Alienation Revisited

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Three books, one theme: American writers of the nineteenth century confront the damaging effects of modernity and devise strategies for overcoming alienation. Nothing extraordinary, one might think. In fact, rather old-fashioned. Come to think of it: can one even write such books today?

In the olden days, Americanists found it most natural to place the writers of the nineteenth century—above all, Matthiessen's heroes who made up the American Renaissance—within a tradition of the critique of modernity. Lionel Trilling famously claimed great writers to "contain a large part of [their culture's] dialectic within themselves" (9), while for Leo Marx they explored "kinds of pastoralism[s]" that were "imaginative and complex" (5): alternative spaces that differed from nostalgic longings in that they—as devised by the dialectically capacious writer—never shut out the presence (and power) of reality and thus enabled critical insight. Marx, in fact, spent a good many pages of The Machine in the Garden (1964) on tracing how the tradition of cultural critique had arrived in New England: that is, how American Renaissance writers had appropriated the machine as a figure of modern life from Carlyle, who had appropriated it from Schiller (Marx 145-226). American writing was unquestionably a part of a critique of modern rationalization that searched for spaces of negation and found them in, well, writing.

Yet, as the various strains of revisionism in American literary studies pointed out subsequently, the idea that serious writers were serious critics of modern life led to neglecting the ways in which those writers themselves perpetuated the ideologies of their times, ideologies that stood out in sharp relief to the truly serious revisionists. Moreover, Trilling, Marx, and Henry Nash Smith (to name just three) themselves seemed to derive their own self-image from the writers they admired, thus blinding themselves to their own implicatedness in a Cold War ideology that defined democratic nonconformity as America's true soul.

Much needed as the revisionist critique was, it, too, came at a price. As I argue in Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and Emerson's Challenge (2010), the theoretical premises of revisionism, which became most apparent in the work associated with the "New Americanists," made it difficult to conceptualize how writers who were inevitably drenched in ideology could nevertheless formulate positions or even theories that allowed for an immanent critique. Cultural power, in the revisionist view, turned self-professed non-conformists into ideologists. Resistance, on the other hand, was seen by revisionists to require strategies that were capable of opening up the entire symbolic order, allowing the subject to disidentify from discursively imposed identities. The resulting matrix of total complicity versus ultimately transcendental resistance, which I argue has become the foundation of a critical common sense in US American studies, is deeply at odds with the earlier tradition of cultural critique that sets out to battle alienation—not least because the revisionist paradigm rejects the idea of a subject that could be alienated from itself.¹

So, before engaging the books under consideration here, it is necessary to consider the question of whether alienation is a concept that can be revived today without subscribing to an outmoded idea of the subject that is measured by an ideal of wholeness, unity, and self-identity. Philosopher Rahel Jaeggi, who belongs to the youngest generation of what can still meaningfully be described as the Frankfurt School, answers this question in an unequivocal affirmative. In her book Entfremdung: Zur Aktualität eines sozialphilosophischen Problems (Alienation: On the Timeliness of a Socio-Philosophical Problem [2005]), she insists that alienation remains a useful term to describe the damages modern life inflicts on the self.² However, since the philosophical tradition of alienation theory relied on the notion of a substantial subject, doing so first requires reconstructing and rethinking the concept. Jaeggi therefore emphasizes the relational character of alienation...