The Issue of Social Control in Late Modernity: Alienation and Narrativity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.12775/SetF.2023.007Keywords
alienation, ecstatic experience, narrative, testimony, narcissism, postmodernityAbstract
This article shows to what extent the new situation in our late-modern societies can see a further deepening of the social control typical of soft totalitarianism we experience in our globalised democracies, through the mechanisms already denounced by Arendt in her The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951): the promotion of rootlessness and superfluity. In particular, the paper focus on what Eliot (1927) called the hollow man or what philosophy and sociology have called the one-dimensional man, the absent subject or the saturated self, which the technological, social, cultural and economic environment in which we live so favours. The article diagnoses the reasons and means by which the alienation of the subject occurs, but proposes narrative and testimony as ways of combating social control of a psychopolitical kind[1].
[1] Investigación financiada por el proyecto del Banco de Santander – CEU titulado “Control social, posmodernidad y comunidad política” (COSOPOC) con código B920PR02 // FUSPBC-PPC14/2018.
References
Adorno, Theodor W. 1978 [1951]. Minima Moralia. New York: Verso.
Agamben, Giorgio. 1998. Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Homo sacer. Torino: Einaudi.
Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.
Babiak, Paul, and Hare, Robert D. 2007. Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go to Work. New York: Harper.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2003. Liquid Love. On the Frailty of Human Bonds. Cambridge: Polity.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2005, Liquid Life. Cambridge: Polity.
Bauman, Zygmunt, and Lyon, David. 2013. Liquid Surveillance. Cambridge: Polity.
Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage.
Béjar, Helena. 2018. Felicidad. La salvación moderna. Madrid: Tecnos.
Belmonte, Miguel Ángel. 2020. “Phenomenology of resentment according to Scheler and Girard in light of sloth in Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae.” Scientia et Fides 1: 221–242. DOI: https://doi.org/10.12775/SetF.2020.002
Borghesi, Massimo. 2005. Il soggetto assente. Educazione e scuola tra memoria e nichilismo. Milano: Itaca.
Bruder, Jessica. 2017. Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-first Century. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
Cabanas, Edgar, and Illouz, Eva. 2019. Manufacturing Happy Citizens: How the Science and Industry of Happiness Control Our Lifes. Cambridge: Polity.
De Sousa Santos, Bonaventura. 2021. El futuro comienza ahora. De la pandemia a la utopía. Madrid: Akal.
Deleuze, Gilles. 1992 [1990]. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October Winter: 3-7.
Dutton, Kevin. 2012. The Wisdom of Psychopaths. London: Cornerstone Digital.
Eliot, Thomas. S. 1927. Poems 1909-1925. London: Faber & Faber.
Esposito, Costantino. 2021. Il nichilismo del nostro tempo. Una cronaca. Roma: Carocci.
Gergen, Kenneth J. 2000. The Saturated Self. Dilemmas of Identity in Contemporary Life. New York: Basic Books.
Glynn, Paul. 1989. A song for Nagasaki. San Francisco: Ignatius Press.
Grassi, Martin. 2020. “Self-organized bodies, between Politics and Biology. A political reading of Aristotle’s concepts of Soul and Pneuma.” Scientia et Fides 1: 123–139. DOI: https://doi.org/10.12775/SetF.2020.005.
Han, Byung-Chul. 2012. La sociedad de la transparencia. Barcelona: Herder.
Han, Byung-Chul. 2014. Psicopolítica. Neoliberalismo y nuevas técnicas de poder. Barcelona: Herder.
Han, Byung-Chul. 2015. La salvación de lo bello. Barcelona: Herder.
Han, Byung-Chul. 2021. La sociedad paliativa. Barcelona: Herder.
Han, Byung-Chul 2021a. No-cosas: quiebras del mundo de hoy. Barcelona: Herder.
Hare, Robert D. 1991. Without Conscience: the Disturbing World of Psychopaths Among Us. New York: Guilford Press.
Hillesum, Etty. 1999. An Interrupted Life: Diaries and Letters of Etty Hillesum [1941-43]. Bath: Persephone Books.
Illouz, Eva. 2021. The End of Love. A Sociology of Negative Relations. Cambridge: Polity.
Jappe, Anselm. 2019. La sociedad autófaga. Capitalismo, desmesura y autodestrucción. Logroño. Pepitas de Calabaza.
Klein, Naomi. 2014. The Shock Doctrine. The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. London: Penguin Books.
Lasch, Christopher. 1979. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. New York: W. W. Norton.
