Against humanist (including 'Marxist') discourse on alienation

The intellectual historian Martin Jay has argued that Marxist notions of alienation and reification reiterate Biblical and Jewish ideas of idolatry and the forbidding of divine images. I find persuasive the arguments of Louis Althusser and Lucio Colletti that these are religious and idealist notions in Hegelian Marxism and are ideological. For me, the clearest evidence of this is in the way managerial and therapeutic professionals, and sometimes academically trained ones, are often hyper-sensitive to the possibility of feeling 'alienated', just as others are to thinking so many things are 'micro-aggressions' or forms of 'violence' ('raising your voice', being contrary, etc.) 

I am an editor of scholarly writings by trade, and I recall one graduate student client of mine was trying to find a way to interview people without 'objectifying' them. Soon enough, she learned that all speech is 'objectifying', and she then began to look for ways to unmask all of the almost infinite number of layers of objectification, alienation, or reification, which is little different from find 'prejudice' in almost everything that everyone says. 

The cure for this is not to 'de-reify' all social relationships so that there is a pure appearance of constitutive subjectivity, but rather simply to correct statements of the other person that you think are incorrect. It is not then a matter of authenticity vs. alienation or true self vs. mask, but only of true and false in statements. The opposition of Hegelian and existential or humanist Marxists to all 'alienation' leads nowhere except to denouncing other people as making you feel strange. I don't know if we needed Derrida to understand this, but to see the limit of this humanism, consider the philosophy of Martin Buber and what is so wrong with it. 

Buber thinks you can speak ABOUT an "it" or TO a person. Why not both, why not speak about a thing AND to a person? Most speech is that. Buber finds ‘spirituality’ in the enunciative aspects of speech acts, wherein one not only says something about something, but says it as an “I” addressing a “you”. He thinks these conflict. So all objectivity must be thrown out. Of course this project is not just humanist--though I think this gets nicely at what humanism really amounts to: an ethics of interpersonal interactions that actually is just a romantic anti-capitalism and anti-modernism. The project is a religious one based on the mystification that opposes some 'positivistic' uses of language in favor of 'spiritualist' ones. And precisely because this is essentially an ethics, it cannot be a politics. Next thing you know, the manager accuses you of not just 'alienating' him or her, but of symbolic or imaginary 'violence.' This is not Marxism but bourgeois spiritualism rooted in idealist metaphysics.

If labor is alienating, it is not because it fails to embody creative subjectivity. You can call it boring and even dehumanizing without needing a positive idea of what is 'human' and what isn't. Otherwise, we are in the territory of a Kantian ethics, and might as well admit that the alienation here is a matter not of labor but social interaction. But there is no credible idea of alienation in social interaction. To assume that is to suppose that social interaction can be 'authentic' but (in modern life perhaps) usually isn't. That cannot be maintained apart from mystifications that are spiritualist and religious, and so idealist. Authenticity is a myth, the myth of a real, true, or pure way of being. Attempting to purify social practices is a fascist, not a communist, project. The ideal of social practice must not be that it adheres to the purity of an origin, but that it has none at all. In the modern world, the good life is not the holy life but the free life. To say that it is a life without idols of the holy is not to say it requires icons of holiness; liberation is essentially negative, knowing only what it refuses, and does need a utopia to move towards. We want to change the world and the social practices it is part of, not correct them, or find the true ones. There is a governmentality of correctional procedures, but by definition it is not a politics.

Every ethics that is only that is a form of governmentality, and its enforcement and use will tend to keep social institutions the way they are. Every politics departs from these concerns, and is oriented to and by no ideas of the good, but only projects of freedom and liberation. Politics seeks to change the way things are, and may do so, like science and art, through experimentation. But it is not normative. The idea of a legitimate way of being political is a contradiction in terms. This distinction separates the ancients and moderns: on the one side, there is Plato, Aristotle, the Hellenistic Stoics and Epicureans, and more or less every Jewish or Christian ethics; on the other side, Machiavelli, and Marx. This is the reason why there is no Marxist ethics. The political has a different relationship than the ethical to time, because it opens onto a future that is unknown. The future is not created out of nothing, as it can only be constructed out of given elements, but it looks towards what seems from here to be a nothingness. What we must reject, what every genuine politics rejects, in the process, is not the way the present order lacks the good, but its unfreedom. This does not mean that we must settle on new forms that are not judgeably good in light of what we desire, but it does mean that the political is action that is not oriented as an implementation (or enforcement) of an idea. This is how politics is different from technology and bureaucracy, in which theories and judgments are applied in a practice that must conform to a legitimating, determining, and operative thought. Like science, and the negative theology of Maimonides, modern politics is a process wherein new forms are invented and settled upon not because a truth is discovered but as forms we must reject are negated.