However, "part-time job" not only has an impact on the economic and political level, but also has a spiritual consequence that cannot be ignored: many migrant workers always feel inadequate sleep, exhausted, depressed and unable to find the meaning of work and life. This paper attempts to understand the concepts of labor and consumption from the perspective of psychoanalysis and philosophy. In the first part, we will discuss how exploitation works on the level of meaning, how the ideology of the work becomes exploitation on the level of "the existence of discourse", and how the collapse of this ideological narrative affects the subject. In the second part, by introducing Freud's "real neurosis" theory, we discuss how the neo-liberal working environment works with consumerism, which explains why contemporary migrant workers always feel anxious, depressed and tired. In the last part, we will briefly discuss the problem of "time". Time plays a vital role in labor relations, but time is not only a social time, but also a subjective stagnation time, which is very important for getting out of the digital labor-consumption cycle.
1
Exploitation means: "Are you tired? Tired is right. Comfort is reserved for the boss. "
The word "tool man" was popular on the Internet before the popularity of "migrant workers" and "end users". At first, "tool man" was mostly used in online games, which refers to a role that can be quit only by completing a function that is conducive to customs clearance. This word soon surpassed online games and was used in life. When people are entrusted by friends/bosses to accomplish something, it is only part of their plan, and when they are only used as their tools, they will laugh at themselves with "tool people". The popularity of "migrant workers" and "tool people" obviously has the same vein. The contradiction of the former more clearly points to the working environment in the workplace, especially the problem of workers being exploited.
There are countless popular theories about exploitation and surplus value, but we might as well rethink a problem first: when a person is regarded as a "tool man", it is exploitation, while when a real tool (machine) is regarded as a machine, it is not exploitation. What's the difference between workers and machines? According to Marx's classic theory, machines do not create value, but only transfer value, and human labor is the source of value. Suppose you spend 100 yuan a year to buy and maintain the machine, this part of the value is only transferred to the product in the production process, and it does not create value itself. But if you spend 100 yuan a year to hire workers, then in the production process, workers will not transfer the value of 100 yuan to new products, but form the value of more than 100 yuan through labor. According to Marx's view, value can only be created by human labor, but what kind of labor can be called "human labor" instead of the operation of machines?
Machines run when they drink oil, while people just drink milk-a physically sound body is not enough for work. In order to "run", people need not only physical strength, but also so-called "energy". According to Lacan's psychoanalysis, the so-called energy is not an entity existing in nature (although some psychologists still think so), but a metaphor at the language level. Only metaphor can produce reference, which is essentially a delusion. For example, when a person goes to work, he needs to construct the meaning of work-for a sense of accomplishment, for his family, for integrating into society or being like others, and so on. Enterprises will create "corporate culture", and even the ruling class of the whole society will create various ideologies, moralizing and even mythologizing work-all of which have produced metaphors that people can operate. The ultimate myth that supports these metaphors is death-"People who don't work will starve to death".
This brings us back to Hegel's master-slave dialectics. When two selves meet, there will be a life-and-death struggle. In this struggle, people who are afraid of death become slaves, and slaves are responsible for labor, and the fruits of labor belong to their owners. This is the embryonic form of exploitation theory. Here we can see that exploitation in production is a kind of exploitation in a sense, and those metaphors about the meaning of work are ultimately used to serve the enjoyment of the owner. There is no "struggle" between the master and the slave. The master is not just a boss or a capitalist, but the capital itself that constantly increases itself.
Ideology constructs the illusory state of our existence in the world, and perhaps for some people, they can easily gain the energy of work without reflection. However, today, when the anthropologist David Borger, who just died, mentioned that "the work of cattle people" (1) is becoming increasingly rampant and the vicious competition is becoming more and more involved, this kind of lie is becoming more and more difficult to maintain. The word "working class", which once had a distinct ideological color, has now become a "migrant worker" with strong irony. "Livelihood" ("working may lose ten years, and you can't live without working for a day") has become the ultimate delusion metaphor of migrant workers, but it is undoubtedly fragile and negative. Some young people don't have enough enthusiasm to work. They may not think too much about the exploitation theory, but they will intuitively feel that "that's wrong." This simple intuition points to the alienation and exploitation of labor. However, although some people don't believe in the "grand narrative" of work, they can make money to buy things and live a better life when they see work, and this seemingly more "practical" meaning is also deconstructed in the jokes of "migrant workers".
