Excerpt from this article: Life and Multiple Times in Postmodernity
Author: Keith Tester
Translator: Li Kang
Efforts have been made to dismantle the defining identity/identity/identity in socio-cultural relations. In this history, the intertwining between form and transcendence, boundaries and unboundary, is very clearly displayed. Among the institutions and arrangements of modernity, the dismantling of the defining identity/identity/identity of socio-cultural groups, individuals or processes is particularly important. If a characteristic/identity/identity can be defined and therefore seen as knowable once and for all, then it can also establish certainty. The dismantling of defining characteristics/identities/identities makes the space of the world no longer seem so mysterious. On the one hand, the identification of defining identity/identity/identity means being able to give meaning to the world (the secrets that are said to exist in sociocultural relations are in principle possible to know, because the core of these relationships is set to not change with time and place). On the other hand, the establishment of a qualified identity/identity/identity turns itself into a boundary, capable of claiming the right to force deviant activities and attitudes to confine themselves to the framework of these identities/identities/identities, or interpreted by intellectuals as something that must be transcended in the name of freedom.
If this emphasis is placed on the struggle for freedom, the modern interpretation of the world as a space limited by boundaries, in which everything has a definite place, a single meaning (that is, the construction of the world as a space of oppression), implies the overcoming of itself, or at least the seed for such overcome. Indeed, given that modernity involves the establishment and implementation of those single, unquestionable identities/identities, any transcendence implies a shift towards a plurality of identities/identities/identities, interpreted as having no boundaries. Naturally, however, even those representations of transcendence will not be long before they are recognized as limits, and therefore as forms, which themselves need to be transcended.
The endless dialectical history of form-transcendence-form-transcendence, which is also the conflict in modern culture, is particularly clearly embodied in narratives that express and create the identity/identity/identity of the proletariat, both as a class here and now and as a revolutionary subject facing the not-too-distant future. In fact, it is important and valuable to explore how the identity/identity/identity of the proletariat is so difficult to advance, because in many ways this class is the great hope of modern freedom. Think of its fate as a concrete manifestation of the fate of modernity itself.
The narrative of the proletariat can be interpreted as the reflective interest and the subsequent attempts of intellectuals to free the world from boundaries, although the boundaries they seek to overcome are themselves the result of earlier expositions of implications of boundlessness. Through the example of the proletariat, it is possible to see that identity/identity/identity can be interpreted both as a precondition for interpretive confidence and as a cage from which one must be motivated to escape.
The difficult history of class identity/identity/identity, especially proletarian identity/identity, is particularly evident in Marx's writings. This is not surprising given the grandeur of Marx's thought, and given his ability to reveal the secrets of modernity. On the one hand, Marx used the concept of "class" to comprehend the existing world and the various relations in this world. In Marx's writing, the world is interpreted as a giant cage containing the forms that capitalist relations of production have bred up. On the other hand, Marx firmly believed that all forms of class, as well as all forms of class-divided society, need to be transcended, and may be surpassed and eventually surpassed, so as to embody a universal unbounded nature (that is, communism) that seems basically ineffable at the moment. In this way, in Marx's view, the future world will be a reflective world, transcendent relative to the existing world, and the existing world will appear as a series of continuous materializations. However, recent discussions of class identity/identity/identity, especially the fate of the so-called "revolutionary proletariat," have shown a tendency to go beyond Marx's expression of the boundless nature of once-but-no-more.
And the works of commentators such as André Goertz and Jean Bouchier, though otherwise very different, may see a very similar approach to the deconstruction of the boundlessness that Marx implicates. This deconstruction is justified because the old implication now becomes itself immutable and boundary. In other words, Marx surpassed the forms of capitalist society in a reflective way, and people such as Golz and Bushya surpassed Marx's forms of the proletariat in a reflective way (in the same way as the later reflective intellectuals). In the eighties and nineties of the 20th century, along with the process of reinterpretation, the status of Marxism and those who call themselves Marxists has undergone a major transformation. People who call themselves Marxists are successful in practical and practical terms, but because of this they can no longer be intellectuals. Instead, they tend to become technologically intelligentsible. They often happily guard their achievements around their homes, forgetting the world outside the front door.
