Relateable Alienation: The Logic and History of an Idea

So what do I mean by the term ‘relatable alienation’? First we’d need to appreciate the ambiguity of the term ‘alienation’ itself, with the variety of the contexts where it features. It’s one of those terms that is overpoweringly tempting to use in the formulation of generalities, simply because it contains so many connotations and usages, both vernacular and specialised. To try and map some of these would be an undertaking this paper couldn’t possibly provide the scope for, though perhaps the three days of this symposium, and the upcoming exhibition, are a solid contribution to encompassing some of that field. So I’ll have to adopt some quite crude methods here and work more indexically than genealogically.