The Paris Manuscript and the Night Twilight, Marx and Lacan's concept of alienation.

Introduction: Marx was the inventor of the concept of alienation, and Lacan became famous because of his subjectivity. The similarity between them is that they not only explore the concept of isolation, but also focus on the discussion of genetics. In Marx's view, alienation is based on the triad of wages, capital and labor, and alienation is the movement process of the triad. The same is true for Lacan, who takes the imagination-symbol-reality triad faced by the symbolic system as the basis and the mirror stage and Oedipus stage as the movement process, thus the alienation of the subject arises. Marx is best known in China as Das Kapital, which lays more emphasis on surplus value and economics, while the Paris Manuscript quoted here lays more emphasis on alienation and critical philosophy. Twilight at Night is a book written by a Taiwan Province scholar. It is called the most comprehensive book introducing Lacan's thoughts in Chinese literature, but the concept of alienation is not the whole introduction of these two books. Here I just make a personal interpretation of the part about alienation. Let's start the text.

It is divided into concept introduction and description of alienation. If you want to save time, you can jump directly to alienation.

"Wage depends on the hostile struggle between capitalists and workers, and victory must belong to capitalists", Marx's Paris Manuscript begins with the first section, and then immediately writes: the alliance of capitalists is very common and fruitful, while the alliance of workers is prohibited; Land owners and capitalists own industrial capital, while workers have neither land rent nor capital interest except their labor income. This became the basic reason for all subsequent inferences, that is, workers did not have the right to negotiate. In the production order, workers are basically in a passive position. They do not have the right to make rules, and do not exist as participants in the whole production system, but as production factors, that is, labor.

After that, Marx drew a series of inferences. Firstly, the fluctuation of market price has greater influence on wages than land rent and profits. Second, in the three possible States of society, fierce competition will always come, but for workers, competition is life-and-death, and the population exceeding the needs of industry will meet death (for that era)

Marx's conclusion here is that proletarians are regarded as abstract people by national economics, and the capitalist system they represent regards the abstraction of labor as a commodity, and the workers behind them actually become abstract. In itself, workers regard crops as well as their freedom as human beings. Workers becoming workers are not the result of "free trade", but the slavery of the existing economic system.

capital is the private right to other people's labor products. Capital is accumulated labor. Capital is the theft and fraud of legislation. Capitalist's power comes from capital. These four sentences are Marx's definition of capital in this book.

Capital is reproduced, and it is reproducing itself. It will always create the most suitable conditions for its reproduction, including the ordinary profit rate, that is, the price that is only enough to maintain the life of workers during labor; Business and manufacturing secrets; Monopoly prices and so on. The accumulation of capital, the competition between reproduction and its spokesman capitalists will inevitably lead to big capital replacing small capital and going to monopoly.

with the continuous expansion of capital competition, the petty bourgeoisie has been bankrupt, leaving only two classes among the residents, the working class and the bourgeoisie.

according to the laws of national economics, the alienation of workers in his objects is manifested in the following aspects: the more workers produce, the less they can consume; the more he creates value, the less valuable he is, the lower he is; the more perfect the workers' products, the more deformed they are; the more civilized the objects they create, the more savage they are; the more powerful they are, the less able they are; the more skillful they are, the more stupid they are.

Labor is an external thing to a worker, that is, something that does not belong to his essence. Therefore, in his own labor, he does not affirm himself, but denies himself. Instead of feeling happy, he feels unhappy, which makes his body suffer and his spirit suffer. Therefore, workers only feel comfortable outside of work, but feel uncomfortable in work. The alienated nature of labor is obvious. As long as the physical compulsion or other compulsions stop, people will escape from labor like the plague. Finally, for workers, the external nature of labor is that this kind of labor is not his own, but someone else's. His activities belong to others, which is his own loss.

As a result, workers only feel that they are free to move when they use their animal functions, such as eating, drinking, sexual behavior, and at most, living and decorating, while when they use human functions, they feel that they are just animals. These functions are divorced from other human activities and make them the last and only ultimate goal. In this abstraction, they actually become the functions of animals.

