THROUGHOUT HISTORY, THERE has always been a shared understanding of how life is meant to progress. The young adult’s first hunt, a teenage girl’s quinceañera, a baby’s baptism — rites of passage give us markers that signal adherence to a path that promises the “most good” within the communities we belong to.
Today, we live in a largely homogenised society. Our first job, our first car and our first, and hopefully last, marriage have become a few of the universally accepted rites of passage into adulthood in contemporary society. However, due to socioeconomic challenges, these symbolic markers are appearing later and later in the lives of the ordinary human being. Many of these markers of societal integration are becoming harder to achieve and accomplish. The mantra “delayed is not denied” may keep us working towards our goals, but the emotions associated with postponing a life you have always imagined for yourself are not easy to extinguish.
As a result, many of us find ourselves in a place of existential displacement, a term I refer to as a feeling of being alienated in the world. Sociology regards alienation as encompassing the experience of various mental states, such as loneliness, estrangement, isolation and meaninglessness. It is associated with separation — social, political or psychological — and reflects the nebulous space between what one knows about themselves and how that appears in one's lived experience.
Communist theory tells us that capitalism’s encouragement of individualistic pursuits has exacerbated our alienation from other human beings, despite our awareness of the importance of community. Our treatment of the Earth reflects an alienation from nature, as we have seemingly resigned ourselves to its destruction as long as it sustains our material desires. For Marxists, communism was the answer to unchecked capitalism, a way to overcome alienation and cultivate humanity.
Through various lenses, alienation has been viewed as a consequence of a failure to meet a certain criterion of living. With the right relationships, attitude or politics, we are told, alienation is surmountable.
But what if alienation is constitutive to being human? What if our very conception of freedom cannot exist if we are not alienated?
At its base, alienation describes our lack of self-identity. When we find ourselves “out of balance” or “uncentred,” we speak about finding and being true to ourselves. Embedded in this common way of speaking is the implication of an internal distance from ourselves.
To put across my point, I need to employ some terms:
While Karl Marx locates the source of alienation within materialistic determinations, Lacanian scholars, following in the school of Hegel, believe that a large part of alienation and the dissatisfaction associated with it is tied to identity. To have an identity as a marker of the particular society you are in is to be anchored in a shared reality of that society. Our social conventions, including our naming ceremonies, collective sacrifices and other rituals, create the contours against which we form our individual identities.
What logically follows is that the sacrifices we make to participate in society are typically conformist. The family unit, community rituals and religious orientations connect strangers in a social “contract” of sorts within which our actions can be interpreted in a familiar context. These connections facilitate the reproduction of the living conditions of that society.
While identity is the means through which we can perceive and relate to ourselves and others, it is disturbed by our subjectivity, that is, the internal, dynamic aspect of ourselves that is not easily constrained within identity. It is rooted in the unconscious, where our fears and desires interact in ways unseen to determine our identities. This distance between identity and subjectivity is alienation.
No matter how much I try to be a brother, be a writer, be an accountant, be an adult, “no matter how much I see myself as any of these identities, I am never fully identical to them,” as Todd McGowan states in “Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn’t Try to Find Ourselves.”
The promise of being alike to your symbolic identity is the promise of overcoming alienation. Due to the minimal distance between who we are right now and who we wish to become, there is an implied hope and promise that some future version of ourselves will be able to fill the void in us that urges us into action. Thus, we always relate to ourselves from a distance. We inhabit a constant state of internal division. And this division is inherent to what it means to build a life. We careen towards an ever-elusive future, but the promise of becoming something more than we are today is the very thing that animates our day-to-day lives.
In the TV show “The OA,” a young woman comes back to her hometown after having gone missing for seven years. To the astonishment of her hometown’s community, she returns with her vision restored, though she had been blind for most of her childhood. No matter how much her community prompts her, she does not reveal what happened to her in those seven years. She does, however, reveal the truth to a group of five misfits.
“The OA” is a show about faith. Not the religious kind, but a faith in the Other. The five people the protagonist chooses to narrate her story to have absolutely nothing in common except that they attend the same school. Following their individual stories, we discover that they all come from broken homes and carry various traumas that are not easily translatable to the people in their lives.
Still, the distance they feel from themselves and from those around them is the very thing that unites them despite the incredulity of their situation. The precarious nature of their group’s relationship lingers, yet they all share a place of no place — a place of non-belonging, where words can only fall short of truly encapsulating their union. Their shared dissatisfaction with their lives, their alienation, is the strength of their community.
The Heideggerian notion of “Thrownness,” the concept that human beings find themselves thrown into the world in a context that isn’t of their choosing, can be our point of departure towards easing the pains associated with being alienated. For Martin Heidegger, “being-in-the-world” necessitates community.
The OA, our titular character, finds herself “thrown” into a world that has become foreign to her. She barely understands the predicament she finds herself in, yet she knows she will need people she can trust. Her aversion to any institutional recourse is intentional: what she needs, she can only get from community.
Within our experience of alienation, we have a keen ability to seek out people uniquely capable of helping us find our places in a shared context of being thrown into the world. Symbolic identities help us tie ourselves to reality, but the truth of community is that it helps us become more than our subjective notions of these identities.
I have always been fascinated by Malcolm X’s decision to change his name from Malcolm Little. For him, the X symbolised the unknown African name to whose lineage he belonged. No longer desiring any connection to a name associated with the slave traders, he chose to reject what he felt had an overwhelming bearing on his selfhood and sought a new, emancipated identity.
Malcom X’s inability, or refusal, to identify with the symbolic markers tied to his name was a reflection of his alienated status. What some may chalk up to simply a preference instead marks a significant political act. For what is politics if not, as McGowan puts it, acting “beyond the confines of one’s symbolic universe?”
In Judith Butler's “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity,” emancipatory politics begins with the loss of identity. As our socioeconomic and political environments deteriorate, our susceptibility to material and social poverty within authoritarian rule increases. With expanding restrictions on our symbolic freedoms, the identities we have relied on for generations become more and more compromised. However, with this loss of identity, we enter the realm of emancipatory politics.
Identifying with the foreignness within ourselves can enable us to find the courage to act outside the confines of our social and biological determinants. We cannot escape symbolisation as this is how we interact and make sense of the world. Identity is the direct, yet imperfect, response to subjectivity. However, we do not have to continue harmful traditions and beliefs for the sake of an imaginary wholeness. We do not have to make a cage of our identities.
The temptation of any conceptualisation of alienation is that of referring and contrasting to some level of wholeness and completeness. One only needs to look at members of certain political bases who, in the hope of someday achieving whatever misconception of societal wholeness they believe in, are willing to sign off on the most egregious of legislations that disadvantage the disenfranchised. Think of the first time you questioned an institution and the resistance you met.
This reading of alienation is not an endorsement of any one particular identification or movement. And while there is much critique of identity, this reading is not a treatise to do away with identity. Within this context, we reread alienation not as a negative state to be overcome, but as constitutive to the human experience, as a motor that runs an engine.
Overcoming alienation is not the same as resisting it. When we resist alienation, we work towards finding a community where the disjointed nature of our selfhood can find understanding. In that way, alienation gives us freedom.
