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uation is not so much that they reify the institutions and power
structures impinging upon them, ascribing to them an existence and
weight independent of human activity and choice, as that they are
incapable of reifying them in seeing them rather as purely contin–
gent human creations to which they are compelled to accommodate
themselves.
If
alienation is the failure to remember the humanly
produced and socially constructed nature of society, perhaps the
very overcoming of such alienation is not the solution to but rather a
cause of alienation as estrangement, homelessness , meaningless–
ness - the conception of it generally favored by existentialists and
American sociologists as well as by modernist literary intellectuals
before them.
One recalls incongruities in the outlook of the youthful political
and "countercultural" protest movements of the 1960s that made
alienation into a shibboleth. Marxist slogans were combined with
American Indian headbands, the chanting of mantras, and events
like the famous effort, or pretended effort, to "levitate" the Pentagon.
It often seemed as if the desired alternative to commodity fetishism
was the real original fetishism of tribal cults so looked down upon by
Marx from the heights of his nineteenth-century progressivism.
Primitive peoples, far from representing the epitome of an alienated
or reified consciousness because of their failure to see their culture
and institutions as manmade and reformable, were admired as ex–
emplars of the lack of alienation for that very reason, for their
allegedly deep feeling for the wholeness of the cosmos harmoniously
embracing both nature and culture. No wonder alienation became a
discredited cliche under the weight of so many contradictory mean–
ings!
Except for the numbers of people involved and the publicity
they received, little was new in the religiosity and neoprimitivism of
the 1960s counterculture . Fifty years earlier, Max Weber had com–
mented on "the need of some modern intellectuals to furnish their
souls with , so to speak, guaranteed genuine antiques." "They play,"
he noted, "at decorating a sort of domestic chapel with small sacred
images from all over the world, or they produce surrogates through
all sorts of psychic experiences to which they ascribe the dignity of
mystic holiness, which they peddle in the book market." What was
novel about the 1960s, though by no means entirely unprecedented,
was that such attitudes were expressed under the auspices of the
political left and often included the invocation of Marxist phrases
like "demystification" when the very opposite, the "remystification"
