From Alienation from Above to Alienation from Below

Instructor: Mattin Date & Time: Oct 9, 16, 23, 30 14 to 16:30 ET

DESCRIPTION: Alienation is back! From Xenofeminism to Afropessimism, and from Decolonial Studies to discussions around Artificial Intelligence, alienation is at the centre of critical discussions about capitalism, subjectivity, and agency. Whether it is to criticise essentialist notions of gender, to investigate the potential for rationality and technology, to explore and generate new strange worlds, to problematize a universal “we”, or to explore the concept of natal alienation in regards to the slave, there is something about the concept of alienation that seems necessary for grasping our times. During this four-session Seminar, we will explore the Marxian perspectives on the subject, juxtaposing them with recent discoveries in neuroscience in order to work through contemporary thinking on alienation. We will develop a new understanding of alienation that interconnects “alienation from above,” i.e. the socio economic forms of determination, to “alienation from below,” which are the neurocomputational mechanisms that produce what Thomas Metzinger calls the “phenomenal self-model.”

In his work, Marx gives an account of alienation from above in regards to how human activity becomes alienated in the exchange abstraction. Importantly, inverting the histories of philosophy, Marx says Capital is the active subject and people are merely its object. However, at the level of consciousness, we often believe that we are subjects that can separate ourselves from the object. In this Seminar, we will develop an understanding of how the subjective and objective components of alienation are entwined. The key question we will look at is, then, if experiences are something unique and specific to the self or if they are manufactured through generic supersonal mechanisms, which they are used for ideological purposes.

The Seminar will incorporate the work of Metzinger to aid our understanding of alienation from below. Metzinger explains how selfhood and the first-person perspective emerge out of subpersonal representational mechanisms. By analysing different phenomena such as Out of Body Experiences, pathologies such as Cotard Syndrome, or experiments such as the Body Transfer Illusion, he develops a theory of how self-consciousness comes to be, through what he defines as a “phenomenal self-model” (PSM). The study of Metzinger on this course will help us to go beyond the Marxian critique of ideology. His work will aid in the exploration of how self-consciousness activates this phenomenal self-model. We will relate this to the different Marxian approaches that we study on the course. Metzinger is able to give us clues in regards to how our perception of selfhood functions. In doing so, his work offers a powerful critique of phenomenology and theories based on the first person perspective of experience. Our Seminar complements Metzinger through an account of how self-consciousness is determined at the socio-economic and cultural level. In finding out the interrelationship between alienation from below and alienation from above, we can develop a better understanding of the leverage points against capitalist social relations. Key questions that we will deal with across the Seminar include:
– What is the conceptual first person perspective and how does it create a
sense of ‘minenes’?
– What does alienation mean in Marx’s work and how does it differ from this
first person perspective?
– What is the interconnection between existential and economic meanings of
alienation and why is there so much confusion about it?
– How is our understanding of subjectivity determined by capitalist
reproduction?
– How can the philosophy of Thomas Metzinger elaborate on the Marxian
understandings of alienation?
– How does Fanon and Wynter’s notion of sociogeny help us to understand the
intersection between alienation from above and alienation from below?
– What are the psychological consequences of alienation and how do they
relate to what Cecile Malaspina calls the mental state of noise?

IMAGE: Human eye

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