Notes Toward a General Theory

of Alienation (Alienation as a form

of the Chronic Ennui Cycle)

By Dr. Ian Irvine, PhD. Copyright 1999-2010, all rights reserved. First Published July 1999 in The Animist.

An early version of this essay also appeared in the non-fiction book:

The Angel of Luxury and Sadness, 2001.

This version published by Mercurius Press, Australia 20113.

All quotes from theoretical texts are used with respect to the academic research and academic critique provisions of international copyright law.

Introduction

The twentieth century Marxist and Western Marxist terms ‘alienation’ and ‘reification’ have much in common with 18th and 19th century terms like ‘spleen’ and ‘chronic ennui’ (as used by writers, doctors/psychiatrists and culture critics). Nevertheless, there has never been anything approaching an in-depth study of the similarities and differences between the two types of 'maladies' - despite the fact that many writers often confuse these forms of subjective suffering with one another and also with other terms e.g. ‘anomie’ ‘disenchantment’, ‘estrangement’ etc. as used by non-Marxist sociologists, philosophers and culture critics.(1) The main difference between medical and psychological definitions of chronic ennui and the spleen and Marxist/sociological definitions of alienation, reification and estrangement is that the latter schools of thought tend to see socio-cultural influences as central determinants of the states of suffering described. This emphasis can sometimes obscure the fact that at the subjective symptom level there are close correlations between the kinds of feelings Marxists and Western Marxists discovered in working class people subjected to capitalism (and, later, Soviet style communism) and the feelings of morbid boredom and spleen that 18th, 19th and early 20th century artists, writers, culture critics, psychologists and philosophers wrote about. This essay will concentrate on the relationship between the main body of Marxist and Western Marxist writings on 'alienation', 'reification' and 'estrangement' and the various writings generally associated with 'chronic ennui', 'saturnine' or 'black melancholy' and 'the spleen'. Because the writings on chronic ennui are not so well known as the writings on alienation (due to the fact that those who have written about alienation are closest to us in time, and also the fact that the term served as a general catch-all for many different 20th century 'maladies of the subject') I will begin with a short summary of the 'ennui cycle' as written about by the likes of George Steiner (1970), Bouchez (1973) Reinhard Kuhn (1976), Sean Desmond Healy (1984),Orrin Klapp (1986), Patricia Spacks (1995) and myself (1998). The Chronic Ennui Cycle From the beginning of the eighteenth century the French idea of ‘chronic ennui’ signified a particular kind of subjective suffering. At the deepest level the idea signified a cycle of subjective discontent, a cycle that - at least at the symptom level - progressed perpetually through three distinct phases: 1) A stage of anxious boredom, of nameless objectless anxiety, which was accompanied by fantasies of release from that anxiety. This mood, in due course, gave way to a stage two 2) characterised by bursts of frantic activity designed to defeat or flee from the inner feelings of discontent characteristic of the previous stage. This activity had as its goal the denial of the previous feelings by immersion in various more or less repetitive (sometimes absurd) habits. This flurry of activity gave way to 3) a stage of psycho-spiritual numbness which allowed a person to feel temporarily free from the anxieties and impulsive acting out typical of the

previous periods. We may see this third stage as a state of non-being similar to that experienced by the heroin or smack addict, the sex addict, the gambler, the food addict, or the drugged patient in a psychiatric ward etc. This cycle need not be particularly spectacular, the ritualistic activities of the second stage, for example, may revolve around hundreds of routine actions, activities, sayings (rationalisations), thoughts etc. which in combination act to keep the subject fundamentally disconnected from more wholesome experiences of selfhood. We may list the various specific symptoms attached to the ennui cycle. Although such symptoms are experienced differently by different people, I.e. according to gender, race, class, age etc. the core description of the malaise nevertheless seems to reveal a certain degree of consistency across social positionings and across time. The core symptoms are: 1. States/feelings of subjective worthlessness and meaninglessness. 2. Feelings/intimations that the subject is missing out on life. The feeling also that time is a burden and that one is old before one’s time. 3. States of being periodically possessed by certain malign impulses/forces over which one has little or no effective control. 4. Feelings that the subject is estranged from/ divided within/ dispossessed of his/her ‘healthy self’ - that is, a feeling that the way one acts, experiences oneself in the world etc. seems to be merely an act, worse an act that leads to a narrowing of life possibilities, ie. that it is destructive. 5. Feelings of revulsion toward, or obsessive fascination with, one’s own body and bodily functions or with the bodies and bodily functions of others. (Various social and cultural commentators on modernism, e.g. Ihab Hassan, have described a particular state of ambivalence toward the realm of the feminine, the female body and the specifically female biological functions.) 6. Impulses to act violently or maliciously towards others, towards one’s self or towards the world in general. These may be extreme or petty - indeed pettiness as manifested in moods of jealousy, envy, backbiting, greed, etc. are features of the ennui cycle and are connected to the nineteenth century critique of bourgeois culture in general. 7. A sense that ‘objects’ out their in the world resonate in the consciousness of subjects as though they are malign and have special powers over human moods, desires, impulses and over a subjects fate/destiny. 8. The loss of an animated, enchanted state of identification with the world/

cosmos/nature, with others in society and with one’s own needs and desires. Many nineteenth century poets and thinkers described this stage as the loss of ‘vision’ or as the loss of the communal religious experience. 9. Physical feelings - long-lasting in nature - of being burdened, weighed down, exhausted, by the normal activities/interactions of everyday existence. Where a person blames others for this state of being or gives themselves wholly over to flight from self, writers as diverse as Kierkegaard, Sartre, Schopenhauer, Camus and George Steiner have spoken of 'normative', 'active' or sometimes 'bourgeois' ennui. Those who are to some extent aware of their malaise are often deemed to be afflicted with 'creative boredom/ennui' or 'spiritual ennui'. Since the nineteen century this form of l'ennui morbide has been characterised by an additional symptom: 10. The feeling or intuition that society and its institutions are in some way connected to/ nurturant of, the particular experience of ennui suffering felt by a given subject - that perhaps the norms of society are in some way ‘generative’ of the malady. The artists and theorists who have expressed this intuition link the phenomenon of subjective ennui to the great economic, technological, social, political and religious changes that shook Europe in the early modern period eg. secularisation, urbanisation, industrialisation, the rise of the bourgeoisie, bureaucratisation, the political revolutions of the period, the scientific revolution etc.. From George Cheyne (The English Malady, 1733) onwards symptoms associated with ‘subjective ennui’ were linked to various kinds of socio-cultural phenomena. The connections of the concept with many other post-Enlightenment (usually secular) concepts describing subjective disintegration, melancholia and psychic torment are many. It is no understatement to suggest that variations on this relatively simple subjective cycle of consciousness were at the core of many of the great nineteenth and early twentieth century critiques of modernity. In this sense ‘ennui’ in conjunction with other words has always had the potential to launch a full-scale critique of Western civilisation. The perils facing the subject raised on modernity may equally be the perils of the collective. George Steiner for example speaks of ‘The Great Ennui’ as a defining characteristic of post-traditional Western society in general - he sees it as a central motivating force behind the many calamities of the twentieth century notably two world wars, the ecological crisis, the technocratic tendencies of modern social structures, Anti-Semitism and other forms of minority scapegoating and, finally, the advent of the atomic age. Classical Marxist Alienation Theory In this essay I will argue that the general Marxist concept of ‘alienation’ is particularly useful for describing working class forms of 'chronic ennui' I.e. the

