taylor ( 1992), which provide in-depth
examinations of the means by which alienation can be transcended from
moment to moment and according to a variety of social contexts and locales.
8. Altman's depiction of "ordinary" Los Angeles as a violent, brutalizing
society covered by a thin veneer of suburban consumerist fantasy occurred
months before it served as the locale of the OJ. Simpson murder trial, which
depicted these same contradictions in "spectacular" fashion.
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13
Post-ism or Positivism? A
Comparison between Theories of
Reification and Theories of Post-
modernity
Frdric Vandenberghe

Modernity is not a cab one can get out of on the next corner just
when one no longer likes it, as Weber said. 1

Having worked for a couple of years on the theories of reification in classical

and critical German sociology, from the young Hegel to Habermas, via Marx,
Simmel, Weber, Lukcs and the Frankfurt School, I have come to the conclusion
that reification theory, especially as it is formulated by the Frankfurt School, is a
dead end (cf. Vandenberghe, forthcoming). Moreover, having just spent a couple
of weeks visiting the variegated funhouses of postmodernism, poststructuralism,
post-industrialism, post-Marxism, and so forth--in brief what I propose to call
post-ism--I have likewise concluded that this fad of the 1980s is a swamp. In
this chapter, I want to confront head-on the free-floating signifiers of post-ism
and reification. Trying hard not to get trapped in a swampy dead end, I will
present a quick but critical comparative analysis of the ontological,
epistemological, and ideological presuppositions of the theories of the
postmodern and of reification.

Post-ism as Artifact
First, however, let me start with some general observations on this conceptual
construct that is called post-modernism, written here with a hyphen to stress its
highly artificial character. Nobody knows exactly what post-modernism means.
Is it an epochal concept or a counterconcept? Is it a concept at all? Does it refer
to a stage of societal development beyond the modern era or to objects and
discursive practices of contemporary culture? Does it refer to the latest wave

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of reactionary antimodernism? Does it refer at all--or is it just a performative

illusion of a cluster of self-validating discourses? Indeed, it looks as if, until
now, the main stake of the whole Anglo-American debate about post-ism has
been to define it and thus to create it. Thus, post-ism exists, and insofar as
"critical debates about postmodernism constitute postmodernism itself," as
O'Connor ( 1989, p. 20) has rightly observed, those debates prove its existence--
if proofs are still necessary or even possible when paralogy is seemingly all that
matters.

Notwithstanding the appearances, post-modernism is not a French thing. In

France, there are post-modernist writers--writers who consider themselves as
such or who are considered so--Baudrillard, Virilio, Jeudy, Lipovetsky,
Maffesoli, Livet, Latour, Lyotard, and Derrida are just some instances. However,
there is no first- or second-order debate about post-modernism as such. In Paris,
one can hardly find a book on the subject. 2 The books on post-modernism are
mainly written in English, and in Paris, even after the rejection of la loi Toubon,
a proposed law which aimed to counter the hegemony of the English language in
academic life, it is sometimes easier to find a book in Polish than one written in
English.

If post-modernism is not a French thing, where does it then come from? I

surmise it is an Anglo-American invention, a creation of a couple of American
intellectual yuppies and radicalized hash smokers who are connected to E-mail
and who, bored with the local scene and fascinated by the essayistic productions
of the French philosophical avant-garde of the 1970s, decided to import French
thought to the States in the 1980s. Through the accumulation of
misunderstandings (e.g., Lyotard's misreading of Wittgenstein's limits of the
[life]-world being misread as a license to develop a politically correct
"standpoint theory"), it is the transatlantic circulation of French texts itself on
the academic marketplace that has produced the whole reality of this cultural
phenomenon, without an object and, one could even say, without a subject.

Thus, to compensate for the absence of a home-grown avant-garde in the United

States, a huge collective artifact has arisen. By the time it was already largely
dpass in France, it was received and perceived across the Atlantic as the
newest thing from the old Continent. 3 An analysis la Bourdieu of the
emergence of the post-modernist discourses in North America would be
interesting; pushed far enough, it might even explain why the whole debate on
the various post-isms is so mediocre, so middle-brow, and so predictable. I am
not going to pursue such an analysis here, but let me mention that, thanks to the
export of French theory, France itself has finally been delivered from its
perpetual temptation of nihilistic aestheticism. 4 The renewed interest in theories
of Emmanuel Levinas and Paul Ricoeur is a clear sign that the (anti-) intellectual
climate has changed. 5 The defense of human rights is on the agenda. It is time
again to think of the subject--it is time again to Think.

Post-modern Social Theory

We have seen that the main stake of the debate about post-ism is to define it.
And yet, as Bryan Turner has correctly observed, the very playfulness of post-

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modernism precludes any premature foreclosure of its own meaning ( Turner,

1991, p. 5). One thing is clear however: post-ism is a state of mind. Using
Schelskyian terms, this particular structure of sensibility can best be
characterized, I think, as joyous self-destructive and cynical Dauerreflexion (cf.
Schelsky, 1965). As such, this state of mind--or should I say of mindlessness?--
expresses a latemodern reaction against modernity, against its promises and its
betrayals, a reaction that, when articulated in theoretical terms, expresses itself
as a rejection of modernism in philosophy, social theory, politics, art, and so
forth.

Assuming for the sake of argument that there is some scholarly position with
sufficient coherence to warrant the label "post-modernism"--in fact, it is not
evident at all that this is so: in France, Foucault, Lacan and Derrida, for instance,
appear much more as rivals than as fellow travellers--I want to limit the
discussion here to the discourse of post-modern social theory, and more
particularly, to its critique of modern social theory.

It is not always clear, however, who is targeted. In the same way as almost any
author can be post-modernized ( Simmel is just the most recent example of such
an endeavor of post-ist recuperation; cf. Weinstein and Weinstein, 1993), any
author can be modernized. Now it is Descartes, Hegel, or Marx, then it is
Comte, Durkheim, Weber, Parsons, or Habermas who are reconstructed as
archmodernists whose oeuvre just deserves to be deconstructed. In any case, it
seems that if one wants to deconstruct, one has to homogenize one's subject first
so that it becomes deconstructible. Take Lyotard, for instance. In order to be able
to attack Habermas for an alleged "violation of the heterogeneity of the language
games" (cf. Lyotard, 1979, p. 8; 1983, p. 187; 1988, p. 10-12), he has to
reconstruct Habermas's theory of universal pragmatics as though the latter were
"a communist juxebox with only one record to play" ( O'Neill, 1995, p. 194).
Alexander's analysis of the post-modernist (meta-) narrative as a semiotic
system is highly revealing in this regard.

The underlying code of the post-ist narrative is simply binary; it just inverts the
modernist code: "In terms of code, modernity moved from the sacred to the
profane side of historical time, with modernity assuming many of the crucial
characteristics that had earlier been associated with traditionalism and
backwardness" ( Alexander, 1994, p. 176). This fusion of the judgmental axis of
"good versus bad" with the epochal one of "before versus after" results in a
simple pseudohistorical plot which is iteratively standardized . 6 just like in any
James Bond film, we know from the very beginning who are the goodies and
who are the baddies (and who will win), so in post-ist discourse we always
already know what is modern, that it connotes evil, that it has to be fought, and,
we expect, that at the end a plea will be held for a radical deconstruction of, and
rupture with, modernity (or pre-post-modernity, if you prefer).

Instead of allowing for continuity and internal correction, instead of seeing post-
modernism as an intellectual project generated from within modernity, and of
recognizing it as a recurrent form of modernist challenge to Enlightenment
universalism and foundationalism, self-styled post-ists always seem to opt in a
quasi-Foucauldian vein for radical rupture and discontinuity. Thus, pseudo-

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historical deconstruction comes to replace immanent critique and critical

reconstruction of the modernist tradition.

Reconstructed modern social theory is criticized by post-modern edifying

sociologists for, among other things, its foundationalism and logo-
phallocentrism; its universalizing and totalizing onto-theological claims; its
stress on subjectivity and allegedly fallacious rationalism; its supercilious
neglect of difference, pluralism, and localism; its emphasis on representation,
homogeneity, identity, consensus, and meaning; its assumptions of social
coherence and systematicity; its notion of linear causality and determination; its
legitimizing master narratives on emancipation; its macropolitics; and, last but
not least, its continuing belief in the value of the project of modernity.

Countering the modernist faith in the power of Aufklrung, post-modernist

antisociologists claim that modernity is a kind of Heideggerian one-way street.
Although they pretend to be sure about nothing, they seem to be well convinced
that reason is dead and that the historical project of modernity, the project of
European Enlightenment and, ultimately, the project of Western civilization as
such has come to its term--and that that is a good thing. End of reason, end of
history, end of humanity--those are the watchwords of post-ist thought.

Although theories of reification, from the young Hegel via Simmel, Weber,
Lukcs, and the Frankfurt School to the late Habermas, are concerned with the
same issues, they do not treat them in the same way. Their Stimmung is
completely different. 7 They share neither the ideological pathos of the
postmodernists nor their presuppositions about reason and totality. From a
modernist viewpoint that remains faithful to the Enlightenment, post-ism can be
decoded as the cynical play-form of positivism. That is what I would like to
show in this article by means of a comparative analysis of reification theory and
the theories of post-modernity. First, however, I turn to reification theory.

Reification Theory
Georg Lukcs's chapter on reification in History and Class Consciousness
represents the prime exemple of reification theory as it is classically conceived
in Western Marxism (cf. Lukcs [ 1923] 1971, pp. 83-222). The paradigmatic
core of this theory is composed of a grandiose, but brittle and problematic,
synthesis of two somewhat contradictory strands of thought. 8

The first strand is Webero-Marxist: fusing Marx's theory of commodity

fetishism with Max Weber's theory of formal rationalisation, it conceives of
society as a closed, self-referential, alienating and autonomous pseudonatural
structure, which imposes its normalizing and disciplinary constraints from
outside on the alienated subjects. The second strand is Hegelo-Marxist: fusing
the Hegelian ascending and totalizing dialectical movement of consciousness
with the Marxist theory of the class struggle, it projects proletarian class
consciousness as the identical subject-object of world history. Minerva's owl no
longer flies at dusk, but at dawn. From the Webero-Marxist point of view,
reification appears as the reverse side of formal rationalization that characterizes
modern capitalism;

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from the Hegelo-Marxist point of view, reification appears as a kind of cunning

of reason that announces and assures redemption.

Almost half a century before Derrida's call for an majusculation of all

ontotheological teleologies of the Hegelian style and Lyotard's critique of the
Marxist master narratives of emancipation, the members of the Frankfurt School
rejected Lukcs's neo-idealistic version of automatic Marxism as an
anachronistic and misplaced endeavor to actualize Hegel. Instead of actualizing
Hegel in an effort to decipher society as an "expressive totality" (Althusser),
instead of assuming that dereification is the only possible telos of reification,
critical theorists think that, to explain the postrevolutionary times of universal
commodification and generalized reification, the Hegelian dialectics of
liberation should be replaced by a Freudian account of sublimation and
repression and conjoined to a radicalization of Weber's critique of Western
rationalism. Once the Hegelian strand is eliminated, only the Weberian one
remains.

Moreover, in the same way as Lukcs tried to "outhegel Hegel" ([ 1923 1971,
"Foreword [1968]," p. xxiii), the theorists of the Frankfurt School tried so to
speak to outweber Weber. Radicalizing his tragic view of bureaucratic
domination and formal-instrumental rationalization, and linking it to Lukcs's
analysis of generalized commodity fetishism, they paint black on black and push
Weber's sense of despair to the extremes. Consequently, they arrive at the
Dantesque diagnosis of "total reification" (sic), a conclusion that is as bleak and
one-dimensional as it is self-refuting.
The iron cage of modernity might be a bit more luxurious and comfortable than
Weber thought, but this does not alter anything about the fact that it remains a
cage. If people revel in the marvels of consumption, it only shows that they are
so alienated that they are not even aware of it anymore. Moreover, as reification
becomes total, social dynamics come to an absolute standstill. "Plus a change,"
says Adorno with a wink to Nietzsche's philosophy of the eternal return, "plus
c'est la mme chose" ( Adorno, 1976, p. xi). The real is indeed rational and
reason is effectively realized, but certainly not as Hegel and Lukcs expected it.
According to Adorno and the late Marcuse, the subject and the object, the
individual and society are indeed identical, but insofar as the object absorbs the
subject and in so far as the subject is thereby suppressed, or "decentred" as we
say nowadays if we want to be la page, this identity is infernal. The
overpowering might of the system and the absolute powerlessness of the
individual corroborate in a dramatic way Hegel's systematic thought. Moreover,
in this perverted sense, one can indeed say that the truth is the whole.

Adorno's famous anti-Hegelian one-liner according to which the whole is not

the truth ( "Das Ganze ist das Unwahre") does not contradict this statement, for
this cryptic aphorism is not directed against the methodological maxim that the
truth is the whole, but against Hegel's ideological affirmation that the whole is
the truth ( "Das Ganze ist das Wahre") ( Adorno, 1951, p. 80). Indeed, (pace Jay)
Adorno's turn to negative dialectics does not imply the surrender of the
dialectical categories of totality and reification as such, but only of their
expressivist and humanistic overtones. 9 The turn to negative dialectics means

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rather that society is interpreted in protostructuralist terms, which are closer to

Althusser than to the young Marx, as the transphenomenal totality of structural
relations that characterizes the social formation of late capitalism and that
mutilates every particular phenomenon it determines. As a result of this passage
from a humanist to a protostructuralist concept of totality, the Aufhebung of the
social contradictions is no longer assured; to the contrary, insofar as the totality
no longer points to any beyond, the social contradictions only express and
expose the violence of rampant reification. In other words, when the negation of
the negation no longer results in any positivity, the brute facticity of total
reification is all that remains.

Against the omnipresence of reification, Adorno wants to save the nonidentical--

let us say, those particulars that still escape reification by violent incorporation
in the system and are deemed worth saving. Here, where Adorno declares his
solidarity with all possible creatures who are suffering and with all particulars
which are threatened by annihilation by the system; here, where he tries to
express the pain of the imposed systemic violence and to commemorate the
accumulated suffering, he pays honor to the victims in the name of what could
be and what should be totally different. In my opinion, this nostalgic yearning
for the absolute other, for "das ganz Andere" as the late Horkheimer said (cf.
Horkheimer, 1970), constitutes the sympathetic side of Adorno's obscure and
dark thought.

Alas, to the extent that Adorno has forgotten his own admonition that reification
should not be reified in its turn, 10 his endeavor to cherish the nonidentical could
only fail. Starting from the a priori of the existence of a closed functionalized
system, of a totalitarian social totality that does not tolerate anything external to
it and thus greedily devours what still escapes it, Adorno could only register the
permanent failure of the individual to resist reification. At the end of the day, it
appears that by autonomizing the logic of identity and by hypostatizing
reification, Adorno has himself conceptually liquidated the nonidentical, which
he wanted to preserve at any cost from reification, precisely by reifying it. In
this sense, his "functionalism of the worst," as Bourdieu calls this kind of
Durkheimo-Marxist conception of an overintegrated society, is the symptom of
his own diagnosis ( Bourdieu and Wacquant, 1992, p. 58).

If I have quickly recapitulated Adorno's diagnosis of modernity in terms of total

reification, it is not, as happens all too often with his enthusiastic acolytes who
desperately try to emulate this inimitable Adorno-Deutsch, to celebrate the
radicalism of his analysis. To the contrary, I think that critical theory, as we find
not only in Adorno but also in Horkheimer and Marcuse, is a dead end.
Accordingly, I want to plead here for the abandonment of the basic premise
from which all the rest can be inferred, namely, the metaphysical a priori of
reification. In my opinion, the category of reification is a transcendentally
necessary category of any critical theory. In other words, any critical social
theory must be able to think in terms of reification.

However, a social theory that is based on the metaphysical a priori of reification,

and that thus transforms a methodological assumption into a

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metaphysical one, is not a critical theory. Indeed, I think that a theory can only
be critical if it controls consciously and reflexively its basic assumptions in such
a way that is able to conceptualize the transformation of the social system. A
social theory that can only think the alienation of the subject and not its
emancipation is not a critical theory, but a one-dimensional one. I cannot
develop those thoughts here, but I have done so elsewhere ( Vandenberghe,
forthcoming). Here, I would like to argue that a post-modernist social theory
offers no alternative to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School.

Post-ism or Positivism?
At first sight, a post-modern approach that stresses, among other things,
contingency and openness, indeterminacy and randomness, difference and
plurality, reenchantment and local resistance to domination might seem to
propose a handy way out of the metatheoretical cul-de-sac of critical theory. I do
not think, however, that this is the case. For a closer look reveals that, in so far
as it uncomfortably combines these themes with an antihumanistic methodology
and a theory of disciplinary normalization ( Foucault), fetishistic
hypersimulation ( Baudrillard), or libidinal territorialization ( Deleuze and
Guattari), it does not offer a solution but rather prolongs the flaws of a critical
theory of reification.

Of course, I could follow a bricoleur like Zygmunt Bauman and present an

alternative that looks very much like a collage of Giddens's structuration theory,
Maffesoli's eroticizing interpretation of Simmel, and Luhmann's glosses on
autopoiesis and second order cybernetics ( Bauman, 1992) 1 could even add a
zestful bit of Habermasian intersubjectivity to it and call the ensuing result
postmodern social theory. This will not do, however. Post-modernist social
antitheory is fundamentally flawed. Whether this latest variant of intellectual
populism adopts the apocalyptic tone or the Rabelaisian carnival attitude, it
cannot ground or found its normative judgments. Its cryptonormative position
can neither be reconciled with its rejection of modern values, nor with its
declared relativism. As a result, it gets almost invariably stuck in what
Habermas calls, following Hintikka and Apel, "performative contradictions." 11

In general, one could say that the antimodernist commitments of the

postmodernists blind them to the fact that the values that tacitly underlie their
criticism typically include a host of distinctively modern orientations toward
pluralism, diversity, tolerance, equal respect, and the like. Take Lyotard, for
instance. His principled refusal to consider any universal norm leads necessarily
into an aporia, because, as Honneth has correctly observed, without recourse to
any universal norm, the right of coexistence of different forms of life and
language games cannot be guaranteed ( Honneth, 1985).

Deconstruction thus deconstructs itself. If a post-modernist sociology can help

to deconstruct the critical theory of reification, it has not really much to offer for
its reconstruction. Indeed, given its ontological and epistemological
commitments, it cannot think reification and, even if it could, its ideological or
moral commitments would still hamper the elaboration of a satisfactory account

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of it and response to it.

Be tackling the epistemological and the ideological issues, let me start with the
ontological problem. Semantically, the concept of reification refers to the
illegitimate transformation into a thing of something which is not a thing.
Whether this pseudothing is a concept, a person, an animal, a social relation, a
commodity, or the social world itself, the critical category of reification always
and necessarily presupposes a definite ontology. 12 It is well known by now that
a neopragmatist antiphilosophy "without mirrors" refuses all talk about essences
as metaphysical, and thus as idle talk. Against the traditional philosophy of
presence, "from Iona to Iena," as Rosenzweig would say ( 1979, p. 13), which is
marked by the obsession of a signified behind the words and the appearances, a
deconstructive philosophy will proceed to a "dissemination" of meanings and
referents and show that behind the signifiers there are only other signifiers and
that every endeavor to step outside language to find a transcendental signified is
illusory.