2
Consumption and consumption 2:
"Part-time jobs don't make much money, but taking more jobs will make you have no time to spend money."
In the traditional analysis, consumption is necessary for survival and development, and wages can make people survive, develop, relax and entertain. Consumption is regarded as a link in reproduction, and workers buy what they need and desire through wages, which constitutes the motivation of work, that is, the metaphorical energy necessary for work. The energy consumed by production can be compensated in consumption activities, which constitutes the common ideology of the middle class, but why is it not always effective? First of all, we see a contradiction in language. People "consume" energy at work, but they are supplemented by "consumption". The former consumes energy and the latter consumes money. Why does the former reduce energy and the latter increase energy in the same consumption activity? This makes us have to think that there are two completely different "costs".
Now we can shift from production to consumption. Thinker Ba Taye put forward a generalized economics based on consumption rather than production. In his view, life itself is excess energy. It does not pursue unlimited expansion and appreciation in alienation as Hegel-Marx said, but consumes itself in pornography, death and art. When people are exhausted at work, their spirit may not be consumed at all in the sense of Ba Taye, and they may not get the pleasure of pornography and art at work. The problem of labor is not only that the meaning of production is exploited, but also that "hard work will make the boss live the life he wants", and the energy of life cannot be consumed in labor.
In a sense, Freud and Ba Taye share the same view. All activities will cause a certain degree of physical fatigue, but the mental impact is different. Freud called spiritual energy "libido", which is essentially a kind of sexual energy (according to Lacan's point of view mentioned above, this is of course metaphorical), but libido can be transformed into something unrelated to sex through sublimation. Freud believed that mental work is often similar to sexual excitement (GW5, 105). The so-called intellectual labor can be understood as using rational labor as the main body of enlightenment in its own way, which can cope with a part of sublimation (Trieb) to some extent. However, in the global neo-liberal labor environment, the enlightenment subject of workers is excluded, and the subject is only a tool person who pursues performance, and the subject is digitized as a part of the algorithm machine. Physical fatigue is not accompanied by libido/life energy consumption, so we can only seek alternative satisfaction.
We can see the symptoms of "neurasthenia" in many office workers-such as fatigue, anxiety, headache, depression and so on. The concept of neurasthenia first appeared in the middle of19th century. At that time, it was the industrial revolution in the United States, and inhuman factory labor caused a large number of workers to have these symptoms. Interestingly, Freud classified the symptoms of neurasthenia as "actual neurosis", which he thought was caused by "insufficient psychotherapy for physical sexual excitement", and patients had the habits of masturbation, wet dream, abstinence and interruption of sexual intercourse. (GW 1，497)。 Freud's argument seems very puzzling today, with strong color of the times and personal prejudice. But "the sexual excitement of the body is not handled mentally enough" seems to have enough explanatory power in the neurasthenia caused by overwork today.
It should be noted that Freud believed that the reason of neurasthenia was not that the excitement was not treated, but that it was "insufficient treatment", and the alternative measures taken by patients were not enough to deal with it. Just as Freud thought masturbation was an "insufficient" substitute for sexual behavior, then we can say that consumption is an "insufficient" substitute to make up for the lack of enjoyment in labor. In the discourse of modern capitalism, consumption is characterized by "the more you drink, the more thirsty you are". The goods you buy can't satisfy us, but let us buy new and other goods endlessly. This is not only shopping in a narrow sense, but also cultural consumption in a broad sense, such as doing nothing to brush Tik Tok and playing games, which will also make people fall into depression. The depression mentioned here is not only that you are not interested in anything (completely different from depression) and lose the ability to get happiness, but that although you don't feel happy in consumption and entertainment, you are still addicted to it like an addict. This repetition did not bring happiness, but what Lacan called "pleasure". "Enjoy yourself" has become the law of superego itself. Depression is not a resistance to consumerism, but a complete surrender to it.