kind of ennui generated by competitive capitalistic economic structures. This remains the case even into this so called postmodern age. However, I also argue that the ability of the Marxist schema to describe, or even acknowledge, other forms of ennui/spleen is (and always has been) limited, as is the classical Marxist reading of the causes and cures for the problem.(2) This is not so obviously the case with Western Marxist critiques of modernity which often deal much more thoroughly with forms of alienation left out of the classical Marxist perspective. It is a daunting task indeed to try and summarise the critical literature written on Marxist and Western Marxist versions of alienation. In regard to classical Marxist theories of alienation I have concentrated on only a few of the most useful summaries, in particular Fritz Pappenheim (1959), Istvan Meszaros (1982), the Chapter on Marx in Richard Schacht (1971), Betell Ollman (1977), Isidor Walliman (1981) and the chapters on Marxist versions of alienation in Plamenatz (1975).(3) Similarly, I have engaged with specific well known Western Marxist texts and summaries of the same that seem to me bring the concept of alienation (and other Western Marxist terms) closest to the concept of chronic ennui.(4) It is in the Paris Manuscripts of 1844 that Marx comes closest to attributing to his concept of alienation states of subjective suffering similar to those associated with the ennui/spleen phenomena.(5) The essence of Marx’s original formulation of the phenomenon, worked out later through his ‘Theory of Value’, was that the capitalistic economic conditions under which a worker worked and created objects/products made for a situation whereby those objects, once created, confronted the worker as alien entities, symbols of the workers enslavement to the capitalist system - this process Marx labelled ‘the objectification of labour’:

... the object which labour produces, its product, stands opposed to it as an alien thing , as a power independent of the producer. The product of labour is labour embodied and made objective in a thing. It is the objectification of labour. The realisation of labour is its objectification. In the viewpoint of political economy this realisation of labour appears as the diminution of the worker, the objectification as the loss of and subservience to the object, and the appropriation as alienation [Entfremdung], as externalisation [entausserung].(6) The immediate work conditions experienced by the worker go a long way toward producing the specific experience of subjective suffering associated with alienation. What then do we mean by the alienation of labour? First that the labour he performs is extraneous to the worker, that is it is not personal to him, is not part of his nature; therefore he does not fulfil himself in work, but actually denies himself; feels miserable rather than content, cannot freely develop his physical and mental powers, but instead becomes physically exhausted and mentally debased. Only while not working can the worker

be himself; for while at work he feels homeless. His labor is not voluntary, but coerced, forced labour. It satisfies no spontaneous creative urge, but is only a means for the satisfaction of wants which have nothing to do with work...(7)

The alienated objects produced out of such processes exist as such not only because of the oppressive conditions experienced by the worker as he/she produces those objects but also because of the alienated economic and social forces which the act of production symbolises. Even if a boss were to be good to his workers the underlying motivations and values of the capitalistic system would still act to make the activity an alienated one:(8)

The independent, for-itself existence [fursichsein ] of value vis-a-vis living labour capacity - hence its existence as capital - the objective, self-sufficient indifference, the alien quality [Fremdheit. ] of the objective conditions of labour vis-a-vis living labour capacity, which goes so far that these conditions confront the person of the worker in the person of the capitalist - as personification with its own will and interest - this absolute divorce, separation of property, i.e. of the objective conditions of labour from living labour capacity - that they confront him as alien property, as the reality of other juridicial persons, as the absolute realm of their will - and that labour therefore, on the other side, appears as alien labour opposed to the value personified in the capitalist, or the conditions of labour - this absolute separation between property and labour, between living labour capacity and the conditions of its realisation, between objectified and living labour, between value and value-creating activity - hence also the alien quality of the content of labour for the worker himself - this divorce now likewise appears as a product of labour itself , as objectification of its own moments.

Despite Marx’s trust in the ability of science and the various reason based epistemologies of the Enlightenment to solve and reach beyond these processes of alienation he yet opts to use something approaching a magico-religious metaphor to describe the forces concentrated in the alienated object that confronts the worker and the capitalist at the end of the production process:

In order ... to find an analogy [for the forces concentrated in the alienated object of production], we must have recourse to the mist-enveloped regions of the religious. In that world the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race. So it is in the world of commodities ... This I call the Fetichism which attaches itself to the products of labour, so soon as they are produced as commodities.(9)

Marx seems to describe - perhaps metaphorically - a kind of malign animism; the situation whereby objects become portals for feelings of estrangement (demonic

social forces) generated by the enslaved nature of modern work. There are clear, though undeveloped, connections between this view of malign objects and the whole ennui/spleen tradition which stretches back to the writings of the early Church Fathers who suggested that certain objects, once experienced sensually, may become lodged in the intellect as tools for malign spiritual powers (the devil) which act to produce various unfulfilling fantasies and ultimately begin to motivate behaviour in harmful - estranged? - ways. The Medieval sin of acedia, for example, caused by the Demon of Noontide, made its presence felt via a subtle play on a person’s memory of objects. Giving in to the temptations of this peculiar combination of memory, object, demon, malign impulse resulted in a person being estranged from God and from the more ‘angelic’ states of subjective being. In relation to acedia, ensnarement meant an absence of joy and an addiction to unfulfilling and ultimately destructive ‘diversionary’ activities - hence the ennui/acedia cycle. Marx too seems to believe in the ability of external objects to impinge upon consciousness in such a way that the individual becomes unable to respond to the world in life affirming ways. However the joylessness of the worker is not seen by Marxists as the joylessness of disconnection between self and God, but it is nevertheless ‘joylessness’ and a sense of separation from much that is worthwhile in life. The cause of this state of subjective suffering is not a demon as with acedia but the control asserted over one person’s life (the workers’) by another (the capitalist). The idea of ‘oppression’ is thus central to Marxist alienation theory. Things and people become ‘phantasmagoric’ because the worker can only fulfil certain needs (for money to buy food, clothing etc.) by sacrificing other ones (the need to work under non-alienated conditions) - this sacrifice is made to the capitalist:

