Alienation

**Alienation** is a term that refers to the phenomenon of a person being distanced or removed from something or someone, voluntarily or not, and often refers to the relationship between consumer and object. It can explain other things as well, such as the belief in religion as an illusion.

=Summary=

Alienation has many different interpretations. One is a sense of being isolated and cut off from important matters such as people, things or labor. It can manifest itself as loneliness, depression, rejection, anxiety, and/or feelings of insignificance. It could also mean an intentional retraction or forced separation of a person or people from their society, culture, political environment, and/or religious faith. The dictionary definition is, "withdrawing or separation of a person or his affections from an object or position of former attachment". Alienation can also include religion and the idea that it is an illusion to create happiness. Alienation can be caused by warfare, technology, social change, religion, or any number of other factors. Problems of alienation in 20th and 21st centuries in literature often stemmed from dissatisfaction with WWI, WWII, the Vietnam War, other wars, and the development of technology.

The theory of Alienation originated before the 20th century, however, and the theory gained particular attention after the works of Karl Marx.

=History and Major Theorists=

[[image:marx-bio.jpg width="219" height="305" align="left" caption="Karl Marx"]]Karl Marx
The notion of alienation first stemmed from the ideas of Karl Marx. Marx viewed alienation as a process by which a man is rewarded money for the result of his own work. Before there was mass production, a man worked to create what he needed. Because of mass production, a man could spend all day in a factory making the same thing over and over again, and furthermore a thing he probably cares nothing about or has no use for. Take for example a 30-year-old man who attaches arms on Barbie dolls all day: he does not use barbie dolls, he simply has his job to get money, which he uses to pay for the things he needs. Marx saw money as a significant factor in the creation of alienation. Instead of the product of work becoming the end and desired result of the work, the money becomes the desired end. Money becomes the middle man. Although Marx was primarily an economist, his theories on Capitalism and alienation began to be applied to art by literary critics such as Theodor W. Adorno and Atonio Gramsci, among many others. Adorno used Marxist principles to reveal Capitalism's affect on art. He believed that in many cases technology was an alienating factor in art, taking the viewer further away from reality by presenting an alternate reality, where hegemonic ideas reign supreme.

Theodor Adorno
 Theodor Adorno was one of the most prominent philosophers of the twentieth century. His main concern was the human condition, particularly in how society affects human life. His ideas were influenced by Hegel, Nietzsche, and Marx. Adorno wanted to overthrow capitalism and was concerned with promoting socialism. He created a critical theory which states that oppression is created through materialism, economics, culture, and politics. Adorno thoroughly believed that oppression is kept in the mind by each person's consciousness. He believed that people can never be free of the programming of the workplace and the media.

Émile Durkheim
 In 1858, É mile Durkheim was born i n France. Durkheim went on to study religion from an agnostic point of view which led to him changing his study from religion to sociology . É mile Durkheim established his own alienation theory dubbed "anomie," a concept of deregulation in which individuals of a given society lose all relation and understanding of one another, and thus become alienated. Durkheim defines two different social environments: a nonspecific and flexible mechanical society, and an extremely complex and static organic society. Mechanical societies usually have the same goals and objectives, so individuals in this society can easily relate and understand each other. On the other hand, an organic society has many objectives and goals, so work becomes so specialized and complex that individuals become lost to each other and become alienated. Thus, anomie occurs and people cannot connect to their society's wants and needs anymore, and cannot find their place in the grand scheme of things. This would eventually lead to a massive breakdown of society .

Melvin Seeman
 Melvin Seeman believed that alienation has been a theme among society throughout time. Seeman believed in five varieties of alienation: powerlessness, formlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, and self-estrangement.

=Psychoanalytic View on Alienation =

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Alienation is the essence of the problem to be addressed in psychoanalytic theories (or those related to them). It is the problem of uniting with one's essence which Freud discovered in formulating his dialectic approach to psychiatry. From infancy and throughout earliest childhood development, we are all alienated from our impulsive drives in the socialization process, which is wholly contingent upon language. As people go through the stages of development, they learn to express their unconscious impulses through ego defenses. These defenses either suppress those impulses, or they are redirected into activity that be helpful or harmful, socially acceptable or unacceptable. Psychoanalysts seek to give people the power to reunite the alienated self by finding means to satisfy unconscious desires in ways that are socially acceptable.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Sigmund Freud
<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Alienation stems from individuals with an unresolved Oedipal or Electra Complex, which can be satisfied through sublimation or our unconscious (Id) desires into expressions acceptable to our ego- unconsciousness. Treatments include interpretation, automatic writing, and psychoanalysis (couch therapy). It is often associated with several movements and persons, most notably surrealists.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Carl Jung
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Alienation is an inborn p <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">art of the human condition that can only be mastered through the lifelong process of individuation, which is uniting the archetypes of the collective unconscious. Treatments include meditation, dream interpretation, and art therapy. it is often associated with Jackson Pollock who underwent two years of Jungian psychotherapy.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Jacques Lacan
<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Alienation begins with self-recognition during the "mirror stage" in infancy and it follows us more or less, depending on our success in exercising sexual and aggressive impulses. Treatments include more of a theoretician involved in surrealism and structural linguistics. It is often associated with Surrealism, the Paris art scene.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> For more information, visit Psychoanalytic Developments.