Post-ist philosophy is characterized by an extreme and debilitating nominalism,

which dogmatically assumes that there are only words and that truth is nothing
but "a moving army of metaphors, metonymies and antropomorphisms"
( Nietzsche, 1973, p. 180), as Nietzsche once said with provocative eloquence.
In any case, given this extreme nominalism, a post-modernist social theory
cannot think about reification because reification always presupposes a definite
ontology.

If we pass now from ontology to epistemology, we will find a similar incapacity

to think about social reification. Indeed, given its emphasis on difference,
particularity, fragmentation, plurality, marginality, local embeddedness, and
heterogeneity, and given its concomitant rejection of macronarratives and of
macrosociological concepts like totality and social system, a post-modern social
theory cannot adequately conceptualize the alienating autonomy of global social
structures and their inbuilt tendency to colonize the communicative,
motivational, and emotional infrastructures of the life world.

Moreover, if it cannot think macro-social reification, then, as a result, it cannot

fight it either. Its radicalism is thus largely phoney. Take once more Lyotard, for
example. Having grimly outlined the most oppressive aspects of the capitalist
principle of performativity, as he has found it illustrated in Luhmann's
demoralizing systems theory, the rapporteur of the post-modern has really
nothing else to offer in its place but "an anarchist version of that very same
epistemology, namely the guerrilla skirmishes of a "paralogism" which might
from time to time induce ruptures, instabilities, paradoxes and micro-
catastrophicdiscontinuities into this terroristic techno-scientific system"
Eagleton, 1986, pp. 63-64).

However, the worst is still to come. Insofar as post-ism abandons the moral
sensibility and sense of responsibility that characterizes the modernist protest
against alienation and reification, and insofar as it explicitly says farewell, not
only to the proletariat (which is fine), but also to reason and to the project of
modernity, it succumbs either to an irrational "kunism" or to an "enlightened
cynicism," to use the terms of Sloterdijk's Critique of cynical reason to name the
two main ways to abdicate all moral responsibility cf. Sloterdijk, 1983).
 -156-

"Kunism" represents this Nietzscheanor Dionysian strand in post-modernism

which, confronted with the dialectical reversal of rationalization in reification,
seeks solace in what Habermas calls and denounces as the "other of reason," that
is, in the animal and infrarational impulses; in anarchy, ecstasy, and narcissistic
play; in the sublime and the subliminal. Instead of trying to redeem reason by
way of a self-reflection of reason, as Adorno and Horkheimer tried to do; instead
of trying to remain faithful to the promises of the Enlightenment, as I think we
should try to do, this strand of post-ism simply denounces reason as the
pharmakon that kills and joyously renounces the project of Enlightenment. Rien
ne va plus--anything goes.

Apparently without any regret and without any hope, the new Nietzscheans
systematically privilege aestheticism and vitalism over the serene moralism and
commitment for the concrete other that characterizes, for instance, the writings
of the late Horkheimer. In contradistinction to Adorno's melancholy science,
which is still in all its negativity and sadness silently yearning for justice, this
"gay science"--or "happy positivism" as Foucault called it ( 1969, p. 164)--is not
tragic, but ironical. It is, as Derrida says in L'criture et la diffrence, "the
Nietzschean affirmation, the joyous affirmation of the game of the world and the
innocence of the future, the affirmation of a world of signs without faults,
without truth and without origin" ( 1967, p. 427).

Cynicism represents the second reaction of the disenchanted postwar generation

of baby boomers confronting disillusioned middle age. When Sloterdijk defines
cynicism as "enlightened false consciousness," ( 1983, Vol. 1, p. 37), he
perfectly characterizes the nihilistic state of mind of those intellectuals la
Baudrillard and Vattimo who play once more the tragedy of the Frankfurt
School, but this time as farce, so to speak (if you allow me this oblique reference
to the opening lines of Marx Eighteenth Brumaire).

Although Scott Lash clearly confounds post-modernism and modernism--to the

point of considering dadaism and the surrealisms of the 1920s as so many
instances of a premature postmodernism ( Lash, 1990)--I think, nevertheless,
that he has correctly noted the cynicism of a McDonaldized thought, which is no
longer critical of commodity fetishism and reification. Indeed, having dropped
all moral and utopian impulses, ridiculing the project of modernity, raising
alienation to the second power, alienating us even from our own alienation,
people like Baudrillard, Kroker, and Cook, and maybe even the young Lyotard,
try in vain to persuade us that utopia is not some remote telos, but that it is the
present itself.

Reification, once it has extended its empire across the whole of social reality,
effaces the very criteria by which it can be recognized for what it is and so
triumphantly abolishes itself, returning everything to normality. In the Dialectic
of Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer severely criticized the reduplication
of the extant world by the culture industry as the modern version of applied
positivism. 13 Fifty years after the landing of the Allied troops in Normandy and
the liberation of the death camps, the cynics are still playing the same game, and
they even seem to enjoy their relapse into irresponsibility.

Take Baudrillard, for instance. Having poked fun at the carbonized victims

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of the "collateral damages" of the Gulf War ( 1991), he cynically relapses again.
Without any apparent scruples, he describes the hell of Sarajevo in terms of
simulation and hyperreality ( 1995). I don't know whether he is actually working
on a book on the orchestrated genocide of the Tutsis, but I can now confirm the
insinuation contained in the title of this article: post-ism is indeed the cynical
playform of positivism. So, to finish with post-modernism, let me just quote
Jameson: "In fact, what Adorno called positivism is very precisely what we now
call postmodernism, only at a more primitive stage. . . . The question about
poetry after Auschwitz has been replaced with that of whether you could bear to
read Adorno and Horkheimer next to the swimming-pool" ( Jameson, 1990, p.
243).

Notes
1. Beck ( 1991), p. 193. In fact, Weber borrowed the image of the ( Marxist)
cab from Schopenhauer.
2. Just one critical article by Herpin ( 1993).
3. Edgar Morin, the French systems theorist, smugly suggests that post-
modernism sells as well on the American market as Beaujolais Nouveau.
What the French consider to be "junk" wine is flown overnight in specially
chartered plane to Beverly Hills and elsewhere where it is purchased as a
very distinguished dlicatesse ( Morin, 1986, p. 82).
4. I owe this remark to Alain Touraine (personal discussion, Paris, May 1994).
5. The Foucault revival does not contradict this observation. Being
coincidental with the tenth birthday of his death, it was a media event, and
as such it was largely on a par with the recent rediscovery of Rimbaud,
Voltaire, and Montaigne. The publication in September 1994 of Foucault's
scattered interviews and writings, collected by F. Ewald and D. Defert and
published by Gallimard in four massive volumes under the title Dits et
Ecrits, is of a different order, but by then the French market was already
saturated with two biographies and at least five monographs on Foucault.
6. For a critique of the pseudo-historical character of the post-modernist
metanarrative, see Calhoun ( 1995), ch. 4.
7. On the role of moods in the diagnosis of the present, see G. Lohmann, "Zur
Rolle von Stimmungen in Zeitdiagnosen," in Fink-Eitel and Lohmann
( 1993), pp. 266-292.
8. Cf. the excellent article of Brunkhorst ( 1982).
9. In an early article ( Jay, 1977, pp. 132, and 136), Martin Jay assumed that
Adorno's critique of the idealist "lament on reification" implied his
abandonment of the category of reification. Later, probably under the
influence of Rose ( 1978), he changed his mind and stated correctly that
Adorno did not reject the category of reification as such, but only its
Lukcsian version. Cf. Jay ( 1984), p. 269.
10. "The knowledge of the reification of society should not be reified" ( Adorno,
1973, p. 157).
11. Cf. Habermas ( 1985), especially chapters 5, 9, and 10 on Horkheimer,
Adorno, and Foucault.
12. The phenomenological bracketing of ontological issues which Thomason
proposes necessarily implies the abandonment of reification as a critical
category. Cf. Thomason ( 1980), p. 163.
13. Cf. Horkheimer and Adorno ( 1969), on the culture industry, pp. 128-176.

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14
Alienation, New Age Sociology, and
the Jewish Way
Philip Wexler

Alienation
The way, or practice for overcoming alienation changes historically. Before the
postmodern era, critical social science emphasized the disempowerment of
alienated labor. Although humanistic readings of Marx, from Fromm ( 1956) to
Ollman ( 1971), may have indicated that alienation refers to abstraction and
deformation of species being according to Marx Schweitzer account ( 1992)
correctly focuses on alienation as appropriation, as loss of control, agency, and
power. Alienation is a loss of human powers, particularly through the
estrangement and appropriation of labor in capitalism. The counterhegemony is
a reappropriation of this loss through the establisment of collective social forms
that restore human social agency.

Postmodernism circumvents the modernist, Marxist interest in agency, control,

and power with an imploded social and self fractured apparatus.
Disembodiment, to say nothing of disempowerment, is a representational
occasion, an opportunity for a quickly commercialized cultural mourning/
celebration of social, cultural, and individual dismemberment. Commodity
fetishism, as Olalquiaga ( 1992) aptly observed, is taken to extremes by
postmodern culture. No longer evidence of species alienation or social
deformation, within the postmodern culture, fetishism is an accepted grounds of
expression and solidarity for the decadent remains of bourgeois, decentered, and
renetworked selves.

Postmodernism has not, however pervasive its practical mass and elite reflective
cultures, succeeded in obliterating the drive to overcome alienation. That drive
does, however, now take a different direction, just as the character of alienation
has progressively deepened beneath the postmodern smoke screen of
postindustrial, global capitalism. Both the disease and the cure are now more

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extreme.

The aspect of alienation that has deepened, as industrialism was followed by

postindustrialism and modernism by postmodernism, is the fact that beyond the
loss of agency and consciousness of causation and control, there has been a loss
of organic sensation, of feeling, and of the perception of being a living creature.

It is this penetration of alienation to the organic level, to the petrification of life

energy and the inducement of a certain inertness, that has encouraged a
counterforce in what I believe is a new coalescence and configuration in social
theory. This new direction in social theory is not an abstraction from wider
cultural tendencies any more than was postmodernism. Rather, the direction of
the new social theory is toward social renewal. It builds on the variegated
cultural resources of sociocultural trends that are simplistically lumped together
as "new age." It is a counterforce or reaction to postmodern legitimation of the
implosion of being--"mechanical petrification" or alienation--particularly in the
sense of seeking a revitalization of the experience of organic, bodily being. This
apparent narcissism is a collective reassertion of the life force against a
postmodern culture of death.

While it may begin at an organic, bodily level, the counterdrive soon discovers
the social and cultural construction of being and therefore seeks meaning. The
channel for this search for being and meaning has been cleared of modernist
blockages by postmodernism's function as destroyer of modern culture. Whether
moving toward premodern reversion or, as I think, beyond postmodernism to a
new renaissance or renewal, the movement toward revitalization increasingly
occurs within a cultural tendency toward resacralization ( Thompson, 1990).

New Age Social Theory

Resacralization of culture will, I think, increasingly dissolve modernist and
postmodernist sociologies alike back into core cultural traditions. Sociology as a
secular cosmology is already being reintegrated with wider cultural movements.
Its historic role as a secular cosmology and a fulcrum between religious cultural
traditions (the sacred) on the one side, and on the other, commodity fetishism of
everyday life (the profane) becomes less salient within the current forms of
social revitalization and renewal movements.

Simultaneously, new psychologies, particularly those employing cognitive

paradigms, have worked their way toward theories of individual revitalization.
For example, under the heading of adult play, "reversal theory" in cognitive
psychology ( Kerr and Apter, 1991), while Eastern religion is described
accomplishing the "paratelic state," both of which are valued forms of
noninstrumental action ( Fontana, cited in Apter, 1991, p. 160).

The cognitive psychological interest represents both the desire to overcome

alienation and the wider current means to do so through a renewal in which
resacralization also encompasses the human sciences. The most well-known
exemplar of this work is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 1990, 1993). Under the
banner

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of a "psychology of optimal experience," Csikszentmihalyi has been

increasingly explicit that his research and theory involves overcoming
alienation, and, more recently, in the view that focused states of task
attention--"flow"--require contextualization in wider meaning systems. Thus, a
psychology that analyzes experience that is "beyond boredom and anxiety"--the
unalienated state of being--has been extended to an evolutionary theory of being
that is critically, but consciously, aligned with both new age culture and with
pantheistic-oriented religious traditions.

Sociology has not yet, however, surpassed the pervasive cultural discourse of
postmodernism to engage wider cultural processes of desecularization and the
simultaneous resacralization of secular cosmologies, including of course,
sociology itself.

The culture that feeds emergent academic theory may itself be part of an
historically new age. The foundation of a sociology of presence first requires a
rereading of social theory from a new, strategic vantage point that identifies the
precursory elements of a new synthesis. As the transition out of Puritan,
Enlightenment sociology is described within a cultural movement, so, too is a
new synthesis also part of a wider cultural process.

A new culture means new ideals and also new ways of thinking about social and
individual life. In its reflective aspect, traditions are brought forward and
renewed, while precursors and antecedents are rediscovered. For me, those
precursors are in the cultural revolts of the 1960s and 1970s, and even more in
the incipient social analyses that diagnosed the repression to be overcome but
were still unable to live and think beyond that regime's hegemony. That is why,
for example, I have described the "new sociology of education" as always bound
to the mainstream that it criticized. The antecedents are not only in the culture
and critical social thought of the 1960s and 1970s (or, ultimately, in the great
core world civilizational cultures), but also in the turn-of-the-century
sociological canon.

The new culture is the culture of the new age. Its ideal state is one that Erich
Fromm referred to in his introduction to the Bottomore and Rubel Marx reader
( 1964b) as "de-alienation." This state or ideal of being is the driving point, not
only for Marx, but also for Durkheim and Weber. Dealienation involves, in
every case, the collective production or release of socially bound energies that in
their unrealized condition are the source of individual and collective distortion,
disease, and historical blockages to the realization of higher evolutionary
potentials. For the radical Freudians like Wilhelm Reich and Erich Fromm, and
for the sociological existentialists like Martin Buber, the overcoming of socially
organized life repression releases collective energies that become reorganized
new modes of individual and collective being.

The social theory of the new age is always, in the first instance, beyond
negation; theorizing, as Norman O. Brown put it, "the way out," surpassing
repressed, commodified, rationalized social existence to the attainment of an
ideal state of "nirvana" ( Marcuse, 1955), "resurrection" ( Brown, 1959),
"orgasmic potency" ( Reich, 1949), "acosmic brotherliness" ( Weber, 1946), or
(largely

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feminine) "intersubjective mutuality" ( Benjamin, 1988). Second, while it takes

multiple forms, I believe that there is an underlying common commitment to a
theory of social energy, which is biopsychological but collectively shaped,
inhibited, and released. Third, the generation of this energy--whether as "libido"
or "bion," "effervescence" or "charisma"--has its primal force in cultural
creation, but even more particularly, in the religious experience and articulation
at the fount of culture and society.

Preliminary Rereadings
Although Durkheim is typically taught as the exemplar of scientific rationalism
in sociology and the exponent of individualism, his later essays make clear that
"the cult of the individual" is a compromise with individualism (as the
historically workable cult), a compromise designed to favor collective ritual and
not individualism. The "cult of the individual" is a transitional commitment, an
acknowledgment of the end of the old order, and an extraction of all that is
valuable in a more centrifugal society.

Durkheim's hope, however, is evidently, not for his time of "moral cold," but for
a "warmer" social existence, in which a collective religion energizes the moral
life, which in turn enables both generative collective representation and the
motivational discipline required for a restrained balancing of what are otherwise
unlimited individual passions. Robert Bellah ( 1973) notably reads the
passionate Durkheim of collective energy and religion as the crux of social and
individual life ( Bellah, 1973, p. xvi).

From our vantagepoint, Durkheim is not a "happy" modern, but rather one who
anticipates the dawning of a new culture, a new age. What gives this
anticipatory hope interpretive power is Durkheim's understanding of society a
field of forces, of creative social energy generated in the religious origins of
collective life.

Durkheim's language of explanation for collective life shows many underlying

images of cold and heat; there is a view of "currents of energy" and forces. This
social energy is generated in religious activity, and it is the renaissance of such
activity, following Bellah ( 1973, p. xvii) and, later, Alexander ( 1988), which
incurs the new age.

Against moral "stagnation," Durkheim looks toward the "spiritual" as the "ways
that social pressure exercises itself" ( 1973, p. 171). Religion is a "force" for
occasions of "strengthening and vivifying [emphasis added] action of society."
There is a reciprocal flow of energy between the individual and the collective
that is most evident during intermittent social states of effervescence. Again, he
stresses the religious basis of social energy: "the forces that move bodies as well
as those that move minds have been conceived in a religious form" ( 1973, p.
186). If religion is the "primordial" source of ideas, of collective representations,
it is only because it is the source of social energy.

Weber also felt the necessity of a new age, but tentatively and with a deeply
reserved sense of anticipation. For Weber, too, religion is the source of social

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energy. Compared to Durkheim, his language and social analysis is less

recontextualized to either a secular or a more abstract and general theoretical
plane; he is openly working out the sociocultural and individual consequences of
various paths of religious action. His observations are historical and the
determinative social force of religion is culturally specific and full of unforeseen
and, in the case of Puritan Protestantism, undesirable cultural and individual
effects.

The culture of the present age links its collective religious origins with a
deformed, "alienated" individual way of life or social character ( Weber, 1958,
pp. 181-182). "Mechanism" and the deadness of a "rationalist way of life"
( 1958, p. 240) leads to the "Personality type of the professional expert," who
supplants "the cultivated type of man." In terms directly reminiscent of Marx's
description of alienated being, Weber explains the consequences of the
"mechanization and discipline of the plant" ( 1958, pp. 261-262). Moreover, in
the "universal rationalization and intellectualization of culture" ( 1958, p. 344),
"The total being of man has now been alienated from the organic cycle of
peasant life." The social apparatus of bureaucratic specialization, which
increases precision, speed, calculability, and profit, also destroys the "cultivated
man," and deadens or "petrifies" life in an "iron cage."

Weber's new age is a nebulous possibility because rationalization, despite

whatever scientific clarity it has brought--which he defends in "Science as a
Vocation" against romantic academic ideologizing--has destroyed the spirit,
which is the wellspring of cultural life (op. cit., p. 182 ):

No one knows who will live in this cage in the future, or whether
at the end of this tremendous development entirely new prophets
will arise, or there will be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals.
or, if neither, mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of
convulsive self-importance. For the last stage of this cultural
development, it might well be truly said: 'specialists without
spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity [emphasis added]
imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before
achieved'" ( 1958, p. 182).

Against the life-destroying petrification of social mechanization in rationalized

specialization, there is an antipodal force that has asserted itself historically to
"transcend the sphere of everyday economic routines" ( Weber, 1968, vol 3, p.
111). That is "charisma," the "strongest anti-economic force" which "transforms
all values and breaks all traditional and rational norms" ( 3, p. 1115). Against
rationalization, charisma is "the specifically creative revolutionary force of
history."

