Recognizing alienation in art can slide into endorsing that alienation as humanity’s true home

Evidence

The most telling criticism of the ideology of the new sensibility or the new mysticism still remains the comment of Marx on Hegel’s notion of religion in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. For just as the spokesmen for the new modernism claim that it expresses our society, so Hegel showed that religion was an expression of the human spirit, its objectification, with all the ambiguous hesitation between embodiment and alienation which that word implies. Thus, Hegel’s system “implies that self-conscious man, insofar as he has recognized and superseded the spiritual world (or the universal spiritual mode of existence of his world) then confirms it again in this alienated form and presents it as his true existence; he reestablishes it and claims to be at home in his other being. Thus, for example, after superseding religion, when he has recognized religion as a product of self-alienation, he then finds a confirmation of himself in religion as religion…. Thus reason is at home in unreason as such. Man, who has recognized that he leads an alienated life in law, politics, etc., leads his true human life in this alienated life as such.” So it is that from the recognition of a work of art as a disguised expression and an alienation of reality, to making your peace with the very necessity of such disguises and such alienation, it is but a step. — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 789

Categorization

• XREF: This is the dialectical move Jameson elsewhere calls ‘the dialectic’s worst failure’ — accommodation to the very alienation criticism exposes. Connects to Adorno’s critique of Hegelian reconciliation and to the ‘happy consciousness’ theme. — connects to: The concept of alienation functions as criticism without requiring a Utopian counterpart — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 343; Alienation deepens precisely when people happily identify with imposed existence; Artistic alienation means conscious transcendence, distinct from Marx’s alienation concept. — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the…, 290
• DEFINE: Keywords ‘objectification’ and ‘alienation’ are distinguished here through their shared root as Hegel’s ambiguous term.

Broader Connections

• Artistic alienation means conscious transcendence, distinct from Marx’s alienation concept. #qualifies (0.82) — Herbert Marcuse, One-Dimensional Man, 290
• Alienation deepens precisely when people happily identify with imposed existence #expands (0.78)