Prelude to Alienation

...The process which begins in the anonymity of others ends in the anonymity of the self...

...How often in the overflowing Streets, Have I gone forward with the Crowd, and said Unto myself, the face of every one That passes by me is a mystery...

...It is not only the repression that is noted, but, significantly, the invention of "allegoric riches," the extreme alienation of the laborer's product...

...Under the pressure of actual alienation, the idea of humanity has been itself abstracted and, set over against the idea of the Swarm, qualified...

...What is more remarkable is that some of these insights, so early, were so deeply revealing...

...The key figure, in England, is Carlyle, who, of course, in his work from the 1820s was influenced by the German tradition in which the main philo sophical development of the idea of alienation was taking place...

...and (except as it was my own heart, not another's, that I kept devouring) savage also, as the tiger in his jungle...

...The whole natural life of man is stolen from him, by his own political creations...

...What is equally remarkable is that the development of industrialism is seen in the same process as the development of militarism: each is a change from "the arts of life" to "the arts of death...

...and go about professing openly the totalest separation, isolation...

...As we continue to examine, in our own lives, the whole complex of alienation, we shall do well to attend to this prelude...

...There is of course the familiar radical dissociation of the self, from Blake's Protestant inheritance: My Spectre around me night and day Like a Wild Beast guards my way...

...I had, practically, forgotten that they were alive, that they were not merely automatic...

...Urizen, here, is this projected Reason: Then left the sons of Urizen the plow and harrow, the loom, The hammer and the chisel, and the rule and compasses, They forg'd the sword, the chariot of war, the battle ax, The trumpet fitted to the battle, and the flute of summer, And all the arts of life they chang'd into the arts of death: The hour-glass contemn'd because its simple workmanship, Was as the workmanship of the plowman, and the water wheel That raises water into Cisterns broken and burn'd in fire Because its workmanship was like the workmanship of the Shepherd: And in their stead, intricate wheels invented, Wheel without wheel, To perplex youth in their outgoings, and to bind to labours Of day and night the myriads of Eternity, that they might file And polish brass and iron hour after hour, laborious workmanship, Kept ignorant of the use...

...I believe that Marx's ability to make a more precise analysis of capitalism, and to relate this to an idea of socialism which was more politically fruitful than anything Carlyle could arrive at, was indeed a major breakthrough...

...the men are oppressed, but by their own creation...

...The social mystery is projected into a universal mystery, as so often since, under the pressure of this overpowering experience...

...melted and reduced To one identity, by differences That have no law, no meaning and no end...

...Yet the transformation, to the "Everlasting Yea," is, significantly, through action: Yes here, in this poor, miserable, hampered, despicable Actual, wherein thou even now standest, here or nowhere is thy Ideal: work it out therefrom...

...and is thence sending up, over his whole life and activity, innumerable stems—fruit-bearing and poison-bearing...

...Yet the structure fixes on the "Swarm," the distinction between "low pursuits" and "highest minds," and, thus, on withdrawal...

...and to the distortions of human communication, by image-making and advertisement, comes through as still centrally relevant and still theoretically unsatisfied...

...We for the present, with our Mammon-gospel, have come to strange conclusions...

...Under the pressure of alienation, delusion is generated...

...His way is from the City to Nature, where the love of humankind can be reaffirmed...

...I am not suggesting that Carlyle was the decisive influence on Marx in this respect, though he was certainly an important influence, in his very individual combination of a philosophical theory of alienation with a critique of capitalist socety...

...Carlyle's inability to reach this point drove him steadily back into positions which are ultimately reactionary, and this is also generally true of one line (though not the main line, from Carlyle through Ruskin to Morris) of the English Romantic tradition...

...At the same time, Blake, like every writer of this period, tended to see the new society as a recovery of a lost state...

...This structure of feeling— such structures as the mind Builds for itself —is now a large part of modern consciousness: the crowd, the masses, the alienated wandering self, the blind and unknowing general condition...

...The regeneration is in any case a wholly human creative act...

...then in stern repentance They must renew their brightness, and their disorganiz'd functions Again reorganize, till they resume the image of the human, Cooperating in the bliss of Man, obeying his Will, Servants to the infinite and Eternal of the Human Form...

