Overcoming Alienation:

It is very easy to isolate oneself at this time and avoid necessary issues that affect all walks of life. From population boom to global warming, from economics to stagnant politics due to corporate fear of a healthy evolution without the need of capitalism, we are in a roadblock in society and coming to terms with what is actually happening in the world, not just in the United States, but everywhere that has now been extended into the postmodern world is mentally challenging. Alienation is a way in which individuals avoid involvement, and it is a means in which the power structure eases the opposition, leaving power strong and individuals lost in a sense of hopeless cynicism. Alienation is a distraction, which is avoidable through practice.

Quite often to avoid the outside world, people resort to technology, and technology is getting more and more sophisticated to keep people isolated. Though many individuals listen on their headphones, iphones, cellphones, and more for distractions or they watch the same shows on television or cinema, this bond between us is still rather superficial because we are still alienated from our true expression. It is a secondhand experience. The secondhand experience of watching on a screen or listening to a recording rather than in real life activation, only gives partial fulfillments. We have grown to like our solitary solution.

We may be unaware that this form of alienation still has the element of technology from a corporate source dictating to your subconscious that these are one’s only choices.  Our choices are being limited through the technology that we use to escape. Prior to the 20^th Century two significant figures come to mind who had dealt with alienation in quite different ways: Walt Whitman and Karl Marx. Rarely today do we see such figures with presence, physically with their thick bulging beards, and mentally with their reflections on life.

In Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, there is a famous section noting “Twenty-eight young men bathe by the shore,” and while 28 men bathe joyfully beside the shore one-woman alone way in the distance cannot join them. She emotionally yearns to join them. She even visually in her imagination places herself in the crowd of men actively bathing. She wants to join them but is limited. Her social role, her location, and her own mind limit her from running to join the group. She could have defied all limits and faced the backlash, but she could not take the leap in the same way that Rosa Parks in the 20^th Century refused to go to the back of the bus.

For Walt Whitman poetry was a means for individuals to overcome their isolation and share with their common neighbors the emotions and yearnings that they think only they can understand and no one else. Yet the bonding power of poetic theory is revolutionary in the sense that reading out loud one’s internal voice shares the resemblances that we have in common, which we would not know we have in common, if we do not share our voice. Limiting one’s listening through technology creates a one-way transmission: television, radio, etc. However, reading aloud or talking out in a group setting allows multiple transmissions.      

Karl Marx was aware of the limits of the industrial capitalist society, where the bottom line for society is production and profit. In such a limited bottom-line dimension, humanities and human rights are only luxuries for those who can afford it. In a Capitalist society, there will always be the haves and the have-nots. In Whitman’s poem, the have-not is the woman, who is watching the men from the shore. In reflection those countries where capitalism is the most extreme and most demanding, individuals are the most alienated from their fellow men.  Alienation is the leftover parts of man that the production mechanism of society cannot fully profit from.

In the 20^th Century, Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze’s work expanded on where society has evolved since Marx’s knowledge of alienation began. They note in their work, particularly in Anti-Oedipus, that capitalism controls people in three significant ways, through 1) politics, 2) economics, and 3) subjective control. In regards to politics and economics, the corporate elite controls who has the political power and who controls the movement of money. The third notion is the very fact that our Subjectivity can be controlled through how we learn to see ourselves. Far too often today in the 21^st Century, we reflect on our personality through the clothes we buy, the brand names we consume, and the music and movie label we akin to.  Associating yourself with such means of capitalist control, whether we are conscious or unaware of the matter, we are still being controlled through dictation. “I’m a PC, or I’m a Mac, or I am a Pepper (Dr. Pepper)” can still leave us highly alienated from other aspects of human potential.

In a parallel reflection to Guittari and Deleuze, bringing in Marx and Whitman’s sense of alienation where poetics and revolutionary theory mesh together, Herbert Marcuse characterizes how individuals have been limited through the current social contract; “Individual’s awareness of the prevailing repression is blunted by the manipulated restriction of his consciousness. This process alters the contents of happiness. … With the control of information, knowledge is administered and confined. The Individual does not really know what is going on; the overpowering machine of education and entertainment unites him with all others in a state of anesthesia” (Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization)

This joint ‘state of anesthesia’ is what we see today in a generalized apathy towards politics, the mass acceptance of consumption to the point of degrading the environment and degrading our own bodies, and we are not using our senses to protect ourselves anymore. We are not using our eyes or our ears to really see and hear what is happening, and when we do see it or hear it, we accept the hopelessness around because we have been restricted consciously of our options, as Marcuse has said, through our education and our entertainment outlets. We become cynical and alienated masses that have been passively lead into a great hole. The corporate elite wants you to retreat, like the woman on the beach in Whitman’s poem, and just fantasize about escape and true happiness, rather than embrace a higher sense of reality. You tend to be limited in options if you cannot afford to pay for material luxuries. But the material escape, the financial escape, is only a part of the anesthesia process. Real happiness is beyond this alienation and confined limitation imposed on us.     

Julia Kristeva calls this learned sense of helplessness and hopelessness as the ‘maladies of the soul’. This symbolic castration of our intellect and our social means of communicating within groups to overcome our alienation requires hard questioning of the world as we perceive it. In parallel, Lyn Hejinian, uses poetics to alter our perception, in her book The Language of Inquiry, she notices, “When the term realism is applied to poetry, it is apt to upset our sense of reality. But exactly the strangeness that results from a description of the world given in the terms ‘there it is’, ‘there it is’, ‘there it is’ that restores the realness to things in the world and separates things from ideology” (Hejinian). An evolving poetics is also a poetics of scrutiny, and we must not only speak out to those in power, but have the ability to scrutinize these false ideological controls in our life that make ill-logical sense. For example, when we look at money, we say “is this just paper; is it really more important than the blood I bleed to earn it, spend it, and consume it?”  

Using poetic inquiry like Lyn Hejinain or Walt Whitman is one solutionary step to take. Using philosophical questioning like Julia Kristeva and Karl Marx is a similar yet different solutionary approach. Both solutionary approaches require using one’s eyes, ears, and critical thought. These steps bring us closer to a revolutionary process to move away from the stagnant alienation that we face in today’s world.  Speaking out loud and sharing your emotions and reading poetry, letters, singing, or dialoguing breaks up the monologue our technology feeds us from its one-way transmission.

On a humanist psychological level, Carl Rogers brings a third solutionary step. He emphasizes in his On Becoming a Person, an individual must move towards a trust in one self, move towards an acceptance of others, accept the unpredictability of life, increase openness of experience, and take risks. Such movement away from defensive mechanism of isolation and movement towards the pole of openness, self-actualizing allows one to come closer to an inner self that has not falsely been determined through limits of fashion and the stage-directions picked up from camera and screen branding.

Today more than at any other time in history the tools that the corporate elite use to maintain control over the vast population locally and now globally are ever more complex with technology at their fingertips. However, that very same technology is at our fingertips as well, as we share our poetic, psychological, political, and philosophical insights. We have the tools imbedded in us to revolt, but we have to now sink deep inside our alienated consciousness and find them. We must continually ask hard questions, reflect on our observations in poetic and philosophical ways, and seek active ways to communicate with each other beyond the computer and beyond the shores.