If my own activity belongs not to me, but is an alien, forced activity, to whom does it belong? It must belong to a being other than me. Who then is this being? ... [ ].. Neither the gods nor nature but only man himself can be this alien power over men. ...[ ] ...If [the worker] is related to the product of his objectified labour as to an alien, hostile, powerful and independent object, then he is related in such a way that someone else is master of this object - someone who is alien, hostile, powerful and independent of him. If his own activity in the service, and under the domination, coercion and yoke, of another man.(10)

The worker in being separated from the joyousness of work done in a non-alienated fashion also becomes alienated from nature itself. Marx explains this process as follows:

... The more the worker by his labour appropriates the external, sensuous world of nature, the more he deprives himself of the means of life in two respects: first, that the sensuous external world becomes progressively detached from him as the medium necessary to his labour; and secondly,

that nature becomes increasingly remote from him as the medium through which he gains his physical subsistence ... In both respects, therefore, the worker becomes a slave of things. ... The culmination of this process of enslavement is that only as a worker can he maintain himself in his bondage and only as a bondsman to things can he find work.(11)

Economic alienation becomes a recipe for the disenchantment of the world. However, not only is man alienated from nature by the capitalist system but also from himself and from his species:

Just as alienated labour separates man from nature and from himself - his own active functions and life activity - so too it alienates him from the species, from other men. It degrades all the life of the species and makes some cold abstract notion of individual life and toil into the goal of the entire species, whose common life also then becomes abstract and alienated.(12)

Interpersonal relations which should be rich and complex become fragmented, ruled over by the desire to oppress or to make the other beings do specific activities. This same state of fragmentation also exists between various aspects of the self.

Hence, in degrading labour - which should be man’s free, spontaneous activity - to a mere means of physical subsistence, alienated labour degrades man’s essential life to a mere means to an end. The awareness which man should have of his relationship to the rest of mankind is reduced to a state of detachment in which he and his fellows become simply unfeeling objects. Thus alienated labour turns man’s essential humanity into a non-human property. It estranges him from his own body, and estranges him from nature and from his own spiritual essence - his human being.(13)

An especially worthwhile modern study of the way in which the state of alienation is experienced by workers operating under Taylorist and Fordist work regimes was done by Barbara Garson in her book All the Livelong Day. The study deals explicitly with the work conditions which lead to symptoms of chronic boredom as related to the ‘ennui cycle’. Concerning the way in which emotional disturbances, which begin with unhealthy work environments, become structured into the psyches and bodies of workers she says:

It’s hard to analyse whether depression starts internally or externally ... But it’s easy to understand the analogous feeling at work. In a factory or an office, it’s easy to see who turned off the switch. The central function of management is to block vision, to find and eliminate the moments of imagination. With their vision deliberately restricted to one

small point or movement workers toil with little sense of beginning, middle, or end. With no goal they must move as in a depression, by putting one hand, one foot in front of the other. This way of organising work is not the result of bigness, or meanness, or even the requirements of modern technology. It is the result of exploitation. When you’re using someone else for your own purposes, whether it’s to build your fortune, or to build your tomb, you must control him. Under all exploitative systems, a strict control from the outside replaces the energy from within as a way of keeping people working. The humiliating and debilitating way we work is a product not of our technology but of our economic system.(14)

Garson’s study emphasises the way in which work may produce states of chronic subjective boredom or depression and thus reiterates, in a modern setting, the classical Marxist arguments centred around subjective alienation. Clearly, the exact subjective symptoms associated with these states of self and species alienation have been well documented in the years since Marx first wrote down these insights. Worker alienation has been described as a state of being characterised by long term weariness; organismic dullness and an inability to feel; lack of spontaneity; feelings of unhealthy detachment from others and from the objective world; lack of empathy for the feelings/sufferings of others and the tendency to see others as ‘means to an end’, as objects to be manipulated according to the rules of the capitalist game and according to one’s own, by this stage distorted, needs; lack of awareness of the greater possibilities of life, one’s own potential, the potentials of others and of potential one has for more meaningful relationships with others; alienation from the activities of one’s own body, body rhythms and thus one’s sense of personal time (since the productive process harnesses flesh and blood in specific ways which do not contribute to a healthy connection between body, mind and emotion); and, finally a certain dulling of the faculty responsible for world awareness - there is the sense that the true nature of a person’s situation is concealed in some way or by some means. It is not difficult to conclude that such a person’s activities in the world at large will at best be mere meaningless diversion, at worst, oppressive scapegoating of others. The uses of this formulation of alienation to explain the origins of chronic forms of ennui for particular groups of people - i.e. workers and their families - are clear enough. The theory, however, does not analyse thoroughly the psychophysical mechanisms which come into play to bring about the long term subjective symptoms described. Nor does it explain the exact way in which the workers pass on their estranged state of consciousness to their immediate family. Both of these problems might be illuminated by a theory of repression. Classical Marxism and Socio-Cultural Ennui