...For historical reasons, English writers were the first to experience an industrial society...

...the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself: thy Condition is but the stuff thou art to shape that same Ideal out of .. The call is to be "no longer a Chaos, but a World...

...It is certainly not surprising to learn that Engels, reading this in Past and Present, was sufficiently impressed to write a review for the Deutsch-Franzosische Jahrbucher, which then, in 1843, the young Marx was editing...

...I draw attention to this work, not to engage in some sterile debate on priorities, but to provide one more case-history of the formation of the idea, to be set beside others and to make more possible a general historical account...

...This movement of mind, so fundamental to the modern imagination, produces a new kind of social relationship, which is more significant than mere anonymity...

...This is again hostile and competitive: All the strife of singularity, Lies to the ear, and lies to every sense...

...The eventual result was a characteristic tradition of English social criticism, which may well have had some effect on Marx's concept of social alienation, but which in any case has continued to offer a way of thinking about alienation, and, more generally, a still powerful structure of feeling...

...The inquiry that still matters is into the formation of this structure of feeling: an inquiry that can alternatively be imaginative or historical...

...O Friend...

...The earliest observation is characteristic, to one coming from the country: One thought Baffled my understanding, how men lived Even next-door neighbours, as we say, yet still Strangers, and knowing not each other's names...

...Wordsworth then comes to a memorable image: A blind beggar, who, with upright face, Stood propp'd against a Wall, upon his Chest Wearing a written paper, to explain The story of the Man, and who he was...

...The "mind-forg'd manacles" and the "charter'd" streets are seen in the same form...

...The men and women around me, even speaking with me, were but Figures...

...Blake's London and Wordsworth's London are equally alienated, but the standpoint is different...

...that they might spend the days of wisdom In sorrowful drudgery, to obtain a scanty pittance of bread, In ignorance to view a small portion and think that All, And call it Demonstration, blind to all the simple rules of life...

...The image of the Fall is dominant, and this made connection with any actual new society difficult...

...This calculating political system (in which Malthus is as evident as the traditional oppressors) is itself the product of the alienation— the externalization and separation—of reason...

...hope, fear...

...The way of overcoming alienation was then not spiritual but social: a recognition by human process of a human product, which could then be changed by human action...

...it is also that the beast outside will be recognized...

...It is also a category into which many different kinds of experience are directed and in effect lost...

...The combination, in this figure, of the blindness and the identity reduced to a label, is the fact of alienated man...

...But, equally, they had to negotiate this experience without any of the general ideas which were eventually necessary for an analysis both profound and systematic...

...This is then the way of seeing embodied in a new kind of "Public Show," and the detached individual sees show and spectators—the "many-headed mass" —in comparable forms...

...What was offered was not an account of personal alienation in social terms, or of social alienation in personal terms, but a genuine connection of these processes, into a single process...

...These connections were built on, in subsequent theory, but equally they were connections of a kind which could never become entirely or even primarily sociological...

...III The writings we have examined were for the most part completed by 1805...

...But we must note also that these are seen as an imposed system, and yet as the actions of men...

...This is verily the plague-spot...

...The acknowledgments are important, especially the first, but the love of man, the belief in the unity of man, have now been qualified by an act of resignation and withdrawal...

...But most thro' midnight streets I hear How the youthful Harlot's curse Blasts the new born Infant's tear, And blights with plagues the marriage hearse...

...Out of his lost innocence, and through his total experience, man will gain a wisdom which will lead, in the same action, to regeneration and revolution: to recover himself, man must recover brotherhood...

...The "sorrowful drudgery" and the condition of being "blind to all the simple rules of life" are in this way dependent on each other...

...His revolutionary solution is in many ways wider than anything that succeeded it, for the social revolution and the end of personal alienation are very deeply connected...

...But we have been accustomed to think of a Romantic emphasis on spiritual alienation, and then of a revolutionary emphasis on social alienation...

...It is particularly necessary to emphasize this unity in Blake...

...Yet, though Wordsworth has seen it in these precise social conditions, he goes on to generalize it into a permanent human condition: It seem'd To me that in this Label was a type, Or emblem, of the utmost that we know, Both of ourselves and of the universe...

...Blake added to this the alienation, by projection, of reason, which, turning to an external system, then oppressed actual men...