Despite the inevitable instability of charisma and the flourishing of "ersatz

prophecy," Weber does seek a way out of the iron cage by a re-examination of
asceticism and mysticism ( 1946, pp. 323-359). Asceticism tends toward
rationality and is sublimated in knowledge. Mysticism, with its emphasis on
unity and ecstacy, has "always inclined men towards the flowing out into an
objectless acosmism of love. . . . But its ethical demand has always lain in the
direction of universal brotherhood" (p. 330). This tendency conflicts with the
other

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sociocultural spheres of esthetics and eroticism. These spheres, which are "like a
gate into the most irrational and thereby real kernel of life, as compared with the
mechanisms of rationalization," are in tension with the "ethic of religious
brotherliness" (p. 345). Ultimately though, it is the "vocational workaday life,
asceticism's ghost, which leaves hardly any room" (p. 357) for "the cultivation
of acosmic brotherliness."

Mid- twentieth-century social thought continues to articulate the conflict

between a deadening civilization and life-affirming cultural and personal forces.
However, this "dialectic" is played out increasingly less within either
mainstream or radical sociology, nor, later, in rationalized postmodernism.
Instead, it is found among religious existentialists like Martin Buber and
dissident theorists and practitioners of psychoanalysis like Wilhelm Reich,
Norman O. Brown, Erich Fromm, and others ( Marcuse, 1955: Benjamin, 1989).

Brown derives the struggle of "life against death," not from a combined
Simmelian sociology of urban alienation and Jewish mysticism, as does Buber,
but from a Romantic, Christian reinterpretation of Freud's "libido" as more a life
force than, in Freud's terms, a "love force." The alienated state is repression and,
writes Brown: "Therefore the question confronting mankind is the abolition of
repression--in traditional Christian language, the resurrection of the body"
( 1959, p. 307). In opposition to Freud, who saw repression as an individual and
civilizational necessity, Brown calls for the elimination of all repression in a
liberation of the body: "The life instinct also demands a union with others and
with the world around us based not on anxiety and aggression but on narcissism
and erotic exuberance" ( 1959, p. 307).

Brown also looks to religion-particularly "Western mysticism"--as a channel

through which repression/alienation can be overcome. "So seen," he writes,
"psychoanalysis is the heir to a mystical tradition which it must affirm" (p. 310).
Mysticism and Romanticism (the latter of which Freud did acknowledge as the
precursor to his theory of the unconscious) "stay with life" and surpass the
critical negation of analysis with affirmation of the "spiritual," energetic, and
perfectible body ( 1959, p. 312). Then, quoting the poet William Blake, he adds:
"Energy is the only life, and is from the Body . . . Energy is eternal Delight."
The return of the concrete, the body as the locus of energy, and its deeper source
in mystical religion, all leads to a view of social theory itself as part of the
apparatus of repressive alienation or, in this language, neurosis of civilization
( 1959, p. 318).
For Reich, the "de-alienation," or undoing of the repressed body, is not a
mystical, but a material, "vegetative system" process that can be experimentally
traced to the cellular or "bion" level. Psychoanalytic work in the "talking"
therapy led him first to a recognition of the embodiment of neurosis in the entire
musculature in a process of defense against anxiety, which creates "armor" that
is fully physical as well as psychological. This armor binds, and blocks, and
dams the natural flow of biological energy, causing deformation and disease.
The natural flow of energy is realized through the expression, following the
Freudian model of psychosexual development, through genitality, in orgasmic
sexual

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interaction ( Reich, 1949).

Full genitality makes transparent the flow or "streamings" of body energy, which
are repressed in character armors that ultimately derive from the social
pathologies of an authoritarian, patriarchal, antisexual, repressive social order.
By an understanding of both sex-pol--the sociopolitical formation of sexuality--
and of the sex-economy of body and interpersonal energy dynamics, a genitality
of the unrepressed streamings releases body energy for individual and collective
creative self-transformation. Mann and Hoffman ( 1980) recount the path of
Reich's development, from radical sex-pol psychoanalysis to a holistic body
therapy of energy, and then a simultaneously more materialist theory of energy
field in self and environment, on the one hand, and on the other, a more
"religious," or, as they describe it, "spiritual" reawakening.

The Jewish Way

Martin Buber certainly fits the pattern of the Romantic basis of new age theory.
Erich Fromm follows directly a left-leaning Freudianism (though more
continuously than Reich), through a humanistic-Marxist analysis of "social
character." While scarcely circumscribing "the" Jewish way, they both bridge
secular and sacred solutions to the modern problem of alienation. They
explicitly draw from traditions of Jewish thought and practice, and so represent
signposts for rethinking social analysis and overcoming alienation within the
contemporary movement toward further revitalization through resacralization.

The trajectories of their work indicate quite different beginnings but also a
convergence of their later works. Buber is very much the Romantic, as
MendesFlohr ( 1989) has convincingly shown in his contextualization of Buber
within German social thought. Buber's engagement with Nietszche and
Kierkegaard is refracted in his mystical interest in Oriental religion, particularly
Taoism, and in "ecstaticism" more generally, but obviously in Hasidism. Buber's
path is one of socializing the Romantic, subjective individualist interest in
Erlebnis or experience, toward an ever-more social and ethical social interest;
first in his work on the interhuman, in dialogue, and then in his emphasis on
utopian community. Still, as Mendes-Flohr argues ( 1989, p. 126), Buber retains
a core of German Romanticism, and, I would add, ecstatic religious interest.

Fromm, on the other hand, represents a more recognizable (to sociologists, at

least) Marxist interest in socialism and in the overcoming of alienation which he
refers to as "dealienation." His path works through a "humanist" Marxism and
revised psychoanalytic interest to social character and social change toward a
new ethic of social being ( 1976).

Buber's overwhelming tendency is toward experience, ecstasy, and mystical

revelation. Fromm's central direction is toward the grounding of socialist ethics
in a more general and timeless "art of living," which works through Jewish
ethical theorists, like Spinoza and Maimonides. However, in his later work,
Fromm relies increasingly on mystics such as Meister Eckhart ( Fromm, 1976),
and urges that monotheism, from whence he derives his ethics of dealienated

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being, is ultimately nontheistic and mystical ( Fromm, 1956, p. 71). Buber

comes to be self-critical of his own subjective individualism, as he seeks
renewal ("incessant renewal") beyond the early work on Taoist unity and self-
affirmation, in a "neue Gemeinschaft."

At first look, Buber's Jewish "way"--both Buber and Fromm come to the Taoist
and Hebrew term, although "halacha" is very much a legal, ethical way--is, in
Max Weber's term, an exemplary prophecy, while Fromm's more ethically based
precepts for living represent the emissary prophetic mode. They represent the
ecstatic and ethical types that were so central in Weber's sociology of religion
and in his interest in claiming that the ethical, ascetic mode has been the basis of
contemporary culture (the "Protestant ethic"). Weber, of course, astutely
acknowledges that in cultural history, the types are mixed ( 1946, p. 291). Still,
the distinction, which appears to fit the central difference, within Judaism, of
Buber's and Fromm's approaches to overcoming modern alienation--despite the
convergence of Fromm's mystical interest and Buber's social commitment--is
crucial to Weber as the palimpsest for modern culture ( 1946, p. 285). Weber's
famous thesis was to show the translation of ascetic, emissary Protestantism as
the cultural foundation of modernity, in part based on the assumption that
exemplary prophecy was, because of its lack of an unequivocal supramundane
Lord of Creation, without an elective affinity for a practical, "workaday" ethic,
and instead ordinarily tried to "escape" or "fly" from the world (p. 289). While
Weber largely ignores the social-psychological consequences of any
innerwordly mysticism--which, I suggest, is precisely the point of convergence
between Buber and Fromm--he does acknowledge it, at least as a logical
possible combination (p. 326):
 The contrast between asceticism and mysticism is also tempered
if the contemplative mystic does not draw the conclusion that he
should flee from the world, but, like the inner-worldly asceticist,
remains in the orders of the world (inner-worldly mysticism).

This "inner-worldly mysticism" is not only, as I suggest, the common point

between Buber and Fromm, it is now culturally relevant, beyond bibliographical
Jewish interests. The social renewal that lies on the other side of
postmodernism, that builds on a different site from the modernity grounded in
inner-worldly asceticism and draws from new age cultural resources--this
"ideational" (Sorokin) renaissance, at least in its initial phases, is driven by the
nonalienated, experienced being of various efforts at inner-worldly mysticism. If
innerworldly asceticism was the religious foundation of the culture of modernity
and postmodernity was its decadent phase, then inner-worldly mysticism may
well be the religious foundation of the culture emerging beyond postmodernism.
Buber and Fromm are potentially interesting when social analysis consciously
bridges religion and "the workaday world," and defines its role as participatory
in the practice of social renewal.

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Buber
In modern Judaism, Martin Buber clearly sets himself against what he sees as
the dualism and rationalism of the historic Jewish mainstream. Not
differentiation, but integration and unity are the hallmarks of Judaism, according
to Buber ( 1967). Not religion, but "religiosity"--the state of experience, in
James's and Weber's terms--is what needs to be understood, and lived. Against
collective practices and interdicting laws and rites of differentiating structures
and spheres of activity, Buber proposes der Helige Weg, the "holy way" of
unified existence. Unlike Durkheim, who sees a separation, or insulation, of the
sacred and the profane as religion's defining aspect, Buber quests for integration
and unity by sanctifying everyday life and thus ending the dualism of
sacred/profane. The Hebrew couplet that begins with "The Lord differentiates
between the sacred and the profane" is followed by, "All our sins will be erased
by Him." In other words, havdalah (differentiation) is a preface to salvation or
redemption.

On this path, Buber carries forward to modernity a sociology of the

Zwischemnenschliche, the intersubjective, as Eisenstadt ( 1992) has translated it,
and of the utopian ( Buber, 1949). His modern reading of Hasidism places this
work within the long tradition of Jewish alternative movements that have been
broadly referred to as "mystical" (See, for example, Scholem, 1946).

Buber's analyses and language fuse social understanding and religious

partisanship, and particularly a critique of the Jewish mainstream ( 1967, p. 81).
What he wants to uncover is a religiosity of the Orient rather than of the West, a
religion like Taoism and Buddhism, which offers a "way" or "path" aimed at a
redeemed life for both the individual and the collective. Religiosity is not only
an object of social study, but rather, and above all, a lived experience, which is
articulated in the deed as well as the word. The experience that is striven for, as
in mysticism generally, is of unity, although Buber argues for a strong
particularly Jewish orientation to the attainment of unity ( 1967, pp. 28-27).

Unity, hallowing the everyday, is the path through individual consciousness and
decision to redemption of the individual, "the turning," and collective utopia.
While Buber may be seen as the avatar of a mystical, utopian Judaism of unity
and redemption, the so-called "mystical" tradition may offer, more generally, a
dialectic that combines unity or integration with differentiation. Adin Steinsaltz (
1992), in his contemporary "discourses on Chasidic thought," interprets
Kabbalah to speak of the power of division, as well as unity. "Creation" is his
textual basis for a kabbalistic dialectic of difference that begins with a
"separation" or "sawing" of the first androgynous person into male and female
( 1992, pp. 41-42).

These dynamics of unity and difference, of polarities, are, of course, central in

other religious traditions, notably Taoism, Buddhism, and Yoga. It is to these
traditions that I believe we will ineluctably continue to turn as postmodern
culture reveals no world-redeeming alternative to the European Enlightenment
and its tributaries, such as "classical" sociological theory and its applications.
Future "misreadings" will have to challenge also the religious discourses that, I
suggest, are foundational of contemporary social understanding, as we strive to
discover a cultural ethos that makes effective claims on subjectivity and
intersubjectivity.

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To have as well the "evolutionary" value that Weber hoped for-to be collectively
redemptive--such a culture will have to "stand in the face of" all the current
orders, and in that sense, be not reproductive, but revolutionary.

Like Weber, and in this regard like Durkheim, Buber overcomes alienation by
proposing an ideal "state," which he calls "the-between-people." In this state,
transcendental energies, which originate in a direct, personal, creative religious
encounter, flow over into the intentional self and social regeneration through a
social presence that simultaneously represents both mystical union and care for a
personal other. It is a "living" humanism that combats what Buber sees as the
inertness of both religion and society. Energy is created in encounter, in the
"meeting." Here, too, there is a sociology of presence and energy, which begins
with religious experience and overcomes dead or "I-it" social relations to find
and generate social and individual life energies--a path of renewal, regeneration,
and creativity.
Fromm
More than anyone else, Fromm made the affirmation of life an explicit
foundation of his social theory. Nathan Gover ( 1984) called him a "biophile."
Unlike the classical sociologists and Reich, he openly derived a
counteralienation social theory through a close textual reinterpretation of
religion. Fromm's "radical interpretation of the Old Testament and its tradition" (
1966) sees the paradigmatic case of alienation as equivalent to death in the
biblical struggle against idolatry. The key point about idolatry, for Fromm, is not
the jealousy of a monotheistic god, but the fact that idolatry, which he sees as
"the main religious theme," represents death against life ( 1966, p. 37): "The idol
is a thing, and it is not alive. God, on the contrary, is a living God" He quotes
Psalm 115:

They [idols] have hands, but do not feel; feet, but do not walk;
and they do not make a sound in their throat. Those who make
them are like them" ( 1966, p. 38).

Alienation is a preface to its overcoming, which is signified by the concept of

"the messianic time." In this time, writes Fromm:

He returns to himself. He regains the harmony and innocence he

had lost, and yet it is a new harmony and a new innocence. It is
the harmony of a man completely aware of himself, capable of
knowing right and wrong, good and evil. . . . In the process of
history man gives birth to himself . . . [so] that man would
become I like god himself ( 1966, p. 97).

In addition to eternal energy and the messianic time, which is the template for a
"universal historical transformation which forms the central point of the
prophetic messianic vision" ( 1966, p. 109), "it is the life principle and its
affirmation that Fromm carries away from his Old Testament encounter; what he
refers to as "the affirmative attitude toward life" (p. 141 ). This principle is
worth quoting at greater length: "Life is the highest norm for man; God is alive
and man is alive; the fundamental choice for man is between growth and decay"
(p. 142 ). Fromm's

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social solution is: "to recognize this danger and to strive for conditions which
will help bring man to life again" (p. 180 ). For him, that means a "renaissance
of humanism that focuses on the reality of experienced [emphasis added] values
rather than on the reality of concepts and words."

Experienced values have their origin in the realization of the "interpersonal

fusion" which is "the most powerful striving in man" ( Fromm, 1956, p. 18) and
the replacement of God as father with the principle of God. Ultimately,
monotheism leads to mysticism, and theology disappears in favor of the
experience of mystical union--a union that addresses the human need for
transcendence and overcoming the separation and aloneness of individual being.
In terms of our discussion of Weber's struggle for freedom from the iron cage by
examining the cultural, and particularly religious, "spheres," here, too, there are
ways out in both mystical union and love.

The practice of love shows how traditional humanistic values are justified
experientially as a "path," and intentional "right way of living," a "Tao" or
"Halacha." The practice creates life; by developing the elements of the capacity
to love, it then "demands a state of intensity, awakeness, enhanced vitality"
( 1956, p. 129). Fromm specifies what his solution means as a social practice--
that people should "become as Gods," and so reverses Marx's original model of
God's disempowerment and reduction of human being. Ultimately, it is the
capacity to love that recreates the energy of life.

Like both Sorokin and Csikszentmihalyi, in his later work (e.g., 1976), Fromm
describes movements toward a fundamental civilizational shift, an end of "the
religion of progress," with its "radical hedonism" and "individual egoism"
toward a "new ethic." Socialism is now expressly understood as a "secular
messianism," a derivative of the Old Testament ethic of a socially organized
dealienated being. Like Csikszentmihalyi, Fromm returns not only to Hebrew
humanism (to use Buber's term), but to Meister Eckhart's Christian mysticism
and the Buddhist Four Noble Truths as an ethical guide for the social
psychological practices that constitute both an "art of living" and a neue
Gemeinschaft, in Buber's world of, as Fromm puts it, a "new science of man" to
create a "new society." "If," writes Fromm, "the economic and political spheres
of society are to be subordinated to human development, the model of the new
society must be determined by the requirements of the unalienated, being-
oriented individual" ( 1976, p. 162). The "new synthesis" is "life-furthering" and
in its "humanistic religiosity" aims to create a "city of being." Fromm saw
elements of social renewal in contemporary revitalization movements: "I believe
that quite a large number of groups and individuals are moving in the direction
of being" ( 1976, p. 63).

Conclusion
I have tried to suggest that solutions to the modern, Marxist, and Romantic
problematic of "alienation" emerge now from within an incipient, but profound,
cultural transformation. This transformation is occurring, without salient

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institutionalization, in myriad individual and collective practices, which have

been stereotypically grouped under the heading of "new age." Human sciences,
notably in cognitive psychology but also among dissident social theorists, have
provided theoretical and empirical bases for the solution of the problem of
alienation. They center on a social psychology of presence, attention, energy, or
being. While sociology does not yet frontally address the analytical implications
of the noticeable cultural changes that are occurring, the cultural shift
additionally implies a renewal of social analysis as well as of social practice.

The renewal of social analysis occurs by participation in the wider cultural

process of "desecularization," as Fromm called it, or in other terms,
"resacralization." With the assault on modernity, if not its passing--from within
by postmodernism, and from without by various reassertions of religiosity and
spirituality--and on its modern critical bridge role, between religiously based
core cultural traditions and commodified, "workaday life," there emerges a
reassertion of the religious foundations of culture as both ethos and analysis.
With a blurring of boundaries and genres that was well-prepared for by
postmodernism, traditional ethical guides for living come to function more
widely as systems of analytic social and psychological understanding. Sacred
cosmologies in turn replace the secular cosmologies that had previously
replaced them--with the important additions of cumulative empirical scientific
knowledge and new, more democratic, universal aspirations for the self and for
social actualization.

"New age sociology" and "the Jewish way" are elements of this wider
transformation in culture and in social understanding. What remains unfulfilled,
in all the various accounts and premonitions, are the organized, institutionalized
social forms and practices that create and sustain the unalienated, paratelic flow,
transcending selves, dialogical, streaming, resurrected, state of being--in sum,
the "city of being." Sociologists have a particularly knowledgeable role to play
in this social practice of renewal and reconstruction, but they are likely to be
able to do that only to the extent that we are able to surrender the decadent phase
of modernity called now postmodernism--and to accept the emergence and
power of the culture of a new age, and of the core sacred, civilizational cultures,
repressed by modernity, which are now being brought back to collective
consciousness. That is our topic and our resource.

Note
Author's note: Excerpts of this chapter will appear in the author's forthcoming
book, Holy Sparks: Social Theory, Education and Religion, to be published by
St. Martin's Press, New York, 1996.