=<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Writers and Works Associated =

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Both Marinetti and Stein worked towards a style either influenced by alienation or moved towards alienation. Their works are seen as beyond the traditional realm of poetry, something that seeks to alienate the readers from traditionally held values of rhythm and pattern. Such authors and works include Hugo Ball's "Karawane," F. T. Marinetti's //Futurist Manifesto//, Gertrude Stein's //Tender Buttons//, Lorine Niedecker's "Lake Superior," George Oppen's "Discrete Series," and Robert Creeley's "America." <span style="background-color: #20bebe; color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Hugo Ball
<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> In Ball's "Karawane," he addresses alienation through his use of almost familiar non-words. Although it echoes to certain meanings (for example, "jolifanto" calls to mind elephants marching), the overall effect of the poem is one of confusion. Ball uses sounds that are familiar in his native German, but they are not words.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> To some, the poem sounds violent and forceful, to others, the sounds are familiar and comforting. It could be elephants marching, the sounds of war, or the incomprehensible jumble of a crowded street in Germany.

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> The poem alienates the reader because they don't understand what it's trying to say. By presenting a poem composed of non-words Ball defies the expectation of the reader. The reader expects to be presented with a poem composed of words with referential meaning. Even if they cannot interpret the poem's meaning, at least they can understand its individual words. By writing a poem that cannot be interpreted in a traditional sense, the reader must find other ways to gain meaning from the work. This concept of presenting multiple possible meanings, but not allowing the reader to settle on just one is called indeterminacy.

<span style="color: #ef2e2d; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif; font-size: 16px;">

<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">F.T. Marinetti
<span style="color: #000000; font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> This excerpt from Marinetti's //Futurist Manifesto// takes creative violence and indeterminacy to a whole new level. This word picture, in some ways resembling a car crash, in other ways resembling a battlefield, or any other number of things. It takes words and letters out of their original context and throws them into a confused jumble on the page. Marinetti's goal with all of his Futurists works was to alienate language and the reader. He sought to essentially destroy the concept of art, poetry, and syntax in an attempt to get beyond "traditional" poetry.

Lorine Neidecker
<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Her early work was most influenced by [|Imagist] and Objectivist poets including Ezra Pound and [|Louis Zukofsky]. Zukofsky was a mentor to Niedecker and a lifelong correspondent and friend. Niedecker wrote most often about her home on Blackhawk Island, her neighbors and family, history, and the local flora and fauna. In 1968, she published North Central, which is full of intense imagagery. Because of her often austere, vivid imagery, and spare language, many critics and readers have pointed to Niedecker's affinities with writers such as William Carlos Williams as well as with early Chinese and Japanese poets. She described her poetry as a "condensery". Although much of her work was overlooked during her lifetime, three volumes of poetry have been published since her death: //Blue Chicory// (1976), //From This Condensery: The Complete Writings of Lorine Niedecker// (1985), and T//he Granite Pail: The Selected Poems of Lorine Niedecker// (1985).

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> <span style="color: #000000; font-family: 'Times New Roman',serif; font-size: 16px;"> media type="youtube" key="4mPvLmMtvAw" width="296" height="245" align="left" <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> In this video, from the second annual Poets Forum in November 2008, Lyn Hejinian discusses the role of alienation in poetry. For her, a balance must be maintained between feeling out of place and in place. It is in this oscillation between comfort and discomfort where good poetry lies; It makes sense and in the very same moment it confuses.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> "I'm very interested in the absolute, radical unsettling of places that a poem can exemplify. I'm interested in maximal heterogeneity and unassimilability. I very much like what [|Victor [Hernández Cruz]] said about feeling foreign and out of place when in place. To some degree, I feel that anyone that feels in place can only do it properly by being out of place—and keeping those two in juxtaposition.

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> In any case, the point or the place that I would want to point to as absolute interiority of a work of writing is what [|Andre Breton] called the //point sublime//, which is the point of encounter in which unlike things encounter each other and create an extraordinary, albeit usually a very momentary place within a work—if that makes any sense. And I think you hear it in the [|Stein], in those copulas that she puts of:

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> [|"an elephant and a strict occasion,"]

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> and if you linger on that juxtaposition, there is a moment in which an elephant and a strict occasion are absolutely in place together, logically. And then the logic explodes." - Hejinian from video to the left.

=External Links=

<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">Futurist Manifesto <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> George Oppen's Discrete Series <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Karawane Audio <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Lorine Niedecker's Untitiled Poetry <span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;"> Robert Creeley's America

=<span style="font-family: Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;">References =

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