Page 42 - The ISA Handbook in Contemporary Sociology

9781412934633-Chap-02 1/10/09 8:40 AM Page 13

ALIENATION: CRITIQUE AND ALTERNATIVE FUTURES 13

and individuals (see Berlet and Lyons, remains a significant aspect of late modern
1
2000). In popular culture, we note the rise of social life.
MTV, Music Television, a channel devoted to
the youth market consisting primarily of 1 Wages for labor in routinized services include
music videos, songs with a variety of visuals payment for demonstrations of emotion: While
manufacturing has declined in the developed
from street scenes to dancers, and there may
world, jobs today are often automated, comput-
well be a chorus dancing in the streets. The
erized, deskilled, and routinized. In interpersonal
basic content of MTV consists of unending
services, workers are exploited in new ways; they
spectacles of song, dance, and consumerism
are required to do ‘emotion work,’ commodifying
in which an artificial reality, or ‘hyper-reality’ their feelings to ensure corporate profits
is idealized. The bodies of the singers and (Hochschild, 1986). People employed in these
dancers represent an intersection of individ- types of jobs have to balance their admitted
ual genetics and extensive training such that submission and their being palpably ‘other’ than
very few viewers will ever sing, dance or the front demanded of them (Braverman, 1998;
look like the performers, yet the viewers, Goffman, 1958; Leidner, 1993; Ritzer, 2004).
especially young women, will be encouraged 2 Changes in technology: Advanced technologies
of information and production have enabled
to spend vast sums of money on clothes,
global capital to produce a vast array of goods
adornments, cosmetics, and medications in
from cell phones to pharmaceuticals to highly
illusory quests to achieve the looks, lifestyles,
sophisticated means of destruction. At the same
and perhaps the unbridled eroticism of their
time, technologies of surveillance and control
favorite idols. Spectacles of ever-gyrating foster new modes of domination, dehumaniza-
bodies, qua commodified representations, are tion, and, indeed, of alienation (Foucault, 1995;
perpetually celebrating hedonistic sexuality, Gergen, 1991). In doctoral research on the func-
appearance, and the happiness supposedly tions of Internet purchasing and inventory con-
attainable by all. The collage of the songs, trol, Zalewsky and Rezba (2000), found that not
dances, and celebrity images re-inscribe and only was on-line ordering and computer-tracked
valorize essentialist notions of gender which, inventory control devoid of human contact and
brutalizing, but the electronic Panopticon
as role models of ‘ideal’ masculinity and
enabled greater surveillance and control by man-
femininity, are both alienating and dysfunc-
agement. It is important to remember, however,
tional in the current world. Yet these images
that technologies can also enable new kinds of
have multiple uses; they sell clothes, cars,
freedom and fulfillment.
jewelry, foods, medications, and beverages. 3 Culture and identity: While Mead (1934) saw the
The music evokes emotions of power and self as an outcome of negotiation that begins in
desires to live in an ideal, if imaginary world, early childhood, Erikson’s (1950) elaboration of
where the good life is promised to all, but Freudian theory which pinpointed the crystalliza-
which, as is soon evident to youth who join tion of one’s identity as a developmental
the labor force, very few can attain. Other achievement of the late teens, was already out-
realms of popular culture, such as Goth, dated in his lifetime, something he appreciated.
Instead of finding themselves capable of defining
punk, heavy metal, or ‘ghetto rap’ which cri-
talents, obligations, aspirations, many young
tique the conformity and one-dimensional
people were seen to take out a ‘moratorium,’ so
nature of an alienated and alienating society,
to speak, putting off the definition of self until
create spaces for alternative, counter-cultural
the beginning of their fourth decade (Erikson,
life styles. Their articulation of alienation 1980; Keniston, 1965). Half a century later,
and anger, however, as commodities pro- the very image of an integrated Eriksonian self-
duced by the culture industries, ultimately hood is unsustainable, just as the Meadian image
neutralizes the promise of political impact of ‘I’s and ‘me’s calmly acting in tandem and
(see below). interacting with role partners has given way to a
In sum, we suggest three moments of con- vision of interaction as a hectic battleground
temporary capitalism that show why alienation where highly calculated self presentations