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15
Cross the Border, Confront
Boundaries: Problems of Habituality,
Marginality, and Liminality
Pirkkoliisa Ahponen

Encountering the habituality of the self, I quote a statement that characterizes

excellently the strata of modern existence: "Real as Nature, narrated as Discourse,
collective as Society, existential as Being, such are the quasi-objects that the moderns
have caused to proliferate" ( Latour, 1993, p. 90). The political ideals of the
Enlightenment--liberty, fraternity, equality--aimed at mutual social understanding
among world citizens. The promotion of civil rights was a political, social, and cultural
project. The concept of cultural democracy is an extreme expression of the unifying,
though not uniforming, spirit of this civilization process. A popular slogan of modern
avant-gardism--cross the border, close the gap--characterizes the epoch of "no frontiers"
of the 1960s. With its connotations it reminds us of the spirit of the age of those
intellectuals who believed that it is possible to transcend all boundaries in the name of
freedom. The thought was that since the social barriers of being had been overthrown,
the universality of cultural diversity could prevail forever, unifying all nations and all
people. Now, however, modern life has matured toward late modernity and the
conception of the reality that surrounds us has been changed.

Everything is post now, as has often been remarked, and we have to take into serious
consideration the restrictions effected by this situation. Some analysts ask, as
Baudrillard does, "what to do after the orgy"; others note that "there is something
afterwards, but what it is, and what it looks like, we don't know" ( Beck, 1992, p. 199).
However, there is already a turn in a new direction, toward a confusional order and the
making of a contribution to the "sociology of the orgy" ( Maffesoli, 1993). The
confusionality of the social order, which defines the postmodern situation, reflects the
changes in sociality and its focus.

Now the focus is, as Zygmunt Bauman ( 1992, pp. 190-191, 194) asserted,

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on the habitat inside of which the social agent operates and which itself is constituted
according to the movements of the agent. The processes of self-constitution are
structured by the habitual being while they are also stucturing this living space. Life is
constituted of a series of continuous choices inside the habitat, which offers possibilities
for agency and for the actions that accompany it. The flexibility of the habitat and the
necessity of continuous choices increase the reflexivity of this life space and produce
the confusional order. In this confusing life situation of continuous choices, the moral
self has to encounter the prospect of an inherent and incurable ambivalence, as Bauman
stated in his Postmodern Ethics ( 1993, p. 15). I find the message very crucial, when
Bauman concludes:

At the end of the ambitious modern project of universal moral certainty, of

legislating the morality of and for moral selves, of replacing the erratic and
unreliable moral impulses with a socially unwritten ethical code--the
bewildered and disoriented self finds itself alone in the face of moral
dilemmas with good choices, unresolved moral conflicts and excruciating
difficulty of being moral ( Bauman, pp. 248-249).

Reflecting on the changed conditions of this moral situatedness, it may be proper to

think for a while about the meaning of boundaries. I start to deal with this problem by
discussing how social space is structured in the "reflexive turn" of modernity, which has
made it inevitable that society adjust to risks by stretching the margin of the political
presence of democracy. I consider this "turn" significant for our cultural conception of
the Other, especially in the sense of whether the point of integration or difference is
defended in this respect. The integrative and differentiating social processes at work
here strongly affect the formation of collective identities. Therefore, it is crucial to note
how the features of strangeness and familiarity are classified when foreign, alien and
anonymous people are encountered. The other point that I see as crucial is the change of
identity of the person who is crossing the borders of familiar, secure, and trustworthy
circles.

Habitual Being and Marginal Interests in the Risk

Culture
Beck continues his contemplation of the problem of "what is left afterwards" by saying
that "we are living in the period of transition in which the problems of distribution of
wealth and risks overlap" ( 1992, p. 200). It could also be asserted that wealth and
poverty are redistributed in the "network-society," which has been substituted for the
class-based welfare-state system.

The risk tendencies are understood to have been spawned as side effects of the
uncontrolled border crossings of modernity. Now the protagonists of late modernity
seem to propagate a society that increasingly organizes its selfknowledge in terms of
risks, security control, and protection. Devices for reducing, managing, and
compensating for the risks and dangers become extremely important in the risk society,
which is, as Stehr and Ericson pointed out, a knowledge society simply because the
scientific knowledge in this circle

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is "both a source of major risks and the primary basis of security efforts aimed at
controlling them" ( 1992, p. 193).

Luhmann even states that the liberal ideology contains a "hidden programme for
adjusting society to risks" ( 1993, pp. 71-72, 76). According to Luhmann, all
functionaries in the modern system are based on a network model constructed of binary
codes, but not necessarily according to such binary logic that risk and security exclude
each other as alternatives. On the other hand, the development of modernization seems
to depend more and more on its own contradictory dynamics. In this "reflexive turn" the
"society reproduces itself by producing contradictory knowledge about itself," as
Erasaari ( 1993, p. 13) asserts. This means that all possible choices are risky. Thus, only
those decisions are advisable in the risky future that include a determination of the risk
probabilities. This refers to high-consequence risks in the globalizing modernity, which
"interlaces the local and global in complex fashion," as Giddens ( 1990, p. 178)
concludes.

Bruno Latour recently made the polemical statement that we have never been modern-
not yet--nor shall we ever be. The "modern" mind is constructed by separating the
conceptions of the external nature, of human collectives, and of the surrounding
nonhumans as representations of the imagined modernity ( 1993, p. 106). Following
Latour's line of argument, we notice that societies reflect the human mind as natural-
cultural representations--by the culturalization of nature and by the naturalization of
culture, as Maffesoli ( 1991, p. 9) remarked. The focal point here is that the modern
mind was constructed by a strict separation of nature and culture (body and mind), and
now, the conceptual representations of nature and society are produced as increasingly
complicated cultural entities, which follow the logic of this separation.

For interpreting our relationship to these entities, more and better qualified mediators
are needed. "The work of mediation becomes the very centre of the double power,
natural and social," Latour says ( 1993, p. 139). By these means, the "metaphysical
Others" become culturally represented. However, those who have no representatives
have no place in the Parliament of Culture. Modern politics has aimed at extending the
circle of being that is present in the field of democracy. Increasing numbers of marginal
interest groups have emerged with demands for the right to be discursively
represented--to have a vote in the field of cultural power.

It can be expected that in the postmodern political situation, questions of social justice
will be increasingly difficult to answer. In modern democracy, civil rights are based on
the majority principle--in other words, on the justifying principle of social integration.
Now, the political demands of social minorities are presented with increasing frequency.
These demands are problematic for various reasons, not least because they contain and
make visible many ethically differentiative elements, which have nothing to do with the
social class conflict and its potential solution.

The risk-producing tendencies increase the demands for security control, more often
than not for moral reasons. The integrative and differentiative political elements are
entangled with the numerous "recursive" proliferation processes in

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the late-modern network society. Luhmann ( 1993, pp. 108-109) spoke about a
risk/danger syndrome, which absorbs increasing amounts of attention and protrudes
with increasing amounts of communication into the system that aims at integrative
decisions. All decisions are risky in this syndrome and one person's risk is already
another's danger. The problem is how to keep the dangers behind the risk border.
Alternatively, can we sit in peace, believing that the others will keep the situation under
control ( Luhmann 1993, p. 113), or at least bearable? A possible "solution" is to trust
"limiting values," which are situated in an area between the indicators of the forbidden
and the permitted values ( Luhmann, 1993, p. 166).

Luhmann ( 1993, pp. 224-225) himself trusts the recursively organized system-world of
high modernity. According to him, the system can operate by stretching its boundaries
and observing the sequences of the needed operations, by fencing in what belongs to it
and shutting out what does not. However, to those who have an interest in the position
of the "shutout," Luhmann has little to say because he has concentrated his interest on
the reflexive organization of the network of common communication. Being together
will cement a mystical reliance on Us, thus legitimating the connection to the Other
(e.g., Maffesoli. 1991, p. 10). However, if we want to look at the situation of "the
others," we have to take into consideration the "adventure of difference" ( Vattimo,
1993) instead of the "archaeology of integrative knowledge" (cf. Foucault, 1989).

Hermeneutical Understanding of Togetherness

and the Meaning of Monetary Transactions in the
Margin of Modern Culture
Gianni Vattimo became a scholar in the atmosphere of hermeneutics, but elements of
post-structuralism are also absorbed in his conceptual world, which is charted by
following the paths of the "philosophy of difference." 1 Those of us who tread in
Vattimo's footsteps have to admit that "the only world that can ever be known is a world
of difference" ( Vattimo, 1988, 1993). Western anthropology has developed--and
promoted itself as--a discourse on cultures that are other. Cultural anthropologists have
always striven to encounter representatives of "totally other" cultures ( Vattimo, 1988,
pp. 152-153).

Modern thought was based on the "Great Divide" between culture and nature. Divisions
between human and nonhuman entities, or between those who are included in our
community (us) and those who are excluded from the circle of our presence as strangers
(them), are structured on the basis of the same constitution ( Latour, 1993). All qualities
of Otherness--like nature, as such--are excluded from those entities that are interpreted
as belonging to our common cultural property.

From this viewpoint, Vattimo states that the modern pattern of thought is reaching its
end. His critique is especially focused on Western anthropology and hermeneutics in the
sameness-alterity-belonging circle (see Vattimo, 1988, p. 154). Although anthropology
can still be understood as a discourse of alterity, it can no longer be interpreted as the
locus of alterity itself.

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The problem that Vattimo considers to be intrinsic in modernity is that being as the
foundation of sameness has become the cornerstone of Westernization. Subject-
centricity is the basis of ideal being, and the thought of being happy together is
contained in the strivings for unification and homologization of the human world by
means of continuous border-crossings. The circle of unity stretches its margin in its
strivings to include the qualities that are in the interests of those who are willing and
capable of joining together with our common values.

Georg Simmel contributed markedly to our understanding of the paradoxical nature of

modernity when he pointed to the importance of money in the impersonal unification of
individuals. One sentence, picked up from his analysis of the meaning of the money in
modern culture, expresses the core of this problem in a nutshell: "Money offers us the
only opportunity to date for a unity which eliminates everything personal and specific, a
form of unification that we take completely for granted today, but which represents one
of the most enormous changes and advances of culture" ( Simmel, 1991, p. 20). In this
way, Simmel refers to the process of modernization, which changes the quality of
culture into the equality of transactions.

As Simmel ( 1991, p. 21) continues his explanation, he shows modern culture to be

streaming in opposing directions. On the one hand, it promotes individuality, personal
autonomy, and independence; on the other hand, its strivings of equality produce
increasingly comprehensive social circles, networks, flows of meanings, people, and
goods--nowadays even worldwide webs--which aim to connect even the most remote
spots under equal conditions. However, it is worth noticing how the money economy
supports both these tendencies, transforming communication systems equally
effectively everywhere. This presupposes a particularity of relations, a "strong
individualism," which alienates people from each other and forces each to rely on him-
or herself because the relationships are anonymous and personally indifferent.
Therefore, we are free only "with money in our pocket" ( Simmel, 1991, p. 23).

The exclusions of the elements of otherness become specific in these conditions of

"togetherness." Such ingredients are excluded from the circle of modernity that do not
fit well into the models of (Westernized) human understanding and are disqualified
under modern conditions as nonhuman, or archaic, or irrational. A common
understanding is the essence of hermeneutics and the principal condition of
togetherness. Together, we are alike and understand each other's experienced meanings.

If being with other humans is based on this understanding, which is, as Zygmunt
Bauman ( 1993, p. 147) says, always the same and thought of only in the singular, it is
comparable to monetary transactions. Therefore, "money provides a common basis of
direct mutual understandings and an equality of directives," contributing in this way to
the "dissimulation of the generally human" ( Simmel 1991, p. 21). Because money is, as
Simmel states, the "absolutely sufficient expression and equivalent of all values," it
becomes "the centre in which most opposing, alien and distant things find what they
have in common and touch

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each other ( 1991, p. 28)." This statement can also be applied to human relations insofar
as the mutual understanding is based on the principles of sameness, equality and
singularity of being.

However, misunderstandings, as Bauman ( 1993) explains, are thought of in the plural

because they are many and different. He points out ( 1993, p. 147) that differentiations
between ourselves and the others start from the "going wrong" situations, from
experiences in which the "assumption of symmetry and reciprocity has been flouted," or
in appearances of meanness. The position of hermeneutics is very crucial for the
togetherness-sameness dilemma of modernity. Vattimo ( 1988, p. 156) even states that
hermeneutics itself has now become a form of the dissolution of being, and therefore,
contemporary cultural anthropology is increasingly interested in dealing with the
marginality of primitivity in every culture that is Other, in the belief of defending the
other's values in "the margins of the present which embrace both Third World societies
and the ghettoes of industrial societies" ( Vattimo, 1988, p. 159).

In this sense, as David Apter ( 1987, p. 18) has remarked, marginality means
"functional superfluousness." In any case, it is even more true for Apter than for
Simmel that modern life, and especially the knowledge thereof, is "transformed from
the solid, substantial and stable form into a state of development, movement and
instability" ( Simmel, 1991, p. 29). We have to tolerate among us increasing numbers of
marginal people, who live in the liminality of the highly uncertain living conditions,
with great personal risks and few prospects for a stable life, threatening the safety of the
"better people." Such individuals must be raised, enlightened, and made useful for us.
Otherwise, they threaten our life with harmful effects.

Confronting Boundaries in Liminality

Let us, however, also take a position on the politics of differences into consideration.
Orientation toward these lines of thought might stimulate the idea that the only truth
included in the slogan on border crossing is that it increases possibilities to notice, not
only the boundaries, but also the margins and the liminal uncertainty of the presence, by
making visible the differences that must be confronted after crossing border after
border. This is the postulated stance of the cosmopolitan "mirror-self" ( Hannerz, 1990,
pp. 237-251). This kind of self mirrors a plurality of cultures by standing for diversity,
openness, and contrasts in life. This demands, as Ulf Hannerz defines them,
competences of both generalized and specialized kinds, a readiness to be reflexive, and
an ability to reflect other cultures in postmodern life.

The chances for the emergence of the reflexive self are increasing. Situational
encounters with strange circumstances and people are always possible and, in today's
mobile way of life, become everyday realities. An ability to adapt to strange situations
also means a willingness to be involved with the Other. These demands for an expanded
competence of mastery lead, paradoxically, to an interplay between mastery and
surrender, as Hannerz ( 1990, p. 240) notes. In

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his recently published book Migrancy, Culture, Identity, Iain Chambers has dealt with
these problems of liminality in an interesting way. Discussing living in a foreign
country, Chambers wrote:

I perhaps learn to tread lightly along the limits of where I am speaking from. I
begin to comprehend that where there are limits there also exist other voices,
bodies, worlds, on the other side, beyond my particular boundaries ( 1994, p.
5).

In the middle of the otherness, we have to learn--step by step--to realize that the
ultimate border is impossible to reach. Situated at the frontier--or in the liminality--I
begin also to seek my own confines.

Therefore, crossing geographical borders always means facing the mental boundaries. It
is a test of the possibilities to maintain a stable identity--or to become another.
Chambers continues (p. 5 ): "Transported some way into this border country, I look into
a potentially further space: the possibility of another place, another world, another
future." Behind the national border, people have different languages, different habits
and also a different habitus from that to which you are accustomed. Your image of
yourself also changes accordingly, as adapted to the circumstances of this strangeness--
perhaps even if you are a missionary or a conqueror. Taking the stranger's position into
consideration, it is possible to problematize how to encounter the world as a world of
differences.

Situated on the margin or totally outside of our presence, the strange is disqualified, but
located on the liminal areas, the strangeness appears from empty space or as a "dead
end" between the places that are categorized as significant or the life spheres that are
characterized as meaningful. Liminal spaces are no-man's lands, situated always
"betwixt and between" some definite entities ( Zukin, 1992; see also Keith and Pile,
1993). Efforts to construct a secure identity in liminality become complicated because
ambiguity and ambivalence are always present, slipped between the global and local,
public and private, foreign and familiar. These uncertain elements of being cannot be
avoided once they emerge.

Traveling to the Strangeness

Ambiguity and ambivalence let their contents flow through the experiences of border
crossings of the travelers, making them nomadic. However, the purpose of traveling
also makes sense in these experiences; they differ depending on whether the traveler is
a visitor, an explorer, a merchant, or a conqueror. The feeling of strangeness also
becomes different depending on the duration and the degree of voluntarity of this
position.

Tourists visit in the strangeness for only a moment and of their own will. They seek
differences as deviations from their ordinary life and everyday experiences ( Urry,
1990, p. 11). Tourists spend a restricted period outside their ordinary circles to seek
exciting experiences, unfamiliar aspects of life, or ordinary people in unfamiliar
contexts. A tourist's strategy for being the master of strange situations is to pick from
other cultures only those pieces that suit him or her. Another strategy, which can also be
interpreted as a kind of cosmo-

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politanism, as Hannerz pointed out, is to accept the strange things when packed safely
in a vacuum: "he does not negotiate with the other culture but accepts it as a package
deal" ( 1990, p. 240). As far as I can see, this point of view is also included in a
statement of Urry ( 1990, p. 100), that explicitly concerns the fact that the typical tourist
sees named scenes through a frame and emphasizes the gaze as an intrinsic element in
his or her experience.

Although this kind of cosmopolitanism is, according to the typology of Hannerz, a

stance of surrender, it implies a sense of mastery. In the conditional situation it is
important to know where the exit is and, in this way at least, to be a master of border
crossings. Tourists may use a moment for testing the stability of their identity, but they
know that they are returning to their normal circles after a short period of being outside
their usual place of residence and work. Tourists have a strict idea of where they are and
how they get back to their everyday life and into its realities. In this case, the time-
space dimension of strangeness is restricted. The border crossing is only temporal, and
normally a tourist does not lose the sense of his or her own identity.

The more the possibility of return is gradually restricted, as in the case of job seekers,
foreign workers, migrants, refugees, or exiles, the more ambivalent is the consciousness
of being and the more important it is to know in this situation how the transnational
networks are structured. The need to be a master of transnational cultures is becoming
increasingly important nowadays, as people in increasing numbers strive to "feel at
home" in transnational life-areas, whether freely or because they must.

The liminality between these dimensions, these forced movements, and the mobile life
of choices formulates modern living space. Therefore, it is important to remind
ourselves, like Chambers ( 1994, p. 28), that just as the birth of modernism lies in the
heroic history of European expansion, it also lies in the savage expressions of the
ethnic, religious, and cultural alterity, which made modern progress possible. However,
it is true that transnational cultures make the Westernized people in modern societies
feel more at home than any other people. They can use, for instance, their own language
anywhere and also use other means of encapsulating themselves culturally everywhere,
if only they wish to do so.

The migrant, the newcomer to a foreign city, is rootless, living between a lost past and a
nonintegrated present. This might be the metaphor of contemporary nomadism or
neotribalism, using Maffesoli ( 1991, p. 11) term for fusion-like sociality, which
determines a new form of solidarity in today's complex societies. The migrants from
peripheral regions as well as other marginal groups are elements needed to structure
integration in the growing metropolis. However, as Chambers ( 1990, p. 30) notes,
when minorities populate cities, they introduce confusing, fluctuating cultural
ingredients, which change the heart of the city, making it quite unknown to itself. Of
course they can try to build a "home plus" atmosphere ( Hannerz 1990, pp. 241-242)
like so many modern travellers (business-travelers, sunshine-tourists, foreign students,
etc.), who want to have their obligatory or "packaged" journeys as convenient and
home-like as

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possible. At its extreme, this has nothing to do with the meanings of an alien culture,
nor with the strivings of "real" cosmopolitans.

