Page 28 - Cultural Studies Dictionary

ALIENATION

To enact X rather than Y course of action does not mean that we have made an
undetermined selection of activity. Rather, the basis for our choice has been
determined or caused by the very way we are constituted as subjects. That is, by the
where, when and how of our coming to be who we are. In that sense agency is 5
determined by the social structures of language, the routine character of modern life
and by psychic and emotional narratives that we cannot bring wholly to
consciousness. Nevertheless, agency is a culturally intelligible way of understanding
ourselves and we clearly have the existential experience of facing and making
choices.
Neither human freedom nor human action can consist of an escape from social
determinants and as such it is a rather pointless metaphysical question to ask
whether people are ‘really’ free or ‘really’ determined in any absolute sense.
Consequently, it is useful to consider freedom and determination as different modes
of discourse or different languages for different purposes. Thus, our everyday
practice and existential experience of decision making are not changed by the
notion that we are the products of biochemical and cultural determination. Indeed,
since the language of freedom and the language of determination are culturally
produced for different purposes in different realms, it make sense to talk about
freedom from political persecution or economic scarcity without the need to say
that agents are free in some undetermined way. Rather, such discourses are
comparing different social formations and determinations and judging one to be
better than another on the basis of our culturally determined values.
Investigating the problem of agency involves entering a realm of metaphors that
have different applications. Thus the language of agency celebrates the cultural
power and capacities of persons, encourages us to act and to seek improvement of
the human condition as well as persuading us to take responsibility for our actions.
It also enables institutions, for example, the courts, to hold persons accountable for
specific acts. By contrast, the language of determination helps to trace causality
home and points to the contours of cultural life that enable some courses of action
while dis-empowering others. This is the language of the dance in which we actively
and creatively perform ourselves through a cosmic choreography that has no
author. Here the purposes are solidarity, the alleviation of individual responsibility
and acceptance that there are limits to the plasticity of the human condition.
Links Acculturation, determinism, identity, structuration, structure, subjectivity

Alienation The foremost theoretical source for the concept of alienation within
cultural studies is Marxism and the understanding of capitalism and the labour
process that is found within it. For Marx the first priority of human beings is the
production of their means of subsistence (and consequently themselves) through
labour. The centrepiece of Marx’s work was an analysis of the dynamics of
capitalism wherein a propertyless proletariat must sell their labour to survive. As a
consequence, they are then faced with the products of their own labour in the form
of commodities that now wield power and influence over them. Here the workers
are doubly alienated; first by the transformation of the core of human activity,