According to Marx, the current situation is that human nature, which has the potential to prescribe itself, is imprisoned in prescriptive, restrictive forms. In fact, Marx also indirectly pointed out that this cage is tightly cramped, and human nature as an existential feature is almost suffocating (there are many reasons why Marx viewed capitalist society from this perspective, see Gouldner (1985) for a useful discussion). In many ways, this is the main content of the story of alienation that can be found in the 1844 Philosophical Manuscript of Economics (Marx, 1977). The story told by Marx is the decline of human nature, the dehumanization of the modern world (and therefore the formally human world), and this tendency is caused by the rigidity of labor, that is, the form of labor. In other words, in the 1844 Philosophical Manuscript of Economics, Marx spoke of the division of the world into objects and subjects. The tragedy of the so-called modernity lies in the fact that the objects produced by human beings deprive human beings of their own lives. Like Simmel's form, they prescribe humanity, but in fact, humans should have prescribed them.
Ironically, according to Marx, the achievement of workers' subjectivity reduces workersization to the level of objects. There is a passage from Marx that emphasizes this contradiction, which can almost always be seen as a precursor to Simmel (although Simmel was certainly not a Marxist, both in terms of language and moral concerns). In any case, I hope that my argument will make it clear that the so-called adherence to something called Marxism is very important from an hermeneutic point of view compared to the analysis of modernity.) When Marx wrote, "In labor, all the natural, spiritual, and social differences in individual activity manifest themselves, and thus the remuneration received; And dead capital always takes the same step, not caring what the actual personal activity is" (Marx, 1977, p. 19), in order to reveal the contradiction between what should be and what is true.
In Marx's view, the individual should complete self-regulation through labor in a self-sufficient manner (Marx's understanding of labor seems to be roughly similar to Simmel's understanding of life, both from the perspective of vitality). However, in capitalist relations of ownership and production, the formal arrangement of labour (i.e. the current system of the possible conditions of labour) leads to the restraint of individual activity. The capitalist form of production is rigid and alienated from the individual. They confront the individual as objects (even if the individual has been objectified by capitalist institutional arrangements). In the eyes of creative and viable individuals, the form of capitalism is already in a dead state.
Marx proposed that this rigid society produces dead inhabitants. This formulation reflects the moral indignation of Marx's writings. Because of the demands of capitalist relations of production (such as wage labor and profit), workers are no longer living creators of meaning. Instead, the worker becomes the object of meaning imposed from the outside through monotonous coercion. Marx believed that with the surge of material wealth in society, there were corresponding constraints on human ability, and eventually completely destroyed. "The value added in the world of things is directly proportional to the depreciation of the world of man." (Marx, 1977, p63) With the capitalist way of producing things, it is possible to see such a process: "overlabor and early death, reduction to machines, slavery to capital (the accumulation of which is opposed to him as something dangerous), new competition and the starvation or begging of a part of the workers." (Marx，1977，p21)
The world and its objects become "something dangerous." It is this thing that prescribes meaning, position, and identity/identity/identity, and not through this thing, meaning, location and identity/identity/identity prescribes itself. In fact, buying something like a hi-fi or dishwasher is not a way to get out of trouble. Capitalist consumption of goods cannot be bought freely. On the contrary, those things belong to the form of capitalism, and in that sense, consuming them is actually a deeper cage. Marx famously said: "The more power a worker expends in his labor, the stronger the power he creates with his own hands against his own and alien object world, the poorer he himself and his inner world, and the less he owns." (Marx, 1977, p.63) Marx continues to explore this point with a more precise brushstroke: "The worker has devoted his life to the object, but now this life no longer belongs to him but to the object." (Marx，1977，p.63)
This, of course, is the key to Marx's elaboration of the alienation of workers in capitalist relations of production. It would be anachronistic to deny here that the Philosophical Manuscript of Economics of 1844 contained new and insightful themes. But in this regard, what makes Marx's work significant is not so much that it is deeply analytical, but rather that it presents the myths/myths of modernity. Simmel, Husserl, and Kundera all reveal roughly the underpinning point of one of the central myths/myths of modernity (the question of the ossification of reflective products into objectification), and coincidentally, the same series of concerns and captures the same process run through Marx's writings. In Marx's system, the central problem of the present time is precisely the contradiction between these two types of facts: on the ontological and anthropological level, human nature is expressed through work, but on the social and cultural level, the work faced by the worker under capitalism is alienated.
This article is reprinted for Peking University Public Communication
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