Those who belong to "the ultimate others" are totally excluded from the circle of our
community and the stretching borders of its networks, and must live in exile forever.
Those who are situated outside the ultimate space of togetherness are even beyond the
presence of marginal interests of the "poor," "deviates," or "alienated." The strange, in
this sense, is marked only by a total powerlessness and characterized only by an
anonymity, which Bauman sets "outside of or beyond the social space" ( 1993, p. 149).
So it is also outside and beyond the distinctions that are based on the separation
between nature and culture.

Bauman continues by saying that the outsider is virtually not human at all, in the sense
that all humans are specific persons for us or are classified and identified by certain
categorial attributes. The social space could be defined molded in the liminality
between the poles of intimacy and anonymity. It is inhabited by people who derive their
identity from categories to which they are classified, assigned, and typified according to
what is known of them. The extreme anonymity of the stranger means that this alien
being almost vanishes from my view, whereas at the intimacy pole, as Bauman ( 1993,
p. 148) characterizes it, the nearer to me the Other is, the more I share the biography of
this fellow human.

In the ambivalence of contemporary life, the habitual being between strangeness and
familiarity is the situation where we have to learn to live with differences. This message
was already included in Simmel's analysis of modern city life ( Simmel, 1981). We
learn that differences are not necessarily barriers but are, as Chambers ( 1994, p. 18)
remarks, signals of complexity. This is significant because we find ourselves
continuously "on the road," seeking new experiences. Our life contains conscious
strivings to break the circles of routines. In these strivings, however, the possibilities to
be deeply rooted somewhere are lost. Cosmopolitans never feel quite at home after they
have experienced alien and distant cultures, as Hannerz ( 1990, p. 248) remarks. After
these experiences, nothing in their culture seems absolutely natural any more.

Naturalism is increasingly lost in the life that is structured in a postmodern way, in its
habituality where everything is on the move, in its ambivalent liminality, and in the
floating agencies between "realities" and relativities. Tendencies toward
universalization and globalization oppose stable relationships, loyalities to communal
roots, or even an encumbered self ( Bauman, 1993, p. 39). As Bauman ( 1993, p. 234)
says, we might have a safe and "unproblematic" identity inside a secure social space,
near the pole of intimacy, but it is no longer possible to live in that kind of an
encapsulated community. Even breathing demands that the airtight shell of one's own
world be broken. A living discourse is a contest between togetherness and otherness, a
critical challenge to one's own identity.

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Speaking Together, Listening to the Others
A different language isolates the speakers, while a common language integrates the
discursive parties. However, in social discourses the isolating and integrating elements
of interactions are always relative and movable.

The power balance affects the encounters in situations where we find things in common
and ideas that are understandable. In the modern way of thinking, the illusion of the
existence of a common language, which can be spoken together or sung in chorus is
deeply uprooted. However, those who speak aloud all the time, listening only to their
own voice, cannot notice and grasp the meaningfulness of nuances in the others'
languages. Only by listening to the Other can one hear the differences in different
voices; this makes interpretation possible, although, at the same time, it is an effort full
of the risk of being misunderstood.

Going abroad means that a border must be crossed. This experience might, at best, help
us become receptive to noticing boundaries that must be confronted before we are able
to listen to each other and, at least for a moment, also to hear the voice of otherness.
According to Chambers, this means venturing forward with a weakened and restricted
sense of identity. The collective basis of the modern identity has become problematic
for many reasons, and not least because, as Bauman ( 1993, p. 234) notes, identities
may be safe and unproblematic only inside a secure social space. Bauman continues by
stating that spacing and identity production are two facets of the process that was
projected to meet the demand for a unified, managed, and controlled social space.
Bauman sees that this "cultural product" has now become "the last straw of hope for the
seekers of solid identities in the postmodern world of contingency and nomadism." For
those of us who venture with Vattimo into the adventure of difference and turn toward
the process of Verwindung (weak thought), our hope is anchored on the radical
transformation of our relationship to the Other (stranger). This intrinsic problem of
culture, which exists at its core, has to be problematized seriously. Thinking ethically,
this also means confronting the most inevitable choices of the global future of
humanity.

Notes
Author's note: I wish to express my gratitude to Mr. Timo Cantell, M.A., and
Mrs. Eeva Koponen, M.A., for their fruitful comments on the first version of
this chapter, and to Mrs. Joann von Weissenberg, Ph.D., for helping with the
language.

1. Hermeneutics can be viewed as striving to grasp Being by starting from a "same"

and running through different epochs and different conditions with the intention of
attaining the harmonization of existence and meaning ( Vattimo 1993, p. 3).
Vattimo lists the constitutive elements of the hermeneutical circle as follows: the
rejection of "objectivity as an ideal of historical knowledge, the extension of the
hermeneutical model to all knowledge and the linguistic nature of Being" ( 1993, p.
19).
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16
Individual, Time, and Death in
Contemporary Society
Maria Helena Oliva Augusto

The representations that are shared in common by members of a society are

fundamental to characterize that society, accounting for its true profile, and
simultaneously allowing its members to recognize themselves as participants in
it. Clearly, what this sociological principle is intended to mean is that, on the one
hand, the entire complex of shared meanings, of representations men and
women have about "their" society, the way they think about it and see it, is what
allows that society to exist with a certain identifiable and recognizable profile.
On the other, it also makes it clear that the profile of a given society's
participants is derived from those representations: through them society creates
people suitable for its needs; in them the process of introducing those born in the
meanders of the society that receives them takes roots.

In other words, the views men and women have of their society are forms by
which it is maintained, for each individual as well as for the whole. We are
dealing here with how society is represented to its members, creating meanings
that are peculiar to it. Members of a given society become social beings by
incorporating these very same representations or meanings. The process of
socialization, by means of which that society's members internalize them, allows
these members "to become human" in a specific manner. At the same time, all of
the institutions that are particular to that society also give a concrete expression
to these meanings.

Institutions exercise, therefore, a triple function: (a) they structure

representations of the world in general, without which human beings cannot
exist; (b) they assign goals to the actions that members of a given society will
develop, indicating what should or should not be done; and, finally, (c) they
establish the types of affective relations and inclinations that are characteristic of
a particular

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society ( Castoriadis, 1990- 1991, p. 125).

The most important of all meanings produced in this manner is that which refers to
society itself, its representation of itself as something: this representation is inextricably
linked to a certain way of desiring itself as this society, loving itself as this society. This
is what allows each individual to identify him- or herself with a "we," a collectivity
that, in principle, is indestructible:

A sense that concerns society's self-representation, a sense that can be

shared by individuals, a sense that allows them to create a meaning of
the world for their personal benefit, a sense of life, and, finally, a sense
of their death ( Castoriadis, 1990- 1991, pp. 126-7). 1

During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, two representations were at
the basis of how men and women saw society and of how society represented itself. The
first referred to the belief in the possibility of unlimited progress guided by human
reason. This progress, which allegedly was provided by scientific and technological
development, involved, in turn, a belief in the possibility of continuous development of
the process of industrial production and accumulation. That vision entailed the prospect
that humanity could emerge from its condition as victim of unknown processes in order
to dominate them. It presupposed a progressive mastery over nature by human beings,
as well as the abandonment of ideas that were considered superstitious and that, as in
the case of religious beliefs, placed their very lives beyond human control. It was taken
for granted that this development would allow them to totally dominate the natural
processes, making possible, in turn, the satisfaction of fundamental human needs
( Castoriadis, 1990- 1991). Human beings tried to subordinate nature to human control,
"the human mastery of the natural world" ( Giddens, 1991, p. 144).

The second representation consisted of the belief in human creative capacity, in the
possibility that people would grow in freedom and achieve the common good through
free participation in business, public affairs, and collective processes. This
representation generated a particular meaning that referred to individual and social
autonomy, to freedom and to the possibility of creating forms of collective freedom,
corresponding to a democratic, emancipatory, revolutionary project ( Castoriadis, 1990-
1991, p. 127). Therefore, on the one hand, stood belief in progress; on the other, belief
in humanity and its freedom. We may call these two representations the capitalist
meaning and the meaning of individual autonomy.

These representations are mutually antagonistic and lead us in opposite directions.

Indeed, the capitalist meaning points toward centralization and disciplining; the
meaning of individual autonomy, by contrast, leads to the idea of participatory
democracy. However, being contemporaneous and coming to be concurrently effective,
they reciprocally contaminate each other in the end ( Castoriadis, 1990- 1991, p. 127).

The representation that modern society has of itself is thus derived from

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these two interrelated meanings. Modern society views itself as the time and place of
progress and uninterrupted rationalization leading to an enlarged process of production
and accumulation. Simultaneously, it presents itself as a space where, more than in
previous forms of social relationship, the successful realization of the human being is
possible. The sense that results from these meanings is that the convergence of
progress, reason, production, and accumulation implicitly makes possible the existence
of a freer, happier, and more fully realized people.

That representation and the sense it conveyed have, however, suffered setbacks today.
We must understand how this double and contradictory meaning that emerged with
modernity itself is actualized in the contemporary world. Similarly, we must evaluate
the extent to which in today's society the implementation of the notion of time linked to
that representation interferes with the possibility of human realization. Important
changes occurred between the moment in which modern society emerged and the
present; similarly, the then-prevailing sense of life and perception of death have
certainly also suffered alterations.

Some aspects involved in this discussion should be highlighted; it is important to take

into account that, since they reciprocally determine and influence each other, they can
be seen in isolation only from an analytical point of view.

Time, the Individual, and Modernity

The concept of the individual is, therefore, contemporaneous with the very process that
causes the double, and contradictory, meaning to emerge in the modern world. It is,
however, necessary to keep in mind that each one of these meanings, in Castoriadis's
opinion, suggests different individual anthropological types: the enterprising person is
the type that corresponds to the first of them, whereas the critical, meditative,
democratic individual is the one who best fits the second description ( Castoriadis,
1990- 1991, p. 128).

Other authors have also referred to the presence of two different ways of manifestation
of individuality, at the beginning of modernity, which can somehow approach those
suggested by Castoriadis. Simmel reminds us that once the liberal system of ideas of
the eighteenth century understood that what was common to all belonged to human
nature, it emphasized the fiction of individuals in isolation, equal and free, and the idea
of humanity in general; on the other hand, the romanticism of the nineteenth century,
considering that humanity would be represented in a different way in each person,
accentuated the unique character of individuality, the disparity between people, and the
right to singularity ( Simmel, 1986, pp. 260-261, 275-279). From another angle, Gergen
argued that:

largely from the nineteenth century, we have inherited a romanticist

view of the self, one that attributes to each person characteristics of
personal depth: passion, soul, creativity, and moral fiber. . . . But since
the rise of [the] modernist world view beginning in the early twentieth
century, the romantic vocabulary has been threatened. For modernists
the chief characteristics of the self reside not in the domain of depth,
but rather in our ability to

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 reason ( Gergen, 1991, p. 6).

If it is possible to argue that there was a reciprocal contamination, in the historical

process, between the meanings that best characterize modern society, the same can be
presupposed in relation to the double content of the concept of the individual: they
influence and alter each other mutually.

We must not forget that human beings are formed by the society into which they are
inserted, as they internalize its fundamental values. The importance of that link is
highlighted in social theory, which holds that society "forges" its members according to
the meanings by which it is characterized, providing itself--and them--with an identity.
Only when the notions of progress, reason, production, accumulation, liberty, equality,
and singularity had acquired such emphasis was it possible to perceive the emergence
of the idea that isolated individuals, independent of their local or family groups, are the
ones who construct the world.

While that notion presupposes human competence for designing life projects, the
concept of the individual also suggests the capability of self-control and self-regulation.
It refers to someone whose potential is not hindered by any ties to the past, someone
capable of creating a personal history that is independent of the group to which he or
she belongs. Simultaneously, it indicates the possibilities of "self-made" persons and of
projecting a future, which requires the belief that human life is not predetermined.
Implicit in this conception are the notions that each person's life is his or her own
possession and that human beings will become whatever they make of themselves.

When one speaks of individuality, the possibilities of self-reflection, criticism and

freedom are also implied. In this sense, the course taken by the individual's life is,
partly at least, the result of choice. His or her destiny is not beyond the individual, it is
not determined, previously or externally: it is his or her destiny, in the strong sense.
Consequently, individual realization demands that everyone leave signs of his or her
passage to characterize the plenitude or the emptiness of his or her existence.

The historical form of sociability that emerged in the modern world and allowed the
concept of the free individual, as well as his or her empirical existence, to come into
being also produced the experience of a new notion of time, which was no longer linked
to space but appeared independently ( Giddens, 1991, p. 16). At this point, we are no
longer dealing with circular time, but with linear time, which is perceived as a
measurable, divisible, homogeneous, uniform, arithmetized flow. This is also
progressive time, accumulatory, rationalizing, time-conquering nature, as experienced
in terms of unlimited growth and an evergreater approximation to exact total knowledge
( Castoriadis, 1982, p. 244).

This new time makes possible a clear distinction between before, now, and after. This
temporality now supposes, for humans individually as well as for society as a whole,
the existence of a past, present, and future. The present appears simultaneously as a
moment of passage between past and future and the point of departure for new
experiences. Life surfaces as building space--of

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new elements; it implies the idea of project, anticipating what is about to come, with
different characteristics from those "already known" or "already experienced" ( Heller,
1982, pp. 141-142). "The universe of future events is open to be shaped by human
intervention" ( Giddens, 1991, p. 109). In this sense, the process Giddens called
colonization of the future occurs, in which "the 'openness' of things to come expresses
the malleability of the social world and the capability of human beings to shape the
physical settings of our existence" ( Giddens, 1991, p. 111).

Future orientation, which tends to prevail, and the absence of bonds with the past that
this conception involves, are linked to the manner in which humanity came to face
destiny. The latter is not something derived from the will of the gods, nor is it imposed
externally. Rather, it arises from human action itself ( Heller, 1982, pp. 141-162).
Nevertheless, the unique and nonrepeatable history resulting from this process can only
be constructed within a definite period of time: the life span of each person. In order to
be able to trace one's own path and leave one's marks in passing as guarantees that one's
life was successful, there are boundaries beyond which one cannot venture. The growth
of the familiar control of temporal categories is, historically, correlated with the
development of the conscience of finiteness ( Giddens, 1991, p. 50). The notion of the
individual is contemporaneous with changes in the notion of time (and with the
experience of that new temporality), as well as with recognition of life's finiteness.

This convergence consequently involves a profound alteration in the meaning of death.

Death ceases to be the moment of passing on to another existence, whereby
compensation--whether positive or negative--for the life lived will be given. It acquires
the sense of an inexorable end. Recognition of this mark sets up an opposition between
the idea of eternity, which oriented previous existence, and the acknowledgment of
human finiteness. It likewise highlights the notion of time as an irreversible dimension
of human existence, as opposed to previous perceptions of time as a cyclical repetition
of situations. The prospect of that limit, which points toward the need to live the present
moment to its fullest since it cannot be repeated, also impels people to take maximum
advantage of the time available so as to fill it with events and deeds. Living is
converted into using the time available in order to extract from it, through one's
accomplishments, as much as possible.

Recognizing this process, Max Weber stated that, in the modern world, human beings
may feel disgusted, worn out, or weary of life, but never fulfilled by it ( Weber, 1958, p.
140). It has also been said that if death did not exist most people would be honest, for
dishonesty frequently results from lack of time: the fear of losing forever what was not
obtained today ( Heller, 1987, p. 387). In a certain way, consciousness of the end is
what feeds the present. In this sense, one's relationship with death expresses the way in
which one's relationship with life is assumed, as well as its meaning.

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Life and Death Today
After almost two centuries and two world wars, the persistence of misery and hunger,
together with the perception that inequality among people continues, made these
representations that characterize the modern world undergo certain transformations.
Furthermore, we now perceive that the ways in which people establish their relations
and exploit nature are not unrelated. We also perceive that unlimited domination of
nature is impossible since it is not inexhaustible. There is a limit to its exploitation,
beyond which nature begins to revolt: the hole in the ozone layer, the depletion of
natural sources of energy, the consequences of the indiscriminate destruction of forests,
the rise of the earth's temperature, and the climatic inversions we have witnessed all
demonstrate the need to change the ways in which humankind exploits nature.

There is now a divorce between the still existing perception of the possibility of
uninterrupted progress and the recognition that this immense and irrefutable
development does not always better people's lives. We have observed breathtaking
scientific and technological developments that daily achieve wonders which, only a
short time ago, were thought to be unobtainable--and which, in turn, are soon
superseded by new conquests. Nevertheless, it remains clear that while we can develop
the most advanced experiences from the scientific and technical point of view, the
economic, cultural, and social distances separating different social strata are
progressively increasing.

Thus, of the two opposite senses that the representation of modern society sought to
reconcile--the meaning of individual autonomy and the capitalist meaning--only the
latter remains truly present and dominant in the contemporary moment. However, what
it now seems to lead to is the indefinite expansion of the presumably rational matrix,
which has been emptied of whatever humanistic content that gave it vitality in the past.
As a result, today, the very ideology of uninterrupted progress, which guided both
history and projects for the future and provided people with a sense of living a "new
time," is being questioned or, for many, has lost its meaning. On the other hand, the
representation, which presaged the possibility of an emerging free humanity capable of
autonomously constituting a history that would simultaneously provide for individual
happiness and the common good, has been visibly weakened.

Under these conditions, the exercise of reason does not have, as a greater objective,
improvement in the life of humanity but rather is carried out for the sake of greater
wealth or progress for its own sake. Often, what seems perfectly logical when observed
from that angle is revealed as being completely incoherent and/or irrational when its
consequences are analyzed from the point of view of the most immediate human
existence or from prejudices suffered by the environment in the middle and long terms.
It is appropriate for us to ask whether, in many cases, we are really speaking of an
exercise of reason or rather of its negation.

Consequently, the experience of the present moment, for many contemporary men and
women, rather than allowing them to see themselves as whole, or as individuals in the
full meaning of the term, causes them to feel like disconnected

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beings with neither roots nor prospects.

As a result, for most people today--who have lost the feeling of belonging, of
participating in a "we"--the subjective translation of the meaning of individual
autonomy and of the reality that sustains it results in a profound individualism in which
each person turns selfishly to his or her own desires and expectations and will not
recognize a fellow being in the other. The result of this process is none other than the
continuous growth of consumption and leisure--which have become ends in
themselves--the fragmentation of life into an array of meaningless acts and the extreme
solitude that haunts people even though they live in society.

At this point, we need to think about the relation existing between the elements that
have been highlighted. We must emphasize the links that articulate social meanings at
work in the contemporary world, possible individuality, the experienced notion of
temporality, and the perception of death.