Today's working environment, like the abstinence culture in Freud's era, forces people to become pousee a la consumerism, makes the subject consume himself, banishes himself as a waste of desire, and falls into depression. Just as the enlightenment subjectivity of workers is not only excluded in labor, so is their desire subjectivity in the process of consumption, because according to the definition of psychoanalysis, desire has the characteristics of "impossible" or "unsatisfied", which drives them to achieve the goal of satisfaction in the process of constantly pursuing goals but not chasing them. However, in consumption, temporary refreshments bring emptiness, anxiety and depression-as Freud said, the bad consequences caused by masturbation habits. When the subject and object of desire can't keep a distance, and the desire is satisfied too quickly, the treatment of driving force is always insufficient.
In the popularity of "migrant workers", we can see some anti-consumerism emotions. For example, there is such a buzzword-"Do you want to buy iPhone 12? I want to buy it, but iPhone 12 is reserved for the rich. " This is of course related to the remuneration of labor, but perhaps we can also see that the myth of consumption has been deconstructed, and workers realize that consumption is not the destination of labor, and the consumption of life energy cannot be realized only through consumption and recreation.
three
time
"Your circle of friends has not mentioned dreams and literature for a long time. Why, did you go to work with me? "
Time is always an important issue in the direction of working environment reform. Long working hours and lack of time for personal development and establishing relationships with others have caused practical and mental difficulties for a large number of workers. But we can see from the previous discussion that the influence of labor on people is not only quantitative, but also qualitative. It is necessary for a subject to improve the working environment, including reducing and flexibilizing working hours and giving flexible employment more policy opportunities. -Freud also believes that overwork will lead to low self-intensity, so it is easier to find alternative satisfaction (GW16,70), which will lead to insufficient handling of driving force and fall into a vicious circle.
However, just giving time is not enough. During the epidemic, many people were idle at home, but their condition did not improve. On the contrary, playing games at home, brushing Tik Tok and watching live broadcasts will make people more anxious, depressed and tired. Seeking "insufficient satisfaction" (so-called "nipple music")-fatigue-seeking "insufficient satisfaction" again is not the patent of migrant workers. On the contrary, many people who are idle at home are not more tired than work. Giving people extra time and necessary means of subsistence is not a sufficient condition for regaining freedom and subjectivity, but only a necessary condition. So we need to ask, what kind of labor (or "activity" in a broader sense) can "completely deal with excitement"?
Melancholy me
Al Brecht Diu Lei's print Melancholy I shows us some possibilities. Although this painting is called melancholy, it has nothing to do with depression. On the contrary, the girl in the painting broke away from the compass, balance and other instruments that digitized the subject and fell into lonely meditation. This is not so much depression as resistance to depression (neurasthenia) brought by digital capitalism. Whether it is the neo-liberal labor environment or the entertainment and consumption of various nipple music, it tends to obliterate the subject, revert to data and control the subject. It seems to be the first step for migrant workers to take back their time and temporarily break away from these labor and consumption and stop with a Gelassenheit attitude. What we are talking about here is not passive resistance of "doing nothing". On the contrary, the subject can take this opportunity to reposition his relationship with the work.
For psychoanalysis, what is important is not the reconstruction of meaning, but the meaningless signifier that reaches the support subject and goes deep into the bone marrow. Lacan called it a "gay age"? avoir？ ), it can "show its position" for the subject. This kind of "knowledge" without any knowledge marks the unique enjoyment of the subject, which cannot be understood or taken away. It is the opposite of depression and sadness in production and consumption. We need this unique pleasure (not just) to support our work, and we also need a new working environment, so that subjects can find their own uniqueness in their work and experience a kind of time exclusive to them in their work, not just the time of being exploited in the production chain. The existing labor system can no longer meet the realization of the main body, improve the working environment and create work potential.