Lipovetsky, Gilles. 1983. L’Ère du vide: essais sur l’individualisme contemporain. Paris: Gallimard.
Lipovestky, Gilles. 1987. L’Empire de l'éphémère: la mode et son destin dans les sociétés modernes. Paris: Gallimard.
Lipovetsky, Gilles. 1992. Le Crépuscule du devoir: l’etique indolore des nouveuz temps démocratiques. Paris: Gallimard.
Lipovetsky, Gilles. 2006. Le Bonheur paradoxal: essai sur la société d'hyperconsommation. Paris: Gallimard.
Lyotard, Jean-François. 1979. La condition postmoderne: rapport sur le savoir. Paris: Minuit.
MacGillis, Alec. 2021. Fullfilment: America in the Shadow of Amazon. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Maffesoli, Michel. 1988. Le temps des tribus. Le déclin de l'individualisme dans les sociétés de masse. Paris: Méridiens Klincksieck.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society. Boston: Beacon Press.
Martínez-Lucena, Jorge. 2008. “Narratividad y pre-narratividad de la experiencia en A. MacIntyre, C. Taylor, P. Ricoeur y D. Carr.” Rivista di Filosofia Neo-scolástica 100(4): 73-109.
Martínez-Lucena, Jorge. 2021. “Testimonio y recorrido educativo en Euphoria.” In Desafíos audiovisuales y los contenidos en la cultura digital, edited by Sergio Rodríguez-Malo de la Cruz and Rubén Rubial Villamarín, 501-516. Madrid: McGraw Hill.
McCarthy, Cormac. 2006. The Road. New York: Knopf.
Recalcati, Massimo. 2002. Clinica del vuoto. Anoressie, dipendenze, psicosi (Teoria e clinica psicoanalitica del campo freudiano). Milano: Franco Angeli.
Recalcati, Massimo. 2011. L'uomo senza inconscio: Figure della nuova clinica psicoanalitica. Milano: Raffaello Cortina Editore.
Recalcati, Massimo. 2014. Il complesso di Telemaco: Genitori e figli dopo il tramonto del padre. Milano: Feltrinelli.
Ricoeur, Paul. 1983. Temps et rècit. L'intrigue et le récit historique. Paris: Le Seuil.
Rosa, Hartmut. 2010. Alienation & Acceleration: Towards a Critical Theory of Late-Modern Temporality. Malmö-Aarhus: NSU Press.
Rosa, Hartmut. 2018. “The Idea of Resonance as a Sociological Concept.” Global Dialogue. Accessed July 5, 2021. https://bit.ly/3S1VuAD
Rosa, Hartmut. 2021 Resonance: A Sociology of Our Relationship to the World. Cambridge: Polity.
Sennet, Richard. 2000. La corrosión del carácter. Barcelona: Anagrama.
Soler, Colette. 2007. Declinaciones de la angustia. Bogotá: Ed. Gloria Gómez.
Szutta, Natasza Anna. 2021. “The concepts of virtue after the „character – situation” debate.” Scientia et Fides 2: 55–74. DOI: https://doi.org/10.12775/SetF.2021.018.
Taylor, Charles. 1991. The Malaise of Modernity. Toronto: House of Anansi Press.
Virilio, Paul. 1995. La vitesse de liberation: essai. Paris: Galilée.
Zuboff, Shoshana. 2019. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier Power. London: Profile Books.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Jorge Martínez-Lucena
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
CC BY ND 4.0. The Creator/Contributor is the Licensor, who grants the Licensee a non-exclusive license to use the Work on the fields indicated in the License Agreement.
- The Licensor grants the Licensee a non-exclusive license to use the Work/related rights item specified in § 1 within the following fields: a) recording of Work/related rights item; b) reproduction (multiplication) of Work/related rights item in print and digital technology (e-book, audiobook); c) placing the copies of the multiplied Work/related rights item on the market; d) entering the Work/related rights item to computer memory; e) distribution of the work in electronic version in the open access form on the basis of Creative Commons license (CC BY-ND 3.0) via the digital platform of the Nicolaus Copernicus University Press and file repository of the Nicolaus Copernicus University.
- Usage of the recorded Work by the Licensee within the above fields is not restricted by time, numbers or territory.
- The Licensor grants the license for the Work/related rights item to the Licensee free of charge and for an unspecified period of time.
FULL TEXT License Agreement
Stats
Number of views and downloads: 814
Number of citations: 0