As Foucault has described, in this type of sociability, in which producing is considered

so important, an ever more fragmented division of time is progressively established,
which tends to permit its full utilization. Similarly, guaranteeing the quality of the time
used has become increasingly necessary. In this process, the aim is to constitute a
totally useful time which, upon penetrating the bodies and imposing on them efficiency
and speed, presents the possibility of a theoretically ever-increasing utilization. What
occurs, consequently, is an ever more intense acceleration of time's rhythm ( Foucault,
1977, pp. 136-141).

People today perceive that "time flies." Time's velocity has made the endeavor of
planning the future obsolete, if not almost impossible. By the same token, the now, as
well as the need to consume it exhaustively, have come to reign absolutely. "Making"
time and not "wasting it" have become an obsession. People are crushed by the rhythms
and programs imposed on them by the variety of social webs, at the workplace and
elsewhere. The need to adequately administer time is internalized, as are all of the most
important social rules. Time is converted into an imperative. Individuals must adjust
their own behavior to the "time" established by the group to which they belong ( Elias,
1989a, p. 135). Personal temporality, whose rhythm does not accompany the swift pulse
of external time, is overpowered by it and converted into its "colony." Men and women
thus become their own internal clocks and the instruments of their own temporal
servitude. The pressure to rigidly program time penetrates daily life, both socially and
individually ( Chesnaux, 1983, p. 40).

This process can be partially explained by the way in which temporality is being
experienced, by the meaning which time assumes today. The characteristics that time
had acquired during the emergence of modern society are carried to their ultimate
consequences, having now been deprived of their transforming potentials. The demands
of the social order and their dominant logic cause time to be seen almost exclusively in
terms of linearity, with a utilitarian emphasis falling on the quantitative, to the detriment
of the qualitative. This is fundamentally a progressive time, centered on efficiency and
on the need to exhaustively drain the present's potential, but which somehow no longer
carries

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the prospect of global domination of nature, the possibility of total knowledge, or the
idea of humankind constructing its own destiny.

Here is the inversion: human beings, having been atomized, become dominated by an
external rhythm and, instead of regulating their own time, are made into its victims.
They no longer see themselves as building their life and their world. Rather, they feel
susceptible to threats whose origins they cannot detect, and whose development they
cannot control. Consequently, they tend to discipline themselves in a complete and
uniform manner, in almost all aspects and on almost all occasions. Discipline presents
itself as a characteristic of contemporary society's model of self-control. Its model of
civilization is represented by the regulation of time typical thereof: it is no longer
punctual and specific but rather penetrates all of human life, without allowing for
oscillations. This feature is uniform and inevitable ( Elias, 1989a, p. 162). This
perception, which was also developed by Foucault ( 1977), was, in a certain way,
questioned by Giddens when the latter stated that "bodily discipline is intrinsic to the
competent social agent; it is transcultural rather than specifically connected with
modernity" ( Giddens, 1991, p. 56). Nevertheless, there is no way to deny the emphasis
on self-disciplining at the present moment.

Alongside this trend, another feature characterizes the contemporary world: in the most
developed societies, people think of themselves as individual and independent beings,
separated from one another by a sort of invisible wall. For them, consequently, their
life, being isolated from the life of others and hermetically separated from the world,
should have meaning in and of itself. When they are unable to find this type of
meaning, human existence will seem absurd to them and they will feel disillusioned.
Nevertheless, according to Elias, it is important that we remember that the "category of
meaning cannot be understood when referring to the human individual or to a universal
derived from this notion. The existence of a plurality of beings, who are interdependent
in some way and communicating with one another, constitutes what we call meaning."
In other words, "meaning" is a social category and the subject corresponding to it is a
plurality of human beings ( Elias, 1989b, p. 68). To the extent that people tend to see
themselves as individual and independent beings, dissociated from and indifferent to
those with whom they live, their life (as well as their death) is lived as if devoid of any
meaning.

Each historical moment and each society creates a specific type of human being.
Considering all the changes that have taken place in the representations that
contemporary society and humankind make of themselves, the typical character of our
epoch has been presented by various authors as the artificial and passing union of a
disperse set of traits that do not quite constitute a clear human profile.

Some refer to the individuality which is possible in the contemporary world as a

heteroclitic patchwork or as collages ( Castoriadis, 1990- 1991). Others compare it to a
video-clip identity ( Lipovetsky, 1986). Still others assert something that is almost
paradoxical: despite the fact that individualism is progressively being established, the
perception that humans have of themselves

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is filtered through the way they believe others perceive them. It is as if people were
using radar in an attempt to grasp the perception that others have of them, molding
themselves according to external expectations ( Riesman, 1973). In other words, their
yardstick lies outside themselves.

From these points of view instead of that of the autonomous individual, this way of
being in the world results in people's loss of their points of reference next to the
manifestation of generalized conformism. The possibility of controlling their own lives
or providing for their own future and that of their children, of leaving enduring marks
of their passage through the world, becomes ever more distant. Insecurity and the
inability to predict tomorrow prevail in their lives ( Horkheimer, 1976, pp. 168-169). In
this sense, present-day human experience can be viewed as the negation of the notion of
the individual as it was conceived in the early stages of modernity. Nowadays, there is
no further possibility for its manifestation since, under present conditions, none of those
meanings have a way of sustaining themselves--from the enterprising businessperson to
the individual with a romantic viewpoint, from the critical individual to the rational
one. Thus, individual autonomy is impossible, and in its place, heteronomy and
alienation characterize people's behavior.

On the other hand, the "empire of the ephemeral," the emphasis on the instantaneous
(which has become dominant) and the importance of a "now" devoid of meaning, end
up removing the significance of the past while emptying the possibility of a future. The
notion of history--both individual and social--that marked the emergence of these forms
of sociability, temporality, and individuality, as well as the very possibility of
establishing an identity, are devastated, along with the loss of sense that social life
presents, with the evergreater fragmentation of time and the significance that
instantaneousness acquires.

Even agreeing in some points with this way of understanding human life in the
contemporary world (despite having a less negative outlook), Gergen confirmed
significant alterations, albeit subtle, in people's self-conception when one moves from
the way of life that prevailed until the first half of the twentieth century to the way of
life that prevails now at century's end. For this outlook:

where both the romantic and the modernist conceptions of identifiable selves
begin to fray, the result may be something more than a void, an absence of
self. Instead, if this tracing of the trajectory is plausible, we may be entering a
new era of self-conception. In this era, self is redefined as no longer an
essence in itself, but relational. In the postmodern world, selves may become
the manifestations of relationship, thus placing relationships in the central
position occupied by the individual self for the last several hundred years of
Western history. [Thus,] . . . one's sense of individual autonomy gives way to a
reality of immersed interdependence, in which it is relationship that constructs
the self. ( Gergen, 1991, pp. 146-147) 2

To the best of its ability, each historical epoch elaborates its own mechanisms for facing
the problem of death. Consciousness of their very finiteness and of the need to
"eternalize" themselves through deeds realized during their lifetimes provided modern
men and women with their way of confronting death. In

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contemporary society, since life has lost its meaning--to the extent that the sense of
one's own history or even the very sense of history have disappeared--death is also
meaningless. There are various mechanisms that attempt to repel it, as if to deny it were
somehow to keep it away. We are dealing here with the same mechanisms involved in
making life "go by": taking a refuge in the immediate, the generation gap, th loss of the
sense of continuity. In today's world, the individual lives a frenzied race in order to
forget that he or she is going to die and that, strictly speaking, nothing that he or she
does has any meaning. Thus, people succumb as individuals since their sense of
belonging is obscured and the experience of their singularity is annulled.

It is important to emphasize another aspect of that same process. Medical progress and
the social measures to raise hygiene levels instilled the idea in contemporary society
that death should be seen as a "natural process" ( Elias, 1989b, p. 60). However, modern
man and woman see themselves placed before a paradox by science: the more means to
prolong life are developed, the more alienated from one's life one becomes. Not having
control over one's body and over vital processes, all that is left is to respect the good
judgment and knowledge of those who hold the explanation of life and death: the
doctors ( Sanches, 1994, p. 9). Thus, "on apparently acquiring a greater control on life,
technically speaking, by being able to prolong life, avoid the consummation of death, at
least for a certain length of time, man in fact has lost control over his own life"
( Martins, 1983, p. 10; see also Sanches, 1994). While in the past the moment of death
seemed like a moment to be feared, but also a great moment, nowadays, death
withdraws to the silence of hospitals and appears as a lonely and shameful experience.
Simultaneously, and as a consequence, there is ever-greater insensitivity concerning
how life is lived and how death is presented. This is the dominant mode of existence,
even though, in isolated spots, rituals and behaviors recalling old patterns of sociability
remain.

In Brazil, there are gross contrasts between the ways of living life, which are expressed
in significant differences in the ways to understand death. While there is a whole
technological apparatus that serves health institutions and their users, there is also need,
absolute misery, and a total absence of services and assistance. As a consequence of
these two such different means for the availability and enjoyment of society--of fitting
into the world--there also arise different ways of representing death ( Sanches, 1994, p.
17). In distant regions of Brazil (among mestizos and Indians) or in urban shantytowns
and suburbs, funeral rites and conceptions of death rather distinct from those now
prevailing still exist ( Martins, 1983, p. 9). Nevertheless, the latter are insidiously
gaining ground.

This is reflected in a number of attitudes regarding current social issues: efforts to

implement the death penalty supported by popular opinion; the indifference of young
murderers when referring to taking another's life; how children--the "promise of the
future"--are treated, with child abandonment and their extermination; and lack of
respect for the elderly, which ranges from disregarding their experience to denying
them a dignified end of life, as expressed by the difficulty in receiving a reasonable
pension even after many years of work.

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We can perceive in the contemporary world a parallel process. Currently, to the extent
to which society's lack of security has increased, making it ever more difficult for
individuals to foresee and to exert a certain control over their own long-term future--as
was considered possible when modern society emerged--the need for supernatural
protection is resurging ( Elias, 1989b, p. 15).

It is as if a "re-enchantment" of the world were taking place, as can be seen by the great
vitality with which new forms of religiousness surface or resurface and mystic
experiences of all sorts proliferate. For Lipovetsky, the resurfacing of spiritualities and
esotericisms of all kinds does not contradict the principal logic of our time. Rather, it is
a way of enforcing it, "allowing for an individualistic cocktail of realization" ( 1988, p.
119).

Conclusion
What we have presented reveals that we are at a critical moment, characterized by loss
of the sense of life and sense of death, social life without meaning, and individuality
made impossible. Is there some way to remake meanings, to project the senses again
and to reconstruct the promise of free individuals?

Some authors point to redimensioning the present time as a possible route. That
redimensioning demands the rediscovery of the future and a new relationship with
tradition and also with death, as well as a different form with which the individual can
confront time. 3

There are also those who remind us of the need for people's reaction, taking the
"struggle for time" into the field of politics. That reaction should be present in the
workplace--as struggle for internal organization and control over the length of time
worked--as well as in private life through an administration of personal time that makes
room for the unexpected, prevents the imprisonment caused by commitment to a
schedule, and also rejects time-consuming mechanisms ( Chesnaux, 1983, pp. 52-53).

Society can allegedly make other meanings emerge if it is capable of helping us

recognize our finiteness; but in that case, another way of seeing the world and human
mortality is presupposed, as well as a recognition of the obligations that men and
women today have toward both previous and future generations: contemporary men and
women would not be what they are were it not for the hundreds of thousands of years of
work and effort of their predecessors ( Castoriadis, 1990- 1991, p. 134).

Therefore, it is asserted that a new historical creation capable of effectively and lucidly
opposing itself to this shapeless and kaleidoscopic world, this bazaar in which we live,
is inconceivable unless a new and fertile relationship with tradition is established. This
does not mean restoring traditional values as such or restoring them because they are
traditional, but rather, recovering a critical attitude capable of recognizing values that
have been lost ( Castoriadis, 1990- 1991, p. 135). According to another approach, the
past is the only concrete reference available for us to consider the possibility of other
forms of social

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organization, which means that we can look to the past in search of references for
another future. Here, the idea that the past can help us confront the present is also found
( Chesnaux, 1983, pp. 53-54).

Both these approaches suppose a linkage between past and future by way of the present,
and both recover the observation that Alexis de Tocqueville ( 1945, vol. 2, p. 331) made
in that respect back in the nineteenth century: "Since the past ceased to cast light on the
future, the human mind has wandered in darkness."

Notes
Author's note: A more condensed version of this text originally appeared as "Time and
the Individual in the Contemporary World: The Meaning of Death" in Dimensions of
Time and Life: The Study of Time VIII, eds. J. T. Fraser and Marlene P. Soulsby.
Madison: International Universities Press, 1995.

1. ". . . Sens qui concerne l'autoreprsentation de la socit; sens participable par les
individus; sens leur permettant de monnayer pour leur compte personnel un sens
du monde, un sens de la vie et, finalement, un sens de leur mort. . . ." ( Castoriadis,
1990- 1991, p. 127).

2. In spite of finding the discussion developed by Gergen suggestive, I disagree with

two points of his interpretation: first of all, from my point of view, at all
sociohistorical moments and not only at the present moment, "it is the individual as
socially constructed that finally informs people's patterns of action" ( Gergen,
1991, p. 146). Second, I am still not convinced that we live in a "postmodern"
world; I understand that modernity prevails and that the paradoxical aspects
presented by contemporaneity are results of the explicitness of some of its
virtualities, and not very prominent in times of emergency.

3. The trait of a new relationship with tradition must be distinguished, as it means a

reorientation in consideration of the past. Enlightenment thought presented the
breakup of any bonds with the past as a sign of progress, which will be strongly
criticized by the conservative thought, which looks at the past as a source of life
and wisdom. The demand for the use of the past as a referential for new
experiences, expressed by authors that surely cannot be identified with
conservative thought, is something that deserves closer analysis.

-192-
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 Author Index

Abrahamson, P.E., 109 Benhabib, S., 129

Addy, T., 108 , 114 , 116 Benjamin, J., 162 , 164
Adorno, T.W., 141 , 153 -54, 157 -58 Benjamin, W., xxx , 136 - 137 , 141
African National Congress, 51 , 62 Berberoglu, B., 29
Agger, B., 140 -42, 147 Berger, P., 96
Albert, M., 36 Best, S., xxiii , 2 , 4 , 6 - 8 , 15 , 26 , 42 -
Albrow, M., xxviii 43 , 61 , 104 , 106 , 114 , 129 , 139 , 141 ,
Alcoff, L., 131 147 , 151 , 180 , 183 - 184 , 189
Aiderfer, C.P., 88 Bien, J., xvii , xxvi - xxvii , 79 , 81 , 85 ,
Alexander, J.C., 151 , 162 87 - 88 , 90 - 92
Allen, S., 111 Blasi, J.R., 36
Amin, K., 112 -13 Blossfeld, H.-P., 96
Apter, D.E., 160 , 176 Bluestone, B., 48
Arato, A., 61 - 62 Boateng, P., 110 , 112
Archer, M., 88 , 95 Boggs, C., 36 , 59 - 61
Archibald, P., xv - xxvii , 35 , 37 , 47 , 49 Bologh, R.W., 135 -36
Argyris, C., 88 Bonacich, E., 35
Atkinson, D., 51 Bondi, L., 131
Baimbridge, M., 109 -10, 112 , 115 Boonzaaier, E., 59
Bannerji, H., 135 Bottomore, T., 161
Baran, P., 48 Bourdieu, P., 99 , 150 , 154
Baudrillard, J., xix , 128 , 139 -42, 144 Braverman, H., 29
-46, 150 , 155 , 157 , 171 British Broadcasting Corporation, 113
Bauman, Z., 155 , 171 -72, 175 -76, 179 Brown, C., 113 ,
-80 Brown, N.O., xix , 161 , 164
Beck, U., xx , 158 , 171 -72 Brown, P., 108
Becker, H.S., 143 Brown, R.K., 36
Bellah, R., 162

-213-

Brubaker, W.R., 111 Cohen, E., 87

Brunkhorst, H., 158 Cohen, I.R., 25
Brunt, R., 131 Cohen, J.L., 61
Buber, M., xix - xx , xxviii , 161 , 164 -69 Cohen, M.D., 87 - 88
Burkitt, B., 109 -10, 112 , 115 Cohen, R., 112 -13
Calhoun, C., 158 Cohen, S., 143 , 145 , 147 -48
Cambridge Econometrics Group, 109 Connor, S., 48 , 150
Campaign against Racism, 113 Corman, J., 48 - 49
Castoriadis, C., 182 -84, 188 , 191 -92 Crompton, R., 108
Chambers, J., 177 -80 Crook, S., 139 , 146
Chesnaux, J., 187 , 191 -92 Csikszentmihalyi, M., 161 , 169
Church of England, 109 Danziger, K., 96
 De Certeau, M., 142 -43 Foster, H., 7 , 14 , 98 - 99 , 128 , 132
De Tocqueville, A., 192 Foucault, M., xviii , 120 -23, 129 , 151 ,
Debord, G., 144 155 , 157 -58, 174 , 187 -88
Deleuze, G., 122 , 155 Freire, P., 85 , 136
Derrida, J., 121 , 140 , 150 -51, 153 , 157 Friedman, S., 61
Dickens, D., 140 -41 Friedrichs, R.W., 24 - 25
Doleve-Gandelman, T., 91 Frisby, D., 122
Durkheim, E., xix , 96 - 97 , 151 , 161 -63, Fromm, E., xix - xx , xxviii , 117 -19, 146
167 -68 159 , 161 , 164 -66, 168 -70
Eagleton, T., 132 , 156 Fu Ting Liao, xi
Ebert, T., 128 Fuchs, S., 25
Eisenstadt, S.N., 88 , 167 Gergen, K.J., xviii , xxviii , 117 , 121 , 183
Elboim-Dror, R., 87 -84, 189 , 192
Elias, N., 18 , 187 -88, 190 -91 Geyer, F., ix , xii , xiv , 62 , 92
Epsing-Andersen, G., 48 Giddens, A., 35 , 109 , 155 , 173 , 182 ,
Erasaari, R., 173 184 -85, 188
Erickson, F., 96 Gimenez, M.E., 108 -9, 114
Ericson, R.V., 172 Giordano, L., 29 , 33
Erikson, E., xvii , 96 - 98 , 100 , 103 -4 Golden, M., 50
European Consultation on Refugees and Golubovi, Z., xxviii , 32 , 35
Exiles, 116 Goodlad, J.I., 87 - 88
European Commission, 108 -9, 112 Gottdiener, M., xix , xxviii , 139 -40, 147
European Parliament, 112 -13 Gourevitch, P., 48
Everatt, D., 54 , 63 Gover, N., 168
Fals-Borda, O., 80 Gramsci, A., xvi , 36 , 52 , 55 , 59 - 61 ,
Fanon, F., 133 , 136 , 138 136 -38, 144 , 147 -48
Featherstone, M., 139 -40, 143 -44 Grayson, P., 49
Feuer, L.S., 18 Greenberg, E.S., 35 - 36
Fink-Eitel, H., 158 Grossberg, L., 144
Fiske, J., 142 Grosz, E., 134
Flaherty, D., 33 Guattari, F., 122 , 155
Flynn, D., 110 Habermas, J., xix , 80 , 83 , 141 , 144 , 149
Fontana, A., 140 -41, 160 , 151 -52, 155 , 157 -58
Ford, G., 78 , 110 Hahnel, R., 36