On the socio-cultural level the classical Marxist line on mass alienation revolved around seeing the various non-economic social and cultural institutions of capitalist societies (termed the ‘superstructure’) as, to use Plamenatz’s (1975) terminology, ‘forms of alienated life’. The political system, the state and all its institutions e.g. the education system, the legal system, the policing system etc. , the cultural mouthpieces of a society and the religion of a society all served on the side of the controllers of capital as means to continue the oppression of workers and therefore to create subjective states of suffering commensurate with alienation. The capitalistic state, according to this line of thinking, constructed institutions which justified, maintained and palliated the state of worker alienation. The antidote to this was the development among workers of a certain state of collective awareness and the development of the collective will to overthrow oppressors and the social institutions they had constructed. The culmination of this basically rational evolutionary process - working class revolution - would result in a new state of existence which would put an end to all forms of alienation - from self, from one’s body, from one’s fellows, from nature and the cosmos, from one’s work environment, from the objects one produced, from the institutions of society and so on. WESTERN MARXISM The historic events of the late nineteenth and early to mid-twentieth centuries suggested that a Marxist utopia was not about to come to pass. Most of the Western world remained basically capitalistic in terms of economic organisation (thanks to the welfare state compromise), and urban proletarian, middle class professional and entrepreneurial capitalist alike seemed to adapt to the consumeristic model of 20th century capitalism with few signs of serious complaint. Classical Marxist theorising found itself hard pressed to speak of oppression when even Western workers seemed ill-disposed to the Marxist cause. Worse where Marxist states were established alienation and oppression seemed to thrive. At the same time classical Marxism seemed unable to account for the new forms of subjective psychological suffering increasingly apparent in the Western world - forms of subjective suffering brought on by exposure to advanced industrial, social, cultural, scientific and economic (capitalistic and communistic) formations. In response to the perceived inadequacies of classical Marxism and the new social and cultural developments of the twentieth century Western Marxists attempted a thorough critique of both classical Marxist theory and that theory's critique of modernity. As a result new terms for subjective suffering - in particular ‘reification’, ‘objectification’, ‘colonisation of the lifeworld’ were born. These new terms tended to fuse classical Marxist insights with the insights of other critiques of modernity. Raymond Williams and Anthony Giddens (coming out of the British socialist tradition which included people like George Orwell and William Morris) merged Marxist insights with insights drawn from Romanticism and the organicist

tradition. Lukacs, Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas did the same for Marxism in regard to Weber’s ‘rationalisation’ thesis and in regard to other sociological theorising. Wilhelm Reich, Herbert Marcuse and Erich Fromm attempted to merge Marxism with Psychoanalysis, and Jean-Paul Sartre attempted to merge it with Existentialist/Phenomenological critiques of modernity. More recently, Feminists (Margaret Benston, Mariarosa Dalla Costa, Selma James and Alison Jaggar), structuralists (Baudrillard) and less often deconstructionists have tried to graft Marxism to these newer modes of analysis.(15) The classical Marxist belief that the symptoms of subjective suffering typical of ‘alienation’, are created by faults in the economic, social, and cultural institutions of capitalistic societies was reformulated to include a more up-to-date and subtle theory of oppression. In particular the concepts of ‘false consciousness’ and ‘reification’ were developed in order to link capitalistic oppression to a wide variety of other forms of oppression - including forms of oppression endemic to Marxist states.(16) In the process the classical Marxist emphasis on worker alienation was enlarged to include other forms of alienation brought about by the encroachment of the economic/productive and administrative sectors of society into other areas of the social structure. Lukacs, Adorno, Horkheimer and Habermas merged Marxism with Weber’s critique of certain trends in the development of occidental rationality.(17) In Habermas’ recent reworking of this theme a certain form of goal oriented reason appropriate to the productive and administrative spheres of a society (summarised perhaps by the terms ‘instrumental’ or ‘purposive’ reason ), is seen as the cause of certain states of normative alienation. He hypothesises that alienation and loss of meaning occurs when this instrumental or purposive means to an end reasoning oversteps its bounds of usefulness and begins to ‘colonise’ other spheres of social and cultural life (the lifeworld of subjects and the cultural world).(18) In the face of the ‘fragmentation’ and ‘colonisation’ of the lifeworld people increasingly come to see each other (and themselves) in ways appropriate only to the goal orientations of , for example, the productive or economic spheres of a society. People routinely become ‘objectified’ by this process of lifeworld ‘colonisation’ and various subjective pathologies begin to flourish. The role of culture (superstructure) in oppressing people was also reviewed by Western Marxists. Culture could promote states of mass ‘false consciousness’ in ways different to those envisaged by classical Marxists who believed that the central conflicts revolved around the alienating tendencies of capitalism. The illusion that the removal of factory floor alienation through changes to the economic and productive base of a society would end the alienation of mankind was gradually dropped by Western Marxists. If ‘reification’ was a state of mind, a way of seeing the world not confined to the capitalist, then changes to other aspects of the socio-cultural life support system also had to be considered.

The problem of technocratic thinking which has haunted the twentieth century - and is often associated with the passive helplessness felt by many Western people - was also not well accounted for by the classical Marxist scheme. There was the naive belief that ‘science’ and the application of the scientific method would necessarily play the role of ‘liberator’ on the way to the new socialist society that would occur after the revolution. The possible association of ‘science’ and ‘technology’ with alienated life, didn’t seem to occur to Marx. To him it was not technology that enslaved human life energies rather it was the people who, through the capitalist productive system, controlled technology. The Marxist confidence in scientific/technological evolution, and social rationalisation in general became an unwarranted confidence in psycho-social evolution, indeed part and parcel of it. Western Marxists became increasingly aware of the demonic side to science and technology. They began to see the mindset of the scientist or the technocrat as inherently ‘reified’. They criticised the process whereby the life energies of individuals could become objectified in demonic forms of technology. Though Marxism presents to the world the concept of ‘commodity fetishism’, its version of alienation nevertheless ignored some of the complexities of ‘consumption’ side alienation.(19) Consumerism (along with the compromise of the welfare state) proved to be one of the most potent weapons in the armoury of capitalism. The benefits it brought, however, seemed to alienate Western subjects (not merely production workers) from objects in ways quite different to those envisaged by classical Marxists. One did not need to be a worker to become addicted to consumerism, and more importantly consumerism itself was beginning to lead to serious environmental problems. Western Marxists thus sought to examine thoroughly the way in which consumerism functioned as an aspect of false consciousness - of alienated life. In the process they had to ask a question virtually unthinkable to classical Marxism but central to the ennui tradition since the Roman philosopher Lucretius - why should symptoms of alienation/chronic ennui increase with increased wealth? In attempting to answer this question Western Marxists unwittingly echoed the thoughts of a whole stream of ancient, Medieval and Early Modern writers who had linked chronic boredom and melancholy to 'luxuria'. The Marxists like the writers on ennui began to see alienation as a cycle of addiction to objects and activities which are soon discarded for other objects and other activities - in other words they were describing in Marxist terms the 'normative ennui cycle':

The culture industry perpetually cheats its consumers of what it perpetually promises. The promissory note which, with its plots and staging, it draws on pleasure is endlessly prolonged; the promise, which is actually all the spectacle consists of, is illusory: all it actually confirms is that the real point will never be reached, that the diner must be satisfied with the menu. In front of the appetite stimulated by all those brilliant names and images there is finally set no more than a commendation of the depressing everyday world it sought to escape. Of course works of art were no sexual

exhibitions either. However, by presenting deprivation as negative, they retracted, as it were, the prostitution of the impulse and rescued by mediation what was denied. the secret of aesthetic sublimation is its representation of fulfilment as a broken promise. The culture industry does not sublimate; it represses.(20)