The concept of wages shows that wages reflect a kind of struggle and domination, and because of the combination and the power under control, workers will be in a dominated position due to the loss of bargaining power, and the result is to accept the capital-led pricing system. In this system, workers only exist as objects and labor, losing their status as human beings, and the payment of wages can only maintain people's basic survival.

The concept of capital shows that the sole purpose of capital is the reproduction of capital. Capitalists exist as spokesmen of capital and intermediaries to achieve their goals. They will maintain competition through secret and monopoly. Big capitalists will annex small capital and small capitalists will become the proletariat until the proletariat is in the majority monopoly pattern. This will further promote alienation, and capital monopoly will lead to the further loss of the relative dominance of workers in some places, which will make it more difficult for workers to resist monopoly.

further development of labor: the large division of labor under monopoly leads to the increasingly mechanical repetition of the work that workers engage in every day. Labor no longer runs through the whole process of product design and manufacturing, and labor no longer creates complete value realization. In the production process, workers no longer experience creation but compulsion and repetition. Among them, the essential creation of labor is deprived, and labor has become an external thing for workers. Labor and labor products do not belong to themselves, and labor is no longer active creation but simple.

The result will be: poets create poems, get beauty, and teachers' productive education can educate people. Workers can't get anything when they work, and they lose their acquisition of the meaning of labor, and only feel the pain caused by mechanical repetition. Therefore, workers only feel free outside of work. The only purpose of work has become to get rid of work, eat, drink and have sex as a way for people to feel free to realize themselves. The function of animals has become the ultimate goal of people. In production activities, workers have become things that don't belong to them. Marx described the alienation scene here.

Lacan's concept is too complicated, and its conceptual systems are intertwined and mutually supportive. If it is not explained, it will be vague and difficult to understand. It is too long to elaborate here. The introduction here is the deleted Lacan, and interested friends can read the original text.

Lacan's psychoanalytic terminology system is divided into basic and important categories: needs, demands and desires. Lacan's division is based on facts, not semiotics. In order to meet their own needs, children must express them in language, and children must express their own needs with a kind of discourse-like "requirement", which will lead to some division between needs and requirements, that is, each requirement is not only an expression of needs, but also a requirement for symbolic love, although all the requirements point to the other (mother) can meet all specific needs. The split between needs and demands here has created an unsatisfied residue, namely desire itself.

Need to be close to Freud's instinct is a pure biological concept.

The requirement comes from the crying of the baby to the mother. This crying is no longer an instinctive signal, but a symbol embedded in the symbolic system of temporality. Long before the child can express specific recognizable words, the crying of the baby is the result of a language structure. Specifically, babies will "demand" to eat even if they have already eaten, or cry when there is no need to excrete and eat, which is itself a requirement for symbolic love.

Desire is born in the gap between need and demand. The language of demand plays an expression of need and love at the same time, in which need can be satisfied, but love cannot be unconditionally satisfied by the object. Furthermore, as a signifier, it is difficult for any specific behavior to fill the reference about a signifier, so the desire for love will inevitably lead to insufficient satisfaction at this time, and the satisfaction of love will always leave a surplus, which will lead to the next reproduction.

First of all, we must introduce the concept of mirror image stage. In Lacan's view, the imagination is inseparable from the mirror image stage. During the period from six months to eighteen months, the development of the baby's visual system is relatively advanced, but its ability to control the body is not clear, and it does not have full motor coordination. Therefore, before acquiring the right to control its own body, the baby's coordination for itself depends on the control of visual functions. When the baby sees the mirror image/similarity, In this process, there is always a contradiction between the integration of its mirror image and the division of its own body experience. This division will first be experienced by the baby as a kind of competition with its own image. The integration of the body threatens the subject with fragmentation, which in itself causes an aggressive tension. In order to remove this aggression, the subject agrees with the similarity as a promise of future integration, that is, the ideal self.