-214-

Hall, S., xvi , 66 , 70 , 131 , 142 , 144 Honneth, A., 155

Hammar, T., 112 Hooks, B., 131
Hannerz, U., 176 , 178 -79 Horkheimer, M., 154 , 157 -58, 189
Harris, H.J., 36 , 116 Homey, K., 117
Harrison, B., 48 Horowitz, I.L., xiv - xv , xxvii , 17
Harstock, N., 129 Horton, J., xvi , xxvii , 23 , 26 , 35 , 65 , 73
Harvey, D., 48 , 139 , 77
Hegel, G.W.F., xiv - xv , xix , 1 - 3 , 5 , 7 , Horvat, B., 31
10 - 11 , 13 - 15 , 17 , 117 , 149 , 151 -53 Howard, R., 29 , 143
Heinz, W.R., 98 , 104 Ichilov, O., 95
Heller, A., xxviii , 27 , 185 Ireland, P., 111
Herpin, N., 158 Israel, J., xvii , 36 , 81 , 85 , 87 - 88 , 91 ,
Hill Collins, P., 135 99 - 100
Hjarn, J., 113 Jameson, F., xix , 130 , 139 -40, 142 -44,
Hofftman, E., 165 147 , 158
 Jay, M., 153 , 158 Luckmann, T., 96
Kalekin-Fishman, D., xvii , xxvii , 97 - 98 , Ludz, P., xi
109 , 115 Luhmann, N., xx , xxiii , 155 -56, 173 -74
Kane-Berman, J., 52 Lukcs, G., 36 , 144 , 146 , 149 , 152 -53
Kang, L., 136 Lyotard, J.-F., 122 , 150 -51, 153 , 155 -57
Kaufftman, L.A., 131 , 135 Macey, M., xvii - xviii , xxvii , 107 , 110
Kauftman, B.E., 29 , 36 -12, 114 -15
Keane, J., 52 , 62 - 63 Maffesoli, M., 150 , 155 , 171 , 173 -74,
Keith, M., 177 178
Kellner, D., 129 , 139 , 141 , 147 Mann, W.E., 165
Kelly, G., 99 March, J.G., 49 - 50 , 88
Keniston, K., 96 Marchak, P., 48
Kennett, P., 109 Marcuse, H., 48 , 141 , 153 -54, 161 , 164
Kerr, J.H., 160 Markovi, M., xxviii , 31
Kousez, J.M., 87 Martins, J.S., 190
Kwasniewski, K., 80 Marx, A.W., 53
Lacan, J., 129 , 151 Marx, K., xi - xv , xxv , 3 , 14 , 17 - 18 , 21
Lachs, J., xxiii - 25 , 27 - 28 , 30 , 33 , 35 , 37 , 47 , 53 , 60
Lambert, R., 62 , 66 , 97 , 104 , 107 , 117 -19, 134 , 136
Lash, S., 109 , 157 -37, 141 , 146 , 149 , 151 -52, 154 , 157 ,
Laslett, P., 122 159 , 161 , 163 , 169
Latour, B., 150 , 171 , 173 -74 Mayer, N., 112
Lauclau, E., 122 Mayo, F., 18 , 28 , 30
Lawrence, P., 88 McLellan, D., 107
Layton-Henry, Z., 111 McQuail, D., 141
Lefebvre, H., xix , xxviii , 141 -44, 146 -48 Mead, G., 96
Lenin, V.I., 36 Mehan, H., 96
Levy, R., 115 Mell, L., 135 -36
Lichtenstein, N., 36 Melucci, A., 134
Lipovetsky, G., 150 , 188 , 191 Mendes-Flohr, P., 165
Lochen, Y., 80
Lorsch, J., 88

-215-

Mercer, K., 131 Oldenquist, A., 118

Merton, R., 100 Ollman, B., 159
Mico, P.R., 87 Oppenheim, C., 112 -13
Miles, M.P., 88 Orkin, M., xvi - xxvii , 51 - 54 , 59
Mitchell, M., 111 , 115 Orwell, G., 18 , 104
Mittelberg, D., 31 - 32 Pakulski, J., 139 , 146
Mohanty, C.T., 131 Panitch, L., 29
Morin, E., 158 Pappenheim, F., 119
Morton, D., 48 Pecheux, M., 125
Mouffe, C., 122 Peterson, R., 147
Muller, R., 118 Pile, S., 177
Mumford, L., 118 Piore, M., 48
Nelson, C., 144 Plant, S., 40 , 42 , 45 , 144 , 163
Netherlands Institute of Human Rights, Pontusson, J., 50
112 Prigogine, I., xxi
Nietzsche, F., xiv , 1 - 10 , 14 , 153 , 156 Putterman, L., 36
O'Connor, J., 48 , 150 Ramphele, M., 59
O'Neill, J., 151 Reich, W., xix , 110 , 161 -62, 164 -65, 168
Ogden, P.E., 113 Reid, J., 88
Olalquiaga, C., 159 Riesman, D., 119 , 189
 Rinehart, J.W., 29 - 30 Simmel, G., xix , 149 , 151 -52, 155 , 175
Roethlisberger, DJ., 18 -76, 179 , 183
Rogers, M.F., 25 Sloterdijk, P., 156 -57
Rose, G., 158 Smith, B., 131 -33
Rose, N., 120 Smith, K., 88
Rosenzweig, F., 156 Spivak, G.C., 135 -36
Rosner, M., 31 - 32 , 35 - 36 , 118 Stables, M., 49
Russell, D., 111 , 115 Stanojevi, M., 33
Sabel, C., 48 Stehr, N., 172
Sanches, V., 190 Steinsaltz, A., 167
Sandberg, A., 32 , 36 Supek, R., 31
Sandel, M.J., 120 Swartz, D., 29
Sarason, S.B., 90 Sweezy, P., 48
Schacht, R., xiv , xxiii , xxv - xxvi , 1 , 7 , Swidler, A., 96
9 - 10 , 15 - 16 Swilling, M., 53 , 61 - 62
Schelsky, H., 151 Szell, G., 36
Schilder, P., 118 Taylor, F.W., 28 , 36 , 143 , 145 , 147 -48
Schon, A.D., 88 Thomason, B., 158
Schweitzer, D., xii , xv , xxvii , 21 , 36 , Thompson, K., 160
159 Torres, L., 129
Scott, J., 109 , 157 Townsend, P., 109
Seekings, J., 53 Treichler, P., 144
Seeman, M., ix , xxiii , 36 , 92 , 97 , 105 -6 Tsoukalis, L., 109
Sekelj, L., 32 Tucker, R.C., 147
Shavit, Y., 96 Turner, B.S., 95 , 109 , 150 -51
Shoham, S.G., xxviii

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Urry, J., 177 -78 Weinstein, D., 151

Van Wyk, M.J., 61 Weinstein, M., 151
Vandenberghe, F., xix , xxvii , 149 , 155 Weiss, F., 118
Vaneigem, R., 144 , 146 Wells, D., 29
Vattimo, G., 157 , 174 -76, 180 West, C., xi , xxvii , 25 , 40 , 46 , 80 , 112
Voigt, K., 113 , 116 115 , 135 -36, 167
Wacquant, L., 154 Whitehorn, A., 32 , 35
Wagley, C., 116 Whyte, W.F., 18 , 36 , 119
Waldrop, M.M., xxi Willis, P., 96
Walzer, M., 62 Yinger, J.M., 116
Waters, M., 139 , 146 Yudice, G., 130
Weber, M., xix , 109 , 149 , 151 -53, 158 , Znaniecki, F., 80
161 -63, 166 -69, 185 Zukin, S., 177
Webster, E., 62