...one feeling was there which belong'd To this great City, by exclusive right...

...We have profoundly forgotten everywhere that Cash-payment is not the sole-relation of human beings...

...It is then not surprising that Carlyle's analysis of the social crisis engulfing industrial England should be in terms of alienation: Man has lost the soul out of him...

...The limited vision of the industrial worker—alienated from his product, "kept ignorant of the use," "in ignorance to view a small portion and think that All"—is also the limited vision of the system—the "Demonstration"— which has alienated reason from life...

...Thus have I look'd, nor ceas'd to look, oppress'd By thoughts of what, and whither, when and how, Until the shapes before my eyes became A second-sight procession, such as glides Over still mountains, or appears in dreams...

...Art, as the expression of desire, must fight against trade, which is its alienation, and the human integration is a new society: The whole business of Man is the Arts, and All Things Common...

...Fool...

...It is this, as a necessary blindness, a necessary absence of connection, that the mind actually and specifically alienated concludes...

...The description of alienation was then variously made, but in Blake and Wordsworth especially, and then following them in Carlyle, the description was given social connections, which have remained important: precise connections, to new kinds of work, to the metropolis and its new social relations, and to the system of capitalist trade...

...An undistinguishable world to men, The slaves unrespited of low pursuits, Living amid the same perpetual flow Of trivial objects...

...and, working, believe, live, be free...

...It needs also to be emphasized, however, how much continuity there is, in Carlyle, from Blake and Wordsworth and from the English Romantic structure of feeling in which this kind of unified personal and social criticism was embodied...

...One decisive period, for this kind of inquiry, is late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Europe, when the idea, as we now use it, was shaped...

...and now, after the due period, begins to find the want of it...

...Wordsworth responds to his own remarkable vision of an alienated social condition with a reaffirmation of the power of his own mind, educated by Nature, to retain order, relation, and composure...

...Wordsworth, characteristically, saw alienation most clearly in the modern urban metropolis...

...This remarkable passage can be immediately recognized as a response to the new conditions of industrial work...

...Our life is not a mutual helpfulness...

...The conscious individual formulates his relationship with other men as with an undifferentiated mass, and feels at once threatened and hostile: The roar continues, till at length Escaped as from an enemy, we turn Abruptly into some sequester'd nook...

...To turn man from his path, To restrain the child from the womb, To cut off the bread from the city, That the remnant may learn to obey .. To teach mortal worms the path That leads from the gates of the Grave...

...What they experienced, and had to learn to experience, was a social dissolution and the loss of a common world...

...In midst of their crowded streets and assemblages, I walked solitary...

...The necessary acknowledgment of social man produced an emphasis which has dangerously diminished the attention of socialists to our whole emotional life, and which at times, even, has hardened into a philistinism, indeed an alienation, of the human passions...

...In an important sense, this is clearly a metaphysical analysis, but its importance is that it diagnosed the social crisis not in terms of faulty adjustment, as so many liberal thinkers were doing, but as an alienation...

...The human instinct survives, as a potential, and within the vast City there are many "individual sights of courage, and integrity, and truth, and tenderness...

...The emphasis on alienation from God was changed to an emphasis on man's selfalienation, from the world he had made and the society of which he was a member, neither of which he could now recognize...

...If we trace the successive systems this account is reasonable...

...My Emanation far within Weeps incessantly for my sin...

...Where any view of Money exists, Art cannot be carried on, but War only...

...The spiritual powers have themselves to be redeemed from their long alienation: If Gods combine against Man, Setting their dominion above The Human Form Divine, Thrown down from their high Station In the Eternal Heavens of Human Imagination, buried beneath In dark Oblivion with incessant pangs ages on ages In enmity and war first weaken'd...

...we think, nothing doubting, that it absolves and liquidates all engagements of man...

...A perfect unity Cannot exist but from the Universal Brotherhood of Eden...

...The "Parliament of Monsters," which is Bartholomew Fair, is now organically related, in this structure of feeling, to the dangerous mob— when half the City shall break out full of one passion, rage, or fear —and to a characteristically contemporary vision of the general movement of men: as if the whole were one vast Mill...

...all stays, All laws of acting, thinking, speaking man Went from me, neither knowing me, nor known...

