It is divided into concept introduction and alienation description. If you want to save time, you can just skip to alienation.
"Wage depends on the hostile struggle between capitalists and workers, and victory must belong to capitalists", Marx wrote at the beginning of the first section of the first draft of Paris Manuscript, and then wrote: the alliance of capitalists is very common and fruitful, while the alliance of workers is forbidden; Land owners and capitalists own industrial capital, while workers have neither land rent nor capital interest except 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 have no right to make rules, nor do they exist as participants in the whole production system, but as factors of production, that is, labor.
Later, Marx drew a series of inferences. First, the impact of market price fluctuation on wages is greater than land rent and profit; The second is that in the three possible States of society, fierce competition will always come, and for workers, competition is life-and-death, and the population that exceeds industrial needs will meet death (for that era)
Marx's conclusion here is that the proletariat is regarded as an abstract person by national economics, and the capitalist system it represents abstracts labor as a commodity, and the workers behind it actually become abstract and rigid "quasi-material". Capitalism creates workers, but belittles people. As far as they are concerned, workers regard crops as people and their freedom as people. Workers becoming workers are not the result of "free trade", but the slavery of the existing economic system.
Capital is a private right to the products of others' labor. Capital is accumulated labor. Capital is the theft and fraud of legislation. Capitalists' power comes from capital. These four sentences are Marx's definition of capital in this book.
Capital is reproduction, capital is reproduction itself, and it always creates the most suitable conditions for its reproduction, including 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 and reproduction of capital and the competition of its spokesman capitalists will inevitably lead to the big capital replacing the small capital and moving towards monopoly.
With the continuous expansion of capital competition, the petty bourgeoisie has gone bankrupt, leaving only two classes among the residents, the working class and the bourgeoisie.
According to the law of national economics, the alienation of workers in other things is manifested in the following aspects: the more workers produce, the less they can consume; The more value he creates, the less value he has; The more perfect his product is, the more deformed he is; The more civilized his object is, the more savage he is; The stronger he is, the weaker his ability is; The more skilled and dull you are, the more you become a slave to nature.
Labor is an external thing for a laborer, that is, something that does not belong to his essence: therefore, in his own labor, he does not affirm himself, but denies himself, not feeling happy, but feeling unhappy, which is torturing his body and destroying his spirit. Therefore, workers only feel comfortable outside work and uncomfortable at work. The alienated nature of labor is obvious. As long as the physical compulsion or other compulsions stop, people will avoid labor like the plague. Finally, for the laborer, the external essence of labor is that this kind of labor is not his own, but others'. His activities belong to others, which is his own loss.
Therefore, workers only feel free to move when they use their animal functions, such as eating, drinking, having sex, and at most living and decorating. But when they use human functions, they feel that they are just animals. These functions are divorced from other human activities, making 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 power under the combination and control, workers will be in a dominant position because they lose their bargaining power, and the result will be a pricing system dominated by accepted capital. In this system, workers only exist as things and labor, losing their status, 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 secrecy and monopoly. Big capitalists will annex small capital, and small capitalists will become the proletariat until the proletariat is in a monopoly pattern. This will further promote alienation, and capital monopoly will lead to the further loss of the relative dominant position of workers in some places. At this point, workers will further lose their status, and it will be more difficult to resist the standard system stipulated by monopoly groups.
Further development of labor: the great division of labor under monopoly leads to more and more 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. Workers no longer experience creation in the production process, but are forced and repeated. Among them, the essential creation of labor is deprived, and labor becomes the external thing of workers. Labor and labor products do not belong to themselves, so that labor is no longer active creation but simple domination.
The result will be: poets create poems and gain beauty, and teachers' production education can educate people. Workers can't get anything in labor, lose the acquisition of the meaning of labor, and only feel the pain caused by mechanical repetition. Therefore, workers only feel free outside work. The only purpose of work has become to get rid of work, eat, drink and have sex as a way for people to realize themselves freely. The function of animals has become the ultimate goal of human beings. In production activities, workers become things that do not belong to them. Marx described the scene of alienation here.
Lacan's concept is too complicated, and its concept system is intertwined and supports each other. If you don't explain it, it will lead to ambiguity and difficulty in understanding. It's too long to elaborate here. Here is the deleted Lacan. 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 use language to express their own needs, and children must use a kind of "requirement" to express their own needs, which will lead to a certain division between needs and requirements, that is, each requirement is not only an expression of needs, but also a symbolic love requirement, although all requirements point to the other party (mother) being able to meet all specific needs. Here, the split between demand and demand produces an unsatisfied residue, namely desire itself.
The instinct to get close to Freud is a purely biological concept.
The demand comes from the baby's crying to its mother. This kind of crying is no longer an instinctive signal, but a symbol embedded in the temporality symbol system. Before a child can express certain recognizable words, the crying of a baby is the result of a language structure. Specifically, even if the baby has already eaten, he will "demand" to eat, or cry when there is no need to excrete and eat, which in itself is a requirement for symbolic sex.
Desire is born in the gap between demand and demand, and the required language plays the role of expression of demand and love at the same time. Demand can be satisfied in it, but love cannot be unconditionally satisfied by the object. Furthermore, as a signifier, it is difficult for any specific behavior to fill in the reference about a signifier, so the desire for love at this time will inevitably lead to insufficient satisfaction, and the satisfaction of love will always leave a surplus, which will lead to the next reproduction, that is, the birth of desire.