The Classical Marxist conception of high culture, particularly the arts and religion, was recognised as woefully inadequate by many Western Marxists. These inadequacies arose partly due to the fact that Marxism was a social philosophy which wanted to become a science of humankind (and thus prized analytic, prosaic discourses above non-rational artistic and religious ones), and, partly due to a certain sensibility in Marx himself. The Marxist approach amounted to an inability to see the critical tradition in ‘high culture’ and more dangerously an inability to understand the function of art and spirituality in maintaining cultural balance and the psychospiritual integrity of subjects. Once a more general conception of alienation was developed it became possible for Western Marxists to adopt a more generous attitude toward ‘dis-alienating’, ‘anti-reificatory’ or ‘transgressive’ aspects of the Western tradition. Artists, even ones writing from within middle or upper class traditions, could be praised for their attempts to deconstruct socio-cultural tendencies toward dehumanisation (especially in the areas where instrumental or purposive thinking overstepped its bounds). Many Western Marxists were unhappy with classical Marxist conceptions of subjectivity - they critiqued the naivety of its materialist/evolutionary, philosophy of the subject seeing it as reductionist and outdated. To correct these problems many argued that Marxist alienation theory implied the reality of the psychological concept of repression (‘introjection’ as Marcuse called it) - even if only because the dialectical process assumes the hiddenness of certain forms of healthy awareness. Others came to the same conclusion by way of a study of the special conditions of twentieth century life - i.e. the peculiar attraction of the consumer object; the unhappy passivity of the masses. The idea of ‘false consciousness’ was developed to fill this perceived gap in earlier Marxist theorising on subjectivity. Herbert Marcuse merged Marxism and sociology with Freudian repression theory to describe the unaware state of being he saw as endemic among those living under capitalism:

‘Introjection’ suggests a variety of relatively spontaneous processes by which a Self (Ego) transposes the ‘outer’ into the ‘inner’. Thus introjection implies the existence of an inner dimension distinguished from and even antagonistic to the external exigencies - an individual consciousness and an individual unconscious apart from public opinion and behaviour. ... Today this private space has been invaded and whittled down by technological reality. Mass production and mass distribution claim the entire individual ... The manifold processes of introjection seem to be ossified in almost mechanical reactions.. the result is, not adjustment but mimesis: an immediate identification of the individual with his/her society

and, through it, with society as a whole. ... This immediate, automatic identification reappears in high industrial society; its new ‘immediacy’, however, is the product of a sophisticated, scientific management and organisation. In this process, the inner dimension of the mind in which opposition to the status quo can take root is whittled away ... I have suggested that the concept of alienation seems to become questionable when the individuals identify themselves with the existence which is imposed upon them and have in it their own development and satisfaction. This identification is not illusion but reality. However, the reality constitutes a more progressive stage of alienation. The latter has become entirely objective; the subject which is alienated is swallowed up by its alienated existence. ... [in the advanced industrial societies] the productive apparatus and the goods and services which it ‘produces’ sell or impose the social system as a whole. the means of Mass transportation or communication, the commodities of lodging, food or clothing, the irresistible output of the entertainment or information industries carry with them prescribed attitudes and habits, certain intellectual and emotional reactions which bind the consumers more or less pleasantly to the producers, and through the latter to the whole. The products indoctrinate and manipulate; they promote a ‘false consciousness’ which is immune against its falsehood.(21)

In Eros and Civilisation Marcuse reworked Freudian ideas concerning the supposed perpetual conflict between the ‘reality principle’ (necessity) and the ‘pleasure principle’ (instinctual desire). To him, the Freudian theory of repression both reveals and obscures the origins of subjective alienation. He argued that some of psychoanalysis’ key tenets - i.e. the ‘death instinct’, the ‘reality principle’, the ‘pleasure principle’ and the unconscious - are not static biologically conditioned aspects of subjective existence, rather they are dependent upon the specific sociocultural conditions prevalent at any particular point in time. He introduced the terms ‘surplus repression’ and ‘the performance principle’ in order to describe this historically conditioned side to the ‘reality principle’ and thus opened the way for a critique of social and cultural institutions on the grounds of the degree to which they set themselves against the gratification of the pleasure principle. What emerged was a theory of repression (and the unconscious) which made use of sociological concepts like ‘oppression’ and ‘dominance’. To convert Marcuse’s argument into the terminology of chronic ennui we may suggest that post-Enlightenment forms of normative ennui (as forms of false consciousness, alienation or reification) come about through peoples exposure to specific historically conditioned socio-cultural institutions, cultural codes etc. which privilege the ‘performance principle’ (a Marxist version of the ‘reality principle’) over the ‘pleasure principle’. This results in a degree of socially instituted trauma which is anaesthetised by cultural mores - in particular the consumer ethic and ‘mass entertainment’. Consumption is thus allied to stages two and three of the normative ennui cycle i.e. it may be seen as malign ritual

and malign transcendence. From this perspective, the ennui cycle itself originates in the traumas associated with the tyranny of the work related ‘performance principle’ over other aspects of a person’s life which require subservience to the pleasure principle - in particular sexuality, creativity, friendship, subjective (rather than institutionalised) perceptions of time, leisure etc. Whilst Marcuse retains a certain Marxist emphasis on alienated work the causes of that alienation have shifted considerably from the classical Marxist formulation, likewise the emphasis on alienated leisure time make ‘consumerism’ and the ‘mass entertainment industry’ into the new ‘opiates of the people’:

Under the rule of the performance principle, body and mind are made into instruments of alienated labour; they can function as such instruments only if they renounce the freedom of the libidinal subject-object which the human organism primarily is and desires. The distribution of time plays a fundamental role in this transformation. Man exists only part-time, during the working days, as an instrument of alienated performance; the rest of the time he has free for himself. ... This free time would be potentially available for pleasure. But the pleasure principle which governs the id is ‘timeless’ also in the sense that it mitigates against the temporal dismemberment of pleasure, against its distribution in small separated doses. ... the organism must be trained for its alienation at its very roots. It must learn to forget the claim for timeless and useless gratification, for the ‘eternity of pleasure’. Moreover, from the working day alienation and regimentation spread into free time.(22)