...Carlyle, like Blake, saw a fundamental connection between philosophical mechanism and factual industrialism, and was as insistent on the total effects of this change on the whole substance of man: Mechanism has now struck its roots down into man's most intimate, primary sources of conviction...

...of factory work—the fragmentation within the process as well as in the social relations...

...and a type not false Of what the mighty City is itself To all except a Straggler here and there, To the whole Swarm of its inhabitants...

...In every cry of every Man, In every Infant's cry of fear, In every voice, in every ban, The mind-forg'd manacles I hear...

...This significant conclusion is, I would argue, only the last process of alienation...

...Yet within this massing, there is a new kind of display of the self: no longer individuality, of the kind that is socially sustained, but singularity—the extravagance of display within the public emptiness...

...To examine this development in detail would be a separate inquiry...

...But it is not only the gods who combine against men...

...As other men become a "second-sight procession," it is not only the "ballast of familiar life" that is lost, but also all that makes one's own self human and known: the acting, thinking and speaking of man at once himself and in society...

...The most common form of this social imagery of the Fall was, in this period, the contrast between country and town, though the idea of a medieval unity and innocence was, in English nineteenthcentury thought, to become even more prominent, within the same structure of feeling...

...Alienation, evidently, is a major theme in his writing, but it is very easy, in a divided criticism, to take either his sense of social alienation or his sense of spiritual alienation as primary...

...And the hapless Soldier's sigh Runs in blood down Palace walls...

...I do not think, in any case, that we ought to see all ideas of alienation merely as leading to Marx, and deriving their importance from that fact...

...He relates this to wage-labor and its degradation of work, with its result that the Sons of toil sit enchanted, by the million, in their Poor-Law Bastille, as if this were Nature's Law and concludes that Labour must become a seeing rational giant, with a soul in the body of him, and take his place on the throne of things...

...This alienation is a conscious social process, related not only to the traditional enemies, the King and the Priest, but to the contemporary conditions of wage labor...

...This is the new kind of anonymous social relationship, and the crowded street, in its now familiar form, is an epitome of it: The broad high-way appearance, as it strikes On Strangers of all ages, the quick dance Of colours, lights and forms, the Babel din, The endless stream of men, and moving things, From hour to hour the illimitable walk Still among streets with clouds and sky above...

...To him that will consider it, here is the stem, with its roots and taproot, with its world-wide upas-boughs and accursed poison-exudations, under which the world lies writhing in atrophy and agony...

...The self is alienated within the whole body of alienated relationships, and the crucial insight here is the connection between seeing others as "the crowd," the masses, and the substantial loss of one's own most general and most individual human identity...

...Thus the alienation, the reduction to the "one identity" of the masses, are seen as social—"what the mighty city is itself," and the men themselves are seen as "slaves unrespited...

...When he turned to describe alienation, in Sartor Resartus, the continuity from Wordsworth is striking: Invisible yet impenetrable walls, as of Enchantment, divided me from all living...

...It is this, ironically, that Wordsworth now sees: The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft Of modern Merlins, wild Beasts, Puppet-shows, All out-o'-the-way, far-fetch'd, perverted things, All freaks of Nature, all Promethean thoughts Of Man...

...Oppression under which even highest minds Must labour, whence the strongest are not free...

...The whole gamut of alienation—poverty, war, perverted desire—is known in the streets of a city subordinated to trade...

...This, in Carlyle's terminology, is the state of the "Everlasting No," and the emphasis is on a spiritual condition...

...We call it a Society...

...The new industrial and commercial system was seen, then, as of a piece with a human alienation...

...He can look back at the City and acknowledge that among the multitudes oftentimes was seen, Affectingly set forth, more than elsewhere Is possible, the unity of man...

...The story of the development through Hegel to Marx is well known...

...But, while we acknowledge the great importance of Marx's synthesis, we have also to observe, particularly at the present stage of the tradition deriving from Marx, how much, in detail, the synthesis excluded...

...We need no reminder, now, that the perception of alienation, even as a social fact, can lead either way: to the practice of individual preservation, within a grievous general condition, or to the practice of revolution, which would seek to end the condition...

...Many radicals saw God as an alienation, by projection, of human energies...