The foundation of the imaginary world is the formation of the self in the mirror stage. The identity relationship formed by the self against the other (mirror image/similarity) means that the self and even the imaginary order itself is a fundamental alienation. The imaginary world is the field of image and fantasy, which mainly involves the illusion of wholeness, comprehensiveness, autonomy, duality and similarity. The imaginary world itself shows the first alienation of human beings, that is, the identity of their own illusions is established through the mirror image imagination of the other, and this alienation also lays a curse for aggressive behavior. Lacan's original description involves more, so here is only a brief introduction.

Symbolic world, like its name, is composed of symbolic order. Since children's Ford/Da game, when children have to face their missing mother, they begin to use language to replace their missing mother. The presence of Ford/Da replaces the absence of mother, and the naming of mother realizes the "murder" of mother. Because in the future, children no longer need realistic mothers to mediate their own "demands" so as to complete the reproduction of desire, and desire itself can be expressed through symbolic order. At this time, children's desire has turned from realistic desire to Fuehles's signifier desire in symbolic order, and symbolization has been completed. At this time, it involves the second alienation, that is, children's desires are symbolically alienated. Lacan's concrete exposition still involves the Oedipus period, and only a brief introduction is made here.

The real world is slightly different in Lacan's middle and late period. In short, the real world exists as a failure of symbolization, something that language cannot assimilate and symbolic order cannot be rationalized, and it is something that absolutely resists symbolization. In other words, the real world is a field that exists outside symbolism. Reality is impossible, it is impossible for the whole language and symbolic order, it is impossible to imagine, it is impossible to integrate into symbolic order, and it is impossible to arrive in any way. It is this impossibility and resistance to symbolism that endows the reality with traumatic characteristics.

here I quote Lacan's definition in 1964, that is, the small object A is a kind of residue and residue, that is, the residue left by the introduction of symbolic world in the real world, and it is also the motivation and end point of the subject's desire. The small object A is unreachable for the subject and is a failure to try to fill the desire, and the subject's desire can never avoid this failure. The reason is that the symbol that the subject wants initially represents the satisfaction of impossibility, and this impossibility will be retroactively constructed as a kind of original loss. The relationship between children and the world at first is only the relationship between needs and breasts. At this time, for children, the world is needs and breasts. At this time, mother and child are the same body relationship, but the departure of mother's breasts will cause a symbolic loss and trauma. In order to maintain their identity, babies will seek the alienation of symbolic order. From the very beginning, the symbols constructed for their mothers (breasts) point to their absence. The original Ford/Da game exists as an alternative satisfaction, but the alternative satisfaction can never fill the whole symbol. Even if the real mother comes back, the original loss caused by the absence can not be filled again. Therefore, the small object A is the surplus of metonymy substitution in the symbol network, which is loss. But it is precisely because of this lost relationship that talents can construct a metonymy and metaphor system that symbolizes order.

Lacan mentioned the current discourse of consumerism in his speech in Italy in 1972. The subject and the object A are directly linked together, which means that the object A can be obtained at any time, and the requirement is met instantly. Here I make the following interpretation based on Zizek's exposition: In this state of affairs, the symbolic "requirement" is actually reduced to the level of demand, which is embodied in the reproduction of cultural symbols as commodities, and the reproduction mechanism of cultural symbols is no longer through metonymy and metaphor in the symbolic order. It is a standardized recombination of symbolic symbols. As a kind of "surplus", the object A can be quickly obtained by combining with goods, and at the same time, the next desire, such as beauty, can be quickly produced. In the past, our requirements for the beauty of clothing accessories were always related to the whole symbolic system, but now the beauty is directly short-circuited with nike shoes. Here, the relationship between people and symbolic order has become the relationship between people, things and symbols, and things have become the real "other". Of course, this is just my interpretation.

Here are the inferences related to the theme of alienation, mainly some theories of Zizek and my own small inferences

The question left to us from this is, then?