Since the chronically alienated worker is in a state of introjected agony and unawareness, his or her leisure time can only be filled with essentially meaningless diversions, as a result people become addicted to consumer gadgets and to what Marcuse calls the ‘mass entertainment industry.’(23) Life swings back and forth between addictive unfulfilling activity and the pain of alienated work regimes which deny basic psychological and social needs in the name of necessity: ‘.. labour time, which is the largest part of an individual’s life time, is painful time, for alienated labour is absence of gratification, negation of the pleasure principle.’(24) The false highs offered by consumerism and other opiate institutions hide an ethic of repression and oppression - normative alienation prevails. What is the exact process by which the modern worker is traumatised and thus develops symptoms of chronic ennui? Western Marxists emphasise the clash between subjective time rhythms and institutional time rhythms and thus offer us a novel reading of one of the central symptoms of chronic ennui - that of taedium vitae. The loss of eternal time, becomes, in the Western Marxist scheme, the traumatic domination of institutional time over the time rhythms of the worker - this is at the very centre of the worker’s pain. This imposition is necessarily oppressive since it implies some constraint over the subject’s emotional needs and bodily needs.

Summary: Chronic Boredom and Alienation as Manifestations of Disturbances to Subjective Perceptions of Time From the perspective of the problem of chronic ennui the following criticisms hold for both Marxists and Western Marxists: - Marxist historicism attempted to totalise all human history - in so doing it attempted to explain that history in terms of Marxist theory. In the process Marx presumed to summarise the aspirations and struggles of billions of individuals stretching back thousands of years in time via resort to one theory. Such an approach necessarily simplified and distorted the phenomenon of subjective suffering as it actually manifested historically. Western Marxists like Habermas tend toward a similar project - the process of the evolution of the ‘rationality problematic’ tends to dominate the way the Western Marxist looks at history. - The Marxist and Western Marxist critiques of the religious sensibility are very limited (even Habermas exhibits tendencies toward a naive refutation of mythopoetic world views). The possibility that the rationalisation of social formations (purposive or otherwise) necessarily leads to greater subjective alienation (and thus to the sense of meaninglessness central to ‘chronic ennui’) is never honestly canvassed. The idea that Western societies have progressed beyond the ‘metaphysical’ world view (and thus that such societies are superior to societies still stuck with mythopoetic world views) is implicit to much Marxist and Western Marxist thinking. The fact that many metaphysically oriented cultures do not suffer from states of mass alienation as we do, does not lead Marxists or Western Marxists to review various forms of religion on the grounds that they may be a central aspect to subjective psychosocial health. Rather, it is assumed that alienation and chronic ennui arises from temporary glitches in the evolutionary process which will be removed once the more highly evolved forms of rationality are stabilised. Thus despite the novel ways in which many Western Marxists have criticised sociocultural institutions for the way in which they alienate people, Marxists and Western Marxists routinely limit and scientise the various aspects of subjective emotional life. In the process they often strip emotional life of its diversity, its wonder and its more positive psychospiritual aspects. - There is a sacrificial, scapegoating streak to classical Marxist theorising which ultimately leads to the institutionalisation of some of the most inhuman aspects of the ‘ennui cycle’. This scapegoating tendency is neither condemned nor accounted for in the Marxist scheme of things, indeed in certain respects it is encouraged. Though this has been corrected to some extent by the social-democratic political stances of many Western Marxists (it is embodied as an ideal in Habermas’ idea of ‘communicative action’) nevertheless the privileging of rational modes of thinking over creative and spiritual forms may in itself lead to a disenchantment of subjective consciousness, which, if normalised (as it is in

many Western nations), may unwittingly contribute to the general socio-cultural store of spleen which as we have seen always contains a sacrificial scapegoating component. Given these critiques, where might we look to extend upon Marxist and Western Marxist theorising on alienation, reification and false consciousness for possible cures for the virulent, and obviously widespread, maladies of the subject associated with the chronic ennui cycle? In the original Marxist situation a particular subject tries to fulfil particular needs (for food, clothing etc.) by allowing his or her activities to be converted into abstract quantitative money values for certain lengths of time, the person then purchases products, services etc. with the monetary fruits of his or her labour. The work environment and the objects produced, being focal points for social interactions and power relations, easily become focal points for certain forms of subjective alienation at the hands of oppressive social forces. Western Marxists extend the insight. They suggest that much modern work is based upon the unhealthy habit of converting people’s life energies into abstract quantities owned and regulated by people and forces alien to the worker - institutions, market forces etc. The average worker’s life becomes devoid of the qualitative characteristics which make it meaningful and fulfilling. In particular the imposition of alien time rhythms on the worker/subject is emphasised. Lukacs suggested that the worker’s experience of time becomes ‘spatialised’, meaning that it is tuned to the time rhythms of the employer. The worker - body and soul - is forced to view time in terms of doing set things for others over set periods of time. Since this alienation of subjective being at the hands of abstraction and spatialisation is often necessary for millions of people if they are to get basic material survival needs met many workers are forced to make a choice between their psychological wellbeing and the satisfaction of basic material needs. We may ask: when the worker chooses alienation, where do the unmet psychospiritual needs go to? To begin with there may be anger at the oppressive actions of other human beings (the worker’s immediate bosses and employers) who are, in turn, understood to be connected to an entire system of rules, laws, codes and so on (the ‘oppressive society’). However, the expression of this anger would inevitably lead to the stress of unemployment. The person must, therefore, repress this anger and perhaps also the conscious awareness that other needs, qualitative needs, even exist (the ultimate example of this is the alienated workaholic). The result is the satisfaction of basic material needs but, quite possibly, a build up of repressed anger, hatred, sadness etc. which may manifest elsewhere - in the form self estrangement; psychosomatic illnesses; domestic conflict; alienated sexuality; or socially, in the form of intolerant attitudes (scapegoating) toward minority groups. Chronic ennui may result when employees are encouraged to see workers as one dimensional objects or quantities (abstract numbers on a balance sheet) to