...vomiting, receiving...

...I1 Blake's work is, I believe, as well as the earliest the deepest insight into the connections between human and social impoverishment, in the new conditions of industrial capitalism...

...It is hardly surprising that their insights were fragmentary...

...Wordsworth then moves to his most general description of this manysided alienation: Foolishness, and madness in parade, Though most at home in this their dearest school, Are scatter'd everywhere, no rarities, Even to the rudest novice of the Schools...

...And on the shape of the unmoving man, His fixed face and sightless eyes, I look'd As if admonish'd from another world...

...This has radically affected all subsequent English thinking...

...To possess himself again, and to possess the city, is then man's common desire...

...I wander thro' each charter'd street Near where the charter'd Thames does flow, And mark in every face I meet Marks of weakness, marks of woe...

...And all the ballast of familiar life, The present and the past...

...But the emphasis on alienation as an experience, and a connection of this experience with a pattern of social change, was in fact being made in English romantic literature, independently of the better-known philosophical argument...

...The seventh book of Wordsworth's Prelude—Residence in London —has been overshadowed by the earlier, more directly autobiographical books...

...It was in 1844 that Marx wrote his own first sketch of a socialist theory of alienation...

...but rather, cloaked under due laws-of-war, named "fair competition" and so forth, it is a mutual hostility...

...Equally, the attention directed by Blake and Wordsworth to the social effects of the city—the anonymous community...

...This transformation, which he goes on to call Mammonism, is then the practice of social alienation...

...What the individual then sees, in the crowd of others, is not men but social types—images of men—and these are exactly characterized in the "advertisements of giant-size," the "allegoric shapes, female or male," which serve, in this crowded anonymity, to give back to men who have no direct knowledge of each other a generalized image...

...The massing of other men in the street changes from a physical to a mental phenomenon: the crowd takes on a kind of absolute, single existence...

...Contemporary society is seen as "Unnature," and the first example Carlyle gives of this is the transformation of things to items of selling tnd exchange...

...How the Chimney-sweeper's cry Every black'ning Church appals...

...It is impossible to read Blake's description of the alienation of human passions without realizing how much is lost in any theory of alienation which practically excludes this substantial personal life...

...Much of Blake's work is concerned with a regeneration in which the unity of the self will be restored, but it is not only that the hiding, guilty self will come back into the world...

...The recovery of spiritual connection was then in turn transformed by a translation into human and social processes: the hitherto autonomous realm of spirit, in which both alienation and recovery were to be understood, was seen as a projection and alienation of human energies, which could only be recovered by being recognized as human...

...Redemption had become regeneration, and the act of regeneration was social revolution...

...It is this mad rush that lays "the whole creative powers of man asleep," and Wordsworth can conclude: Oh, blank confusion...

...Now, when I look back, it was a strange isolation I then lived in...

...Blake and Wordsworth, this early, point the different ways...

...it is also human rulers: Shall not the King call for Famine from the heath, Or the Priest for Pestilence from the Fen, To restrain, to dismay, to thin The inhabitants of mountain and plain . . . Shall not the Councellor throw his curb Of Poverty on the laborious, To fix the price of labour To invent allegoric riches...

...An essentially religious conception of man's alienation from God by the Fall, and of his redemption through Christ, was generalized and transformed into a continuing historical process...

...There is the way out, he still thinks, from these "self-destroying transitory things" to "composure and ennobling Harmony...

...Yet the basic emphasis, on an absence or loss of connection or community, remains central to all our thinking...

...And while the repression is social, to teach obedience, it is also total: That the pride of the heart may fail, That the lust of the eyes may be quench'd, That the delicate ear in its infancy May be dulled, and the nostrils closed up...

...But it is a very remarkable book, if we read it, as we should, for what is seen, rather than for what our predetermined character of Wordsworth happens to see...

...centre of the universal Social Gangrene, threatening all modern things with frightful death...

...The destruction of false social power is the condition of the recovery of innocence: The King and the Priest must be tied in a tether Before two virgins can meet together...

...In the subsequent forty years, the experience of alienation is very widely recorded, but I will confine myself here to tracing one line of thought: that which brought together the experience of social isolation and the analysis of a competitive industrial society...