Emotive dissonance and being alienated from your own feelings
Under service wage labor, not even workers’ facial expressions are off-limits for Corporate to own.
To understand how the dynamics of alienated labor undermine the true species-being of humans, both of Marx’s terms require (brief) explanation. “Alienated labor,” per Marx, is the separation of the worker from their products of labor and also the phenomena of the worker’s separation from work (or production) itself (McIntosh 1997:18). “Species-being,” or perhaps “species-being-ness” is the human consciousness, capacity, or potential concerning an individual’s subjective nature plus their ability to make objective (that is, to externalize or generalize) this nature (Jaffe 2016:68; McIntosh 1997:19; Paulsantilli 1973:76). This nature consists of a “natural” actual embedding and participation in “vital activity” (McIntosh 1997:19), which includes subsistence labor, communal partnerships, and leisure (Goldstraw 2024:12).
In the Parisian Manuscripts, Marx outlines several specific manifestations in which species-being can be alienated including: 1) through wage labor, in the capitalist world, which waters down “productive life” to nothing more than a means to an end (working so that one has food on the table), rather than laboring as part of “free conscious activity”; 2) by the forcing of competition between workers, since in the wage-labor-world workers must have higher performance, less waste, and more output as violently compared to fellow workers; 3) by making humans, who are a multiplicity of attributes and connections, “human resources” and merely bodies-that-produce; and 4) the “alienation of man from man,” a greater disjointing as compared to workers against workers, because wage labor forces competition between people themselves and not just their work products, the widgets they produce (McIntosh 1997:19–21).
In the Industrial Revolution-era factories of Marx’s time (and as it continues to this day), species-being gets alienated through the loud noises of machinery, too-short break periods, and ever-impending takt times. But in our Modern age, there are now newer, emergent ways in which labor, and species-being, can be alienated: one such way is in the form of “emotional labor,” according to Hochschild (Hochschild 2012:1).
Emotional labor is required by many in service industries, and consists of providing “service with a smile” while knowing that “the customer is always right,” and maintaining this affect while attempting to wrangle ill-mannered patrons while peddling the latest credit card Corporate has announced (“it offers you double the airline miles at select retailers!”). This work triggers “emotive dissonance” (Hochschild 2012:1), which is when one’s affect is alienated from their internal feelings. In some ways, this is alienation a level deeper, as compared to Industrial Revolution factory labor. On the assembly line, one was not (necessarily) graded on the sincerity of a smile, the level of friendliness, or Ritz-Carlton-style conscientiousness. However, for service workers like Hochschild’s flight attendants, their labor requires one to reify their internal thoughts and emotions for the sake of their breadwinning, because too many customer complaints means loss of employment and loss of sustenance (Hochschild 2012:16). Under service wage labor, not even workers’ facial expressions are off-limits for capitalists to own.
References
Goldstraw, Simeon. 2024. “Marx on Leisure: An Aristotelian Interpretation.” Canadian Journal of Political Science/Revue Canadienne de Science Politique 1–19. doi: 10.1017/S0008423924000118.
Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 2012. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. eBook. Berkeley, California: University of California Press.
Jaffe, Aaron. 2016. “From Aristotle to Marx: A Critical Philosophical Anthropology.” Science & Society 80(1):56–77.
McIntosh, Ian, ed. 1997. Classical Sociological Theory: A Reader. 2nd ed. New York, NY: NYU Press.
Paulsantilli. 1973. “Marx on Species-Being and Social Essence.” Studies in Soviet Thought 13(1/2):76–88.