be used to bring about certain limited ends e.g. high productivity/low cost per unit. We may propose, however, that worker alienation illustrates a general principle central to most manifestations of chronic ennui. Chronic ennui may develop wherever a person is dependent upon others, or upon the environment in general for the satisfaction of various subjective needs which can only be met by the sacrificing of other needs. From this perspective worker alienation could be understood as but one form of a more general phenomenon. It can be argued that it has much in common with other forms of Axis 2 chronic ennui which are also related to historic or present oppressive external situations (i.e. circumstances where psychological needs went/go unmet in order to have other ones, or other material needs fulfilled). The chronic ennui of the aristocrat [e.g. oppressed early in childhood by inhumane childrearing techniques designed to civilise him or her (critiqued by Rousseau & Freud)]; the chronic ennui of the bored housewife described so much in the fifties and sixties [torn between a social world that satisfied certain needs for material security at the cost of sacrificing others to do with social exploration, independence etc. (critiqued by Feminism)]; the chronic ennui of the unemployed youth (examined by Sociologists); the chronic ennui of the bureaucrat - caught in an iron cage of material fulfilment, social status etc. at the same time as he or she is forced to sacrifice personal needs for meaningful work activity and personal perceptions of time [critiqued by Max Weber] ), may be similar to the chronic ennui experienced by workers working under oppressive conditions. What, then, do Marxism and Western Marxism have to contribute to a discussion of chronic ennui? Clearly at the symptom level their descriptions of alienation (as the end result of capitalism, false consciousness, and reification) have much in common with descriptions of the ennui cycle. The basic components of the alienated cycles of consciousness are often similar to the basic components of the ennui cycle. It can be concluded that Marxism and Western Marxism seem to provide us with useful descriptions of the disease as it manifests in certain spheres of sociocultural life. Their prescriptions for bringing about states of non-alienated and non-reified existence are, however, suspect (often to the point of nurturing the ennui cycle in individuals and groups) - this is perhaps due to the fact that they are based upon Enlightenment philosophies now implicated in the general ‘crisis of the subject’ unfolding in our age. NOTES 1. For useful summaries and overviews of the interrelations between these three terms and others the reader is referred to Richard Schacht, Alienation (1971); Bernard Murchland, The Age of Alienation (1971), and Ignace Feuerlicht, Alienation: From the Past to the Future 1978. See also P.L. Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s comments in The Social Construction of Reality, p. 225: In the Marxian frame of reference the concept of reification is closely related to that of alienation (Entfremdung). The latter concept has been confused in recent sociological writing with phenomena ranging from anomie to neurosis, almost beyond the point of terminological retrieval. 2. There is, however, the suggestion of a link between the estrangement experienced by workers

as oppressed and the alienation experienced by controllers of capital. One wonders whether the upper class symptoms of alienation that Marx had in mind may have been close to those we associate with aristocratic ennui as thematised in the bourgeois literature of the early part of that century. Unfortunately any such conclusion could only be guesswork. What Marx really thought about about non-worker alienation is condemned to oblivion but for these few comments just before the transcript on alienated labour broke off, he says: Firstly, it must be noted that everything which for the worker becomes an alienated activity, for the non-worker becomes and alienated state of mind. Secondly, what for the worker is a highly practical attitude towards production and the product of labor becomes for the non-worker a mere theoretical attitude. Thirdly, the non-worker does everything against the worker which the latter does against himself, but the non-worker does not do against himself what he does against the worker. 3. See, Marx, Karl, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: ‘Alienated Labour’, ‘Private Property and Communism’, ‘Critique of Hegelian Dialectic and Philosophy in General’, ‘Phenomenology’, in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society; Fritz Pappenheim The Alienation of Modern Man: an Interpretation based on Marx and Tonnies, Monthly Review Press, third printing (1966); Istvan Meszaros, Marx’s Theory of Alienation (1982); Betrell Ollman Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man in Capitalist Society (1977); Isidor Walliman, Estrangement: Marx’s Conception of Human Nature and the Division of Labour (1981), and Plamenatz Karl Marx's Philosophy of Man, Part 1. Chapts. 4, ‘Alienation (1)’; 5, ‘Alienation (2)’; 6, ‘The Causes of Alienation’; and Part 2 ‘The Forms of Alienated Life.’ Clarendon Press Oxford, (1975). See also Lewis Mumford’s ‘The Mechanical Routine’p.114-122 of Man Alone, ed. Eric and Mary Joshephson. 4. In particular I have concentrated on Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation and One Dimensional Man; Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment; Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity; Jurgen Habermas The Theory of Communicative Action Vol I & II. See also useful overviews of the Western Marxist concept of reification in Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman’s The Social Construction of Reality; Joseph Gabel False Consciousness: An Essay on Reification and Burke C. Thomason, Making Sense of Reification. 5. As with definitions of chronic ennui, the various Marxist definitions of terms such as alienation and objectification tend to invite endless discusssion. Bertell Ollman, in his book Alienation: Marx’s Conception of Man In Capitalist Society (1977), is particularly good on the complexities of definition that lurk behind Marx’s theory of alienation, he details well Marx’s conception of a cure (in a word ‘communism’) and the problematics associated with that cure - see in particular Part Three ‘The Theory of Alienation’. Istvan Meszaros’ ‘Introduction’ to Marx’s Theory of Alienation (1982) also discusses the complexity of Marxist and Western Marxist interpretations of the young Marx’s so called Paris Manuscripts (1844); i.e. the essays in which he worked out his theory of alienation. 6. Marx, ‘Alienated Labour’, in Writings of the Young Marx, (p.289). See further comments on the same problem (Karl Marx, 'Alienated Labor', in Man Alone, pg. 96.): ... 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. It is the same with religion. The more man puts into God, the less he retains in himself. The worker puts his life into the things he makes; and his life then belongs to him no more, but to the product of his labor ... The alienation of the worker from his product means not only that his labor becomes an impersonal object and takes on its own existence, but that it exists outside himelf, independantly, and alien to him, and that it opposes itself to him as an autonomous power. The life which he has conferred on the object confronts him in the end as a hostile and alien force.