First of all, we should introduce the concept of mirror stage. In Lacan's view, imagination is inseparable from the mirror stage. During the period from six months to eighteen months, the baby's visual system is relatively advanced, but his ability to control the body is not clear, and he does not have complete motor coordination ability. Therefore, before getting the right to control his own body, the baby's coordination with himself depends on the control of his visual function. When a baby sees a mirror/someone like that, it will. In this process, there is always a contradiction between the integration of its mirror image and the division of its own physical experience. This division will first be experienced by babies as a kind of competition with their own image. The integration of the body threatens the division of the subject, which in itself creates an aggressive tension. In order to get rid of this aggression, the subject recognizes similarity as future fusion's promise, that is, the ideal self.
The foundation of the imaginary world is the formation of the self in the mirror image stage, and the identity relationship (mirror image/similarity) formed by the self to the other means that the self and even the imaginary order itself is a fundamental alienation. Imagining the world is the field of image and fantasy, which mainly involves the fantasy of wholeness, comprehensiveness, autonomy, duality and similarity. The imaginary world itself shows the first alienation of human beings, that is, to establish their own illusory identity through the mirror image of the other, and this alienation has also laid a curse for the attack. Lacan's original description involves a lot, so here is only a brief introduction.
The symbolic world, like its name, is made up of symbolic order. From the children's Ford/Da game, children began to use language to replace the missing mother when they had to face the mother's absence. The existence 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 "demands" to complete the reproduction of desire. Desire itself can be expressed through symbolic order. At this time, children's desire has turned from real desire to the desire for Forrest signifier in the symbolic order, and symbolization has been completed. At this time, the second alienation is involved, that is, the child's desire is symbolically alienated. Lacan's specific exposition still involves the Oedipus period, and here is only a brief introduction.
The real world is slightly different in the middle and late Lacan. In short, the real world exists as a failure of symbolization, something that language can't be assimilated and symbolic order can't be rationalized, and it 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 reach it anyway. It is this impossibility and resistance to symbolism that endows reality with traumatic characteristics.
What is quoted here is 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 the symbol world in the real world, and it is also the motivation and end point of the subject's desire. Small object A is unreachable to the subject, and it 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 originally wanted by the subject represents the satisfaction of impossibility, and this impossibility will be retroactively constructed as an original loss. At first, the relationship between children and the world was only the relationship between needs and breasts. At this time, for children, the world is demand and breasts. At this time, the mother and the child are in the same physical relationship, but the departure of the mother's breast will cause a symbolic loss and trauma. In order to maintain their identity, babies will seek the alienation of symbolic order. From the beginning, the symbols built for mothers (breasts) pointed to their absence. The original Ford/Delta game existed as a substitute satisfaction, but the substitute satisfaction could never fill the whole symbol. Even if the biological mother comes back, the loss caused by her absence can no longer be filled. Therefore, the small object A is the residue of metonymy substitution in the symbolic network, and it is a loss. But it is precisely because of this lost relationship that talents can construct a metonymy and metaphor system symbolizing order.
Lacan mentioned the current discourse of consumerism in his Italian speech in 1972. Subject and object A are directly related, that is to say, object A can be obtained at any time, and the demand is met instantly. Here, based on Zizek's exposition, I make the following interpretation: In this state of affairs, the symbolic "requirement" is actually reduced to the level of demand, which is reflected 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 reorganization of symbols. As a kind of "surplus", object A can be obtained quickly by combining with goods, and at the same time, it can quickly produce the next desire, such as beauty. In the past, our requirements for the aesthetic feeling of clothing accessories were always related to the whole symbol system, but now the aesthetic feeling is directly short-circuited with Nike shoes. Here, the relationship between man and symbolic order becomes the relationship between man, things and symbols, and things become the real "other". Of course, this is just my interpretation.
The following are the inferences related to the theme of alienation, mainly some theories of Zizek and my own small inferences.
The question left to us is whether people can actively oppose the fact that there is a short circuit between symbols and things, which involves the new features of contemporary ideology mentioned by Zizek in The Noble Object of Ideology. In the past, Marx's classical ideological theory can be described as "not knowing". People were deceived by ideology, which concealed the true essence behind ideology. Traditional ideology packages artificial temporary standards into natural universal laws in the form of mythical narration, but the current ideology is just the opposite. People's attitude can be "I understand, but ... so I can't", which probably means that people know that this standard is considered or not universal, but for two reasons: assuming that the third party or others believe in the authenticity of this standard, it has practical effect and I have to abide by it; Compared with opposing this lie, it costs more to establish a brand-new world view, and it costs less to admit it wrongly. Building a new world means that I will lose everything.
In addition, when people are in such a predicament, people's freedom of life is actually deprived. According to Lacan's symbolic discourse theory, as a concept, the signifier of its owner and its meaning are dichotomous, which means that it is actually a combination of multiple signifiers. As a master's signifier, A 1 is a pure signifier, that is, an empty signifier, which has no specific meaning and only represents a development. In the state of being full of meaning, it can be said that A 1 is the container of meaning, while A2 points to specific content as meaning. For example, the word law refers to the empty signifier itself, while A2 refers to specific provisions as a meaning. Here, the relationship between A 1 and A2 is that A2 tries to fill A 1, but A 1 is always in an unsatisfied state, because A 1 itself represents an openness, and no number of specific laws can claim that it covers the law. Here, the signifier of A 1 is similar to Levi Strauss's manna and Lacan's own Fuehles signifier. As an A 1 signifier, the whole meaning of freedom lies in its own openness. You can imagine what a free A2 is, that is, everyone can fill in their own A2 in A 1, and this way is in capital-consumption.