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 Subject Index
African National Congress, 51 , 62
Agency, xv, xix, xxi, 37 , 44 , 46 - 47 , 63 ,
118 , 121 , 127 -35, 138 , 159 -60, 172
Alienation, ix-xxviii, 1 - 3 , 5 - 7 , 10 - 15 ,
17 - 19 , 21 - 28 , 30 , 33 - 34 , 36 - 37 , 46
- 47 , 54 , 59 , 65 - 66 , 68 - 71 , 75 - 77 , 84
- 85 , 92 , 95 - 100 , 103 -9, 114 -25, 139 ,
143 -48, 155 -57, 159 -61, 164 -66, 168
-70, 189 ; commodification of, 25 ;
normative transformation of, 23 ; political,
xii, 54 , 59 , 85 , 92 ; problematic of, 143 ;
scientific reconstruction of, 22
Alterity, 125 , 174 , 178
Ambivalence, 172 , 177 , 179
Americans, 65 - 67 , 70 - 72 , 76 - 78 ;
Asian Americans, 65 - 66 , 72 , 78 ;
Chinese
Americans, 71 , 76 ; Japanese Americans,
67 , 71
Anglos, 65 - 67 , 71 - 72 , 76 - 78
Anthropology, 23 - 25 , 174 , 176 ;
normative, 23 - 24
Anti-essentialism, 128 , 132 , 134
Anti-Semitism, 113 -14
Asylum seekers, 111 -12, 114 -16
Attitudes, xiii, xvi-xvii, xxv, 24 , 26 , 28 -
30 , 81 - 82 , 84 - 87 , 89 , 91 , 190
-219-
Auschwitz, 158
Authenticity, 118 , 121 -22, 131
Autonomy, xvii, 2 , 8 , 12 , 14 , 25 , 32 , 81
, 88 , 97 - 98 , 100 , 103 -4, 137 , 156 ,
175 , 182 , 186 -87, 189
Autopoiesis, 155
Autopoietic, xxi
Being, x, xvi-xvii, xix-xxi, xxiii, xxviii, 3 ,
5 , 7 , 12 , 18 - 19 , 36 , 40 , 42 , 47 , 54 -
55 , 63 , 66 , 69 - 70 , 76 , 82 , 87 , 89 , 98 ,
104 -5, 109 -12, 117 -18, 122 , 124 , 129 ,
132 , 135 -36, 150 , 158 -61, 163 , 165 -66,
169 -80, 182 -84, 186 -90
Border, xx, 116 , 171 -72, 174 -78, 180
Boundary, 125
Capital, xvi, xviii, xxi, 22 , 30 , 34 , 37 , 39
- 40 , 48 , 66 - 68 , 71 , 110 , 137 , 141 ,
147
Capitalism, x-xii, 19 , 36 , 45 - 46 , 123 ,
139 -42, 144 , 146 , 148 , 152 , 154 , 159
-60; late capitalism, x-xi, 139 , 141 , 146 ,
154
Chinese, xvi, 65 - 77
Church, xvi, 44 , 53 , 55 , 57 - 58 , 61 , 80 ,
109 , 124
Citizenship, xvi-xvii, 14 , 51 , 54 - 63 , 66 ,
69 , 77 , 86 , 101 , 109 , 111 , 115
Civil society, 51 - 56 , 59 - 62
Class, xi, xvi, xxi, 18 , 27 , 32 , 37 , 44 -
45 , 47 , 56 , 59 , 65 - 67 , 70 - 72 , 74 - 78 ,
96 . 102 , 109 , 130 -31, 137 , 145 , 148 ,
152 , 172 -73
Commitment, xvi, 6 , 22 , 25 , 29 - 30 ,
51 , 54 - 59 , 61 , 63 , 77 , 97 , 157 , 162 ,
166 , 191
Competition, xv, xvii, xxii, 37 - 38 , 40 ,
46 , 48 , 61 , 76 - 78 , 105 , 107 -9, 114 -
115
Complexity, xi, xiii, xx-xxiv, xxvi, 13 , 31
- 32 , 77 , 179
Consciousness, x-xii, 1 , 18 - 19 , 25 - 26 ,
34 , 52 , 80 , 84 - 85 , 97 , 104 -5, 109 , 117
, 119 -20, 129 -31, 134 -35, 137 , 152 ,
157 , 160 , 167 , 170 , 178 , 185 , 189 ;
social, 84 - 85 , 131
Contemporaneity, 192
Counter-hegemonic, 36
Crises, xv-xvi, 37 - 39 , 44 , 47 - 48 , 84 ;
economic, xv, 37 - 39 , 44 , 48
Culture, xix-xx, xxvi, 3 , 9 , 14 , 32 , 70 ,
84 , 86 - 88 , 95 - 96 , 98 , 116 -17, 120 -21,
123 -24, 130 , 132 , 139 -45, 147 , 149 ,
157 -63, 166 -68, 170 , 172 -80; cultural, ix,
xvii-xviii, 1 - 2 , 6 , 8 - 12 , 32 , 52 , 62 , 70
, 82 , 85 , 87 , 89 - 91 , 96 - 97 , 99 - 100 ,
104 -6, 108 , 117 -24, 128 , 135 , 139 , 140
-44, 147 -48, 150 , 159 -64, 166 , 168 -74,
176 , 178 , 180 , 186 ; multi culturalism,
140
Cybernetics, xiv, xxi, xxiv-xxv-xxvi, 155 ;
first-order, xxi; second-order, xiv, xxi, xxv-
xxvi
Cynicism, 32 , 156 -57
Dauerreflexion, 151
Dealienation, xii, xv, xvii, xix-xx, xxiii, 21
- 24 , 30 - 31 , 65 , 76 - 77 , 95 , 98 - 100 ,
161 , 165
Death, xviii-xxi, xxiv, 7 , 14 , 26 , 32 , 39 ,
76 , 113 -14, 121 , 127 , 129 , 157 -58,
160 , 164 , 168 , 181 -83, 185 -92
Decolonization, 136
Decommodification, 40 , 48
Deconstruction, xviii-xix, 2 , 122 , 151
-52, 155
Dehumanization, 26
Democracy, xv-xvi, xx, 30 - 31 , 33 , 36 ,
46 , 51 - 52 , 54 , 58 - 63 , 81 , 85 , 88 - 89 ,
-220-
91 , 95 , 171 -73, 182 ; participatory, 31 ,
182
Depersonalization, 25
Depoliticization, 142
Deprivation, 37 - 39 , 47 , 109 , 115
Despair, 97 - 98 , 153
Dialectic, xix, 1 , 5 , 96 , 135 , 144 , 148 ,
157 , 164 , 167 ; dialectical inquiry, 35
Difference, 1 , 11 , 15 , 57 , 65 , 77 , 128 ,
130 -31, 135 , 139 -40, 147 , 152 , 155 -57,
166 -67, 172 , 174 , 180
Discourse, xviii, 7 , 21 - 24 , 27 , 34 - 35 ,
99 , 111 , 121 , 123 , 127 , 129 , 134 , 136 ,
147 , 151 , 161 , 171 , 174 , 179 ; moral-
practical, 22 , 35 ; practical, 22 , 27 , 34 ,
35
Discrimination, xvii, xviii, 7 , 21 - 24 , 27 ,
34 , 35 , 69 , 99 , 107 , 110 -16, 121 , 123 ,
127 , 129 , 134 , 136 , 147 , 151 , 161 ,
171 , 174 , 179
Doubt, 15 , 84 , 97 , 100 , 106 , 146
Eastern, xi-xii, 80
Economic, xiv-xv, xvii, xxi-xxiii, xxvii, 3 ,
14 , 22 , 32 , 37 - 39 , 44 , 46 - 48 , 50 , 53 ,
59 - 60 , 65 - 66 , 68 , 70 - 72 , 75 - 77 , 79 ,
95 , 107 -9, 112 -19, 128 , 145 , 163 , 169 ,
186 ; underground economy, 46 , 49
Education, xvii, xxv, 52 - 53 , 56 , 60 , 72 -
74 , 85 , 87 - 92 , 95 - 100 , 106 , 113 ,
120 , 161 ; for democracy, 88 - 89 , 91 ;
educational policy, 87 - 89
Embodiment, 17 , 132 -33, 164
Empiricism, xv, 23 ; empirico-analytic
work, 36
Enculturation, 95 - 96 , 106
Energy, xv, 18 , 87 , 160 , 162 -65, 168
-70, 186
Enlightenment, xviii-xix-xx, 14 , 127 , 130
, 151 -52, 157 , 161 , 167 , 171 , 192
Epistemology, 24 - 25 , 130 , 156
Eshkolot, 90 - 92
Essentialism, 4 , 11 , 128 , 130 , 132 , 134 ,
137
Established resident, 66 , 69 , 75 , 77
Estrangement, ix-x, xv, 12 - 13 , 18 , 66 ,
98 , 104 -6, 119 , 144 -46, 159
Ethic, 21 , 24 - 25 , 34 , 36 , 164 -66, 169 ;
ethical directives, 21 , 23 - 24
Ethnic, xii-xiv, xvi-xvii, xxi-xxii, xxiv,
xxvi-xxviii, 4 - 5 , 8 , 32 , 39 , 44 , 65 - 72 ,
74 - 83 , 85 - 87 , 89 - 93 , 110 -13, 116 ,
178 ; conflict, xxi-xxii, 85 ; groups, xvi,
39 , 44 , 71 - 72 , 76 , 78 , 86 , 93 ; identity,
80 , 82 ; revival, 79 , 83 ; inter-ethnic, 71 ,
76 ; multi-ethnic, 66
Ethnicity, ix, xii, xiv, xvi, xxi, xxvi-xxvii,
4 , 66 , 72 - 73 , 75 , 77 , 80 , 85 , 102 ;
European, 107
Everyday life, xvi, 66 , 133 , 139 , 142 -48,
160 , 167 , 178
Evolution, xxii, 18 , 23 ; co-evolution, xxii
Exclusion, xvii, 65 , 107 , 109 , 113 , 116 ,
133
Experience, xix, xxii, xxvi, 5 , 22 , 25 , 30 ,
33 , 38 - 39 , 56 , 69 , 87 , 90 , 99 , 104 -5,
113 , 118 , 124 -25, 130 -32, 134 -35, 138 ,
140 , 160 -62, 165 , 167 -69, 178 , 180 ,
184 -86, 189 -90
Familiarity, xx, 172 , 179
Fanaticism, 5 - 6 , 10 , 13 - 14
Fascism, 112 -13, 137
Fetishization of alienation, 21 , 24 , 26
Fixation, x, 38 , 84
Foundationalism, 137 , 151 -52
Fragmentation, xiii, xviii, xxiv-xxv, xxviii,
26 , 59 , 103 , 122 , 140 , 156 , 187 , 189
Frankfurt School, xix, 141 -42, 146 -47,
149 , 152 -53, 155 , 157
Freedom, xiii, xx, 52 - 53 , 58 , 86 , 119 ,
137 , 169 , 171 , 182 , 184
Generativity, xvii, 97 - 98 , 101 , 103
Globalization, xii, xv-xvii, xxiv, xxvi,
xxviii, 66 , 107 -8, 114 , 116 , 179
Great Compromise, 39 , 48
Growth, xviii, xxiii, 22 , 26 , 32 , 34 , 65 ,
68 - 71 , 75 , 77 , 91 - 92 , 95 - 96 , 112 ,
169 , 184 -85, 187 ; slow growth, 69
Guilt, 75 , 97 , 100
Habitat, 172
Habituality, 171 , 179
Habitus, 99 , 106 , 132 , 177
Hegemony, 59 , 65 , 130 , 138 , 140 -43,
147 , 150 , 161
Human beings, 1 , 3 - 4 , 6 - 8 , 10 - 11 , 13
- 14 , 85 , 117 , 181 -82, 184 -85, 188 ;
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41 - 42 , 44 - 45 , 48 - 49 , 89 - 90 , 108 ,
115 , 178 ; enlargement, 29 ; enrichment,
condition, 18 , 22 , 24 - 25 ; nature, 3 , 11 ,
24 , 134 , 137 , 183 ; relations, xv, 22 , 28 -
31 , 34 , 144 , 176 ; relations strategies, 22
Humanism, xviii, 13 , 117 , 127 -32, 134 ,
136 -37, 168 , 169 ; humanistic discourse,
24 , 129
Humanity, 2 - 5 , 10 - 11 , 13 - 15 , 152 ,
180 , 182 -83, 185 -86
Identification, xiv-xxv, 1 , 3 , 5 - 6 , 8 - 11 ,
13 , 84 , 99 , 104 , 111
Identity, xiv, xvii-xviii, xxv-xxvi, 1 - 10 ,
12 - 13 , 32 , 77 , 79 - 80 , 82 , 84 , 86 - 87 ,
92 , 97 - 98 , 103 -4, 110 , 119 , 124 , 127
-28, 129 -37, 145 , 152 -54, 172 , 177 -80,
184 , 188 -89; politics, 127 -28, 131 -32,
135 , 137 ; quest for, xxvi
Ideology, xv, 4 , 8 , 14 , 18 , 23 , 26 , 29 ,
32 , 34 , 51 , 59 - 61 , 77 , 95 , 108 , 110 ,
114 , 130 , 142 , 173 , 186 ; corporate, 29 ,
34 ; political, 8 , 61 , 108 ; of science, 23 ;
of scientific objectivity, xv, 23
Individual, ix-xi, xiii, xvii-xviii, xx, xxiii-
xxiv, xxvi-xxviii, 1 - 2 , 9 , 12 - 13 , 17 - 18
, 24 - 28 , 34 , 38 , 60 - 52 , 76 , 91 - 93 , 97
- 98 , 103 , 106 -7, 109 -25, 131 , 135 ,
140 , 143 , 153 -54, 159 -65, 167 -70, 181
-92
Individuality, 105 , 175 , 183 -84, 187 -89,
191
Industry, xv, xvii, 98 , 101 , 103 -4, 108 ,
142 , 157 -58; industrial relations, 28 , 33 ,
36
Inferiority, 97 , 101 , 116
Initiative, xvii, 97 - 98 , 100 , 103
Integrity, 97 - 98 , 101
Interaction, x, xiii, xv-xvi, xxii, xxiv, 18 ,
41 , 56 - 60 , 63 , 78 , 88 , 91 , 96 , 100 ,
143 , 145 -46, 165
Intimacy, xvii, 97 - 98 , 101 , 103 -4, 145 ,
179
Israel, xvii, 36 , 81 , 85 , 87 - 88 , 91 , 99 ,
100
Jews, 79 , 81 - 82 , 91
Job, xv, 22 , 28 - 31 , 33 - 35 , 38 - 39 ,
31 ; redesign programs, xv, 22 , 28 ;
redesign strategies, 29
 Kibbutz, 22 , 30 - 33 , 35 ; communities,
22 , 30 - 32 ; factories, 31 ; industries, 35
Knowledge, xiii, xv, xvii-xviii, xx, xxv,
xxviii, 5 , 9 , 14 , 21 - 22 , 25 , 27 , 29 - 30 ,
33 - 35 , 46 , 81 , 83 - 84 , 87 , 92 , 99 , 102
-3, 120 , 123 , 127 , 129 , 158 , 163 , 170 ,
172 -74, 176 , 180 , 184 , 188 , 190 ;
producers, 25 , 34
Labor, xii, xv-xvi, 17 , 22 , 26 - 30 , 33 -
35 , 39 - 41 , 43 - 44 , 48 , 66 , 97 , 103 ,
108 -9, 113 -15, 118 -19, 123 , 159 ;
rationalized control of, 22
Latino, 65 , 67 - 68 , 73 , 75 - 76 , 78
Liberalism, 9 , 86
Liminality, 171 , 176 -79
Logo-phallocentrism, 152
Los Angeles, 35 , 65 - 68 , 70 , 76 - 78 ,
145 -46, 148
Management, xii, 22 , 28 - 32 , 34 - 36 , 79
, 87 ; participatory, 29 ; scientific, 28 , 36
Marginality, 119 , 156 , 171 , 176
Marginalization, xvi-xvii, 107 , 113 , 145
Materiality, 133
Meaning, xx-xxi, xxiii, 2 - 6 , 8 - 10 , 12 ,
15 , 22 - 23 , 29 , 34 - 35 , 67 , 73 , 79 , 82 ,
96 , 105 , 120 -25, 128 , 135 , 139 , 151
-52, 160 -61, 172 , 174 , 175 , 180 , 182
-83, 185 -92
Meaninglessness, ix, xxiii, 97 , 104 -5
Mediation, xxiii, 134 -35, 173
Metonymy, 140
Migration, 67 , 113 -15, 128 ; immigrants,
xvi, 65 - 66 , 69 - 72 , 74 - 76 , 78 , 111 -12;
immigration, xvi, xviii, 65 - 69 , 72 , 76 -
78 , 110 -12, 115
Minorities, xvii, xx, xxvii, 65 , 68 , 72 ,
76 , 80 - 81 , 86 , 107 , 109 -11, 113 -16,
173 , 178
Modernity, xix, 123 , 147 , 149 , 151 -54,
156 -57, 166 -67, 170 -76, 183 , 188 - 189 ,
192
Modernization, 32 , 173 , 175
Narrative, xxi, 25 , 34 , 124 , 151 , 158 ;
voice, 25 , 34
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119 -20, 122 -25, 127 -30, 134 -36, 139
-40, 142 -47, 149 , 159 -60, 167 , 171 -73,
176 , 179 -80, 189 , 192 ; politics, 65
Postmodernism, ix, xii-xiii-xiv, xviii xix,
xxi, xxiv-xxviii, 2 , 4 , 127 -32, 135 , 137
-39, 141 -47, 149 -50, 157 -61, 164 , 166 ,
170 ; ludic, xviii, 128 -29, 131 -32, 135 ,
Nationalism, 8 , 32 , 59 , 86
Nativism, 66 , 70 - 72 , 74 , 77 ; nativist,
xvi, 65 , 70 - 71 , 75 , 77
Nazism, 5 , 113
Neuronal networks, xxi-xxii
New Age, xix-xx, xxviii, 159 -63, 165 -66,
170
New social movements, xxii, 44 , 130 -31
Nihilism, 6 , 10 , 14
Nomadism, 178 , 180
Nominalism, 156
Normlessness, ix, 97
Norms, 36 , 83 , 98 , 100 , 134 , 163 ;
normative theory, 21 - 23 , 33 - 34
Objectification, 7 , 25
Objectivity, xv, 21 , 23 - 27 , 34 , 36 , 180 ;
scientific, xv, 21 , 23 - 24 , 26 , 34 , 36
Official English, 65 , 69 - 71 , 75
Ontic void, 25
Ontology, 24 , 125 , 135 , 156
Operationalization, 21 , 23 - 26 , 54 ;
scientific, 24 - 25
Oppositions, 19 , 35 , 70 , 164 , 185 ;
binary, 128 , 131
Otherness, 5 , 133 , 174 -75, 177 , 179 -80
Participation, xvi-xvii, 3 , 5 - 15 , 19 , 29 -
34 , 41 , 46 , 51 , 54 , 60 , 62 , 69 , 71 , 76 ,
80 , 89 , 95 - 100 , 103 -4, 106 , 113 , 125 ,
170 , 182
Party, xvi, 18 , 32 , 43 - 45 , 51 , 53 - 55 ,
58 - 62 , 73 , 112 ; parties, 19 , 48 , 51 - 52 ,
54 , 56 , 58 , 62 - 63 , 81 - 82 , 91 , 112 ,
114 , 180
Politics, xiv, xvi, xviii, 4 , 8 - 9 , 51 - 52 ,
60 , 63 , 65 - 66 , 69 , 71 - 73 , 76 - 77 , 92 ,
111 -12, 127 -28, 130 -32, 135 , 137 , 151 ,
173 , 176 , 191 ; political alienation, xii,
54 , 59 , 85 , 92 ; diversity, 76 ; of
differences, 176 ; postmodern, 65
Post-fordism, 139
Postmodern, xiii-xiv, xvi, xviii-xix, xx,
xxii-xxiii-xxiv-xxv, xxviii, 4 , 7 , 10 , 12 -
13 , 65 - 66 , 76 - 77 , 105 , 117 ,
137 ; of resistance, xviii, 128 -29, 131 -32,
135 , 137
Postmodernity, ix, xi, xiii-xiv, xviii-xix,
xxvi, 1 - 2 , 10 , 12 - 13 , 15 , 128 , 166
Power, xviii, 14 - 15 , 23 , 29 , 31 - 32 ,
38 , 40 - 41 , 45 , 53 , 60 , 62 , 68 , 76 - 77 ,
87 , 89 , 93 , 95 , 108 , 114 , 120 -22, 127
-30, 133 -35, 147 , 152 , 157 , 159 , 162 ,
167 , 170 , 173 , 180 ; domains of, 87 , 89 ;
equalization, 31
Powerlessness, ix-x, xvii, xxii-xxiii, 31 -
32 , 38 , 41 , 59 , 63 , 66 , 77 , 97 , 104 ,
109 , 153 , 179
Praxis, 22 , 25 - 27 , 33 , 35 , 84 , 104 , 133
, 135 , 137 -38, 143 -44, 147
Prediction, 77 ; predictive efficiency, 24 ,
30 , 34
Presence, xx, 156 , 161 , 168 , 170 , 172 ,
174 , 176 -77, 179 , 183
Prophecy, 163 , 166
Psychological, xv, 23
Quality, xv, 22 , 28 - 30 ; control, xv, 29 ;
control circles, 29 ; of working life, xv, 22 ,
28 - 30
Racism, 75 , 86 , 107 -8, 110 , 112 -16
Rationalization, 28 , 34 , 36 , 108 , 152
-53, 157 , 163 -64, 183
Reductionism, xv, 23 , 141 ; psychological,
xv, 23
Refugees, 71 , 111 -12, 114 -16, 178
Regression, xv, 38
Reification, xv, xix, xxvii, 27 , 36 , 149 ,
152 -58; reified sociological knowledge, 21
, 33 ; sociological work, 25 , 34
Remedial action, 23
Representation, xx, 71 - 72 , 77 , 140 , 145
-47, 152 , 162 , 182 -83, 186 ; mode of, 140
Resacralization, xx, 160 -61, 165 , 170
Restriction of output, 45
Revolution, xv, xviii, 14 , 18 , 36 - 37 , 108
, 118 -19, 146 ; revolutionary, xx, 18 , 48 ,
59 , 136 -37, 163 , 168 , 182
Role, xvii, 12 , 15 , 51 , 53 , 65 , 75 , 92 ,
97 - 99 , 101 -3, 105 , 113 , 136 , 139 ,
145 , 158 , 160 , 166 , 170 ; identity, xvii,
97
Sameness, 130 , 174 -76
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xi-xx, xxii-xxiii, 2 - 3 , 17 , 19 , 59 , 61 , 80
- 81 , 87 , 109 , 116 , 132 , 139 , 173 , 176 ,
178 , 188
Sociotechnics, 29
Spirit, 5 , 15 , 136 , 163 , 171 ; spiritual, 2 ,
3 , 5 , 15 , 80 , 83 , 85 , 96 , 108 , 162 , 164
-65; spirituality, 5 , 170
Stagnation, x, 32 , 162
State, x, xvi-xviii, xxii, xxvii, 1 , 10 , 19 ,
27 , 31 - 32 , 37 , 39 , 45 - 46 , 48 , 51 - 54 ,
Science, xv, xxi, xxviii, 2 , 6 , 8 , 18 - 19 ,
21 , 23 - 25 , 27 - 30 , 35 - 36 , 123 , 139
-40, 157 , 159 , 163 , 169 , 190 ; epistemic
stance of, 21 , 24 , 25 ; scientific, xv, 9 , 21
- 26 , 28 , 30 , 34 - 36 , 82 , 90 , 156 , 162
-63, 170 , 172 , 182 , 186 ; community, 24 -
25
Self, ix-x, xii, xiv-xv, xvii-xxi, xxiv-xxvi,
1 - 5 , 7 - 14 , 17 , 19 , 22 , 25 , 27 , 30 -
32 , 34 - 35 , 38 , 60 - 61 , 82 , 84 , 90 , 97 -
98 , 102 , 104 -5, 117 -25, 127 -36, 138 ,
144 -47, 150 -53, 157 , 159 , 163 , 165 -66,
168 , 170 -72, 176 , 179 , 182 -84, 188 -89
Selfhood, 6 , 8 , 11 , 117 , 127 , 130 , 132
-33, 135 , 137
Self-realization, 144
Shame, 97 , 100
Simulation, xxi-xxii, xxiv, 140 -41, 145 ,
158
Sit-down strike, 45
Social, ix-xv, xvii-xxiii, xxviii, 1 - 3 , 6 -
7 , 9 - 15 , 17 - 19 , 21 - 25 , 27 - 28 , 30 -
36 , 38 - 40 , 43 - 44 , 46 , 48 - 49 , 52 , 55 ,
59 - 63 , 65 - 66 , 72 , 78 - 81 , 84 - 85 , 87
- 91 , 95 - 96 , 97 - 98 , 102 , 104 -16, 118
-25, 127 -36, 139 -42, 144 -48, 150 -57,
159 -73, 175 , 179 -91; isolation, ix, 98 ,
104 -5; movement, 19 , 60 - 62 ; structure,
131
Socialization, xxv, 2 , 83 , 95 - 99 , 103 ,
106 , 181
Society, xii-xiii, xvii-xx, xxii-xxvi, xxviii,
2 , 7 , 10 - 11 , 14 - 15 , 17 - 18 , 23 , 25 -
28 , 31 - 32 , 34 , 51 - 57 , 59 - 62 , 70 - 71 ,
80 - 81 , 83 , 85 , 88 , 90 - 92 , 95 - 97 , 104
, 107 , 109 , 113 , 116 , 118 -20, 122 , 125 ,
128 , 130 , 134 -35, 139 -48, 152 -54, 158 ,
162 , 168 -69, 171 -74, 181 -88, 190 -91;
societies,
59 - 62 , 76 , 79 - 82 , 87 , 95 , 97 - 99 , 108
-11, 116 , 118 -19, 121 , 124 -25, 136 ,
144 , 151 , 157 , 160 -61, 164 , 167 , 168
-70, 172 , 176
Strange, xx, 172 , 177 -79; strangeness, xx,
172 , 177 -79
Subalterity, xviii, 127 , 131
Subject, x-xii, xviii-xix, xxiv, 27 , 34 - 35 ,
40 , 61 , 81 , 90 , 124 , 127 -33, 135 -38,
147 , 150 -53, 155 , 175 , 188
 Suburban, 67 , 78 , 90 , 148
Systems, xxi-xxiv, 6 , 17 , 19 , 30 , 80 , 95
- 96 , 108 , 120 , 134 , 139 , 156 , 158 ,
161 , 170 , 175 ; complex adaptive systems,
xxii-xxiii
Taylorism, 28 , 36
Time, xx, xxiii-xxiv, xxvii, 2 , 13 , 17 - 18 ,
31 , 35 , 38 , 42 , 47 , 54 , 62 , 67 , 71 , 73 ,
75 , 78 , 87 , 89 - 91 , 99 - 101 , 104 , 106 ,
108 , 115 , 119 , 121 , 123 , 125 , 129 ,
140 , 142 , 146 , 150 -51, 156 -57, 162 ,
168 , 178 , 180 -81, 183 -92
Togetherness, 174 -76, 179
Totality, 26 - 27 , 98 , 133 -37, 152 -54,
156
Unemployment, xviii, 32 , 39 , 46 , 48 ,
107 -8, 112 -13, 115
Union, xiii, xvi, 5 , 33 , 39 - 44 , 46 , 52 -
53 , 55 , 57 - 58 , 61 , 63 , 107 , 109 , 111 ,
164 , 168 -69, 188
Value, xv, 2 - 3 , 5 - 6 , 8 - 10 , 14 - 16 , 18
- 19 , 21 , 23 - 26 , 30 , 32 , 34 - 36 , 57 , 77
, 125 , 140 -44, 148 , 152 , 168 ; neutrality,
xv, 21 , 23 - 25 , 30 , 34 , 36
Violence, xxvii, 101 , 110 , 113 -14, 116 ,
154
Women, xvi, 44 , 48 , 52 , 58 - 59 , 62 -
63 , 65 , 68 , 71 , 76 , 131 , 145 , 181 -82,
186 -87, 189 , 191
Work, x-xi, xiv, xvi, xix, xxvi-xxviii, 1 , 13
, 15 , 18 , 21 - 22 , 25 - 36 , 38 - 41 , 44 - 47
, 53 , 66 - 67 , 78 - 79 , 97 , 99 - 100 , 105
-6, 108 , 113 , 117 -19, 122 , 124 -25, 129 ,
137 -38, 140 -43, 145 -46, 161 , 164 -67,
169 , 172 -73, 178 , 187 , 190 -91
Workplace, 30 , 33 , 36
Xenophobia, xviii, 77 , 86 , 114
Yugoslav, xii, xv, 22 , 30 - 33 , Yugoslav
collectives, 31

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Contributors
Pirkkoliisa AHPONEN Department of Social Policy and Philosophy, University
of Joensuu, Finland

Peter ARCHIBALD Department of Sociology, McMaster University, Canada

Maria Helena Oliva AUGUSTO Head, Department of Sociology, University of

So Paulo, Brazil

Yehuda BIEN Kibbutz Kfar Masaryk, Israel

Kenneth J. GERGEN Department of Psychology, Swarthmore College, USA

Felix GEYER SISWO (Netherlands Universities' Institute for Coordination of

Research in Social Sciences), Plantage Muidergracht 4, 1018 TV Amsterdam,
The Netherlands

Mark GOTTDIENER Chair, Department of Sociology, S tate University of New

York at Buffalo, USA

-225-
Irving Louis HOROWITZ Transaction Publishers and Department of Sociology,
Rutgers University, USA

John HORTON Department of Sociology, University of California Los Angeles,

USA

Devorah KALEKIN-FISHMAN School of Education, University of Haifa,

Israel

Lauren LANGMAN Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Loyola

University of Chicago, USA

Marie MACEY Department of Social and Economic Studies, University of

Bradford, United Kingdom

Mark ORKIN Head, Central Statistical Service, South Africa

Valerie SCATAMBURLO Department of Sociology, York University, Canada

Richard SCHACHT Department of Philosophy, University of Illinois at Urbana-

Champaign, USA

David SCHWEITZER Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University

of British Columbia, Canada

Frdric VANDENBERGHE Aalbeke, Belgium

Philip WEXLER Dean, School of Education, University of Rochester, USA

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