7. Karl Marx, 'Alienated Labor', in Man Alone, pg. 97-8. See also additional comments on the same theme: How could the worker stand in an alien relationship to the product of his activity if he were not alienated in the very act of production? The product after all is but the resume of his activity, of production. Hence if the product of labor is alienation, production itself must be active alienation - the alienation of activity, the activity of alienation. [Karl Marx, 'Alienated Labor', in Man Alone, pg. 97.] 8. Karl Marx, Grundrisse pg 452. 9. Karl Marx, pg. 72 Das Capital . 10. Karl Marx, 'Alienated Labor', in Man Alone, pg. 102. 11. Karl Marx, 'Alienated Labor', in Man Alone, pg. 96. 12. Karl Marx, 'Alienated Labor', in Man Alone, pg. 99. 13. Karl Marx, 'Alienated Labor', in Man Alone, pg. 101 On the same theme, Marx also says: In general, the statement that man is alienated from the larger life of his species means that men are alienated from each other and from human nature. Man's self-estrangement - and indeed all his attitudes to himself - first finds expression in his relationship to other men. Thus in the relationship of alienated labor each man's view of his fellows is determined by the narrow standards and activities of the work place. [Karl Marx, 'Alienated Labor', in Man Alone, pg. 101.] 14. See Garson (1975, p. 211). See also Mumford’s essay 'The Mechanical Routine' (1975, p.114) which carries the analysis of worker alienation into the high industrial era: The first characteristic of modern machine civilisation is its temporal regularity. From the moment of waking the rhythm of the day is punctuated by the clock. Irrespective of strain or fatigue, despite reluctance or apathy, the household rises close to its set hour ...[ ] ... As the scale of industrial organization grows, the punctuality and regularity of the mechanical regime tend to increase with it: the time clock enters automatically to regulate the entrance and exit of the worker, while an irregular worker - tempted by the trout in spring streams or ducks on salt meadows - finds that these impulses are as unfavourably treated as habitual drunkenness: if he would retain them he would remain attached to the less routinized provinces of agriculture. ...[ ] ... Under capitalism time-keeping is not merely a means of co-ordinating and interrelating complicated functions: it is also like money an independant commodity with a value of its own. The issue of the flattening and regulation of time has particular relevance to the issue of chronic boredom however, especially if we apply something like a psychoanlytic model to the situation. Mumford (pg. 115) comes close in the following passage: While regularity in certain physical functions, like eating and eliminating, may in fact assist in maintaining health, in other matters, like play, sexual intercourse, and other forms of recreation the strength of the impulse itself is pulsating rather than evenly recurrent: here habits fostered by the clock or the calendar may lead to dullness and decay. 15. There is no room here to go into a full description of the similarities between the concepts of subjective psychological suffering emerging from such cross fertilisations and the concepts of chronic ennui and socio-cultural ennui - that task would take a full length book in its own right. 16. Such is the general tack of Berger and Luckmann whose concept of reification can be applied to a wide variety of social and cultural instututions and situations unrelated even to Capitalism:

Both the institutional order as a whole and segments of it may be apprehended in reified terms. For example, the entire order of society may be concieved of as of a microcosm reflecting the macrocosm of the total universe as made by the gods . Whatever happens ‘here below’ is but a pale reflection of what takes place ‘up above’. Particular institutions may be apprehended in similar ways. The basic recipe for the reification of institutions is to bestow on them an ontological status independant of human activity and signification.’ [P.L.Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality, p.107-8.] 17. A typical modern definition of ‘reification’, ‘false consciousness’ or ‘objectification’ opens up new vistas of subjective alienation unenvisaged by the classical Marxist: Reification: This term refers to the process by which the products of the subjective action of human beings come to appear as objective, and so autonomous from humanity. However, two broad uses of the term may be identified. In the Marxist tradition the term is used critically, to describe a process that is specific to capitalism, and that serves to maintain the inequalities of a capitalist society by concealing actual processes of exploitation. In the non-Marxist tradition, and especially in phenomenological approaches, reification is presented as an inevitable feature of all societies, as part of the social construction of reality. ... Within Marxism, the term ‘reification’ occurs as the standard English translation of the German Verdinglichung which was introduced by Gyorgy Lukacs (1923, pp. 83-222) and does not occur in Marx’s writings. Lukac’s theory of reification is a generalisation of Marx’s theory of commodity fetishism. ... Lukacs attempts to extend Marx’s economic analysis to the total life of society. He does this through reference to Weber’s analysis of the growth of rationality. Instrumental rationality is integral to the development of the capitalist economy and further reflects the process of commodity exchange, in so far as it facilitates the equating of different objects. For Lukacs, this equation works only by emphasising the quantitative characteristics of the object at the expense of the qualitative. Lukacs suggests that these qualitative aspects are the uniquely human properties of the object, and hence are systematically concealed by reification.... While reification has been referred to widely in Marxist writing, the theory has been developed most precisely by Theodore Adorno. Reification becomes a theory of the social determination of language and thinking. This emphasises the relationship between concepts and the objects to which they refer. In so far as concepts are products of social processes, they cannot be presupposed to correspond wholly to the objects. Under reification, concepts serve either to impute properties to the object that are absent , or to conceal and distort existing properties, so that they appear objective rather than subjective. (Adorno 1966) [Blackwell Dictionary of 20th century Social Thought, 1993.] 18. Perhaps Habermas’ most definitive statement on, and cure for, this process is to be found in his The Theory of Communicative Action, Vol I & II. Polity Press, Cambridge, 1992. 19. Feminists have pointed to an assumed ‘feminine’ side to the consumption process in modern societies - an insight not developed by classical Marxism. For women in particular consumer objects are seen as part of the ‘site’ of symptom production due to repression i.e. by the patriarchal system. This is the case regardless of class and in a way not directly attributable to the ‘productive process’ alone. Feminists see the passivity afforded women by Marxist privileging of the ‘production process’ over the ‘consumption one’ one as demeaning. To them it is as though women cannot suffer from alienation in their own right, but only through the (work) activities of their menfolk. This point unites with the general Marxist assumption that productive processes determine the alienating process. 20. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, The Dialectics of Enlightenment, essay ‘The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception’ p139-40. 21. Herbert Marcuse, One Dimensional Man, p.25-26. 22. Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation, p.48-49.

23. Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation, p.49. 24. Marcuse, Eros and Civilisation,p.48. *'Notes Toward a General Theory of Alienation' copyright (c) Ian Irvine, 1999-2001, all rights reserved.

Author Bio

Dr. Ian Irvine is an Australian-based poet/lyricist, writer and non-fiction writer. His work has featured

in publications as diverse as Humanitas (USA), The Antigonish Review (Canada), Tears in the Fence

(UK), Linq (Australia) and Takahe (NZ), among many others. His work has also appeared in two

Australian national poetry anthologies: Best Australian Poems 2005 (Black Ink Books) and Agenda:

‘Australian Edition’, 2005 and one international anthology (Fire, UK, 2008). He is the author of three

books and currently teaches in the Professional Writing and Editing programs at BRIT (Bendigo,

Australia) and Victoria University (Melbourne). He has also taught history and social theory at La

Trobe University (Bendigo, Australia) and holds a PhD for his work on creative, normative and

dysfunctional forms of alienation and morbid ennui.